Opinion

  Ever since the 1970s, European Green parties have argued passionately for cutting carbon emissions from the continent’s energy, while at the same time reflexively shunning the world’s only reliable source of zero-carbon electricity: nuclear power. Russia’s Ukrainian invasion is punching big holes in the logic of this position. That is especially true in Germany and Belgium, countries where the ...

As a young KGB officer stationed in Dresden, Vladimir Putin became fluent in German and went on to fancy himself quite the expert on his host culture. How ironic that decades later his actions have led to a turning point in German history that he won’t like, but the world should welcome. When Putin launched his unprovoked war of aggression ...

The recent surge in gasoline prices suggests we might see a reversal in consumers’ years-long shift towards trucks or sports-utility vehicles (SUV) back to more modest, fuel-efficient vehicles. But don’t expect automakers to go along. We’re not likely to have an adequate supply of the basic gasoline-powered family sedan ever again, thanks to the transition to electric vehicles, continuing supply ...

Perhaps the saying, “There is no such thing as bad publicity,” holds true for controversial technology companies. New York-based Clearview AI has been criticised by privacy advocates for years because of the way it has scraped billions of images from social-media networks to build a search engine for faces used by police departments. It was the subject of a New ...

  Let’s talk about presidenting during a crisis. A crisis, the late political scientist Nelson W Polsby used to say, is “a period where everybody believes that something must be done.” The Russian invasion of Ukraine certainly fits that definition — and it’s both an opportunity and a danger for a presidency. The opportunity side of it is captured in ...

Billions of people around the world are watching helplessly as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine accelerates into its third week, continuing to kill more innocent people every day, while destroying infrastructure throughout the country and forcing millions of refugees into neighboring European countries. There is one positive step that the US and like-minded countries should begin developing immediately to ensure that ...

Howard Schultz is the Tom Brady of the consumer world. Starbucks said that Chief Executive Officer Kevin Johnson would retire and that Schultz, who stepped down as CEO for a second time in 2017 and left the company a year later, would return as interim CEO early next month. The company’s shares rose as much as 8% as investors welcomed ...

  Early on in the pandemic, a lot of New Yorkers got major deals on apartments. Now the landlords are striking back. Even though rats are popping out of toilets, hedgehogs are escaping through holes in walls and my own ceiling rains sewage on me (really!), the rent is still going up by percentages your paycheck can only dream about. ...

  As Taliban insurgents fended off US-led forces in their battle for Afghanistan in the late 2000s, local warlords decided that the nation’s mobile phone network was becoming an unacceptable risk. So they shut it down. Sometimes the outages in Afghanistan were only during the night or sporadically enforced. Quite often, though, the Taliban simply blew up cellphone masts so ...

Driving into Washington over the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge the other night, I looked over at the Kennedy Center, all lit up in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. For a moment I was proud: Yes, America stands with Ukraine. Then I remembered: At that moment, Russia was shelling residential areas, mothers and their children were cowering in basements, ...