Opinion

  After almost a week of meetings, diplomats and negotiators representing Syrian regime and opposition factions in the UN-mediated talks appear to have made modest achievements. The latest round of Syria talks in Geneva was centred on setting agenda for future talks, which could bolster opposition demands for a political transition in which Syrian President Bashar Assad would have to ...

  March is likely to see at least four key Brexit battles, whose outcome will frame the next two years of negotiations as Britain and the remaining 27 EU members wrangle over their future relationship. Here’s the rundown. THE LORDS Prime Minister Theresa May would undoubtedly prefer Brexit to be under way by March 25, when the remaining members of ...

  What use would a country with more people over the age of 70 than under 20 have with amusement parks? More than you might think. U.S. cable giant Comcast Corp. certainly seems to think so, judging by its decision to spend $2.3 billion buying full control of Universal Studios Japan. Comcast’s NBCUniversal unit previously paid $1.5 billion for 51 ...

  Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates made a splash in a recent interview, when he suggested that robots should be taxed in order to help humans keep their jobs. Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If ...

  Donald Trump boasts that his “America First” trade and economic policies are bringing well-paid manufacturing jobs back to America. That’s probably his biggest “deliverable” to Trump voters. But is this claim true? Trump won the presidency partly because he voiced the anger of American workers about lost jobs and stagnant wages. But in the process, he fundamentally misled the ...

  It’s been 16 years since Air India Ltd. was last on the block. So strong was the political opposition then to privatizing the national carrier that Singapore Airlines Ltd., Emirates Airlines, Delta Air Lines Inc. and Air France SA pulled out of the race. Now, India is again mulling the idea of selling 51 percent of the state-owned carrier, ...

  If South Sudan’s famine is “man-made,” and it is, then maybe man can also unmake it. Given the country’s unstable government and the U.S.’s uncertain global leadership, however, most of the effort will have to come from China. More than 40 percent of South Sudan’s 11 million people don’t have enough to eat not because of drought or other ...

  Mindful of the chaos and confusion in the wake of Trump’s last month executive order barring entry from seven Muslim majority countries and halting refugee program, airport officials and civil rights lawyers across the US are getting ready for Trump’s new travel ban. Trump said that his executive order named seven countries because they had already been deemed a ...

  Back in 2006, after Chung Mong-koo, chairman of Hyundai Motor Co. Ltd. and son of its founder, was arrested amid one of South Korea’s recurring corruption scandals, I called a friend in the company’s public relations office. He answered in a breathless panic. Without Chung in the driver’s seat, he assured me, the management of Korea’s largest automaker would ...

  London’s Cheesegrater building is as close as Britain gets to a memorial to Brexit. Construction of the wedge-shaped skyscraper in the heart of the city’s financial district started in 2011 as things were picking up after the financial crisis. Within three weeks of the European Union referendum, the tower was fully let. At the time, its co-owner, British Land ...