Opinion

  Peter Bittner SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS The Mongol Post, the newly-privatized national Mongolian mail carrier, plans to adopt a new and wildly innovative address system this summer in partnership with what3words, a U.K.-based tech company. Each address will be denoted by a three-word phrase representing a specific 9-square-meter GPS coordinate. Effective on August 1, the Mongol Post’s new nomenclature ...

  Leonid Bershidsky Volkswagen made every effort to leave its diesel emissions scandal behind this week. It planned to announce a $10 billion deal with U.S. car owners and a fix for their cars, hold a general shareholders’ meeting on Wednesday and settle down to implement its new strategy, announced on June 16. VW’s management and top shareholders haven’t, however, ...

  Here’s something you probably already know about Latin America: In a region ravaged by graft and political payola, regard for elected authorities is dragging bottom. Serial corruption scandals are one of the main reasons why dissatisfaction with democracy is higher in this region than in any other. Here’s something you may not know: The long-flawed justice system is on ...

History of aviation is being rewritten in our lifetime, as the Solar Impulse 2 project is getting closer to completing a world tour in an ultralight one-man aircraft intended to demonstrate how best technology may provide solutions to combat global warming and advance aviation industry. The sun-powered Solar Impulse 2 set off from New York’s JFK airport early Monday, embarking ...

  Mark Buchanan sometimes say that there’s no need to rush in addressing climate change — that our constantly increasing wealth will eventually make the problem relatively inexpensive to solve. Thanks to some careful mathematical research, that argument is looking increasingly wrong. Placing a value on something that may happen 50 or 100 years from now isn’t easy. Economists typically ...

  Bhavani Castro SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently embarked on an impressive five-nation tour that included countries as diverse as Afghanistan and Mexico. Modi’s international travels have rendered fruitful results, bolstering diplomatic ties and giving India more visibility in the international community. The six-day tour included visits to Afghanistan, Qatar, Switzerland, the United States, and ...

  Anushka Wijesinha SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS Sri Lanka is in an enviable location. The busy East-West shipping route passes just six to ten nautical miles south of the island. More than 60,000 ships ply this route annually, carrying two-thirds of the world’s oil and half of all container shipments. Sri Lanka is also at the doorstep of a dynamic ...

An iOS app called Prisma has been taking 10 post-Soviet nations by storm, reaching the No. 1 spot in app stores in record time. At first glance, the software does nothing special: It’s a collection of image filters that make photos look like paintings. But the technology is far more complex and troubling: It uses artificial intelligence to completely “repaint” ...

  The doomsday narrative of British Prime Minister David Cameron, the Bank of England and their official friends around the world is setting a course for a self-fulfilling financial panic. They insist that the British economy will be permanently poorer and global markets will be roiled if the British public votes to leave the European Union in a referendum on ...

  Here’s what the world could look like on June 24 if the “Leave” camp won the previous day’s referendum on whether the U.K. should continue to be part of the European Union: The foreign exchange markets are in turmoil, with the pound falling 7 percent to 10 percent and the euro down about 3 percent to 5 percent. Stocks ...