With flashing red eyes and a swivelling head, Yuuji Ohta’s robot wolf bares its white canines and lets out an array of ghastly growls. A matted coat of brown synthetic fur covers its life-size body. This futuristic creature is part of everyday life for Ohta, president of a company that manufactures machine tools in rural northern Japan. While he started ...

Post-vacation blues don’t come much grimmer than this. No one was expecting a particularly bright future for Thomas Cook Group Plc, the UK package-holiday company that filed for administration in the early hours of Monday morning. The way the business came crashing to earth, however, is shocking. Rather than entering insolvency proceedings and attempting to salvage a remnant of the ...

Singapore is a major Asian refining hub, though it doesn’t have a drop of crude petroleum. Now, the tiny country is punching above its weight in data. The upshot for investors: An asset class that pays 51% in a world where earning even zero is increasingly a luxury. There’s a limit to how many bits and bytes even a busy ...