There’s a grim inevitability to the fact that the latest concerning strain of the Covid-19 virus — known as B.1.1.529, and now nicknamed the Omicron variant 1 — should have been first identified in South Africa. So far, Sars-CoV-2’s most devastating impacts have been in developed countries. The US, UK and European Union have accounted for about a third of ...

In the 2000s, the growing ubiquity of bank branches was one of America’s great retailing puzzles. Online banking was on the rise and the industry was consolidating, but branches kept popping up seemingly everywhere — if you define “everywhere” as the reasonably affluent parts of cities and suburbs. That ended with the financial crisis. The number of bank branches in ...

Emmanuel Macron and Mario Draghi signed a treaty at the Quirinale palace in Rome to get France and Italy working together better. That’s good news for Europe. It’s also tinder for populists. How their countries — both founding members of the European Union — pull off cooperation will determine how much nearer the continent’s dream of “ever closer union” gets ...