When President Joe Biden took office, he inherited a foreign policy disaster in Afghanistan. A year ago, his predecessor‘s envoys negotiated an agreement with the Taliban that said the last US troops would leave the country by May 1. That’s just six weeks away, and leaving then would mean the collapse of the elected government the US helped create. And yet a decision to stay past May would put remaining US forces at risk of renewed Taliban attacks. The wise course for Biden would h

Viewpoints March 25, 2021

Comparisons of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus bill to the New Deal are flourishing. They obscure the fact that Biden’s achievement -- passing reform legislation against an intransigent opposition -- is very fragile. Republicans are already waging an extensive culture war on issues cherished by progressive Democrats, starting with freer immigration. And though Biden and his colleagues are taking to the road this week to sell the administration’s plan, victory in w

Viewpoints March 24, 2021

Ask on the street in Hong Kong if passers-by will get the COVID-19 vaccine, and you may hear what I did: “Sometime.” “Maybe.” “No.” Combating this hesitancy here and elsewhere will take more than opprobrium and exhortation. It requires tuning in. A combination of deep-seated distrust in government, ignorance and lack of urgency -- in a territory that has kept coronavirus cases low -- means Hong Kong is now struggling to get enough residents inoculated. This

Viewpoints March 23, 2021

The suspended rollout of AstraZeneca Plc’s Covid-19 vaccine in some European Union countries over concerns about possible side effects could delay a goal of immunizing three-quarters of their populations by as much as a month. Limiting the use of the AstraZeneca shot as a precautionary measure could push back efforts to hit that threshold by at least a couple of weeks and potentially longer -- to September instead of August -- according to London-based research firm Airfinity Ltd. While

World News March 15, 2021

Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE’s coronavirus vaccine blocked 94 perceent of asymptomatic infections in an Israeli study that further builds the case for the shot’s overwhelming effectiveness against the virus a year after the pandemic began. The vaccine stopped 97 percent of symptomatic cases, hospitalizations and deaths, the companies and the Israeli Ministry of Health said on Thursday. Crucially, the results were measured two weeks after the second dose, suggesting that high ef

World News March 11, 2021

Economists concerned about slowing productivity have spent the past decade hotly debating the value of free digital services such as Google’s web search and Amazon’s online store. But those online services have proven their worth during the pandemic. And COVID-19 may ultimately push our society to learn new ways of using digital technologies that accelerate productivity growth. Over the past year I’ve been occasionally bombarded with tweets casting doubt on the value of softw

Viewpoints March 11, 2021

Those Americans who cheered President Joe Biden’s announcement this week that the US would have enough vaccines to inoculate every citizen by the end of July might want to note the cold silence with which the rest of the world greeted the news. Biden’s triumphalism was more than a little grating, considering that the US, alongside most other rich countries, has essentially chosen to corner the market on shots that are desperately needed elsewhere. Just this Monday, the Mexican presi

Viewpoints March 9, 2021

The scientist in charge of France’s vaccine rollout, Alain Fischer, must sometimes feel like Sisyphus forever rolling his boulder up the hill. After months of patiently working to win over a doubting public’s acceptance of the groundbreaking mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, he’s now fighting to convince French doctors to offer AstraZeneca’s more traditional shot to their patients. Resistance runs deep even as doses pile up, more data about efficacy emerges and Pres

Viewpoints March 5, 2021

President Joe Biden’s ability to bring together the two parties in Congress is already being tested. But the good news is that on at least one issue -- climate change -- the fate of the president’s ambitions does not rest primarily with his ability to unite Congress, but with his ability to support and expand ongoing work in the rest of the country. Consider this: The US is actually within striking distance of reaching the goal it set under the Paris climate agreement, a 26 percent

Viewpoints March 2, 2021

China faces a “critical and urgent” task to overhaul Hong Kong’s electoral system, Beijing’s top official for the city said, in the latest sign that authorities were mulling major changes in the coming weeks. Beijing needed to reform the city’s electoral system “to ensure that Hong Kong’s governance is firmly controlled by patriots,” Xia Baolong, director of China’s cabinet-level Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, said in a speech Monday.

World News Feb. 22, 2021

Bitcoin gave up all its gains from weekend trading as analysts questioned whether the cryptocurrency is overheated. Prices dropped as much as 8.2 percent during the European session, falling back to around $53,000. The world’s largest cryptocurrency has been on a tear this month, propelled by purchases from Tesla and institutional investors who say Bitcoin is an attractive alternative to gold and the dollar. In February alone, Bitcoin is up more than 60 percent, prompting comme

Market Feb. 22, 2021

Over the four years I led the Afghan war effort as supreme allied commander at NATO, I was lucky to have four superb generals working for me as the in-country commanders of the International Security Force, Afghanistan. Generals Stanley McChrystal, Dave Petraeus, John Allen and Joe Dunford all performed superbly during their one-year assignments in Kabul. I relied on their military advice every day as I reported to the senior civilian leaders of the 28 NATO nations, from President Barack Obama

Viewpoints Feb. 18, 2021

For Masayoshi Son, these days are even better than the dot-com bubble. Shares in the Japanese billionaire’s SoftBank Group surged in Tokyo on Tuesday to the highest close since the company went public in 1994, rising past a long-standing record two decades ago. The shares rose 4.2 percent to finish at 10,420 yen, surpassing its previous record of 10,111.09 yen marked on Feb. 18, 2000. SoftBank’s share price increases have been backed by a surging stock market which lifted

World Business Feb. 16, 2021

The extended trial brief filed by Donald Trump‘s lawyers advances three defenses: that Trump did not incite the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol; that the Senate can’t try a president who is no longer in office; and that the First Amendment protects Trump from being impeached for words that, they say, don‘t meet the requirements for criminal incitement conviction laid down by the Supreme Court. The factual defense is highly unconvincing, as anyone who watched Trump’s speech

Viewpoints Feb. 11, 2021

Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said social-media services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube need clearer laws and rules to govern whether controversial “Unilateral action by individual companies in democracies like ours is just not Microsoft doesn’t currently run a consumer social media service, but it is among cloud-computing In the past several years, antitrust regulators have ramped up investigations into the market power of large technology companies, just

Technology Feb. 10, 2021