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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

When Joe Biden arrived in the White House, he promised a new dawn of unity and bipartisanship. But when he began to pursue a COVID-19 relief bill, he met with Republican senators for only about two hours before deciding to push the measure through the US Congress without further negotiations. Biden had two goals at the outset: to go big and to make the process bipartisan. They turned out to be incompatible. “We got a chance to do something big here,” the president said Friday in a

Anyone paying attention for the last three years should not be surprised that President Joe Biden on Thursday announced the end to US support for Saudi offensive operations in Yemen, calling the war a “humanitarian and strategic catastrophe.” Most of Biden’s party has given up on the Saudi regime, particularly after its agents murdered and then dismembered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018. But it would be a mistake to read too much into the Biden admin

The new transatlantic honeymoon isn’t over yet. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, like most European leaders, is still basking in the afterglow of Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president of the US. After Number 45, of course, she’d have warm feelings for anybody. And yet, it’s just a matter of time -- days or weeks -- before they’ll need to have an awkward talk. The topic will be Russia. The US and Germany have long been at odds about an almost finished pipel

Last year made it feel as if the US was a nation in steep decline. And in some worrying ways it is. But looking back on 2020, and looking ahead to 2021, there are signs that the country has robust reservoirs of strength and effectiveness that will cause it to outperform the gloomiest expectations. It may not be morning in America yet, but it’s past midnight. The clearest example is the vaccination race. Despite problems with the initial rollout, the US public health system has now found i

The Democratic Party has before it a choice between two economic policies: a big increase in the federal minimum wage, to $15 an hour from $7.25; and a per-child cash benefit of several thousand dollars a year. The decision will have major implications, for the future of both the party and the US economy. The cash benefit is clearly the better option. One problem with the minimum wage hike is that it is not clear how many people are harmed and how many low-skilled workers will lose their jobs,

Nearly lost in the tumult of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol and the excitement of Joe Biden‘s inauguration is the continuing fallout from the massive data breach of SolarWinds Corp. by suspected Russian hackers. As the new team settles into office, what can it do to keep the nation safe in cyberspace? Let’s begin with the scale of the hack. SolarWinds was a prime vendor to tens of thousands of clients, including hundreds of Fortune 500 enterprises and nearly the entire US go

Retail investors hell-bent on watching stocks go up have made life miserable for short sellers around the world. In South Korea, the government is piling on too. Lawmakers who oversee the country’s $2 trillion stock market are discussing plans to extend one of the world’s longest bans on short selling, amid pressure from mom-and-pop punters who drive more than two thirds of daily trading. Calls to make the 10-month ban permanent are mounting. More than 203,000 people have signed a

The storming of the US Capitol on Jan. 6 was a real lowlight for Congress. At least during the sacking of Washington in the war of 1812, the White House burned alongside the Capitol. But on Jan. 6, 2021 the head of the executive branch urged his followers to interfere with the operation of the legislative branch. The entire sequence of events is a reminder that congressional power has been receding relative to the executive branch for almost a century. Now is the time for Congress to stand up f

Hand it to human beings. We have repeatedly defied predictions that we will buckle under the extreme pressure of adverse events. Time and again, whether it was during the eight-month blitz in World War II, or after 9/11, people have proved remarkably resilient in the face of adversity. Will it be the same with this pandemic? On aggregate, probably yes. Most people have experienced, or know someone who has experienced, mental stress as a result of pandemic-related circumstances. But once they a

The US never fully recovered from the Great Recession. One of the benefits of the $1.9 trillion COVID relief package unveiled Thursday night by President-elect Joe Biden is that -- in addition to helping Americans hurt by the pandemic -- it could help America accomplish that goal. At that point, US politics can safely return to arguments about whether tax increases or spending cuts are the best way to reduce the deficit. It may be a tired debate, but if it means the US has finally healed from t