There's a new Grinch in town this holiday shopping season. Retailers' Black Friday shopping nightmares are no longer simply overcrowded stores or running out of stock. Instead, there is a new fear to keep executives up at night in the days leading up to Thanksgiving: websites crashing. One after another, major retailers faced tech issues…
CHINA ABHORS the notion of referendums in democratic Taiwan. It fears that a plebiscite may one day be used to assess whether the public wants the island to renounce its notional links with the mainland. Secession, it has warned, could trigger war. So it is with disquiet that China is watching Taiwan’s preparations to…
That insistence is what set off the Iranian nuclear crisis. Over the years, several nations have demonstrated that it is possible to turn ostensibly civilian programs into sources of bomb fuel, and thus atomic warheads and military power. Israel recently released an archive of material, stolen from Tehran in January, to prove that the Iranian…
“We have failed to properly manage health risks at our semiconductor and LCD factories.” That’s the sobering message Samsung’s top executives contritely delivered Friday, as the South Korean tech giant signed a settlement to compensate employees who developed numerous types of illness in its factories. Campaigners have since 2007 been pressuring the company over the…
President Donald Trump on Thursday disputed the CIA's reported assessment that Saudi Arabia's crown prince had ordered the killing of a journalist, saying that the intelligence agency never reached a conclusion. Trump's remarks contradict the reporting of multiple news outlets that say the CIA concluded with "high confidence" that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally…
THE BRITISH body politic is again convulsing. Theresa May has appointed new ministers, including her third Brexit secretary and counting, following another round of cabinet resignations. The prime minister’s own backbenchers are feverishly (if ineptly) plotting to bring her down. The Labour opposition’s position is hopelessly unclear. The cause of this chaos is that those…
Chief Justice Marshall confronted many challenges, including a clash with President Thomas Jefferson that established the basis for judicial review of congressional action in Marbury v. Madison. Chief Justice Roberts, by contrast, was called on to address unfocused remarks from Mr. Trump lashing out against the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit,…
Back in July, Tesla raised the prices for its Model S and Model X in China, thanks to the trade war between the country and the U.S. In retaliation to tariff aggression from the White House, China imposed a 40% levy on car imports from the U.S., so up went Tesla’s prices. It had previously…
Facebook's outgoing boss of policy and communications, Elliot Schrage, said he's taking the blame for the hiring of a controversial public-relations firm whose attacks on the company's critics led to accusations of anti-Semitism — and said it was Facebook that directed the firm to go after George Soros. TechCrunch obtained an internal memo that Schrage…
BEFORE HU JINZHOU began his climb into the foothills of fame, as a professional player of computer games in China’s multi-billion-dollar livestream industry, he was a schoolboy tearaway. He got into playground fights, tried to sell his textbooks to classmates and sneaked out after dark for some online gaming. Back then, Mr Hu’s reluctance to…
