[Nisha Gopalan] Starbucks, there’s a unicorn in your china shop

Investors may worry that the trade war will wreak havoc on Starbucks’ prospects in China, its second-largest market. The real concern isn’t any kind of patriotic boycott, but competition from a homegrown challenger.Luckin Coffee, which officially launched in January, already has more than 1,500 stores in 21 cities across China. Starbucks, whose mainland adventure began in 1999, has more than 3,400 outlets in 140 cities. Both are racing to expand further: Luckin is aiming for 2,000 stores by year

Dec. 5, 2018

[Leonid Bershidsky] France faces typical Facebook revolution

The liberating role social networks played during the Arab Spring and the Russian protests of 2011 and 2012 was widely lauded. Little of that enthusiasm is on display today amid the violent “yellow vest” protests in France -- even though Facebook is still doing what it does best: letting people channel their rage.In a 2011 paean to “the Facebook revolution,” Chris Taylor of the tech news website Mashable wrote that Facebook was “democracy in action.” Philip Howard of the University of Washington

Dec. 5, 2018

[Tyler Cowen] Trump deserves some credit for a truce with China

Just because the US and China have agreed to call a truce in their trade war doesn’t mean that it’s over: This was a classic exercise in can-kicking. Nonetheless, most cans have quite a few kicks in them, and overall this is good news for the global economy. Instead of sweeping everything under the rug, as was the case before US President Donald Trump took office, America and China have found a new way of addressing conflict by talking openly.Let’s consider the announcement itself. The US has pl

Dec. 4, 2018

[Mohamed A. El-Erian] G-20 gives markets a short-term win

The G-20 Summit in Argentina ended without fireworks involving the US, which was appropriate in a way, given the pall cast by the death of President George H.W. Bush.The US went along with a watered-down communique rather than stand in the way of a consensus, as it recently did at the APEC summit and the G-7. And rather than ending the meeting with a dramatic breakthrough or a loud breakdown, America reached an agreement to freeze trade tariffs with China that went somewhat beyond the one it rea

Dec. 4, 2018

[Hal Brands] Elizabeth Warren has (half) a foreign policy

A crucial challenge for the Democratic Party is to formulate a foreign policy platform that goes beyond critiquing US President Donald Trump and lays out a compelling vision of America’s role in an increasingly dangerous world.Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who will likely be a leading candidate for the party’s nomination in 2020, offered up her vision in a recent speech at American University. That speech, and an accompanying article in Foreign Affairs, outlined a strategy of progressive internationali

Dec. 4, 2018

[Faye Flam] Nature hasn’t created perfect species

For such flawed creatures, human beings are surprisingly hard to improve, at least through our genes.That’s one reason there’s so much outcry over the recent claim that researchers in China altered the genes of a pair of twins girls -- endowing at least one with resistance to HIV. The genetic change, even if it worked as advertised, would not be a clear-cut improvement but a trade-off.The claim is that the researchers disabled a gene called CCR5, which in its intact form helps HIV enter cells. G

Dec. 3, 2018

[Alexandra Borchardt] Mundane dangers confronting news media

The brutal torture and murder of the US-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has focused attention on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is widely believed to have ordered the killing. It also highlights the hazards of the news business. When the final numbers are tallied, 2018 could be the most dangerous year on record for journalists worldwide.But while physical attacks on journalists have become frighteningly bold, most dangers confronting the profession are much more mundane. Five

Dec. 3, 2018

[Julian Lee] OPEC might kick Saudi Arabia when it’s down

OPEC and friends meet in Vienna later this week, and the backdrop isn’t pretty. Oil prices are their lowest in over a year, and there’s the prospect of a glut in 2019 if the group doesn’t make a new deal to cut production.But agreement may be impossible. Saudi Arabia is adamant the burden must be shared. Others in the group argue that the kingdom’s output boost since June has created the problem and it is up to the kingdom to solve it by bearing the brunt of the cuts.From an economic perspective

Dec. 3, 2018

[John Micklethwait] China inching in the right direction

It was appropriate that US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping flew to Buenos Aires for their showdown summit at the close of a month that began with the centennial of the end of World War I. America’s economic tussles with China are all too reminiscent of the rivalry at the beginning of the last century between Britain, the superpower, and the rising power, Germany.This is not as bleak a comparison as it sounds, for two reasons. First, nobody now seems to be planning on immi

Dec. 2, 2018

[Matthew B. Kugler] Does it hurt you if your face is tracked by technology?

Would you care if a store used facial recognition to track you as you shopped? If it could link your face to your credit card and know not just what you bought, but also what you looked at? Data I’ve gathered on consumer sentiment suggests that many people do mind being tracked through their biometrics. In one study I conducted, 77 percent of people expressed interest in a coffee shop customer loyalty program that worked by ID card, but only 47 percent were interested if the same program tracked

Dec. 2, 2018

[Eli Lake] Don’t punish US for Saudi Arabia’s crimes

If you want to understand why the Senate voted last week to move forward with a resolution ending US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, read the speech that Bob Corker delivered from the Senate floor on Wednesday.The outgoing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has long been an ally of Saudi Arabia in Washington. And yet Corker voted to move the Yemen resolution out of his committee. Mind you, he didn’t say he would be supporting it when it comes to the floor for a vote. Rath

Dec. 2, 2018