SHANGHAI—General Motors Co. faces a critical test winning back consumers in China, a market integral to its fortunes.

Global auto makers are looking to China, where auto sales have rebounded more strongly than in the U.S. and Europe, to help them recover from a prolonged market slump exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

Few auto makers...

Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal is launching its Peacock streaming service Wednesday, betting its low price in return for limited advertising will appeal to cash-strapped customers and make it a viable alternative to its pricier rivals.

The platform faces plenty of challenges: Not only is it joining the streaming wars months, if not years, later than its competitors, but it will also debut without its planned marketing centerpiece, the Tokyo summer Olympics, which were postponed to 2021. Plenty of its original content isn’t...

A surge in demand for soap and hand sanitizer during the pandemic has led to a global shortage of plastic hand pumps that dispense the products, propelling companies to redesign packaging and urge customers to reuse pumps.

Many businesses are wrestling with shortages of all sorts of things as the virus continues to spread across the world. Demand has surged for everything from bikes and masks to flour and puppies as people shift the way they shop and behave. For some producers, though, securing the packaging to sell their...

For climate scientists, the pandemic has made one thing clearer: the difficulty of reducing carbon emissions.

Emissions sank when factories were shut down, planes grounded and cars parked, as people stayed home to slow the spread of the coronavirus, but they are now rebounding fast as economies reopen.

When two-thirds of the world’s population...

TikTok has been one of the world’s biggest distractions during the pandemic, thanks to its endless stream of bite-size videos featuring dance-offs, pranks and other goofs.

Lately there has been a dash of something new at TikTok: politics.

Experimenting with letting users post short political videos, the app is emerging as a platform for protesters...

ViacomCBS Inc. landed the U.S. rights to show soccer matches from the UEFA Champions League, the company said, a deal that adds a popular live-sports property to its CBS All Access streaming service.

The four-year agreement, terms of which weren’t disclosed, gives ViacomCBS exclusive English-language rights to show Champions League matches, including on its CBS broadcast network, the CBS Sports cable network and CBS All Access, the company said. The deal also covers two other competitions, the UEFA Europa League and UEFA...

The surge in U.S. coronavirus cases and growing demand for Covid-19 tests are straining the ability of pharmacies and labs to deliver timely results to consumers, causing delays that hamper efforts to contain the spread of the virus.

CVS Health Corp., which tests tens of thousands of patients daily, initially promised results in three to five days and is now telling people to expect a wait of between five and seven days because of backlogs at testing labs. Walmart Inc. says tests that took around two days as recently as late...

SHANGHAI—Chinese shoppers have long used their phones to buy almost everything they need. The coronavirus crisis has supercharged that trend, turning online retail into a show which has hooked millions of stay-at-home consumers.

Fu Chenyuan thought she might have to close her 14-year-old Shanghai clothing shop, DF Boutique, in the spring as she watched other stores in the city’s bustling Jing’an district shut their doors. Having never sold anything online before, the 35-year-old reluctantly took up her iPhone and started modeling...

Civil rights advocates came out of a meeting Tuesday with Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg saying they didn’t make progress on their demands over how the social media giant polices the platform.

The lack of headway, one week into a boycott by some of the company’s top advertisers over the issue, points toward the likelihood of a protracted campaign that could extend beyond July, the original time frame. The organizers said they’re asking more advertisers to pause their spend on Facebook globally.

Dana Canedy is about to become publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint, taking over a storied house in the middle of a pandemic, with several high-profile books in the pipeline.

Starting July 27, Ms. Canedy, 55 years old, will succeed Jonathan Karp, the former publisher who in late May was named president and chief executive officer of the Simon & Schuster book-publishing unit of ViacomCBS Inc. The unit’s other imprints include Scribner, which publishes Stephen King.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has indicated the Trump administration is considering limiting U.S. users’ access to the popular video-messaging app TikTok. The Chinese-owned company has faced scrutiny in Washington where concerns are growing that Beijing could tap the social-media platform’s information to gather data on Americans.

TikTok, which has said it wouldn’t hand U.S. user data to Chinese authorities, has exited two international markets in recent weeks, as the first global social-media sensation to emerge from...

Bad news for fans of buffet meals: It might be a long time until your next one.

Pizza Hut, Ponderosa & Bonanza Steakhouses and other restaurant chains have roped off their buffets to prevent contamination and crowding as they seek to reopen dining rooms during the Covid-19 pandemic. And grocery stores such as Whole Foods Market and Wegmans Food Markets Inc. have kept hot-food bars closed since March, until lately a growing part of the business and a draw for customers. Now, those sales have plummeted given the risk of...

ZHANGJIAGANG, China—Factories in the U.S. and around the world are facing the challenge of how to reopen safely following the coronavirus pandemic. After weeks of lockdown and social distancing, bringing back thousands of employees to work together in proximity could cause new clusters of infection, setting back the economic recovery and forcing some companies to extend costly closures.

China,...

At the year’s start, few outside the world of biotech had heard of a Boston-area company with a New Age name and unproven approach to drugmaking. Most in the industry who did know Moderna Inc. doubted its prospects. Investors barely had interest in the company, which had yet to produce a medicine.

Moderna and its staffers were dealing with other pressures. For nine years, chief executive officer Stéphane Bancel nurtured a high-stress environment at the Cambridge, Mass., company, characterized by high expectations, sharp critiques...

John Smith started shopping early on a recent Wednesday and didn’t stop for days.

He visited an auto-supply site where he loaded his cart with a replacement turn-signal lever, emergency strobe light and two dozen other items. He hopped over to a home-goods merchant for another 10 items including wood picture frames, address plaques, a towel rack and mailbox. He ordered one of every kind of baby bundle, ranging from about $80 to nearly $500, from a site that sells infant sleeping boxes popular in places such as Finland.

Business-casual retailers are trying to figure out how to entice Americans who have grown used to T-shirts, leggings and gym shorts to buy their blazers, maxi dresses and fancier pants.

Brands like Ann Taylor, Banana Republic and Express have organized online categories around working or staying at home, hoping to keep selling their signature work apparel during the pandemic. But the coronavirus lockdowns have only furthered America’s embrace of informal attire, retail executives say.

President Trump’s most prominent Silicon Valley supporter, billionaire Peter Thiel, has told friends and associates that he plans to sit out this year’s presidential campaign because he thinks re-election is increasingly a long shot, people familiar with the matter say.

Mr. Thiel, a venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal Holdings Inc., spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2016, where he criticized the state of the economy and described Mr. Trump as a man set to rebuild America. One of the few tech leaders to...

Rick Smith, the man who pioneered Taser stun guns, says he wants to manufacture a next-generation Taser that is so effective police officers won’t have to use their pistols anymore. But he says it will take 10 years.

“Lethal force, even today, is still the most effective way to stop a threat,” Mr. Smith, chief executive and founder of Axon Enterprise Inc., said in an interview. “If we had really elevated weapons that can do the job and not kill someone, then the rationale for killing people goes away.”

Is the mass advertising boycott hitting Facebook Inc. a meaningful turning point for the social-media king? Or is it just another public-relations storm it weathers on its way to joining the Trillion-Dollar Club?

Companies like Coca-Cola and Unilever are pausing their social-media spend, citing a variety of reasons, most commonly their view that Facebook is not doing enough to eliminate hate speech, and the way the company’s products polarize and divide us all. Sound familiar? Accusations like this are leveled at the company...

New Delhi—TikTok, a popular short-video app, sought to distance itself from Beijing after India banned it and dozens of other Chinese mobile apps in retaliation for a deadly border clash last month.

In response to the ban, which was given on cybersecurity grounds, new TikTok Chief Executive Kevin Mayer said Chinese authorities had never requested the data of their Indian users, and even if they had, the company wouldn’t comply.

“The...

The Covid-19 pandemic has dinged the auto sector, but one part of the industry is faring better than it was before the crisis: used cars.

Sales of used vehicles in the U.S. have roared back after dropping 38% in April, when states were shut down and some dealerships were forced to close. In June, used-vehicle sales rose 17% above the pre-pandemic forecasts, according to research firm J.D. Power.

A...