World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Apart from all the details of the visit of the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, to China, and the outcomes resulting from the meetings and statements, what truly stands out is the fact that Blinken is indeed the first US Secretary of State to visit China in the past five years. This is…

The anticipated clash between Iran and the West has become a joke. The US and Israel have failed to follow through on their threats, and Iran has continued to develop its nuclear program unconcerned... Why is it a joke? Because it stands in the face of reality, from President Bush’s threats to Iran…

In U.F.O. arcana, one of the figures claiming a whistle-blower’s knowledge of a secret US program to reverse-engineer recovered alien technology is a man named Bob Lazar. Here’s how Lazar has told the story: As a physicist educated at M.I.T. and Caltech, he was hired by the US Navy in the 1980s…

In 1968, with the “Prague Spring”, the “New Wave” was born; cultural life flourished, and previously unimaginable films, books and plays appeared. This experience was crushed by the tanks that rolled in in the summer of that year. A vindictive backlash targeted intellectuals, and they migrated…

It was 1971. China secretly hosted a strange, unfamiliar and enigmatic visitor known as Henry Kissinger. During that period, the country existed under the influence of Mao Zedong, widely regarded as the "Great Master." It was not easy for the Richard Nixon administration to send its foreign…

The intensity of Western media coverage of Saudi Arabia, its achievements and efforts gives you the impression that the United States and the West have just discovered the Kingdom. It is true that the echo of the Saudi accomplishments has reached experts and the general public in the West, but it…

Libya has been devastated by chaos and looting. Communities are clashing over control of the country. Islamist factions derive their strength from foreign fighters who do not recognize the concept of nationhood (a geographically defined space that was home to ancestors) but the words of their…

Lebanon's Deputy for Forces of Change Ibrahim Mneimneh fearlessly voiced his stance, as he is known to do. Despite being one of the rare steadfast politicians in the country, Mneimneh and his fellow Forces of Change deputies have demonstrated flexibility. They have exhibited unwavering commitment…

Has the long-promised Ukrainian “spring offensive” already started? With summer just knocking on the doors, the question is making the rounds in political circles in Europe and the United States. By last Monday French military analysts were still trying to equivocate on the subject. “The offensive…

On May 27, the AP reported that fierce clashes between the Taliban and Iran erupted on the Iranian-Afghan border on Saturday, killing and wounding troops on both sides. Tensions over rights to shared waters have been rising sharply for months, and after culminating in the recent border clashes,…

Back in the early ’90s it would have been hard to imagine a time would come when people would long for double denim, the glumness of grunge and Ethan Hawke’s patchy “Reality Bites” facial hair. Yet more unfathomable: that there would be any affection for anything about that era’s nascent political…

The author of this article is not known for being friendly to the “Arab Socialist Baath Party.” He supports neither its ideas nor its actions, the regimes it has established nor its opposition to already existing regimes, its Syrian version nor its Iraqi version, its civilians nor its soldiers, its…