World News Insights: Opinion Articles

There are well over 100 currencies, from the Angolan kwanza and the Bhutan ngultrum to the Uzbekistan sum and the Vanuatu vatu. Is that the right number for the global economy? Not really. A multiplicity of unpredictably fluctuating currencies discourages trade and investment by injecting…

In September, scientists at the University of Hong Kong published the most complete census of ants ever assembled. The numbers are so big as to seem made up. The study estimated that there are at least 20 quadrillion — that is, 20,000,000,000,000,000 — ants on Earth. That’s about 2.5 million ants…

It seems as if the world is encountering a “perfect storm” of simultaneous crises: The coronavirus pandemic is approaching the end of its third year; the war in Ukraine is threatening to go nuclear; extreme climate events are afflicting North America, Europe, Asia and Africa; and inflation is…

A few days ago, the British daily “The Guardian” published a cautionary column by Gordon Brown, who was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010 and is currently a WHO ambassador for global health financing.    The column laments the reasons for the current state of the world. International…

As Iran’s protests enter their fifth week, they are taking an unprecedented course. The house of the man who led the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, has been burned, and protests have broken out in most of the country’s cities and villages. This includes Khomeyn, Khomeini’s hometown. We have also…

By the time the climate summit in Sharm El-Sheikh concludes, the outcomes will be classified under metaphors, ranging from failure and weakness to glorious victory. This is often due to unrealistic perceived goals or excessive hostility on one hand, and passionate national pride on the other. Some…

This month, I chose to leave my position leading trust and safety at Elon Musk’s Twitter. My teams were responsible for drafting Twitter’s rules and figuring out how to apply them consistently to hundreds of millions of tweets per day. In my more than seven years at the company, we exposed…

Addressing the subject of language is usually associated with culture, which is a natural association, given that language is a component of culture. Rather, language is a determinant of the symbolic construction of the identity of any society. Historically, the most famous, expansive, and…

The majority of the historical polities in the vast geographical area of the Iranian plateau, which had previously been independent states (city-states), were brought together under a single entity and central state centuries ago. However, while it seemed, superficially, that a nation-state had…

On the cusp of winter, a blooming international political spring is in the air. An atmosphere of optimism has prevailed over this year’s G20 summit as the US and China, the world’s two largest economies, saw their deteriorating relations come to a halt. “The world has come to a crossroads. Where to…

The three-word slogan-“woman, life, freedom”- launched by Iranian protesters in the past two months seems to have found a global resonance that few expected. You see it on giant posters in Tokyo, on a wall in the central railway station in Amsterdam, in neon-light messages in Rio de Janeiro, and…

Even if US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart President Xi Jinping were to sit through a thousand dialogues, the two countries would inevitably clash militarily. Indeed, the tensions between these two countries will inevitably lead to a military confrontation. There is no escaping this…