World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Artificial intelligence has been moving so fast that even the scientists are finding it hard to keep up. In the past year, machine learning algorithms have started to generate rudimentary movies and stunning fake photographs. They’re even writing code. In the future, we’ll probably look back on…

Elon Musk is now the proud owner of Twitter. The danger here is not that we have a rogue billionaire in our midst — that has happened before, and it will happen again — but that this one will be in control of what he has rightly referred to as our “digital town square.” Musk is the face of 21st…

The protests that have been ongoing in Iran for the past two months are not expected to lead to radical changes to the nature of the Iranian regime in the short or even medium term. However, the protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, which have turned into a social movement, have begun…

The Brazilian elections have just concluded. Former President Lula has accomplished a dramatic comeback by winning the elections for the Brazilian presidency. Elections that received the most international attention of all Brazilian elections since the restoration of democracy in 1985. This is…

The kitchen is the same, as is the chef. The ingredients are also the same. But when the witches’ brew is served in the restaurant, Chez Ayatollah, would-be clients reject it in disgust. This is the image that comes to mind as the Islamic Republic in Iran struggles to crush the latest popular…

El Buen Samaritano, an Episcopal outreach ministry in Texas, serves the east side of Austin, the poorer of the two sides of the city split by I-35. There are fewer services there, including many neighborhoods that don’t have a health center. The population is mainly people of color, many whose…

Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at the Yale School of Medicine, says he worries about two kinds of long Covid. There’s the obvious version where people suffer prolonged virus symptoms like fatigue, and a stealthier version in which people recover yet carry an added risk of blood clots and strokes. …

The presidential term of Michel Aoun, his party the Free Patriotic Movement, and his son-in-law Gebran Bassil is over. Characterizations of the past six years in which he ruled can be divided into two main categories: depreciation and demonization. Claims that he and his entourage are responsible…

The Covid pandemic still isn’t over, but it has gone remarkably flat. It’s been nearly a year since Omicron was discovered in South Africa and Botswana, and no new variant of concern has been declared since then by the World Health Organization. That’s a notable interlude, since five were…

For Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, the demise of Friendster is a cautionary tale. Friendster, a social network founded in 2002, gained millions of users soon after it started but lost them almost as quickly, later metamorphosing into an online gaming site based in Malaysia before closing down…

The protests currently underway in Iran tell us that the legitimacy of the regime is weakening or withering away. We are not looking at a familiar scenario. Just as we used to say that the conditions of the countries that witnessed what has falsely been called the Arab Spring are not similar, the…

New York City’s new pay rule takes effect today, requiring companies with at least four workers to include a “good faith” estimate of a minimum and maximum salary in new job listings (including internal promotions and transfers). More pay information for workers sounds like a good thing, and it…