World News Insights: Opinion Articles

The Lebanese scene is surreal, sad, and funny: The government vacuum continues, and no government that responds to the punitive votes cast on May 15 to a minimal degree will be allowed to take form. The parties to the regime of sectarian-quota-based spoil-sharing have accepted that electing a…

After Queen Elizabeth’s passing, Britain may never be the same again, for reasons that cannot be attributed exclusively to Buckingham Palace. Today, a combination of factors threatens the long-standing entity that the United Kingdom has known. Starting with Brexit and the receding influence of…

Alipay and WeChat Pay’s dominance of China’s retail payments was scripted over the past decade on the back of the humble quick recognition code. The same dotted squares could now start to undermine their moat. Fan Yifei, a deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China, said at a recent forum on…

Who owns the moon? The question sounds preposterous, but a few weeks ago NASA stumbled into it by releasing a list of potential lunar landing and exploration sites for its upcoming Artemis missions. It turns out that some of those sites are also being considered by the Chinese space program for its…

Apple Inc. last week unveiled its latest iPhone in a 90-minute glitzy infomercial that was all about hardware. Though the company didn’t talk about what it would do with people’s personal data, it has long been a given that your information on an iPhone is kept private. Its messaging system is…

The gains of Ukraine’s bold offensive are real, spectacular, and the product of a remarkable partnership with Washington. Success, however, can test any relationship, and Ukraine’s battlefield victories could, ironically, stoke new tensions with the US. Right now, officials in both countries are…

Until recently, everything the West exported to us was sacred; every idea was accepted, every product, and every political or social narrative. The major reason we believed them was a conviction that the West had beaten us to it in science, that its nationals are more knowledgeable and…

Whether it is the arrival of the Covid pandemic, or the droughts across the UK, there is nothing like an immediate crisis to jolt us into focusing on what has been known, and said, for a long time - but not given enough thought. Ironically, an answer to some of our climatic problems could lie in…

We see a new impasse in negotiations about renewing the 2015 agreement that limits Iran’s nuclear program. Members of Congress are pressuring the Biden administration not to make any concessions. Many Democrats and Republicans in Congress want no deal. A group of fifty representatives from the…

Arab political thought has extensively dealt with what it called “authenticity and modernity” and reconciling the two. Days ago in Britain, we saw, with the passing of Queen Elizabeth and the ascension of her son Charles to the throne, a remarkable ceremony of “authenticity and modernity:”…

The gist of what we have read and heard from American and western statements after Iran’s response to the “final proposal” offered by the European Union to the Iranians and Americans over the revival of the nuclear deal is that there is no Plan B to deal with Tehran. For example, US Secretary…

Meta Platforms Inc. has become the latest social media giant to tinker with the idea of selling premium features as part of its service, according to a report in The Verge. Having been free for years, it wants to see if any of us will pay for new widgets in Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp. That…