World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Many are shocked by the submissiveness and passivity of the so-called Axis of Resistance in addressing the ongoing Israeli air and missile strikes targeting this Axis’ military bases in Syria. Adding to their bewilderment is that this servility persisted even as the rules of escalation changed,…

In Iranian mythology, partly reflected in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, the national epic, the advice given to young men who aspire to become great warriors is to never reveal their strategy and avoid boastful talk. Rustam, Gudarz, Geeve, Bahman and other heroes of Iranian epic are never seen spilling the…

If 2021 was the breakthrough year for mRNA vaccines, then 2022 may be the breakthrough year for artificial intelligence. So far there have been major advances in text generation and image generation, and now investor Nat Friedman is predicting big developments in AI personal voice assistants. More…

Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, said it best in a tweet this week: “What is Berlin afraid of that Kyiv is not?” Kuleba and his compatriots, along with their friends all over the world, are celebrating the heroic rout by Ukrainian forces of the Russian invaders in Kharkiv over the…

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…