World News Insights: Opinion Articles

We should be grateful to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei for admitting to the role that his country plays in the Arab world. In a series of tweets from his English account, Khamenei put forward his vision of a Western conspiracy that Iran had foiled. “From the Westerners’ point of view,…

Shoppers on both sides of the Atlantic are under intense pressure from inflation. So far, sales of everything from luxury goods to laundry detergent have been better than expected. But cracks are already emerging in demand — and these are set to intensify as winter draws in. There’s no…

When FIFA announced in 2010 that Qatar would host this year’s World Cup, football fans and sports pundits were left scratching their heads. Qatar, it was said again and again, had no real business hosting the tournament: The weather is too hot; there aren’t enough stadiums; the country doesn’t even…

The World Cup is a sporty and stubborn human dream. In 1930, in Uruguay, this international event was born and drove the residents of the planet into a kind of addiction. Every four years, the ninety-year-old celebration rejuvenates and doubles its sparkle. It resisted the hurricanes that swept the…

When Lewis Carroll’s Alice says she can't believe impossible things, the White Queen gives the smart politician’s reply: “I daresay you haven't had much practice. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Rishi Sunak, the UK’s pragmatic new prime minister,…

What we are witnessing today of attempts to impose “values” and ideas on the whole world and to involve politics in sports is nothing but racism, not freedom, as some claim to be the case. It reaches the point of barbarism in various fields. What is known and simple is that your freedom ends…

In recent years, a swelling chorus of Americans has grown critical of the nation’s billionaires. But in the extraordinary week gone by, that chorus was drowned out by a far louder and more urgent case against them. It was made by the billionaires themselves. One after another, four of our best…

There is a theory that, other than Uruguay at the inaugural tournament in 1930, every World Cup winner has been in some way influenced by the wave of great Hungarian coaches scattered across the globe in the aftermath of World War I. It’s not entirely tenuous, even if some are skeptical. Nobody,…

For all the controversy surrounding his purchase of Twitter Inc., Elon Musk has at least one thing right: Twitter really is “like open-sourcing the news.” The world’s richest man has long been an advocate for “citizen journalism,” but since his takeover of the social media site he’s been…

The characterization of the events in Iran does not differ much from the characterization of what happened in Syria, so it is okay to summarize. Here too, the scenes are straight out of a movie. Indeed, the images and clips being recorded and shared by Iranian protests aim to document the flood in…

Last Tuesday, 22/11/2022, is no longer just another day on the global calendar. That day, the Saudis weaved a story that will remain engraved in the world’s collective memory, in the minds of the West more than the East and rivals more than friends. The victory of the Saudi national team…

Like a one-trick pony, Iran’s ruling mullahs have played unpredictable so often that they have become predictable in their unpredictability. Facing a nationwide uprising that seems to continue despite massive repression and shaken by the International Atomic Energy’s unexpectedly tough stance…