World News Insights: Opinion Articles

The recent extensive armed confrontations, the storming of the Presidential Palace that is a state symbol, and the casualties have all made Baghdad a more dangerous city than before. Despite the army’s intervention, the removal of road blockades, and the cessation of clashes, Iraq’s near future is…

Today, on the 1st of September, Lebanon sees the term of its president end. It is true that Article 73 of the Lebanese constitution leaves it up to the Parliamentary Speaker to choose a day this month to hold a parliamentarian session to elect a new president, and he will probably bide his time in…

“Welcome, welcome!” My guide, Philip, waves at me from his seat in a virtual conference room, where he’s wearing a green shirt and sitting at a desk. I’m at Facebook’s Reality Labs headquarters in Burlingame, California, wearing Meta Platform Inc.’s Quest 2 headset. Philip is in another room there…

Mikhail Gorbachev was a man who hoped for the best, and got the worst. The legacy of the last Soviet leader, who died yesterday aged 91, was largely undone by two decades of Vladimir Putin. Now a grinding war in Ukraine is its grim and bloody requiem. Gorbachev had an aversion to violence, a…

Four decades ago I spent a year working in the US government, on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers. (For those wondering: Yes, this was the Reagan administration; no, I wasn’t a Republican.) It was a technocratic job. I was the chief international economist; the chief domestic…

There’s been a lot of talk of shifting the manufacturing supply chain away from China. Other countries want to cut their dependence on the world’s biggest factory floor, wary that Beijing is wielding too much power over the global economy. Rebuilding manufacturing and replacing China, though, isn’t…

And so it is another one of the ongoing intermittent rounds of civil conflict in Libya. Blood, corpses, and destruction. Neither the Skhirat Agreements, the Bouznika Understandings, nor the UN envoys could contain this conflict. What began in the summer of 2014 with the war over control over…

What has happened in Iraq so far tells us that we are facing a dangerous game of mistakes. This means that Iraq is open to all options, none of which is good enough to defuse the dangerous conflict there. Today, all the cards have been used in Iraq. The country has witnessed tension among…

With energy prices soaring, few houses will be fully illuminated during the festive season. Don’t expect glowing reindeers on lawns or Santas on rooftops. Up and down the country, these holiday features will likely be absent this year. But don’t think Christmas trees will be totally stripped of…

If you’re looking for an emblem of why Pakistan will struggle to recover from the floods that have killed more than 1,000 since June, consider its latest bailout from the International Monetary Fund agreed Monday. The infusion of $1.16 billion might help unlock enough cash to get the country…

Evidence is growing that monkeypox, like Covid, can be reliably detected in wastewater. Yet the US has moved far too slowly to include the virus in its regular scans of sewage for coronavirus. By the time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launches a program in the next month or two to…

Today in Geneva representatives of Syria’s international friends will meet to show our support for the Geneva-based political process facilitated by the UN in implementing UNSCR 2254. We will once again urge the regime to work in good faith towards a genuine, inclusive political settlement. This…