World News Insights: Opinion Articles

A new study that mined health records from the Department of Veterans Affairs hints that the drug Paxlovid might be useful in preventing long Covid. Scientists have been urging the government and the drug’s manufacturer, Pfizer, to study the idea that lingering virus could be the culprit behind…

As the third month of protests in Iran begins, the regime is now confronting a revolt organized independently with the dynamics needed to endure, which leaves all the branches of the regime in a tight spot- the conservatives of both the doctrinal and military wings, and the reformists, both those…

Japan is America’s single most important ally, but Australia has historically been its most reliable. Alone among US allies, not just in the Indo-Pacific but globally, Australia has fought in all of America’s major wars since World War I. As I found during three days in Sydney and Canberra, the…

As the days shorten and the dark hours stretch, every impulse in me is to slow down, get under a blanket and stay there till spring. In a 2020 piece for The Atlantic exploring the possibility of human hibernation, James Hamblin wrote that as the winter months come upon us, “Maybe our minds and…

As Iran enters a third month of popular protests, or a revolutionary uprising as some analysts assert, it seems that the troubled country may be heading for an impasse in which the ruling clique is neither able to calm down the situation nor capable of crushing it as it did on a number of previous…

No one following developments in the Arab world can miss the transformative progress being made. This progress was accompanied by some ambiguity in the vision for it and an array of changes and formations that have become a hallmark of our era. The media scene has not been isolated from these…

After decades of failure, weight loss drugs seem finally poised to become big pharma’s newest blockbuster category. Bloomberg Intelligence sees the US obesity drug market alone as worth $12 billion in 2028. Morgan Stanley Research recently made a far more bullish prediction, forecasting global…

Restructuring is a horrible time for the staff of any company, but it’s also an opportunity to concentrate on what reliably makes money. Elon Musk has made cuts so deep at Twitter Inc. that his team has started asking dozens of workers to return after being laid off last Friday, when about half of…

TikTok is a happy place. From cute kitties to lip-syncing stars, the Chinese short-video service is a place where people go to entertain and to be delighted. Unlike Twitter and Facebook, the site is abjectly apolitical. Yet, politicians increasingly find it quite objectionable. This is not…

The question now is: how do we understand Iran? What impact will its protests have? What is the difference between them and what came to be known as the ‘Green Revolution' in 2009, which former US President Barack Obama, for electoral reasons, has finally apologized for not supporting? When and…

Climate challenges have long occupied a large segment of world leaders’ agendas. Although some leaders view the matter from a scope of political goals, a few others deal with this issue as a duty of moral responsibility. Today, this space may not be an opportunity to review the two previous…

With the revolt that recently erupted in Iran, Syria came to feature in the rhetoric of the Iranian regime and its followers. It was mentioned in the following terms: they- Western powers, enemies, spies and their subordinates- want to destroy Iran like they tried to destroy Syria. Before that,…