World News Insights: Opinion Articles

President Vladimir Putin signing the decree annexing the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson, after having held internationally unrecognized referendums in those regions, raises an important question: Has Putin won? Has he achieved any victories at all? To answer this…

Imagine if Arab intellectuals, during the nationalist era in the fifties and sixties, had behaved as though the Palestinian Nakba did not concern them. Such behavior would have been considered a grave shortcoming in their nationalist qualities, if not collusion with the enemy of nationalism…

When a Tesla Inc. battery caught fire at an energy storage facility that helps power California last week, critics were quick to pounce. Michael Burry of “The Big Short” fame, who called the mid-2000s housing collapse correctly, hit out at the EV maker. Blaming Elon Musk’s firm for a bad battery…

The price of “living with Covid” in a free and open society is turning out to be much heftier than public health experts predicted. Even with good vaccines and treatments, this year’s US death toll is already many orders of magnitude higher than that of the other virus that circulates each year,…

You can’t control when a recession hits. But although tech platforms like Alphabet Inc. and Snap Inc. are slimming down to cope with the global economic rout, Meta Platforms Inc.’s own restructuring couldn’t come at a worse time for the firm. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff on Thursday to…

Our international rules-based order through which the world’s nations pursue global peace and development is crashing into the limits of its founding vision. What our predecessors built some eight decades ago, after the Second World War — from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to the…

In its effort to quell the crisis of protests over the murder of Mahsa Amini by the morality police, the Iranian regime has done many things in parallel. To turn attention away from the protests that have been ongoing (though their scale has been oscillating throughout) for two weeks, it invoked…

The new US Covid booster campaign needs a dose of clarity about its goals and limitations. The latest “bivalent” vaccine — retooled to protect against the currently circulating BA.5 variant — will benefit some more than others. The oldest and most vulnerable citizens are likely to benefit most…

“The white giant in chains!” This is how Bahar, one of Iran’s greatest contemporary poets, describes Mount Damvand, the towering volcano that looms over the horizon in the Tehran region. At the end of his qasida (ode) Bahar pleads with the volcano to end its silence with an explosion of fire and…

Growing up in southern Iran and Southern California, I had the pleasure of having a father who loved to tell stories about his childhood in Iran. Most of his stories were funny, but there was one that always brought him to the brink of tears. Of course, he never cried; he always changed the…

With the passing of yet another Muslim Brotherhood symbol, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the movement loses one of its key propagandists. With the absence of most of its leaders and its loss of power in the states it had controlled, the Muslim Brotherhood is suffering enormous losses on nearly every level. So…

There is no truth whatsoever, with all due respect to our “Iranian brothers,” to the claim that there is such a thing as an Iranian nation. Indeed, I was surprised, as an observer, to find that so-called genealogical DNA tests had demonstrated that 56 percent of this brotherly nation is of Arab…