World News Insights: Opinion Articles

One of the challenges of being alive right now is making sense of the threat to the American election system: It’s hard to determine, conclusively, how widespread that threat is, how much chaos and danger we’re living through and what to do next. How bad are things? In an October Reuters/Ipsos…

Iraq deserves our most genuine wishes for a way out of the dark tunnel and into normalcy. We can only hope that the most recent political transition will be the end of the country’s long journey of sorrow that started with the rise of Saddam Hussein, who dragged his country into futile wars that…

In an unprecedented initiative that is not just empty talk but a real effort to support joint efforts in the Middle East to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and remove them from the atmosphere, Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman took the unprecedented step of launching the …

If China were to attack Taiwan, it wouldn’t just have to face a hostile superpower. It would also likely have to confront its longstanding regional rival, Japan. For centuries, Japan and China have vied for hegemony in East Asia; at times, they have threatened each other’s survival. Today, as I…

If you bought a new phone, computer, game console or some other such device in the past few years, there’s a good chance that you’ve been charging it using a cable with at least one end that looks something like a squashed Tic Tac — a rectangular plug with rounded corners, about a tenth of an inch…

President Biden will be one of the losers in the November 8 elections. He and his Democratic party had hoped that the issue of legal abortion would attract most voters, but the Republican Party found that inflation in the economy is the stronger political issue. Most political analysts here agree…

Baghdad was writhing with the sound of explosions and the scenes of blood and rubble. An Iraqi official accused the media of amplifying the number of victims, and controversy erupted on the matter. I was overwhelmed by journalistic curiosity, so I asked an Iraqi friend to find me the contact number…

The war in Ukraine led to a very serious risk of a food crisis at a global level when Ukraine, one of the world’s top producers and exporters of grain was no longer able to export its products because of Russia’s blockade. Before the war, Ukraine exported five million metric tones of grain…

The bursting of social media’s ad-funded bubble is creating big market waves. Meta Platforms Inc. is less valuable than Home Depot Inc., Snap Inc. is worth less than Deutsche Bank AG (which underwrote its IPO), and Twitter is now privately owned by Elon Musk after almost a decade of cumulative…

In February 2020, in the midst of a vitriolic presidential election, an idealistic group of donors from across the ideological spectrum met to plan an ambitious new project. They called themselves the New Pluralists and pledged to spend a whopping $100 million over the next decade to fight…

While the protests in Iran have no open leadership, they do have remarkable symbolism. This symbolism speaks to the protesters’ awareness and focus, which is seen in the slogans raised by the young Iranian women, as well as men, taking to the streets. Indeed, their symbolism has become a…

The Aounist “philosophy of strength” has run its course, ending up powerless and lying flat on a haystack. Anger and bluster were not enough to conceal this terrible fact. The “strong president,” his “strong rule,” “the ascension of the candidate who is strongest within his sect to the…