World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Joseph told Pharaoh to use his seven years of plenty to prepare for the lean times to come. In Aesop’s fable, the grasshopper danced away the summer while the industrious ant prepared for a harsh winter. Western leaders don’t lack for good advice from the classics, but clearly they don’t always…

Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century North African scholar, wrote that empires tended not to last beyond three generations. The founders of the first-generation are rough men united by hardship, grit and group solidarity, a concept he called asabiyyah. The next generation preserves the achievements of…

Should demanding the establishment of an Environmental Criminal Court be considered a step too far, then it might be necessary to review this stance based on the facts, which prove that environmental crimes are expanding more rapidly than other types of organized crimes, and are generating profits…

The most popular depression drugs taken by millions don’t work by fixing an “imbalance of the brain’s neurotransmitters,” as many drug advertisements claim or imply. That’s because depression isn’t caused by a chemical imbalance, according to a new analysis published in Molecular Psychiatry…

Walt Disney Co.’s streaming strategy appears to be shifting ever so subtly away from subscriber growth toward profits, dealing another blow to customers who have become accustomed to low-price, ad-free viewing. While Wall Street showed its delight with the 14.4 million new Disney+ subscribers…

In Donald Trump’s quest to sustain his dominance over the Republican Party, his claim to have been robbed of victory in 2020 has been a crucial talisman, lending him powers denied to previous defeated presidential candidates. By insisting that he was cheated out of victory, Trump fashioned himself…

It has been a good week on the inflation front. First we had a flat month for the Consumer Price Index — zero inflation in July. Then we saw an actual decline in the Producer Price Index. Naturally, there is a lot of pushback against the good news. I’ve been seeing many warnings against…

Imagine living the life of every human being who has ever existed — in order of birth. Your first life begins about 300,000 years ago in Africa. After living that life and dying, you travel back in time to be reincarnated as the second-ever person, born slightly later than the first, then the…

Since announcing that his parliamentary bloc would resign, the leader of the Sadr Movement, Muqtada al-Sadr, has been playing tug of war with his rivals in the Coordination Framework. The latter were recently deprived of the constitutional legitimacy they had obtained in the courts, not through…

The Covid wave fueled by the omicron BA.5 surge is finally starting to ebb in the UK and in some of the harder-hit parts of the US. But why? It’s no longer tenable to argue that disease waves peak and fall primarily because people start taking precautions. People, especially in these two countries,…

This is not the end of inflation. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported something we haven’t seen since the depths of the pandemic recession: a month without inflation. That is, the average…

In his meeting in Tehran with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Islamic Republic’s “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised what he called “Your Excellency’s pre-emptive initiative” in launching “Special Operations “ against Ukraine. He claimed that if Putin had invaded Ukraine, the…