World News Insights: Opinion Articles

I am writing this from Amritsar, India, in the state of Punjab. The Sikh Golden Temple here is one of India’s leading attractions, and last night I shared space with thousands of people over the course of four or five hours. In that time, I saw only two people who might qualify as White Westerners…

After five years of negotiations involving the government, tech companies and civil society activists, the world’s largest democracy is sending its debate on privacy back to the drawing board. The Indian government has junked the personal data protection bill, and decided to replace it with “a…

It seems so naïve now, that moment in 2020 when Democratic insiders started to talk of Joe Biden as a transformational figure. But there were reasons to believe. To hold off a pandemic-induced collapse, the federal government had injected $2.2 trillion into the economy, much of it in New Deal-style…

It’s a hot summer and the message is clear; the residents of the planet must save themselves before it is too late. They have to get the signals sent by hurricanes, floods, and wildfires. Climate change will destabilize the world, hit crops and make some places uninhabitable, cause massive…

A few days ago, Coinbase Global Inc.’s top lawyer issued an unequivocal rejection of the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s allegations that digital tokens it offers its customers were, in fact, unregistered securities. “Coinbase does not list securities,” Paul Grewal wrote in a blog post. …

When it comes to electric vehicles, there is no great American supply chain. Storied automakers General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. have just proved as much. General Motors last week signed three significant deals. They include a $10.8 billion dollar agreement with South Korea’s Posco Chemical…

Turn on the evening news and it immediately becomes clear that Americans are experiencing the effects of climate change. Extreme heat and drought are affecting tens of millions of people, as floods and wildfires ravage communities from Appalachia to California. In the coming days, Congress has the…

Last Thursday, the day of the second anniversary of the Beirut port blast, was the day that it became conclusively certain that the Lebanese have been expelled to nature and that they must manage their affairs there, not in a state of laws or through socialization. The scale of the protests…

As Israel strikes Gaza, targeting Islamic Jihad with arrests and assassinations, the head of Quds Force, Brigadier General Esmail Qaani, said that Hezbollah was capable of wiping Israel off the map when the time is right. Speaking on Friday evening in the city of Sari in northern Iran, he said…

The debate about whether the world’s largest economy is in a recession, or headed for a recession, or sufficiently robust to avoid a recession, just got even more complicated. Friday’s US employment report showed total payrolls at a record high, with companies adding twice as many workers as…

When 26,500 tons of corn sailed out of the port of Odesa this week — the first agricultural export from Ukraine since Russia’s invasion — many food security experts breathed a sigh of relief. The news, combined with the falling cost of wheat after global prices had nearly doubled, has investors and…

As quickly as it blew up, the food crisis of 2022 appears to be receding. Red spring wheat rose to nearly $13 a bushel in March, prompting the world’s biggest wheat importer, Egypt, to devalue its currency. It’s now trading around $8, a fall of more than a third. Indonesia halted exports of…