World News Insights: Opinion Articles

And so it is another one of the ongoing intermittent rounds of civil conflict in Libya. Blood, corpses, and destruction. Neither the Skhirat Agreements, the Bouznika Understandings, nor the UN envoys could contain this conflict. What began in the summer of 2014 with the war over control over…

What has happened in Iraq so far tells us that we are facing a dangerous game of mistakes. This means that Iraq is open to all options, none of which is good enough to defuse the dangerous conflict there. Today, all the cards have been used in Iraq. The country has witnessed tension among…

With energy prices soaring, few houses will be fully illuminated during the festive season. Don’t expect glowing reindeers on lawns or Santas on rooftops. Up and down the country, these holiday features will likely be absent this year. But don’t think Christmas trees will be totally stripped of…

If you’re looking for an emblem of why Pakistan will struggle to recover from the floods that have killed more than 1,000 since June, consider its latest bailout from the International Monetary Fund agreed Monday. The infusion of $1.16 billion might help unlock enough cash to get the country…

Evidence is growing that monkeypox, like Covid, can be reliably detected in wastewater. Yet the US has moved far too slowly to include the virus in its regular scans of sewage for coronavirus. By the time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launches a program in the next month or two to…

Today in Geneva representatives of Syria’s international friends will meet to show our support for the Geneva-based political process facilitated by the UN in implementing UNSCR 2254. We will once again urge the regime to work in good faith towards a genuine, inclusive political settlement. This…

In May the literary critic Christian Lorentzen published a Substack newsletter about being bored. “Hollywood movies are boring. Television is boring. Pop music is boring. The art world is boring. Broadway is boring. Books from big publishing are boring,” he wrote. Since I have been rather bored,…

Europe is getting back to business after its summer break — but this year feels like jumping into a cold shower. Just listen to Emmanuel Macron. The French President told his ministers during their first formal gathering last week that a new paradigm is on the horizon — it’s the end of abundance in…

It feels intuitively right that a reformulated booster vaccine aimed at the omicron BA.5 variant would vastly improve our protection against it as well as any offspring that might threaten us in the fall. But intuition doesn’t always agree with scientific data. It’s not intuitive at all to think…

If you expect your job to give your life meaning, you’re setting yourself up for failure. There was a time when a job was just an economic transaction: Someone paid you for your labor and that enabled you to live and support your family. But for a variety of reasons, many workers today expect more…

I was struck by a comment on the article I wrote last week: Biden...Summertime Santa Claus?, which discussed Washington potentially returning to the nuclear agreement. “If Biden plays Santa Claus in the summer, the US administration will certainly take its presents back before Christmas….” “Biden…

On 24 August, Ukraine celebrated its 31st anniversary of independence while fighting off an invasion by the country (even though under a different name and form then) from which it gained its independence from. On this independence day, Russia hit the train station in the city of Chaplyne in…