World News Insights: Opinion Articles

When Israeli forces invaded Beirut in June 1982, Vladimir Putin was still a young officer in the KGB empire that was run by Yuri Andropov. In the fall of that same year Andropov would be named master of the Kremlin. Also in 1982, Volodymyr Zelensky was still a boy of four, playing in a Russian…

On August 24 John Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said an agreement with Iran about its nuclear program was closer than it had been in early August although there are still differences between the two sides. The Biden administration is being careful about its language…

The idea was to be permanently chastened by the Civil War, that the relief of emancipation and reunification would always be tempered by the shock of 600,000 corpses. And yet “civil war” has lately become one of those zeitgeist phrases that rattle around the internet, like “quiet quitting” or “Pete…

It’s a bad time to be a Japanese brand in China. Even a fake one. Miniso Group Holding Ltd., a Chinese retailer of cheap household goods with around 3,000 stores in the mainland, made it big off an aesthetic that could charitably be described as an homage to modern Japanese branding. While…

They’ve been around for thousands of years but they’re still tripping up foreign investors in China. Company chops are the carved seals that, when used with a red inkpad to stamp documents, confer legitimacy on corporate actions. Investors accustomed to the norms of Western business may think they…

The year 1982 is being recalled often in Lebanon today because it is the 40th anniversary of many things. That year, the clash of sentiments and ideas that were born with the emergence of the country itself was crowned. But it was also the year that launched a new race to part ways and stirred…

The phrase “unprecedented” has become a common description in the past years, in media reports about natural disasters such as forest fires, droughts and floods. It sounds as if the world is witnessing a streak of record-breaking calamities, matching breaking records in sports, except that those…

President Joe Biden’s plan to have the federal government pay off hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans has received blistering criticism, all of it deserved. It’s a constitutional offense: Congress is supposed to authorize sweeping spending programs, not the president acting on his…

There were reports on Saturday that the International Atomic Energy Agency has a team of experts ready to visit Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant within days. It would not be a minute too soon: Artillery shells are landing with chilling regularity in and around the facility, Europe’s…

AIDS. SARS. H1N1 influenza. Ebola. Covid-19. Monkeypox. Infectious disease outbreaks often come and go, though some persist over the long haul, much like the man who has occupied the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., as director of the National Institute of Allergy and…

China’s central bank protests too much. Beijing is wary of overdoing its efforts to shore up the troubled financial system and faltering economy, but continues to be pushed into rolling out new measures. Fresh steps are announced almost daily, though many are modest in scope. China faces at least…

In Kosovo, the power goes off every six hours. It’s the first European country to suffer rolling outages as the energy crisis escalates. In an effort to avoid that fate, Europeans are taking colder showers, offices are turning down thermostats and stores are dimming their lights. In the UK, waiting…