World News Insights: Opinion Articles

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…

My generation of Chinese looked up to the United States. When I was a university student in northwestern China in the late 1990s, my friends and I tuned in to shortwave broadcasts of Voice of America, polishing our English while soaking up American and world news. We flocked to packed lecture…

A former high-ranking Hezbollah official who has now become among the party’s most ardent critics has been saying that Hassan Nassrallah has a deep hatred for Beirut and everything the city represents as a space where civilizations come together socially, economically, politically, culturally, and…

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, many observers expected that Russia’s military would make quick work of President Vladimir Putin’s mission: ​​to capture the country’s capital, Kyiv, depose its democratically elected government and restore Ukraine to Moscow’s control. But nearly six months…

A central dilemma of US foreign policy today is this: The country that most threatens the American-led global order is also the country whose cooperation is essential to preserving a livable world. That quandary flared anew last week, when China responded to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to…

If success has many fathers, then a crypto exchange in the eye of a money-laundering storm has become an orphan. After Indian law enforcement froze $8 million in WazirX assets, Binance Chief Executive Officer Changpeng Zhao denied owning the country’s largest crypto exchange. Binance’s November…

Inflation finally surprised markets in good way, and traders are understandably enthusiastic that the worst price pressures may finally be in the rear-view mirror. But the true turn for the better will come when inflation ceases to be shocking altogether — positively or negatively — and can fade…