World News Insights: Opinion Articles

As recently as three years ago, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. was trying to sit on the increasingly thorny fence between the US and China. The former is a much bigger buyer of chips, the latter is growing faster, and both are important markets for the world’s most advanced manufacturer of…

Legislation helping veterans exposed to toxic trash-incineration pits while serving overseas finally passed the Senate this week. Comedian and activist Jon Stewart, who had worked hard to elevate the problem and then to help get the bill across the finish line, expressed frustration that the…

In any international conflict that involves tough political and diplomatic measures and violence of one sort or another, a key question faces the adversaries on both sides: what is the other side’s threshold of pain? More than six months after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine his adversaries…

Last month, Alphabet’s artificial intelligence subsidiary, DeepMind, stunned the world of science by presenting something truly spectacular: a snapshot of nearly every existing protein on Earth — 200 million of them. This machine-learning feat could speed the creation of new drugs. It has…

On this day two years ago, on August 4, a massive blast destroyed Beirut’s port, flipped the city on its head, and left a genocide in its wake. Not a single official pleaded for forgiveness or apologized to the people. No one was held accountable; they are all still in their seats, leaning on the…

Iran’s ILNA news agency quoted Major General Rahim Safavi, the top military adviser to the Supreme Leader, saying that his country’s forces were ready for a “hybrid” war. “The political, economic, cultural, and security situation in West Asia is changing and evolving, and Iran must play an…

MicroStrategy Inc. is two things: a publicly listed enterprise-software company whose annual revenue has barely budged in five years, and a publicly listed Bitcoin trading vehicle that has borrowed money to buy volatile cryptocurrency and lost a cumulative $2 billion in the process. The results…

Everybody knows you should never let a good crisis go to waste, and Nancy Pelosi gave China all the hardware it needed to construct a golden chariot of crisis and ride it to glory. But the People’s Republic promptly crashed its crisis chariot into a ditch. Today was Day Two of our long national…

How many patents on a single drug is too many? Scholars, activists, and politicians have debated the question for decades. This week, a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit gave a firm answer. As long as the owner doesn’t use what’s known as the patent estate in a way that violates…

The Iranian theory, explicit sometimes and implicit at others, is founded on the idea that Tehran, since its 1979 revolution, has been supporting the Arab effort to liberate Palestine and wipe Israel out and that Iran was the one to revive this project after the Arabs had abandoned it in succession…

Much like Osama bin Laden was killed among his wives and children in Pakistan in 2011, Ayman al-Zawahiri, another terrorist, was killed in hiding among his wife and children in Afghanistan last Sunday. According to the New York Times, al-Zawahiri was killed in hiding at a safe house belonging to…

Israel will be a big factor in a primary election on August 2 where two Democratic Party nominees are competing to be the Democratic candidate next November against a Republican Party candidate to represent a Congressional district in Michigan. The national lobby that rejects criticism of…