World News Insights: Opinion Articles

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…

President Joe Biden’s student-debt plan is bad policy in too many ways to count. But is it also bad politics? Apparently he and his advisers think not, given that he announced this initiative just before the midterm elections. No disrespect to their expertise, but I wonder if they have…

Moderna Inc. dropped a lawsuit on Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, claiming the technology in their Covid-19 shots infringes on its messenger RNA patents. The legal battle will surely be protracted and expensive. What it won’t do is slow the pace of innovation in mRNA, if gene editing tool Crispr’s…

The details of the back and forths in Vienna are becoming increasingly obscure, worrying those involved in the negotiations and eating at their composure. Apprehensions are rising of an American slip up in the negotiations that could turn what should have been an effort to solve a crisis into…

It is now almost four weeks since al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in an American drone strike on the balcony of a residence in the diplomatic quarter of the Afghan capital Kabul. The strike represented the end of a decades-long search for Zawahiri, a veteran figure of al-Qaeda’s…