World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Nearly everyone expects that Republicans will, if they win November’s midterm elections, use newfound majorities in the House and possibly the Senate for intense oversight of the Biden administration and to press Democrats on hot-button issues like critical race theory, gender identity and the…

Hadi Matar, the young man of Lebanese descent who said that he had read only two pages of The Satanic Verses, stabbed Salman Rushdie ten times. Luckily, Matar didn’t read the entire novel (546 pages); otherwise, he would have stabbed him 2,730 times. That is what we conclude from a simple…

Eight out of nine Supreme Court justices went to Harvard or Yale law schools. So did nearly a fifth of the federal judiciary. This rankles some politicians, watchdog groups and others who see it as an outrageous manifestation of elitism that needs to be changed, given how much power this small…

The two weeks since the F.B.I. descended on Mar-a-Lago have felt remarkably familiar. It’s not just that Donald Trump is dominating headlines once again; it’s that all the hits of 2017 and 2018 are being played again: legal experts cobbling together complex theories out of fragmentary information,…

There’s something strange in the D.C. air these days. It smells a bit like … competence. Seriously, it has been amazing to watch the media narrative on the Biden administration change. Just a few weeks ago President Biden was portrayed as hapless, on the edge of presiding over a failed…

This week, the Centers for Disease Control announced it will overhaul itself in response to pandemic mistakes. The first thing the CDC should do is to clarify what those mistakes were. While many experts think those mistakes are obvious, half of the public assumes the mistakes involved too many,…

On his way back from Sochi on August 6, President Tayyib Erdoğan revealed that intelligence organizations of Türkiye and Syria were meeting. His Foreign Minister Çavuşoğlu stated at a press conference on 11 August, that Türkiye supports a political reconciliation between the Syrian opposition…

The latest buzzword among many economists and investors is “ noise.” It’s being used to refer to any piece of economic data that doesn’t fit the prevailing narrative, which is happening a lot these days. Don’t get me wrong — this economy is proving hard to understand. It is very strong in some…

Indonesia wants Tesla Inc. to make cars — and batteries — locally. That might be the smartest bet Elon Musk can make, and it won’t be so hard. “What we want is the electric car, not the battery. For Tesla, we want them to build electric cars in Indonesia,” President Joko Widodo said in an…

Indonesian President Joko Widodo has long put domestic concerns ahead of diplomacy. He’s now about to host one of the most significant geopolitical gatherings in years. On Thursday, he told Bloomberg News that Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping plan to attend the Group of 20 summit. For…

Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi forced the political class to face up to its historical responsibilities after turning his call for dialogue into a concrete initiative. His initiative could create a dent in the wall of political intransigence that has plagued the political process in Iraq…

It was almost exactly 20 years ago when Kemal Dervis told a group of reporters in Ankara that in “in 20 years”, Türkiye would be one of Europe’s two biggest economies alongside Federal Germany. Shortly after that remark, however, Dervis’s brief tenure as Türkiye’s “economic miracle worker” in…