World News Insights: Opinion Articles

The foreign ministers of the European Union will discuss on Monday the transfer of Iranian drones to Russia and their use in Ukraine. They might also agree on future sanctions tied to the matter, according to Reuters. The delay in the response of the Europeans and, before them the Americans, in…

What do Neanderthals have to do with medicine? More than enough, it turns out, to earn Svante Pääbo Monday’s Nobel Prize in medicine for sequencing the Neanderthal genome. It may sound more like a feat worthy of an anthropology prize, but scientists are already using Neanderthal DNA to make…

The wave of protests in Iran ignited by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on September 17 continues to this day. The number of people killed is unknown but it is said to be close to 200 and maybe even more. In fact, this is one of the many crises Iran has experienced throughout the years…

The big economic news of the week was, of course, Thursday’s report on consumer prices. And there’s no way to spin that report: It was ugly. There has been a lot of buzz from private-sector observers to the effect that inflation is rolling over, but there was no sign of that in the official numbers…

Just a few months ago, the concept of using artificial intelligence to generate unique artwork seemed cutting-edge and futuristic. Pretty soon it will be as mundane as running a Google search. Microsoft Corp. announced this week that it was making the most of its $1 billion investment in OpenAI,…

President Biden shocked me when he said on October 6 that we are closest to a nuclear war since 1962 and the Cuba Missile Crisis. Biden pointed to President Putin and stated that it is hard to stop an escalation from using smaller, tactical nuclear weapons to total nuclear Armageddon. Excuse me,…

More profound than an understanding between two belligerents, the Palestinian-Israeli Oslo Accords, at their core, are an approach. The Accords changed the rules, turning them from rules governing the conflict to rules governing the settlement. What Palestine’s Oslo Accords and Lebanon’s recent…

As the uprising in Iran enters its fourth week speculation about its future is rife. Participants insist that they are on the path to victory, achieving regime change. They cite a number of reasons. To start with this is the first time that a national uprising isn’t about any particular…

Year three of the Covid-19 pandemic is now more than halfway over, believe it or not — with a fall surge likely on the way. But the emergency phase is far enough in the country’s rearview mirror that the experience of the pandemic thus far can be examined a little more clinically and a little less…

Lebanese media reports have asserted that Quds Force Deputy Commander Reza Fallahzadeh has made calls to several Hezbollah officials to inform them that an agreement on a nuclear deal would be delayed despite the parties to it having agreed on all the details. Reza Fallahzadeh also conveyed the…

The late economist Hyman Minsky is famous for developing the theory that long periods of steady investment gains can foster complacency and thus encourage excessive risk-taking, leading eventually to a crisis: what was later termed the “Minsky Moment.” In other words, stability breeds instability…

Two decades ago, a cascade of accounting scandals in the US led to one of the most comprehensive packages of financial rules of the past century. Now, it’s time for regulators to act on escalating cybersecurity breaches to offer similar protections to consumers and investors. Within the span of…