World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Fewer than half of eligible Americans have received a third Covid vaccine shot despite clear evidence of its benefit. That booster shot improves your odds of avoiding even mild omicron. So why haven’t more people gotten it? One reason may be that we’re all over map in our risk of getting…

President Joe Biden gave a prime-time speech Thursday about gun violence. It was carried by all three broadcast networks, as well as the cable stations. As presidential speeches go, it was fine; he mixed some aspirational policy goals with support for more modest objectives that may have a…

Despite the frenzied talk about the huge rise in oil prices, what the market is witnessing is not a novelty, as prices have reached higher levels in the past, based on political, military and economic developments. If we compare the purchasing power of Dollars a barrel of oil can fetch today with…

When the inhabitants of the United Kingdom and television audiences across the world celebrate Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee this weekend, one telling secret of her popularity is likely to be overlooked. As her most authoritative recent biographer, Robert Hardman puts it, “the Queen genuinely…

The world is struggling with simultaneous energy and climate crises. To solve the first could require undoing all the progress made toward greener power and cleaner air. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Euphoria for electric cars — and the powerpacks that run them — has obscured a more…

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s push to give renewed prominence to the old imperial system of weights and measures in the United Kingdom is stirring fresh interest in a fascinating corner of economics: path dependence. Path dependence explains how small, even random, events can have lasting…

Coming of age in the 1970s and ’80s, a kid took in a fair number of public service messages. Smokey Bear warned that only you could help prevent forest fires (if only this were entirely true). An actor dressed up as a Native American shed a single tear to get people to stop littering (or at least…

With immense difficulty and effort, Hezbollah’s candidate for the Speakership, Nabih Berri, was elected for the seventh time. However, Berri’s victory seemed like it had been achieved in the dead of night, as the number of votes that he and his deputy received affirmed that the national consensus…

For the past two weeks a large number of Iranians, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have been taking part in protest marches in more than 100 cities across the nation to vent their anger against a system that they consider to be corrupt, incompetent and oppressive. At the same time the government…

In a predictable sequence, just after President Joe Biden’s approval rating fell below where Donald Trump’s had been four years ago, we get a story from NBC News about problems in a White House described as “adrift.” Political scientist Brendan Nyhan nails it: Versions of this story are written…

Talk is easy. Political change is hard. In Australia, it’s more than two centuries overdue. Claiming victory in last month’s election, new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s first words were a vow to redress the unfinished business from the colonial invasion of 1788. His promise to “commit to…

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi often speaks of “trusted” supply chains. At the G-20 last year, he said that global supply chains depend upon “trust, transparency, and timeframes”; he’s made a similar pitch for Japan, the United States and Australia to “trust” India as a trade partner. And…