World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Will inflation — or efforts to tame it — lead to a recession in the US? When such fears arise, people start paying a lot of attention to weekly unemployment-insurance claims, as an early indicator of layoffs that could augur a broader slump. They should be careful. Unemployment claims are a…

What do you get when three pandemics coincide with a drought? The most expensive chicken we’ve seen in years. Prices for the world’s most consumed meat have been surging in recent months. Retail whole chickens in the US cost $1.79 per pound in April, the highest price in 15 years of records and…

We don’t talk much about helicopter money anymore. After a debate that raged through the early days of the pandemic, it’s all but fallen off the map as a topic. That’s hardly surprising, given how radically economic conditions have changed. Rather than worrying about how to shore up a collapsing…

The bad news for President Joe Biden is that his popularity has fallen, this past week, into dead last place. Of the 13 presidents during the polling era, none has been in worse shape at this point in his first term, almost 500 days into a presidency, than Biden’s 40.5% approval rating. That’s…

Temperatures are rising across the US, and so is the cost of the chlorine tablets commonly used to sanitize the water in swimming pools. A 35-pound bucket of trichlor tablets is typically enough to last the average owner of a midsize pool an entire summer. That bucket costs $199 now at Leslie’s…

It’s not easy being second in command. China’s Premier Li Keqiang, sidelined for years by President Xi Jinping, should know this better than anyone else. In recent weeks, Li has re-emerged with his own voice. He has been pressing officials to stabilize an economy ravaged by draconian Covid…

Andrew Breitbart, founder of the right-wing website Breitbart News, once said that “politics is downstream from culture,” and conservatives have been reverentially repeating his maxim ever since. This belief contributes to the right’s eternal sense of victimization. Our system’s rural bias may…

Looking at the figures, it is difficult to see how any Lebanese faction could form a parliamentary majority; even if it succeeded, its majority would be temporary. They have all lost seats and seen their grip over parliament loosen. Meanwhile, those trying to go at it alone and disregard the…

There are days, now, when you can almost forget about the virus. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are still being infected with Covid-19 daily — an average of about 361 Americans died from it every day in the last week — but after more than two years and millions of lost lives, the…

Close to 70% of American adults use Facebook. They peruse the pages of old school friends, browse cooking videos and click on titillating news headlines. Once in a while, they will also stumble across a video of a live shooting or buy a semi-automatic rifle with relative ease. The pattern of…

Whatever its outcome, the Russian war against Ukraine, now in its fourth month, is already studied by many analysts with emphasis on two issues. First, will it put an end to Vladimir Putin’s ambition to surround his Russia with autocratic regimes or “illiberal democracies”? Of the 15 nations…

Three months after Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine, the war is entering a new phase. This change requires all involved — the Kremlin as well as Kyiv and its supporters in the West — to rethink scenarios, goals and strategies. For the aggressor, it appears, all possible outcomes are shades…