World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Japanese virologist Hitoshi Oshitani has an impressive record fighting pandemics. As one of the leading experts advising the government during Covid, he helped formulate a strategy that has kept deaths in the country with the world’s oldest population lower than any other developed nation, without…

There are things in life that are fated to be governed by facts and figures, with sentiment playing no role at all. Some of these facts and figures may be painful, but to dress them up is to fabricate them, and doing so would harm the party concerned before anyone else. One of the most…

He’s the son of a brutal dictator, fudged his own educational credentials, and his family owes up to $3.6 billion in estate taxes, yet he still won a landslide election to become the Philippines’s next president. When Bongbong Marcos gets sworn in Thursday, the 64-year-old might want to add Chinese…

The leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries are in Madrid for the alliance’s most consequential summit in a generation. NATO appears to have overcome Turkish diplomatic blackmail to bring in two new members, Sweden and Finland. It must approve a new concept for transatlantic…

In 2033, a US spacecraft will return to Earth carrying the second cache of rocks ever collected from the surface of Mars. The first cache? It will have been collected by China two years earlier, in 2031, according to plans released last week by one of China's top space scientists. Of course,…

People no longer know what to do about the Covid pandemic. Part of the problem is the very language we use to talk about it. Words such as “breakthrough,” “booster” and even “sick” mean different things to different people — and to experts and the general public. The solution is for experts to be…

The civil war cruel males are waging against women is escalating: verbal abuse. Depriving them of their children. Assault. Physical impairment. Rape. Setting them on fire. Murder... These are some of the headlines at the forefront of the conversation about women in our region. It sometimes seems…

Important back to back international summit meetings have been taking place; in Asia (the BRICS Summit) and in Europe (EU Council and the Group of Seven Summit). The last of the series, 2022 NATO Summit, will begin Wednesday. All these meetings are held in the midst of what almost everyone…

The Qatari Foreign Ministry announced that Doha welcomes the hosting of a round of indirect talks between Washington and Tehran, and sponsored by the European Union coordinator, over reviving the nuclear deal. The Iranian negotiating team’s media aide said “Iran chose Qatar because it is a…

Kim Stanley Robinson writes bestselling novels about a colony on Mars. Elon Musk talks of actually colonizing Mars. There is even a 30-page constitution, courtesy of a Yale political science class, for a Mars settlement. The actual prospects for a settlement remain uncertain, but the question of…

The Jumbo Floating Restaurant, a landmark attraction built in the style of an imperial palace that adorned the south side of Hong Kong island for more than four decades, capsized this month in the South China Sea, having been towed away after its business was rendered unprofitable by the pandemic…

As the leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations prepare to meet this week in Madrid, I’m reminded of a call I received shortly after I became supreme allied commander at the alliance in 2009. It was from Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and with the directness for which he…