World News Insights: Opinion Articles

There’s a pretty good chance the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which produces the numbers on gross domestic product and other macroeconomic data, will declare on Thursday, preliminarily, that real G.D.P. shrank in the second quarter of 2022. Since it has already announced that real G.D.P. shrank in…

Elon Musk probably took it for granted that his space exploration company would launch and land the first private space mission to Mars. However, if he thought that SpaceX had cornered the market, he no longer does. This week, two space startups announced a bold plan to send a lander to Mars by…

What makes our current situation so unnerving is an outbreak of “non-simultaneity.” At least that’s what I recently heard Robert Habeck, Germany’s energy and commerce minister, tell a gathering of German industrialists. What a big word, I thought to myself. And what a difficult — though…

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. It’s an expression that warns people not to want things that are inherently incompatible. China would do well to heed this wisdom. In recent years, the government launched quite a few ambitious top policies that would fundamentally alter its economy…

Everyone wants a Rumpelstiltskin in their lives, spinning straw into gold. So when Softbank Group Corp’s Rajeev Misra comes knocking on your door looking for a few billion dollars, you’re in luck. The former Deutsche Bank credit trader, who was instrumental in building up the $100 billion…

Whenever human societies evolve culturally, they build cohesive and coherent systems of values to guide them. Building these value systems is influenced by the prevailing affective and linguistic experiences of each nation. People articulate their values based on the terminology that is…

Haven’t the Lebanese people the right to denounce the lack of respect for the constitutional deadlines? Aren’t they allowed to be surprised that a new president has not been elected at the end of the reign of the occupant of the palace, and to dread the much-hoped for election results, which…

Dictators are rarely funny. Even ones who cultivate bare-chested, bear-hugging personas and have a penchant for extra-long tables. In more than 20 years of watching Russian President Vladimir Putin, I can’t recall him laughing spontaneously, or cracking a joke — certainly not a memorable one…

We all learn from failure. Our mistakes become the bridge to our successes, teaching us what works and what doesn’t, so that the next time we muster the will to try, we’ll succeed. But nefarious actors can also learn from failure. And that, unfortunately, is where we find ourselves with…

The blitz of Omicron variants has felt like one long wave. And many questions have arisen amid the tumult. Are we seeing the emergence of entirely new coronavirus variants that are impervious to immunity from vaccines and previous infections? If we keep getting reinfected, is it inevitable that…

Turkey has, once again, started planning to launch a new military offensive in northern Syria. Its rhetoric is coupled with substantial military mobilization along the border region, making the materialization of Ankara's threat a likely possibility. The threatened territories are currently held…

Creating what has become known as the Maronite Archbishop Moussa al-Hajj affair after he was apprehended at the Naqoura Crossing in southern Lebanon sums up the entire country’s state of affairs: What mindset and kind of governance are intended for it? How the country is intended to be? This…