World News Insights: Opinion Articles

“I strongly supported Obama for President,” Elon Musk tweeted late last month, part of the spree of ideological comments accompanying his continuing takeover of Twitter, “but today’s Democratic Party has been hijacked by extremists.” Around the same time, he set the social-media platform ablaze by…

Beijing’s new requirement that government agencies ditch foreign computers and buy local is designed to wean the nation off overseas products. The move will certainly boost sales of Chinese-made PCs domestically, but it won’t do much to advance the nation’s long-held ambition to deepen its tech…

The light on the harbor; the hum of escalators on the MTR; the battered orange Ikea sofa that I will leave behind. Even the most mundane sights and sounds have become invested recently with the rare and precious significance that impending loss brings. More than 100,000 Hong Kong people have taken…

Presenting the leader as a demi-god is among the features of Lebanese cronyism. Those who present him this way are followers drawn to him by kinship loyalties, primarily sectarian, which are reinforced with services that take an array of forms, the most prominent of which is the provision of…

Bashar al-Assad conducted a secret visit to Tehran, the second since 2019. What’s the significance of its timing? Its purpose? And what does it purport, especially following efforts to remove Assad from the arms of Iran? Before answering the above questions, we must stop at two statements…

China’s consumer-tech companies are riding an endless train of trouble. Just as the government seems to be easing its regulatory crackdown, consumer fatigue — even disinterest — is setting in. At an April meeting of the Politburo, the top government policymaking body, Beijing vowed to support…

First the whiz and then the explosion a second later. One after another. One after another. I was hiding in an underground dugout — it would be difficult to call it a bunker: no solid entrance door, no proper stash of food and water. The walls were wooden and there were two sort-of beds, a…

The upcoming elections in Turkey (in a year's time or maybe even as early as November as some observers claim) and not so favorable public opinion poll results have put President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party government on alert. The government has quite a…

The war in Ukraine will continue for a long time – maybe years. An analysis from the British Royal United Services Institute last month emphasized that Moscow is preparing for a long, difficult war. On this side of the Atlantic Ocean there is consensus that Washington and NATO should help Ukraine…

At the core of the frenzied interest in Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is an intuition that I think is right: The major social media platforms are, in some hard-to-define way, essential to modern life. Call them town squares. Call them infrastructure. They exist in some nether region between…

President Biden has the chance to avert a nuclear crisis that could push the United States to the brink of war and threaten the coalition he’s built to counter Russia. But he isn’t seizing it for one overriding reason: He fears the political blowback. Since taking office, Mr. Biden has pledged…

After I wrote a newsletter last month on how economists’ views differ from those of ordinary people, I got emails to the effect of, “If economists are so smart, why ain’t they rich?” I’m not an economist, so the question doesn’t ruffle my feathers. The possible explanations, though, are interesting…