World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Russia’s botched invasion of Ukraine has been a public relations disaster for the world’s second-largest exporter of weaponry. Plentiful images of exploded Russian tanks — their turrets ejected and abandoned in fields — a reportedly high failure rate for some Russian precision-guided missiles and…

The current state of the nuclear deal negotiations (Also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) between Iran and the P5+1 could best be described as an “uneasy stalemate.” The attempts to build bridges following the US withdrawal from the agreement during Trump’s term (May 2018), after…

The world has deceived us. We assumed that we had learned the lessons of the two world wars, of smaller yet brutal collapses, of mass graves, and of waves of emigrants, who drifted away from their homeland. We thought we had drawn the lesson from wrecked states, armies and cities, and of coffins…

It has been an exasperating week for computer scientists. They’ve been falling over each other to publicly denounce claims from Google engineer Blake Lemoine, chronicled in a Washington Post report, that his employer’s language-predicting system was sentient and deserved all of the rights…

Last week’s call between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping was timed to coincide with the latter’s birthday — but also to send a message. By reaffirming Beijing’s support for Moscow even as the Russian military is laying waste to a wide swath of Ukraine, the Russian and Chinese presidents were…

Deliver us from evil. The line is among the most familiar, in one of the oldest Christian prayers. Most of us are wary about using the E-word, because grown-up people know that few issues, or indeed people, can rightfully be characterized as either wholly good or the other thing, but instead exist…

US media is talking about President Joe Biden’s upcoming visit to Saudi Arabia next month with a series of articles and news stories. It is basically a contradiction… but it is their story, not ours. Politics is not an arena for slogans, good intentions and naïve leftist dreams. Politics is…

Individuals can only learn politics in a political society, just like they can only learn the law in a society of laws. Thus, for example, the Cuban oppositionists in Miami engaged with all sorts of concerns and activities that are difficult to link to politics and the law. The same is true for…

Karte Parwan is a neighborhood in northwestern Kabul, on a considerable height compared to the other quarters of the city. Its houses, right next to the lush heights of Pakhman, give the residents the benefit of being away from urban mayhem. On Saturday morning, the people of Karte Parwan woke up…

The auto industry is set to be transformed by the shift to electric vehicles from internal combustion engines and the introduction (any day now, trust me on this one) of fully self-driving automation that will turn drivers into passengers. Ferrari NV is reluctantly (and slowly) participating in the…

Could this economic slowdown be different for industrial companies? There are valid reasons to think so, but it’s becoming harder to make the argument. The unwinding of the pandemic surge in consumer demand for physical goods has picked up in recent weeks, with retailers from Target Corp. to…

The fifteenth session of the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which was held in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, garnered little publicity. Although the UNCCD has been ratified by 196 states, no less than those that signed the Paris Climate…