World News Insights: Opinion Articles

An international organization is relevant and effective to the extent that it can respond to needs and requirements and adapt itself in time. NATO, which is world’s leading political and military alliance, was founded in 1949 after the Second World War. At the time, Nazi’s were defeated and a…

Beware the “lessons of history” as drawn by charlatans, ignoramuses or tyrants, for they will be daft, wrong and possibly disastrous. The self-serving amateur historiography of Russian President Vladimir Putin is an example. Last year, he invented a narrative “On the Historical Unity of…

News that Alphabet Inc.’s Google sidelined an engineer who claimed its artificial intelligence system had become sentient after he’d had several months of conversations with it prompted plenty of skepticism from AI scientists. Many have said, via postings on Twitter, that senior software engineer…

The globe is getting warmer, and extreme heat kills thousands of people — perhaps tens of thousands — every year. Climate activists are pressuring officials to start naming heat waves, the way we do hurricanes, and several cities around the world are considering adopting the practice. If heat waves…

Hong Kong was never a British colony, schoolchildren in the city will soon be taught. That may come as a surprise to the many parents who remember British governors, the Queen’s head on coins and stamps, and numerous other relics of a 150-year colonial presence. Behind the apparent absurdity is a…

With escalation between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency at its height, amid Western statements that the Vienna negotiations have reached an impasse, the United States has not closed the door to diplomacy with Tehran, presenting it with a new opportunity, which may be the last before…

Is the war in Ukraine no more than a patch of cloud in an otherwise bright sky? This seems to be the Panglossian opinion of some elites in Western democracies who, like French President Emmanuel Macron, are anxious not to humiliate Vladimir Putin over a mere peccadillo. However, fact is that…

In commodity markets, there are few phenomena more feared than a corner. If a few traders become too dominant, they can at times set prices at will by withholding supply, driving values to ridiculous levels. That’s what happened when the Hunt brothers cornered the market in silver in 1980,…

This week, the crypto market plummeted for the second time in a month, in tandem with a sharp drop in global stock markets. The collapse, not the first of its kind, showed again how the violent swings of a largely unregulated market warp the development of a transformative technology. But crypto is…

Within hours of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, last month, as President Biden flew home from a trip to Asia, he found himself wondering why liberal democracies like Australia, Canada and Britain can get gun violence under control, while America has tried for decades without success. “They…

Lebanon emerged victorious then, imposing Line 23 on Israel as the maritime borderline separating the two country’s economic zones. Lebanon’s victory, which would be added to the President and his resistance’s long list of achievements, hinges on overcoming a minor obstacle: getting Israel to…

Russian forces have bombed grain silos and farms and plundered Ukrainian wheat, which US diplomats say Moscow is now trying to sell on. Ukraine’s Black Sea ports are blocked by mines to protect the shoreline from attack by Russia’s navy, which is also bottling up shipments. And yet, if President…