World News Insights: Opinion Articles

The democracies opposed to Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine have been clear that, in Boris Johnson’s words, “Putin must fail.” But they haven’t defined failure. British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss took a stab at it on Wednesday night, and it’s worth a closer look at what she said. Her 2022…

It rained one morning this week. I moved back to Texas last year, in part for the rainstorms. Here, it rains decisively, gloriously, like it really means it. It explodes, pounds, roars, thunders and then, suddenly, moves on. I stepped on my back porch, not wanting to miss the show. I sat, silent…

All journalists have complicated relationships with Twitter. For Black journalists, the relationship is particularly fraught. For Black female journalists, it’s truly treacherous. Journalists are in the business of conveying information. Some of it they find themselves. Other information they…

Since the beginning of the Iran nuclear negotiations, we have been hearing US and Western statements warning that time is running out. However, it’s been a year of talks without the signing a final agreement, and some of the terms of the 2015 deal have even approached their end without extension…

Lebanon is another Iraq, or maybe Iraq is another Lebanon, same thing. “Paralysis” and “impasse” are the two terms that describe the situation in Iraq, and Lebanon too. That comes 19 years after the US war and Saddam Hussein’s ouster from power. Failure to elect a president, and there are…

Call it poor judgment or bad luck, but India’s expansion of natural gas coverage to more than 90% of its population couldn’t have come at a worse time. In January, Adani Total Gas Ltd. and others won keenly contested licenses to add new areas to city gas networks; in February, Vladimir Putin…

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the idea that it might lose seemed far-fetched. Vladimir Putin appeared to have a powerful, modernized army, supported by a defense budget a dozen times larger than Ukraine’s. You didn’t have to buy into Ted Cruz-style fantasies about the prowess of a military that wasn…

Elon Musk is hard to love. Elon Musk is hard to like. On his way to becoming the world’s wealthiest person, Musk has emitted so many metric tons of self-indulgent puerility he might have violated the Paris Accords. But one need not find Musk personally or politically appealing to appreciate that…

In October 2020, a few weeks before the experimental trial results for the BioNTech-Pfizer, Moderna and Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines were released, German virologist Christian Drosten cautioned that the shots would be of limited effectiveness in preventing the spread of the disease. “We…

President Joe Biden continues to announce military aid packages. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have visited Kyiv and reiterated their country’s resolve to stand with Ukraine against Russia’s aggression. Among all political declarations, Secretary of…

Elon Musk is becoming a leading figure in American mergers and acquisitions. This week he agreed to buy Twitter Inc. in what will probably be the largest leveraged buyout ever done by a guy in his personal account. In 2018 he spent a week pretending he was going to take Tesla Inc. private, in what…

When consumer prices began soaring last year, a trade union representing staff at the European Central Bank demanded their wages increase in lockstep with inflation. This grassroots effort to index pay to price increases was ultimately unsuccessful, but it was incendiary stuff coming from the…