World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Four years ago when Imran Khan emerged as prime minister of Pakistan many saw him as a breath of fresh air in a political system marked by the stink of corruption and ineptitude. In many ways Imran was an outsider. First, unlike his predecessors he was neither a Sindhi nor a Punjabi but a Pathan…

Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter Inc. for $43 billion — but he has only about $3 billion in cash on hand. Most of the fortune of the world’s richest man, which adds up to some $259 billion, is tied up in Tesla Inc. and other nifty things. So if he’s serious about a takeover — and there is ample…

On Tuesday, news broke that inflation continued to worsen in March, as consumer prices rose by 8.5 percent from a year earlier, the sharpest increase since 1981. While so-called core inflation — which strips out the volatile prices of fuel and food, both of which have surged because of Russia’s…

Almost a month before 15th of May, the day parliamentary elections will be held, Lebanon appears to face its most dangerous juncture. These elections will either take the country towards consolidating the Iranian mullah regime’s hegemony or, despite difficulties, it will put the country on a path…

For a few days late last month, “a cocktail of high atmospheric pressure, little wind and peak farming season emissions” left London with more-polluted air than Beijing, Bloomberg News reported. These worse-than-Beijing episodes are likely to occur more and more frequently — not because London’s…

There’s a trite expression that perfectly encapsulates how corporate leaders should now be viewing their intense dependence on Chinese production: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. After Covid-19 first struck in China, shuttering factories there before disruptions spread…

Judging by the latest inflation numbers, developed nations are turning into emerging markets. The US reported 8.5% year-on-year jump in March, while inflation in the UK soared to 7%, a 30-year high. Meanwhile, Chinese consumers saw only a 1.5% rise in prices last month. This is not how it’s…

The Pakistani state leads the world in one thing: every political development it undergoes, like the removal of its prime-minister Imran Khan from office a few days ago, puts its history, function, and raison d’etre as a state to the test. Since the end of the Cold War and the explosion of identity…

Israel has carried out more than 400 airstrikes in Syria and other parts of the Middle East since 2017 as part of a wide-ranging campaign targeting Iran and its militias, according to The Wall Street Journal. The daily reported that Israeli leaders refer to the campaign as the “war between the…

My dad’s American dream was made of aluminum. Not that he would have put it that way. He did not talk much, and never about his dreams, but most days for nearly 25 years he headed off to a factory and turned aluminum and other metals into parts and a paycheck. He started at the Torrington Company,…

One of the more astonishing things that scientists learned from deliberately exposing volunteers to Covid-19 was that nearly half of them never got infected — even when the virus was introduced directly into their noses. More surprising still, these were people who hadn’t been previously infected…

Last fall, a group of researchers conducted a vaccine promotion experiment: They showed an advertisement to millions of US. YouTube users highlighting Donald Trump’s support for Covid-19 vaccines, using news footage in which the former president urged people to get vaccinated. This was a randomized…