World News Insights: Opinion Articles

To mark World Health Day on 7 April, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, lays out a bold new initiative that highlights the need to promote peace and health in order to protect the planet and its people. Last week, I learned from Jarno Habicht,…

Could the re-election campaign of France’s President Emmanuel Macron be any less inspiring? As French voters go to the polls on April 10 for the first of two voting rounds, gone is the enthusiasm or interest in the election of 2017, when Macron came to power as the youngest leader since Napoleon…

Google’s groundbreaking DeepMind unit makes a pledge on its website to “benefit humanity” through research into artificial intelligence. It may need to solve a more practical problem first: allowing staff to speak freely about alleged mistreatment in the workplace. An open letter published last…

“J’accuse…!” This was the famous title of a withering public letter Emile Zola wrote in 1898 to the president of France. In it, the author accused the government, and by extension the whole country, of anti-Semitism. “Ich klage an…!” This, in effect, would be the German version of Zola’s letter…

Europeans enduring an unseasonal April cold snap may be forgiven for thinking winter is back. But for the natural gas market, summer has arrived. April 1 marked the start of a new year in the energy calendar, moving the focus to injecting enough gas into storage during the coming low-demand months…

The era that began after the Cold War ended and the Soviet bloc collapsed is often referred to as unipolar, and this unipolarity is often described as overwhelming, devastating US hegemony that leaves all the other peoples of the world unable to lift their chins up and all of its countries unable…

Russian and Ukrainian delegations held their fourth round of meetings in Dolmabahçe Palace in İstanbul on 29 March. At the end of that meeting on the shores of the Bosphorus, which lasted for four hours, both sides noted some progress and the need to receive instructions from patrons. …

Just a day after it was revealed that Elon Musk had bought $3 billion of Twitter Inc.’s stock, making him its single largest shareholder, the company’s chief executive officer took to Twitter to announce how the world’s richest man had decided to exercise his leverage. “I’m excited to share that…

China’s strict Covid-zero policy is getting costlier by day. As the infectious omicron variant spreads, the government is resorting to widespread lockdowns. Shanghai, a city of 25 million people, is at a standstill, and cities accounting for a quarter of China’s gross domestic product are under…

In recent months, a string of carmakers and electric vehicle battery producers have announced their intentions to build facilities in the US. Manufacturers from across the world are throwing around billions of dollars of investments into EV battery technology, too. Meanwhile, President Joe…

If there has been a silver lining to this terrible Covid-19 pandemic, it is that the rate of Americans without health insurance dropped to a near historic low, thanks to various federal initiatives connected to the government-declared public health emergency. Now, with the pandemic’s acute phase…

President Biden bragged on Twitter on March 26 that “as a result of our unprecedented sanctions, the ruble was almost immediately reduced to rubble.” It was an ill-timed tweet. The Russian currency did crash in February after sanctions were imposed, but by the time Biden exulted, it had already…