World News Insights: Opinion Articles

As quickly as it blew up, the food crisis of 2022 appears to be receding. Red spring wheat rose to nearly $13 a bushel in March, prompting the world’s biggest wheat importer, Egypt, to devalue its currency. It’s now trading around $8, a fall of more than a third. Indonesia halted exports of…

In the ongoing war in Ukraine, Russia has occupied a part of the country extending from areas marked by major cities of Kharkiv in the north, to Kherson in the south, or around 22 percent of the country. On the waterfront, Ukraine has lost the Azov Sea and most of its Black Sea coast to Russia,…

It’s time to give President Joe Biden credit for achieving something no one predicted: bipartisanship in foreign policy. The Senate on Wednesday delivered a victory for Biden’s foreign policy agenda, voting almost unanimously to admit Finland and Sweden into the North Atlantic Treaty…

Days after the England women’s football team clinched a 2-1 victory over Germany in the UEFA Women’s Euro 2022 final, the country is still coming to terms with what it means to bring the game home. Alex Scott, a former England player and highly regarded commentator, likened it to when the US women…

Parenthood has always been fraught with worry and guilt, but parents in the age of social media have increasingly confronted a distinctly acute kind of powerlessness. Their kids are unwitting subjects in a remarkable experiment in human social forms, building habits and relationships in an unruly…

The Boris Johnson era is over. But the turmoil has only just begun. For the third time in under a decade, a crisis at the top of the Conservative Party has ousted a sitting prime minister. Whereas his predecessors had been brought down by Brexit, Mr. Johnson’s reign was broken by a series of…

By chance, I met with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi during the most difficult forty-eight hours Iraq has endured during his term, as Mesopotamia was split into two camps, each with its own narrative about how it is right and the other side is wrong. Baghdad was on the brink, and if…

As recently as three years ago, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. was trying to sit on the increasingly thorny fence between the US and China. The former is a much bigger buyer of chips, the latter is growing faster, and both are important markets for the world’s most advanced manufacturer of…

Legislation helping veterans exposed to toxic trash-incineration pits while serving overseas finally passed the Senate this week. Comedian and activist Jon Stewart, who had worked hard to elevate the problem and then to help get the bill across the finish line, expressed frustration that the…

In any international conflict that involves tough political and diplomatic measures and violence of one sort or another, a key question faces the adversaries on both sides: what is the other side’s threshold of pain? More than six months after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine his adversaries…

Last month, Alphabet’s artificial intelligence subsidiary, DeepMind, stunned the world of science by presenting something truly spectacular: a snapshot of nearly every existing protein on Earth — 200 million of them. This machine-learning feat could speed the creation of new drugs. It has…

On this day two years ago, on August 4, a massive blast destroyed Beirut’s port, flipped the city on its head, and left a genocide in its wake. Not a single official pleaded for forgiveness or apologized to the people. No one was held accountable; they are all still in their seats, leaning on the…