World News Insights: Opinion Articles

On the day Russia launched its all-out attack on Ukraine, Svitlana Krakovska was holed up in her home city of Kyiv, working feverishly to finish a report. As leader of the Ukrainian delegation to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), she and scientists around the world were dotting…

What role can China play in de-escalating the war between Russia and Ukraine? Is Beijing’s relationship with Russiaheightening global tensions and what, if anything, can the US do to lower the temperature? President Xi Jinping has not been cheering his counterpart Vladimir Putin’s invasion of…

In 2001, after the attacks of 9/11, Western solidarity was at its peak. But the tight hugs were to say goodbye; that became evident two years later, with the war on Iraq. The dispute between the US, which had declared and waged the war, and the French and the Germans, who opposed it, cut deep. At…

Is the West partially responsible for what Ukraine is enduring right now? Have the successive leaders after the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union failed in leading? Have they harshly or dismissively dealt with the wounds of the Soviet Union's "orphans"? Are they treating…

Amid the monthslong roller coaster of updates about the efficacy and anticipated availability of a Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine for younger children, we have a new development: Moderna announced this week that it will submit the results of a two-dose vaccine trial for children ages 6 months to…

President Vladimir Putin’s bloody assault on Ukraine, nearly a month in, still seems inexplicable. Rockets raining down on apartment buildings and fleeing families are now Russia’s face to the world. What could induce Russia to take such a fateful step, effectively electing to become a pariah state…

“Russia’s aggressive actions constitute a threat to Euro-Atlantic security,” NATO leaders stated in their Summit communique in Brussels on 14 June 2021. And the same Heads of State and Government declared in their statement after NATO’s extraordinary Summit in Brussels on 24 March 2022: “We met…

We must assume that a man like Vladimir Putin is capable of anything, even the use of nuclear weapons. The Russian President has made abundantly clear that human life is worth nothing to him unless it’s his own. And there are scenarios in which he might calculate diabolically that launching one or…

When Steve Jobs led Apple Inc., the company was famous for making products that would impress and even “delight” its customers. The uninspiring iPhone SE unveiled today shows how far Apple has strayed from that standard. That’s unfortunate, because the world’s richest technology giant…

Scary headlines about the long-term effects of Covid gain traction easily. Recent news reports have warned that “even mild Covid can cause brain shrinkage,” “memory loss” and “long term” “brain damage” that “greatly” changes the brain “as much as a decade of aging.” Over time, that fear is likely…

The “polluter pays” principle has been associated with the environmental movement since its inception, although its interpretation and mode of application remain ambiguous. The declaration issued by the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, whose 50th anniversary…

After the Cold War, the feeling in Europe was that war ended would mean the end of the division that had split the continent between East and West, symbolized by the Berlin Wall, too. The victorious West, it had been assumed, would expand to reach Russia’s borders. This sentiment was, of course,…