World News Insights: Opinion Articles

In the late sixties, two competing strategies for dealing with the Palestinian cause and the Israeli question collided. The first initially emerged from the milieu of the Palestinian resistance and was formulated by one of Fatah’s senior leaders at the time, Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), who dubbed…

The recent Russian-Israeli escalation over statements by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who accused Israel of supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine, and claimed that Adolf Hitler was of Jewish origin, is a bad indicator for our region. Despite the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin…

California and Florida have a lot in common: Large populations, nice weather, beautiful beaches, celebrities, Disney theme parks, hundreds of thousands of acres of citrus orchards. When Covid-19 came to the US in early 2020, the two states reacted similarly, shutting down in-person schooling and…

The coronavirus outbreak brought back the plastic waste dilemma to the forefront. Although the overall amount of waste decreased during the past two years due to lockdowns and the decline in economic activity, the consumption of single-use medical equipment and utensils, such as face masks and…

Lots of people predicted that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s administration would be a bin fire, but I don’t think anyone expected it to be quite so surreal. The voters, at least, have noticed, and they have punished him. In Thursday’s local elections Mr. Johnson and his Conservative Party lost…

On the surface, the tiny Ukrainian navy, just 5,000 active-duty sailors and a handful of small coastal boats, appears to be significantly overmatched by Russian maritime forces. The Kremlin’s Black Sea fleet consists of over 40 frontline warships. The Russians seem poised to cut off the…

Singapore had the perfect opportunity to lure away billions of dollars of wealth from Hong Kong, whose isolationist approach to Covid-19 and a Beijing-imposed national security law are sapping confidence in the financial center. Yet the Asian city-state is moving in the opposite direction. Its…

The Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, was correct on Wednesday when he said in a news conference that the unemployment rate is “just about as low as it’s been in 50 years.” But that does not necessarily mean, as Powell also said, that “the American economy is very strong and well positioned…

If you just followed news reports on Ukraine, you might think that the war has settled into a long, grinding and somewhat boring slog. You would be wrong. Things are actually getting more dangerous by the day. For starters, the longer this war goes on, the more opportunity for catastrophic…

The Supreme Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-Il, had no alternative to the nuclear option to protect his regime. By 1994, the year he took power and succeeded his father, Pyongyang had lost its Soviet protection, and the ideological underpinning of the North Korean regime, Juche, was threatened from…

What do you do when you have called a victory parade but have no victory to parade? This is the question that Russian President Vladimir Putin faces as his faction factory prepares to churn out a gigantic street show in Moscow with Tsarist eagles with varvels bearing Volodya’s coat of arms. …

To understand the latest incarnation of the colossal crypto grifts that continue to engulf the internet, I suppose we should start with all those bored apes, because how could we not? I don’t mean real apes — little of what’s in this column is about stuff you could call in any tangible sense …