World News Insights: Opinion Articles

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the idea that it might lose seemed far-fetched. Vladimir Putin appeared to have a powerful, modernized army, supported by a defense budget a dozen times larger than Ukraine’s. You didn’t have to buy into Ted Cruz-style fantasies about the prowess of a military that wasn…

Elon Musk is hard to love. Elon Musk is hard to like. On his way to becoming the world’s wealthiest person, Musk has emitted so many metric tons of self-indulgent puerility he might have violated the Paris Accords. But one need not find Musk personally or politically appealing to appreciate that…

In October 2020, a few weeks before the experimental trial results for the BioNTech-Pfizer, Moderna and Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines were released, German virologist Christian Drosten cautioned that the shots would be of limited effectiveness in preventing the spread of the disease. “We…

President Joe Biden continues to announce military aid packages. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have visited Kyiv and reiterated their country’s resolve to stand with Ukraine against Russia’s aggression. Among all political declarations, Secretary of…

Elon Musk is becoming a leading figure in American mergers and acquisitions. This week he agreed to buy Twitter Inc. in what will probably be the largest leveraged buyout ever done by a guy in his personal account. In 2018 he spent a week pretending he was going to take Tesla Inc. private, in what…

When consumer prices began soaring last year, a trade union representing staff at the European Central Bank demanded their wages increase in lockstep with inflation. This grassroots effort to index pay to price increases was ultimately unsuccessful, but it was incendiary stuff coming from the…

Since March 11, the nuclear deal negotiations in Vienna between the P5+ Germany and Iran have been at an impasse as negotiators struggle to find a solution for what appears to be an unresolvable dispute. Removing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps from the US sanctions and terrorism lists…

“Like the remake of a bad movie,” says a voter in Sarcelles, one of Paris’s many “Underprivileged” suburbs that, having formed the “red belt” of the French capital for decades, have now shifted to far right populism. The second and final round of the French presidential election last Sunday was…

Elon Musk’s deal to take Twitter private, which has spurred questions about power, censorship and safety for the future of the platform, happened just days after the European Union reached a landmark agreement to make social media less toxic for users. The new E.U. standards, and the ethic of…

It’s been more than two years since Apple Inc. issued revenue guidance. The iPhone maker initially blamed the Covid-19 pandemic, and later added chip shortages, for its inability to forecast the future. Yet the move is part of a worrying trend toward decreasing transparency at the world’s largest…

My first command as a US Navy captain was leading a squadron of warships in the western Pacific in the late 1990s. It included a flagship cruiser, the Valley Forge, a Spruance-class destroyer, two frigates (one Canadian) and three brand-new Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers. …

The Lebanese political class’s performance has changed significantly since the October 17 revolution, and much of its behavior changed after the Beirut port blast. The deals they used to make in secret are not made in the open. They speak of Lebanon’s need for around 20 billion dollars to launch…