World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s slowest quarter on record comes amid a prolonged crackdown on China’s major technology companies. It’s easy to conflate the two. But the increased regulatory burden is overshadowed by even harsher problems. Chief among them: peak customer. It’s a reminder that the…

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a lamentable but localized crisis, whose consequences will be felt only by people far away. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war has created perhaps the gravest security crisis of this century, one that will have profound…

In an article published in July, President Vladimir Putin invokes historical arguments to refute the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state. During his speech recognizing the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, he reiterated this position, saying that Ukraine lacks the foundation of an independent entity…

When Mark Zuckerberg described the metaverse last year, he conjured an image of harmonious social connections in an immersive virtual world. But his company’s first iterations of the space have not been very harmonious. Several women have reported incidents of harassment, including a beta tester…

Almost everybody wants to be seen as embracing science. That’s true whether they are arguing to take masks off or leave them on, or whether they’re pushing continued caution or a return to normal. The phrase “follow the science” has been used by the left to defend its Covid policies and lobbed back…

Rarely has a Hong Kong budget been presented in such gloomy circumstances. The city is in its coldest spell of the year, and has been sodden by several days of persistent rain. As omicron cases spiral and the health system is overwhelmed, the specter of a full-scale lockdown still hangs over a…

Russian President Vladimir Putin can escalate his offensive against Ukraine whenever he wants. Even then, however, he’ll almost certainly prefer a pretext for the move. Is he already writing that script? The other day a car blew up in Donetsk, one of the separatist regions in eastern Ukraine…

Though it originally emerged in Europe, "the thirties" has become a universal term and concept. It refers to nationalist and youth movements, fascist and semi-fascist, impressed by violence and might. They try to stand in for their states, which they decry as weak and disintegrating, and each of…

Only a few days ago, European officials were feeling pretty good about their united position regarding Russia’s troops along the Ukraine border. But the quiet hope was that Moscow wouldn’t push them to the brink of actually having to deliver on their threat of sanctions. This week, as the dust…

Perhaps Pat Gelsinger knows something investors and traders don’t, because he’s decided that Tower Semiconductor Ltd. is worth more money than the Israeli company has been valued at any time in the past 17 years. At $5.4 billion, the Intel Corp. chief executive officer is paying over 35-times…

For analysis of what’s at stake for Europe, Russia, the US and the world more generally in the potential Russian invasion of Ukraine, I’ll defer to experts for foreign policy analysis — I do recommend checking out recent posts by political scientists at the Monkey Cage (see several links in this…

The puffy face of the man on the screen was distorted by hatred: Eyes narrowed, thin lips pressed together and pushing out sharp words in angry bursts. At times, the right hand — with an expensive watch on the wrist, concealed by too-long shirt and jacket sleeves — slid under the desk, as if he…