World News Insights: Opinion Articles

In 2033, a US spacecraft will return to Earth carrying the second cache of rocks ever collected from the surface of Mars. The first cache? It will have been collected by China two years earlier, in 2031, according to plans released last week by one of China's top space scientists. Of course,…

People no longer know what to do about the Covid pandemic. Part of the problem is the very language we use to talk about it. Words such as “breakthrough,” “booster” and even “sick” mean different things to different people — and to experts and the general public. The solution is for experts to be…

The civil war cruel males are waging against women is escalating: verbal abuse. Depriving them of their children. Assault. Physical impairment. Rape. Setting them on fire. Murder... These are some of the headlines at the forefront of the conversation about women in our region. It sometimes seems…

Important back to back international summit meetings have been taking place; in Asia (the BRICS Summit) and in Europe (EU Council and the Group of Seven Summit). The last of the series, 2022 NATO Summit, will begin Wednesday. All these meetings are held in the midst of what almost everyone…

The Qatari Foreign Ministry announced that Doha welcomes the hosting of a round of indirect talks between Washington and Tehran, and sponsored by the European Union coordinator, over reviving the nuclear deal. The Iranian negotiating team’s media aide said “Iran chose Qatar because it is a…

Kim Stanley Robinson writes bestselling novels about a colony on Mars. Elon Musk talks of actually colonizing Mars. There is even a 30-page constitution, courtesy of a Yale political science class, for a Mars settlement. The actual prospects for a settlement remain uncertain, but the question of…

The Jumbo Floating Restaurant, a landmark attraction built in the style of an imperial palace that adorned the south side of Hong Kong island for more than four decades, capsized this month in the South China Sea, having been towed away after its business was rendered unprofitable by the pandemic…

As the leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations prepare to meet this week in Madrid, I’m reminded of a call I received shortly after I became supreme allied commander at the alliance in 2009. It was from Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and with the directness for which he…

The implosion that became known as the Asian financial crisis had several chapters. Over the better part of two years in the late 1990s, the economies of Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea crumbled, while Malaysia suffered its deepest recession and rocked the world with capital controls. To…

It seems that India’s central bank is no fan of “buy now, pay later.” But then, the regulator’s irritation with this newish fad in consumer finance is wholly understandable. “Get Credit in 90 seconds. Shop at Millions of Merchants. Pay Later,” says the website of LazyPay, which claims to have 60…

Last month, sanctions on Russia upended the oil market, the world’s biggest commodities trade. Now, Group of Seven leaders are proposing to repeat the trick with the second-biggest trade, gold. Don’t expect the same reaction. Between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen first…

Our colleague Nadim Koteich wrote about ‘two Middle Easts’ in this newspaper’s column; one of the two encompasses the countries of moderation and peace, and the second is the axis controlled by Iran. This assessment began crystalizing through meetings between the region’s heads of state and the…