World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Last week’s call between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping was timed to coincide with the latter’s birthday — but also to send a message. By reaffirming Beijing’s support for Moscow even as the Russian military is laying waste to a wide swath of Ukraine, the Russian and Chinese presidents were…

Deliver us from evil. The line is among the most familiar, in one of the oldest Christian prayers. Most of us are wary about using the E-word, because grown-up people know that few issues, or indeed people, can rightfully be characterized as either wholly good or the other thing, but instead exist…

US media is talking about President Joe Biden’s upcoming visit to Saudi Arabia next month with a series of articles and news stories. It is basically a contradiction… but it is their story, not ours. Politics is not an arena for slogans, good intentions and naïve leftist dreams. Politics is…

Individuals can only learn politics in a political society, just like they can only learn the law in a society of laws. Thus, for example, the Cuban oppositionists in Miami engaged with all sorts of concerns and activities that are difficult to link to politics and the law. The same is true for…

Karte Parwan is a neighborhood in northwestern Kabul, on a considerable height compared to the other quarters of the city. Its houses, right next to the lush heights of Pakhman, give the residents the benefit of being away from urban mayhem. On Saturday morning, the people of Karte Parwan woke up…

The auto industry is set to be transformed by the shift to electric vehicles from internal combustion engines and the introduction (any day now, trust me on this one) of fully self-driving automation that will turn drivers into passengers. Ferrari NV is reluctantly (and slowly) participating in the…

Could this economic slowdown be different for industrial companies? There are valid reasons to think so, but it’s becoming harder to make the argument. The unwinding of the pandemic surge in consumer demand for physical goods has picked up in recent weeks, with retailers from Target Corp. to…

The fifteenth session of the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which was held in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, garnered little publicity. Although the UNCCD has been ratified by 196 states, no less than those that signed the Paris Climate…

An international organization is relevant and effective to the extent that it can respond to needs and requirements and adapt itself in time. NATO, which is world’s leading political and military alliance, was founded in 1949 after the Second World War. At the time, Nazi’s were defeated and a…

Beware the “lessons of history” as drawn by charlatans, ignoramuses or tyrants, for they will be daft, wrong and possibly disastrous. The self-serving amateur historiography of Russian President Vladimir Putin is an example. Last year, he invented a narrative “On the Historical Unity of…

News that Alphabet Inc.’s Google sidelined an engineer who claimed its artificial intelligence system had become sentient after he’d had several months of conversations with it prompted plenty of skepticism from AI scientists. Many have said, via postings on Twitter, that senior software engineer…

The globe is getting warmer, and extreme heat kills thousands of people — perhaps tens of thousands — every year. Climate activists are pressuring officials to start naming heat waves, the way we do hurricanes, and several cities around the world are considering adopting the practice. If heat waves…