World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Russia insists that it’s going to bring the US astronaut home. The rest is just warmongering rumor. Mark Vande Hei, who’s about to break the American record for longest time in orbit, will depart the International Space Station as scheduled on aboard a Soyuz spacecraft on March 30 and land in…

Perhaps the saying, “There is no such thing as bad publicity,” holds true for controversial technology companies. New York-based Clearview AI has been criticized by privacy advocates for years because of the way it has scraped billions of images from social-media networks to build a search…

It’s almost odd now that in the years leading up to February 2022 a lot of people became convinced that modernity was a post-heroic age. Heroes — and less often heroines — belonged to Greek or Norse mythology, or to warrior societies long gone, it was said. But then Russian President Vladimir Putin…

Ukraine and Finland have little in common and 21st-century warfighting is new and different. But the parallels are still hard to miss. Ukrainian and Russian negotiators are reportedly getting closer to a deal that would end the Russian invasion. The deal, if and when it arrives, likely will…

Russians are facing a psychological conundrum all human beings confront every day, but at a far more consequential level. Itis this: How much will they choose to know, or deliberately not know? Their answer may decide the course of history. If the war of aggression by Russian President Vladimir…

The war in Ukraine is getting more dangerous, in part because it is going better than Ukraine’s supporters could have imagined. President Joe Biden has sought to reconcile two conflicting objectives: avoiding US military intervention while also helping Ukraine and making Moscow pay a high price for…

So much for the “Roaring Twenties” after Covid-19. The mood feels more like the Four Horsemen: As Pestilence subsides, War has returned to Europe, destroying lives, homes, economies and the optimism greeting the lifting of pandemic restrictions. Overnight, a Europe reshaped by Covid — with a…

As the Covid-19 pandemic shattered lives and livelihoods, experts somberly anticipated a decline in philanthropic donations. The World Bank predicted an alarming drop of 20 percent in global emigrant remittances as a result of the economic crisis. After all, the 2008 Great Recession led to…

The world’s biggest car companies have a lot to fear from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And it’s not just production shutdowns or supply chain snarls. As the war rattles commodities from nickel to wheat and corn, upending exchange trades and casting doubts around sustained supply, a material…

Observers of the course of the Chinese policy know that the leaders of this giant country avoid confrontation in any situation, unless it's forced upon them. That happened when former US President Donald Trump put countering China at the heart of his foreign policy objectives. Nonetheless, the…

In 1994, I was a young journalist in the information graphics department at The Detroit News, just two years out of college. In April of that year, the Rwandan genocide — a war of ethnic tensions — erupted, resulting in 100 days of unspeakable carnage. The United States, still stinging from…

As it heads for its second month, like other wars in history, the war in Ukraine seems to be finding the rhythm and tempo that determines its cruising speed at least for some time. One thing that all wars have in common is that, after an initial shock-and-awe period, they are factored in as part…