World News Insights: Opinion Articles

It has the feel of a surrealist watershed, the moment that brought home the nature of Hong Kong’s dystopian journey more vividly than any other. Perhaps we will look back one day, when this is all over, and remember where we were when they decided to kill the hamsters. The scientific basis for…

The snafu over 5G cellular service at US airports is unfortunate and unnecessary. From what I can tell, most of the blame falls on a bureaucratic battle between sister agencies, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Communications Commission. Politics trumped economics. The latest:…

It’s a shame that Ukraine was largely absent from talks last week among American, European and Russian diplomats. Especially since it is our future that is at stake — and Kyiv’s asks might come as a surprise. Our country is not brimming with hope about a Western savior or a NATO rescue in the…

It is easy to welcome the decision of the court in Koblenz that convicted Anwar Raslan of responsibility for torture, rape and murder at Branch 251 in Damascus. When I was ambassador in Damascus I heard from Syrians about several detention centers, among them Branch 251. We knew intellectually…

In June a statistic floated across my desk that startled me. In 2020, the number of miles Americans drove fell 13 percent because of the pandemic, but the number of traffic deaths rose 7 percent. I couldn’t figure it out. Why would Americans be driving so much more recklessly during the pandemic…

Deaths among working-age Americans were up more than 40% over the pre-pandemic norm last summer and fall, the chief executive officer of an Indiana-based insurance company said late last month. His assertion has been reverberating around social media since, inspiring a much-shared Twitter thread…

The current and clear state of discrepancy between the Arabs and their neighboring countries did not suddenly emerge. It simply reflected a path that affected almost most of the interactions of the past decade and was expressed by the growing appetite of Israel, Iran, Turkey, and Ethiopia, to…

Forecasts for a second year of strong global growth face two main dangers: the health of China’s economy and the prospect of much higher US interest rates. How the world’s commercial poles navigate these risks will determine whether 2021’s rapid expansion was a blip or whether the recovery will…

As health care workers prepare to enter the third year of the pandemic, we are experiencing disillusionment and burnout on an extraordinary scale. Many of us have confronted more death and sickness than ever before in our careers. As a physician at a teaching hospital that was one of the hardest…

When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan last summer, it was left with a critical choice: allow the collapse of a state that had mostly been kept afloat by foreign aid or work with the Taliban, its former foes who were in power, to prevent that outcome. More than four months after the…

Caring for an individual and protecting a population require different priorities, practices and ways of thinking. While it may sound counterintuitive, to heal the country and put our Covid-19 response on the right track, we need to think less like doctors. I can speak to both ways of…

Days before the Iranian president’s visit to Russia and after his foreign minister’s trip to China, Tehran seems more interested in consolidating its eastward policy than the outcome of the negotiations in Vienna. Perhaps it considers that ties with China and Russia are a protective card in the…