World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Vladimir Putin addresses America with such a confidence that the US star has faded. He is engineering a massive mine in Ukraine, and is demanding a heavy price in exchange for giving up on detonating it. He talks about Ukraine, listing his conditions, not presenting his demands. Repeating the game…

The Coalition to Restore Legitimacy in Yemen has done well and continues to do well to expose the scale of Iranian complicity by revealing the extent of Iran’s (and with it Hezbollah’s) involvement in crimes perpetrated in Yemen through their support for the Houthis, targeting maritime navigation,…

Last October, Citigroup Inc. told about 70,000 of its employees to get Covid-19 vaccinations or lose their jobs. Today, the banking giant made good on that promise, telling its staff that any who remain unvaccinated by Jan. 14 will be placed on unpaid leave and then lose their jobs at month’s end. …

Hong Kong’s veneer of normalcy has been shattered — and it’s exposed just how misguided and unrealistic the territory’s Covid-19 containment strategy has become two years into the pandemic. After months of no local Covid infections, Hong Kong reported a string of positive cases over the past…

When pigs fly. That’s the kind of surreal day Thursday was at the Capitol. Donald Trump has so malignantly scrambled his party and this country that we keep seeing tableaus that defy belief and flout history. The last time we took note of Dick Cheney and Patrick Leahy at the Capitol was in…

President Vladimir Putin of Russia is playing a game of suspense. When he kicked over the global chessboard late last year, amassing thousands of troops at the Ukrainian border, he sent the world into panic. An invasion seemed imminent — and beyond it loomed the threat of a new global…

Among the many contradictions Lebanon is brimming with, the political, economic and cultural, one contradiction is deeper than the others, affecting them more than they affect it. It is the stance on war: Should we be embroiled in war or not? And accordingly, which kind of regime and relationship…

Nursultan Nazarbayev, the first President of Kazakhstan after it became independent in 1991, had remained in his seat until 2019. Kasım Tokayev took over as caretaker for a few months, until he was elected president with 70 percent of votes. In effect, Nazarbayev who was under pressure for the…

Yes, he came to dinner. In the summer of 2014, I received word through a friend that I was being asked to a dinner in Los Angeles that would include Sidney Poitier. I’m not easily star-struck. As you can imagine, in my line of work, you meet all types. Being easily impressed is an…

Israeli scientists monitoring samplings of sewage water in 2013 made a startling discovery: an outbreak of paralyzing polio was imminent. A national vaccination campaign was quickly mobilized and no cases appeared. That same year, Swedish scientists provided public officials with an early warning…

The world’s No. 1 men’s tennis player now has the dubious honor of joining actor Johnny Depp in receiving a harsh lesson on Australian quarantine and border policy. Novak Djokovic tried to enter the country without meeting a clearly stated requirement for receiving a full course of Covid-19…

The video game industry is at a crossroads. Enticed by the prospect of easy profits, game publishers and even a retailer like GameStop Corp. are embracing the opportunity provided by the hottest buzzword of the moment: blockchain-enabled non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. But they should reconsider. …