World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Unhappy Coup Day to All Who Celebrate A year ago today, a group of energetic tourists, decorated with bracelets and other festive garb and chanting amusing slogans, visited the Capitol to express their feelings about the prospect of Donald Trump no longer being president. In their zeal, they might…

When it comes to elections, the Republican Party operates within a carapace of lies. So we rely on the Democrats to preserve our system of government. The problem is that Democrats live within their own insular echo chamber. Within that bubble convenient falsehoods spread, go unchallenged and…

Protests that began in western Kazakhstan over a sharp rise in fuel costs have turned into days of upheaval, with demonstrators storming government buildings and the airport in Almaty, the country’s largest. That’s bad enough for President Vladimir Putin, who is wary of unrest on Russia’s fringes…

Personal details scrawled on Post-it notes, an unmasked security guard and an hours-long wait in a US rental car. My family was two days from departure for Singapore and the window for getting a negative Covid-19 verdict was closing fast. The line at a drive-in testing operation at the University…

“A tent”… is this new year’s wish. The word was repeated by a 10-year-old girl, Shahad, from a camp in the northern countryside of Idlib after wind and heavy rain ripped her family’s tent apart. Samer’s (11 years old) wish was to escape the camp’s mud and resume his studies in order to become a…

In the next few days we will witness a tsunami of diplomatic agitations spanning over Geneva and Brussels as American, Russian and European leaders try to create the impression that they know what is going on and what must be done about it. The diplomatic marathon is set to start on 9 January…

Amid all the hype about flying taxis and digitally souped-up jets, a simple truth about the aviation industry can get lost: Change happens glacially. This is for a good reason; airplanes that ferry hundreds of people don’t make the best laboratories, and the worst-case scenarios from technology…

For most Westerners, the news that Russia has sent troops to quell a popular uprising in Kazakhstan may seem like a minor event in a far corner of the world. But seen in the context of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule, and of his coercion of Ukraine, it takes on a more sinister significance…

What to Expect: The year 2022 is shaping up to be one in which Big Tech sees a bigger clampdown than ever before from regulators, stemming attempts to grow into new markets and forcing redesigns of some of their most lucrative and addictive features. Most of the action will come from Europe…

Some friends, as they were commenting on the 2009 parliamentary election results, reminded me that Hezbollah “broke its promise… ‘whoever wins should rule’.” Instead, it imposed its blocking third on the first government formed after the elections, only to topple it the moment the head of that…

In 2021 I saw many people claim that the United States will abandon the Middle East. This is ridiculous. The United States is staying in the Middle East, as analyst Dalia Kaye from the University of California in Los Angeles wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine a month ago. The Biden administration…

Car dealerships are, in essence, giant lots staffed by folks trained in the art of emptying those lots as quickly as possible and repeating the process ad infinitum. But 2021 was a strange year for all of us, dealers included. Their lots emptied ... and then quite often stayed empty as supply-chain…