World News Insights: Opinion Articles

When Neil Young launched his boycott of Spotify over its hosting of popular podcaster Joe Rogan, whom the rocker accused of spreading Covid misinformation, the Polish startup FreeYourMusic sprang into action. It tweeted the hashtags #cancelspotify and #byespotify to draw attention to its main…

Predicting how Covid-19 will behave next remains notoriously hard. Predicting how humans will react is much easier, since history can be a guide. One of the most prescient articles written about the pandemic’s future was Gina Kolata’s May 2020 New York Times article “How Pandemics End,” with…

There are instances of benign interventions one country could make in another. Here are some examples of cases where that is the case: - The regime of state (A) is committing acts of genocidal against its people, so state (B) intervenes to stop it (Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, al-Assad’s Syria,…

I don’t think it is difficult to predict the response to the paper submitted by Kuwaiti Foreign Minister, Sheikh Ahmed Nasser Al-Mohammed Al Sabah, to the Lebanese officials, regarding confidence-building measures to end the crisis with the Gulf. Whoever deals with the intra-Lebanese crisis can…

The crisis in Ukraine continues to ramp up, with the US, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Russia engaged in a disjointed diplomatic dance, exchanging position papers on European security structure. Meanwhile, Russia’s 8th Guards Army – an historic unit with World War II ties to Ukraine…

Apocalyptic scenes open “The Ministry for the Future,” the latest novel by science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. India is hit with a calamitous heatwave — one so sweltering, with humidity so high, that bodies struggle to sweat, and therefore to survive. Thousands die in the sun-heated waters…

Most histories of the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed at least 50 million people worldwide say it ended in the summer of 1919 when a third wave of the respiratory contagion finally subsided. Yet the virus continued to kill. A variant that emerged in 1920 was lethal enough that it should have…

Boris Johnson, Britain’s classics-loving prime minister, has long been fascinated by the fall of the Roman Empire. Now his government risks a fall of its own. The decline in his fortunes has been swift and dramatic. For weeks, the news media heaved with accounts of lockdown breaches: There was a…

Nobody in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates has illusions about Lebanon. No one needed to examine the Lebanese response to the Kuwaiti initiative to understand that Lebanon is an occupied country. There was of course no harm in the assertion of the Kuwaiti Foreign Minister, Sheikh Ahmad…

On 26 January 2022, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg informed the public that NATO and the USA had responded to the “Russian list of demands”. NATO’s reply was prepared by the representatives of 30 member states at NATO Headquarters in Brussels and the USA reply was prepared in…

Verifying your identity used to be so simple. You’d show a picture on your driver’s license or passport and these were two objects that lived in your pocket or a drawer at home. Today, you can be identified by an array of digital representations of your face via the likes of Apple Inc., Microsoft…

Here’s a new obstacle that could prevent the world finally turning the corner on climate change: Imagine that over the coming decade a whole new economy the size of Russia were to pop up out of nowhere. With the world’s fourth-largest electricity sector and largest burden of power plant emissions…