World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Over the years, as social media companies gorged themselves on the data of billions of people to fuel vast profits, the information flow never went the other way. Now the tables are turning. One of the most promising pieces of legislation in Congress tackling tech giants’ undue influence, out of…

The United Nations initiative to hold talks to find a solution for the Sudanese crisis does not inspire much optimism. The apathy with which all parties received UN envoy Volker Perthes’ call for talks, especially the opposition, highlighted that the initiative has no practical dimension or vision…

From Russian President Vladimir Putin’s point of view, last week’s unrest in Kazakhstan was a godsend just as negotiations with the US over Russia’s security demands were about to start in Geneva. With an instant deployment of an unnecessary “peacekeeping force,” and now a planned rapid withdrawal,…

Director Adam McKay’s climate satire “Don’t Look Up” isn’t exactly subtle. The hair is big, the parody obvious, the targets as plentiful as the star-studded cast competing for space — and the planet is about to explode. The whole enterprise is a monument to anger and frustration, which may…

I’ve been talking to parents about pandemic stress for nearly two years, and I haven’t heard the level of despair that I’ve heard over the past week since the spring of 2020. Some of the words parents used to describe their January 2022: “devastating,” “disgusting” and “at a breaking point.” The…

On Friday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments about two of the Biden administration’s emergency Covid-19 regulations, including a vaccine or test mandate for large employers and a vaccine requirement for some health workers. At stake in the cases, brought by business groups and Republican…

The world “colonialism” no longer applies to any place in the world the way it applies to Russia. It is colonialism in the crudest and most primitive sense. It is forbidden for a country to neighbor Russia and be free at the same time. To be safe while neighboring Russia, sovereignty must be given…

The Bank of England is trapped in a policy box of its own making, having dithered and delayed on whether and when to withdraw pandemic stimulus. Although inflation is now roaring away, it shouldn’t try to make up for lost time. Fiscal tightening on the way reduces the urgency for a monetary…

At some point after he became chief surgeon in Napoleon’s army, Dominique Jean Larrey started walking across blood-soaked battlefields to pick out those among the wounded who could still be saved, usually by instant amputation of limbs. In time, he developed a system of sorting and separating —…

January 2022 is one of the worst possible times to get Covid-19. That’s not only because hospitals are dangerously full, but because after nearly two years of gradually learning more about SARS-CoV-2, the omicron variant has thrust scientists and doctors back into a state of ignorance and guessing…

While the rest of the world is struggling to live with Covid, there are signs that China is determined to stick to a zero-tolerance approach to the pandemic. In late December, it locked down Xian, a city of 13 million in northwestern China. The quarantine measures were so draconian some residents…

The Cold War ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. The so-called “Arab-Israeli conflict” has taken complex paths since the cease-fire agreements between Syria and Egypt on the one hand and Israel on the other hand, following the 1973 war, all the way to the Abrahamic Agreement between the UAE …