World News Insights: Opinion Articles

If disappointed progressives are looking for a Democrat to blame, they should consider directing their ire toward one of their party’s founders: James Madison. Madison’s Constitution was built to thwart exactly what Democrats have been attempting: a race against time to impose vast policies with…

What outcomes are expected from the seventh round of the negotiations in Vienna aimed at reinstating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the nuclear degree, between Iran and the P5+1? It is difficult to describe the atmosphere around the talks as encouraging, whether from the…

The emergence of a new mutation of the coronavirus was not surprising. Scientists have previously warned of this. They used this argument to try to persuade the fearful, hesitant, and lost, who consider being pushed to receive the vaccine as a violation of their freedom. The position of the…

Last week’s economic and Covid-related news may well resurrect a risk narrative that makes policy makers and virtually all financial markets particularly anxious: US stagflation, that awful combination of rising inflation and declining growth. How this risk plays out in the next few months,…

Every few months, the world learns of a new variant of the coronavirus. While most of these variants turn out to be inconsequential, some, like the Delta variant, are immensely consequential. The latest, B.1.1.529, now known as the Omicron variant, bears very close watching because of concerns that…

Governments are making multibillion-dollar announcements to deal with the global chip shortage. That's unlikely to help at this point and only risks muddying priorities for the future. Following the US and the European Union, Japan has announced large capital investments in the semiconductor…

It is sectarianism. It is ethnicism or factionalism. To use a broader term, it is clannishness or the extended kinship system. We say this as though we are discovering something, and we may slap our hands together in lamentation for what we are saying. We discover this truth whenever a civil war…

From Los Angeles to Felixstowe, England; to Dubai, United Arab Emirates; to Shenzhen, China, the world is witnessing delays and shortages of everything from toys to turkeys. At the root of this crisis is a transport sector that is buckling under the strain of Covid-era conditions. Workers who drive…

America’s international travel rules still seem prejudiced against Europeans. The US reopened its borders on Nov. 8 to vaccinated foreign nationals from Europe, ending a ban that had dragged on far too long (more than 18 months) and looked increasingly arbitrary. No similar US blockade applied…

At least we’re learning. Remember when the early reaction to the outbreak of a deadly virus in Wuhan was to discourage people from changing their travel plans? South Africa’s government didn’t sit on information about a new worrying variant of SARS-CoV-2, which the World Health Organization has…

It’s been nearly 30 years since then-Gov. Bill Clinton took a break from the campaign trail to oversee the execution of death-row inmate Ricky Ray Rector. Morally, it may have been repugnant to kill a man so mentally handicapped by a failed suicide attempt that he set aside the pecan pie of his…

Central banks have been caught out by the sudden upturn in inflation. In the United States, CPI inflation is now 6.2%. The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation, core PCE, has risen to its highest level in 30 years. And inflation is well above target in many industrialized countries. …