World News Insights: Opinion Articles

In the vast primeval forest that lies between Poland and Belarus, European bison graze under ancient trees alongside refugees, weak from cold and hunger. The new arrivals — from countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria and Cameroon — have different stories, but a shared predicament…

Like many who work in public health, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, I’ve been waiting my whole career for a malaria vaccine. And even longer than that: I suffered from severe malaria when I was 10. The World Health Organization has now endorsed the first vaccine as a complementary tool for…

Stuart Woolf, a large almond and tomato producer, recently bulldozed 400 acres of almond orchards in central California — about 50,000 trees that under normal conditions would have produced $2.5 million of nuts every year for another decade. It’s a fraction of the 25,000 acres his family farms, but…

In today’s exercise in whataboutism, it turns out that (as some pundits are keen to remind everyone) there are Democrats who have claimed that the 2000 election was stolen, which presumably is important to bring up because it somehow turns the behavior of Donald Trump and his apologists into normal…

The opening scene of a brief online documentary by Chinese state-run media channel CGTN shows jaywalkers in Shenzhen getting captured on video, identified and then shamed publicly in real time. The report is supposed to highlight the country’s prowess in artificial intelligence, yet it reveals a…

When Frances Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook, told a Senate hearing this week that the company put its “astronomical profits before people,” the outcry was loud and indignant. The social media company’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, responded with a Facebook post…

Some news can only be understood when seen as part of the broader picture, even if that news comes from geographically distant places and deals with different issues. Today, we are facing two pieces of breaking news, which outlets reported on the same day, that sum up the absurd path we have been…

“If you want to understand the Iraqi situation, you must remember that it’s a country that has always been anxious or afraid, and has not savored - especially in the past decades - the taste of a natural rule,” someone once told me. He added: “Iraq has geographical fears because it is situated…

When exactly is something either fair or unfair? Whether the topic is taxation, pay and bonuses, government benefits, crime and punishment, or almost anything else, we just can’t seem to agree. The reason, it turns out, is that our intuitions about these matters are shaped not only by culture…

Drop in at Air India Ltd.’s Mumbai office in early 2001, and you might have come across an elderly, white-jacketed man winding up the clock. With 17,400 employees and just 24 planes — three times the staffing level at major US airlines — silly tasks like timekeeping in the headquarters had become…

This week’s Congressional testimony by whistleblower Frances Haugen drove home an important message: Facebook is actively harming millions, perhaps billions, of users around the world with a host of algorithms designed to boost engagement and advertising revenue. This leaves the question: what…

I have met Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg only once and it did not go well. It was at a dinner in July 2017, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, and controversy was raging about Facebook’s political role. I had the temerity to warn him that he increasingly…