World News Insights: Opinion Articles

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…

US academic and writer Perry Link, an expert in Chinese affairs, wrote an article entitled “The CCP’s Culture of Fear” for the “New York Review of Books” latest volume. He says Xi Jinping’s claims: resemble Mao’s of the late 1960s: the East is rising over the West; China is a new model for the…

It has been a good couple of months for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The opportunities for enhancing Russia’s “great power status” — long Putin’s strategy for shoring up support at home — are coming faster than he can take advantage of them. In the past, his strategy has often involved…

A Nobel Peace Prize doesn’t solve thorny political problems. It didn’t draw a line under Apartheid when South African activist Albert Luthuli won it in 1960, or bring freedom to the Soviet Union when physicist and human rights campaigner Andrei Sakharov did in 1975. But it does, unfailingly, shed…

Washington was entranced Tuesday by the revelations from Frances Haugen, the Facebook product manager-turned-whistle-blower. But time and again, the public has seen high-profile congressional hearings into the company followed by inaction. For those of us who work at the intersection of technology…

Long lines outside gas stations. Panicked drivers fighting one another as the pumps run dry. Soldiers deployed to distribute fuel across the country. And in the background, the pandemic stretching on, food rotting in fields and families sinking into poverty. This is Britain in 2021. Not long ago…

Those who thought that declaring new climate commitments, whether to cut emissions or increase finance, would suffice to resolve challenges, discovered that the issue was more complicated than that. While pledges of rich countries during the recent United Nations General Assembly in New York were a…

For more than two decades, India has maintained the fantasy that a major semiconductor manufacturer will set up shop on its shores, kicking off the nation’s journey along an inevitable path toward chip glory. It never happened, but there’s now a very clear script for how it might be done, if only…

At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, former Facebook Inc. product manager Frances Haugen didn’t need to convince lawmakers that the company has a big problem. Republicans and Democrats were, for once, united on her side, at several points even calling her a “hero.” What they needed was direction…

Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. European politicians are scrambling to pin the blame for a painful surge in wholesale energy prices on reliable punching-bags — the shift to cleaner power sources, the price of carbon, greedy utilities — while conveniently missing the bigger…