World News Insights: Opinion Articles

For a long time, longer than I’ve held this job, my advice to Republican politicians and policymakers has been consistent: It isn’t the 1970s or 1980s anymore. The ideas associated with Ronald Reagan’s ascent to power, forged in an era of Cold War and high crime rates, stagflation and sexual…

The Chinese shadow is evidently worrying America with its officials, experts and architects of future. The Chinese Communist Party is the new Soviet Union for many American analysts. The US Administration is trying to deny claims about the end of its role in the world. Its forces’ withdrawals from…

Some of those who studied European history noticed a shift in positions on the wars that would break out between principalities and then states. In the centuries preceding the First World War, the public sentiment was that wars did not concern the population and that rather, they were waged at the…

With Build Back Better, President Biden has attempted to revive a New Deal ethic that entwines human and physical infrastructure. No one likes taxes, but building a nation where Americans know that their families are safe and cared for is popular across party lines. It shouldn’t have been a hard…

Plato and Aristotle disagreed about the imagination. As the philosopher Stephen Asma and the actor Paul Giamatti pointed out in an essay in March, Plato gave the impression that imagination is a somewhat airy-fairy luxury good. It deals with illusions and make-believe and distracts us from reality…

Facebook is not just any corporation. It reached trillion-dollar status in a single decade by applying the logic of what I call surveillance capitalism — an economic system built on the secret extraction and manipulation of human data — to its vision of connecting the entire world. Facebook and…

Most Americans believe that the economy is getting worse, and economic confidence measures are low. At the same time, as analysts have pointed out, a lot of the economic data look pretty rosy. The unemployment rate is 4.6% and falling, and US consumers have built up $2.3 trillion in extra savings…

Thousands of people killed, more than two million internally displaced and nearly a million facing famine. The conflict in Ethiopia, begun a year ago when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched a military assault on the Tigray region, is spiraling out of control. The crisis has been building since…

The easy money days for Square Inc. may be behind it. On Thursday, the fintech company — known for its merchant checkout system and its digital wallet Cash App that enables person-to-person payments, stock investing and Bitcoin trading — reported lower-than-expected revenue for the quarter ended…

Beijing’s real estate crackdown has sent shudders well beyond the sector. But US President Joe Biden may have China Inc. covered. President Xi Jinping’s efforts to rein in property giants has left industrial companies in the lurch. Real estate accounts for a quarter of China’s economy and a big…

The importance of masks to public health is fading as other pandemic-fighting tools emerge: highly effective vaccines, better tests and now powerful antiviral drugs. So it’s time to consider making masks optional in most settings. It made sense to turn to masks when Covid-19 was spreading fast…

An objective reading of the situation in Iraq and Lebanon leads us to only one conclusion; the accused is one and the same, and has been convicted. Contemplating the contours, scenes, scenarios, preparations and direction, we find similarities between the two countries, both of which are…