World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Manny Pacquiao is running to be president of the Philippines. In a country obsessed with celebrity culture, the candidacy of its most famous son feels as inevitable as night following day. That’s reason enough for caution. Pacquiao, or “Pac-Man,” is rightly regarded as a hero. A lightning-quick…

American parents are justifiably wondering why the United States hasn’t authorized Covid-19 vaccines for children under 12. Given the spread of the Delta variant and the recent increase in Covid-19 cases among children in the United States, their concerns are growing more urgent by the day. …

US climate envoy John Kerry joined the ranks of environmental activists when he called for direct action that turns scientific research findings into policies and plans. This may be true in an ideal world, but the difference between science and public policy is vast, amid the complex elements…

Taking the world towards a new Cold War serves no one. At a time when the peoples of the world are seeking stability, coexistence, security and peace, we see that several countries are heading, with unparalleled enthusiasm, towards the world of nuclear armament. The US and Chinese presidents…

As the world begins to come to terms with Covid-19 becoming endemic, Hong Kong has chosen to stick to a zero-Covid strategy. With no local cases over the past few months, it imposes one of the longest quarantines anywhere on overseas travelers: up to 21 days in a self-funded, government-approved…

San Francisco Mayor London Breed sent an important but unintentional message last week when she was caught violating her own mask mandates while partying away, maskless, in a jam-packed jazz club. Her excuse was incoherent; she said she was “feeling the spirit,” enjoying the music and so not…

Walk around a supermarket in the US or Europe and you will see some empty shelves once more. This isn’t due to people panic-buying toilet paper, as they did early on in the pandemic; rather it’s because supply chains are clogged at almost every stage between Asian factories and grocery stock rooms…

Now that the top US health regulators have delivered their verdict on Covid-19 booster shots, who exactly is in line to get one in the coming weeks? Sadly, too many of the wrong people and too few of the right ones, adding more messiness to a rollout process that’s been far from smooth. The…

The scene of Iranian fuel tankers being smuggled into Lebanon in broad daylight for everyone to see - especially the government, which chose to put its head in the sand- is not complete without that of the celebrations that accompanied it. Purporting to have broken an imagined siege supposedly…

In the never-ending drama that is Brexit, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has floated a proposal to allow the UK’s vegetable and fruit vendors to use non-metric units like ounces and pounds. David Frost, the government minister overseeing the exit from the European Union, described the move as an…

Groups of congressional Democrats trekked down to the White House on Wednesday to meet with President Joe Biden in order to … well, no one is quite sure. Weeks ago, a wide range of outcomes seemed possible for the Democrats’ two-bill strategy for enacting bipartisan infrastructure legislation and a…

Success, victory, achievement, triumph…. These are some of the words that Tehran’s state-controlled media are using these days to describe the performance of Ibrahim Raisi, the new President of the Islamic Republic. The undertone is that Iran is just emerging from eight years of bad news under…