World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Two years after the October 17 protests began in Lebanon, the scene has gone back to normal. The revolution, whose participants had claimed they wanted to evade the fatal curse of civil wars, it seems, with all its crowds, supporters, songs and slogans, very far from today’s reality of armed…

Google has long been an also-ran in the smartphone world. But as of this week, the Alphabet Inc. unit may have finally figured out how to compete with its iPhone-making rival: custom silicon. On Tuesday, Google unveiled the Pixel 6 and the Pixel 6 Pro, both featuring a new Google-designed main…

Facebook Inc. may be preparing a fresh coat of paint for itself. A report in technology news site the Verge, citing a source with direct knowledge, says that the company is planning to change its name next week to reflect its new focus on building the metaverse — a new digital network for…

Once again Britain has one of the highest rates of Covid infection anywhere. The UK just reported its biggest single day Covid case increase in three months and a 16% increase in confirmed cases in the week to Oct. 18. The government has warned of a bad winter. While deaths from Covid are now…

Some things are so predictable you could almost set your watch by them: debt ceiling standoffs on Capitol Hill, the Bitcoin bubble rising from the dead again, Manchester City winning the Premier League. Add to that list the news that China’s planned property tax has run into serious headwinds. …

It is no longer a secret that Hezbollah has an issue with courts. The party hates and fears them. The reasons can be traced back to actions that many see as legitimate causes for suspicion. However, there is another dimension to Hezbollah’s hatred for and fear of justice: it lies in the makeup of…

The news in America has been bad for President Biden for weeks. He promised to rebuild America and to bring experts to his administration who know how to manage government offices wisely, unlike the Trump team which brought chaos all the time. What we have seen in recent weeks is chaos in the…

The US rollout of Covid-19 booster shots has been defined, unfortunately, by confusion. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration approved additional shots for many people who had received the Pfizer vaccine, but not for anyone who’d gotten Moderna or Johnson & Johnson. And in contrast to health…

Feedback on my newsletter about the embrace of “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun referring to a single person — Joel is wearing their green shirt today because it matches their pants — has been, well, pointed. It seems that quite a few people have a major problem with this change in pronominal…

Television fans have been willing to give just about every new streaming-TV service a shot. But “Squid Game” shows how Netflix Inc. has uniquely mastered the art of keeping its subscribers. Netflix surpassed expectations Tuesday when it reported 4.38 million net new members for the third quarter…

History always repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. We seem to have both when it comes to Brexit. The UK is once again threatening to walk away from trade terms it signed with the European Union, lambasting them as unworkable despite having signed up to them in 2019. The EU, even as it…

It has been a rough few months for the internet. In June, Fastly Inc.’s content-delivery network failure forced some of the world’s biggest e-commerce and media websites offline. Later, there were massive data breaches at T-Mobile US Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.’s Twitch streaming service. And last…