World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Vaccine opponents are seizing on the death of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was fully vaccinated yet died of Covid-19 complications, to cast doubt on the vaccination effort against the virus. As usual, these people are dangerously wrong. The death of someone like Powell, who was 84…

Everyone is looking for new ways to get a piece of the global electric vehicle value chain. It’s no longer just car companies or battery firms, it’s the entire range of parts that make up batteries — from the chemicals that form each component to the wiring and everything in between. With all the…

Lebanon’s October 17 movement’s second anniversary passed amid dangerous and violent divisions in the streets and elite political circles over the investigation into the Beirut blast and the Shiite duo’s (Hezbollah and the Amal Movement) demand that Tarek Bitar step aside as had his predecessor,…

How difficult it is to write amid pain and agony! The weeping of a mother who lost her son, the grief of those who lost their brother, and the tears of children who joined the procession of orphans. Every bloodshed inside the homeland is equal to the killing of the homeland itself. Regardless of…

One day in Korea in 1951, a puzzled American soldier peered at a sign above the entrance to a British base, which proclaimed “Britannia Camp.” He quizzed an officer, pointing upwards: “Whaddoes that mean?” Major Gerald Rickord said: “Haven’t you ever heard of Britannia Rules the Waves?” The…

Globalization may have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, but to its critics, it has long been a dirty word. They associate it with enhancing corporate power, reducing the wages of workers and deepening divides between the wealthy and everyone else. During the pandemic,…

Our energy system is built upon a mountain of waste. Believe it or not, that’s a good thing. Look at the journey that power takes to your plug socket from its original source, and you’ll find excess and overcapacity every step of the way. All electricity grids are designed with a reserve margin …

Going back to 1975, our minds would spew out pages of history that the well-intended among us thought had been turned. Maarouf Saad’s assassination, the Ain al-Rummaneh bus…all were recalled to this present day. The past does not pass in Lebanon. What leaves the past in the present, or perhaps…

I have a T-shirt that I have never put on because I don’t deserve to wear it. It says “Master of ’Metrics” on the back. I got it in 2015 as a promotional tie-in with a review copy of a book on econometrics called “Mastering ’Metrics: The Path From Cause to Effect,” co-written by Joshua Angrist,…

There’s a pattern to medical reversals that can help explain this week’s seeming U-turn on that age-old advice to take an aspirin a day to prevent heart attacks and strokes. Evidence had actually been building for some time that this might do a lot of people more harm than good. This latest news…

In testimony before a Senate subcommittee last week, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower, raised a number of important and complex policy questions about how society might better regulate the wayward social-media giant. But she also raised a very basic question, one…

In an age of masking, compulsive hand sanitizing and plexiglass dividers, it seems inconceivable that for more than 40 years people enthusiastically signed up — and were often put on a waiting list — to have respiratory viruses, including coronaviruses, dripped into their noses. They were…