World News Insights: Opinion Articles

In 2015, when the garbage crisis erupted in Lebanon, we found ourselves thrown into a strange situation: all the Lebanese, with no sectarian or regional affiliations, were suffering from the problem. At the same time, many villages and towns yelled out: don’t bury “strangers’” trash in our area…

The Iraq that hosted the Cooperation and Partnership summit two days ago is definitely not the same Iraq that hosted the Arab summit in 2012. Many things have changed in Iraq and its surrounding and the world since then. The most important change, however, took place in Baghdad where a calm and…

Vaccines never promised us perfect protection. Yet studies are showing that our defenses are declining faster than expected. One from Oxford University published last week showed that the efficacy of the BioNTech/Pfizer Inc. vaccine was halved after four months. Another, published Tuesday by the…

The US decision to withdraw combat troops from Afghanistan, announced by Barack Obama in 2014, formalized by Donald Trump in 2019 and implemented by Joe Biden in 2021, has provoked a howl of anguish among political, security and media establishments across the Atlantic. Max Boot of the Council…

Six years after finding themselves at the forefront of Europe’s political crisis over refugees, thousands of Greeks are now refugees in their own country. On July 21, a small wildfire began burning over the northern half of Evia, an island around 30 miles northeast of Athens. Over the next 20…

Humanity’s failure to avert the crisis of a warming climate is sometimes framed as a grand technological problem: For centuries, countries relied on fossil fuels to industrialize their economies and generate wealth, and it was only in recent years that alternative ways of powering a society, like…

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) latest report has confirmed much that we already knew: Human activities have caused an unprecedented warming of the Earth and, as a result, we’re seeing more frequent droughts and heat waves, extreme rainfall and record-breaking temperatures. …

Fear of failure is part of human nature. But what’s surprising is that some people act as if they fear success, or fail to even recognize success. It is even more surprising when it comes to exceptional environmental successes, which deserve to be scaled up rather than down. A few weeks ago,…

Twenty years ago, when the United States was sucked into the Afghan cesspool, pundits were divided about the ultimate aim of intervention. President George W. Bush talked of GWOT, remember the acronym? or Global War on Terror. His critics argued that, unless it led to nation-building in Afghanistan…

The Afghan arena and its surrounding area could become an open field of war between the Taliban and ISIS in Khorasan Province, better known as ISIS-K. ISIS’s incorporation of the names of countries and regions, especially those that can be traced back to the Islamic era, into its names has a long…

Now that the US airlift is being shut down — by bombings and deadlines — some 100,000 to 300,000 Afghans are being left behind. These range from people who worked directly with the US and NATO partner nations to members of the former Afghan government, teachers of girls, and outspoken anti-Taliban…

When a powerful technology company wants everyone to know it has made large concessions in its business practices, it pays to look at the fine print. Sometimes the details don’t match up with the rhetoric. That seems to be the case regarding Apple Inc.’s class-action settlement with app developers…