World News Insights: Opinion Articles

When the Olympic Games open Friday night in Tokyo with a global roll call, audiences will get a geography lesson that comes just once every four years. Schoolteachers use replays of the ceremony to instruct kids about the flags of the world, challenge them to find countries on a map, and ask which…

As the first anniversary of the August 4 crime draws closer, scenes from the catastrophic explosion that struck Beirut invariably come to mind. And with the approach of this day, glaring questions return to mind: Why was the capital targeted? For what reason? Who is responsible for the largest…

Many people are watching the American withdrawal from Afghanistan but there is a bigger debate in Washington about future US military interventions in the Middle East. In response to public opinion, Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress want to make it more difficult to start a new war…

The web of commercial ties spun between the world’s two largest economies over the past two decades is fraying. Early in the US Democratic primary, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris came across as two of the least confrontational candidates on China issues. Their administration, however, is offering not…

Part of what’s so insidious about the conservative assault on critical race theory is how it exploits a deep-seated rift in the Democratic coalition, one that’s been apparent since the advent of the back-to-the-city movement in the 1980s and 1990s. That divide has never been fully resolved — and it…

Cubans are, by necessity, talented at getting by. Yet even they have limits, and this past weekend thousands of fed-up citizens stepped out in what became unprecedented island-wide protests over acute shortages of food, medicine and fuel. The pain of a pandemic that has shut down tourism, combined…

Twentieth-century Arabs appropriated two terms that describe natural phenomena and adopted them to their political and social narratives: “nakba” (catastrophe), was adopted in their description of Israel’s establishment in 1948, and “naksa” (setback) was used to describe the defeat in Six-Day War…

There she was again, the proverbial mother of the nation, walking somberly through the rubble and mud of a nearly destroyed town called Schuld, which happens to be German for “guilt.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel, two months before an election that will usher her out of politics and into…

The next target for China’s cybersecurity crackdown will be the pools of data collected by the latest generation of cars. This approach risks Beijing shooting itself in the foot, and jeopardizing its ambitious plans to lead the global race for electric and autonomous vehicles. China wants to…

People are worried about the coronavirus again. So it’s understandable that public health officials are feeling pressure to recommend Covid-19 booster shots soon, before we find out the hard way when the vaccines wear off. Pfizer Inc. contributed by announcing earlier this month that it would soon…

When dealing with politics, and understanding the mechanism of ‘trial and error’, a political analyst needs to be cynical; more so, when politicians preach morality. There is nothing more dangerous than when politicians justify their interests with ethical standards, and nothing more worrying than…

It was a stunning thing to say, even if it is in many ways true. “They’re killing people,” President Biden said loudly enough to be heard under the roar of his Marine One helicopter idling on the South Lawn of the White House on Friday. He was talking not about terrorists or leaders of rogue…