World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Stablecoins have gone from an obscure corner of crypto to near the center of it. Major institutions, such as Mastercard, are now trying to create alternate payment networks based on stablecoin and crypto. I am rooting for such efforts to succeed, but in the meantime I have news for you:…

In the runup to the COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow, everyone and their aide wants countries — particularly large developing countries such as India — to commit to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by a specific date. The European Union and the United States have promised carbon neutrality…

Facebook Inc., you may have heard, has changed its name to Meta. Setting aside, briefly, the vital debate on Facebook Inc.’s myriad evils, and focusing specifically on the name and brand, there are some elements of note. Given there is no “good” name for a “bad” company — and that nothing…

The near conclusive results of the Iraqi elections affirmed that a new political course is crystalizing and will impose itself on domestic and foreign actors…This course and its twists and turns began taking form on the first of October 2019, which is tied to the sacrifices of the Iraqi youths who…

In a previous column, I allowed myself to daydream about Mark Zuckerberg announcing the end of Facebook Inc.’s main app. It may have sounded implausible at the time, but now Zuckerberg appears to share my dream at a certain level: He’s working on a wholesale solution to Facebook’s endless public…

It’s not often that we get a preview of global catastrophe, and yet Covid-19 has offered us just that: a cataclysm that affected the entire planet, cost too many lives, battered economies and hit the poorest disproportionately hard. Unimpeded, a warming planet will do all that and more. Like the…

The supply-chain crisis is driving a wedge through big tech. Earlier this week, Microsoft Corp. and Google-parent Alphabet Inc. posted robust earnings results, as their software and internet-focused business models allowed them to avoid much of the supply-chain headwinds affecting other…

Political systems based on ideology always face a challenge when they realize that real events have rendered their ideology obsolete. This could happen at different moments in an ideology-based regime’s life. The Nazi party in Germany realized that soon after sweeping to power and decided…

Hezbollah’s approach to dealing with the investigation into the explosion that struck the port and the capital, most recently manifested in the events of “Black Thursday” seen on the 14th and its implications, has been marked by extreme arbitrariness and arrogance. Claims are always presented as…

Over the weekend, the already troubled relations between Turkey and the US and some other Western countries were further strained with a diplomatic row over a joint declaration of 10 Embassies in Ankara (US, Netherlands, Germany, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Canada, and New Zealand)…

Amid all the scandals and controversy, Facebook Inc. watchers were on pins and needles going into the company’s most hotly anticipated quarterly report in years. In the end, it fell a bit short. But with many expecting far worse, sometimes avoiding disaster is good enough. Late Monday, the…

The climax of Kati Marton’s captivating new biography of Angela Merkel, “The Chancellor,” comes in 2015, when the German leader refused to close her country’s borders to a tide of refugees fleeing civil war and state collapse in the Middle East and Africa. “If Europe fails on the question of…