World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Why does Iran insist on holding presidential elections while the world watches these elections being rigged on a daily basis during the weeks that precede the day of the vote? The elections’ results were determined weeks before they were held, not because of overwhelming popular support for then…

Higher education in the US has been heading for a shakeout for a long time, and now it has come. Universities are facing a big, long-lasting funding crunch as demand for undergraduate education looks unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels anytime soon. That means schools need to find new ways to…

Water has been generating conflicts and controversies in the US for centuries, but the American West could be heading toward the most severe water shortages and skirmishes in the nation’s history. The latest clash broke out this month along California's border with Oregon in the Klamath River…

Before thousands descended on St. Petersburg for Russia’s annual economic forum this month, the local governor boasted to radio listeners that no one had held a similar-scale event since the pandemic struck. A few days later, President Vladimir Putin told the audience that his country was in a…

A model of corporate finance that I like and find helpful goes like this: 1. A company is founded to do a thing. 2. It raises money from investors to do the thing. 3. It spends the money to do the thing. 4. It does the thing profitably, which generates money. 5. It gives some of the money…

With the Lebanese Saeed Akl and the Iraqi Saadi Youssef, as with the many other poets who passed away between the two’s passing, the same scenario is repeated: As soon as a poet, a novelist, or an artist leaves our world, we see the emergence of satire and eulogies that are, in most cases,…

Did George Bush commit a sin two decades ago similar to the one committed by Leonid Brezhnev four decades earlier when he sent his army to Afghanistan to wage an unwinnable war in a country that cannot be controlled? Was sending the American army to topple Saddam Hussein a similar sin that ended…

Of the natural gas burned in American homes, just 2.8% is used for cooking, according to a 2015 survey by the US Energy Information Administration. Residential natural-gas use in turn makes up just 15% of total US consumption, a percentage that has fallen over the past decade as (1) natural…

“Legacy” and “mature” are the words usually thrown at the semiconductors Tom Caulfield produces at factories in Singapore, the US and Germany. He doesn’t like that. Instead, the chief executive officer of GlobalFoundries wants people to refer to his chips as “feature-rich,” a term he feels…

Reportedly, there’s a deal on an infrastructure bill, which may or may not have the votes to defeat a filibuster in the Senate and may not even have enough votes to clear the House and at any rate will be vetoed by President Joe Biden unless a different bill including other portions of his…

The Supreme Court’s decision in the shareholders’ suit against Goldman Sachs over the bank’s transparency was extremely subtle, leaving enough room for both sides to say that they were happy with it. And it did very little, if anything, to make new law. So what were the justices doing, exactly?…

When the US Food and Drug Administration approved Biogen Inc.'s controversial Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm earlier this month without firm evidence that the drug helps patients, it created concern that other unproven treatments might follow. That scenario is already here. Eli Lilly & Co. announced…