World News Insights: Opinion Articles

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…

Is Assad on his way to become a respectable member of the international community? Assad has gained some ground in terms of coming back into the international community. There are many who envisage that Syria could retain its seat in the Arab League by the end of the year. UAE and Jordan have…

Heads are rolling at Turkey’s central bank, this time for not lowering interest rates aggressively enough. Deeper cuts will likely come, perhaps as soon as next week. This is a dangerous game when most of the world is moving in the opposite direction. An already battered currency is unlikely to…

Green finance, green banking, green investing — in a time of climate change, the capital markets obviously want to assist in the necessary transformation of our economies. Unfortunately, the state is increasingly interfering in these markets in a way that will prove counterproductive because it…

The demise of LinkedIn’s operations in China wasn’t inevitable. Having watched names like Google, Facebook and Twitter retreat from the country, the US social-media provider found a way in 2014 to survive by moderating content in such a way that its presence was palatable to Beijing while still…