World News Insights: Opinion Articles

At 88 years of age, Abolhassan Banisadr passed away in Paris. The passing was quiet and cold, and the man who passed is almost unknown. Banisadr is not an anonymous person, or his anonymity is not that simple. He was elected Iran’s first president after it was declared a republic. As for how he…

Whether you are religious believer or an atheist, it’s galling to realize that some people are feigning religious objections to Covid-19 vaccines to avoid compliance with mandates. And since the law requires that religious beliefs be “sincere,” it’s tempting to argue for strict policing of the…

A new pill to treat people with Covid-19 may be given emergency use authorization by the US Food and Drug Administration before year’s end. The data from a late-stage clinical trial suggest that the drug, molnupiravir, can protect patients who are treated within the first five days of feeling…

In the vast primeval forest that lies between Poland and Belarus, European bison graze under ancient trees alongside refugees, weak from cold and hunger. The new arrivals — from countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria and Cameroon — have different stories, but a shared predicament…

Like many who work in public health, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, I’ve been waiting my whole career for a malaria vaccine. And even longer than that: I suffered from severe malaria when I was 10. The World Health Organization has now endorsed the first vaccine as a complementary tool for…

Stuart Woolf, a large almond and tomato producer, recently bulldozed 400 acres of almond orchards in central California — about 50,000 trees that under normal conditions would have produced $2.5 million of nuts every year for another decade. It’s a fraction of the 25,000 acres his family farms, but…

In today’s exercise in whataboutism, it turns out that (as some pundits are keen to remind everyone) there are Democrats who have claimed that the 2000 election was stolen, which presumably is important to bring up because it somehow turns the behavior of Donald Trump and his apologists into normal…

The opening scene of a brief online documentary by Chinese state-run media channel CGTN shows jaywalkers in Shenzhen getting captured on video, identified and then shamed publicly in real time. The report is supposed to highlight the country’s prowess in artificial intelligence, yet it reveals a…

When Frances Haugen, a former product manager at Facebook, told a Senate hearing this week that the company put its “astronomical profits before people,” the outcry was loud and indignant. The social media company’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, responded with a Facebook post…

Some news can only be understood when seen as part of the broader picture, even if that news comes from geographically distant places and deals with different issues. Today, we are facing two pieces of breaking news, which outlets reported on the same day, that sum up the absurd path we have been…

“If you want to understand the Iraqi situation, you must remember that it’s a country that has always been anxious or afraid, and has not savored - especially in the past decades - the taste of a natural rule,” someone once told me. He added: “Iraq has geographical fears because it is situated…

When exactly is something either fair or unfair? Whether the topic is taxation, pay and bonuses, government benefits, crime and punishment, or almost anything else, we just can’t seem to agree. The reason, it turns out, is that our intuitions about these matters are shaped not only by culture…