World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Joe Biden couldn’t have picked a better time to release his latest executive order than his inaugural trip to Europe as US president. In overturning Trump-era bans on Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat messaging app and ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok video service, the administration sends a message not…

Tim Culpan

By holding a tete-a-tete with Vladimir Putin just after the G-7 summit in Cornwall, US President Joe Biden may signal a move towards a G-7 and a half arrangement in which Russia, once a full member of the club, secures a side chair in its ante-chamber. The arrangement suits Putin just fine. For his…

Amir Taheri

After a cyberattack crippled the world’s largest meat producer last week, JBS SA meat plants have begun to reopen across the globe. But the meat industry shouldn't be returning to business as usual — and for the security of our food supply, the Biden administration needs to make sure that it doesn…

Amanda Little

Global tax reform is bringing the conflicted incentives of post-Brexit Britain out into the open. When the Biden administration took the unprecedented step earlier this year of floating a global minimum business tax rate of 21%, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak and his team took a dim…

Lionel Laurent

Whenever I can, I take a look at the Lebanese press; and these days I find it necessary to read what the poor Lebanese are suffering under incessant lectures about “patriotism” and “achievements”, as well as floods of “exclusives” and “deep analyses”. Among both the leading qualities and faults…

Eyad Abu Shakra

Last week, President Biden stood up to deliver a speech about the Tulsa race massacre in which dozens of black people were killed and their homes and property burned down 100 years ago. Among the powerful phrases on the bitter memories of this tragic incident and the major lessons to learn from it,…

Mamdouh al-Muhainy

The job of prime minister in Iraq is perhaps the most difficult in the region and Mustafa Kadhemi’s biggest challenge is imposing control over all the armed in Iraq. There was some hope that the arrest May 26 of militia commander Qasim Moslih indicated progress on the part of Kadhemi. Instead, it…

Robert Ford

As much as the US pines for the good old days of global semiconductor supremacy, Japan feels its loss of glory even more. Once a dominant name in electronic components, the nation has been overtaken by South Korea, Taiwan, and, more recently, China. Yet Tokyo may have a viable plan to…

Tim Culpan

First there was Pokemon Go. Now augmented reality is growing up. For years, techies have envisioned that AR technology — which can superimpose digital content over real-world images — would drive the next major shift in computing. That vision has long seemed just out of reach. But a spate of…

Tae Kim

Around 100 years ago, the UK fumed as the wealthy Vestey brothers shifted their family business to Argentina to escape the long arm of London tax collectors. As the multinational used ever-more-elaborate schemes to shuffle profits, including creating a trust in Paris, the authorities likened…

Lionel Laurent

It’s time for big, passive investors like FMR LLC (Fidelity), Vanguard Group and BlackRock Inc., sitting on trillions of dollars of assets, to use their heft as shareholders and protect corporate governance standards. It’s no longer enough to simply shovel money into index funds and ETFs. As…

Anjani Trivedi

If there’s any scandal revealed by the emails of Anthony Fauci, recently released after a Freedom of Information Act request by journalists, it’s that scientists were wildly clueless at the start of the pandemic. They didn’t know what to do about the pandemic, when and how to deploy masks, or where…

Faye Flam