World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Vladimir Putin snatched from the Afghans their right to choose the system of governance that suits them as he was criticizing the West’s attempts to impose its model of democracy. However, keeping the peoples of the Third World hostage to their “traditions” is no less arbitrary than any attempt…

The world’s best-selling smartphone may not be tops when it comes to navigating life during a global pandemic. At least that’s what I discovered — and it’s why I ditched my iPhone. Normally, swapping out an iPhone for a competing device just weeks ahead of Apple Inc.’s annual September iPhone…

Whenever G7 leaders gather, the optics usually say more than the anodyne communiques issued afterwards. Fortunately for Joe Biden, there will be no group photo from Tuesday’s virtual summit to talk about Afghanistan. The withdrawal debacle has left the world’s preeminent power looking like the…

The past two decades were widely assumed to usher in the transition from the “American Century'' to the “Chinese Century,'' as evidenced by the most populous nation's burgeoning gross domestic product, dominance in manufacturing and global trade and, most recently, advancing technology poised to…

To mitigate a huge problem like climate change, we need to be open to big ideas. One of these has been around since the 1990s but may only now be ready for prime time: the issuance of tradable carbon allowances not only to companies (as in existing cap-and-trade systems) but to all of us…

Reuters reported Tuesday that the head of Iran’s prison system has apologized for the “bitter events” that unfolded at Evin prison in Tehran after footage of prisoners being tortured and assaulted were leaked and shared online by hackers. In a tweet reported by state media, Mohammad Mehdi…

Hotter, faster, stronger: That isn’t a tagline for the next blockbuster superhero movie. This is what climate change is doing to many extreme weather events. As the planet warms, heat waves are getting hotter, wildfires are moving faster and burning larger areas, and storms and floods are becoming…

In a June email to his staff, Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, wrote: “Video conference calling has narrowed the distance between us, to be sure, but there are things it simply cannot replicate.” He then announced plans for employees to return to the office three days a week in the fall. …

For years, “broken windows” policing — the idea that the best way to prevent serious crime was to enforce laws against petty crime — was derided by critics as unnecessary, unjust, even racist. So cities across America pulled back from prosecuting the supposedly small stuff, like shoplifting. Now…

My hometown of Sydney is a divided city. Never more so than now, in the grip of a Covid-19 outbreak that’s overwhelmed its complacent sense of having escaped the pandemic. In the east, suburbs close to the beach and the cooling breezes of the Pacific are the playgrounds of the affluent. Further…

On Aug. 14, a day before armed fighters swarmed into Kabul, a Twitter account for one of the Taliban’s magazines posted a video of six nervous Afghan government soldiers sitting in a truck surrounded by Taliban warriors. The post included a snippet of text, in Pashto, one of the two main languages…

In 2019, allied and government airstrikes in Afghanistan killed some 700 civilians, more than in any other year since the war’s start, according to the Costs of War Project, a group working to tally the human toll of America’s post-9/11 conflicts. US and NATO airstrikes declined in 2020 after…