World News Insights: Opinion Articles

To talk or not to talk? For Joe Biden’s administration in Washington this is the question with regard to “frozen” negotiations with Iran over its so-called “nuclear ambitions”. Initially, Biden appeared keen to team-roll the process so that he could revive what his former boss Barack Obama still…

Two hundred and sixty-six years ago this month, a column of British regulars commanded by Gen. Edward Braddock was cut to pieces by French soldiers and their Native American allies in the woods just outside today’s Pittsburgh. The defeat turned into a rout when Braddock was shot off his horse,…

This month marks the one-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s initial threat to ban ByteDance Ltd.-owned TikTok, entangling the social media platform into the unpredictable web of geopolitics. But despite the existential distraction, the app has thrived over the past year. And now with…

When the Olympic Games open Friday night in Tokyo with a global roll call, audiences will get a geography lesson that comes just once every four years. Schoolteachers use replays of the ceremony to instruct kids about the flags of the world, challenge them to find countries on a map, and ask which…

As the first anniversary of the August 4 crime draws closer, scenes from the catastrophic explosion that struck Beirut invariably come to mind. And with the approach of this day, glaring questions return to mind: Why was the capital targeted? For what reason? Who is responsible for the largest…

Many people are watching the American withdrawal from Afghanistan but there is a bigger debate in Washington about future US military interventions in the Middle East. In response to public opinion, Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress want to make it more difficult to start a new war…

The web of commercial ties spun between the world’s two largest economies over the past two decades is fraying. Early in the US Democratic primary, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris came across as two of the least confrontational candidates on China issues. Their administration, however, is offering not…

Part of what’s so insidious about the conservative assault on critical race theory is how it exploits a deep-seated rift in the Democratic coalition, one that’s been apparent since the advent of the back-to-the-city movement in the 1980s and 1990s. That divide has never been fully resolved — and it…

Cubans are, by necessity, talented at getting by. Yet even they have limits, and this past weekend thousands of fed-up citizens stepped out in what became unprecedented island-wide protests over acute shortages of food, medicine and fuel. The pain of a pandemic that has shut down tourism, combined…

Twentieth-century Arabs appropriated two terms that describe natural phenomena and adopted them to their political and social narratives: “nakba” (catastrophe), was adopted in their description of Israel’s establishment in 1948, and “naksa” (setback) was used to describe the defeat in Six-Day War…

There she was again, the proverbial mother of the nation, walking somberly through the rubble and mud of a nearly destroyed town called Schuld, which happens to be German for “guilt.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel, two months before an election that will usher her out of politics and into…

The next target for China’s cybersecurity crackdown will be the pools of data collected by the latest generation of cars. This approach risks Beijing shooting itself in the foot, and jeopardizing its ambitious plans to lead the global race for electric and autonomous vehicles. China wants to…