World News Insights: Opinion Articles

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

A few days ago, a new law was issued in North Korea. It was described by the Western media as intending to eradicate all forms of foreign influence: Punishment that goes as far as the death penalty for anyone caught acquiring Western movies or wearing foreign clothes. Speaking some of the country’s…

The job market recovery is looking better for 2023 and 2024, even while this year's forecasts need to be reined in a bit. The best evidence for the optimistic outlook is coming from a surprising place: teenagers. The last two jobs reports poured cold water on the hope that we could add a million…

In “Love in the Time of Cholera,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez imagines an enduring love triangle between two passionate people — Florentino and Fermina — and a punctilious doctor, Juvenal Urbino, whom Fermina is persuaded by her father to marry. Trained as a physician in Paris, Dr. Urbino is a national…