Scientists have begun to develop high-tech “guardian angels” to constantly keep tabs on your health – in your clothes and jewelry. But privacy – and health – questions loom.
Month: May 2012
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The Grossest Thing About Cannes
NICE MATIN (France) CANNES – Far from the red carpets and movie stars, Cannes hides its dark side. Look closer into the famous stretch of Mediterranean and you might see a crowd of cans, cigarette butts and other waste that continue to plague this southern French seaside city. Being a tourist attraction not only brings […]
Off the Nigerian coast, near the country’s largest city of Lagos, is a “graveyard” of some 100 grounded and rusted vessels that pose an environmental and security challenge to the oil-producing African country.
LA TERCERA (Chile) SANTIAGO – A “fake chef” in Chile has been accused of conning his way into numerous restaurant and café jobs with a souped-up resume, and then robbing his employers. Police say the 28-year-old man, indentified as Jorge Sepúlveda Salazar, used a bogus resume to land jobs throughout the South American country, La […]
Collecting stamps (like gold) used to be banned in China. No longer — and Chinese collectors and investors may be creating a postage-stamp bubble.
[dailymotion https://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/xquaco expand=1]Nicolas Sarkozy quitte l’Elysée au bras de son… par LeNouvelObservateur Francois Hollande has become the 24th president of the French Republic following a ceremony at the Elysee Palace in central Paris. This is a crucial day for French politics: -Watch the passage of power between François Hollande and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy […]
Editorial: Whoever is “lucky” enough to win Mexico’s upcoming presidential election will inherit a gruesome drug war that has already killed some 55,000. Just this week, 49 headless corpses turned up near the northern city of Mo
The fourth U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue yielded an important reform: Chinese state-owned firms must turn over a bigger chunk of their profits to the government to help finance public spending. U.S. companies are pleased — and ordinary Chine
XINHUA NET, FENGHUANG NET (China) BEIJING – The Beijing Police have just announced a “Hundred Days Special Action” from May 15th to the end of August, aiming to “clean up” the foreigners who have entered, stayed, and worked in the capital illegally. This action includes conducting a census of various communities, assaulting various key sites, […]
Francois Hollande has been sworn in as president of France, becoming the first Socialist leader in 17 years to occupy the Elysee Palace.
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Iran hangs ‘Israel killer spy’
Iran has hanged a man it said was an agent for Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. The man was convicted of killing an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran two years ago.
Rebekah Brooks and her husband, Charlie, are being charged with perverting the course of justice as part of the UK phone hacking inquiry.
LA PRESSE (Canada) After three straight months of strikes, including several violent clashes, the Quebec student movement can finally claim a tangible victory. Quebec’s Education Minister Line Beauchamp resigned Monday evening, to be replaced by Michelle Courchesne. The province’s new minister is expected to meet leaders of the student associations later Tuesday, to “evaluate the […]
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Germany Says Yes To Growth, Yes To Rigor
Op-ed: Germany has been accused of being anti-growth. But Germany’s Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble argues that growth goes hand-in-hand with the budgetary discipline that Europe’s biggest economy holds so dear.
During the just concluded campaign, France’s incoming Socialist President François Hollande had vowed to push through gay marriage during his first year in office. Conservative Catholic groups are already gearing up for a fight.
A unpaid $7,000 tab at Copacabana’s Porto Bay hotel was traced to a 53-year-old American, whose hotel bill showed 30 caipirinhas a day. Employees say the suspect was constantly surrounded by women… apparently also with drinks in hand.
NOVAYA GAZETA, KOMMERSANT (Russia) MOSCOW – In the aftermath of the “March of the Millions’ on May 6th and the arrest of several hundred protesters that night, an improvised camp sprung up overnight in Moscow in the Park of Chistye Prudy, Novaya Gazeta reports. The camp looks in many ways like the protest camps that […]
The making of a hoax: how a story about a law allowing Egyptian men to have sex with their dead wives went from rumor to front page of the Daily Mail, the Huffington Post and Al-Arabiya.
EL MUNDO (Spain) SEVILLA – Veteran American rocker Bruce Springsteen kicked off his European tour Sunday night in Sevilla with a special nod to Spain’s indignados, a grassroots movement launched in 2011 to protest austerity measures and high unemployment. Addressing the crowd of some 30,000 in Spanish, the 62-year-old musician dedicated one of his new […]
Why take the train when you can ride a bicycle? What better way to take in the gorgeous Italian countryside than to ride along the Po River, a route dotted with cathedrals, national parks and beautiful cities.
At least 30 people – including 23 soldiers – have died in heavy overnight clashes in the central Syrian city of Rastan.
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Eurozone worries still pressure stocks
Markets are having difficulty establishing a bullish platform as continuing worries over the eurozone counteract news of more monetary easing in China.
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Nepal plane crash kills 15 in Himalayas
A plane crashed into a mountain in the Himalayas while trying to land at an airport in northern Nepal, killing 15 people and critically injuring six.
If Athens opts out of the euro zone, the economic union as a whole will probably survive. But it won’t be pretty, especially for Germany, which stands to lose upwards of 100 billion euros, according to economists.
EL MERCURIO (Chile) SANTIAGO – In the heart of Providencia, a populous middle-class district of Santiago, you might find yourself walking along Avenida 11 de Septiembre. Of course, anyone familiar with modern Chilean history knows that street commemorates “the other 9-11,” the military coup of Sept. 11, 1973 that toppled Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president […]
LA NACIÓN (Costa Rica) SAN JOSE – An American man accused of running a sex slave operation in Costa Rica is on the lam while his associates – a Colombian, a Costa Rican and an Egyptian man – are now behind bars following a series of raids this past week. Police in San Jose, the […]
Italy loves its indigenous red squirrels – so much so that it is waging a full on war, at a cost of millions of euros, to get rid of the American grey squirrels, which have invaded the northeastern region of Liguria.
More than two decades after its political reunification, Germany continues to be divided along religious lines. Christianity still holds a fair amount of sway in the West. Not so much in the East, where two thirds of the population – young and old – are d
Color expert Katrin Trautwein “could never live anywhere that has white walls.” Her three-room apartment in Uster, Switzerland is proof of that. But she rejects the “naïve” notion that yellow is necessarily sunny, or that beige is always bland.
The Chinese people are fed up with their justice system which is rife with corruption and lack of due process. There have been too many cases of wrongful convictions and confessions obtained through torture.
Despite political highjacking, corruption and lack of information, a campaign to promote insecticide-treated mosquito nets is helping the Democratic Republic of Congo fight its number one child killer: malaria.
NOVAYA GAZETA (Russia) MOSCOW – Roughly 60% of synthetic narcotics in Europe are made with an ingredient that is illegally exported from Russia, possibly with the help of high-ranking officials in the Russian Drug Enforcement Agency and Security Agency, Novaya Gazeta reports. The allegations stem from an audit started after a former top-level officer in […]
LIBÉRATION (France) CRÉTEIL – The planned deportation from France of a Bangladeshi immigrant has been suspended after his son was crowned French junior national chess championship, Libération reports. Nura Alam, a member of the political opposition in Bangladesh, taught his son Fahim how to play chess in their native country, where the boy evenutally became […]
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Text Messaging Turns 20
EL CRONISTA (Argentina) BUENOS AIRES – This week marks the 20th anniversary of a technology that has changed the way the world communicates: text messaging. Also known as Short Message Service (SMS), texting is “simple, every day and cheap, and is now used by more than 4 billion people the world over,” El Cronista reports. […]
The Pentagon plans to shutter its air base in Mannheim, Germany, meaning the property – which is significantly bigger than the city itself – will soon be on the market. The local government wants to incorporate the space, but fears it’ll end up in the han
KYODO (Japan) SENDAI – Kenichi Yamamoto, 63, was driving through Tagajo prefecture, in northeastern Japan, when the March 11, 2011 tsunami struck. The former Toyota employee, a science and engineering professor at Ishinomaki University, narrowly escaped death. “His car immediately started filling with water, tipping it 45 degrees. He barely managed to escape by breaking […]
CORRIERE DELLA SERA (Italy) MILAN – An anarchist group claimed responsibility Friday for the recent shooting of a top Italian nuclear energy executive, calling the victim “one of the many sorcerers of the atom.” The Milan daily Corriere della Sera received a lengthy text by regular post from the “Olga cell” of the Federazione Anarchica […]
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon says the firm suffered a $2 billion trading loss after an “egregious” failure in a unit managing risks, jeopardizing Wall Street banks’ efforts to loosen a federal ban on bets with the
A relative of one of those killed by Anders Behring Breivik has thrown a shoe at the defendant, interrupting his trial in Oslo.
Four people, including a village chief and a police officer, were killed in a shootout that stemmed from a misunderstanding in a bikini competition in Jaro, Iloilo City.