Worldcrunch
BRUSSELS – Greece needs at least two more years and an additional 30 billion euros in order to be able to meet the targets set for it by the euro zone countries, European sources tell Süddeutsche Zeitung. When – and indeed if – the country gets money from the second bailout package is unclear. In […]
TAIPEI TIMES, LIBERTY TIMES (Taiwan), KYODO (Japan), SKYNET.BE (Belgium), REUTERS Worldcrunch A fleet of up to 100 Taiwan fishing boats, accompanied by 10 Taiwanese coast guard vessels, sailed into Japanese-controlled waters this morning, according to the Taipei Times. The waters are near the islands being disputed between Japan, which calls them the Senkaku, and China, […]
LES ECHOS, METRO, 20 MINUTES (France), BBC, THE TELEGRAPH (UK) Worldcrunch Facebook has been forced to deny reports that private messages have been appearing publicly on the social networking site, as millions of users panic and company share prices plummet. France’s leading business daily Les Echos reports that the French government has summoned Facebook managers […]
Putting the right spin on your words is a science. Obviously, the civil servants who owe a fiduciary duty to the public have an urgent need to master this subject. And it helps to shift the blame on someone else, a child, a spouse, or a convenient foreigner will do. Two weeks ago Yang Dacai, […]
FOLHA DE S.PAULO (Brazil) Worldcrunch DE TERESINA – Federal Police in the northeastern state of Piauí are investigating allegations of a drugs-for-votes ring. Candidates for the city council in the capital Teresina used crack to lure dealers and addicts to vote for them, accuses a prominent lawyer in the region Lúcio Ribeiro, who heads the […]
Many years ago, when Italian military service was still compulsory, the army subjected its new conscripts to a general culture test with various types of questions. One asked: “Who is Leonardo?,” which prompted a surprising range of responses. Someone, it seems, even replied “The pope.” The artist behind the most famous painting in the world, […]
ASTANA – Earlier this month, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev rolled out his new project for cooperation between the East and West — and it lacked neither ambition nor a healthy supply of alphabet-soup acronyms . A person close to President Nazarbayev’s administration said this was the most audacious of Kazakhstan’s recent foreign policy projects, unveiled […]
DIE WELT, DER SPIEGEL (Germany) Worldcrunch BERLIN – German politician Julia Schramm, 26, is a member of the national executive committee of the Pirate Party, which has built a strong following for its crusade for Internet freedom and an end to copyright law. But soon after the publication last week of Schramm’s new book called […]
BANGKOK POST (Thailand), AFP (France), BBC (UK) Worldcrunch HO CHI MINH CITY – The Vietnamese communist party has jailed three bloggers Monday for disseminating anti-government propaganda. The three bloggers belong to the independent media group Free Journalists Club, which sought to outline human rights violations in the southeast Asian country. The renowned dissident blogger, Nguyen […]
AL MASRY AL YOUM, MASRAWY (Egypt) Worldcrunch CAIRO – Social networks bristled with rage last week when city workers in the capital began painting over graffiti near Tahrir Square, including some iconic images and writings commemorating the 2011 Revolution. Now Cairo’s mayor Osama Kamel has conceded that the clean-up of the walls of Mohamed Mahmoud […]
BUCHAREST – When he’s not glued to his computer screen, Stefan Cornea watches films on TV. At 18 years of age, this Bucharest high school student is fed up with politics, Romania and life in general. “There’s nothing to do here,” he says in a cynical tone. “It was better before. My parents have told […]
RIO DE JANEIRO – 10 employees from the Rio 2016 Olympic Committee were fired for stealing confidential information from their counterparts at the London committee during the Games this past summer. This is the first scandal involving the next Olympics, which is still three years and 11 months away. The two committees of the British […]
SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST (Hong Kong), REUTERS, WALL STREET JOURNAL (USA), ASAHI SHIMBUN (Japan) Worldcrunch BEIJING – Wang Lijun, former mayor and head of police in the Sichuan city of Chongqing, was sentenced Monday to 15 years in prison for corruption and attempting to defect for his role in one of the most damaging political […]
CHICAGO TRIBUNE, LA DAILY NEWS, LA TIMES, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER (USA), LE MONDE (France), TWITTER Worldcrunch LOS ANGELES – Quality television “is the only American product the Chinese haven’t figured out how to make,” joked host Jimmy Kimmel, presiding over the 64th Primetime Emmy Awards on Sunday. The list of nominees may have been impressive, writes […]
EKANTIPUR (Nepal), AFP (France), CNN (USA) Worldcrunch Rescue workers have resumed their search Monday morning for mountaineers trapped by an avalanche on Mount Manaslu in Nepal. At least 11 people have been confirmed dead, reports Nepal’s Ekantipur news publication, including climbers from France, Spain, Germany and Nepal. AFP reported that Christian Trommsdorff, the vice-president of […]
DIE WELT (Germany) Worldcrunch MUNICH – Some seven million people are expected to turn up for Oktoberfest in the southern German city of Munich. What has been the world’s biggest popular fete since 1810 kicked off Saturday in the Schottenhamel beer tent, the oldest party tent on the Theresienwiese fairgrounds. Die Welt asked Christian Schottenhamel, […]
NEW DELHI – It was a long, hard summer in New Delhi — and it was made worse by the nice weather. In a country subject to monsoons (rainy season from June to Sept.), it’s when it doesn’t rain in July and August that the weather is considered bad. From this point of view, summer […]
CAIRO – How do you turn a blackout into a business opportunity? According to some consumption statistics, Cairo is also one of the world’s most brightly lit cities, with such high amounts of energy used for illuminating homes and streets that can often exceed the capacity of what electricity networks can deliver. That leaves the […]
LOIBOR SIRET – Laly Lichtenfeld has reason to be cautious. White outsiders have left some painful memories in this region of vast plains in the north of Tanzania. Thousands of people were expropriated to create the nearby national parks of Tarangire and Manyara, as well as the Serengeti, further north on the Kenyan border. In […]
GOMA – In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, mothers of disabled children, rather than being given the help they need, are typically blamed for the disability — and often literally chased out of their homes. Lingering local superstitions say that a mother is somehow responsible for her child’s health problems — and the consequences […]
KOMMERSANT (Russia) BBC Worldcrunch MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir Putin is back in the middle of the oil business. Putin met this week with the head of Rosneft, a partially state-owned oil company, as well as the president of BP and a representative from the British multinational’s board of directors to see if a partnership […]
PARIS – Pirates, spies, moles, thieves: those who want to steal the scientific treasures of French research laboratories had better be careful. With a new measure to protect the “nation’s scientific and technical potential,” in the next few months every organization, university and engineering school will be receiving instructions on how to protect themselves. Indeed, […]
GENEVA – Sami, age 7, is puzzled. On the screen of his iMac, a small Darth Vader orders him to conjugate verbs in the future tense. The boy hesitates at the first question. “You… will likes?” Darth Vader squeaks. Wrong! Sami pulls his grammar book out of his desk, checks it, and corrects his answer […]
UOL (Brazil), BBC Worldcrunch FLORIANOPOLIS – It all started when Brazilian student Isadora Faber, 13, decided to do her homework a bit differently. She exchanged paper and pencil for a Facebook page, where she began complaining about the conditions of her school. It didn’t take long for “Diario de Classe: A Verdade” (“School Diary: The […]
-Analysis- For a week, Beijing and Tokyo have been challenging each other in the China Sea. They are playing a dangerous game in a high-risk zone. Any day now, an incident could degenerate into an armed confrontation. The U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is currently in Beijing trying to calm the waters. We are way […]
LA REPUBBLICA (Italy) Worldcrunch LECCE – Though Barcelona has “King Lionel Messi”, this week the Italian city of Lecce is rolling out the red carpet for Iya Traore (“The Prince of Paris”) and Abdellah (“Amsterdam’s Maradona”) to show off their tricky soccer skills at the Red Bull Street Style soccer world championship. Held in São […]
Worldcrunch It’s the launch of iPhone 5! As the entire world stands in line and tweets live updates of their quest for iPhone glory, we’d like to provide a little reality check. It’s just a phone, guys. Just think of all these things you could be doing instead: 1. USA – Go to the SPAM […]
LE MONDE, OUEST FRANCE (France) Worldcrunch PARIS – French far right leader Marine Le Pen weighed in on the Prophet Muhammad caricatures and anti-Islam film protests in an interview published by Le Monde on Friday. When asked by the French newspaper what she would do if she was elected president, the Front National party leader […]
BERLIN – In grandpa’s time, somebody would call out “End of the work day!” – as a signal in many companies for workers to pack it up and go home. It’s not so easy today, says Wolfgang Panter, the president of the Association of German Business and Company Doctors (VDBW): “Boundaries between work and free […]
REUTERS, AFP, DIE WELT (Germany) Worldcrunch SINGAPORE — Held back by the financial crisis in Europe, world trade will grow by a meager 2.5 percent this year, the World Trade Organization (WTO) said on Friday. Reuters reports the WTO cut the 2012 estimate (originally set at 3.7 percent growth in April). “I see the risk […]
MOSCOW – U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland has announced that Washington would close the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) offices in Russia. Nuland said that it was the Russian government forcing the closure, a charge the Kremlin denies. “Like all foreign agencies that provide financing to Russian NGOs, USAID needs to follow […]
GENEVA – People strolling, music, smiles, bursts of laughter. Customers walk between clothes and trinkets, homegrown zucchini and children’s games, spread on tables or on the ground. A neighbor has brought his electric razor; another has just found a book by French sociologist Marcel Mauss. This kind of flea-market-with-veggies could be coming to your neighborhood […]
DIE WELT (Germany) Worldcrunch BERLIN – The elite of the German Federal Armed Forces are sometimes suspected of being a breeding ground for right-wing radicals. So beginning in 2007, the Defense Ministry decided to take a closer look at the political orientation of future officers. With the results now in of a study of 2,300 […]
SANTIAGO – The number, $7.9 billion, brings a smile to faces. That number corresponds to the amount of exports from Brazil to China in the first trimester of this year. The joy is reduced a little when you learn that 80 percent of that number comes from only three exports: soy, iron ore and petroleum. […]
EL NACIONAL, LA JORNADA (Mexico) Worldcrunch MEXICO CITY – What if that kidney you needed for a transplant showed up, but the surgeon didn’t? That scenario is too often a reality in Mexico, says Arturo Dib Kuri, the director of the country’s National Transplant Center (CENATRA). Dib Kuri warned that Mexico loses around 20 percent […]
-OP-ED- In China, anti-Japanese sentiment is running very high. The call for a military occupation of the Diaoyu Islands is popular among the public. Managing Sino-Japanese relations and maintaining peace in the East China Sea has become a matter of urgency. China and Japan’s conflicting claims over the sovereignty of the Diaoyu Islands have always […]
LE MONDE (France) Worldcrunch PARIS – Genetically modified corn from Monsanto, touted as safe for human consumption, has been shown to cause breast tumors in female rats and kidney and liver disease in male rats, a new study shows. NK603 corn was originally engineered by Monsanto, a worldwide agricultural conglomerate, to be resistant to the […]
LE MONDE, AFP, LA LIBÉRATION (France) Worldcrunch France is bracing itself for repercussions after satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published caricatures of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad Wednesday. Le Monde reports that a small Syrian organization called Syrian Freedom Association has filed a legal complaint against the French weekly. It accuses Charlie Hebdo of “throwing oil on […]
THE HINDU (India), BBC NEWS (UK), AL JAZEERA (Qatar) Worldcrunch NEW DEHLI – Opposition parties and trade unions in India have taken part in a daylong strike on Thursday over plans to open the country’s retail sector to global supermarket chains, reports BBC News. This measure announced last week by the government has triggered a […]
BERLIN – Till Roenneberg, a professor at the Institute for Medical Psychology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich, is a chronobiologist – which means that he specializes in the study of how biological rhythms affect our physiology and behavior. Over the course of his career, he has gathered statistics on people from 166 countries. The human […]