THE BOOKER PRIZE FOUNDATION, TELEGRAPH, GUARDIAN, INDEPENDENT (UK) Worldcrunch LONDON – The 2012 Man Booker Prize has been awarded to British author Hilary Mantel for her novel Bring Up The Bodies. Mantel is both the first woman and the first British author to win the prize twice, the Booker Prize Foundation noted Wednesday in announcing […]
Month: October 2012
MOSCOW – The first third of Srdzhan Dragoevich’s new film, The Parade, will bring a smile to even the gloomiest of faces. It’s a silly, rude comedy that is meant to be fun for the viewers. It is also very much a film with a message about tolerance for homosexuals, as well as for those […]
LA RAZÓN (Spain) Worldcrunch Spanish police arrested more than 80 people in a well-orchestrated raid against the Chinese mafia. According to Spanish newspaper La Razón, the police action, nicknamed Operación Emperador (Operation Emperor), was aimed at money laundering by Chinese criminal organizations. Up to 300 million euros a year transited in this way to launder […]
LE MONDE (France), DIE WELT, DIE ZEIT, FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG (Germany), FINANCIAL TIMES (U.K.) Worldcrunch The European Union’s privacy commission issued a sharp reprimand to Google, ordering the company to change its way of informing people how their data is being used, or face sanctions, the Financial Times reported. Le Monde reported that the decision […]
BUENOS AIRES – Steak sushi (a sushi roll filled with cooked steak), served with grape leaves, quinoa and Malbec barbecue sauce. From the very first pages, the new authority on Argentine cuisine, entitled New Argentine Cooking, is provocative, to say the least. In this book of 224 recipes from 31 Argentine chefs, mountain empanadas made […]
A Die Welt exclusive explores declassified German documents 50 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
CHINA TIMES (Taiwan), APPLE DAILY (Hong Kong), DAILY MAIL (UK) Worldcrunch BEIJING – One week after the end of the Golden Week holiday, when more and more of upwardly mobile China travels abroad, the bills are rolling in. And once again, Chinese purchasing power is stunning the world. During the nine-day-long holiday, which this year […]
ATHENS – Everyone knows that Greece’s debt is spiraling out of control, but few know that the country is an oil producer, though its production is minimal: 2,000 barrels a day – 0.5% of just its own needs. During the 1980’s, however, Greece produced 30,000 barrels a day – 12% of its consumption – through […]
GRANMA (Cuba), AP Worldcrunch HAVANA – Cuba’s Foreign Ministry has announced that it will no longer require its citizens to apply for an exit permit before travelling abroad. Starting January 14 next year, Cubans will no longer have to go through a lengthy and expensive process – citizens have to pay between $150 and $200 […]
CNN (U.S.), AFP (France) Worldcrunch Republican Senator John McCain has praised U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for taking responsibility for the security failure in Benghazi, Libya, last month that led to four American deaths. After Clinton’s statements in a CNN interview Monday night, AFP reports that McCain issued a joint statement with fellow Republican […]
LE MONDE, AFP, (France), REUTERS Worldcrunch PARIS – Like the United States, France now finds itself in front of an open “reparations question” for its past role in slavery. Visiting Africa for the first time since his election, French President François Hollande found himself entangled in the thorny question of compensation for the descendents of […]
CAIRO – One of the most memorable scenes from the Libyan revolution was when the rebels, in wretched clothes and advanced weaponry, seized a house of the oldest son of Muammar Gaddafi. They famously entered his living room, sat in his couch, watched his TV, ate his food and slept in his bed. Mohamed Morsi […]
MILAN – Amazon was born in a car: Jeff Bezos wrote the first draft of his business plan for the company on a long drive between New York and Seattle. It was symbolic for the company, which arrived on the scene in 1995, selling books over the Internet. Today, Amazon is the biggest store in […]
LE MONDE (France), DW-TV (Germany) EFE Worldcrunch From London, Barcelona, and Rio de Janeiro, the list of cities worldwide that are being enticed by the allure of suspended cable cars is growing, heralded as a cheap, green and safe means of transport suspended above the normal rush of urban traffic. Although the cable car systems […]
Contemporary French historian Henri Rousso’s seminal book Syndrome de Vichy (The Vichy Syndrome) came out in 1987. Its subject was the way the French dealt with the Nazi occupation, and it in Rousso coined an iconic phrase: “The past that does not pass…” Now, however, Rousso says, “The past is past. It’s not forgotten, but […]
Categories
French Government To Ban Homework
LE MONDE, L’EXPRESS, LA CROIX, EUROPE 1 (France) Worldcrunch PARIS – Speaking to a group of 600 educators at the Sorbonne, France’s 700-year-old university, President François Hollande declared last week that he hopes that his government will become known as the “education administration,” Le Monde reported. One of Hollande’s most talked about reforms was the […]
MOSCOW – The traffic jams in Russia’s capital have become world-famous in the last several years, so bad that in 2010 the Federal Government decided to address the problem directly. At the time, then-President Dimitri Medvedev commissioned a plan for the development of Moscow’s transportation system through the year 2020 that aims to get Muscovites […]
NOBELPRIZE.ORG (Sweden) Worldcrunch STOCKHOLM – The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2012 was awarded on Monday to Alvin Roth of Harvard University and Lloyd Shapely of UCLA “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.” The work concerns a central economic problem, explained the […]
DENVER – Political experts keep telling us there are no undecided voters this time around. Such received wisdom is reason alone to go look for them. With less than a month left before the U.S. presidential election, statistically there must be at least a handful of undecided voters inside the walls of Cherry Creek, an […]
SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG, SUDWEST PRESSE, RHEINISCHE POST, BERLINER ZEITUNG (Germany) Worldcrunch Germany’s Minister of Education and Research, Prof. Dr. Annette Schavan, has criticized the University of Düsseldorf for allegedly informing the press about the results of a report on plagiarism in her doctoral thesis before she herself had been informed of the existence of the report. […]
HET LAATSTE NIEUWS (Belgium), THE SCOTSMAN (UK) Worldcrunch After Catalonia stepped up its bid to secession, separatist parties in Belgium and the United Kingdom have made major gains amid a crisis-hit Europe. British Prime Minister David Cameron is set to meet Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond in Edinburgh Monday to sign a historic deal that […]
CAMBODIA DAILY (Cambodia), BBC (UK), NEW YORK TIMES (USA), ABC (Australia) Worldcrunch King Norodom Sihanouk died in Beijing early Monday morning, reports the Cambodia Daily. The former monarch was about to celebrate his 90th birthday. Prince Sisowath Thomico, chief of cabinet for the late king said he had suffered a heart attack, after suffering fragile […]
AL MASRY AL YOUM, AL WATAN (Egypt), AL CHARK AL AWSAT (Saudi Arabia) Worldcrunch CAIRO – ‘Chaotic’ is the only word to describe the Egyptian political scene right now. There is of course the ongoing battle among and within the three main movements in post-Mubarak Egypt: Islamists, secularists and those who still support the old […]
BONN – “You have to use violence to defend Islamic values?” asks the judge. “Yes, of course,” Murat K. replies. Five months after he attacked police officers with a knife, the 26-year-old Salafist came clean in the courtroom: it was his duty, he said, to wound the police officers. The officers in question are veterans, […]
Categories
Zeppelins Over Paris… Again?
SÜDKURIER (Germany), AIR PARIS (France) Worldcrunch PARIS – The first time zeppelins flew over Paris, it was to bomb the city during World War I. Now, a German zeppelin company says it is nearing agreement with a company in Paris that plans to offer flights around the Eiffel Tower. The company, Air Paris, already has […]
Chinese routers from Huawei and ZTE are “a threat” for the United States, or even the world, according to a U.S. Congressional intelligence committee report made public on October 8. The committee suspects that these machines, which transmit Internet communications, could be working for the Chinese government. With this report, the American Congress has launched […]
BERLIN – This truck has been shipped from China, where it was bought from the country’s biggest truck maker, CIMC. It looks just like the kind of truck a child would draw: bright red, very long, very high, with massive wheels. Everything about it is just a tad too big for German roads. The truck […]
TAMAQUITO II – When a new baby is born in Tamaquito II, a Wayúu indigenous settlement in La Guajira, in northern Colombia, the child’s family digs a hole near its pichi (hut) and buries the umbilical cord. The Wayúu practice this ancestral ritual as a way to connect to the land, to remind themselves where […]
PARIS – At every exhibit opening, he takes off his shirt, sits on a pedestal, his back to the public, waiting for a visitor he will never see and doesn’t want to hear. Turning on his MP3 player in order to block out cruel comments and hurtful jokes is part of the ritual. Tim Steiner […]
CEYLANPINAR – “Is the tea good? It comes from those houses over there.” Ramaazen adds sugar to the already sweet drink, pointing at a line of dwellings on the far side of the barbed wire. On this side of the border is Ceylanpinar, a mostly Kurdish town of 45,000 people. It is the farthest outpost […]
MOSCOW – Russia is going through a home-grown adoption boom. In the changing landscape of adoption, 6,700 children were adopted or placed with foster parents inside of Russia last year. It is a marked change since the mid-2000s, when most adoptive parents were foreigners. Now the majority of Russian adoptees are adopted by Russian parents. […]
CHINA TIMES, ORIENTAL MORNING POST, SINA (China) Worldcrunch LANZHOU – The Yellow River has no lid, why don’t you jump in…!? For Chinese who live along the river, this old expression is used when an argument heats up. But in the last few days, with reports by the Oriental Morning Post that hundreds of corpses […]
NOBELPRIZE.ORG (Norway), TWITTER Worldcrunch OSLO – The 2012 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the European Union for having “contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe” for more than six decades, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced. Thorbjørn Jagland, head of the Oslo-based Nobel Committee, said the EU […]
CNN, WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE DAILY CALLER (US) Worldcrunch Joe Biden and Paul Ryan battled through a tough vice presidential debate Thursday, with commentators largely suggesting that the result was a draw. Immediate polls showed that voters were split on who won the debate with CNN putting Ryan at 48% and Biden on 44%. CNBC […]
FRANKFURT – Even before the world’s biggest book fair opened this week in Frankfurt, figures from a study conducted by the PwC consulting firm added more worry for printed book dealers about the uncertain future of their trade. According to the study, released Tuesday, demand for e-books is getting ever-larger in Germany. By 2015, the […]
SANTIAGO – It’s July of 1990, and the two Germany’s have just united, marking the end of the Cold War, and capped with West Germany’s soccer World Cup victory over Argentina. As the images of the defeated players travelled the world (who can forget Diego Maradona’s tears?), in New York, a Latin American company was […]
MUNICH – In central Munich an Arbeiterstrich is a crossroads where day laborers from southeastern Europe hang around waiting for low-paid work. Some say they are modern-day slaves, ready to take whatever job comes along, even at the risk of not getting paid. All Ilya* has to offer is his physical strength. “I don’t give […]
PARIS – This time, it was definitely not a bug. Facebook has admitted to spying on all private conversations on its network, looking for Internet links being exchanged and for possible “criminal activities.” The admission opens the network up to many questions concerning privacy and legal rights. The Next Web, a popular technology site, found […]
Worldcrunch One-third of the world population now has access to the Internet, according to the U.N.’s telecommunications agency. The International Telecommunications Union released its annual report, Measuring the Information Society, on Thursday. The agency’s top-ranked country for information and telecommunication technology was South Korea, followed by Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Finland. There are seven billion […]
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL LETTERS, REUTERS Worldcrunch Researchers from France and the United States have discovered a planet twice the size of the Earth, but far denser, which appears to be one-third constituted of diamond, Reuters reported Thursday. Yale researcher Nikku Madhusudhan and Olivier Mousis of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie in Toulouse, France, […]