IRNA (Iran), AP, BBC Worldcrunch TEHRAN – By midday Wednesday more than 80 aftershocks had been registered in southwestern Iran following a 6.1 magnitude earthquake that killed at least 37 people and injured 850. Twelve villages were completely destroyed by the quake, forcing thousands of terrified residents to spend the night in the open, according […]
Month: April 2013
The onus is on Washington and Beijing to forge a new, much deeper diplomatic bond to stop the Korean Peninsula and Japan-China conflicts from sliding into open war.
SOFIA – While Cyprus was in the middle of a financial crisis, the court of Limassol, the island’s second largest city, made a ruling that largely went unnoticed. Yet it was a judicial first. On March 28, the Cyprus court condemned a 24-year-old Swedish-Lebanese man, Hossam Taleb Yaacoub, to four years in prison for helping […]
Hers was a revolution of ideas and economics that still can be seen in the struggle to shape the future of the West.
AAP (Australia); NZ HERALD, RADIO NEW ZEALAND, SCOOP (New Zealand) Worldcrunch WELLINGTON – Parliament on Tuesday approved a measure that would make New Zealand the first country to legalize synthetic drugs, otherwise known as party pills. If it gains final approval later this year, the Psychoactive Substances Bill would create a system to test and […]
BEIJING – Last month, President Xi Jinping told the mayor of Suzhou, who had outlined a plan to make improvements on the water quality of the city’s lakes, that for China’s netizens, the best measure of acceptable water quality would be to see whether the mayor dared to jump in and swim. In February, a […]
LA DEPECHE DU MIDI, LE FIGARO (France) Worldcrunch TOULOUSE – Three months ago, Jeannot Marciniak, a 70-year-old retired garbage collector from this city in southwest France, packed his bags for India, a country he’d long dreamed of discovering, reports Le Figaro. While sitting on a bench in Pondicherry, in southern India, a man came up […]
AFP, REUTERS, AL JAZEERA Worldcrunch TEHRAN – Iran unveiled on Tuesday a new uranium production facility and two extraction mines, a few days after talks with world powers on its disputed nuclear program ended in a deadlock, reports AFP. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared Iran now controlled the entire chain of nuclear energy production — and […]
UKRAINE’S ULTIMATUM TO PRO-RUSSIAN PROTESTERS Ukraine’s acting Interior Minister Arsen Avakov has said that the situation in Eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists are still occupying state buildings, will be “resolved in 48 hours,” threatening “the minority who want conflict” with a “forceful answer”, the BBC reports. “There are two options — political and negotiations, and […]
As Sunday’s election looms, Folha de S. Paulo sits down with, and gets a ride from Nicolas Maduro, the fiery former bus driver and heir apparent to Hugo Chavez.
KCNA (North Korea), YONHAP (South Korea), BBC NEWS (UK), REUTERS, AFP Worldcrunch North Korea has warned foreigners to evacuate South Korea to avoid being dragged into a “thermo-nuclear war” – the latest in a series of provocative declarations that led Japan to deploy Patriot missiles in Tokyo on Tuesday. Here’s a look back at the […]
Worldcrunch UK AUSTRALIA ARGENTINA AUSTRIA BELGIUM CANADA CHINA FRANCE GERMANY SINGAPORE ITALY JAPAN SWEDEN SWITZERLAND SPAIN USA PORTUGAL
Step inside the diamond market in Surat, where billions worth of the precious stone circulate every month. There are serious concerns about both security and origins.
AP, REUTERS, B92 (Serbia), RT (Russia) Worldcrunch VELIKA IVANCA – A man shot and killed thirteen relatives and neighbors on Tuesday morning in a town 50 kilometers south of Belgrade. The gunman then tried unsuccessfully to kill himself and his wife, police report. According to RT, the killings began when the man shot his son […]
SUDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG (Germany) TIMES OF ISRAEL Worldcrunch AMSTERDAM – Of the 110,000 Jews deported from the Netherlands during World War II, only 6,000 returned home from the concentration camps. The survivors mostly found that their homes had been destroyed, or had been taken possession of by non-Jews. It was then, if they were from Amsterdam, […]
BEIJING – Last month Shandong University announced that 97 of its students wouldn’t be granted their diplomas due to “poor academic performance after frequent warnings.” Ninety-seven is a drop in the bucket next to the school’s 43,000 undergraduates; and even of those 97, all but 16 have been given a reprieve allowing them to graduate […]
Bono, Bowie, and the Rolling Stones, not to mention Apple, Google and Microsoft keep an address in the Netherlands, which doesn’t tax profits by foreigners. What do locals say?
Worldcrunch Margaret Thatcher, baroness of Kesteven, died on Monday, from a stroke at the age of 87. The iconic leader of the Conservative Party, Thatcher served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 up to her resignation in 1990. The Soviet Press gave her the nickname the “Iron Lady” for her toughness, and […]
BUENOS AIRES – Argentina’s capital has a new problem: the growing number of “underground” parties in improvised nightclubs and bars – a sector that is thriving in utter illegality. In the past two months, authorities have closed down 15 so-called mega-parties, where alcohol was being sold without a license and which operated without a city […]
PARIS – The combination of the Arab Spring and the economic crisis in southern Europe has led to a quiet panic spreading in hospitals across the Mediterranean Basin. “With the disorganization of medical services, the number of infections resisting most known antibiotics has literally exploded,” says professor Patrice Nordmann, chief of the bacteriology-virology-parasitology department at […]
“COUNTERTERRORISM” UNDERWAY IN EAST UKRAINE The Ukrainian police arrested 70 pro-Russian protesters who were occupying government buildings in the eastern city of Kharkiv as part of what acting Interior Minister Arsen Avakov described as “a counterterrorism operation,” Ria Novosti reports. According to Reuters, the standoff continues in Luhansk and Donetsk. VERBATIM“I was besotted,” Oscar Pistorius […]
Authorities worry for the safety of the mostly young sign-ups, but also the risk that they return home radicalized — and set on striking targets in Europe.
YONHAP (South Korea), CNN, (USA), REUTERS Worldcrunch SEOUL – South Korea has backtracked from an earlier statement that said there was evidence North Korea was preparing for its fourth nuclear test. South Korea’s Defense Ministry on Monday denied earlier suggestions by South Korean Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae that a nuclear arms test was imminent in […]
ESPRESSO (Italy); BBC, THE GUARDIAN, THE INDEPENDENT (UK) Worldcrunch LONDON – Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks is back making worldwide waves, publishing 1.7 million United States government records, covering diplomatic and intelligence reports on virtually every country in the world on Monday morning. The vast collection spans from the beginning of 1973 to the end of 1976, […]
RIO DE JANEIRO – Cleide Oliveira, a 45-year-old beauty salon owner specialized in straightening curly hair, says she’ll soon be forced to find a new job. Since November 2011, when a Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora or Police Pacifying Unit (UPP) was created in Rocinha — Brazil’s biggest favela near Rio de Janeiro — she has […]
RANGOON –Two years after the official end of the Burmese military regime, some citizens are skeptical, whilst others remain deeply critical of the current government. Some people fear the reforms will keep running into many obstacles. Still, there is one point everyone agrees on: the clearest sign that the democratization process is happening is that […]
PRO-RUSSIAN PROTESTERS SEIZE BUILDINGS IN EASTERN UKRAINEPro-Russian protesters seized government buildings last night in the East Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk, following rallies to demand independence referendums there, Reuters reports. FRANCE AND RWANDA ARGUE GENOCIDE Rwanda is launching commemorations today in Kigali to mark the 20th anniversary of genocide there, which lasted 100 […]
Look at the numbers, both environmental and economic, and the solution is clear: slower growth.
Categories
Turning A Refugee Camp Into A Golf Resort
CALAIS – Jacques Gounon is very happy. The CEO of the Eurotunnel Group has just announced the launch of a huge real-estate project in Sangatte, on France’s northern coast. If the name rings a bell to newspaper readers, it is because Sangatte is where up until 2002, there was a massive refugee center, housing asylum […]
-Essay- WARSAW – When a group of Polish intellectuals, priests and politicians signed a petition for Polish humanitarian assistance to Syria, all hell broke loose on the Internet. The Polska Akcja Humanitarna (Polish Humanitarian Aid) petition — signed by former presidents Lech Walesa and Aleksander Kwasniewski; former Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski and Archbishop of Krakow […]
CHINA TIMES, ECONOMIC DAILY (Taiwan); XINHUA (China) WUHAN – In a booming economy, even the dead can help you turn a profit. Friday was Tomb Sweeping Day, or the Qingming Festiva, in China. Set officially as a national holiday on April 4 or 5, this has traditionally been a family day on which people pay […]
LEMERA – One woman now lives with her daughter in a densely populated neighborhood of the city of Bukavu, in eastern Congo. Six months ago, she had been sentenced to permanent exile from her native village of Lemera, in the South Kivu province, after a tribal court tried and convicted her of using witchcraft to […]
Categories
Penguins Bask In Global Warming
TVNZ (New Zealand); SCIENCE WORLD REPORT; PLOS ONE JOURNAL Worldcrunch BEAUFORT ISLAND – A new study published this week by U.S. and New Zealand researchers shows that there are actually some winners when it comes to global warming: the Adélie penguins. The study, published in the PLOS One journal, shows that the colony of Adélie […]
HANOI – We are in Hanoi, sitting in Mrs. Vu’s kitchen. The table is weighed down with exotic delicacies, passion fruit, pineapple, slices of melon, litchis, dragon fruit, kumquats, grapefruit, heart-shaped pieces of watermelon and small, fat bananas. We’ve already made considerable inroads into the spread, as if we hadn’t eaten for days. Mrs. Vu, […]
HINDUSTAN TIMES, FIRST POST (India), BBC (UK) Worldcrunch MUMBAI – As many as 40 people were killed, including 11 children, in the collapse of a building illegally under construction near Mumbai, police said Friday. Dozens of people were injured in the disaster late Thursday night, The Hindustan Times reported, as authorities continued searching for others […]
This classic Paris address, which inspired the movie Ratatouille, is even more fancy — and delicious — in real life.
EL OBSERVADOR (Uruguay), LA NACION (Argentina) Worldcrunch MONTEVIDEO – Latin American diplomacy is buzzing after Uruguayan President José Mujica — apparently unaware that his microphone was still on — made nasty comments about his Argentinian counterpart, and her late husband. At the end of an online broadcast about relations between Uruguay and surrounding countries, Mujica […]
XINHUA (China), BBC NEWS (UK), BLOOMBERG, REUTERS Worldcrunch SHANGHAI – Chinese authorities slaughtered more than 20,000 birds and closed a poultry market in Shanghai on Friday, due to the new H7N9 bird flu outbreak that has already killed six people over the past week. State news agency Xinhua said the Huhuai market for live birds […]
After the death of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela is set for the second presidential election in less than six months. Chavez’s handpicked successor Nicolas Maduro faces challenger Henrique Capriles.
MANAUS – As the plane approaches the dense green mantle, interrupted by the curves of the most abundant river in the world, you start to make out the shapes of the friendly – and not so friendly – animals living in the rainforest. Before we embark for our cruise on these alligator, snake and piranha-infested […]