A solar-powered hospital offers a glimmer of hope in a country still mired in poverty, and the after-effects of the massive 2010 earthquake.
Month: January 2014
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In Naples, One Small Beer For Mankind
A couple of hours after I took this picture, I shared a beer with an American G.I. stationed in Naples, not far from this narrow street in the old city center where laundry was drying in the summer heat. How do I remember that beer so clearly? The date was July 21, 1969 — and […]
LONDON — It’s that time of year again, and Super Bowl fever is definitely NOT spreading across the planet. Still, the rest of the world is slowing warming to American football, and the game will be broadcast live Sunday in more than 180 countries and in more than 30 languages, mostly on cable and satelite […]
The 45-year-old founder of Baidu, dubbed the “Google of China,” says technology offers great opportunity for success – but also means failure can arrive at any moment.
Here are some of the songs topping the charts from music hot spots around the world. Worldcrunch Pick: This week, The Who singer Roger Daltrey told NME he would reunite with his bandmate and guitarist Pete Townshend later this year to make their 12th album, as the British band is set to celebrate their 50th […]
In the Netherlands, a growing movement to lease clothing rather than piling up ever more cheaply-made, environmentally damaging jeans, shirts and sweaters.
After the nation and world’s attention turned to the plague of Indian gang rapes, a women-only police unit was founded in Bhopal with one central objective. Some say they go too far.
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The Jewish Ghetto And Its Phantom Opera
Nazis used a Czech military fortress to hold Jewish prisoners during World War II. Yet somehow art and music flourished, including one notable opera that had gone tragically unperformed.
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Same Street, Different Cars
The Rua Conde de Bobadella in the center of Ouro Preto, in Brazil’s southeastern Minas Gerais state, hasn’t changed much since we went there 20 years ago — as this photo, taken at almost the exact same angle, shows on Wikipedia … Can’t say the same about the cars!
The German driving legend has been in an artificially induced coma for more than a month since a ski accident. Doctors take us inside the state-of-the-art head trauma treatment.
– Commentary – WARSAW — The Washington Post story was both scary and a bit comical: Polish intelligence received $15 million from the CIA to operate secret prisons — or “black sites” — and the money was supposedly delivered in two cardboard boxes. Hmmm. According to my calculations, the dimensions of the two boxes would […]
Two revolutions, two months apart, that launched the Arab Spring. Three years later, the respective quests for democracy in Tunisia and Egypt are in very different places.
-OpEd- I too can play the game of “I won’t think about that, so it can’t exist,” like a character tells himself in Delirium, the novel by Colombian writer Laura Restrepo. Indeed, such mental games are a national character trait. The country’s principal cinema chain Cine Colombia refused last December to show a short trailer […]
BEIJING — It was 30 years ago at the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics that a 20-year-old Chinese gymnast named Li Ning captured three gold medals, two silvers and one bronze with an array of never-before-seen flips and twists that he had invented himself. Li, now 50, became China’s most decorated athlete and won the […]
TEL AVIV — Just last week at the Davos summit, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was publicly praising the hi-tech industry in Israel. Now it seems his compliments may have been a bit premature. A new report says that Palestinian hackers from Gaza have recently launched a cyber-attack on Israel that has successfully targeted government […]
And Igor Luzenko is the lucky one. The other activist with whom he was abducted, beaten and interrogated didn’t make it home alive.
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Danish Dragons
The building in the background is Copenhagen’s 17th century Borsen, the oldest stock exchange in Denmark. With its intriguing spire made of four dragon tails twined together, I wondered if Danish bankers appreciated the architect’s twisted sense of humor…
There seemed to be confusion among Iranian politicians about the Supreme Leader’s “real” position on Iran’s negotiations with the West on its nuclear program, the Persian language edition of Radio France Internationale is reporting, citing several Iranian press reports. The Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say on Iran’s key domestic and […]
President Obama used his State of the Union address to declare his determination to raise the U.S. minimum wage above 10 dollars. Wage policy in the rest of the world may surprise you.
Barack Obama made American inequality the central challenge of his State of the Union address. Europe and the rest of the West should be listening too.
TEL AVIV — Frida Issa knew from the age of 11 that she’d one day work in the world of computers. But it was with her first job at a Tel Aviv startup that she first nurtured ambitions to do something on her own — and something built for the future. “We’re not into building […]
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Danger: Camel Crossing
This is the greatest danger we faced when we drove from Ouargla to El Oued in southern Algeria: bumping into a wild camel…! By 1970, the anti-French sentiment left over from the Algerian War a decade earlier had largely faded away. But we were lucky to enjoy the calm then; as three years later, the […]
How did the Argentine economy arrive at a point of complete exhaustion, asks Brazil’s leading daily. Here’s a checklist of the errors made over the past decade.
The unlikely story of a Bosnian refugee who stumbled into winning best actor honors at the Berlin Film Festival, yet still can’t feed his family.
It was just one snippet on the sidelines of the Davos summit, but President Hassan Rouhani’s comments to CNN last week are making news back home. Several Iranian news outlets have reported on Rouhani’s statement that “nobody remains in jail forever,” responding to a question about when several dissidents and political prisoners jailed in recent […]
”The goal of the fundamentalists is to force us to leave Bangladesh and go to India,” says one activist for the rights of religious minorities.
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Naples, The Beauty And The Horror
Luigi De Magistris, a left-leaning former prosecutor, was the latest would-be savior for the troubled Italian city. But look around, things in Naples are worse than ever.
Beijing is making infrastructure investments in and around Minsk that no one else is prepared to make. It may be a gateway to business in both Europe, and Russia.
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Turban Tying In Rajasthan
In India’s sumptuous Mehrangarh Fort, in the western Rajasthan region, we watched two guards’ traditional turban-tying demonstration. Different styles and colors of head-gear used to be associated with specific Indian villages and communities — a custom that we could see was already beginning to fade two decades ago in many of the places we visited.
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Iranians Mock U.S. ‘Bluff’ On Syria
As talks between the Syrian regime and rebels continue in Switzerland, the “Iranian Question” isn’t going away. Though Tehran, which is a key supporter of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, was barred from attending the Geneva 2 talks for refusing several pre-conditions, it has made its voice heard from back home. Ali Akbar Velayati, a former […]
-OpEd- MUNICH — During these past years of economic crisis, we Europeans learned that our fate was inextricably linked to that of the banks. We’re accustomed to the idea that numbers will decide how the continent fares. A good European, then, is a thrifty European. And now the pictures from Kiev come crashing in. They […]
Clashes with the government in Ukraine and Thailand, summits in Switzerland, Daft Punk on red carpet are among the images making news…
Change is afoot again in Tunisia, with a new constitution, a new technocratic government, and a Parliament in full celebration mode. Three years after triggering a wave of popular upheaval across North Africa and the Middle East, marked by decidely mixed results, Tunisia is again offering a snapshot of democratic hope. “Nothing can describe my […]
A Die Welt editor spent four months living and working in California, and though many of his countrymen are critical of the U.S., he fell in love with its cool, can-do spirit.
GENEVA — If the term “fast-track surgery” conjures a fast-food restaurant in your mind, then some explanation is in order. The term refers to a protocol that can reduce hospital stays by 30% to 50%, without any higher risk of readmission than ordinary surgery. In a study published last June in the British Journal of […]
-OpEd- BOGOTA – Permit me to be direct and frank, but also practical. What do we see from the outside when we look at Europe? We see a Europe that is languishing, despondent, self-absorbed and self-satisfied, and to some extent both tired and apathetic. I know these are words that are both harsh and ugly, […]
There is power, and there is truth. Then it’s up to you what to say and do. An essay to mark Jan. 25 in an Egypt where things change and stay the same.
Yakuza, Japan’s notorious crime syndicate, is trying to emerge from two decades of economic stagnation, and is betting on the much-discussed stimulus from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Seven years after the assassination of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink, silence remains on the crime of incitement to murder – just like last century’s Armenian Genocide.
