Bracing itself for an influx of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, Russia has indicated an easy path to citizenship. But skeptics note Moscow’s notoriously tough migration policies.
Month: March 2014
BUENOS AIRES — A pending amendment to Argentina’s Hunting Act will consider packs of wild dogs in rural areas as harmful, allowing them to be hunted or captured. This has caused much discussion among animal rights groups, which claim that this amendment is would allow only authorized agencies to shoot or trap the animals, La […]
Could landlocked Switzerland finally get some coastline? There is a movement afoot pushing Swiss annexation of the Italian island of Sardinia.
ISTANBUL — The current state of Turkey offers little cause for comfort. • The claims of corruption and theft multiply with each passing day. • Those same claims are about to be swept under the rug. • The judiciary is effectively finished. • Limitation of basic freedoms is on the rise. • Authoritarianism is alive […]
Even if General Al-Sisi is elected president because people want a return to the past, he can’t pick up where Mubarak left off. The revolution has changed things forever. For better or worse.
In serving the plundered art worth hundreds of millions, historical justice is being served. But it comes at the expense of legal rectitude.
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Very Old Habits
I don’t remember what the lady in the foreground was doing, in front of Teotihuacan’s majestic Pyramid of the Sun. Maybe she had come up with an early version of the e-cigarette, trying to break free from her Mayan ancestors’ tradition of smoking tobacco …
Employees who toil long hours for low wages at the Chinese factories that assemble the iPhone are part of the dark side of the country’s rush to urbanization.
-OpEd- ISTANBUL — The saying goes that if the word “but” is featured in a sentence, nothing that comes before it should be taken seriously. Whether this is always true, I don’t really know, but what happened after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan targeted Twitter at a political rally in Bursa reminds me of this […]
The news in numbers from archeological finds to big babies to bad basketball.
A political and environmental coup de théatre by Greenpeace has drawn attention to the need to protect the melting glaciers in Chile’s southern reaches.
Protecting the ‘green lung’ of the sprawling, wheezing metropolis is becoming increasingly harder in the face of surging population and hungry real estate developers.
BERLIN — Anyone caught writing about Chuck Norris should tread very carefully because, according to one meme, the Texas Ranger has threatened to switch off the Internet if he finds any more stupid jokes about him posted online. This threat is not to be taken lightly: according to another post, the only reason why there […]
Below are some of the songs currently topping the charts around the world. Worldcrunch Pick “We’re making a single-sale collector’s item. This is like somebody having the scepter of an Egyptian king.” This is how Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA, in an interview with Forbes, described the hip-hop collective’s surprise new album, Once Upon A Time In […]
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Egypt Targets Both Islamists And Atheists
This week’s Egyptian court ruling imposing death sentences for 529 Muslim Brotherhood members was widely condemned abroad as a troubling sign for the health of the nation’s democracy. But Cairo’s continued escalation against the Islamist organization might also give outsiders the false impression that religion in general is under attack in Egypt. In fact, another […]
What happened when the most powerful man in the world felt the aura of the Argentine pontiff.
BUENOS AIRES — A shortage of affordable rentals in the Argentine capital has become manna for determined squatters who use “tricks of the trade” to move into once-cherished homes. Not just a homeowner’s nightmare, these situations are becoming bureaucratic ones for many as well. At the top of the list of this new breed of […]
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Ancestral Shade
Fellow travelers from our organized tour were catching some rest in the shade of the tongkonan, the ancestral houses of the Toraja people in southern Sulawesi (the Indonesian island formerly know as Celebes). This was one of the first package holiday tours we went on, after having started to experiment with this form of group […]
A Turkish writer tries to piece together a particular episode that offers a grisly European postscript to the slaugther of the Armenians last century.
Ten people have been arrested for suspected animal trafficking after 1,500 tortoises and 80 caimans were discovered on a boat in northern Colombia. The animals are both on the South American country’s endangered wildlife list. Police stopped the boat on a river in the Mahates region, which is full of lakes and swamps, and is […]
-Opinion- BEIJING — After trying it out for less than two months, China’s southeast city of Guangzhou has announced it will suspend the “safe baby hatch” program, which provided a secure place to leave abandoned babies to increase their chance for survival. Since Guangzhou’s Children’s Social Welfare Home launched the arrangement earlier this year, 262 […]
BORDEAUX — Jeanne Lacombe, who runs four vineyards owned by wine magnate Bernard Magrez in France’s Médoc region, is used to waiting: for the grapes to ripen, for wines to age — and now, for her drone. It is due this month, and will come equipped with three carbon fiber feet, six propellers and a […]
Reports say the North Korean leader has made his slicked-back, shaved-on-the-sides coiff mandatory for young men in his country. Here’s how international VIPs look with Kim Jong hair.
MOSCOW — The Kremlin is already busy looking for ways to compensate for the economic hit that could come if sanctions get worse or Western businesses start to shy away from working in Russia. And the direction Moscow is looking is decidely to the east. Actively developing relationships with East Asia was on Moscow’s mind […]
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Period Costumes
This is how Nazaré’s fishermen used to dress every day, back in the 1950s. What was then an unassuming fishing village has become the Portuguese equivalent of France’s Saint-Tropez. The throngs of tourists looking for a little authenticity can still catch a glimpse of the traditional costumes today — courtesy of the town’s visitor center.
A Latin American writer describes a single moment in time in Miami, where the sad contradictions of American culture were on full display.
With power outages and deep shortages, some civilians are finding new ways to heat homes and cook meals, by using the natural resources around them — and even bomb craters.
BAHIA BLANCA – A transsexual in this Argentine city died after injecting silicone into her backside in what was most likely an attempt to look more feminine, the Buenos Aires daily Clarín reports. Cecilia Báez, 35, was at her home in Bahía Blanca when she lost consciousness after injecting the silicone into one of her […]
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Mystery From Up High
Travelling the world for more than 50 years as we did, you are bound to see some incredible sights. The Nazca Lines, in southern Peru’s Nazca Desert, rank high among these unbelievable wonders. No one really knows why and how the geoglyphs — some of which are over 200 meters across — were made … […]
BADEN-BADEN — There is no fur in sight here — no wraps, mink collars, not even real-fur trim on a hood at Baden-Baden’s casino. Granted, this is not ideal fur weather, as the Sparkasse Bank thermometer reads 22° Celsius. But for rich Russians, it is still very much the winter travel season, and one wonders […]
While many news outlets have been wondering what will happen to the Ukrainian navy in Crimea, the question that everyone has really been wondering about has finally been answered: The dolphins in Sevastopol’s combat unit will indeed become Russian. The combat program trains these hyper-intelligent mammals to patrol open water and attach buoys to items […]
A February double murder in the South African city of Soweto illustrates a quiet rise in demon worship among teenagers, influenced in part by American pop culture icons.
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Beyond Solitude
Weeks before Marquez’s death at 87, the Bogota daily wrote how the legendary novelist was followed right until the end by the ghosts of his strongest character: his mother.
“Clean and fair..” is how Egypt’s judiciary was described across the airwaves after the decision to execute 529 members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
“If you’re standing at the ATM and it is not giving you your money, you don’t care where something is going wrong…”
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Going The Distance: Loved-Up Storks Edition
While this may sound like something from a Disney film, we assure you that it is nothing less than true love: A male stork flies 13,500 kilometers every single year to be with his beloved. This year, for the twelfth time, the male known as Klepetan has made the journey all the way from southern […]
BEIJING — China is far from being a central character in the Ukrainian crisis drama. Still, it has the potential to become an important mediator on the global stage between Russia and the West. China’s influence in the past was limited to its vote in the UN Security Council, but since the Crimea crisis emerged, […]
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An Oasis Of Tradition
At Ouargla’s traditional market in southern Algeria, this merchant was selling wooden bowls carved from single blocks of wood. Even though palm trees are ubiquitous in the several oases surrounding Ouargla, Saharan craftsmen prefer to use Atlas Cedars, found in the nearby Algerian mountain range of the same name.
ABDUL REHMAN GOTH — Ahmad Baloch couldn’t remember life ever changing much in this centuries-old fishing village just outside Karachi. But when two nuclear power plants started being built nearby, coast guard and naval security personnel arrived. “They don’t allow us free mobility in the waters,” he says of his fishing trade in Abdul Rehman Goth. “What are we going to do?” Fears about a terrorist attack on the nuclear power plants have led to massive security around them, leaving the fishermen locked out. “There are not enough fish recently,” Baloch says. “We’re just worried for our next generation.” Families […]
CARACAS — The rigid black-and-white vision of a Venezuela divided between government supporters and opponents obstructs any understanding of the multiple identities that have emerged since the start of mass anti-government protests in February. For those looking in from the outside, the media have presented a veritable caricature of events. The situation reminds me of […]