Worldcrunch
Cover songs can sometimes sound surprisingly better than the original — or at any rate, become significantly more popular. Take Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah”, Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along The Watchtower” for example — but there are dozens of other such intelligent covers that have made it to the shelves of musical classics. Over the past few […]
BEIJING — On June 27, after days of uncertainty and rumors, 1,260 Chinese workers who had been trapped in northern Iraq’s war-torn Saladin province were finally evacuated and transferred to Baghdad. Just like the 2011 emergency pullout of Chinese nationals from Libya and the recent evacuation of others in the anti-Chinese protests in Vietnam, this […]
BRASILIA — What will be the political and economic reverberations of Tuesday’s historic humiliation of Brazil’s soccer team? The government of President Dilma Rousseff is already on alert, fearing that the national bad mood left by the 7-1 defeat at the hands of Germany may deepen the already rather bleak Brazilian economic forecast, and have […]
We went to Finland multiple times. Once we even brought a Finnish dictionary with us to try and understand a few words of the very peculiar suomi language … Many headaches ensued!
As air strikes and missile attacks intensify following the deaths of both Israeli and Palestinian teens, neither the region’s leadership nor rank and file hold much hope for a peaceful way out.
The news in images, and images making news…
VANCOUVER — The bearded Garlic Guy at Granville Island Market looks as if he’s been standing here since the 1970s pitching his organic garlic. The name of his one-man enterprise is Oddball Organics. He grows 19 kinds of garlic and mixes the cloves into sauces (“Nuclear Nectar,” for example) that he sells on Granville Island, […]
Photo: Redcarpetboy Italian rapper Amir Issaa’s new song “Ius Music” dives straight into the country’s heated debate over immigration. And without missing a beat, conservative Italian politicians have accused the 35-year-old of inciting hatred. The Lega Nord party has called for the resignation of Khalid Chaouki, a member of the Italian Democratic Party of Moroccan […]
Ukrainian Orthodox Church Metropolitan Volodymyr died on Saturday. The showdown between Kiev and Moscow makes picking his successor more than a religious event.
BOGOTA — Call it the South American version of selling ice to eskimos: Starbucks is opening its first store in Colombia on July 16. The shop marks the start of the American coffee giant’s operations in a country that grows and produces lots of its own brew, and already has a strong, local but international, […]
Most of these locals were selling firewood on the famous market of Chichicastenango. Since it was already pretty hot on this Spring day, we were more interested in what another of the K’iche” vendors, of Mayan descent, was offering: deliciosos helados de crema, ie. “delicious ice cream,” as is written on the cart.
Graduates who come back to Poland after earning prestigious degrees at Oxford or Cambridge often find themselves shut out of the labor market. Blame a mix of suspicion and envy.
“Hit It!” is Worldcrunch’s music blog, your global source of anything music-related: news and novelties, albums and songs, videos, charts, events, you name it. While we’ll leave most of the mainstream London and L.A.-generated news to the various Rolling Stones and NMEs, our focus will be what’s happening everywhere else. The name of this blog […]
Why are American “vulture” funds taking such a hard line on Argentina’s debt? It may have something to do with the political influence finance wield in the United States.
On the scene as Germany’s 13th Primark branch was stormed by shoppers at its opening. Hard questions asked after the Bangladesh worker tragedy are lost in the furor of “Primania.”
TEL AVIV — When Lucy Brown fell in love with her current husband a decade ago, she immediately went to work. When she arrived, she lay down in the latest fMRI brain scanner, closed her eyes and thought of him. “It’s not that I was looking for scientific proof that I was in love,” Brown […]
Nashville is grand, New York is cool and London keeps calling. But music is happening everywhere in the world, and we’ll discover it together here.
The construction of Pakistan’s next tallest building in Karachi is seen by the country’s Hindu minority yet another attack in this Muslim-majority country of 180 million.
To be honest, with such strange feet, I’m not surprised Buddha preferred to lie down … To give you a rough idea of the size of this reclining Buddha in the Wat Pho temple, there’s a man at the bottom left corner of the slide.
SAARBRÜCKEN — If you’re looking for the biggest whorehouse in the state of Saarland, you’ll probably end up first at a dog training school. There aren’t any signs yet pointing the way to the brothel — or, as it calls itself, the “wellness oasis” — so the GPS will take you right past its unobtrusive […]
QASYAR — Ahmed is wearing a Barcelona soccer jersey with Argentine superstar Lionel Messi’s name on the back. Rasheed has Rodrigo Palacio’s from Inter Milan, while Samad is sporting the Chelsea shirt of Brazil midfielder Oscar dos Santos Emboaba Junior. While their heroes compete in the World Cup on the other side of the world, […]
BEIJING — Summer shopping included the hunt for a new pair of sandals, which was also an opportunity to take stock in where the Chinese shoe industry stands. In itself, it is not surprising to find a “cohabitation” of different quality from different brands in a single shopping center. It’s also natural that different brands […]
LONDON — A conservative British politician? Stereotypes would call for him to be educated in an expensive private school, to wear tailor-made suits from Savile Row and to be able to recite Shakespeare sonnets without an accent. We would expect him to have been a lawyer, a banker or a chartered accountant — and to […]
The international movement of talent has helped level the playing field of top national soccer teams. Among other things, it has also produced the most wide-open World Cup in memory.
Doggy business stinking up sidewalks is a very real problem in towns and cities around the world. Different attempts to clean up include raising fines, public leaflets or even a project in Buenos Aires to give green collars to the dogs whose owners scoop their poop. So inevitably it would have to come to this: […]
BEIJING — Obesity is a worldwide problem. The latest confirmation comes from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, which conducted a study in 188 countries that found one-third of the global adult population and one-fourth of all children are overweight or obese. That includes no fewer than 671 million […]
Relatives of Amer Abu Aisheh, accused of abducting three Israeli teens, don’t expect to see him again. His mother’s definition of a martyr: “one who chooses to give their life to kill the Jews.”
Things were getting heated in West Berlin in the summer of 1967. The conflict was escalating between the government and the West German student movement, peaking with the police shooting dead a young protester just one month before we went there. This photo shows the ongoing construction of the Berlin Wall, six years after the […]
So-called lifeloggers track and record their personal data, often sharing it with the world. Why? To make connections that can improve health and sleep…and maybe avoid oblivion.
Released in late May after two years in prison, Nabeel Rajab has taken his cause to foreign capitals. But will the West challenge the oil-rich nation’s human rights record.
By Patrick Randall On June 21, the Swedish Barbecue Team won the European Barbecue Championship that took place in the heavenly town of Znin, in Poland. With 24 teams participating in eight different events that included cooking pork ribs, beef briskets or fish, this competition was one of the high points of the year for […]
As Egypt’s economy nosedives, the jobless are forced to hawk wares in the streets. It all makes the new president’s efforts to eliminate street vendors seems especially harsh.
Crossing borders in and out of post-Soviet Russia is about to get more complicated, especially for Ukrainians.
To perform the more than 1,400 works of the repertoire, Peking Opera artists have to be able to sing, dance, act, mime — as well as wield the occasional sword or spear.
In a seaside town in the Netherlands, an 11-year-old boy creates a private war zone in his everyday environment. What should his parents do?
VATICAN CITY — To the priests who invited him to take a vacation with them, the late Cardinal Alberto Idelfonso Schuster of Milan replied, smiling, that there would be plenty of time for that in the afterlife. Pope Francis — the Jesuit whose agenda would wear out any 40-something — seems to be inspired by […]
What did the golden retriever say to the patient with arthritis? This isn’t actually the start of a joke, but the beginning of a study. From January to June of this year, a pilot program was run in the outpatient department of the University Hospital in Florence, to evaluate the scientific efficacy of pet therapy […]
It may be billions and billions of years away, but right now the annihilation of the Universe is a foregone conclusion. Should scientists try to do something to change that?
Rebel fighters are no match for Bashar al-Assad’s superior military might. But underground, they use tunnels to travel safely and plant bombs close to the president’s seats of power.