Troops fighting around the world are often chasing enemies from somewhere else. A global tour of how the shards of ‘broken nations’ are fed into the conflicts of others.
Month: September 2014
Switzerland’s Federal Council, it’s seven-member collective head of state, has been called to intervene to guarantee children the right to be heard, notably in divorce cases.
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Vintage Airbnb
In 1966, it was still affordable to stay in the center of Venice. We went there twice in the 1960s, and both times we rented a room from la Signora Nardi (I remember her well), just five minutes from the Rialto and Piazza San Marco whose Santa Maria della Salute church is in the background.
Almost a month after she attacked a mushroom forager in the mountains of Trentino while protecting her 8-month-old cubs, Daniza the bear is dead. She was captured by a task force of rangers that had been deployed to capture her, but she did not survive the anesthesia she was given. After immense backlash from the […]
PALAWAN — Chito Villarin starts up the engine of his small fishing boat. The 36-year old makes his living by sailing into the waters of the South China Sea, off Palawan’s west coast, in the hopes of bringing back a good catch. “I catch different types of fish and octopus,” he says, adding that he travels about 20 kilometers into the water. But Filipino fishermen like Villarin aren’t the only ones casting off into these waters. Foreign poachers are frequently found off the coast of Palawan, and the authorities here are trying to stop them. “Narcotics trafficking, human trafficking, terrorism, […]
Images that captured the news around the world…
Sweden has long been a haven for Christians from the Middle East. Will it show the same humanitarian spirit for Muslims fleeing Iraq? The debate heats up before national elections.
Paraguay’s Ministry of Culture says the real birthplace of the game the English named football, and gave rules to, was not in fact England. The Jesuits may have the proof.
Tim Cook and the Apple team remind us that a wearable time piece is much more than a style statement. But 500 years on, watches still represent a singular mix of status, obligation…and death.
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Iran, ISIS And Ambitions Of Empires
There has been much recent speculation about Iran working with its longtime nemesis, the United States, to confront a new, common enemy: the radical Islamist organization ISIS. Indeed, the Sunni zealots of ISIS have focused some of their rhetoric directly at Tehran, the center of Shia Islam, vowing to fight what it says are Iran’s […]
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Beauty Standards
I’ve already told you about Rajasthan’s colorful nomadic culture, but this close-up allows us to better see how society standards vary from one world to another: For instance, the huge nose ring this woman was wearing is regarded as a mark of beauty and social standing there.
Photo: Sachyn Mital James Murphy, the 44-year-old American musician of LCD Soundsystem fame, announced at the start of the 2014 U.S. Open that he was teaming up with IBM to create an algorithm that would turn raw data from tennis matches into music. Now that the tournament is over and Serena Williams and Marin Cilic […]
BEIJING — While September is the moment for most children go back to school or start for the first time, more than 80% of the approximately 500,000 school-aged disabled children from China’s migrant families have never been schooled. Twenty Chinese organizations have just published a public letter calling on the Ministry of Education to change […]
From Golda Meir to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli leaders have too often put off decisions on key questions for the country’s future. The cost of “conflict management” is no longer sustainable.
Nobody wants to die for Donetsk, but much more is at stake for the West than just Ukraine’s borders. In the face of Vladimir Putin’s ambitions, it’s time to ask the hard questions.
For fear of an Iran-led rise of Shia, authorities from Riyadh to Ankara fed the radicalism that now eyes them as the primary target.
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Budding Traveler
This is probably one of the oldest pictures you will see here. I was 5 when we drove to Villersexel in eastern France, in my dad’s brand new Peugeot 201. We visited the city’s famous château, which you can see in the background and which is said to have been partly built by both Charles […]
How about a selfie instead?
WUPPERTAL — The god you’ll discover if you become a Salafist is not a god who will coddle you. That’s a message zealot Pierre Vogel sends out loud and clear over the microphone when he’s doing his village tours to promote the “perfect sharia.” Germany’s best-known convert to Islam used to be a professional boxer […]
SEOUL — Thanks to the popularity of South Korean television series in China, a wave of Chinese capital is flowing to South Korea. For the first half of this year Chinese investment to South Korea reached $70.8 million, an increase of more than 600% compared with the same period last year. Investment in real estate […]
MUNICH — Munich’s Oktoberfest has an ugly side. Alexandra Stigger is all too familiar with it but says it’s nevertheless a great celebration. Stigger, 29, is a Munich native who grew up attending it every year, and now she works there — not in one of the beer tents but in a service center where […]
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In A Galaxy Not Too Far Away
Don’t worry, I haven’t traveled that far. This was just one of the tourist attractions at Universal Studios Hollywood back in 1988.
PUNE — Every morning Rebecca Kedari pulls a cart through an upmarket neighborhood in this city of 3.3 million to collect household waste. Ten years ago Rebecca would not even been able to enter this area of Pune, in western India. “Before I had to go outside the city to look for dry waste and bring it back. The work conditions were bad and collecting the waste took me at least 6 hours,” she says. She now wears a local government identity card, has a health insurance plan, and is part of the KKPKP — a waste pickers’ union set […]
-OpEd- PARIS — We French love our rentrée littéraire. But with the launch of this year’s new literary season, dedicated in part to the memory of our American World War II allies, a new war is erupting. And the alliances seem to be changing. U.S.-based Trojan horse Amazon started the fight by targeting major French […]
President Enrique Pena Nieto has pulled off the political feat of pushing through unprecedented reforms. But they are based on a promise that economic growth will inevitably follow.
Compared to radical Sunni terrorist organizations like ISIS, the regime in Tehran can seem relatively tame. But don’t be fooled.
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Global Charts #4
Well look at that: It’s Friday again! Time to check out some of the songs currently topping the charts around the world. Turkmenistan: Anna Sedokova – “Chto Ya Nadelala” Qatar: Nico & Vinz – “Am I Wrong” Argentina: Gustavo Cerati – “Crimen” Egypt: Hassan El Shafei feat. Abla Fahita – “Mayestahlushi” France: Lilly Wood & […]
Will Divine Providence, or “Bible roulette,” play a role in the outcome of next month’s Brazilian elections?
Video game competitions can attract millions of spectators online. A Swiss “cyber athlete” shares his story as the booming industry sets its sights on real-world credibility.
Remember asset-backed securities and the 2008 global financial crash? Desperate to jumpstart Europe’s economy, the European Central Bank chief is making them presentable again.
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Next Mechanic: 10 Miles
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well that’s lucky, because I don’t really remember what happened here. I’ll let you imagine the misfortunes of these two Swazi men.
A growing number of China’s upper class are investing in a foreign education for their children. There are costs and benefits, debates about teaching styles — and always some surprises.
Dutch aerospace student Boyan Slat, 20, has an idea that could conceivably remove millions of tons of toxic trash from the world’s waters. It even has a revenue model. But will it work?
The news, quantified.
Driven by the belief that Russia is the last bastion against liberal globalization, a small band of French fighters, some of them former military officers, have taken up arms against Ukraine.
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The Last Of The Log Drives?
By the end of the 1990s, it was decided that flowing rivers were not the best way to transport timber, and log drives were gradually abandoned in Canada — much to the dismay of local kids who had to bid adieu to their log rolling competitions. But in 1994 logging was still going on along […]
Their economic philosophies may differ, but Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa and Colombia’s arch-conservative former president Alvaro Uribe, share a taste for the perpetuation of power.
TURIN — As surprising as it may sound, what we order in restaurants has very little to do with what we actually want. It’s all about the menu. A recent study, conducted by Cornell University researchers on more than 200 menus and 300 meals in New York, shows that only two things really dictate what […]
Recent behavioral and developmental studies of animals such as rabbits and rats show striking similarities to patterns we see in how childhood relationships and experiences shape humans.