Abolfazl Arabpour, 86, has been sizing up all the high dignitaries of the Iranian clergy for half a century.
Month: March 2016
GUADALAJARA — Mexico”s state of Jalisco is experiencing a violent crime wave against women. Mexico City-based daily El Universal reports that the number of murders of women, also known as femicides, rose to 150 there in 2015, part of a troubling rise in killings since 2009, when only 58 were recorded. While the notoriously violent […]
ASSAD CALLS FOR UNITY GOVERNMENT Syrian President Bashar al-Assad reiterated calls yesterday for opposition members to join him in forming a national unity government, a prospect opposition leaders have rejected. In an interview with Russian news agency Ria Novosti that comes days after the government’s recapture of Palmyra, Assad said that the main goal of […]
The Daily Telegraph, March 31, 2016 Sydney-based The Daily Telegraph devoted its front page Thursday to the city’s plans to scrap 62 public alcohol-free zones in parks and streets, featuring Lord Mayor Clover Moore as a bartender in an end-of-prohibition photomontage. Moore is using new crime statistics to justify removing the booze-free areas in and […]
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Rugs And Ruins
Coming across the border after our stay in Syria, our first stop in Jordan was Jerash, the ancient settlement known as Gerasa. Sitting at an outdoor café, we gazed upon the “Pompei of the East” — and the rugs for sale right next to the Roman ruins.
The terrorists attacks in Brussels last week provided instant fodder for the U.S. presidential campaign. Republican front-runner Donald Trump had already boasted last month that he would order the U.S. military to “target the families of terrorists,” also pledging to reinstitute waterboarding and “a whole lot more” as a tactic to extract information from terrorists. […]
SANTIAGO — China has been one of Latin America’s main trade partners in recent years, driving the engine of development in the region with a hungry demand for raw materials to help sustain the Asian giant’s growth. But the recent slowdown of China’s economy has been felt acutely in the economies of several Latin American […]
-Essay- CAIRO — They did not expect the joy and the despair, the potential and the tribulations that have spanned six long years. They were allured by calls for freedom and social justice before they were hit hard by authoritarian regimes and objectified by the region’s Salafists in both the East and the West. They […]
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Travel Wisdom — A Video Quote In 15 Seconds
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Lonely Dilma, Hijackass, Pope’s Fiat
MYANMAR PRESIDENT SWORN-IN Htin Kyaw has been sworn in as Myanmar’s first elected civilian president in more than 50 years. In his first address as president, the 69-year-old, a close aide to Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, promised “national reconciliation” and a new Constitution guaranteeing a federal democracy and “the lifting up […]
In a never-before-published interview shortly before his suicide, the Jewish-Italian author opens up about his adolescent angst and traumas beyond Auschwitz.
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Spiny Delicacy
From September to April in southern France, seafood lovers can participate in the “oursinades” festivals. Sea urchins are cut open, and you eat the gonads raw, with a squeeze of lemon.
“It has to be the best selfie ever,” Ben Innes, a British passenger who was on the EgyptAir flight hijacked yesterday, told The Sun about his picture with the hijacker. The 26-year-old health and safety worker explained he wanted to take a closer look at the fake explosives belt Mustafa, the “hijackass,” was wearing. But […]
And it’s cheaper than you think …
CASABLANCA — With one proposal to criminalize tobacco and another to legalize marijuana, Moroccan politics these days is smoking. Casablanca-based daily Aujourd’hui Le Maroc reports that the governing Justice and Development Party (PJD) is proposing a law that would prohibit the sale and consumption of tobacco from hookah water pipes across the country. The moderate […]
-OpEd- BOGOTÁ — Years ago, toward the end of Lula da Silva“s first term (2003-2007) as president of Brazil, I remember reading a perplexing article. It was about Lula’s son, Lulinha, who had apparently become a multi-millionaire in the span of just a few years. It is always possible, if highly improbable, that someone could […]
Even as ISIS loses ground in Syria and Iraq, its jihadists are bringing the war to Europe’s capitals in minutely planned terror attacks. It is a scenario driven by a new kind of criminal profile.
HOSTAGES HELD ON HIJACKED PLANE IN CYPRUS A Cairo-bound commercial jet that was re-routed to Cyprus this morning was hijacked over what appears to be a personal matter involving a woman, The Guardian reports. The hijacker is reportedly still holding seven hostages in the plane that landed at the Cypriot city of Larnaca 7:50 a.m. […]
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Buddhist Carving
Every single piece of furniture handcarved in the Chiang Mai area is unique, featuring detailed scenes from Buddhist scriptures in beautiful teak or rose wood. I would have brought one of these chests back home, but I feared they were too delicate to be shipped by plane.
With half of the world’s food tossed out, how can we be less wasteful? For starters, looking for smart new ways to earn money by decreasing waste.
In the Paris neighborhood of Belleville, home to a thriving Chinatown, prostitutes with no other prospects work to support families here or in China. And now, new dangers loom.
Modern society has it wrong: Beauty is about love, not looks.
JAKARTA — Amid violent anti-Uber protests by taxi drivers in the Indonesian capital, the country’s largest taxi company is trying to defeat its app-based American competitor with an innovative approach: uberize itself. Leading Indonesian magazine Tempo reports that the Blue Bird taxi company is seeking to shift its business model to a car-sharing service, competing […]
Many locals are trying to maintain a so-called “belgitude” after last week’s deadly terror. But the city’s vulnerability is on full display.
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Death Toll Rises In Lahore Suicide Bombing
Scenes of chaos are making the front page of Karachi-based daily Dawn on Monday, after an Easter Day suicide bombing in a Lahore park killed at least 70 people and injured more than 300. According to rescue workers and police officials, a majority of the dead and wounded were children and women, the Pakistani daily […]
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Medieval Headache
Spectacular, arresting, remarkable … That is how many would describe the Fort-la-Latte castle, in northeastern Brittany. But I’ll add one adjective to the list: dangerous. Climbing down the steep dungeon stairs, I bashed my head against a stone lintel, which left me with a minor concussion!
By next year, there will be three times more connected objects than humans on earth, all containing information that can be mined to improve public services, benefit consumers and boost economic growth.
GENEVA — Imagine a banker getting on a helicopter loaded with bank notes and flying over the whole country, raining money down on the population. This idea came from none other than Milton Friedman. In the late 1960s, as the economy was struggling, the iconic American economist believed that people would jump on the falling […]
PARIS — Jihadism in Europe seems to always be one step ahead of European security services, which despite enhanced cooperation remain fundamentally national operations. Paradoxically, terrorism is unifying Europe with a sense of common identity in the face of the attacks in Paris and Brussels, which seem as if they could have just as well […]
-OpEd- WASHINGTON, D.C. — Spend enough time watching politicians talk, and pretty soon you’ll have a good idea of how to address the public like a seasoned elected official. No matter the topic, our nation’s leaders invariably find a way to tie things back to members of the hard-working middle-class who just want a fair shot at the American dream, perhaps with a side of help for small business. Lawmakers today might be able to give this kind of political speech in their sleep. But with the way technology is going, they might as well have a robot write it […]
The Brussels attacks are a reap-what-you-sow moment for Europe, after biding its time and coddling its dangerous allies for too long.
The renewed relations with the U.S. may have been prompted by the Cuban revolutionaries’ connection with Pope Francis.
When they’re not warning us that Trump would put the world in grave danger, foreign media are trying to explain him.
nrc.next, March 25, 2016 “J.C. Superstar” reads the front page of Dutch-language daily nrc.next on Friday, paying tribute to soccer legend Johan Cruyff who died Thursday in Barcelona, following a long battle with cancer. He was 68. The newspaper’s headline — a pun on the 1970s Broadway musical Jesus Christ Superstar — conveys the icon […]