El Espectador — June 24, 2016 Colombian daily El Espectador featured an AK-47 assault rifle with the headline “Do not recycle” on the paper’s front page on Friday. Rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, signed a historic ceasefire deal with the government in the Latin American nation. After more than 50 […]
Month: June 2016
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Former Member
Britain is making the news today. I took this shot in Edinburgh“s Princes Street, just five years after Scotland, as part of the UK, joined the European Union.
-OpEd- BEIJING — On June 9, U.S. company XpressWest suddenly announced that it would end the joint venture agreement that it had signed with China Railway International to build a high-speed rail linking Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The U.S. firm said its decision to terminate the relationship with China Railway International was based “primarily […]
BEIJING — Recycling used materials is great. School athletics, too! But in China this week, we see where the two activities should never cross paths. The Tuesday night edition of Economic 30 Minutes, a program of CCTV, the Chinese state television broadcaster, exposed the shady story of China’s plastic school tracks and sports fields made […]
Ever since the financial crisis, casinos have been losing money. To survive, Las Vegas must lose its reputation as a place good only for gambling, boozing and prostitution.
SPOTLIGHT: BEYOND BREXIT The big day has arrived. Britons have begun voting to decide if their country should remain a member of the European Union, or go its own way. The latest polls all suggest the race is too close to call, with two surveys putting the “Remain” camp ahead while two others say those […]
-OpEd- PARIS — The year 2015, an annus horribilis if there ever was one, will remain etched in people’s memories for the violent acts committed in the name of religion, of murder perpetrated in the name of Islam. Faced with the threat of terrorism, we’ve adopted new security measures for the long term, and that’s […]
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Walking In A Painting
I’m not the only one to find the Alyscamps, near Arles in the south of France, picturesque. Both Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin immortalized the alley of sarcophagi in this great Roman necropolis.
PARIS — The fateful day has arrived. Voters in the United Kingdom go to the polls Thursday to decide if they should stay or should they go from the familiar but increasingly unpopular arms of the European Union. The consequences of an potential “Brexit” extend beyond Britain, as the EU would lose a major economic […]
Venezuela, a land that made 19th-century travelers marvel at its natural treasures, has become one of the last places any tourist would visit these days.
If the UK leaves the European Union, the members of the free market camp in the EU would be severely outnumbered.
SPOTLIGHT: SARAJEVO RUBBLE TO TRUMP TOWER The pace of modern communication tells us that what’s here today is gone … tonight. The potential worldwide virality of any piece of digitally circulated information comes with the caveat that everything is also potentially, and eternally, invisible. The tree falling in some proverbial unseen forest of the Internet. […]
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Extra! Is Iran-Venezuela Love Affair Over?
The regimes of Iran and Venezuela may have been great chums and eager members of the anti-imperialist camp over the past decade. But the current in Caracas, where food shortages and clashes are rising, is prompting some finger-wagging in Tehran. “We Want Food — Venezuela’s Economy A Step Away From Total Collapse” read the front […]
MILAN — Taking home leftover food from a restaurant is not common practice in Italy, where your fresh plate of lasagna should be finished the first time around. Basta. But as the world struggles to reduce food waste, even Italians may be coming around to the idea of leaving a meal with leftovers in hand […]
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Laundry International
When you travel as much as I did, laundry drying in the heat is one of the sights you get to see around the world and through the ages.
Signing a petition challenging Donald Trump’s right to run for U.S. president is one bad good idea. A novelist who lived through Balkan tragedies knows this well.
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In France, The Sky Is Falling — Still
-Essay- PARIS — Nothing ruins the cheese course more than the smell of burning tires. Yes, it seems, the hour of camembert and brimstone is at hand. Angry mobs are burning Michelins at the picket lines. Congestion at the gas pump. Travel chaos as metro and rail lines strike. Power outages and the River Seine […]
ISTANBUL — Pride Week traces its roots back 47 years to a New York bar called the Stonewall Inn. On June 28, 1969 in response to a sudden police raid, gays who no longer wanted to cope in silence with the social pressure, violence and discrimination trapped the police officers that assaulted them in the […]
SPOTLIGHT: A LOADED TRANSCRIPT It’s hard to recall the last time the FBI flip-flopped so quickly. The release yesterday morning of transcripts of the Orlando nightclub gunman’s calls to 911 had initially withheld Omar Mateen’s references to his apparent Islamist motivations for the attack that killed 49 people. Outrage was immediate. House Republican Speaker Paul […]
PUEBLA — Mexico’s recently opened International Museum of the Baroque, in this historic colonial city, is as much a work of art as the numerous 17th- and 18th-century pieces it contains. Designed for Puebla by Japanese architect Toyo Ito, the structure — with its 53 white walls, all a little different from each other, and […]
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Royal Ferry
Amalienborg, the winter home of the Danish royal family, is located next to a ferry docking point — very convenient for tourists. You may notice this slide is a little bit dusty, but my grandson and I didn’t want to photoshop that away.
An estimated 150 Kenyan soldiers were killed five months ago in an al-Shabab ambush in Somalia, a tragedy made all the more troubling by the fact that authorities in Nairobi are mysteriously mum about it.
A video of Chinese bank employees being spanked with a kind of bat or paddle for poor job performance has gone viral, setting off outrage online in China. The video, apparently recorded during a training session at a rural bank in the poor western province of Shanxi, shows eight staff members — both men and […]
Europe has seen its relative economic and military power decline for decades, but its “soft power” has held strong. But even that is now at risk.
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Herculean Skewer
This was a souvlaki of epic proportions, near the ancient site of Mycenae in southern Greece.
SPOTLIGHT: EUROPE’S FATE, FROM ROME TO LONDON Italy’s 5-Star Movement won the mayoral races in Rome and Turin, where Virginia Raggi and Chiara Appendino will become the two major cities’ first female mayors. For Italian pundits, their victories, particularly Raggi’s landslide triumph in the Eternal City, is a major blow to center-left Prime Minister Matteo […]
GENEVA — Alain Thébault is working on making a small bubble-shaped electric catamaran that can “fly” over water. And perhaps be remotely controlled. This vehicle may sound like something that belongs to the realm of science fiction except for the fact that Thébault is a successful inventor. He created the Hydroptère, one of the fastest […]
ROME —Virginia Raggi, a 37-year-old insurgent newcomer, has scored a resounding victory over the candidate from Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s ruling party to become the first woman mayor of Italian capital Rome. Raggi, a member of the upstart anti-establishment 5-Star Movement founded by Italian comedian Beppe Grillo, defeated Democratic Party candidate Roberto Giachetti in the […]
Chased from their homes and communities, many transgender women in Colombia seek refuge in a four-block area in Santa Fe, in downtown Bogotá.
SAO PAULO — The brains of highly trained athletes function more efficiently than others. Sports players activate only the parts of the cortex — the outer layer of the brain — necessary for specific movements like dribbles, tackles or saves such as those employed by soccer goalkeepers. “These athletes activate a smaller part of their […]
An astronomer uses stargazing to give young Afghans some much-appreciated perspective, all the while taking care not to tread on anyone’s religious sensibilities.
KIEV — In real life, Nadiya Savchenko’s eyes are neither large nor blue. But on welcome posters splashed across Kiev Airport recently with the slogan #freesavchenko, the doctored photos of the just released air force pilot — who was captured by Russia and elevated to heroine status back home during her long imprisonment — played […]
BEIJING — China has received a string of recent visits from African government and business officials, including Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, in April, and Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi, who came in May accompanied by officials from his national petroleum company. The president of the Algerian national oil company also made a trip to China of […]