Month: June 2016
KIGALI — About a 20-minute drive from the Rwandan capital of Kigali, there’s a barren road that leads to a construction site amid cornfields and banana trees. A single blue sign from the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation indicates the entrance to the location, which stands at the top of a hill. There, across a […]
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Clown Show — Video Quote Of The Day
PARIS — The death of Muhammed Ali is that rare global moment when the world is not only talking about the same topic, but largely saying the same thing. The 74-year-old boxing legend transcended differences without ever flinching from life’s toughest questions. He was the Greatest, and also good; a fighter hailed for his intelligence […]
Chen Man’s release from prison has historical significance, writes Liang Yingfei.
Young people have far more accidents than the elderly, yet no one is clamoring for greater restrictions to be imposed on them. Why are we singling out senior citizen drivers?
It is both a cultural phenomenon and a marketing play, but one researcher says that Muslim-inspired fashion is ultimately true to the faith.
If foreign endorsements are any reflection of the quality of the U.S. presidential campaign, we are most certainly doomed. Democrat Bernie Sanders, who is facing a do-or-die party primary in California on June 7, got the helpful support of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The Latin American leader, himself facing angry calls for his ouster, has […]
SPOTLIGHT: ISRAEL-PALESTINE TALKS IN PARIS, A “USELESS CONFERENCE”? The headlines in France on the new Mideast conference are hardly inspiring. “The French initiative will fail,” declared right-leaning daily Le Figaro. Newsmagazine Le Point was more succinct: “A useless conference,” it noted. As is often the case with Israel-Palestine peace talks, expectations are low at the […]
From David Lynch to Francis Ford Coppola and Wes Anderson, filmmakers are going beyond movie sets to design hotels, bars and nightclubs.
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French Floods On Le Parisien Front Page
Le Parisien, June 3, 2016 “France Wades” is the front-page headline splashed across Friday’s national edition of the Paris-based daily Le Parisien, accompanied by the image of military vehicles struggling to drive on a national highway, near the city of Orléans. Last month was the wettest May since the 1880s, and the resulting floods across […]
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Go Up Moses
In the Bible, Moses ascended Mount Nebo in Jordan, and from this ridge on the King’s Highway, he was granted a view of the Promised Land. Unfortunately, like Moses, I never made it there.
Former employees from German gun company Heckler and Koch face charges in German court for illegal deals with Mexico. But were government officials complicit?
With the help of its Russian partner, Novatek, and the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), French energy giant Total has created an uprecedented liquid natural gas plant on the frozen Yamal Peninsula, some 370 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
SPOTLIGHT: WHY ARMENIAN GENOCIDE MATTERS NOW As the country responsible for the Holocaust, Germany understands better than others the importance of acknowledging and atoning for the wrongs in your past. But today, German lawmakers will confront another country’s historical crime, as a debate opens on a resolution that would officially qualify the 1915 mass deportations […]
As battlefield losses pile up for the Islamic State terror group, al-Qaeda eyes both the Sinai and Cairo for new attacks — and new recruits.
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The Painter’s Village
If Ornans looks picturesque enough on my photographs, it’s nothing compared to the way 19th-century painter Gustave Courbet — arguably the most celebrated artist from my neck of the woods — depicted the village in his masterpieces.
-OpEd- WASHINGTON — What word comes to mind when you see the name Donald Trump? For some people, it might be “anger,” since he provokes it and stokes it. For others, it might be “ignorance,” since he knows so little and, like many unburdened by knowledge, is untroubled by facts. Some might say “fear,” since it would take some scary police tactics to push 11 million people over the border to Mexico. For me, none of those words suffices. I would say “betrayal.” It is the word that comes to mind almost on a nightly basis when I see some […]
“Hello fetus listeners …” The Babypod is a speaker that, inserted vaginally, will expose a fetus to music of your choice inside the womb. But what kind of music should we choose?
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Syria’s Gruesome Organ Trade
In Syria and its neighboring countries, an underground network of organ traders has sprung up, preying on the thousands affected by the five-year-long war by offering them desperately needed cash for nonessential organs.
BERLIN — The sight of a swing causes not only children, but also many adults, to impulsively sit down, push off with their feet and swing back and forth for as long as possible. This very impulse was a stroke of luck for Oliver-Selim Boualam and Lukas Marstaller, when the management of the Cologne Furniture […]
SPOTLIGHT: GOOD AND BAD NEWS FOR THE PLANET Breathe in … Last year, an estimated 147 gigawatts was added to the world’s renewable power capacity — the largest such global rise ever recorded, making it an “extraordinary” year for renewable energies. According to the Renewables 2016 Global Status Report, investment in green energies around the […]
Of the various measures emerging to combat global warming, a small Canadian company says its solution to manipulate Carbon Dioxide is both easy to set up, and scalable.
MARCA, June 1, 2016 “Didier Deschamps has bowed to the pressure of a racist part of France,” French soccer player Karim Benzema told Spanish sports daily MARCA, less than 10 days before the beginning of the European championship in France. Benzema’s remarks echo comments made a few days ago by French soccer legend Eric Cantona, […]
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Floating To Sleep
This unusual float, part of the Madeira Flower Festival that fills the streets of Funchal every spring, looked very comfortable indeed.
-Analysis- SAO PAULO — Brazil’s leftist Workers’ Party always liked to think of itself as a crusader for the poor. Yet in the wake of the party’s 13 years in power, there are still 73,327,179 citizens living below the poverty line in the country — a staggering 36% of the population. Don’t take it from […]