Worldcrunch
It was rather quiet when we got to the indigenous town of Otavalo, in northern Ecuador, and I was able to take my time photographing a woman using a big spinning wheel. The image ended up looking something like a Flemish painting.
Not since Pope John Paul II’s health woes a decade ago has the world been so focused on one person’s medical updates. Forced off the campaign trail for four days following a woosy exit from a 9/11 commemoration, Hillary Clinton has the global media zooming in on her every move. The Democrat’s return to the […]
LIMA — Sometimes it seems the popular smartphone gaming app Pokémon Go knows no bounds. But Lima-based daily El Comercio reports that the capital’s seafront district of La Punta recently banned the game in most areas, restricting players to a limited zone. The district council moved ahead with the ban this week after receiving numerous […]
Whatever the hopes for Cuba, the country’s regime seems keen to follow the profit model for the economy to shore up its political grip. Just like China and Russia.
JAKARTA — A deal between Indonesia’s leading lender and an Uber-like moto-taxi application is the latest in a string of partnerhips that are making Indonesia a veritable hotspot for startup ventures in Asia. The initiative, between Bank Mandiri and the Jakarta-based company Go-Jek, will allow customers to store credit on the app by handling payments […]
Russian daily Kommersant reports today that more athletes’ medical files from the World Anti-Doping Agency have been leaked, including three-time Tour de France champion Chris Froome and two-time Wimbledon champion Petra Kvitova. With tensions rising between Russia and the West, such an information security breach — whether about alleged banned substances in sports or gossipy […]
There is an economic explanation for why more Syrian refugee families in Jordan were able to make it to Mecca this year.
Among the tombstones at Petersfriedhof cemetery in the Austrian city of Salzburg are those that are not stones at all, but intricate works of wrought iron.
Israeli researchers recently showed how data can be stolen from an offline computer. But computers aren’t the only devices that can be compromised.
After seven years of research, a determined academic says he has definitive proof that Capa’s legendary Spanish Civil War photograph ‘Falling Soldierâ’ was a fake.
The French capital is weighing whether to issue its own unique currency. But can I buy a baguette with that?
Ever since the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore last year, the Black Lives Matter movement has been growing exponentially, both in citizen participation and in media attention. The Black Lives Matter cause was even exported abroad, with similar protests in Paris, Rio de Janeiro and other cities around the globe. Right now, much of […]
Thousands of Afghans are making their way home after years and years living as refugees in neighboring Pakistan. For many of the migrants, their native country is now a foreign place.
The statue of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges (Our Lady of the Snow) marks the top of the Bavella Pass, in central Corsica. In this photograph, the serene but somewhat austere statue stands in stark contrast with our playful daughter Cécile posing under the road sign.
A new Brazilian report shows that far more babies born with microcephaly and other conditions linked to the Zika virus are black or mixed race. There are troubling explanations for this fact, including access to (illegal) abortion.
Science has determined a variety of actions you can take aimed at keeping people cancer-free: diet, avoiding sun exposure, exercise, et al. Now your smart phone can help.
MUNICH — The field of epigenetics is being lauded for its discoveries, which some describe as revolutionary. There’s talk of a wide range of scientific textbooks being rewritten. But are the findings really that groundbreaking? First, what is epigenetics? It is any additional information that gets tacked on top of the genome. Epigenetics refer to […]
A photograph of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, covered in dust and blood after an Aug. 17 airstrike in the Syrian city of Aleppo wrenched our hearts, and reminded us that the country’s civil war is not just some geopolitical football. Omran was lucky to survive. Tens of thousands of other children have not, including Omran’s own […]
History mostly knows him as the disgraced architect of the Vietnam War, but McNamara first made his mark in the corporate world with his mastery of numbers before it was as fashionable as it is today.
In Philadelphia, a group of U.S. Marines were petitioning to change the Constitution and make any desecration of the American flag a crime. That hasn’t happened, though the debate over national symbols is apparently still very much alive across the Atlantic.
The withdrawal of the ambassadors of Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela from Brazil to protest Dilma Rousseff’s ouster is a good example of partisan zeal harming the national interest.
On the first of our many trips to Greece, my wife and I drove down to Mystras in the south of the country. Abandoned in the 19th century, the town’s churches, castle and fortress walls stand as a reminder of Byzantine grandeur.
Every November, the erudite British council behind Oxford Dictionaries picks a word of the year to signify the term that most influenced society in the previous 12 months. They picked the word “selfie” in 2013. “Vape” was the winner in 2014. Last year, it wasn’t even a word. It was an emoji (the one with […]
The days without reports of a terrorist attack, somewhere in the world, have become rare. And no, today is not one of them. Details are emerging this morning of three veiled women attacking a police station in the Kenyan city of Mombasa, reportedly wounding two officers before they were shot dead. What stands out in […]
The two presidential candidates are at that age when “things start happening …” says President Obama’s former personal physician.
Some 800,000 Catalans used Sunday’s annual La Diada, national day in Catalonia, to renew demands for independence from Spain. “Another spectacular Diada,” read Monday morning’s front-page headline of the Barcelona-based La Vanguardia daily. The newspaper noted the separatists’ determination to achieve independence, with Catalonia’s regional president Carles Puigdemont proposing that the government hold a secession […]
Whether killing with their own hands, orchestrating or quietly aiding and abetting, a disturbingly high number of people in voluntarily fell in line with the Nazi killing machine.
CAIRO — “Everyone wants a tattoo now in Egypt,” says 23-year-old Kareem Shaheen as he sits on his bed sketching the outline of a flash of lightning. Shaheen started to tattoo less than a year ago under the name “Monkey Tattoo,” and hopes to open the first street tattoo studio in Cairo. “People relate getting […]
Donald Trump shows disdain for both Latinos in his own country, as well as some basic tenets of international relations.
It is a philosopher’s job to debunk prejudice and foregone conclusions. But isn’t there also a duty to not ignore the facts? A look back 15 years later from a prominent Paris thinker.
India’s northern state of Bihar recently imposed a complete ban on alcohol in the state, driven largely by women’s rights groups. The prohibition is now blamed for a dozen recent deaths from bad booze.
Instead of global stability, the end of the Cold War has ushered in an age of high-tech changes and social turmoil. New tales of two cities for the 21st Century.
At first, most thought it was another earthquake. But the 5.3-magnitude rumble coming from the northeastern corner of North Korea was a potentially much more frightening event: Pyongyang had set off its most powerful nuclear weapon test ever. World leaders were quick to react to this latest act of defiance. South Korea denounced Pyongyang leader […]
This summer, I was arrested in Turkey. It was the wrong time, and I was in the wrong place — visiting the predominantly Kurdish eastern regions of the country. For the first four days I was held in a cell in a police station, before being transferred to a deportation center. I had come as an activist, trying to document the Turkish military’s actions on the eastern part of the country, where a veritable war has been waged on the Kurdish population. My own story of the events leading to the detainment is, however, for another day. Now, I want […]