Worldcrunch
Under the authoritarian regime of Josip Broz Tito in then Yugoslavia, lots of shop windows were empty. Roadside vendors were a more reliable source of food there, with watermelons being a staple of domestic agriculture.
Peter Wohlleben wrote an unlikely bestseller about trees. Now the lifelong forester explores the spiritual side of animals.
PARIS — So far, so good. The collapse of the British economy predicted by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, in a case of a Brexit victory, has not materialized. The services sector, which represents 80% of the UK’s GDP even rebounded unexpectedly in August, and business activity recovered its level of March, […]
PARIS — Breaking more than two years of public silence, actress Julie Gayet, the long presumed companion of French President Francois Hollande, appears on two major French magazine covers this week. Gayet has guarded her privacy after her affair with the French President was revealed in January 2014 in a gossip magazine while Hollande was […]
“UK government has just gone full Trump.” The British announcement yesterday that the construction of the “Great Wall of Calais” is about to begin was bound to arrive at the feet of Donald Trump. Of course, the New York businessman is far from being the first, or the last, to have the idea of setting […]
The 2016 Summer Paralympics opened at Rio’s iconic Maracana Stadium on Wednesday evening, 17 days after the end of the Olympics. Brazilian daily O Globo devoted its front page Thursday to the opening ceremony, with the headline “The Paralympics move the Maracana” alongside a picture of Amy Purdy dancing with a robotic arm. The American […]
About a hundred kilometers south of the Himalaya mountain range, the village of Chobhar is a far cry from the country’s bustling and polluted capital, Kathmandu.
A clearer picture is emerging of the socio-political profile of those who recently voted to oust Dilma Rousseff from the Brazilian presidency: right-wing males with a penchant for more “traditional,” submissive women.
Even for those who abhor the Republican nominee, it’s important to get the terminology right.
SHEIKH ZUWAYED — In front of a house located in this bedouin town in the North Sinai, a masked man sits next to his companions, each of whom are holding a weapon. The man proudly speaks about their “Death Squad,” the name they have given to their armed civilian troop. The residents of the area […]
Turkey, past and present, is a particularly tough balancing act for Angela Merkel. On the one hand, Germany’s own past means its leaders face a bigger responsibility than those of other nations to officially recognize the 1915 killings of 1.5 million Armenians as a genocide. But Berlin knows that it is an immensely sensitive topic […]
For anyone truly concerned with climate change, trends like rooftop gardens and sustainable badges for office buildings are a distraction, at best.
With my RDA-made Exakta Varex camera, I tried my hand at some macrophotography. I processed the film myself in a home-made darkroom.
PARIS — Ten months after the terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 130 people, including 89 at the Bataclan concert hall, it is now possible to virtually “conquer” the tragic music landmark thanks to the latest distasteful twist to the augmented-reality mobile game Pokémon Go, which sends players to find and catch more than 100 […]
MANILA — Heavy clouds in the sky over Manila, soon it will start to rain. Jennilyn Olayres must hurry up if she wants to whisper a few more words to her fiancé. How she’s feeling, what she has been up to all day long. And that she’s really mad at him. What a bastard for […]
Foreign correspondents, and their editors, have long wrestled with translations of newsworthy words from one language to another — both those quotable quotes from colorful personalities, and the jargony langue de bois of international bureaucrats and businessmen. We like to think of ourselves at Worldcrunch as experts in the field, and watched with some amusement […]
-OpEd- Frustration is the lifeblood of dictatorship. Just look at what’s happening in Venezuela. President Nicolas Maduro recently declared that he had readied a decree to revoke the institutional immunity from criminal prosecution of “all public positions,” including members of parliament of course. As you may recall, since the last elections in January, the majority […]
Making the sweet wine Passito is backbreaking work but has given Pantelleria, an island off the Tunisian coast, a new lease on life.
This is one of two rostral columns opposite the Old Saint Petersburg Stock Exchange on the Neva river. The red stucco columns, adorned with bronze ship prows, were meant as beacons — the torches at the top are still lit on ceremonial occasions.
Swiss developers turn the business model of online gaming on its head.
Last year, the price of vegetables surged 140% during the high holiday season, yet the Israeli government still opposes the import of cheap, high-quality produce from Gaza.
The crew here at Worldcrunch is busy scouring the best foreign-language journalism in search of untold local stories and points of view from different countries: like this German story from deep in Bavaria or a Chinese op-ed about China’s Olympic performance. Sometimes, though, it’s also useful to zoom back out, and weave together the whole […]
ДеÑÑ‚, Sept. 5 She had been dubbed “the saint of the gutters,” she will now be remembered as “Saint Teresa of Calcutta” after Pope Francis canonized the Catholic nun at a ceremony Sunday in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City. Mother Teresa, who died in 1997, had devoted her life to helping the poor in […]
We drove to Spain several times in the 1960s, back when General Francisco Franco was still leading the country. This is a Spanish peseta coin representing El Caudillo (“the Chief”) that I kept from our trip all the way down to Santiago de Compostela.
A truth and reconciliation commission is investigating crimes committed during Nepal’s decade-long internal conflict (1996-2006) between state security forces and Maoist rebels.
The past few months have left a feeling of an ever less stable future. But a clean defeat of the Republican in November is the quickest way to bring back some order to the world.
HAVANA — Cuba“s belated embrace of the Internet has people packing into places like the Plaza de la Revolución and the colonial fort Castillito, two of the island’s just 114 public WiFi hotspots. Overall, the number of Cubans who regularly access the Web is still relatively small. But things are changing, and quickly. The Internet […]
Germany suddenly faces hundreds of young girls who have disappeared from schools because their parents have found husbands for them. Lawmakers appear powerless to face the new phenomenon of child brides brought by the arrival of immigrants.
WASHINGTON — The morning after Donald Trump once again embraced his hard-line immigration posture in a shouted speech, at least four members of his two-week-old Hispanic advisory council said they might not vote for the Republican presidential nominee and warned that his harsh rhetoric would cost him the election. At meetings Thursday on the 14th floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan, the candidate’s top aides held the opposite view. They thought his tough talk on immigration — combined with a whirlwind trip to Mexico on Wednesday — had, in the words of one adviser, “won him the election.” “How do […]
It was the week two U.S. tech giants saw their seemingly unstoppable sprint toward global domination hit a wall. First, on Tuesday, Apple was ordered to pay up 13 billion euros in back taxes after the European Union ruled that a series of sweetheart tax deals made with the Irish government were illegal. That’s a […]
Little is known of what Dilma’s successor actually plans to do to lift Brazil out of its crisis. Temer, whose career has been defined by discretion, must now show his hand.
TEHRAN — A councilwoman in Tehran, Fatemeh Daneshvar, said that a growing number of male beggars are dressing like females in the Iranian capital, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency reported last week. “Some of these beggars are Pakistani and some are dressed as girls, and of course the feminine beggars have increased,” Daneshvar said, […]
El Nacional, September 2 “Massive, without fear and in peace” reads Friday morning’s front-page headline of Venezuelan daily El Nacional, after one of the largest protests to date against President Nicolas Maduro’s reign. Tens of thousands of chanting protesters marched Thursday through the streets of Caracas demanding a vote on recalling Maduro. In recent years, […]
In between visiting the wonders of the nearby city of Jerash and the desertic Wadi Rum valley, we stopped for the night in Jordan’s capital Amman. And scenes like this one in the hotel lobby were as memorable as the country’s ancient ruins and wondrous landscapes.
MUNICH — In an effort to loosen up, the Otto group, a mail-order company based in Hamburg, Germany, has taken the bold step of doing the “du.” In German, “du” is the informal version of “you” — something to be used among friends, but a no-no when it comes to formal work environments, especially when […]