When the famous pelicans of Mykonos get tired of all the attention, do they take a break and fly down to the calmer shores of Cyprus? See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World.
Categories
A Pelican’s Pause
Month: January 2017
For more than a decade, South Korea has been a pioneer in the use of robots to aid teaching. Now, the country will offer middle school classes in robotics.
Beyond the beltway, far from America’s heartland: the most unlikely of incoming U.S. presidents is daily bread for the international press. See what they’re saying.
Xi Jinping’s calls in Davos to protect free trade are not a jab at Donald Trump, but in keeping with China’s march toward a market-led consumer society.
Categories
Caught In The Crossfire In Nigeria
-Analysis- With the violence that ISIS has sown in the West, it’s sometimes easy to forget about Boko Haram, another Islamist terror outfit, which while pledging allegiance to ISIS has confined its horrors to western Africa. There, it has killed an estimated 20,000 people since 2009, with methods of murder that have included using young […]
BERLIN — The quality of organic food products is no better than non-organic offerings. At least that’s the result of a recent study by the consumer portal Vergleich.org. The study compared 49 test reports by German consumer organization Stiftung Warentest, which, over the course of a decade, analyzed approximately 1,000 food products ranging from meat, […]
Categories
A New World Disorder
PARIS — Put any two Americans abroad (of a particular political bent — or not?) in the same room, and they’ll try at first to avoid the elephant in said room. It won’t last. The time has come to count down the days and hours to Friday’s inauguration of a bad-New-York-joke-turned-leader-of-the-free-world. An old Colorado friend […]
Categories
The King’s Door
Glimpsing through the crack of the imposing brass doors was as much as we were going to see of the Royal Palace of Fes: Visitors are (still) unfortunately not allowed in. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World.
The end of the road has come for Barack Obama’s eight years as President of the United States. From China to Kenya and Argentina to Laos, Obama has traveled thousands of miles around the world and has visited 58 countries. Here is a tour of some of the highlights, as seen through the local media […]
Russia has become a main theme in the U.S. In part, perhaps, this is a sign of success of the Kremlin’s politics. But both Putin and Trump will have to compromise if they want to change things.
MEXICO CITY — The Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG, has long controlled the drug trade in nine states in Mexico’s south and west. But in recent months, the cartel has edged out Mexican and Colombian rivals to conquer the narcotics market in the U.S. Writing for Mexico City daily El Universal, investigative journalist Laura […]
Categories
Sail Away, Sevillian Summer
Starting in spring, to protect passersby from the heat, Seville deploys its sails-like awnings along the calle Sierpes, the city’s main commercial street. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World.
Women held in Syria’s government prisons report psychological abuse, sexual assault and torture. But for many, the suffering they experience after their release is even worse.
I love Germany. I love Great Britain. I love Mexico. I love free trade. I like Angela Merkel, but I don’t know her. I liked President Obama. He was very nice. He was very nice in personal conversations. Maybe not so nice for the rest. NATO is obsolete. Apart from that, it’s still very important […]
-OpEd- Is this China’s big moment? The World Economic Forum in Davos is welcoming Chinese president Xi Jinping as a special guest. It’s the first time a Chinese leader has attended the event. It marks a historic moment, not least because it comes just a few days before Donald Trump will be sworn in as […]
It seems only the Church has managed to curb the ambitions of recent Congolese rulers Mobutu and Joseph Kabila. Now Church leaders are trying to peacefully nudge Kabila from power to avoid the bloodshed many are predicting.
It is yet another alliance of ideas that fiction could not have invented. The leftist vice president of Bolivia, who has never disavowed his Marxist past, is seeing eye-to-eye with a certain out-for-himself American real estate mogul with a taste for gold-plated everything. Writing for America Economia, Álvaro García Linera has penned a kind of […]
Categories
A Photographer’s Exception
I’m an analog kind of photographer: I started taking pictures in the 1950s, when film was still somewhat expensive — meaning that even though I now own a digital camera, I’ve never really gotten used to taking lots of shots of the same subject. But some of the world’s wonders, like the Taj Mahal, are […]
-Essay- 1988 As usual I sat at the front, close to the blackboard because I’m short-sighted, and to the left, so the teacher’s body wouldn’t hide what he wrote. On that particular day the teacher was absent. I don’t remember what he taught us or even who he was, but I remember the substitute who […]
Pete Souza has worked for the Chicago Tribune, Life and National Geographic. He’s covered the war in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks and the beginning of Barack Obama’s Senate career. He’s been the White House’s official photographer twice, for Ronald Reagan and for Barack Obama. At 62, Souza is always ready for another shot. But […]
Donald Trump is not the free market’s executioner, but a coroner appointed to quietly confirm its demise. Sadly, in its place, is a gaping void of alternatives.
-OpEd- SAO PAULO — Donald Trump is horrifying. Still, there’s a part of his package that could be quite useful to have in Brazil. I’m referring to the president-elect’s threats against General Motors, Ford and Toyota to try and force them to bring back factories installed in Mexico to the United States. It’s true that […]
-Analysis- Looking at some of the world’s intractable problems today, we often wish that governments had done things differently in the past. In the future, we may be looking back with similar regret at what’s happening now with the Rohingya in Myanmar, whose plight could develop into a lasting problem for the Southeast Asian nation, […]
PARIS — Here’s some terrible news for millions of people around the world who need pacemakers, insulin pumps or electrodes that relieve chronic pain or symptoms of Parkinson’s disease: These implant devices can be easily hacked. Remember that episode from television series Homeland a few years ago? The one when hackers attempted to kill a […]
Categories
Welsh Ward
On the northwestern coast of Wales, my wife Claudine was pacing the ramparts of Harlech Castle, looking out toward the peaceful Welsh countryside. Some 700 years ago, watchmen walking the same path would have been looking at the sea, which has since retreated. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World.
WASHINGTON, DC — President-elect Donald Trump tweeted Wednesday that he has “NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!” Trump, however, has a long history with Russia, trying repeatedly to build luxury properties in Moscow, holding a beauty pageant there, and benefiting from heavy investments from Russians in his properties around the world. It is not possible to verify whether Trump has no current deals or loans with Russian entities because he has refused to release his tax returns. But a look at Trump’s record since the 1980s shows that he and his family long have […]
TURIN — Riding their bicycles along the banks of the Po river last Sunday, a university professor and his wife came upon a scene that caught their attention: A man and a woman, armed with shovel and spade, were busy digging out a bench, just before the Sassi bridge in central Turin, that had been […]
-OpEd- PARIS — As far as beginnings go, this is a terrible start. As a matter of fact, it’s going badly before it has even started. Though American politics has no shortage of scandals, this is still unprecedented. One week before his inauguration, President-elect Trump finds himself under devastating fire. Accused of mixing with a […]
Nearly all of the data sent between continents goes through fiber optic cables that reside at the bottom of the ocean. It’s a delicate and costly, but essential, network for our daily lives and work.
CAIRO — When one woman was sexually harassed this month in Cairo, she made an unusual move: she came to an informal agreement with her attacker’s family and juvenile prosecutors to drop charges on condition that the boy get therapy and do community service. Having caught the boy who groped her hard from behind, after […]
Categories
Plastic Trees
The sap harvested from these Pará rubber trees on the Indonesian island of Java coagulates in the yellow collection cups, and voilà, here’s your rubber latex. Or as we say in France, caoutchouc ! See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World.
SAO PAULO — The hatchet has been dug up. No surprise there. The truce brought about in the ride-hailing war by Didi Chuxing’s acquisition of Uber’s Chinese operation in August was only ever going to be temporary. Instead, this hiatus allowed both competitors to pick a new battleground: Brazil. São Paulo-based business magazine Exame reported […]
Just hours before outgoing U.S. President Barack Obama’s emotional farewell address in Chicago, another head of state was taking center stage down in steamy Central America to let just the opposite be known: He’s still very much here, with no plans to leave power anytime soon. Daniel Ortega, the long-serving leader of Nicaragua, first came […]
NORILSK — The belly of Mother Russia is most fertile 1,000 meters underground and 300 kilometers north of the polar circle. Outside, the temperature can drop as low as -60 degrees Fahrenheit. But down below, it’s warm and moist. And the walls shine. The blocks that detach themselves as bulldozers strike the stone are loaded […]
-Analysis- PARIS — Last year was full of surprises across the world: a spike of protectionist fever in the United States at the instigation of Donald Trump, an anti-globalization wave of populism in developed countries bogged down by mass unemployment, Britain’s planned exit for from the European Union, worries about a widening inequality gap, migration […]
‘Baad’ is a tribal tradition through which a woman is offered as compensation if her relative commits a crime.
The refrain has continued ever since Donald Trump stunned the world with his election victory: “But what will he actually do?” As the two-plus month interregnum winds down, ahead of the Jan. 20 inauguration, some (but not all) of the answers have begun to emerge. The first clear message is that he will nominate whomever […]
Categories
Of Fallen Armies
These wooden statues of Thai gods and warriors, in a carving workshop in southeastern Thailand“s Sanctuary of Truth, conjure up memories of other immutable soldiers: China’s famous Terracotta Army. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World.
MUNICH — After tallying the results of Santa’s wish list comes the next step: wishful thinking. With the turning of the calendar comes another New Year full of hopes and expectations as the list of resolutions pile up. It’s like closing-down sales: Everything must go, everything must change. Around the world, the vows look similar: […]
-Analysis- WARSAW — In Poland, hatred is clearly fueling violence. But after six racist attacks were registered in a four-day period, this was the reaction from the country’s Interior Minister: “”There is no racism in Poland.”” The victims of these attacks are foreigners from the Polish cities of Wrocław, Legnica. Lublin and Ozorków. Four kebab […]