Weighing collateral damage in the wake of Oxfam prostitution scandal.
Month: February 2018
Categories
Guatemalan Open Carry
Just a friendly walk by the pier? Perhaps. The machetes, or “coupe-coupe” as we French call them, are a multi-purpose tool, and were ubiquitous through much of our Central American travels. But looking back at this scene was also a chilly reminder that Guatemala was, and still is, one of the most violent countries in […]
CAIRO — “Angry” was the way many described President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s improvised speech during the inauguration ceremony of the Zohr natural gas field on January 31. The president declared that the only way Egypt’s national security could be compromised was over his “dead body” and the “dead body of the military.” But with whom […]
Categories
Watch: OneShot — Condemned Man
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/0Bb3dVG29c0 expand=1] OneShot — Condemned man, 2011 (©Robin Hammond/NOOR) OneShot is a new digital format to tell the story of a single photograph in an immersive one-minute video. Follow OneShot:
Categories
The Eros And Ethics Of Sex Robots
Imagine if machines could do the job of strippers — or prostitutes. Where would it lead us?
War has dismantled Syria’s healthcare system, preventing women and children from receiving life-saving treatment for preventable illnesses. Exiled doctor Khaled Almilaji is determined to do something about it.
Barranquilla’s gay events at carnival time have shed social shaming and police harassment to become part of the intangible patrimony of this historic Caribbean city.
OneShot — Fairest of them all, 1996
French commandos are practically invisible as they carry out high-tech operations across Mali to track down Salafist fighters and other terrorists.
-OpEd- PARIS — At the Beauval Zoo in central France, visitors line up every day for a chance to glimpse at His Majesty Yuan Meng. The animal’s birth, on Aug. 4, 2017, was followed by 26 million people on social media. Baptized with great pomp and circumstance by French First Lady Brigitte Macron in a […]
Nuclear policy in the age of Trump (and Kim) is a scary proposition. But deterrence should still be front and center in light of Moscow’s aggressive posture.
Egypt’s Zohr gas field is the largest ever natural gas find in the Mediterranean. But reshaping the global energy balance of power must factor in other equations.
François-Xavier Mousin and Caroline Buechler used to do marketing for Switzerland’s watch industry. But that was before they went cuckoo for cacao.
Categories
Modern Mausoleum Wonder
The remains of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus can be found in present-day in the southwest Turkish city of Bodrum. It was once one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World before it was destroyed by earthquakes. Tant pis ! Some 700 kilometers north is Ankara’s tomb of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first […]
-OpEd- TURIN — Fifty years ago, in January 1968, the reformist leader Alexander Dubcek rose to power in Czechoslovakia. His ascent began a brief era known as the Prague Spring, which ended when peaceful protests against the presence of Soviet troops in the country were violently put down by Russian tanks as the West passively […]
A chilly bit of ‘wealth flaunting’ in time for the Chinese New Year.
-Analysis- The PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games finally kicked off Thursday with the riveting-if-baffling sport of curling and a first victory for hosts South Korea. But all eyes will be on the official opening ceremony tomorrow, especially since a disproportionate dose of the attention for this edition will be focused off the ice and snow. Coming […]
France is the land of seduction, where relations between men and women can seem more harmonious, dating back to the Ancien Régime. Or is that a myth hiding a darker reality?
Asian long-horned beetles in North America. Tropical parakeets in the capital cities of Europe. The plague of frogs Bart accidentally unleashed that time the Simpsons visited Australia. Yes, invasive species are a growing problem in our globalized world. And yet there’s something absurdly uncommon about the animal invaders that, over the past quarter-century, have made […]
Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA’s famously frugal founder died last month at 91. In southern Sweden, where his mega-business began and continues to thrive, locals remember him fondly.
The old, retired cardinal has had enough. He does not like what the Vatican is doing in China. He takes a plane and asks to be received by the pope. But instead of bringing it to an end, the encounter between the two men escalates the tensions around the Vatican’s pending agreement with China, a […]
This bio-friendly cattle rancher doesn’t win many friends among either vegetarians or traditional ranchers. But those who eat his ‘no-stress’ beef can taste the difference.
-OpEd- PARIS — A people brings glory upon itself up when it is able to confront the complexity of its history. On the contrary, it dishonors itself when it takes on a defensive posture with its past. In Poland, both houses of the legislature have now voted in favor of a law criminalizing any reference […]
Categories
Cliffside Drama
In my 60+ years of driving, I was never involved in any kind of serious accident — barely a flat tire. Not everyone is so lucky. This was the scene a day after a bad turn along the coastal road from Fréjus to Cannes in southern France. I never did find out the fate of […]
Civic values are ultimately worth more than dollars and yen.
ISTANBUL — Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a historic visit to Rome on Monday, the first time a Turkish leader has met the Pope at the Vatican in nearly six decades. But the visit to Italy, which included meetings with top Italian leaders, comes as Turkey’s military is engaged in heavy conflict with Kurdish […]
Decades ago, thousands of war-weary Colombian made their way to Venezuela in search of better opportunities. Nowadays, the flow of migrants runs in the opposite direction.
President Xi Jinping demands ‘inflexible atheism’ from his fellow Communist Party members. But he also has a soft spot for Buddhism, sources suggest.
Categories
When Billionaires Turn To Nonprofits
NEW YORK — Amazon.com Inc., Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are publicly traded, profit-oriented corporations. So it is interesting that when they announced their new joint health-care venture this week they made a point of saying it would be “an independent company that is free from profit-making incentives and constraints.” Interesting but maybe not all that surprising: Around the world, health, life and property insurance, as well as various other financial services, have long been provided by nonprofit organizations, mostly in the form of customer-owned mutuals. From the 1960s through 2000s, wave after wave of conversions turned […]
LAUSANNE — Margaux and her partner, Séverine, have spent more than a year traveling in a van from the United States to Patagonia. It makes sense then that they’ve come across #Vanlife, an Instagram hashtag van users like themselves use for posting pictures of their lives on the open road. The couple, from Lausanne, enjoy […]
Chile has buried Parra, the antipoet who turned to ‘impudent’ street talk for inspiration and revolutionized modern Spanish poetry.
Categories
The Grandfather Of Selfies
My wife and I were ahead of the times with this selfie from the early 90s in the Butchart Gardens near Vancouver.
MINYA — Anba Makarios, a bishop in the governorate with Egypt’s highest number of violent sectarian incidents, does not employ the usual appeasing rhetoric of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox church. He is a man who makes his voice heard but avoids being seen, expressing himself through official statements and brief phone calls to television talk shows. […]
Some designers can’t wait to start burrowing. In Mexico, there’s even talk about building an ‘earthscraper.’
‘Love jihad’ is a brutally constructed political agenda combining patriarchal notions of ‘our women’ and communal notions of ‘their men.’
BOGOTÁ — A new in-depth study of the well-being of Colombian coffee farmers could help provide the prescription for good health for us all. Understanding the fundamental elements of healthy living could lead to something of a “positive pandemic,” according to researchers of a project that began in 2012 after medical experts gathered in Toronto […]
-Analysis- It’s now more than a year since Donald Trump“s inauguration as the 45th President of the United States, and the media’s animosity towards him continues unabated. After his surprise victory against the wishes of the establishment, Trump remains the target of a never-ending campaign against his legitimacy, his very presence at the White House […]