Worldcrunch
What’s the deal with strongmen and their horses? Whether its Kim Jong-un galloping through the snow or shirtless Vladimir Putin on horseback mountain or Nicolas Maduro striking an el vaquero pose on the ranch, power-hungry world leaders tend to have an equestrian thing going on. Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, however, is taking it to another […]
ROME — A deep dive into Italian anti-vaxxer social media groups leaves me stunned. For them, AstraZeneca, Pfizer/Biontech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and the others are very dangerous, lethal poisons. They keep track of all the alleged casualties of the vaccine roll-out — even if they are just a repetition of the same articles, drawn […]
The usually hushed words of international diplomats is a reflection of our real-time communication age, but also of rising tensions on an unsettled geopolitical chessboard.
Across the region, hard-line conservatives use residual fears of communism and uproar over changing cultural mores to drum up support.
The Colombian man was located in Brazil, and has spoken by phone to his 95-year-old mother, but still not seen her.
A year after the world’s second most populous nation went into quarantine, a new study aims to calculate the cost in terms of mental health illness, suicide and inability to receive medical care.
Alexander Lukashenko’s regime is sending more and more protesters to prison to try to prevent a new mass mobilization.
A major bust last week of a Colombian-led narcotics ring deep in the Spanish Pyrenees led to the arrest of 12 people, the seizure of two kilograms of cocaine and the discovery of the laboratory where the drug was processed. Police say they discovered the traffickers while on the trail of the killer of a […]
The Islamic Republic allows girls as young as 13 to marry legally. On top of that, a lack of enforcement means that elementary school age children may be forced into marriage as well.
A pandemic and a maritime accident teach us the same lessons: humility, fragility and ultimately human ingenuity. Risk is impossible to predict, except that we know it always exists.
Petrobras, the state-owned Brazilian oil and gas company, may post big numbers but it has a backward strategy.
We knew the name: Operation Gallant Phoenix. But now Le Monde has exclusive access to details of the U.S.-led, Jordan-based effort to use digital tools to track, capture and convict some of the most dangerous perpetrators of Islamist terror around the wor
First, the good news: A major archeological find has been discovered in the north of Peru. A ceremonial mound or temple that’s thought to date back some 3,200 years, the site also contains a mural with a vaguely visible image of a giant spider and, for reasons yet unknown, a spoon. Cool, right? This is […]
Up against a microscopic virus, the world’s leaders have failed myriad different ways to do what was necessary to beat the pandemic. Was another fate possible?
The enduring pandemic has forced the world to develop new ways of working. What once were casual chats at water coolers are now endless WhatsApp group message chains, while cubicles and corner offices have been replaced by everyone’s home kitchen table… not to mention your children doing (or not doing!) their schoolwork beside you. The […]
Close brushes with bulls are part of the culture of Arles, which maintains a strong tradition of bullfighting in local Roman ampitheaters and annual festivals with well-organized courses of the bulls through the streets of the southern French city. But on Tuesday, it was the bulls who chose the time and place to brush with […]
Moscow and Washington are attempting to work out how to communicate with each other after Joe Biden insulted Vladimir Putin.
Underage or not, guerillas who continue taking up arms against the state are ‘war machines,’ the Colombian defense minister recently stated. But what if they were forcibly recruited?
Ten years after the popular Syrian uprising against the Assad regime, we see the wider impact of both the moral and a strategic error committed by Western democracies to not intervene.
While drilling deep for water last week in his field near Ouled Rahmoune, in northeastern Algeria, a farmer was surprised to see a liquid pouring from the pipes of a very different consistency, smell, color — and worth! Oil. What makes the discovery all the more unusual is that Algeria’s most important known deposits of […]
Thousands of tons of trash are sent from Italy to Bulgaria illegally each year. Between poor controls and political complicity, wealth-hungry entrepreneurs — and the mafia — and local oligarchs earn millions as Eastern Europe turns into a rubbish dump.
In one of the world’s poorest countries, cheese is still a niche market. And yet, little by little, even the working class are starting to getting a taste.
Since its founding in 1949, the iconic French weekly Paris Match has published countless photos of the rich and powerful — and every now and then, a paparazzi shot might cost them. This time, instead, it was a homeless man demanding the magazine pay serious VIP money for running a photograph of him without his […]
Chile planned its COVID vaccinations in advance, and reserved millions of doses while Argentina dithered.
Glittering virtual lounges are popping up, inviting people to participate, solely by audio, in debates on all subjects. And, in the Middle East, the powers that be disapprove of the elites’ infatuation with a trendy new app.
They haven’t actually gone anywhere. But because of the pandemic, the city’s celebrated cafés are off limits — and sorely missed.
Thieves in Bogotá have been displaying impressive gymnastic prowess by forming human ladders to break into homes. Security footage from one incident shows a seamless, efficient thieving chain as a television is passed out the window to an accomplice below. This circus-style robbery took place in the district of Usaquén. The understandably stunned homeowner, Daniela […]
The official announcement came Thursday evening from European Union health officials, but it simply confirmed what we already knew: the AstraZeneca vaccine is safe. And most European countries will recommence distributing the jab, as the vaccination campaigns continue to be far slower than promised. For Guy Vallancien, a member of the French Academy of Medicine, […]
Underpaid and overexposed to what in some cases can be truly disturbing content, moderators are the invisible, human grease that keep the social media machine running. It’s grueling but essential work that happens behind the scenes.
In our digital era, having a pretty face is more important than ever. We spend our workdays staring at ourselves on Zoom cameras, and our off-time watching TikTok and Instagram videos. Applying online face filters for slimming noses, tucking cheeks, perfecting skin is always an option. Of course, there are also more, well, permanent effects […]
While the pandemic has restricted people’s movement, climate change will increasingly do the opposite as populations move from the worst to less affected zones.
As elsewhere in Europe, Germany’s decision to suspend the use of the vaccine makes no logical sense when you weigh the risks and benefits in concrete figures.
Too generous…with others.
A new Greenpeace report warns that foreign fishing fleets, mostly from China, are gobbling up every bit of marine life they can into ‘stadium-sized’ nets.
In many ways we’ve moved beyond outdated parenting models of the past. But the modern parent too often produces ‘little tyrants’ who wind up as dysfunctional adults.
Even with his blood pouring out, Jorge Eduardo Yaso exhibited serious sang-froid. The Colombian policeman had intervened to break up a brawl earlier this month in San Cristóbal, just south of Bogotá, when his lower right arm and his right hand was severed with a machete. In spite of the “stress’ of the situation, Yaso […]
Can nature save capitalism? Biomimicry is thought-provoking because it provides many sources of inspiration to calibrate production models to nature, and thus continue to grow while respecting our environment.
-Analysis- It was quite a statement about Brazil’s justice system: “I have been the victim of the biggest judicial lie in 500 years,” Luiz Inácio da Silva declared last week. But the hyperbole from the former president, better known as Lula, was also very much about politics — considered by many to be the opening […]
The proof, this time around, was not in the proverbial pudding. It was in the sausage. As daily Berliner Kurier reports, police this week said they have identified the culprit in a 2012 break-in that happened in the western German town of Gevelsberg after the man’s DNA was found on a piece of sausage he’d […]
The pandemic and subsequent closing of the border with Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, put an end to the ‘atypical trade’ that sustained the Fnideq region.