Worldcrunch
Iranians only have online speculation to guess how much the country’s clerical regime has conceded to China as part of the New Silk Road initiative. There are now reports of 5,000 Chinese security agents being deployed in Iran to “protect” Chinese personnel working in the oil sector.
A reporter arrived from elsewhere in Europe, posing the questions so many others have begun to ask themselves since all-out war began last week.
The Russian leader’s invasion is a both a pursuit of his Hitlerian obsession to rectify his nation’s humiliation, and a bet that the West’s decline is permanent.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine that began Thursday morning on multiple fronts was meant to quickly overrun the outnumbered defensive positions. Kyiv-based Livy Bereg reports that it hasn’t turned out that way.
While Kyiv comes under full military attack, less than 500 miles to the north the Russian capital is a surreal mix of normalcy, pockets of protest and the quiet sensation that nothing will ever be the same.
Vladimir Putin’s claims that NATO threatens Russia’s security, and that the only way Russia will back down is if NATO promises never to admit Ukraine, is a bait and switch. His long-term dream is to erase the idea of a Ukrainian nation on the road to his wider tsarist conquests.
Most workers want to keep the flexibility they had during the pandemic. And they no longer have any qualms about changing jobs if this isn’t possible.
War is upon us. But many in the West have sleepwalked through two decades of rising tensions with Russia. The situation in Ukraine can only be understood in the context of Vladimir Putin’s view on Boris Yeltsin, NATO’s eastward expansion, wars in the Balkans and Iraq, and beyond.
As fog of war spreads across Ukraine, we’ve tried to gather some testimony, videos and images from verified journalists covering the beginning of the Russian invasion.
Early in the pandemic, Swedish authorities were roundly criticized for the lack of COVID-19 restrictions and for arguing for a different cost-benefit calculation in trying to eliminate the virus at all costs. Now, more and more countries are dropping all restrictions even as Omicron continues to spread. But is this really about herd immunity?
Faced with a massive invasion by its far more powerful neighbor, Ukrainians must be conscious of the stakes at play and the means that Vladimir Putin is prepared to employ.
Faced with a $32 billion drop in their wealth this year, Russian oligarchs are looking for assets to allow them to overcome sanctions that will increase with the invasion of Ukraine. Familiar with crises, they see bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as an escape from the hegemony of the dollar, and a way to diversify their holdings.
“Can’t you see it’s a movie? It’s all fiction. Stop crying.”
Moscow’s large-scale attack launched on Ukraine erases any lingering doubts about where Russia’s president wants to go. Vladimir Putin is taking back part of the Soviet empire and attacking the European post-War order. Europe and NATO must respond, by arming the eastern flank.
Exclusive: New details emerge of a would-be forced evacuation last week of pro-Russian civilians from the Donetsk and Luhansk territories that Vladimir Putin has used to justify Thursday’s invasion of Ukraine. Locals call the operation a “farce.”
You can threaten to destroy the Russian economy or target the president’s friends, but you can’t stop Putin’s imaginary vision of the past, and present. It’s bad news for Western diplomats, for peace in the region — and may be the ultimate ruin of modern Russia.
The question of who gets to decide questions around a child’s health when vaccines are at play is complicated, and keeps popping up from Italy to Costa Rica to France and the U.S.
Russia’s president is neither clearly right-wing nor left-wing. As his dubious allies around the world suggest, he simply hates Western liberal democracy and seeks to expand his personal power, at home and abroad, by sowing unrest and conflict.
No girls, no science, no foreign languages, only the Koran. This is how the Taliban want to erase the generation of students educated for 20 years by the “Western usurpers.” La Stampa’s Francesca Mannocchi visits one of the rigid, boys-only madrasas near Kabul.
The true version of Hinduism teaches that one has to respect other faiths. That has been threatened the past century by ideologues inspired by the worst ideas of our times.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s move to order troops into two rebel-held regions in eastern Ukraine, after recognizing them as independent states, is front-page news all around the world.
The situation in eastern Ukraine is highly explosive. What will happen after the recognition of the self-proclaimed “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states? Will Putin hunker down or double down? Instant analysis from German foreign policy thinkers on what happens next.
The Cuban government has once again jailed dissenting artists or forced them to flee. But anger at the 60-year dictatorship has spread far beyond artistic circles and the regime no longer has the power to silence people.
It’s not the presence of Western weapons that scares Moscow, it is the idea of freedom. And yet by threatening Ukrainians with invasion, his neighbors and rivals in the West rally around that same idea. Has the would-be strategic mastermind in the Kremlin finally painted himself into a corner? Unfortunately, that’s a dangerous place.
A recent video of a chained woman has raised the alarm of the poor treatment of the mentally ill in China. It’s worse for women in rural areas, where the stigma around mental illness is high.
Iran’s clerical regime is handing over vital economic sectors to its “allies,” Russia and China. But future generations may end up paying the real price for the country’s “Look to the East” philosophy.
Most Latin American countries fear civil conflicts more than international invasion. A regional union is the best way to assure stability and lawfulness in a troubled but culturally cohesive continent. The EU shows us what that would look like and how to make it happen.
It was Jane Austen, back in 1816, who wrote that “every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.” That neighborhood is getting quite a bit bigger these days as our digitized lives and economies extract ever-deepening rivers of private data from the daily lives of citizens. Of course, with that has also come […]
Western states are taking democratic governance for granted and responding feebly to threats in their midst. With the crisis at the Ukraine-Russia border coming to a head, the 1930s offer lessons on the dangers of complacency in the face of a kind of semi-democracy.
Illegal mining and deforestation are destroying parts of the Amazon and devastating indigenous people’s lives. As laws and governments fail to protect the environment and vulnerable communities, locals have turned to the imagination of the future generation.
Women today, and the limits of tolerance…
Over the past two months, as tensions rose in Ukraine, Russian has launched new missiles from the contested islands north of Japan. Kyiv and Tokyo have made it clear that they are firmly aligned with each other and with Washington. Moscow’s eastern flank opens major strategic questions, including China’s role.
Ukraine’s former president Petro Poroshenko has taken refuge in Poland after being accused of treason and cooperation with Russia. It’s a film we’ve seen before in Kyiv.
A recent tender for Brazil’s 5G network once again highlighted the growing rivalry between the two superpowers. Now, the Biden administration may even have a formula to free countries of their debt to Beijing.
The former hostage Ingrid Betancourt, who recently decided to run for president with a focus on women’s rights, is the center of criticism after her declarations in a presidential debate at a University seemed to say poor women who are raped are somehow provoking it. She later blamed a mix-up between French and Spanish.
The mood is dark, and so are the jokes, which may explain Ukrainians’ apparent sense of calmness in the face of the neighboring Russian bear lining up at the border.
The circular economy is a hot trend, being embraced by everything from fashion to home decor. But one industry has been upcycling for decades. And the benefits and potentials go far beyond the environment. Soon, your perfume might help you fight stress and even wrinkles.
Catalonia has recently pardoned up to 1,000 people, mostly women, who were accused of “witchcraft” as late as the eighteenth century. But as some countries atone for their past, “witch hunts” are still common in other parts of the world.
“A Turkish father marries his daughter to his brother’s son…” begins a hypothetical scenario in an official textbook used in western Germany to supposedly teach students about ethics. The multiple layers of prejudice are teaching unanticipated lesson for school officials after the Turkish-Germany community reacted with outrage.
In Egypt, private schools are driven solely by profit. As the economic effects of COVID-19 forces families to choose cheaper schools, many parents are forced to confront the country’s endemic education problems. And they’re discovering that expensive private schools are better in outward appearance only.