Worldcrunch
Like their Easter Island counterparts, the giant statues of Tiwanaku, in western Bolivia, are shrouded in mystery. For example, the stone used for this “Monk” monolith comes from a quarry nearly 100 kilometers away.
Abdelrahman al-Gendy, a standout student and Harry Potter aficionado, was just 17 when he was arrested in Cairo, charged with multiple crimes, and given a 15-year prison sentence.
For millennia, Aleppo was a city of riches, a significant stop on the Silk Road. Sadly, many parts of the Ancient City — including its famous souks — have now been destroyed in the ongoing Syrian Civil War.
The good, the bad, and the bizarre. Part-time Uber operator Andrej Mrevlje offers an honest, intimate take on what it’s like to work with the controversial ride-sharing platform.
Reykjavik isn’t only the world’s northernmost capital, it’s also one of the quietest. Overlooking Iceland“s beautiful Faxa Bay, the unassuming city of then 110,000 souls looked very peaceful all these years later, with its peculiar-looking church rising in the distance.
Looking at the fading colors of this Wroclaw memory, you couldn’t really tell that at that time, Poland was in the early stages of one of the country’s worst economic and political crises. A year later, it would culminate in students uprising and ensuing repressing, around the same time as the Prague Spring in neighboring […]
The setting and timing of this shot coincide perfectly with the release, half-way around the world, of the seminal surfer album Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. But this summer in Romania was also just a year after the rise of Communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu. We didn’t know it then, but he would become one […]
As the conductor of a traditional French choir, I was invited several times to the international music festival in Llangollen, in Wales, where I got to see costumes from around the world. Here, a singer from my choir studies a woman in a rural Welsh costume that includes an apron and a tall felt hat.
These rows of red chilies, drying by the side of a road in northern India, bring back culinary memories of a painful kind. My French stomach, unaccustomed to eating spicy food, definitely had a hard time appreciating some of the country’s delicacies … See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
If Nordic people are the happiest people in the world, it is thanks to the state of welfare and cuddling with friends in the candlelight. Today the word for this ritual invades the life of Francophones.
BAGHDADI, MAKING IT PERSONAL IN MOSUL Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, is back on your screen. After almost a year of public silence, and amid rumors that the self-proclaimed “caliph” might be dead, ISIS released what it claims is a 31-minute audio recording of its leader. In his message — which was recorded […]
It took them 108 years, but the Chicago Cubs finally won the World Series after what reporters are describing as “the greatest World Series Game 7 ever.” This is how the Chicago Tribune described the decisive game against the Cleveland Indians that lasted into the early hours Thursday: It “lasted almost five hours, featuring some […]
SPOTLIGHT: PANAMA PAPERS & POLITICS, FROM PAKISTAN TO ICELAND It’s been more than six months since a massive leak first exposed vast networks of offshore financial dealings linked to a Panama-based law firm. But the reverberations of the so-called “Panama Papers” continue to show up in unlikely places. Pakistan’s opposition party announced today that two […]
I crossed the Arctic Circle on several occasions — but always under the same polar sun and blue sky.
We, the fortunate and overstimulated masses of the early 21st century can watch the whole world pass by on our computer and smartphone screens. The picture often isn’t pretty, and we would all do well to lift our heads up more often to see what’s happening right in front of us. In real life, as […]
Traveling the world means seeing different attempts to blend bad American culinary imperialism into local cityscapes. Here the golden arches ruin an otherwise characteristic Wilhemian facade in this old city center in western Germany.
Today, the top United Nations human rights official declared that the targeting of eastern Aleppo in Syria constituted war crimes rarely seen before. “The violations and abuses suffered by people across the country, including the siege and bombardment of eastern Aleppo, are simply not tragedies; they also constitute crimes of historic proportions,” Zeid Ra’ad al […]
When I visited the prehistoric site of Stonehenge in southern England, it was still possible to walk among, and even touch, the megaliths. Not for long, though: A year later, the damage to the standing stones caused by erosion forced the authorities to start keeping visitors at a safe distance.
Among the many memorable lines from Rodrigo Duterte’s run for the presidency was this colorful threat to Chinese leaders: If elected, he would personally ride a jet ski across the South China Sea to plant the Philippine flag on the Spratly Islands that are claimed by both countries as their own. Just past 100 days […]
Manipulation and violence, animus and hypocrisy: Such is the stuff of politics on almost any given day, in any corner of the world. But, on our best days, politics holds out the possibility of actually making things better and solving our problems. These are not our best days. In the war-torn country of Colombia, a […]
CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s first question at Sunday night’s presidential debate was, not surprisingly, about the just-released lewd 2005 recording of Donald Trump boasting of being able to force himself on women. Cooper looked up at the billionaire Republican nominee: “You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?” After Trump circled […]
The Candelabra of the Andes is even more mysterious than the neighboring Nazca Lines. No one knows with certainty what it represents, or when, why and by whom the 600-foot tall geoglyph was carved into the hill.
The ills of the Smartphone industry go beyond the meltdown of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7. A market sector that was still booming not so long ago is now expected to suffer losses this year for the first time, and is forecast to stagnate for the foreseeable future, a recent report from tech research and advisory […]
Le Figaro — Oct. 12, 2016 “Paris-Moscow: the big chill” writes French daily Le Figaro on its front page Wednesday a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin postponed his planned visit to Paris next week, amid rising tensions between Russia and France over the Syrian conflict. Tensions between French President François Hollande and Putin have […]
The quaint fishing harbor of Polperro, on southwestern England“s Cornwall coast, is having a hard time delivering on its promise: Unscrupulous parking lot owners have been known to capitalize on car park fees.
These half-timbered structures of the Den Gamle By open-air museum in the Danish town of Aarhus remind me of some houses in the eastern French region of Alsace and across the border in Germany.
Since its birth in the aftermath of World War II, the United Nations has faced innumerable crises. The eternal messiness of global affairs is, of course, exactly why the UN was created. But perhaps never in its 71 years of existence has the biggest of global institutions been faced with so many simultaneous fires — […]