The French capital is weighing whether to issue its own unique currency. But can I buy a baguette with that?
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Daily Bread, A Local Currency For Paris?
Category: blog
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Black Lives Matter, From Baltimore To Brazil
Ever since the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore last year, the Black Lives Matter movement has been growing exponentially, both in citizen participation and in media attention. The Black Lives Matter cause was even exported abroad, with similar protests in Paris, Rio de Janeiro and other cities around the globe. Right now, much of […]
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Our Ladies Of The Snow
The statue of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges (Our Lady of the Snow) marks the top of the Bavella Pass, in central Corsica. In this photograph, the serene but somewhat austere statue stands in stark contrast with our playful daughter Cécile posing under the road sign.
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This App Could Reduce Your Risk Of Cancer
Science has determined a variety of actions you can take aimed at keeping people cancer-free: diet, avoiding sun exposure, exercise, et al. Now your smart phone can help.
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Syria, Stakes Of A Fragile Ceasefire
A photograph of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, covered in dust and blood after an Aug. 17 airstrike in the Syrian city of Aleppo wrenched our hearts, and reminded us that the country’s civil war is not just some geopolitical football. Omran was lucky to survive. Tens of thousands of other children have not, including Omran’s own […]
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Stars And Strifes
In Philadelphia, a group of U.S. Marines were petitioning to change the Constitution and make any desecration of the American flag a crime. That hasn’t happened, though the debate over national symbols is apparently still very much alive across the Atlantic.
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On This Day – September 13
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Ghost Town Grandeur
On the first of our many trips to Greece, my wife and I drove down to Mystras in the south of the country. Abandoned in the 19th century, the town’s churches, castle and fortress walls stand as a reminder of Byzantine grandeur.
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Women In Jihad
The days without reports of a terrorist attack, somewhere in the world, have become rare. And no, today is not one of them. Details are emerging this morning of three veiled women attacking a police station in the Kenyan city of Mombasa, reportedly wounding two officers before they were shot dead. What stands out in […]
Some 800,000 Catalans used Sunday’s annual La Diada, national day in Catalonia, to renew demands for independence from Spain. “Another spectacular Diada,” read Monday morning’s front-page headline of the Barcelona-based La Vanguardia daily. The newspaper noted the separatists’ determination to achieve independence, with Catalonia’s regional president Carles Puigdemont proposing that the government hold a secession […]
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On This Day – September 11
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Wedding Kiss — Video Quote Of The Day
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North Korea’s Biggest Nuke Test
At first, most thought it was another earthquake. But the 5.3-magnitude rumble coming from the northeastern corner of North Korea was a potentially much more frightening event: Pyongyang had set off its most powerful nuclear weapon test ever. World leaders were quick to react to this latest act of defiance. South Korea denounced Pyongyang leader […]
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Pit Stop, Watermelon Seeds
Under the authoritarian regime of Josip Broz Tito in then Yugoslavia, lots of shop windows were empty. Roadside vendors were a more reliable source of food there, with watermelons being a staple of domestic agriculture.
PARIS — Breaking more than two years of public silence, actress Julie Gayet, the long presumed companion of French President Francois Hollande, appears on two major French magazine covers this week. Gayet has guarded her privacy after her affair with the French President was revealed in January 2014 in a gossip magazine while Hollande was […]
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Another Wall For The Road
“UK government has just gone full Trump.” The British announcement yesterday that the construction of the “Great Wall of Calais” is about to begin was bound to arrive at the feet of Donald Trump. Of course, the New York businessman is far from being the first, or the last, to have the idea of setting […]
The 2016 Summer Paralympics opened at Rio’s iconic Maracana Stadium on Wednesday evening, 17 days after the end of the Olympics. Brazilian daily O Globo devoted its front page Thursday to the opening ceremony, with the headline “The Paralympics move the Maracana” alongside a picture of Amy Purdy dancing with a robotic arm. The American […]
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Life By The Mountain
About a hundred kilometers south of the Himalaya mountain range, the village of Chobhar is a far cry from the country’s bustling and polluted capital, Kathmandu.
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Germany Caught Between Its Past And Turkey
Turkey, past and present, is a particularly tough balancing act for Angela Merkel. On the one hand, Germany’s own past means its leaders face a bigger responsibility than those of other nations to officially recognize the 1915 killings of 1.5 million Armenians as a genocide. But Berlin knows that it is an immensely sensitive topic […]
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Shutterbug
With my RDA-made Exakta Varex camera, I tried my hand at some macrophotography. I processed the film myself in a home-made darkroom.
PARIS — Ten months after the terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 130 people, including 89 at the Bataclan concert hall, it is now possible to virtually “conquer” the tragic music landmark thanks to the latest distasteful twist to the augmented-reality mobile game Pokémon Go, which sends players to find and catch more than 100 […]
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On This Day – September 7
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Duterte, Not Lost In Translation
Foreign correspondents, and their editors, have long wrestled with translations of newsworthy words from one language to another — both those quotable quotes from colorful personalities, and the jargony langue de bois of international bureaucrats and businessmen. We like to think of ourselves at Worldcrunch as experts in the field, and watched with some amusement […]
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Colossal Column
This is one of two rostral columns opposite the Old Saint Petersburg Stock Exchange on the Neva river. The red stucco columns, adorned with bronze ship prows, were meant as beacons — the torches at the top are still lit on ceremonial occasions.
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On This Day – September 6
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Connecting The Dots, French-Style
The crew here at Worldcrunch is busy scouring the best foreign-language journalism in search of untold local stories and points of view from different countries: like this German story from deep in Bavaria or a Chinese op-ed about China’s Olympic performance. Sometimes, though, it’s also useful to zoom back out, and weave together the whole […]
ДеÑÑ‚, Sept. 5 She had been dubbed “the saint of the gutters,” she will now be remembered as “Saint Teresa of Calcutta” after Pope Francis canonized the Catholic nun at a ceremony Sunday in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City. Mother Teresa, who died in 1997, had devoted her life to helping the poor in […]
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Caudillo Currency
We drove to Spain several times in the 1960s, back when General Francisco Franco was still leading the country. This is a Spanish peseta coin representing El Caudillo (“the Chief”) that I kept from our trip all the way down to Santiago de Compostela.
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On This Day – September 3
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Tech Giants With Feet Of Clay
It was the week two U.S. tech giants saw their seemingly unstoppable sprint toward global domination hit a wall. First, on Tuesday, Apple was ordered to pay up 13 billion euros in back taxes after the European Union ruled that a series of sweetheart tax deals made with the Irish government were illegal. That’s a […]
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Studying Hard — Video Quote Of The Day
TEHRAN — A councilwoman in Tehran, Fatemeh Daneshvar, said that a growing number of male beggars are dressing like females in the Iranian capital, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency reported last week. “Some of these beggars are Pakistani and some are dressed as girls, and of course the feminine beggars have increased,” Daneshvar said, […]
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Extra! Mass Protests In Venezuela
El Nacional, September 2 “Massive, without fear and in peace” reads Friday morning’s front-page headline of Venezuelan daily El Nacional, after one of the largest protests to date against President Nicolas Maduro’s reign. Tens of thousands of chanting protesters marched Thursday through the streets of Caracas demanding a vote on recalling Maduro. In recent years, […]
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Coffee Break
In between visiting the wonders of the nearby city of Jerash and the desertic Wadi Rum valley, we stopped for the night in Jordan’s capital Amman. And scenes like this one in the hotel lobby were as memorable as the country’s ancient ruins and wondrous landscapes.
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It Is A ‘No’ For Rajoy
Spain’s political crisis has deepened, after the country’s acting prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, lost a parliamentary bid for a second term in office. “84 times no,” daily newspaper La Razón wrote on its front page, referring to the socialists who refused to back Rajoy’s attempt to stay in power. The leader of the opposition, Pedro […]
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Shifting Relations In The Americas
Donald Trump dominated global headlines once again this morning after meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto in Mexico City, and later reaffirming his hardline stance on immigration in a speech in Phoenix, Arizona. In front of a cheering crowd, the Republican presidential candidate delivered enough anti-immigrant applause lines for his supporters’ hands to get […]
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Birds Of Prayer
In the Bharatpur bird sanctuary, these long-billed vultures had built their nests in the trees. These vultures are more widely found around the cities of Mumbai and Karachi, where the Parsi community’s rituals include leaving its dead outside to be eaten by the scavenger bird species.
Oscar-winning Hollywood hunk Leonardo DiCaprio pulled out of hosting a fundraiser for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton last week, saying there was a problem with the timing. Well, kind of. The FBI needed to question DiCaprio about his apparent links to two suspects accused of embezzling a sovereign fund in Malaysia, Swiss newspaper Le Temps […]
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Dilma Or No Dilma
All signs say this is the end of the line for Dilma Rousseff. Both O Globo and Folha de S. Paulo, two of Brazil’s main newspapers, report that she will lose today’s vote in the Senate and will be impeached. Many are hoping the decision, which arguably has more to do with Dilma’s perceived ability […]
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Poles Of Attraction
The nine totem poles in Vancouver’s Stanley Park were impressive both for the carvings, and the height. For some perspective, my wife Claudine, in the foreground, was about 5ft7.