Contrary to the West, where obesity rates are higher in poorer, less well-educated areas, China’s overweight youth are from wealthy families. It has been dubbed a “disease of affluence.”
Category: blog
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Give And Take
No, these monks are not giving food to destitute people, quite the opposite. In Thailand, the giving of alms is not considered charity — it is part of a two-way relationship: The community feeds and clothes the monks, who in return have a responsability to support the community spiritually.
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Barns On Stilts
A stone’s throw away from Santiago de Compostela, I took this picture of a hórreo — a kind of granary built above ground and characteristic of Spain’s northwestern Galicia region. The pillars end in flat stones to prevent rats from accessing the grain stored there. When I took this shot in the month of July, […]
Recent acid attacks on women in the central Iranian city of Isfahan have apparently begun to upset Iranian authorities, but as much for the media coverage they are prompting as for the real-life effects. Political leaders have accused both the culprits and those spreading “rumors” of the attacks of being foreign agents. Acid attacks have […]
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A Man’s Job
Seeing these two girls with their spindles and balls of yarn, going their merry way on a steep path of Lake Titicaca’s Taquile Island, you might think they are among the Peruvian girls and women who create the kind of high-quality handicraft I’ve already told you about. But on Taquile, women are only allowed to […]
ZAHEDAN — Three tons of “rotting” sardines were among thousands of dead fish from the Oman Sea that have washed onto Iran’s southern coast in recent days, in and around the port of Konarak. Local fishermen have blamed trawlers — the vast nets that sweep the sea floor in industrial fishing — and have urged […]
There are around 20 to 25 metal bands active across Egypt. Though their concerts are increasingly rare and their audiences small, the fans they do have are passionate about the music, Cairo-based website Mada Masr reports. “I was a metalhead since I was born,” Sherif Tarek, 24, told Mada Masr. “I’m a very hardcore metalhead.” […]
Six years ago, people thought the endangered hawksbill sea turtle had become extinct in one of its habitats, the American Pacific coast. But, as it turns out, they haven’t quite yet. After several were spotted months back in Colombia’s Gorgona national park, Colombian investigators and collaborators from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) began searching for […]
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Austria In One Shot
Beautiful mountains, colorful wooden houses, costumed Mädchen … The village of Schoppernau, in the state of Vorarlberg’s Bregenz Forest, is a living, breathing Austrian postcard. I guess my wife and I liked this kind of scenery: We went to Austria 23 times!
Smartphones and iPads, we all know, can be pretty cool. We also know they can suck. Take music concerts, when the other fans in front of you form a view-blocking field of little blue lights in their own private attempt to take home a digital souvenir of the show. Filming performances has even been encouraged […]
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Good News For Ireland’s Farting Cows
Ireland’s gassy cows emit so much methane gas that the country wants to be treated as a special case when it comes to greenhouse gas levels. EU leaders met overnight Thursday and agreed to cut emissions 40% by the year 2030, compared with 1990 levels. Between 10-12% of greenhouse gas emissions come from global agriculture, […]
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Silver Lining
You can’t tour the world for nearly 60 years without a few rainy days. Sure, rain is annoying — but it also makes for interesting, if gloomy, pictures.
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Monumental Indeed
It doesn’t matter how many pictures of the Taj Mahal you’ve seen before, or how often you’ve seen the Iguazu Falls on TV: Seeing the world’s wonders in the flesh will always leave you awestruck. Same goes for Monument Valley’s gigantic sandstone buttes — yes, this speck of dust in the foreground is a car.
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The Meanings Of Bigouden
The Breton word “Bigouden” was first used to designate the very distinctive, sugarloaf-shaped lace bonnet traditionally worn by the women in the southwestern tip of the French region of Brittany. Then the meaning expanded, and “Bigouden” was used to identify the women themselves, then all the inhabitants of the region — then the region itself! […]
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The 6 Sexiest Sax Songs
Photo: Roy Anderson/Family handout A sad note in the music world today with news of the death of Raphael Ravenscroft, the British saxophonist who worked with some of the best artists of his generation. He died at age 60 after an apparent heart attack on Sunday in Exeter, UK. Ravenscroft is best known for penning […]
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Same Scene, Different Place And Time
My grandson, who’s just got back from his honeymoon in Brazil, tells me he could have taken a very similar picture there, today. From the cotton candy to the still ubiquitous VW Beetle and Camper, it looks like 1989 Mexico City and 2014 Rio de Janeiro have a lot in common.
In the late 1990s, a group of Russian physicists settled on the Greek island of Gavdos. With the idea that they can program themselves not to die, they believe themselves immortal.
A somewhat unusual event was held over the weekend in a park in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, called “I want to touch a dog.” The idea was organized through Facebook in order to introduce Muslims to dogs, and more than 800 people attended, Asia One reports. Many came to see and be near the dogs, and […]
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After The War, Living In Harmony
Only five years after the end of Word War II, the mayor of Montbéliard (my hometown in eastern France) and the mayor of Ludwigsburg in western Germany started talking about making “sister cities” out of their respective localities. The choir of traditional folk singing I ended up conducting played a significant role in this local […]
Carmen Tulia Ortega recently came face-to-face with a former paramilitary chief responsible for some of the deaths of her loved ones. No, she did not forgive him.
Sixty years ago this week, on October 16, 1954, a 19-year-old Elvis Presley stepped on stage at the Louisiana Hayride radio show in the town of Shreveport, Louisiana. Backed by his band, the young man from Memphis, Tennessee, played a song he recorded just a few months earlier called “That’s All Right.” The first ever […]
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Small Tibetan Boy, Big Tibetan Trumpet
In a Tibetan refugee camp in central Nepal, we came across this little boy having a blast with a dungchen, or Tibetan horn.
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The Dangers Of Iron Curtain Tourism
In 1962, the Sovietization of Eastern Europe was at its height. It was hard enough to get into Czechoslovakia (we had to wait three hours at the border), but getting out was where things got dicey. From a watchtower, a guard had seen me take pictures of the Iron Curtain, and asked me to open […]
A Siberian tiger released into the wild by Russian President Vladimir Putin has attacked a henhouse in northeastern China, raising concerns that farmers may now have to hunt it down, according to Chinese media reports quoted by the AP. The official Xinhua news agency says the animal, known as Kuzya, was believed to have eaten […]
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Child’s Play
Abu Simbel, Amalienborg Castle, the Acropolis of Athens … Many of the famous landmarks I ended up visiting in real life are featured at Legoland Billund, the original Legoland park in central Denmark. Just to give you an idea, it took 1,500,000 Lego bricks to build this 12-meter-tall (40 ft) reproduction of the Mount Rushmore […]
Nearly 40 years after the Sex Pistols’ first began transforming music forever, Johnny Rotten is still not ready to calm down: There’s the release of his memoir Anger is an Energy, the upcoming recording of a new album with PIL and a concert at London’s O2 arena in December. In between two book signings across […]
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Long-Lost Cousin
I was not expecting to find my surname in the list of immigrants featured on Ellis Island’s Wall of Honor. But after all, mallards are migratory birds, aren’t they?
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The Pharaoh’s New Digs
In the 1960s, the Great Temple of Ramesses II in Abu Simbel was relocated 200 meters back from the banks of the Nile — and raised 65 meters — because of the building of the Aswan High Dam and the threat of rising waters. The tiny tourists at the bottom of this slide give you […]
Federica Trivelli got her first pig as a birthday present in 2009. Today, there are about 20 in her land in Vigone, which has its own Facebook page called The Little Animal Farm. But, unlike the Orwellian nightmare, these pigs are anything but evil. “All the pigs have been abused, or have been saved from […]
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Global Charts #7
It’s almost the weekend! Time to see what the world’s been listening to this week. Worldcrunch: Outsiders, “Summertime Blues” Austria: Meghan Trainor, “All About That Bass” Dominican Republic: Mozart La Para, “Pa Gozar” Swaziland: M.anifest & HHP, “Jigah” Saudi Arabia: Ismaeel Mubarak, “Shoog” Macau: Jinny Ng, “Love Is Not Easy” Source: Hot Music Chart
Welcome to Moonshine, where it would all seem illegal if everyone didn’t look so cool.
Kang Chun-hyok, a 29-year-old North Korean defector and hip hop artist now living in South Korea, wants to release his first album in December and become the first internationally recognized hip hop artist of his native country. Kang was born in North Korea’s Onsung County, North Hamkyung Province. In an interview with the Indonesian radio […]
Zurich-based group Zürcher Tierschutz launched a campaign earlier this year to set a quota for the country’s cats, deeming them a threat to other wildlife, including small mammals, reptiles and birds. However, since the campaign began, cat lovers have been pawsitively up in arms about it. The group estimates there to be 1.4 million cats […]
After monks went on a hunger strike to push for a citywide ban on animal slaughter, the local government declared Palitana a meat-free zone. But the city’s Muslims are not happy.
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Global Charts #6
This week, people in Turkmenistan are dancing to Kiesza. In Uganda, they’re listening to Korede Bello. We’re looking forward to the weekend with this band from Birmigham: Worldcrunch: Black Sabbath, “War Pigs” Spain: Sia, “Chandelier” Panama: MAGIC!, “Rude” Uganda: Korede Bello, “Cold Outside” United Arab Emirates: John Legend, “All Of Me” Turkmenistan: Kiesza, “Hideaway” Source: […]
In an article published on Immersive, a new website that enables easily produced and elegant storytelling, Paris-based writer and musician Ilan Moss delivers a fascinating account of Italy’s “Trallaleri” singers. This ancient form of European polyphonic singing can still be found in the quiet streets of the port city of Genoa. Trallalero is usually performed […]
It was just a month ago that public anger exploded in Colombia after reports of horses drawing tourist carriages being worked to death in the coastal city of Cartagena de Indias. Now, another bout of equine outrage is trending on social media sites after a picture surfaced of a dead horse left in a garbage […]
You’ve been with the professors, and they all like your looks… A group of five Swedish scientists of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have revealed that they have been inserting Bob Dylan lyrics and song titles into research articles for the past 17 years as part of a bet. The scientist who winds up quoting […]
The number of wild animals living on our planet has drastically decreased over the past 40 years, according to research by scientists at the World Wildlife Foundation and the Zoological Society of London. “Unsustainable human consumption” is to blame — killing creatures for food, whilst polluting and destroying their habitats. The report suggests populations have […]
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Global Charts #5
It’s Friday! Why not check out what the world is listening to? Worldcrunch: The Human Beinz, “Nobody But Me” Bulgaria: Indila, “S.O.S.” Paraguay: Nicky Jam, “Travesuras” Botswana: Meghan Trainor – All About That Bass Bahrain: MAGIC!, “Rude” Papua New Guinea: Enrique Iglesias, “Bailando” (feat. Sean Paul, Descemer Bueno & Gente de Zona) Source: Hot Music […]