Burk Uzzle’s image of loving (and muddy) couple at Woodstock has become a symbol for the 1960s hopes for a better future.
country: United States
Stay updated with comprehensive news on the United States from Worldcrunch. Discover insights on American politics, economic strategies, societal issues, and cultural landmarks with translations from top international sources. Highlights include Washington D.C., New York, Los Angeles, and cultural events.
Along with all the hardware to get to the moon and back, the Apollo 11 mission also brought along three Hasselblad 500EL cameras. With video and audio equipment to beam sound and moving images back in real-time, NASA also wanted to preserve the history in crisp, high definition photographs. Two of the Hasselblads were taken to the moon’s surface: one was a Hasselblad Data Camera with a Zeiss Biogon 60mm lens, which was attached to Neil Armstrong’s chest to document what he was seeing during his stroll on the lunar surface; the other, a Hasselblad Electric Camera (HEC) was used […]
Though seductive as pure financial innovation, Facebook’s crypto currency project risks a concentration of power that must be stopped at all costs.
Aid groups have plenty of protocols for scaling up humanitarian responses to crises. Less clear is when or how they should phase down — and eventually out.
-Analysis- For press-freedom advocates, Julian Assange has long been a polarizing figure. And his arrest Thursday in London once again ignited the seemingly endless debate: Is the WikiLeaks founder, who until Thursday had been holed up in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London for years, essentially a publisher — though a notably strange one — who believes in taking radical steps to expose government secrets, and who thus should be afforded the same First Amendment protections given to news organizations? Or is he a reckless traitor — and by no means a journalist — who deserves no such consideration and who […]
As countless important women remain unrecognized in their fields, a collection of campaign groups are springing up to fight to fight that
WASHINGTON — Next, more of the same, but with more entrenched division, a bitter crossfire of allegations and then, finally, a reckoning in the form of the 2020 presidential election. The long-awaited conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election is likely to harden congressional Republicans’ wall of support for President Trump, strengthen Democratic demands to hold Trump to account — and result in little change in public opinion, according to historians and politicians who have studied past national scandals. Mueller’s conclusion — he found no evidence of collusion with Russia but […]
The aggressive Republican stance on Venezuela reflects an attempt to seduce Latino voters in Florida.
Pigeonly is one of several applications that were designed by ex-cons and are transforming the way U.S. prisoners communicate with the outside world.
As the two superpowers get closer to an agreement, the global trade regime could suffer. History offers several precedents.
The straight-talking senator from Vermont energized the 2016 presidential race. But he faces a very different playing field this time around.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/IR3JN13nloA expand=1] Bertrand Piccard’s Selfie — © Solar Impulse | OneShot Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg accomplished a feat of aviation that few believed possible: the first Round-The-World flight, powered only by the sun, with no fuel or polluting emissions. The flight of Solar Impulse demonstrated not only that clean technologies are the future, […]
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Postal Service likes to boast that it is the nation’s most trusted government agency. It certainly has the trust of dope dealers. A report by the Postal Service Office of Inspector General demonstrates just how valuable the mail is as a marketing tool for drug pushers: “For example, a cocaine trafficker claimed to have used the Postal Service to successfully distribute nearly 4,000 shipments, stating that they had a 100% delivery success rate. In addition, of the 96 traffickers who indicated they used the Postal Service as their shipping provider, 43% (41) offered free, partial, or […]
Categories
Thou Shalt Never Be Polite To Robots
Google and Amazon are trying to force us to speak politely to their AI-driven personal assistants. But giving souls to our technology is a dangerous return to the past.
There’s nothing (and everything) left to chance in the world-famous image Life magazine photographer Philippe Halsman, shot in 1948, of the legendary surrealist painter Salvador Dalí.
It’s the silent (and sullied) face of an unprecedented presidency. The partial government shutdown that Donald Trump has brought on in his battle with congressional Democrats over funding for the president’s proposed border wall with Mexico has become the longest in U.S. history.
-OpEd- WASHINGTON — Two newly released reports from the Senate Intelligence Committee about Russian interference in the 2016 election have been nothing short of revelatory. Both studies — one produced by researchers at Oxford University, the other by the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge — describe in granular detail how the Russian government tried to sow discord and confusion among American voters. And both conclude that Russia’s campaign included a massive effort to deceive and co-opt African Americans. We now have unassailable confirmation that a foreign power sought to exploit racial tensions in the United States for its own gain. Ever […]
And why he’ll never be the savior they’re looking for…
-Analysis- NEW YORK — As 2018 comes to a close, attention is turning to what is likely to happen in 2019. I have no idea. But if you follow these questions, you will have your finger on the pulse of the world to come: What will happen with Chinese civil society? Five to 10 years ago, China had a proliferating and diverse group of non-profit groups, think tanks and cooperative civil society institutions, such as charities and clubs. They never stood on a firm legal foundation, but in the last few years they have been subject to a severe crackdown, […]
The Earth also rises … On Dec. 24, 1968, on the first human orbit of the Moon, astronaut Williams Anders looked out the window of Apollo 8. Reaching for his camera, and its color film, Anders would capture an image that would change human perspectives of our planet, ourselves and our place in the universe.
-Analysis- WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump pledged in his campaign that he would not be predictable. He’s more than lived up to that promise this week, and along the way, he has made a hash out of the way business is being done in Washington. Three times this week, Trump abruptly and unexpectedly changed course, lending credence to perceptions of a presidency in chaos. The biggest bombshell came Thursday afternoon, when Trump announced that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis would leave the administration at the end of February, and Mattis’s resignation letter explicitly stated that he and the president were not […]
-Analysis- NEW YORK — What a difference two decades make. In 1997, China’s gross domestic product was about 11% of the U.S’s. By 2017, it was up to 63%. But this overstates the difference in living standards between the two countries, since prices are generally lower in China. In purchasing-power-parity terms, China’s economy became the world’s largest in about 2013. So which country’s economy is really bigger? The truth probably lies somewhere between these two figures. If China were to abolish its capital controls and open its currency to foreign speculation, there’s a good chance the yuan would rise in […]
Google tried and failed to play the social media game. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing for the tech giant, which is doing just fine by sharing the tech market with California rival Facebook.
Monopolistic companies may be near a tipping point where people (and governments) want them reigned in.
In the 1950s, El Morocco was the It-spot for New York’s who’s-who — and the perfect place for a young Garry Winogrand to hone his skills as a street photographer.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/yUa3mH8ixmU expand=1] Solar Impulse Above San Francisco Bay — © Solar Impulse / Jean Renvillard / Rezo.ch | OneShot Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg set out and accomplished something that still seems impossible today: the First Round-The-World Solar Flight, powered only by the sun, with no fuel or polluting emissions. Solar Impulse wanted to […]
WASHINGTON — I loved Amazon when it first appeared. It was the 1990s, and I was living in Italy and then China, two countries that are strongly monolingual with a scarce number of foreign-language bookstores. Rome for instance, with three and a half million inhabitants at the time, had a couple of English bookstores and […]
It may be the most iconic photograph of the Great Depression. Dorothea Lange’s 1936 image has come to be known as Migrant Mother, though the Library of Congress references its full title as Destitute pea pickers in California.
This is a story about love, hate and Mark Twain. The object of Twain’s desire (then resentment): the typewriter. Twain first laid eyes on a “newfangled typing machine,” as he called it, sometime in the early 1870s. He was, by then, on his way to becoming the world’s most famous writer and humorist. At the same time, the tools of writing were undergoing a profound transformation — from fountain pens, with their leaking and smudging ink, to the pleasant sound of tapping a key whose corresponding letter was magically stamped to paper. The new technology did not emerge with the […]
WASHINGTON — On the night of the midterm elections, my wife and I organized an open house, inviting friends and people from all walks of life to watch the results. The TV was on, but instead of staring at the screen and following the constant predictions of electoral victories and losses, people were interacting and […]
America’s midterm elections saw Democrats recapture the House, but lose ground in the Senate. A nation as divided as ever, though with new checks on Trump.
-Analysis- BERLIN — Democracies are made of constant ups and downs. Sometimes one party is on top, the next it’s another. And what may look like a dramatic election result often is, in reality, nothing more than the natural ebb and flow that characterizes healthy democracies. Every now and then, however, comes a moment when […]
To act, let’s start by not looking away.
This is what they had long been fearing. As the threats increased, as the online abuse grew increasingly vicious, as the defacing of synagogues and community centers with swastikas became more commonplace, the possibility of a violent attack loomed over America’s Jewish communities. On Saturday, the worst of those fears was made real as a gunman stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue, killing at least 11 of its members and injuring many more, reportedly shouting “All Jews must die” during his rampage. It is the worst single attack on American Jews in the history of the country. And it is one that […]
A series of bombing attempts have targeted prominent Democrats and other Trump critics. Is this the inevitable result of inflammatory presidential rhetoric.
Yonder’s Slovenian-born Andrej Mrevlje is also a part-time Uber driver in Washington. Oh, the people he meets.
WASHINGTON — When Christine Blasey Ford accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault last month, she did more than open herself up to unwanted scrutiny. She held up a mirror to a country in crisis, revealing its political players and embattled institutions not for what they claimed to be but for what they really are. The painful 20-day passion play that followed — staged in committee rooms, Senate floor debates, hallway protests and millions of private conversations — did little to alter the future makeup of the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh was narrowly confirmed Saturday by the Senate, 50-48, in a […]
As U.S. hegemony fades, the dollar has become the worst currency in the world — expect, of course, for all the others.
In some western states, utilities are flipping the script on waste-water treatment, transforming sewage facilities into attractive parks with streams, hiking trails and science museums.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The subject was supposed to be the selection of a new justice on the Supreme Court. Instead Thursday’s showdown on Capitol Hill was a raw, scorched-earth confrontation across the nation’s most emotionally wrenching divides. This was men against women, right against left, a cascade of recriminations, explosions of anger, hours of tears and sobs. A hearing that was supposed to bring clarity instead erupted in thunderclaps from the nation’s built-up tensions over how the sexes are supposed to behave with each other. Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh and the woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her came […]