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.

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Ideas Trump And The World

What Putin Would Do With A President Trump

Putin and Trump caricature by Donkey Hotey
Putin and Trump caricature by Donkey Hotey Wikimedia Commons

-OpEd- So let’s stipulate: Donald Trump is not Vladimir Putin’s willing agent, and it’s not certain if or to what extent Putin is trying to elect Trump president. The real issue is that Trump and Putin share the same nihilistic approach to international relations. Together, they could transform our world. Putin already has fostered a current of ruthless, cynical and utterly unprincipled opportunism in what, before his arrival, was thought of as an increasingly cooperative and rational international community. The Russian president has embraced and perfected the use of lies for geopolitical advantage, pursued and murdered his opponents in foreign […]

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Trump And The World

Chelsea Or Ivanka, Two Powerful Friends Vie To Be Powerful First Daughter

Ivanka Trump vs. Chelsea Clinton
Ivanka Trump vs. Chelsea Clinton Marc Nozell/Edward Kimmel/Worldcrunch collage

Whoever wins the election in November, America is poised to have its most consequential first daughter since Anna Roosevelt.

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Ideas

Clinton To Counter Trump’s Gloom-And-Doom Message

Upside-down at an anti-Trump rally in San Diego
Upside-down at an anti-Trump rally in San Diego Hayne Palmour Iv/San Diego Union-Tribune/ZUMA

-OpEd- The Democratic National Convention will feature plenty of well-earned criticism of Donald Trump’s isolationist, revisionist, immoral and self-contradicting foreign policy agenda. But if Hillary Clinton wants to win the argument, she must also convince voters that the world is not in the catastrophic state that Trump would have them believe. Foreign policy was always going to be a big part of the 2016 presidential election, as far as the Clinton campaign was concerned. Its candidate spent four years as secretary of state and is running on her record of service. What the Clinton team did not anticipate is that […]

Categories
Ideas Trump And The World

Donald Trump, The Fear Candidate

Protesting agains Trump in Cleveland
Protesting agains Trump in Cleveland Rick Majewski via ZUMA

WASHINGTON — These are anxious times in America. Despite a steadily, if slowly, growing economy and the absence of a major war, people remain troubled by a sense of national underperformance and myriad social ills, most recently the surge in racially tinged fatal shootings committed by law enforcement officers and against them. A new Gallup poll reports that only 17% of Americans feel satisfied with the way things are going, the lowest percentage since October 2013 — and down 12 points in just the past month. For many, of course, a cause of concern is Donald Trump, who accepted the […]

Categories
Eyes on the U.S.

Is This The End Of The Republican Party?

Donald Trump in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 18
Donald Trump in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 18 Richard Ellis/ZUMA

-OpEd- WASHINGTON — The Republican Party came to life as the bastion of “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men.” It was a reformist party dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery and to fighting a “Slave Power” its founders saw as undermining free institutions. The new political organization grew out of the old Whigs and reflected the faith that Henry Clay and his admirer Abraham Lincoln had in the federal government’s ability to invest in fostering economic growth and expanding educational opportunity. Its partisans embodied what John C. Calhoun, slavery’s chief ideological defender, described disdainfully as “the national […]

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Trump And The World

A Mean Life: Donald Trump And The Purpose Of Politics

Trump makes his case
Trump makes his case Andy Martin Jr. via ZUMA

NEW YORK — In October 1980, in his first major interview on network television, Donald Trump sat on a couch in his Fifth Avenue apartment discussing the tough decisions he had made as a builder. (“Rona Barrett Looks at Today’s Super Rich” would air the following year.) Then the 34-year-old Trump abruptly turned the casual interview into something more controversial: a lecture on the lack of leadership in the United States. Gas prices were soaring, and inflation was rampant. More than four dozen Americans who had been kidnapped from the U.S. Embassy in Iran were being held hostage while, according […]

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Society

In American Heartland, Swiss Amish Carry On Yodeling Tradition

Yodeling in the USyodelA
Yodeling in the USyodelA Gerry Dincher

The Swiss Amish in the United States are keeping alive a vocal art passed down from their ancestors in Switzerland and eastern France. Both a symbol of identity and entertainment, yodeling was also a source of inspiration for American country music.

Categories
Eyes on the U.S.

Dallas Police, A Model Of Improvement Was Targeted Anyway

In the aftermath of the killings in Dallas
In the aftermath of the killings in Dallas Paul Moseley/TNS via ZUMA

A sad bit of irony to the deadly assault on police Thursday night is that the Dallas police department had made great strides in reducing cases of excessive use of force.

Categories
Economy

Is Sugar The New Tobacco?

LAUSANNE — The question has been debated for many years, but is now gaining more attention than ever: Has sugar become the new tobacco? Are there parallels, in other words, between current attempts to curb the use of addictive industrial glucose and the strict regulations applied to the cigarette industry starting in the late 1990s? […]

Categories
Eyes on the U.S.

Guns And Gays After Orlando, Meet The Pink Pistols

Guns And Gays After Orlando, Meet The Pink Pistols
Nicki Stallard

PHILADELPHIA — Try as he might, Tom Nelson just could not get any other gay people to the gun range. For the past four years he sent out email invitations to a local mailing list for Pink Pistols, a shooting group that encourages members of the LGBT community to carry concealed firearms. Then, on the third Sunday of each month, he would head to a gun club in the Philadelphia area and wait. Nobody ever showed. “It’s been very lonely out there,” said Nelson, a 71-year-old retiree who continued to make the trek lest his own shooting skills deteriorate. Nelson […]

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Food / Travel

Las Vegas, How Global Finances Are Burning Sin City

Tunnels beneath Las Vegas house the city's homeless
Tunnels beneath Las Vegas house the city's homeless David Honl/ZUMA

Ever since the financial crisis, casinos have been losing money. To survive, Las Vegas must lose its reputation as a place good only for gambling, boozing and prostitution.

Categories
Geopolitics Society

From Sarajevo, An Unlikely Lesson For American Democracy

Cellist Vedran Smajlovic in 1992 in Sarajevo's destroyed National Library
Cellist Vedran Smajlovic in 1992 in Sarajevo's destroyed National Library Mikhail Evstafiev/GFDL

Signing a petition challenging Donald Trump’s right to run for U.S. president is one bad good idea. A novelist who lived through Balkan tragedies knows this well.

Categories
Geopolitics Society

The Risks Of Being Gay, Orlando To Berlin To The Middle East

Remembering the Orlando victims in Warsaw, Poland.
Remembering the Orlando victims in Warsaw, Poland. Anna Ferensowicz/Pacific Press/ZUMA

Let’s be clear, the terror in the Pulse club was not an attack on Western culture in general: It was aimed explicitly at gay people. Most heterosexuals don’t have the slightest idea what this really means.

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Ideas

Divided We Stand: Why Orlando Hurts Three Times More

Mourning in Orlando on June 12
Mourning in Orlando on June 12 Joseph Garnett Jr./ZUMA

Three of the most contentious questions in American culture and politics — gay rights, gun control and terrorism — collided in a horrific way in an Orlando nightclub early Sunday. It is not entirely clear what inspired Omar Mateen to commit the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, or what might have been done to stop it. But it happened in a gay club, just two weeks shy of the first anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, and on a weekend when cities across the country, including Washington, were holding gay pride festivals. It was perpetrated […]

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Trump And The World

Clinton Makes History. My Generation, With No Sense of History, Doesn’t Care

Millennial apathy
Millennial apathy Beat Tschanz

A millennial explains why her peers aren’t excited about the likely first female major-party nominee for U.S. president

Categories
Society

Muslim And Hipster, Why ‘Mipster’ Fashion Is Trending

Hijabistas cruisin'
Hijabistas cruisin' Sheikh and Bake screenshot

It is both a cultural phenomenon and a marketing play, but one researcher says that Muslim-inspired fashion is ultimately true to the faith.

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Ideas Trump And The World

Trump Is Not The Problem — I Blame My Fellow Americans

A pro-Trump rally in San Diego
A pro-Trump rally in San Diego David Bro via ZUMA

-OpEd- WASHINGTON — What word comes to mind when you see the name Donald Trump? For some people, it might be “anger,” since he provokes it and stokes it. For others, it might be “ignorance,” since he knows so little and, like many unburdened by knowledge, is untroubled by facts. Some might say “fear,” since it would take some scary police tactics to push 11 million people over the border to Mexico. For me, none of those words suffices. I would say “betrayal.” It is the word that comes to mind almost on a nightly basis when I see some […]

Categories
Society

America’s Gun-Loving Women, Where Feminism Meets Firearms

Ideal for women ... and kids
Ideal for women ... and kids The Well Armed Woman via Instagram

SCOTTSDALE — In this suburb of Phoenix, Carrie Lightfoot chooses her weapon of the day from a compartment stash under her bed. She’s spoiled for choice: six semi-automatic pistols and a revolver, not to mention the AK-47s and shotguns. The scene looks like something from old westerns, but Lightfoot embodies a contemporary America, where more […]

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Geopolitics

From Hiroshima To Iraq, America’s Long History Of Not Apologizing

From Hiroshima To Iraq, America's Long History Of Not Apologizing
Pete Souza/White House/ZUMA

This week, President Obama will become the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima, the Japanese city that the United States nearly destroyed with a nuclear bomb in 1945. While the bombing is estimated to have killed as many as 150,000 people, Obama is not expected to apologize during his visit. It’s reasonable to ask, after more than 70 years, why not apologize for Hiroshima? One well-worn argument is that the bombing of the city (and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki that followed) was morally justifiable as it was the quickest way to end World War II — a conflict […]

Categories
Future Smarter Cities

Applied Mathematics To Design The Perfect Future City

Applied Mathematics To Design The Perfect Future City
Jordiferrer

“The city is a complex form for which there exists no equivalent in nature…”

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Future Society

At A Texas Body Farm, Studying The Decay Of Donated Corpses

Texas students working on the skeleton of a donated corpse
Texas students working on the skeleton of a donated corpse Texas State University

American forensics researchers place human corpses in so-called “body farms” to study their decomposition for a variety of sometimes surprising reasons.

Categories
Geopolitics Trump And The World

Why Trump’s America Rejects Globalization

A simple message
A simple message Bill Shettle via ZUMA

For the first time in 70 years, Americans have a chance to vote for an outspoken protectionist from a major party. How did we get here?

Categories
Economy Eyes on the U.S.

A Yogurt Story, When Immigrant Dreams Feed American Capitalism

Chosing Chobani
Chosing Chobani Official Facebook page

Twenty years ago, Hamdi Ulukaya, a Kurdish shepherd born in Turkey, grew tired of eating nothing but yogurt, so he came down from the mountains to seek his fortune in New York. For 10 years, he lived the hard life of an immigrant, and over time, came to miss the very yogurt he had once […]

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Trump And The World

How The 2016 Campaign Has Rewritten Debate On Economics

At a Bernie Sanders rally in NYC in January
At a Bernie Sanders rally in NYC in January Angel Zayas/Pacific Press/ZUMA

-Analysis- PARIS — It all adds up to a major mea culpa. For the most prominent economists, the U.S. presidential campaign feels like an act of contrition. Yes, we were wrong about the virtues of global free trade. No, French philosopher Montesquieu’s beloved doux commerce (“gentle commerce”) thesis wasn’t necessarily a win-win recipe for all. […]

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Ideas Trump And The World

Why Hillary Clinton Can Count On Bernie Sanders

Sanders looks to the future
Sanders looks to the future Bill Shettle/ZUMA

-Analysis- WASHINGTON — Eight years ago, I spent an election night in a basement gymnasium in Manhattan, watching Hillary Clinton and her campaign advisers take up residence in a parallel universe. It was June 3, 2008, and Barack Obama had just clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, making official a victory that had seemed inevitable for months. But Terry McAuliffe, then the campaign chairman and emcee of this Clinton “victory” party, recited a list of Clinton’s primary wins and introduced her as “the next president of the United States.” Clinton that night made no mention of her defeat, boasting that she […]

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Trump And The World

For A Damaged Hillary Clinton, Now What?

Clinton in New York on Tuesday night
Clinton in New York on Tuesday night Louise Wateridge/Pacific Press/ZUMA

Though her victory in New York nearly assures a path to the Democratic nominee, the stature of the former Secretary of State has been weakened in her battle with Bernie Sanders. How does she adjust for November?

Categories
Society

When One In Three American Farmers Is A Woman

Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S, Jul. 16, 2013
Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S, Jul. 16, 2013 Marla Brose/ZUMA

Researchers say they would like to learn more about the full contribution these women make, and what the rise of women farmers means for the future of farming and ranching in the United States.

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Trump And The World

Deconstructing The Sexist American Animus Toward Hillary Clinton

Hillary looking
Hillary looking Louise Wateridge via ZUMA

A Polish commentator notes that despite Clinton’s fitness for the job, many see her presidential ambitions through a bigoted lens. She’s not just a woman, but one who doesn’t know her place.

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Geopolitics Ideas

For Latin America, Obama Will Leave A Major Legacy

Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro
Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro Pete Souza/Planet Pix via ZUMA

Barack Obama’s recent trip to Cuba and Argentina are the crowning achievement on his administration’s efforts to consolidate peaceful ties with and among Latin American countries.

Categories
Future Ideas

Speech-Writing Robots Can Parrot Pandering Candidates

Rise of the robotic politicians?
Rise of the robotic politicians? Shadow Robot Company

-OpEd- WASHINGTON, D.C. — Spend enough time watching politicians talk, and pretty soon you’ll have a good idea of how to address the public like a seasoned elected official. No matter the topic, our nation’s leaders invariably find a way to tie things back to members of the hard-working middle-class who just want a fair shot at the American dream, perhaps with a side of help for small business. Lawmakers today might be able to give this kind of political speech in their sleep. But with the way technology is going, they might as well have a robot write it […]

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Geopolitics Society Trump And The World

The United Divided States Of America

At a Trump rally in Warren, Michigan, on March 4
At a Trump rally in Warren, Michigan, on March 4 Detroit Free Press/ZUMA

DETROIT — To reach the heart of the matter in Michigan on a late-winter evening, navigate out of downtown Detroit and drive 20 miles north on Interstate 94, and continue for seven miles, the darkening way lit by the flickering yellowish glow of American commerce, until you reach yet another strip mall at the corner of Schoenherr Road. There, in a storefront headquarters stuck between Buy Buy Baby and Long Tall Sally, members of the Macomb County Republican Party emerge from the cold to watch their presidential candidates debate again on television. In the vast suburban landscape above Detroit, Macomb […]

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Ideas Trump And The World

U.S. Primaries Expose Crisis For Moderates On Both Right And Left

At a Bernie Sanders rally in Missouri
At a Bernie Sanders rally in Missouri Timothy Tai via ZUMA

It’s not just Donald Trump …

Categories
Trump And The World

These 5 World Leaders Share Something With Donald Trump

Planet Trump
Planet Trump Worldcrunch montage

Take 5 — Donald Trump’s Alter Egos, International par Worldcrunch

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Society

Serpico, Iconic Cop Whistleblower On Snowden And Ferguson

Serpico in 2011
Serpico in 2011 Rick Mackler/Globe Photos/ZUMA

At 79, Frank Serpico, the former New York police whistleblower immortalized by Al Pacino is still a rebel at heart, as cranky and idealistic as ever.

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Trump And The World

Donald Trump, The Snowballing Strangelove Effect

Trump in the eye of his supporters
Trump in the eye of his supporters Lexington Herald-Leader/ZUMA

WASHINGTON — As the sun rose on Super Tuesday, the D.C. in-crowd still didn’t fully grasp the power of Donald Trump’s message. Elites bemoan The Donald at cocktail parties and take comfort in calling Trump supporters uneducated. But while the Republican Party plunges into civil war, Trump keeps expanding his base. (He won seven of the 11 states with primaries on Tuesday.) Many readers would probably be stunned by some of the people who are secretly supporting Trump but don’t want to admit it on the record. His coalition includes not just rock-ribbed conservatives and God-fearing evangelicals, but also Ivy […]

Categories
Future

Can I Protect My Car From Hacking? Start By Updating The Software

Inside a Tesla in Geneva
Inside a Tesla in Geneva ZUMA

— You hate them on your phone and dread them on your computer — now, those pesky software updates are coming to your car. Carmakers led by Tesla are pushing over-the-air Wi-Fi and 3G or 4G wireless downloads to add functions such as self-parking and to upgrade performances of their vehicles. It’s prompting suppliers like NXP Semiconductors, Ericsson and Gemalto to celebrate as car builders fight to keep hackers out. “As soon as you connect anything to the Internet, there’s a hacking risk,” said Jonathan Olsson, a security expert at Ericsson, which sells wireless networks to clients from mobile carriers […]

Categories
Society

How Coldplay And Beyonce Tried To Kill Exoticism

How Coldplay And Beyonce Tried To Kill Exoticism

-Essay- CAIRO — Growing up in the United States in the 1980s through the noughties made most of my generation pretty hard to offend. Not because America itself is offensive, though some might argue that point, or because it is so idealistic about free expression that people there respect individuality too much to be offended, […]

Categories
Economy Future

NREL, The Mega Colorado Lab Leading Renewable Energy Revolution

A wind turbine more than 260 feet above the ground at NREL
A wind turbine more than 260 feet above the ground at NREL US Dept of Energy

On the dusty, deserted plains of Colorado, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) works with researchers and the world’s top companies to create the consumer economy of the future, which will be much more environmentally conscious.

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Ideas Trump And The World

Confused And Angry, How U.S. Voters Look In Latin America

A Trump rally last month in Iowa
A Trump rally last month in Iowa Bryce Vickmark via ZUMA

BOGOTA — The U.S. presidential elections have left the two main parties stunned. Amid acrid debates filled with harsh words and the insolence of one billionaire candidate, raw emotions have turned out to be more potent than any substantial solutions proposed by the candidates for their country. Faced with the populism of the tycoon Donald […]

Categories
Eyes on the U.S. Ideas

With Greed For Money, China And U.S. Walk Hand In Hand

A file photo of the legendary Waldorf-Astoria
A file photo of the legendary Waldorf-Astoria thenails

-Essay- NEW YORK — A short news flash in early October 2014 made me shoot out of my comfortable chair. For no particular reason, I felt that the news of a Chinese insurer buying the Waldorf Astoria, the world’s most prestigious hotel, was important. For me, it was as big as when the Chinese bought […]

Exit mobile version