A chronicle of one organization’s determination to point Syrian refugees toward a better future through innovative education.
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.
A persistent drought is threatening California’s storied vineyards, which employ hundreds of thousands in the Golden State alone. But there is still water, for now.
It is politically reasonable for President Obama to want to focus on problems at home. But his fainthearted foreign policy approach has contributed to global volatility.
-OpEd SANTIAGO — Over the past half-century, two fundamental social changes have taken place in the United States around the issue of race. One was the end of segregation laws that explicitly discriminated against African-Americans, and the other was the decline in racial prejudices. Polls show that such racist sentiments among individuals persist today in […]
PALO ALTO — Tucked away on Waverley Street in Palo Alto, California, the house where Steve Jobs used to live is an inconspicuous brick Tudor with rambling roses climbing all over. As one of the residential areas favored by Silicon Valley software engineers, a big house here usually costs well above $10 million. Over the […]
NEW YORK — Four different credit and bank cards, an International press card, a health insurance card and a gym membership card, a monthly MetroCard for the New York subway, a couple of prepaid international phone cards — probably expired — and $32 in cash. In the inside pocket, my Italian driver’s license and a […]
It is time to start asking harder questions about the world’s largest company, both how it runs its business and how it conditions our lives.
Though a shadow of its former self, the Ku Klux Klan has registered a small uptick since Barack Obama’s election and the Ferguson riots. Here’s how it looks from one senior member who lives in a Tennessee trailer.
The Obama administration says, try talking to truculent states instead of squeezing or bombing them. In its own way, this is an eminently imperial approach.
An entire industry has been built to exploit Chinese couples desperate desire for their children to obtain U.S. or Canadian passports. But because the process requires both operators and clients to distort the truth, homeland security has launched a crack
PARIS — First there was the campus. Next up Facebook city. The size of the “Zee town” project Mark Zuckerberg announced in February surprised many: For an estimated $200 billion, the king of social networks plans to build what will essentialy be an entire town — a 200-acre development in California’s Silicon Valley featuring supermarkets, […]
You may know torch songs from Rihanna, but what about Enheduanna? In ancient Mesopotamia, she wrote the very first love songs, holding back very little. Watch her burn …
As an internationally renowned cryptography expert, American Bruce Schneier used to be a welcome visitor everywhere. But that’s no longer the case. “I used to be popular with the National Security Agency,” he says. “They used to invite me to their seminars, they listened to my advice. But it’s over. I was very critical after […]
The modern-day successors of ragmen, New York’s trash pickers (or “canners”) are credited with recycling 60% of the city’s glass and aluminum. Why don’t we notice this hidden economy?
A native of China’s bustling capital who studied in the U.S. and UK felt more embraced as a local abroad than in a new Chinese city. Inside the native-foreigner divide.
And it will happen sooner than you think…
-OpEd- BOGOTA — Skokie is a mostly Jewish district outside of Chicago, Illinois. In 1977, the far-right National Socialist Party of America decided to organize a march there, which the scandalized residents, including thousands of Holocaust survivors, naturally sought to stop, arguing it would incite hatred and lead to violence. But the ACLU, the American […]
Art Week and the sumptuous events around its star show, Art Basel Miami Beach, was a perfect showcase not just for art, but also guiltless expenditure of vast amounts of cold hard cash.
To the surprise of many, the family of legendary novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez sold his personal papers to the University of Texas. It’s nothing political – but all about posterity, and money of course.
Categories
The Blurry Future Of Google Glass
Though Google’s new technology was once hailed as revolutionary, product disappointment has set in and technology watchers are predicting that Google Glass is doomed.
After World War II, it was SS prisoners in Germany’s Landsberg prison. After 9-11, it was Guantanamo. The U.S. repeats its sins, but also repeats its repentance.
The dominant economic idea used to be to cut all barriers to capital flows, the so-called Washington Consensus. But since the 2008 financial collapse, the tech industry’s hold on global consumption rules the day, and anything impeding it is considere
For Renaud Laplanche, it all began with a credit card statement that seemed all wrong. Now, after helping to bring banking into the digital era, it’s time for a major IPO for his SF-based firm.
With its 391 units spread among 46 floors, the glass tower has transformed south Manhattan’s skyline. But it has been an utter business failure.
The midterm elections were a stinging defeat for Barack Obama. But it was also a wholesale indictment of U.S. politics, which is both disturbing and confounding when viewed from abroad.
A second Obica location has now opened in New York, bringing the global chain’s high-end authentic mozzarella experience to a new level of global expansion.
While elsewhere the ‘Obama factor’ may hurt Democrats, in South Dakota the Sioux tribe may tip the scales in the president’s favor as control of the U.S. Senate hangs in the balance.
Looking at the business fundamentals, there are both very good and very bad signs for Microsoft’s new CEO Satya Nadella. Is there a (positive) lesson in IBM’s evolution?
DALLAS — Greg Lucas wasn’t feeling at the top of his game. He’d gained weight, and the machines at the gym filled him with apprehension. “Sex wasn’t tops, but that wasn’t the problem,” he says. “I felt tired. I was dragging myself around.” Lucas was then 25 years old. He decided to go and see […]
A German expat in California explains why American microbrews get it all wrong.
The only way to eradicate the destructive lionfish, non-native to the Atlantic Ocean and now endangering prey species along the U.S. coast, may be to eat it. But mind the venom.
Barack Obama is governing in a much different world than his predecessors. How will his foreign policy be remembered? Who does he most emulate? Hint: It’s not Jimmy Carter.
It is nearly too little, nearly too late, but there is still a way for the U.S. President to be the leader the world needs in the face of ISIS extremism.
With its racist ideology and its customs from another era, the KKK is still poisoning the minds of children and wreaking havoc. The movement aspires to create a “new white America.”
The author of a new book on the U.S. drone program reveals an early attempt to pilot drones out of Germany, without the German government’s knowledge.
OXFORD — The walls in this Oxford, Mississippi, bookstore are covered with pictures of authors. One by one, Richard Howorth comments on them, as if this place were an open book narrating a multitude of unfinished stories. With his wife, this keen-eyed slender man with a dry humor has owned and managed Square Books, housed […]
After 15 years of living and working in the United States, a Die Welt correspondent says good-bye, not only to his adopted country but also to the pre-9/11 grandeur the U.S. once enjoyed.
Many countries agree that the U.S. politicizes the dollar by punishing nations who don’t abide by U.S. sanctions. With this American approach comes isolation, and the risk of the dollar being replaced as global currency.
As disturbing as it is, what’s happening in Ferguson, Missouri, is simply evidence of American police becoming increasingly militarized, a trend that’s been building for years.
President Barack Obama’s decision on the limited U.S. intervention in Iraq seems to have no long-term strategy behind it. Even Obama seems to know that.