WorldcrunchStay 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.
Tuesday’s fiscal agreement defuses the fiscal cliff by deferring most tax hikes and pushing back the sequester. A deal has been made, a financial crash avoided, and near-term growth prospects look rosier. Markets have cheered news of the agreement. Is such cheer warranted? That depends on what happens next. By itself, the package raises little […]
PARIS – Hurricane Sandy in the U.S., the tsunami in Japan or the eruption of the Eyjafjoll volcano in Iceland. Could the rising tide of such natural disasters be explained by man’s voluntary action? Could these cataclysms be triggered deliberately by the army, for political reasons? For years, these conspiracy theories, relayed generously on the […]
Forget New York, Washington, Boston, Houston, Miami and Chicago. Starbucks, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Hooters, Checkers, Target, Best Buy, 7/11, CVS, Wal-Mart, Family Dollar? Well, forget them too. If you’re looking for the soul of America, get in your car and drive out to back country. Where nothing happens. Nothing at all. Like Hollywood, […]
GENEVA – To distinguish themselves from Facebook and Twitter, new social networks are trying to find a different economic model. A trend is emerging – the return to paid subscriptions. From App.net to Diaspora, here is a short review of these new actors. App.net, the paying Twitter “We are selling our product, not our users.” […]
Bob McMahon and I typically use our weekly podcast to discuss major foreign policy issues likely to be in the news in the coming week. In honor of the approaching New Year, we decided to change things up and examine the issues likely to dominate world politics in 2013. We discussed a sluggish global economy; […]
Americans started eating out a lot more over the past thirty years, a trend that likely caused obesity rates to skyrocket, according to a new USDA report. The study tracked caloric and nutrient consumption at home versus restaurants, fast food establishments and schools between 1978 and 2008. Their results: Over the past 30 years, food […]
For investors just getting into the game, the process can seem a little bit like a middle school dance. Awkward and inexperienced, they suction-cup themselves to the walls and poke around the punch bowl while bullish professionals stampede the floor and steal all the good deals. Ever thought you might be selling yourself a little […]
Using lasers for tracking objects through the sky has been possible for years, but there’s never been anything like Lockheed’s new laser defense system successfully tested last week. It’s not that using high-powered lasers to drop incoming missiles is anything new, and was achieved by Boeing with a nine-year Air Force project that was canceled […]
PARIS – As the end of the year approaches, it is difficult to escape the gift-giving madness. Santa has the family covered, of course, but the office is a different matter. Here, a postman replaces the old man with the red coat. The person who sent the present is rarely from Lapland – most often […]
PARIS – Adam Lanza, killer of 20 children and seven adults, including his mother, is a mass murderer – he murdered a large number of people in a short time in one place. He then committed suicide in a classroom. Ending your life or having the police shoot you dead is often part of the […]
NASA and others have chimed in on the likelihood of black holes, solar flares striking on Dec. 21.
-Essay- BERLIN – My five-year-old son Finn goes to an American kindergarten – a place just like Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Bethlehem in Pennsylvania is about as far from Philadelphia as Newtown is from New York – in their own way, both are typical U.S. East Coast towns. Finn’s school even looks […]
-OpEd- PARIS – America is crying for its children. The country is in mourning, after the Connecticut elementary school shooting that left 28 dead, including 20 children between the ages of six and seven. President Barack Obama shed real tears as he was listing the number of recent shootings: “These neighborhoods are our neighborhoods, and […]
Twenty of the victims are reportedly children. The gunman, a son of a kindergarten teacher at the school, killed himself.
-Film Review- PARIS – Since December 2001, movie fans all over the world have been divided into two categories. On one side, you have the Peter Jackson fans – the “chosen ones,” possessed by an unwavering and somewhat disturbing faith, and on the other side, you have the heretics, pagans and other trolls of the […]
Seniors Demographic Reaches Social Media Tipping Point.
-OP-ED- PARIS – Israel and Palestine, two states living side by side in fair and sustainable peace. This is, for any genuinely pro-democracy advocate – be they Jewish or Arab – the deeper meaning and the real political impact of the vote that took place Thursday at the United Nations General Assembly. Yet this upgrade […]
-OpEd- BERLIN – The resignation of David Petraeus as head of the CIA means that we can once again play that great political guessing game that measures the gap between what’s being said and the real reasons behind what’s happened. It is apparent yet again that moving out of public office is almost as difficult […]
-Analysis- NEW YORK – Not long ago, China replaced the United States as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet. And now the International Energy Agency (IEA) is predicting two things: the first is that the U.S. will be the world’s biggest oil producer in the next 10 years. The second is that […]
To say that the U.S. is more divided than ever has become a cliché. The country has been largely divided down the middle ever since Ronald Reagan’s runaway victories in the 1980 and 1984 elections, when the Republican candidate won respectively 44 and 49 out of the 50 U.S. states. What Americans call “a landslide” […]
-Analysis- Barack Obama’s reelection to a second term in the White House is in spectacular contradiction to the trend in Western politics since the beginning of the current economic crisis. One after another, Western leaders have been dumped by voters who have made them pay for the effects of the crisis and the austerity measures […]
-Editorial- MUNICH – Obama’s victory is not a shining victory. The president stays president. But Americans did not re-elect Barack Obama because they thought his first four years were so grand and convincing. America’s voters were perfectly prepared to fire him – they just weren’t ready to vote Mitt Romney in to replace him. The […]
WASHINGTON D.C. – As the campaign draws to a close, the American people have been hit by a barrage of promises of a better, more civil future. The two candidates have vowed, even sworn, that they will work harder with the opposition. Mitt Romney mentioned it first in one of his advertisements and confirmed it […]
PARIS – Naive or arrogant? Daring or cautious? Four years after he entered the White House, Obama remains an enigma. Naive or cunning?“I never saw someone so competitive. What is the only thing that Barack Obama hates more than losing? Losing twice,” confides Robert Gibbs, his former press advisor. But Obama wants to win fair […]
DETROIT – An old woman stands in front of a one-armed bandit with a half-lit cigarette between her lips. She takes tokens out of a bucket of popcorn and slides them endlessly into the same slot. You can tell she has been doing this for years. Further in, at the blackjack table, two young men […]
WASHINGTON – As Mitt Romney would say, it’s a particularly well-stuffed “binder full of women.” The 2012 vintage of candidates for public office is one of the best — at least in terms of quantity. More women are running for Congress this year than ever before. The newspapers are comparing it to the 1992 so-called […]
-Essay- Chinese-Americans account for 1.5-2% of the population in the United States, while Asian-Americans taken altogether account for 6%. In comparison, Jews account for only about 2%, but the positions that the two ethnic groups occupy in the eyes of American politicians are not comparable. Rudolph Giuliani, the New York mayor, once rushed to the […]
-Analysis- SANTIAGO – If Mitt Romney’s Mexican father had been deported or had not been able to enter the United States in July 1912, the Republican candidate would not have been born in Detroit in March 1947, Bain Capital would not have existed and, most probably, the citizens of the state of Massachusetts would not […]
A French reporter travels to the heart of the most pivotal swing state in the Obama v. Romney showdown where economic uncertainty is the only sure thing.
For months, free smartphone instant messaging service WhatsApp has been topping the download charts. It is a favorite application for both iPhone and Android users. To the annoyance of cell phone providers, WhatsApp has become a kind of quasi replacement for the old fee-based SMS. According to WhatsApp developers, their servers handle over 10 billion […]
CHARLOTTE – No, Obamania is not a thing of the past, quite the opposite in fact. Michelle and Barack hugging, Barack with his dog Bo, the complete family portrait… all plastered on t-shirts, books, photos, pajamas, pins, badges, mugs, cushions and posters. “Business is picking up fast,” says Delia, who has sold more than 400 […]
BEIJING – Conduct a survey anywhere in the world and ask respondents to describe the United States with one word, many will surely choose the word “arrogant.” In their view, this superpower has become synonymous with conceit and a bald sense of superiority. In Lord Acton’s famous words: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Typically, such people […]
PALO ALTO – Daphne Koller has a grudge against school. As a child, Israeli-born Koller wanted to solve third degree equations and learn more about dancing, Ancient Greece and poetry. But like any other pupil, she had to follow the curriculum and adapt to the system. Her thirst for learning faced the limits of mainstream […]
Over 150 years ago the Gold Rush began in California. It made some people very rich, but most people who were a part of it were only enriched by the experience. Today, the state is making people dream again – but this time it’s silicon, not gold, that’s making them see big. The half-metal is […]