Worldcrunch
-Editorial- SANTIAGO – In the morning on Jan. 4 in Araucania, a region in southern Chile where the Mapuche people live, a group of masked men attacked and set fire to the house of a local landowner and farmer who had spent years litigating with indigenous groups. The landowner, Werner Luchsinger and his wife were […]
TOULOUSE – Will we be forced to eat spiders, larvae, crickets and other creepy-crawlers in the near future? In the face of mounting demographic pressures, we may be faced with this question sooner rather than later. “With 20 billion cattle, twice the number of the 1980s, the earth has reached its maximum number of ruminants. […]
XINHUA (China), LIANHE ZAOBAO (Singapore), CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY (Taiwan) BEIJING – China’s new leaders have adopted new measures to cut back on government perks and outright corruption, but there’s at least one sector of society that is not pleased: the catering industry. On Dec 4, the newly elected Politburo Standing Committee adopted eight measures to […]
In 1981, Issei Sagawa, a Japanese student in Paris killed and ate a fellow students. A French classmate stayed in touch with Sagawa, and now tries to make sense of the macabre.
-Essay- BEIJING – Recently, a fire killed seven children in a private orphanage in the Eastern Chinese town of Lankao. The woman who runs the Henan province orphanage, Yuan Lihai, called “Loving Mother” by locals, became a controversial figure overnight, even though she has cared for more than 100 abandoned children over the past 20 […]
DIE WELT (Germany) Worldcrunch BERLIN – The German Police has launched a special investigation codenamed “Tunnel” in the search for the perpetrators of a spectacular break-in at a Berlin bank. According to Die Welt, the thieves dug 100-foot long tunnel from a neighboring underground garage into the safety deposit box vault of the Volksbank in […]
CORRIERE FIORENTINO, LA STAMPA, LA REPUBBLICA (Italy) Worldcrunch ROME – Meet Tommy and Toldo, two Italian pets deeply attached to their owners. In fact, they’re still searching for them, months after they died. Tommy is a German Shepard who lives in the town of San Donaci in the southern region of Puglia. He goes to […]
BUENOS AIRES – For some people, it’s a powerful sign of the crisis in the luxury market in Argentina. For others, it’s more a sign of the frivolity and stupidity of the Argentine elite – the opening of a Chinese supermarket on the Avenida Alvear, Buenos Aires’s most prestigious shopping street, has roiled passions. The […]
French sex symbol turned animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot is shining a light on Baby and Nepal, two former circus elephants infected with tuberculosis, now facing euthanasia.
MUNICH – Our meeting takes place at Munich’s old Jewish synagogue on Reichenbachstrasse. Rachel Salamander and her Synagogue Reichenbachstrasse charity co-chair, attorney Ron Jakubowicz, are telling us about their plans for the synagogue’s future. The mission of the charity, which was launched in November 2011, is to save and restore the pre-war synagogue that was […]
Local memories and a final salute from French-speaking Switzerland to the founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival, who died on January 10.
BBC, THE GUARDIAN (UK) Worldcrunch NEW YORK– Dan Brown, the bestselling author of the Da Vinci Code, is set to release a new novel on May 14. According to The Guardian, Dan Brown’s dapper, tweed-suited symbologist Robert Langdon, the man who cracked The Da Vinci Code and found The Lost Symbol, is about to embark […]
BENI – Gisèle Masika, a young divorced woman from this Congolese city, says she wants nothing of her aunt’s life as a housewife. “My aunt can’t do anything, her husband takes care of everything, and he has no consideration for her,” she says. Like other women in Beni, in northeastern Congo, Masika decided to learn […]
Worldcrunch LOS ANGELES – The 70th Golden Globes ceremony took place Sunday night in Los Angeles, bringing together Television and Cinema… surprise and predictability. Here’s what happened: 1. After being snubbed at the Oscar nominations, Ben Affleck’s drama “Argo” about the hostage crisis in Iran, won Best Picture, Drama, (and Director) beating tough competition from […]
LAMINGAN – It’s late November, patches of a green mountainous landscape are piercing through the morning fog. They follow a regular pattern, typical of palm oil plantations. The trees’ bases are surrounded by burned vegetation – a sign that pesticides were used. The palm oil plantation, started in 2005 by Nakeen, a subsidiary of the […]
BUENOS AIRES – The organization of the 1934 World Cup in Italy by Mussolini and the 1936 Olympics in Germany by Hitler helped those governments legitimize their regimes around the globe. Sport in general – and soccer in particular – is a phenomenon that integrates society, promotes values and arouses a large interest amongst very […]
GURGAON – Shoes are not allowed on the foam mat. We are surrounded by the noise of fists hitting the leather of the punching bags, the high-paced breathing of two fighters training one-on-one. We are in Gurgao, in the suburbs southwest of New Delhi, a snapshot of the fast-developing India with its shiny new buildings. […]
Some provocative studies are cited as the debate heats up in France over a law to legalize gay marriage.
ISTANBUL – Early-term abortions are still legal in Turkey, though Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan made his own opposition clear last year, calling abortion “murder.” There was also at least one case of a woman who had an abortion after the 10th week facing three years in jail, in a country with an increasingly pious […]
TUBUAI – For the past 30 years, local residents from the Austral Islands have been dumping their garbage just a few kilometers from the Tubuai airport, in the swamps. “When the hole starts to overflow, we pack it with machines, we fill the hole and dig a new one,” explains Therese, who owns a bed […]
MUNICH – A major research project set up to shed light on sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Germany has been shelved, according to information obtained by Süddeutsche Zeitung. Germany’s Catholic Church has cancelled the project, and a letter to that effect has been sent by the German Bishops’ Conference to the Criminal Research Institute […]
BBC MUNDO (UK), CLARIN (Argentina) RIO DE JANEIRO – The 2014 World Cup in Brazil is just 18 months away, and the entire nation is preparing. Local prostitutes, for their part, are getting ready to make sure they can keep up with the expected influx of international visitors by studying English, French, and Italian, as […]
BEIJING – In the history of Eastern and Western art, the aesthetic standards for painting have been more or less the same. The most esteemed paintings were large scenes with people in them. They can be broken down into the two categories, of either historical or religious nature. The classic scene of Christ being taken […]
LE POINT, LE PROGRÈS (France) Worldcrunch PARIS – It’s been an eventful couple of days for French actor Gérard Depardieu. Or is it Belgian actor Gérard Depardieu? Wait, you said Russian? In case you’re having trouble keeping up with Gégé’s moves, here’s a quick overview of what’s happened the past three days in the life […]
PARIS – For the past ten years, Mundiya, head of the Hulis tribe, has been traveling across France, finding things, movies… to bring home with him to his native Papua New Guinea. His last find – three showgirls from the Lido. There are many things Mundiya Kepanga could export to France. He could start by […]
VATICAN CITY – The last few days before he was ordained archbishop at St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, “Don Giorgio” Gänswein was without his iPhone or PC, and also well away from the landlines and fax machines and the Vatican’s old-fashioned pneumatic and courier mail systems that are still so much a part of his […]
Smuggled in from Burma and North Korea, meth is flooding Chinese mean streets.
Worldcrunch ZURICH – The results for Golden Ball 2012 killed any remaining doubt over who is our era’s undisputed emperor of the soccer planet. FC Barcelona’s Lionel Messi won his fourth straight trophy for best player of the year, the first to notch that record for a man whose talent seems to know no limits. […]
MUNICH – Wearing a bright checked shirt, the man is strikingly tall, fit, with very short brown hair and brown eyes. He smiles a lot. Right now he’s looking for a suitable female partner – not in cafés or bars as such a search might have been conducted just a few short years ago, but […]
-Essay- BEIJING – There has been a succession of dynasties in China’s long history, but Chinese culture has always followed the same basic ideology. This ideology is composed of ideas from three sources: the Book of Changes, Confucianism, and Taoism. Today, if we want to export the soft power of Chinese culture, we must first […]
A new L.A. exhibit shows the legendary director’s concern that IBM, which advised him on “2001: A Space Odyssey,” would not be happy with the 1968 classic’s scary tech storyline.
In Colorado, meet the nation’s first newspaper weed critic.
BEIJING TIMES (CHINA) CHINA TIMES (Taiwan) Worldcrunch BEIJING – Over the last few days, China’s blogosphere has been heating up with spicy rumors that could stretch all the way back to Silicon Valley: a female director of the China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (SINOPEC) has been accused of accepting gigolos as bribes from an American […]
The Number 13 has a long history of being blamed for bad luck. But some spiritual and superstitious folk in South America have a good feeling about the coming year.
PARIS – Founded in 1713, the Paris Opera Ballet is about to celebrate 300 years of innovations, while continuing to transmit its classical repertoire. This festive season, as always, the Ballet is a huge success. Whether it is for its 26 performances of the classic “Don Quixote” at the Bastille Opera; the 21 nights dedicated […]
GOMA – While the Congolese government was keeping the public in the dark about the fall of Goma to the M23 rebels in mid-November, here the news had already gone viral on Facebook. Soon after the rest of Congo was checking in on a variety of social networks to follow news updates and the latest […]
ALEPPO – As a man cleans his Kalashnikov, another next to him is peeling garlic for supper. At his feet, the assigned cook has left his pistol and his knitting, with the needles stuck inside – it is a striped scarf with the colors of the rebellion. A small fire is lighting up the walls […]
PARIS – Do the Internet and digital devices make us happier and more efficient. Or do they just make us less intelligent? Two new books try to answer the question asked by Nichols Carr in The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. Italian linguist Raffaele Simone and French philosopher Jean-Michel Besnier deliver […]
NUREMBERG – Paul wanted glitter on his Christmas tree ornament; at his age – six – he doesn’t think glitter is too girly. His dad took in the request and patiently started applying the glitter to the wet paint of the ornament they’re making together. “What does an angel look like?” a little boy at […]
LE MONDE, EUROPE 1 (France) Worldcrunch MOSCOW- The Kremlin has issued a press release stating that Vladimir Putin had signed a decree on Thursday granting French movie legend Gerard Depardieu Russian citizenship if he ever needed it. The actor confirmed it to his friends in a Parisian restaurant Tuesday: “Putin has already sent me a […]