NEW YORK TIMES (US), THE TELEGRAPH (UK), REUTERS Worldcrunch An unfolding sex abuse scandal at the BBC risks spilling over to another premier global news source across the Atlantic. The New York Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, has questioned whether former BBC chief, Mark Thompson, who has been tapped to be the new Times CEO […]
Category: Society
BENI – In the early morning hours, John Kasongo Muhowa, a tractor driver from North Kivu agricultural cooperative, is clearing the undergrowth, plowing up weeds around a two-hectare (5-acre) field where peanuts and corn will be planted. Twenty or so young men from the nearest town are waiting in line to use the tractor, one […]
LE MONDE (France), L’ÉQUIPE (France), CYCLING WEEKLY (UK) Worldcrunch PARIS – Le Tour d’Après. Literally “The Tour, After.” This is the name Christian Prudhomme, the French race’s organizer, has decided to give to the 2013 edition of the Tour de France, which he will be presenting this week at Paris’ Palais des Congrès. “After,” as […]
THE WEST CHINA URBAN DAILY (China), CHINA TIMES (Taiwan) Worldcrunch YANSHI – Xie Guizhi came onto the stage to a burst of applause at a community concert in Yanshi City. The 58-year-old sat at the piano and played a well-known folk song called The Waves of Hong Lake, a so-called red song of China’s Cultural […]
RIA NOVOSTI (Russia) KOMMERSANT (Russia) Worldcrunch MOSCOW – Smokers, so much for the wild East. The public smoking bans already in place in Western Europe look set to expand to Russia by 2015, RIA Novosti reports. The Russian Duma will be voting on new smoking legislation that includes restrictions on advertising and sales of cigarettes, […]
A real-life experiment is playing out in front of computer screens all over the world, as millions of people regularly consume porn. Scientists, who have begun to study the potential consequences, are divided. One person to have addressed the issue very openly is advertising maven Cindy Gallop. In 2009, during a TED conference in Monterrey, […]
LIBERTY TIMES, UNITED DAILY NEWS (Taiwan) Worldcrunch Arson is suspected in an overnight hospital fire in Taiwan that has killed 12 people, the Liberty Times reports. Police say a suspect has been arrested. The fire at North Gate Hospital in Tainan, one of Taiwan’s largest cities, began around 3:30 a.m.. Two other patients are still […]
RADIKAL, KEHABER (Turkey), FINANCIAL TIMES (UK) Worldcrunch ISTANBUL – A Turkish education union has pressed charges over the distribution of anti-Semitic books to schools in Istanbul’s Maltepe district, the daily Radikal reported. “The books include phrases that are unscientific, anti-Semitic, anti-Armenian and humiliate Christians, non-religious people and people with a left-wing philosophy,” read a statement […]
MOSCOW – With winter coming, and the end of this year’s bicycling season, it is worth looking at Russian cities’ relationship with two-wheel transportation. First of all, the number of people choosing to get around by bike has actually become noticeable. In response, Moscow’s city government has started to think seriously for the first time […]
UCI (Switzerland), LE FIGARO (France) Worldcrunch GENEVA – The International Cycling Union (UCI) said it will recognize the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA)”s sanctions against Lance Armstrong, thus stripping the former champion of his seven Tour de France titles and banning him from cycling for life. International Cycling Union president Pat McQuaid revealed Monday that […]
Why it is time for British art to leave its bad boy behind.
UMOJA – In a wooden hut in Archer’s Post, a small settlement in Kenya, three men of the Samburu tribe are drinking tea. The eldest is wrapped in a red-and-white checked cloth; the other two wear shirts and jeans. Nothing much going on, so they are happy to talk. Question: Why should only men have […]
PYONGYANG – The austere, angular façade of the Taedongmun movie theater, surmounted by large statues depicting a worker, a soldier and a peasant, gives off an air of power and authority. The date of construction, 1955, is carved into the building, which stands close to Kim Il-sung Square, near the center of the North Korean […]
CASABLANCA – Cafés are a public space like any other. Theoretically, nothing prevents women from entering one. But too many women still will not frequent certain cafés, which are always occupied almost entirely by men. Obviously, we are not talking about chic cafés in the center of town. When they have the choice, some women […]
AMBOSELI TRUST FOR ELEPHANTS (Kenya), AAP (Australia) Worldcrunch They say elephants never forget. We humans don’t either. When the Amboseli Trust for Elephants organization in Kenya learned of a baby elephant calf stuck in a 1.5-meter well somewhere on the savannah, there was only one thing to do: Jump in the SUV, hurtle toward the […]
GOMA – For the past 30 years, Dufina Tabu has been defending human rights in Goma, the capital of the North Kivu province in Congo. Tall and thin, with white hair, Dufina is a forthright man. He inherited his frankness, he says, from his father, a progressive man who worked as an accountant for the […]
-Analysis- In September, China’s National Development and Reform Commission announced that China’s highways would be toll-free during the Golden Week national holiday. To boost domestic tourism, certain local governments, such as in Jiangsu Province, also passed a decree banning price hikes on tourist attractions during the eight-day holiday break, which this year combined the Mid-Autumn […]
-Essay- PARIS – Twitter is a great tool, capable of changing lives. It opens a window on the world, an embodiment of a new kind of digital solidarity. All the same, in the past few days, many people in France had an eye-opening experience as they discovered Twitter’s unsavory side. The anti-Semitic hashtag #unbonjuif (#agoodjew), […]
DER SPIEGEL, HANNOVERSCHE ALLGEMEINE (Germany), FRANCE 24, AFP (France) Worldcrunch Twitter has agreed to block content from a neo-Nazi account at the request of German authorities. For the first time in its short history, Twitter has censored tweets in a specific country. The microblogging service has had the capacity since January 2012 to block tweets […]
MEXICO CITY – More blood and more death. Mexico’s drug wars seem to be getting crueler and more sadistic by the year. Of all the players involved, probably no one is more responsible for the increasing violence than Miguel Angel Treviño, a.k.a. ‘Z-40,’ who has just taken over control of the notorious Los Zetas cartel […]
PARIS – Although Switzerland’s Art Basel is still incontestably the top fair for contemporary art, London’s Frieze, which took place last week at Regent’s Park, and Paris’s FIAC, which begins Thursday, are now sharing the second place on the podium. “Each fair has a different identity and energy. Paris is more established, while London is […]
CLARIN (Argentina) NEW YORK TIMES (U.S.) Worldcrunch BUENOS AIRES – To combat violence in soccer, both on and off the field, a new law in Argentina will require each top league team to have a security chief who reports directly to the Ministry of Defense, Clarin reports. The role must be filled by someone who […]
THE BOOKER PRIZE FOUNDATION, TELEGRAPH, GUARDIAN, INDEPENDENT (UK) Worldcrunch LONDON – The 2012 Man Booker Prize has been awarded to British author Hilary Mantel for her novel Bring Up The Bodies. Mantel is both the first woman and the first British author to win the prize twice, the Booker Prize Foundation noted Wednesday in announcing […]
MOSCOW – The first third of Srdzhan Dragoevich’s new film, The Parade, will bring a smile to even the gloomiest of faces. It’s a silly, rude comedy that is meant to be fun for the viewers. It is also very much a film with a message about tolerance for homosexuals, as well as for those […]
LA RAZÓN (Spain) Worldcrunch Spanish police arrested more than 80 people in a well-orchestrated raid against the Chinese mafia. According to Spanish newspaper La Razón, the police action, nicknamed Operación Emperador (Operation Emperor), was aimed at money laundering by Chinese criminal organizations. Up to 300 million euros a year transited in this way to launder […]
LE MONDE, AFP, (France), REUTERS Worldcrunch PARIS – Like the United States, France now finds itself in front of an open “reparations question” for its past role in slavery. Visiting Africa for the first time since his election, French President François Hollande found himself entangled in the thorny question of compensation for the descendents of […]
LE MONDE (France), DW-TV (Germany) EFE Worldcrunch From London, Barcelona, and Rio de Janeiro, the list of cities worldwide that are being enticed by the allure of suspended cable cars is growing, heralded as a cheap, green and safe means of transport suspended above the normal rush of urban traffic. Although the cable car systems […]
Contemporary French historian Henri Rousso’s seminal book Syndrome de Vichy (The Vichy Syndrome) came out in 1987. Its subject was the way the French dealt with the Nazi occupation, and it in Rousso coined an iconic phrase: “The past that does not pass…” Now, however, Rousso says, “The past is past. It’s not forgotten, but […]
MOSCOW – The traffic jams in Russia’s capital have become world-famous in the last several years, so bad that in 2010 the Federal Government decided to address the problem directly. At the time, then-President Dimitri Medvedev commissioned a plan for the development of Moscow’s transportation system through the year 2020 that aims to get Muscovites […]
SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG, SUDWEST PRESSE, RHEINISCHE POST, BERLINER ZEITUNG (Germany) Worldcrunch Germany’s Minister of Education and Research, Prof. Dr. Annette Schavan, has criticized the University of Düsseldorf for allegedly informing the press about the results of a report on plagiarism in her doctoral thesis before she herself had been informed of the existence of the report. […]
BONN – “You have to use violence to defend Islamic values?” asks the judge. “Yes, of course,” Murat K. replies. Five months after he attacked police officers with a knife, the 26-year-old Salafist came clean in the courtroom: it was his duty, he said, to wound the police officers. The officers in question are veterans, […]
TAMAQUITO II – When a new baby is born in Tamaquito II, a Wayúu indigenous settlement in La Guajira, in northern Colombia, the child’s family digs a hole near its pichi (hut) and buries the umbilical cord. The Wayúu practice this ancestral ritual as a way to connect to the land, to remind themselves where […]
PARIS – At every exhibit opening, he takes off his shirt, sits on a pedestal, his back to the public, waiting for a visitor he will never see and doesn’t want to hear. Turning on his MP3 player in order to block out cruel comments and hurtful jokes is part of the ritual. Tim Steiner […]
MOSCOW – Russia is going through a home-grown adoption boom. In the changing landscape of adoption, 6,700 children were adopted or placed with foster parents inside of Russia last year. It is a marked change since the mid-2000s, when most adoptive parents were foreigners. Now the majority of Russian adoptees are adopted by Russian parents. […]
CHINA TIMES, ORIENTAL MORNING POST, SINA (China) Worldcrunch LANZHOU – The Yellow River has no lid, why don’t you jump in…!? For Chinese who live along the river, this old expression is used when an argument heats up. But in the last few days, with reports by the Oriental Morning Post that hundreds of corpses […]
FRANKFURT – Even before the world’s biggest book fair opened this week in Frankfurt, figures from a study conducted by the PwC consulting firm added more worry for printed book dealers about the uncertain future of their trade. According to the study, released Tuesday, demand for e-books is getting ever-larger in Germany. By 2015, the […]
TABOÃO DA SERRA – It was Tuesday, 2 a.m., and D. was lying on her sofa, trying to get some sleep. Bang…Bang…Bang. “It sounded like somebody was shooting inside here,” she recalled. D. crouched, waited for the shots to stop, and left home to check the street. She opened the front door and, three meters […]
NOBELPRIZE.ORG (Sweden) Worldcrunch STOCKHOLM – The 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to 57-year-old Chinese writer Mo Yan. 2012 #NobelPrize in #Literature was awarded to Mo Yan “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” — Nobelprize_org (@Nobelprize_org) October 11, 2012 The official site of the Nobel Prize describes Mo […]
KIGALI – In Rwanda, getting married has always been a complicated affair. Before anything, the families of the bride and groom sit down for a long negotiation. Once they have exchanged gifts and agreed that the couple should indeed marry, and of course settled on what the dowry will be, the traditional wedding can start. […]
GELSENKIRCHEN – It was just a few days before summer break that nine-year-old Lisa Bahlhaus (not her real name) came home in tears. The teacher had announced that after the school holidays the whole class would be presenting a play, and she’d assigned roles. Of all the kids, only Lisa didn’t get a role. The […]