Demarkated by the British for tax purposes, these villages have since been swallowed by India’s massive capital city, but continue to stand apart in terms of zoning and design.
Category: Society
Registering facial recognition data with a biometric authentication application is all the rage in China, but it comes with major privacy concerns.
There’s a fundamental flaw in the case being made against certain grammatically gendered nouns.
The coronavirus crisis has been stressful and tedious. But it’s also a reminder that we can’t have everything we want, when we want it. And that, in many ways, is a good thing.
As the European Commission targets U.S. retail giant Amazon for alleged antitrust violations, David Barroux in French business daily Les Echos offers his own take.
-Essay- PARIS — Every aspiring strongman must fulfill a number of prerequisites. He should be skilled at demonizing his opponents and intimidating his allies, manipulating the media and restricting free speech — all the while mixing different doses of serial lying, fear-mongering and nationalism to rile up the masses. But, of course, the long-term success […]
Most Tunisian men in the Sicilian port town of Mazara del Vallo work in the fishing industry. But while they’re out at sea, their wives stay home, where the rules of tradition leave little room for integration.
From the moment the movie began, I had a funny feeling. First, there were no opening credits — nothing to tell us who the producers or director were nor what famous actors would appear. No sign of even the author’s name, like they showed in The Godfather. But I had seen Batman Begins, so I […]
Rafaela Dutra was working in Rio de Janeiro’s tourism industry and studying to become a nurse when the coronavirus arrived. A resident of the sprawling low-income favelas in the city’s Zona Norte, she had worked in one of Copacabana’s shiny, high-rise hotels, earning up to twice the region’s minimum monthly wage of 1,200 reais ($220). […]
Across the globe, travel restrictions, stay-at-home orders and shifting health care priorities have combined to make abortion an even more difficult procedure to obtain.
“Zeitgeist,” “Kindergarten,” “Wanderlust” have long since made it into international speak. Since we found out that U.S. President Donald Trump was infected with coronavirus, another popular German word has been spreading.
Attitudes are shifting in countries with both a communist past and strong Christian roots.
Swedish-born, Paris-based writer Carl-Johan Karlsson has been seeing “dead museums” since the pandemic arrived… and even earlier.
“Amazon is ‘un-Swedish”…” Yes, in my country too, you’d probably hear something called osvenskt in one of those low-budget conference halls where “patriots’ gather to drink domestic beer and worry about the Moderland. So, you’ll be surprised that slap at the U.S. e-retailer was delivered by my old Swedish Econ101 professor, 10 years ago, as […]
Hindutva is a menace of Indian society, and to confront it head on, liberals need to stop celebrating the supposedly tolerant Hinduism of yesteryear, historian Partha Pratim Shil argues.
In southern France, a family asked the local elementary school to call their child a new name.
A recent speech by former ECB chief Mario Draghi hit close to home in his native country.
The pandemic closed classrooms and pushed the education process online. It was a desperate measure for desperate times that avoided the worst, but shouldn’t be the norm.
Long before his sex scandal took over the front pages, every Swede knew Paolo Roberto. The son of an Italian father and Swedish mother, Roberto gained some notoriety in his teens as a street fighter, eventually earning a place on the police’s national list of “10 most dangerous youths’. After turning things around following a […]
Families, neighborhoods and even the remains of loved ones are bulldozed over in order to build new highways and other works without the input of the people.
Argentina must boost its scientific activities in the South Atlantic and maintain diplomatic pressures on Great Britain as part of its efforts to recover the Falklands.
Although the coronavirus pandemic is dominating global politics, Swedish environmentalist Greta Thunberg and her peers are hoping to turn their activism into tangible policy change.
A chocolate museum nestled in Spain’s small town of Astorga reveals how an exotic delicacy became a veritable ‘opium of the masses.’
The opponents of ‘Europe’s last dictator’ are trying to avoid loss of life and focusing new energy on labor strikes.
BERLIN — Germans are feeling the heat. For almost a week now, temperatures have been over 86 °F (30 °C) in most of the country, and every day a local council pleads with its residents not to fill up their paddling pools again. Last weekend, authorities asked residents of Lauenau in Lower Saxony to buy […]
Unless we question the socio-economic structures associated with the production of waste and waste management, we’ll never dig out of the waste crisis.
I’ve worked from home long before the coronavirus outbreak forced the rest of the world to go remote. When I used to talk about my job as a freelance writer and video editor — and the fact that virtually all my working hours were spent alone in my apartment, on my computer — my friends […]
For a long time, urbanization has been one of the defining features of our societies — a tendency that has accelerated with the growth of the information economy, with now half the world’s population living in cities. But some believe that we may have reached a peak, as COVID-19 has not only paused the trend […]
Artist Balvir Singh and his murals of revolutionaries like Che Guevara and Lenin have helped rekindle socialist ideas in his home state of Punjab.
It’s official: Zoom parties are here to stay. And to anyone who ever attended an actual party, no need here to spell out why there’s no comparison. Yet there I was last week in a text exchange with a friend turning down my invitation to our bi-weekly drinks at my … er … place, suggesting […]
In the movie version, the contagion would lead to lawlessness and chaos. But in reality, institutions are encouragingly resilient.
PARIS — Grandioso, say the Italians. Kolossalt for the Swedes. The Berkeley student newspaper called it monumental, while a Buenos Aires daily was stamping it patrimonio de la humanidad. The world’s popular music critics and other sundry writer types (wink!) have spent the past few weeks trying to size up something that is much more […]
The country’s ‘principled’ approach to data collection does a disservice to people dealing with real and consequential discrimination.
PARIS — Growing up in Chicago, one of my favorite books was From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the story of a brother and sister who run away to live in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even as a kid, I could sense what a rare treat it could be to […]
Earlier this week, as I packed my things for my first post-pandemic vacation, my eyes and mind dwelled on the object I spend more time with than any other: my laptop. Of course many things have changed since last summer’s break. Instead of flying, I’ll drive from my home in the northern city of Milan […]
-Analysis- BEIJING — How many disabled people are there in China? The number is 85 million, or 6% of China’s total population, according to the statistics of the Chinese Disabled Persons’ Federation. Yet rarely do we see any of them in China’s major cities. So where are they? Recently, a video from the southwestern city […]
Anti-Muslim attitudes are ‘eating away at the idea of India’ and finding expression even among the country’s cosmopolitan elite.
Grief and catastrophe in and around the Italian city that became a symbol of the swiftness of the pandemic’s death and destruction.
Let’s not forget that well before COVID-19, we often referred to the “revolution” underway in the workplace. Automation, digitalization, climate change and other seismic shifts were bringing upon major changes in the ways we work. Now, the economy — and life— as we know it seem more unpredictable than ever. Yet after several months of […]
-OpEd- Let’s talk about the words that are at the center of this wake-up-call of a debate. There’s the word “racism,” for starters. It’s a garbage dump of a word, one that embodies a stinking reality, that brings to mind filth like Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan. That’s what comes to the mind of […]