The targeted killing of a top Iranian scientist has increased pressures on Iran’s regime at a time of speculation about a renewal of dialogue with the United States.
Category: Eyes on the U.S.
Donald Trump’s departure renews the possibility of talks between Washington and Tehran. But the Iranian leadership has reasons to be wary of the incoming administration in Washington.
With Joe Biden in the role of Brutus…?
It’s Joe! After the world watched for four days as the United States counted its votes, Joe Biden has clinched victory over Donald Trump in one of the most consequential presidential elections in American history. Trump’s four tumultuous years in the White House are now bound to end, even if the outgoing president has vowed […]
By prematurely declaring victory, while the counting of votes is still ongoing, Donald Trump is taking a leaf out of an autocrat’s playbook.
-Analysis- PARIS — It was the kind of headline that risks fading into your news feed as if it were barely news: “Ivory Coast: As Presidential Election Approaches, International Criminal Court Worries About Violence,” Jeune Afrique magazine announced last week. And so it followed, as votes were cast this past weekend in President Alassane Ouattara’s […]
What is happening in India is casting a long shadow on the forthcoming U.S. elections.
“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.
TURIN — Two months from election day, we can leave no doubt: Donald Trump is taking the Republican Party for a ride toward the Apocalypse. The Republic convention was a frantic exercise in stoking of fear, violence and social unrest in the U.S. — a country already burning, scared, angry and almost never so divided. […]
A self-described American aesthete has no good answers for her French friends aghast at the reality show in the White House.
Slovenian-born writer Andrej Mrevlje tries once again to get a read on the fiercely reserved first lady, this time with the help of new book called The Art of Her Deal.
Leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro don’t just bend the truth. By using lies as a consistent political tool, they try to destroy it — as did the fascist regimes of the last century.
PARIS — It’s been a tumultuous few months for so-called “surveillance tech.” Most recently, following pushback from Black Lives Matter activists, Amazon has suspended police use of its facial recognition software for one year. IBM followed suit, announcing it will stop offering its similar software for “mass surveillance or racial profiling.” The moves from the […]
João Pedro Matos was in his uncle’s garden on May 18 in São Gonçalo, near Rio de Janeiro, when Brazil’s Federal Police stormed in. Police claim officers traded shots with armed drug traffickers, though the Matos family denies this. A bullet fired by an officer hit João Pedro, who was taken away in a helicopter […]
PARIS — That people should be judged by the content of their character was one of those rare elementary-school concepts that actually stuck. It was no doubt the candor and simplicity of the idea, but it may have helped that my history teacher Mr. Hansson for once deviated from his trademark text-heavy PowerPoints — and […]
How have U.S. governments treated their deferential Latin American allies and admiring societies in the past century? A hard look from Bogota.
Welcome to Monday, where impeachment looms for Trump, a new COVID strain is identified in Japan, and cases spike in China to the highest level in five months. Also, find out what made sharks’ ancestors even scarier … SPOTLIGHT: SWEDEN REVISITED, FROM NORDIC MODEL TO PANDEMIC PARIAH On one of the final Fridays of 2020, […]
LES ECHOS France’s Yellow Vests And The Problem With Post-Truth Economics Opinion shapers have a habit these days of disregarding facts, be they scientific or economic. Opinions matter, of course, but shouldn’t supersede well-founded knowledge. SUDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG RoboJudge: When Laws Are Transformed Into Computer Code Laws take time to catch up with reality. Could we […]
LA STAMPA Meet The Doctor’s Maid Who Inspired The Mediterranean Diet A housekeeper with serious culinary skills helped feed the mind and mouth of Ancel Keys, the American doctor famous for documenting the health benefits of Mediterranean food. THE INITIUM Yulin To Paris: Dog-Eating At Center Of Animal Rights Battle A Chinese dog meat festival […]
In loudly rejecting President’s Trump threat to label Mexican drug gangs terrorists, Mexico’s government is covering its failure, if not reluctance, to tackle systemic corruption and its offspring, crime.
President Donald Trump became the third president in American history to be impeached. In a vote almost exclusively along party lines, Democratic-controlled House of Representatives charged Trump the high crimes of abuse of power and obstruction of justice following the President’s alleged pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy to investigate former Vice President and political […]
President Trump’s erratic strikes against the world’s trading regime require a collective response, as unilateral state reprisals cannot check an ‘arrogant’ U.S. administration.
The U.S. president has a history of strong-arming trading partners. But the move to tax things like French wine and Spanish olives is actually justified.
After Trump fired hawkish U.S. official John Bolton, who had repeatedly threatened Venezuela’s regime with military action, Maduro may have the opening he’s been waiting for.
Donald Trump’s decision to threaten Mexican exports over migration is weakening years of U.S.-Mexican cooperation, further shaken by this weekend’s El Paso shooting.
WASHINGTON — Next, more of the same, but with more entrenched division, a bitter crossfire of allegations and then, finally, a reckoning in the form of the 2020 presidential election. The long-awaited conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election is likely to harden congressional Republicans’ wall of support for President Trump, strengthen Democratic demands to hold Trump to account — and result in little change in public opinion, according to historians and politicians who have studied past national scandals. Mueller’s conclusion — he found no evidence of collusion with Russia but […]
Pigeonly is one of several applications that were designed by ex-cons and are transforming the way U.S. prisoners communicate with the outside world.
The straight-talking senator from Vermont energized the 2016 presidential race. But he faces a very different playing field this time around.
Jonatan Matamoros, 36, climbs the border fence at La Playas de Tijuana, Mexico on December 8, 2018. He was part of a migrant caravan with his wife and son from Central America, and was scouting for possible places to cross to the U.S. eventually. He was just having fun at Playas de Tijuana border, looking […]
LE MONDE Monstrous Times Call For Monstrous Fiction: A French Manifesto Against the omnipotence of “reality-show novels’ and costume fiction, a group of young French authors want to reassert the novel as a contemporary art. SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG The Real Invisible Threat To Democracy: Poverty Even in economically powerful Germany, poverty threatens the social fabric. And […]
LE MONDE Full Translation Of French Anti-#MeToo Manifesto Signed By Catherine Deneuve Some 100 prominent French women artists and intellectuals have issued an open letter in Le Monde condemning the movement to call out inappropriate male behavior that erupted in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. CLARIN Interview With A Recovering Hippie Named Paulo […]
-Analysis- WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump pledged in his campaign that he would not be predictable. He’s more than lived up to that promise this week, and along the way, he has made a hash out of the way business is being done in Washington. Three times this week, Trump abruptly and unexpectedly changed course, lending credence to perceptions of a presidency in chaos. The biggest bombshell came Thursday afternoon, when Trump announced that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis would leave the administration at the end of February, and Mattis’s resignation letter explicitly stated that he and the president were not […]
-OpEd- BERLIN — Thousands of students marched through Tehran last weekend, and state television broadcast the protest march live. The crowd burned U.S. flags and pictures of President Donald Trump in front of the building of the former U.S. embassy. And, yes, they chanted: “Death to America.” After the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear treaty […]
America’s midterm elections saw Democrats recapture the House, but lose ground in the Senate. A nation as divided as ever, though with new checks on Trump.
-Analysis- BERLIN — Democracies are made of constant ups and downs. Sometimes one party is on top, the next it’s another. And what may look like a dramatic election result often is, in reality, nothing more than the natural ebb and flow that characterizes healthy democracies. Every now and then, however, comes a moment when […]
As U.S. hegemony fades, the dollar has become the worst currency in the world — expect, of course, for all the others.
In some western states, utilities are flipping the script on waste-water treatment, transforming sewage facilities into attractive parks with streams, hiking trails and science museums.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The subject was supposed to be the selection of a new justice on the Supreme Court. Instead Thursday’s showdown on Capitol Hill was a raw, scorched-earth confrontation across the nation’s most emotionally wrenching divides. This was men against women, right against left, a cascade of recriminations, explosions of anger, hours of tears and sobs. A hearing that was supposed to bring clarity instead erupted in thunderclaps from the nation’s built-up tensions over how the sexes are supposed to behave with each other. Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh and the woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her came […]
-OpEd- PARIS — The gravity of the situation at the White House grows clearer each day. The anonymous article published by the New York Times in which a high-ranking official from the Trump administration describes the internal resistance, coupled with the publication of “Fear,” in which the investigative journalist Bob Woodward, celebrated for his role […]
Taco Bell in Mexico? McDonald’s in Hamburg? Americans find the recipe abroad, bastardize it, and then have the stomach to go back and sell it where it all began.