With the melting of the ice, maritime traffic is growing, which means new economic opportunities, but also some cold and hard questions.
Category: FOCUS
Anti-immigrant rhetoric has become increasingly commonplace as political forces jockey for position ahead of this Sunday’s national elections.
This bio-friendly cattle rancher doesn’t win many friends among either vegetarians or traditional ranchers. But those who eat his ‘no-stress’ beef can taste the difference.
Decades ago, thousands of war-weary Colombian made their way to Venezuela in search of better opportunities. Nowadays, the flow of migrants runs in the opposite direction.
Many have hailed the innovations of Songdo, a planned community near the South Korean capital of Seoul. But the city, which once served as a set for the “Gangnam Style” music video, also has its critics.
CHRISTOPHERSEN — Argentina’s Adecoagro, an industrial farming multinational has turned one of its dairy farms into a surprising source of power. A new technique for generating energy from cow dung has now proven to supply enough electricity from cowpat to power a town of 5,000 residents. Its biodigester system with a 1.4 MW capacity, began […]
The latest disturbing images along the modern immigrant journey arrive from the French-Italian border. Five migrants from the Ivory Coast, in flip-flops and soaked t-shirts, were rescued last week in 80 centimeters of snow, as they tried to pass from Italy into France. “We didn’t know it would be so cold,” one of the rescued […]
GENEVA — A series of hurricanes of unprecedented intensity in the North Atlantic. Record-high temperatures all over the planet. Monstrous fires in California and Portugal. Entire regions hit by severe drought. Mountains collapsing… Has 2017 given us a foretaste of the disasters to come because of climate change? To answer this question and get a […]
The route from Turkey to Greece was once crowded with Syrian asylum seekers fleeing to Europe. But some are now moving in the opposite direction because of a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment
-Analysis- Donald Trump won’t be in Paris on Tuesday. Following his decision to unilaterally withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, French President Emmanuel Macron didn’t invite him to the two-day One Planet Summit opening in the French capital. Gathering 50 world leaders and dozens of international business leaders, the conference coincides with […]
-Analysis- Bitcoin’s blistering price rise has broken a new milestone, passing the $10,000 threshold for the first time. It’s a considerable achievement given that the most famous of cryptocurrencies was worth under $1,000 at the beginning of this year, and first reached $2,000 just a few months ago. But it’s also a frightening feat. The […]
-Analysis- Are we witnessing “the twilight of Angela Merkel”? The question, asked Tuesday in Le Figaro“s lead editorial, is on everybody’s mind, both inside and outside Germany. To be sure, in her 12 years as German Chancellor, Merkel has never been as vulnerable as she now appears to be. The collapse of post-election talks to […]
A key message at this week’s COP 23 climate conference: the fight against global warming requires protecting the natives who’ve known the rainforests for centuries.
Eco-friendly national legislation and hard work on the local level has made it possible for wind farms to blossom throughout Germany. But it’s not without costs.
The Lebanese ‘Party of Hope’ calls for the immediate expulsion of more than one million Syrian refugees.
Plans to build highways through the Amazon rainforest are clear violations of pledges made in Paris to end deforestation by 2020. But the situation on the ground is not a one-way street.
MEXICO CITY — As the Trump administration threatens to expel nearly a million undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as children, Mexico is seeing a spike in arrivals of children fleeing violence in Central America. Over the past four years, the number of unaccompanied minors from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador seeking asylum in […]
BENGALURU — In vintage crime novels, there is often someone murdered by slow poisoning, and arsenic has been a common weapon of choice. It works the same way in your body — slowly killing you — if it is present in the water you drink beyond a certain threshold. This is why it’s disturbing that, according to a new study, the groundwater along the densely populated Indus river basin in Pakistan is severely contaminated with arsenic, putting the health of over 50 million people at risk. Arsenic occurs naturally in Earth’s crust. It is used by humans in some alloys […]
Libération — Sept. 7, 2017 Hurricane Irma has wreaked destruction across the Caribbean, and the situation is about to get worse. “Irmageddon” was the front-page headline Thursday of French daily Libération, as the most violent cyclone to strike the Antilles in the region’s history struck the island of Barbuda and the French territories of St. […]
WASHINGTON — President Trump is hurtling toward a crossroads on immigration — his signature campaign issue and a key source of his law-and-order reputation — where each path before him comes with significant political risks. Trump has temporarily placed the fates of roughly 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children in the hands of Congress, buying himself time and shunting responsibility. Should Congress act, the president will have to choose whether to sign on to a legislative solution granting the “dreamers’ legal status — or to let the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, […]
In Lebanon, the country with the highest number of refugees per capita in the world, a cemetery for Syrian refugees is running out of burial plots.
In the south of Tunisia, near the Libyan border, an ancient dump serves as a cemetery for immigrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean illegally. But the living remain undeterred.
Hundreds of thousands of refugees want to reach Europe via Libya, constituting a billion dollar trade option for smugglers. But a local warlord, armed with only one boat and plenty of opaque motives, has declared war on the trafficking gangs.
As the Rainbow Warrior III traverses the Strait of Magellan, its crew shows what it means to defend the natural world on a daily basis.
A deadly flash flood and landslide in southern Colombia is a brutal reminder that people can’t take the environment for granted.
DIBRUGARH — A blazing sun is shining on Jyoti Khaund’s plantation, where rows of green foliage stretch as far as the eye can see. This hot and damp district in the Brahmaputra Valley, in the northeastern state of Assam, is where India’s best tea is produced. But Khaund is frustrated this morning looking over his […]
ORISTANO — Club scouts and retired players from across Italy have come to this town on the Italian island of Sardinia to find new soccer talent among recently arrived African migrants. They offer their services to the migrants so that one day they might have a shot at Italy’s top professional league, the Serie A. […]
Trump’s victory reminds this Chilean writer of some of the worst moments of the past half-century, including 1973 army coup in Chile and the 9/11 terror attacks.
Lives destroyed, entire towns damaged, widespread health problems. There is no end in sight to the toll on a region in Brazil decimated by a toxic dam break last November.
Near the French capital’s Gare du Nord train station, migrants have expanded yet another shantytown just days after the controversial Calais “Jungle” was dismantled by the state. Locals are not pleased.
SKARA — As Bert Karlsson enters the refugee center’s cafeteria, dark-haired boy greets him with a “Hey!” The four-story building called Stora Ekeberg is just one of many refugee centers started by Karlsson’s Jokarjo AB group, which respond to Sweden’s burgeoning need to house refugees. This center is reaching its capacity of 570 people. “Here, […]
NOGINSK — Knowledge Day falls on Sept. 1 and marks the traditional start of the school year in Russia. But for the children of Syrian refugees who live in Noginsk, a town of about 100,000 inhabitants that’s a 90-minute train ride from Moscow, it’s a day like any other. These refugee children can’t go to […]
Our planet has actually grown greener. Really. You can thank yourself.
More and more coffee growers are going organic in Colombia. A boost for the environment, the trend is also improving lives, as producers in the coastal Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta can attest.
BREMEN — Murat Kurnaz, a German native of Turkish origin, likes to joke around. And considering his story, the humor can sometimes turn rather dark. Today, he speaks about the journey from the Guantanamo detention facility in Cuba to the Ramstein U.S. air base in Germany at the end of his five-year imprisonment in August […]
In towns and cities around the Nile delta, fishermen are selling their boats to a local mafia outfit, which controls a burgeoning human trafficking racket.
There is an economic explanation for why more Syrian refugee families in Jordan were able to make it to Mecca this year.
For anyone truly concerned with climate change, trends like rooftop gardens and sustainable badges for office buildings are a distraction, at best.
Germany suddenly faces hundreds of young girls who have disappeared from schools because their parents have found husbands for them. Lawmakers appear powerless to face the new phenomenon of child brides brought by the arrival of immigrants.
Climate change is drying up the Earth and making Bolivians search for new livelihoods in Latin America’s poorest country.