Worldcrunch
INGOLSTADT — Math is the first class of the day. Only two students, who are clearly aces at math, are raising their hands to answer the teacher’s questions. Almost everyone else is dozing off. But Mahmoud, who is seated in the first row, appears to be wide awake. He does not, however, raise his hand. […]
Libya is where refugees now gather to attempt the perilous crossing to Europe. But Egypt is often the source of both crafts and crews. Only economic solutions can stop human smuggling.
BERLIN — It’s been a year since German Chancellor Angela Merkel made a Palestinian refugee teen burst into tears live on national television. Reem Sahwil was 14 years old, and living on a temporary residence permit, when she was invited with others for a townhall-style public encounter with Merkel on July 15, 2015, in the […]
LIMA — The Peruvian capital has no shortage of vultures flying overhead. For the past year they have also been enlisted to help find, and perhaps eventually clear, some of Lima’s worst illegal trash heaps. How is it done? The city and scientists have been using 10 vultures strapped with GPS and GoPro cameras to […]
The psychology of global warming helps explain why we can’t solve it. “It triggers nothing in our brain,” says one psychologist. “It lets us sleep calmly in a burning bed.”
In the small Sicilian town Of Mineo is a sprawling facility where asylum seekers, many of whom have survived perilous journeys, live in limbo and face exploitation.
This African country produces more refugees per capita than any other. But there is method to the madness: Gambia’s dictator systematically banishes people and refuses to accept repatriation agreements. And he receives European funds for his services.
Too many Muslims keep to themselves, speak poor German and pass on their problems to the next generation. They harm themselves and therefore the rest of society.
TURIN — Refugees have come to Italy from all across war-torn Iraq and Syria, from the monasteries of Mosul to the Assyrian villages of the Khabur valley and the Christian churches of the Nineveh plains. Among the millions now languishing in refugee camps are people from all walks of life, including government bureaucrats, university professors, […]
Borrowing techniques developed by U.S. architect Michael Reynolds, a group of Uruguayan amateurs turned piles of trash into an innovative and one-of-a-kind education center.
JALALABAD — It’s early morning in Jalalabad, eastern Afghanistan. Haroon Sarwari, 17, and Manzoor Ali, 18, are wearing their backpacks and walking quickly to get a taxi to reach Kabul on time. These close friends have laid out plans to travel to Europe illegally with the help of a smuggling agent. Haroon’s cousins managed to get to Germany three months before, so his father, Sarwar Khan, supports the plan. “My father sold a few of his cows and borrowed some money from his friends to send me to Europe,” the teenager explains. “He has already agreed with the agent on […]
Saving rainwater and increasing green spaces are two small steps shown to help fight the ravages of climate change in cities.
SABRATHA — It’s just past 10 p.m., and Omar, Mohammed and Isa are driving on the Mediterranean coast highway that links the Libyan capital of Tripoli with the Tunisian border. In the distance, flares of burning natural gas emanating from the Mellitah oil terminal light up the pitch black night. The three men, all in […]
A cooperative that’s giving formerly jobless Argentines a second chance has evolved from a recycling enterprise into a flourishing sustainable-design business. Many of its partners could never have seen this coming when they lost their jobs back i
For psychiatrists at Munich’s Heckscher Clinic, underage migrants who have fled war and violence, often alone, represent a difficult new group of patients.
Top German security officials say criminals and violent Islamists are using the asylum crisis to recruit refugees. They especially target minors traveling alone.
Near the western coast of Turkey, a humble imam recites too many lonely prayers in a cemetery that is filling with nameless victims of the perilous migrant route to Europe.
Many refugee families after World War II took generations to get on their feet. A new German study finds today’s influx of refugees face the same risk, and new ones too.
The dangerous sea and land crossings that Syrian refugees are making to Europe have been well-documented. Less well known are the equally perilous journeys people take to leave Syria itself.
In the Paris neighborhood of Belleville, home to a thriving Chinatown, prostitutes with no other prospects work to support families here or in China. And now, new dangers loom.
Using hydraulics to churn energy from its most obvious natural resource, Ushant is on its way toward an environmental overhaul, and other countries are taking note.
GASR GARABULLI — Migrant #322 slowly lifts his head and opens his eyes. The long shadow of the sun, punctuated by the jail’s metal bars, bathes the cement walls as the blue sky seeps through the metal grate ceiling. It’s silent in the cells, except for the faint sound of children crying in the distance […]
The German Chancellor has made many mistakes: She has isolated Germany, inside Europe. But it is hardly her fault alone in a continent unable to see the stakes at hand.
With help from agencies and the government, locals from Monte de María in northern Colombia are breathing new life into the land stripped by abuse and violence.
Wanted in two countries for his actions to save endangered marine wildlife, the Sea Shepherd founder is now under the unofficial protective custody of France, where he manages an extreme conservation group that makes Greenpeace look like pikers.
The streets of Mexico’s capital are littered with plastic and styrofoam, the constant remnants of an irresponsible culture of consumption, an essayist writes. If we can’t change simple habits only we can control, no summit or government in
SALLA — On the door of the tourism bureau in Salla, Finland, there’s a poster proudly informing visitors that they are “in the middle of nowhere.” That much is indisputable: Salla is a dark, remote place, lost in the middle of hundreds of miles of Laponian pine forests and covered in a thick mantle of […]
The village of Sutera was facing demographic doom as young people have been leaving for generations. Then locals started to wonder about those migrants coming to Italy.
In the multiethnic French city of Marseille, the La Rouvière complex has its own unwritten bylaws.
On foot in the cold or crammed into run-down train cars, migrants face a long journey of long waits, endless security checks, and uncertain prospects. Up close along the Serbo-Macedonian Border.
GENEVA — War is reshaping Syria, causing massive displacements of populations that, even more than the rising casualty numbers, have shifted the roles played by the country’s principal ethnic and religious communities. Some groups have emerged strengthened, others weakened, now and perhaps forever. These demographic gains and losses will carry more weight in the long […]
A new surge in deforestation can be traced to an unauthorized road connecting La Macarena to San Jose del Guaviare. What is the origin? What will be done?
Turkey is supposed to guard our borders against more refugees and receive financial aid for its services. But refugees fleeing to Europe across the Mediterranean keep coming.
China risks losing a growing number of so-called “environmental migrants.”
Six month later, a reporter is reconnected to a family who’d fled war in Deir ez-Zor, Syria. They wound up in a small village, where they are building a new life. Integration is not easy.
TOLIARA — The heat and the years have taken a heavy toll on Rebokane Mahatsanga’s frail, scaly-skinned body. Squatting, almost prone, among a few bad-looking ears of corn on his patch of land, he doesn’t quite know his age anymore. “I think I’ll be 100 soon,” he says, his eyes half-closed. People don’t really celebrate […]
The North African country is increasingly a destination for sub-Saharian Africans looking to move on to Europe, even if many get stuck in Algeria with few rights or hopes for work.
Deforestation is one of the primary causes of global warming, and much of it has happened across vast areas of the Amazon rain forest. Will pledges at the climate change conference in Paris really count?
TIANJIN — A stone’s throw from the highly polluted Bohai Gulf, the Tianjin eco-city is like a mirage. Its buildings, surrounded by trees, offer a rare green and airy setting in the surrounding industrial development zone, which is choked, for much of the year, in a blanket of smog. Public lighting is charged through solar […]
A wave of violence rocked Cologne on New Year’s Eve, when more than 100 women reported that men of Arab and North African appearance robbed, groped and raped them. Though shocking in Germany, such attacks are all too common in Arab countries, wher