Perhaps just as fascinating as the electric cars is the company’s founder and the genuinely earnest ideal among employees to make the world a better place.
Category: FOCUS
Hey Donald Trump, Hugo Chavez Would Be So Proud CHILE / America Economia, Aug. 25 Jihadism As Nihilism, An X-Ray Of Homegrown Terror In France FRANCE / Le Monde, Dec. 3 The Siberian Fasting Cleanse For Body And Mind RUSSIA / Le Temps, Aug. 17 El Chapo Escape, When Income Inequality Breeds Corruption MEXICO / […]
QUETTA/JAKARTA/MELBOURNE — Five-year-old Mohammad Raza is holding a photograph of his uncle Sadiq Ali. He believes his uncle is in Australia and that he will soon send a toy airplane. But his grandmother knows that Sadiq Ali is detained abroad. Sadiq left, she says, because he didn’t see any hope for his future in Pakistan. “It was a tough time for him here,” she says, “He ran his own shop but got tired of having no work because the area was unsafe. So he left the country.” Sadiq, 22, is part of the Shia Hazara community in Quetta, a town […]
About 60,000 underage refugees have arrived in Germany this year without their parents. An alarming number are disappearing from custody. Experts warn they are vulnerable to both human traffickers and Islamists.
From Alexandria to Aswan, urban gardening in Egypt is growing, especially on rooftops. The movement wants to be allowed to develop without the prying policies of a government that has other priorities.
-OpEd- PARIS — If you travel to the far north of England, you’ll see Hadrian’s Wall still proudly standing almost 19 centuries after it was built. Of course, it’s no match for the Great Wall of China, in length or in what remains of its fortifications. But it’s still an impressive construction, and its message, […]
PARIS — Our fair-minded but ever subjective staff of journalists, translators and editors have chosen what we believe to be the year’s most engaging and provocative stories. Why The Chinese Are So Good, But Rarely Great CHINA / Caixin, Jan .5 That Slippery Euphemism We Call “Cultural Differences” FRANCE / Worldcrunch, Jan. 15 Artificial Intelligence […]
Border police and other German law enforcement unions say a black market of passports and insufficent border controls are creating a major security risk amidst the surge of Syrian refugees.
THIAROYE — Sitting on the corner of his bed, behind the curtains drawn to hide the blazing sun, Saada Ndiaye is waiting for the moment to come. That moment is his would-be departure to Spain, via a clandestine and uncertain path from this small town in Senegal, and onward through Morocco. Ndiaye, who introduces himself […]
SÃO PAULO — When the dam at the iron ore mine in Mariana burst more than a month ago, killing at least 15 people, it was quickly described as Brazil‘s worst ecological disaster ever. The 40 billion liters of toxic mud unleashed in the central state of Minas Gerais, destroyed houses, roads, and left many […]
“Saving the Planet” isn’t enough. Activists must begin to think about other ways to push people towards an ecological approach to life.
PECS — When they first took the plunge two years ago, farmers around Pécs may have only seen it as a way to improve profit margins. Certainly nothing wrong with that. But as time went by, their foray into alternative energy production turned out to be much for this group of 50 pioneers, who live […]
-Editorial- When the photo appeared Sept. 2 of Alan Kurdi, a lifeless 3-year-old boy facedown on a beach, the plight of refugees from Syria’s civil war shocked the world. In Canada’s election campaign, rivals responded with pledges to accelerate their resettlement. The election winner, Justin Trudeau of the Liberal Party, outlined the most ambitious agenda, to bring 25,000 refugees to Canada by year’s end. Trudeau has extended the deadline eight weeks, out of prudence over the logistical challenges. It is a small adjustment to a generous response that serves as a rebuke to the senseless xenophobia heard lately in the […]
After the Paris attacks last month, an emergency accord between Turkey and the European Union has sealed a border that was once so porous. It has real-life effects on desperate refugees, and entire towns.
Muslims are supposed to save water, Christians and Jews energy. In the past, we blamed those ideologies for ecological crises.
NAUBISE — In the village of Naubise, about 90-minute drive from the capital Kathmandu, farmer Nirbhaya Sapkota is experimenting with crop rotation, mixed cropping and even intercropping — anything to maintain soil fertility and moisture. Sapkota, 45, and others this area are contending first-hand with the effects of climate change, which is particularly hard-hitting in Nepal because of its high poverty rates and low adaptive capacity. The major earthquake that struck in April has complicated matters even more. But in this community, at least, Sapkota and other smallholder farmers refuse to go down without a fight. With the help of […]
PARIS — France, the host of the COP21, has in its hands the most vital mission it has ever been entrusted with: spare humanity the irreversible disaster that would come from a two-degree rise of the globe’s average temperature by this century’s end, compared to the pre-industrial era. There will be no second chance. We […]
The Quirimbas islands in northwestern Mozambique is the front line in the war on over-fishing.
Though 146 countries have pledged to fight global warming ahead of the UN’s COP21 conference, market realities and other forces means such commitments are unlikely to materialize.
An EU report issued to member states seven years ago offered an eerily accurate warning of what was to come — that areas affected by global warming and political tension (Yemen, Syria, etc.) would be vulnerable to destabilization.
The global refugee crisis forces us to rethink city planning and housing, with more focus on assuring people’s rights and needs. A chance to actually wind up with more human cities.
PARIS — As investigators follow possible leads from Syria to Greece and Belgium, Friday’s deadly and meticulously coordinated assault in Paris was no doubt very much a European attack. Governments across the continent are busy taking measures to enhance security against a growing threat of similar coordinated terror assaults. FRANCE French authorities carried out anti-terror […]
Bangkok and other urban areas in Thailand are home to some 8,000 refugees who have fled religious persecution in their home countries. But since the deadly shrine bombing in August, the government has been harassing and arresting illegal immigrants.
Molested, harassed, abused: Women in refugee camps are increasingly victims of sexual violence. Authorities in Hamburg try to react.
Brazil has utterly failed to find an environmentally friendly response to waste disposal. The struggling economy makes change unlikely, meaning ever more garbage “pickers” making modest livings sifting through the dumps.
On the island of Sardinia, asylum seekers rebuild their lives on the football pitch.
As a border guard in 1989, Arpad Bella personally opened a portion of the Iron Curtain between Hungary and Austria to a crowd of East German refugees. Today, while migrants rush to the gates of Europe, he sadly watches history run backward.
Tensions rise between northern European neighbors. Sweden is second only to Germany for hosting the most refugees, while Denmark is dubbed Hungary of Scandinavia.
-OpEd- BERLIN — German authorities are now trying in every possible way to come up with solutions for sheltering the wave of refugees entering our country. But that has somehow led the state to threaten the suspension basic rights of property and ownership. The federal government does its best to foster optimism. German Chancellor Angela […]
Two Syrian refugees who attempted to swim part of the way to Europe recounted why they wound up making such a dangerous journey.
Peyrelevade, a village of 800 people in central France, has welcomed 60 refugees since April. Its former retirement home has been renovated, the primary school has avoided a class closure, and there are new jobs for residents. But the future is no less un
BODRUM — When the photograph of Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body spread around the world, the plight of Syrian refugees suddenly came into focus like never before. Yet Kurdi was just one of many who have died making the perilous journey to Europe, where they hope to attain asylum as the ongoing Syria civil war in their homeland continues to claim countless civilian lives. Turkey, which currently hosts some 1.8 million exiled Syrians, has increasingly become a departure point for a perilous sea journey toward Greece in flimsy rafts and ill-equipped boats to get inside European territory. Sayeed, a construction worker […]
From local politics to the the battle against polio to a banned prostitution film, here’s a quick tour of what has been happening in Morocco in recent days.
Arriving in Germany every day, Syrians who have fled civil war are now the targets of the Salafi movement, radical Muslims who include those who espouse Islamis jihad.
A vacation destination in western Turkey is now at the center of the human trafficking of Syrian refugees and other migrants trying to make the perilous sea journey to Europe.
Humanitarian, demographic and economic reasons have been cited by much of the German establishment for welcoming migrants. But what’s the real end game?
Traditional local populations are facing the brunt of the environmental fallout in the massive lake between Bolivia and Peru.
Why are they here? Who can stay? How should we treat them? The fate of Middle East and African refugees dominates German debate. They were once our own grandparents.
A French philosopher dissects the mix of reactions across society, and within our own individual psyches, when human misery arrives at our door.
The MIT-educated activist and scientist travels the world to condemn the effects of multinationals on the environment. Her recent project in Bern was the 3D modeling of oceans.