Worldcrunch
TUNIS — Six years ago, the Tunisian Revolution sparked the Arab Spring uprisings and overthrew the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his notoriously violent police state. Now a nascent democracy, Tunisia is once again faced with the issue of police brutality. Tunis-based daily Le Temps reports that several local and international NGOs […]
Brazil is a major banana-producing country. In Belem, the gateway to the River Amazon in the north of the country, these dock workers were unloading the day’s cargo destined for city markets. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
China eased its controversial one-child policy in late 2015. But there are still plenty of people, for one reason or another, who can’t have children and could benefit from surrogate woman willing to carry the pregnancy.
MOSUL — Leila Khaled hadn’t felt well that morning. It was the end of August, when the Iraqi summer sun had hit the walls and windows hard, like the wind in the middle of a powerful storm. Mosul was still in the clutches of ISIS. The war was still far away; it was being raged […]
-Essay- For the record, I am writing this from home. On a late winter Monday, with most of our crew either off-the-clock or working remotely, I decided to spare myself (and a few others) the day’s commute to hash out the news from our office in eastern Paris. So again, for the record: Yes folks, […]
Clarín, March 13 A concert for fans of Argentine music star Indio Solari turned deadly, and the grim details dominated front pages Monday of the nation’s newspapers, along with questions about bad planning and crowd control. “Another tragedy due to lack of controls’, reads today’s front page of Buenos-Aires based daily Clarín. At last Saturday’s […]
Being creative is often just a matter of connecting the dots — though they better be the right dots.
ALMERE — Founded in 1976, this city 30 kilometers from Amsterdam offers a glimpse into the future of the Netherlands. Leaving behind the tourist droves of the capital, a 20-minute ride on an Intercity train — equipped with WiFi — whisks you through windmills and farmland to reach Almere. Lying 3.2 meters below sea level, […]
MOSCOW — Slumped on the one of the fluorescent poufs in his Moscow office, a gothic T-shirt-clad Alexander Lyamin says he’s “stunned.” Founder of Qrator Labs, a Russian startup specialized in cybersecurity, and a staunch supporter of a free and borderless internet, Lyamin is seeing his world collapse around him. Located opposite a huge flour […]
Investigators in Mannheim, in southwestern Germany, have a real whodunnit on their hands, a brutal kidnapping-murder case — but with a twist. The victim is a five-kilogram Humboldt penguin whose lifeless and decapitated body was found last month in a local parking lot. The gruesome discovery came five days after the animal, of South American […]
Among the ruins of one of the world’s oldest surviving Byzantine churches, about 30 kilometers northwest of Aleppo, stand the remains of the pillar of Saint Simeon Stylites. The fifth-century ascetic monk is said to have lived 37 years as a hermit, perched on a platform at the top of a column. More than 1,500 […]
-Analysis- It’s just a coincidence, but the symbolism is too hard to ignore. Two days ago, as every year on March 8, the world was celebrating women for, among other things, their “economic” and “political achievements.” Earlier today, South Korea’s Constitutional Court ruled that President Park Geun-hye must be removed from office over a corruption […]
The new U.S. president might want to think twice about taking a business-world approach to international affairs.
The northern state of Punjab is known as India’s bread basket. But in recent years, it has become a fertile ground not just for crops, but also drug abuse.
MEXICO CITY — The capital of Mexico delivers water unequally to its 20 million people. While residents of neighborhoods like Cuauhtémoc or Polanco suffer occasional water shortages — everyone does — poorer areas face routine shortages, reports Mexican newspaper La Jornada. One such place is Iztapalapa, where there can be no water for weeks, and […]
L’Esportiu, March 9, 2017 FC Barcelona’s stunning victory over France’s PSG last night at Camp Nou earned a succinctly shocked (and triumphant) front-page headline in the Catalan-language sports daily L’Esportiu. For those linguists keeping score at home, L’Impossible (“The Impossible”) reads exactly the same in the Catalan and French languages. Headlines in France, though equally […]
The Japanese diet is rich in carbohydrates, but widespread obesity has not occurred even through the country’s economic boom.
Venezuela is one of a handful of petrol states that imagined they could live it up forever off crude oil cash. After oil prices sank, decades of neglecting agriculture has now left a nation literally starving.
-Essay- PARIS — In 1949, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir published the landmark feminist book Le Deuxième Sexe (“The Second Sex”). The work is a challenge to anyone who chooses — or is assigned? — to read it, with almost 1,000 pages between two volumes. Revered for the clarity and force of its arguments, de […]
There are several such typical watering holes and fountains along the winding roads of Corsica. They come in handy when your daughter is thirsty. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
Feel the novelty fatigue growing inside? But it is not just the vintage feel of the reissued Nokia 3310 that makes it convincing, it is something deeper.
MUTWANGA — At the foot of mount Rwenzori, locals erupt in joy when they see their homes lit with electric light bulbs for the first time in their lives. Meanwhile, at the nearby Pic Hotel in Mutwanga, a small village in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), tourists are finally returning. Over the past few […]
Debate continues to simmer over the threats of “fake news’ and the civic and journalistic responsibilities of the world’s largest and most powerful social media platform. What does state censorship in China have to do with all of that? We asked ourselves that very question. January 17, 2018* It was a handshake nine years in […]
Romania has Europe’s highest infant mortality rate. The main causes of death are infectious diseases like tuberculosis and rubella, while VIPs make public claims that vaccines are dangerous.
I see a wisdom behind the slowness. I’ve learned that he must give the question full attention and respect, and won’t answer lightly.
Talent is distributed around the globe, opportunity is not. Visit to a finance-sponsored ‘datathon’ to find the next generation of quantative wizards.
During the Tito-era of communist rule in then-Yugoslavia, agricultural workers gathered every morning, tools in hand, and waited for someone to hire them for the day.
BEIJING — In Xi Jinping’s China, it is again a risky proposition to openly criticize Mao Zedong. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) thought it had resolved the discussion in 1981 when it decreed that the reign of Mao, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, had been 70% good and 30% bad. But since […]
A day in the life of an Uber driver in São Paulo.
WASHINGTON — When President Barack Obama delivered State of the Union addresses without a full and detailed discussion of foreign policy, conservatives justifiably complained. We are a country at war, with rising, big power threats in an increasingly unstable world. All true. And yet when President Donald Trump said virtually nothing of substance Tuesday night on national security, conservatives by and large gave him a pass. Trump’s highlighting of the widow of slain Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens obscured the lack of substance on the cause for which Trump correctly said Owens gave his life. Repeating that we will eradicate […]
-Analysis- PARIS — How could something like this happen? Some of us have spent the past week trying to find out the facts (and comprehend the enormity) of Sunday night’s Academy Awards mega-gaffe, when La La Land was incorrectly announced as Best Picture. It turns out that the blame rests with the old school audit […]
This eternal battle in Spain in not just between man and nature, but among humans. The freshly slain body of a still bleeding wolf was found hanging from a signpost along a highway in northern Spain last weekend, reigniting the debate over the killings of the protected species, reports El País. Here is a photograph […]
This was the end of the road for us: Driving with my family from France in our Peugeot 404, our goal was to go as far north as possible, by way of Denmark and Sweden. What I didn’t know was that back then, about 100 kilometers north of the Norwegian capital Oslo, roads were in […]
But for some, politicians’ rising calls for unity ring hollow.
Modeled on Swiss-based nuclear research center CERN after the 1994 Oslo accords, the idea of the Amman-based facility is to use science as a way to learn to work together in the Middle East.
Beth sometimes sleeps for months. She suffers from a rare disorder — the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ syndrome. Her boyfriend Dan sits bedside every day. A different kind of timeless love story.
Repatriating people like Ismael Arciniegas, a Colombian executed in China for drug smuggling, could create a perverse incentive.
-Analysis- As China opened its markets and rose to become the world’s second-largest economy, foreign media focus has shifted from tales of political repression and exotic outposts to largely a business story. Corporate chiefs and bankers unpack the meaning of hard, cold economic figures, and the latest data revealing Chinese “expansionary territory,” with the odd […]
-Analysis- PARIS — Political junkies everywhere are getting used to the rush of watching election campaigns defy the laws of physics. Just a few weeks ago, the path looked all clear for François Fillon to become the next French President in the vote later this spring. By yesterday, the former center-right Prime Minister looked to […]
As the bombs continue to drop on parts of Syria, doctors struggle to give basic medical care to women, which then has ramifications for children.