Researchers at the University Of Macerata used volunteers and online bots to help translated the 19th century children’s classic.
Category: In The News
For Afghan asylum seekers arriving in cold Sweden, the transition isn’t always simple — but a new project is aiming to ease the way.
Bitcoin has proved popular in Colombia, especially in small retail operations. But is it being used by criminals?
PARIS — It all started with a video shot late last year on the banks of the Seine, between the Musée d’Orsay and Pont Royal bridge in the French capital. The video, which has gone viral around the world since first being posted by the daily Le Parisien, shows garbage collectors discovering with horror dozens […]
-Analysis- BUENOS AIRES — Everything suggests that in the future, the world may want practically anything Argentina can produce. The question is whether the response to this demand should be simply augmenting current productivity, or seeking wholly new approaches. Recently, we noted that China, the chief trading partner with which Argentina has just clinched a […]
India’s police and political leaders need to find better ways to halt regular acts of vandalism on Valentine’s Day by those who want to block Western influence.
-OpEd- PARIS — While leafing through the newspapers in an English pub last weekend, I was surprised to see The Sunday Times, hardly a tabloid, portraying the three fiercest Brexiters as “musketeers.” A rather flattering image assuming Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg — the three men in question — are not offended by […]
Weighing collateral damage in the wake of Oxfam prostitution scandal.
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Guatemalan Open Carry
Just a friendly walk by the pier? Perhaps. The machetes, or “coupe-coupe” as we French call them, are a multi-purpose tool, and were ubiquitous through much of our Central American travels. But looking back at this scene was also a chilly reminder that Guatemala was, and still is, one of the most violent countries in […]
CAIRO — “Angry” was the way many described President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s improvised speech during the inauguration ceremony of the Zohr natural gas field on January 31. The president declared that the only way Egypt’s national security could be compromised was over his “dead body” and the “dead body of the military.” But with whom […]
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Watch: OneShot — Condemned Man
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/0Bb3dVG29c0 expand=1] OneShot — Condemned man, 2011 (©Robin Hammond/NOOR) OneShot is a new digital format to tell the story of a single photograph in an immersive one-minute video. Follow OneShot:
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The Eros And Ethics Of Sex Robots
Imagine if machines could do the job of strippers — or prostitutes. Where would it lead us?
War has dismantled Syria’s healthcare system, preventing women and children from receiving life-saving treatment for preventable illnesses. Exiled doctor Khaled Almilaji is determined to do something about it.
Barranquilla’s gay events at carnival time have shed social shaming and police harassment to become part of the intangible patrimony of this historic Caribbean city.
OneShot — Fairest of them all, 1996
French commandos are practically invisible as they carry out high-tech operations across Mali to track down Salafist fighters and other terrorists.
-OpEd- PARIS — At the Beauval Zoo in central France, visitors line up every day for a chance to glimpse at His Majesty Yuan Meng. The animal’s birth, on Aug. 4, 2017, was followed by 26 million people on social media. Baptized with great pomp and circumstance by French First Lady Brigitte Macron in a […]
Nuclear policy in the age of Trump (and Kim) is a scary proposition. But deterrence should still be front and center in light of Moscow’s aggressive posture.
Egypt’s Zohr gas field is the largest ever natural gas find in the Mediterranean. But reshaping the global energy balance of power must factor in other equations.
François-Xavier Mousin and Caroline Buechler used to do marketing for Switzerland’s watch industry. But that was before they went cuckoo for cacao.
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Modern Mausoleum Wonder
The remains of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus can be found in present-day in the southwest Turkish city of Bodrum. It was once one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World before it was destroyed by earthquakes. Tant pis ! Some 700 kilometers north is Ankara’s tomb of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first […]
A chilly bit of ‘wealth flaunting’ in time for the Chinese New Year.
France is the land of seduction, where relations between men and women can seem more harmonious, dating back to the Ancien Régime. Or is that a myth hiding a darker reality?
Asian long-horned beetles in North America. Tropical parakeets in the capital cities of Europe. The plague of frogs Bart accidentally unleashed that time the Simpsons visited Australia. Yes, invasive species are a growing problem in our globalized world. And yet there’s something absurdly uncommon about the animal invaders that, over the past quarter-century, have made […]
Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA’s famously frugal founder died last month at 91. In southern Sweden, where his mega-business began and continues to thrive, locals remember him fondly.
The old, retired cardinal has had enough. He does not like what the Vatican is doing in China. He takes a plane and asks to be received by the pope. But instead of bringing it to an end, the encounter between the two men escalates the tensions around the Vatican’s pending agreement with China, a […]
-OpEd- PARIS — A people brings glory upon itself up when it is able to confront the complexity of its history. On the contrary, it dishonors itself when it takes on a defensive posture with its past. In Poland, both houses of the legislature have now voted in favor of a law criminalizing any reference […]
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Cliffside Drama
In my 60+ years of driving, I was never involved in any kind of serious accident — barely a flat tire. Not everyone is so lucky. This was the scene a day after a bad turn along the coastal road from Fréjus to Cannes in southern France. I never did find out the fate of […]
Civic values are ultimately worth more than dollars and yen.
ISTANBUL — Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a historic visit to Rome on Monday, the first time a Turkish leader has met the Pope at the Vatican in nearly six decades. But the visit to Italy, which included meetings with top Italian leaders, comes as Turkey’s military is engaged in heavy conflict with Kurdish […]
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When Billionaires Turn To Nonprofits
NEW YORK — Amazon.com Inc., Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are publicly traded, profit-oriented corporations. So it is interesting that when they announced their new joint health-care venture this week they made a point of saying it would be “an independent company that is free from profit-making incentives and constraints.” Interesting but maybe not all that surprising: Around the world, health, life and property insurance, as well as various other financial services, have long been provided by nonprofit organizations, mostly in the form of customer-owned mutuals. From the 1960s through 2000s, wave after wave of conversions turned […]
LAUSANNE — Margaux and her partner, Séverine, have spent more than a year traveling in a van from the United States to Patagonia. It makes sense then that they’ve come across #Vanlife, an Instagram hashtag van users like themselves use for posting pictures of their lives on the open road. The couple, from Lausanne, enjoy […]
Chile has buried Parra, the antipoet who turned to ‘impudent’ street talk for inspiration and revolutionized modern Spanish poetry.
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The Grandfather Of Selfies
My wife and I were ahead of the times with this selfie from the early 90s in the Butchart Gardens near Vancouver.
MINYA — Anba Makarios, a bishop in the governorate with Egypt’s highest number of violent sectarian incidents, does not employ the usual appeasing rhetoric of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox church. He is a man who makes his voice heard but avoids being seen, expressing himself through official statements and brief phone calls to television talk shows. […]
‘Love jihad’ is a brutally constructed political agenda combining patriarchal notions of ‘our women’ and communal notions of ‘their men.’
Responding to changing consumer habits, big box retail in Argentina have started converting outlets to offer an easier and cheaper shopping experience.
Even in a pre-internet era, the impact was almost immediate. Eddie Adams’ Feb. 1, 1968 photograph of Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a North Vietnamese prisoner hit the Associated Press wires, and would soon appear in newspapers in the United States and around the world. The graphic image stunned the public and politicians alike, quickly adding to the mounting opposition to the war in Vietnam. Some historians say it may have changed the course of the war itself. Adams, who would win the Pulitzer Prize for the image, had mixed feelings about the work. For a seasoned AP war […]
Rising sea levels are already forcing thousands of South Pacific residents to leave their homes. But what happens when an entire country has to relocate?
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Tintin And The Red Lanterns
Show this picture of red lanterns in the gardens of Suzhou to any Tintin reader, and there’s a good chance it’ll remind them of the cover of The Blue Lotus.