U.S. President Donald Trump is raising the threat of an arms build-up, and even nuclear confrontation itself. But he’s not the only one.
Category: In The News
KABUL — In the crowded old city of the Afghan capital, dozens of shops are lined with piles of colourful dried herbs, sitting out in the open. Their fragrance wafts into the street. Hindu shopkeepers wear red, blue and black turbans, and have long, bushy beards. They tell they’ve been making and selling herbal medicine here for generations. Darmander Singh is a Hindu sage – a wise mystic. People here call him La La Dil Soz, which means ‘Kind big brother” in Persian. He sees more than 30 patients a week, asking them detailed questions about their body, before setting […]
Hellish firestorms in northern California have killed at least 17 people and razed entire neighborhoods, destroying more than 2,000 structures. Dozens of other people have been reported missing, raising fears that the death toll could rise sharply. The “disaster is relentless,” Wednesday’s front page of the San Francisco Chronicle reads above a photograph of the […]
Backers of Catalonia’s quest to break away from Spain had just eight seconds Tuesday night to savor the moment they’d long been waiting for. “I accept the mandate of the people that Catalonia become an independent state in the shape of a republic,” Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont said in a highly anticipated address before […]
ACCRA — Ghana has two presidents. The first was elected last December, and is named Nana Akufo-Addo, a 73-year-old British-educated son of a former head of state. The other is Janet Adu, 57, who never studied abroad and has always lived far from the luxuries of the official presidential palace. But she too was elected […]
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Leaning Tree Of Denmark
I was in Denmark multiple times, usually on our way to get up north to Sweden and Norway — and never disappointed by the scenery along the way. This shot stands out for the tree leaning over the stream and the vivid green contrasts, though I also did my best to catch the blond cyclist […]
Cold War-style propaganda isn’t helping the Kremlin win over young Russians. For that, President Vladimir Putin has turned to social media and its teenage fans.
Sexual violence is being used by almost all the warring factions in the Syrian conflict. When victims are forced to suffer in silence, documenting instances of rape is nearly impossible.
The devastating earthquake in 1985 upended politics in Mexico. Could last month’s deadly disasters do the same?
KABUL — You see the images everywhere in the streets of Kabul: bare-chested men posing with their protruding and pulsating muscles. Scattered across the Afghan capital, the posters are eye-catching in there own right, but stand out even more in a place where men typically sport the traditional long trousers and puffy shirts known as […]
Lack of resources and social stigma continue to stand in the way of saving lives of those at risk of AIDS in many parts of Africa.
SAN FRANCISCO — I can’t help but feel disappointed that TaskRabbit, the San Francisco-based startup and “sharing economy” pioneer, has agreed to become a unit of Ikea. Although the company has tried to cast the deal as an expansion opportunity, this outcome is a far cry from the lofty expectations of its early days. TaskRabbit’s fate illustrates Silicon Valley’s unbounded idealism when it comes to optimizing everything. The company was a catalyst for “collaborative consumption,” a movement in which everyone would share their homes, their vehicles and their time. In a seminal TED talk, Rachel Botsman declared that the currency […]
Switzerland is behind only the U.S. and Yemen in rate of gun ownership. For Americans, maybe it’s not just about the quantity of guns but also their relationship with them.
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A Marble Souvenir
To help me remember where I’ve been, along my 60+ years of travels, I have amassed a decent collection of rocks, pebbles, bits of bark — in addition to my 20,000 slides. On the floor of this extraordinary Jain temple in northwestern India, a tiny fragment of marble was waiting for me to pick it […]
Sandy makes big money stripping down, but never all-nude.
It is the great challenge (and paradox) of our time: Far from erasing identity claims, globalization reinforces them. From Spain to Myanmar to Trump’s America, it must be confronted head-on.
-OpEd- PARIS — Donald Trump’s task on Tuesday should have been simple enough. Traveling to the storm-ravaged island of Puerto Rico, the American president was supposed to offer some comforting words, distribute emergency supplies, and commit the federal government to rebuild the U.S. territory as quickly as possible. But rather than disaster relief, Trump was […]
PALERMO — As the Sicilian capital’s oldest market, La Vucciria has long drawn visitors from around the world for its myriad colors and aromas. While its peculiar traditions live on, with vendors barking out in the local dialect to sell their products to passersby, the market is a shadow of its former self. Once immortalized […]
The carnage in Las Vegas is evil and tragic, but is it terrorism?
SERTÃOZINHO — In a simple house here, 330 kilometers northwest of São Paulo in Brazil, Glauber Pereira Souza, 36, is the head of a four-legged family: He owns five dogs, two cats and two rabbits. The youngest member of his household is Preta, a mongrel female who had been run over by a bus, but […]
With designs that imitate fakes, luxury fashion brands try to attract a younger and more connected clientele.
Each year, about 200 soldiers from the elite military unit become naturalized French citizens.
Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oct. 2, 2017 “Mass shooting on Strip,” reads the front page of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, just hours after a man opened fire on a crowd of an open-air country music festival in Las Vegas. At least 50 people were killed and 406 people transported to hospitals according to the latest report […]
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Conflict Over Catalonia, Bad To Worse
MADRID — For Mariano Rajoy, it’s as if October 1 never happened. The Spanish Prime Minister insisted that his government was simply implementing Spain’s democratic constitution in sending gendarmes to stop an illegal, separatist referendum organized by the Catalan regional authority on Sunday. But October 1 may go down as a turning point in Spanish, […]
KOTA BHARU — On Sultan Zaineb street, congregants leave the mosque one by one in Kota Bharu, the capital of the rural Kelantan state, in northeastern Malaysia. After Friday prayers, the loudspeakers are put on standby. Some men wearing the traditional kufi turban cross a square at the heart of which stands a white arrow-shaped […]
With the arrival of tech-heavy, self-driving vehicles, makers of traditional cars will have to adapt. But so too will everyone from real estate agents to insurers and tax collectors.
The surge in worldwide refugee numbers may be alarming, but for Argentina it should be seen as an opportunity to boost its economy. Much like in the past.
The success of the far-right populist party Alternative for Germany in this week’s parliamentary elections has prompted comparisons to the rise of Nazism. There are in fact similarities, but also key differences. An overview.
Chinese domestic brands like Huawei, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi are undercutting the American giant, which aims ever more upmarket.
Historically for Madrid, there is no such thing as delicate diplomacy. But that approach has boomeranged in the face of the Catalan push for independence.
-Analysis- PARIS — It was a final gift from the American patron of beauty and pleasure: The sight of Hugh Hefner’s silk-robed portrait, splashed across the top of the internet as Paris woke up this morning, was an odd kind of relief from the neverending stream of terrorism, natural disaster and nuclear threats. The death […]
Did adverse conditions force such Latin American strongmen Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro to clamp down, or did they hide their authoritarian designs from the start?
Ammar Abd Rabbo covered two Assad presidencies from the inside, but his view changed when the Syrian civil war started.
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Chinese Apparel
I stumbled upon a parade in full traditional attire in the lush gardens of Suzhou, in eastern China. What I like most about this shot is the pair’s symmetrical contrast with the man and woman in contemporary uniforms just over their respective right shoulders.
French President Emmanuel Macron has just set himself up as the European Union’s would-be savior. Seen from a Swiss point of view, there’s no better option out there.
VISSO — Francesco Sbaffi was recouping after a long day during a busy wine harvest when a powerful earthquake struck this idyllic town in the Apennine Mountains 11 months ago. The grape must was already fermenting in barrels at the Coppacchioli winery, where Sbaffi works as an oenologist, when the earthquake hit. As thousands of […]
High education levels and salary expectations have created something of a disconnect between South Korean job seekers and employers.
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Germany, Welcome To The New Normal
The success of the far-right Alternative for Germany party in the election is history’s revenge against the idea that Germans had to be a model for the rest of the world.
The tragedy of the Rohingya in Myanmar should be viewed within the region-wide context of the resurgence of religious nationalism across Southeast Asia.
-Analysis- Is there ever a good time to hold an independence referendum? Of course the answer to that question, from Kurdistan to Catalonia, depends on whom you ask. For those looking to declare a new nation based on ethnic, economic or political claims, there’s no time like the present to take destiny into your own […]