Though Angela Merkel has secured a fourth term with Sunday’s election, the populist party Alternative for Germany will be the first far-right party since 1961 to enter parliament.
Category: In The News
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Olympic Pause
Running, discus throw, long jump, javelin throw, wrestling … After learning all about the Ancient Olympic Games, my wife was enjoying a well-deserved break in the shade, sitting on the ruins of the sanctuary of Olympia where the very first competitions were held.
Once again, life imitates art. In his masterpiece 1984, George Orwell wrote, “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.” This quote has proven particularly relevant in recent weeks as activists in the West suddenly […]
The Getty Center launches a festival of Latin American art that also considers its influence on American culture and identity. In the age of Donald J. Trump, this has become doubly significant.
China, for one, sees the incumbent German Chancellor as the ‘mother if not grandmother’ of all of Europe. Her likely victory will be good news for her nation, and the planet.
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View From A Batak Backyard
It’s sometimes easy to forget that the Batak houses of Indonesia’s North Sumatra are not there only for the tourists’ viewing pleasure — people actually live in them. All you need to do is take a little walk around the impressive facades to get a glimpse of the Batak’s way of life.
-OpEd- In his account of the 1985 earthquake, which killed between 6,000 and 30,000 people (there are no precise figures) and destroyed more than 800 buildings in Mexico City, Carlos Monsiváis, one of the country’s greatest writers, described what he saw as the “emergence of civil society.” At the time, Monsiváis, who died in 2010, […]
A recent series of documentaries unveil untold chapters of ugly Japanese history.
-OpEd- BOGOTÁ — In August 1894, while traveling to Venezuela, the Colombian poet José Asunción Silva spent time in Cartagena de Indias, the colonial port on Colombia“s Caribbean coast. He wrote about his impressions of the city to his mother and sister. He had taken a liking to the locals, who were cheerful and informal, […]
With each passing day, war with North Korea seems to draw closer. Kim Jong Un continues to test his arsenal; Donald Trump issues new threats and nicknames his nemesis “Rocket Man“; Kim responds in kind, saying the U.S. president’s speech yesterday at the United Nations was “the sound of a dog barking.” Some say the […]
The French coastal city was home to the infamous makeshift village of migrants seeking to cross to the UK. The ‘Jungle’ was dismantled less than a year ago, but immigrants are now back in town.
German elections will see the results of a seismic change within the German political landscape, as Merkel’s moderate policies have opened space on the right for extremists.
-Essay- SANTIAGO — Nowadays, it’s virtually impossible to surprise anyone. This is a big challenge, especially in the entertainment industry where you need to make a considerable effort to stage memorable events that have an impact. When you consider that most consumers now are millennials, you have to ask, how do you make them pay […]
Milenio Novedades, Sept. 20, 2017 For the second time is as many weeks, “Mexico Shakes,” as the front page of the Yucatán daily Milenio Novedades reports, following a 7.1-magnitude earthquake on Tuesday that toppled buildings and killed at least 216 people. Many more are missing. Victims include a group of children in Mexico City’s Coapa […]
The U.S. president’s threat to ‘totally destroy’ a nation is beyond the pale. But is there method to it?
-OpEd- TURIN — Everyone knew that Australian politician Rachel Carling-Jenkins had filed for a divorce, but nobody knew why. She explained it herself, a few days ago, standing up to speak before the state parliament of Victoria, of which she is a member. In February 2016 she had found images on her husband’s computer of […]
Libération, Sept. 19, 2017 Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Tuesday broke her silence on the violence in her Buddhist-majority country that has forced hundreds of thousands of minority Muslim Rohingya to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. French newspaper Libération featured a picture of her with the headline “A Nobel and a massacre” splashed on […]
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Lining Up For Lenin
Even a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, people were lining up in Red Square to get a glimpse of Vladimir Lenin: the Communist leader’s embalmed body remains on display inside the mausoleum.
GENEVA — She didn’t expect the enthusiasm with which she was honored. When she received the 2017 Sergio Vieira de Mello Award, which is named after the former High Commissioner for Human Rights who was killed in Iraq in 2003, it was followed by a spontaneous roar of applause. Rebecca Dali, 56, was being feted […]
In places like Venezuela, electronic interactions may be a more reliable source of information than the government.
-Analysis- The blueprints of the Middle Ages are back. Even as metal and glass have long since replaced stone and mortar, there is an unmistakable parallel to be drawn between medieval fortifications and the walls rising in all corners of the world: from the U.S.-Mexico border to Hungary, from São Paulo to the West Bank. […]
The PLO gives monthly allowances to the families of Palestinians detained in Israeli jails. The Israeli and U.S. governments want the practice to stop.
There is no contradiction between feeling French (or Catalan, or Berliner) and becoming a European citizen. But it is time for that citizenship to have real civic meaning.
WASHINGTON — This month, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons will open for signature at the United Nations. Signatories will promise never to “develop, test, produce, manufacture . . . possess or stockpile nuclear weapons’; never to transfer weapons to other parties nor to receive them; and never to “use or threaten to use nuclear weapons.” The treaty’s aims, if they could be universally effected, are noble. After all, the prospect of nations — including, now, an international pariah like North Korea — facing off with their respective nuclear arsenals is horrific. Their renewed use in war would […]
TEKNAF — They ran, they walked, they stumbled, then they ran again. They’re exhausted, starving, some are wounded. They fled with fear and death chasing from behind. They are also carrying with them the memory of those who have died and an endless list of the missing. There is, in the forced exodus of Myanmar’s […]
-Essay- BOGOTÁ — I always had mixed feelings about the Netflix series Narcos. The first two seasons were based on the life and times of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, and the show has just released a third season. Initially, I did not want to watch a series depicting what I had watched on the […]
Writers, artists, journalists and others fleeing oppression in Turkey are settling in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin. But the dream is always to go back home.
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Seattle From The Needle
That’s the beauty of shooting with a telelens: From the top of the famous Space Needle, I was able to see details of downtown Seattle — more than a mile away.
We have seen far fewer grim accounts of rescues and drownings of would-be immigrants in the Mediterranean in recent weeks, as the human trafficking route-of-choice between North Africa to Europe shuts down. But another dangerous route appears to be opening up right next door. The recent efforts to crack down on traffickers operating along the […]
The restaurant ‘Garemt Akl’ (eating crime) aims to tap into Hunger Games morbidity and real-life curiosity about incarceration among Egyptians. But it is chillingly insensitive to real inmates and their families.
Cleaning up after natural disasters has become a lucrative business, but raises questions for victims and governments alike.
Chile, not chili! A national deconstructing of that viral video of the hungry Latin American canine stealing the internet’s heart.
An online show called Drugslab gives viewers a first-hand account of what it’s like to take anything from mushrooms to ecstasy.
RECIFE — Caricatures can sometimes cross the line. But world leaders, who are always the center of attention, tend to get used to unflattering satirical portraits. But two former Brazilian Presidents embroiled in corruption scandals, Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, have become targets of a different — literal — sort. As daily Folha de […]
Millions of British citizens don’t want to give up being European.
-Analysis- The honeymoon is definitely over. Just four months after he was elected to lead France, Emmanuel Macron faced his first major nationwide protest Tuesday against major labor reform plans that are seen as the central pillar of his presidency. Tens of thousands of workers have gone on strike for the day, causing some travel […]
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Heroic Minsk
Minsk is a former Hero City: a Soviet title awarded to 12 cities for their “outstanding services to the Motherland” during World War II. The honor came with an obelisk.
HAWASSA — Peter Wan is smiling from ear to ear. The 50-year-old walks past huge warehouses, where dozens of Ethiopians are busy working on spinning and thread-dyeing machines. “We are in the production test stage,” he says, at the Chinese factory of JP Textile at the entrance of the industrial park of Hawassa, some 270 […]
In May 1999, I visited North Korea. I was based at the time in Beijing as a correspondent for a Slovenian newspaper, and it was impossible not to visit the country that had aroused so many questions and offered so few answers. One just needed to see the place. So I did. I joined a […]
Miami’s beaches and boardwalks have become waterways. Houston’s highways looked like lakes just two weeks back, while halfway around the world boats were replacing buses as the streets of Mumbai were turned into rivers. The scientific literature has a clear explanation for these dramatic images: global warming is bringing more rain and more floods, and […]