*Note: grosse (große) means great in German…
Category: In The News
Admitting newcomers based on their skills is smart; cutting their numbers in half is a mistake.
Correio Braziliense, Aug. 3, 2017 Brazil’s President Michel Temer has survived a crucial vote in the lower house of Congress on whether he should be tried on allegations of corruption. The vote is a “victory” that “strengthens’ his position, Correio Braziliense writes on its front page Thursday. The newspaper features a striking image of one […]
Decades after the Khmer Rouge, the legacy of their brutal regime claims a new generation of victims.
Holding a contested vote to replace parliament with a loyal popular assembly may give Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro a little more power and time. But how long for?
Categories
Try To Stand Still Life
The lights were dimmed inside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. So when my wife moved a bit during the shot, it gave her a bit of a surrealistic blur next to this 17th-century Dutch genre painting. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
-Analysis- Long before Angela Merkel or even Margaret Thatcher, Indian politics has produced some fearsome female leaders. Indira Gandhi, also known as the “Iron Lady” of India, took office as the first female prime minister of the country in 1966 and returned for another term in 1980. Years after Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, her daughter-in-law Sonia Gandhi, carried forward both the family and female legacy, and still stands as longstanding president of the Indian National Congress party. Lesser known abroad, but in some ways perhaps even more influential, was Jayalalithaa, fondly known as Amma (“Mother”), who ruled the huge southern […]
The regional government of Catalonia will hold a controversial independence referendum in October. Opinion is deeply divided in the cities of Lleida And Berga.
VUELTA DEL RIO — In the heart of the Argentinian region of Patagonia, near a spot called Vuelta del Rio, a banner hung by the side of the road stands out against the wilderness of the surrounding steppes. “Fuera Benetton de Territorio Mapuche” (Benetton, out of Mapuche Territory) it reads in red capital letters. The […]
-Analysis- PARIS — Wednesday will mark “Earth Overshoot Day,” the moment when humanity uses more of the Earth’s ecological resources than the planet can regenerate in a year. This awkwardly named annual event, first conceived by the UK think tank New Economics Foundation in 2006, is a way to track the accumulating effects of climate […]
PARIS — A series of major terrorist attacks since 2015 has changed life in France in big and small ways. Now it is about to change training requirements for French medical students. Beginning in September, every Faculty of Medicine in France must provide a training class for all of its students on how to treat […]
Bling and style are barriers that the Chinese-owned, Swedish-based company may not be able to overcome.
-Analysis- During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump had promised to improve U.S. relations with Russia. His supporters said it was just the kind of bold move the world needed as escalating hostilities between the two nations stood in the way of solving major global issues from Syria to cybersecurity. Trump’s opponents, to this day, see […]
Categories
French Naval Pride
We French call our country “la France.” But when we speak of “le France,” that’s the SS France — once the biggest ocean liner in the world. In my 60 years of travels, I’ve found myself twice in its wake: here in the late 1960s, off the pier of Cannes in southern France; and some […]
In between nuclear tests, Pyongyang is investing massively in its tourism infrastructure. A delegation visited Spain last month to study their resorts.
As more men are migrating into cities in search of a living, women are left with all the weight of the farming and family. That is not a sustainable model.
KARBALA — Inside the shrine and mosque covered by mosaics, the crowd is rushing to touch the silver edge of the martyr’s tomb. Among the crowd is Manjour, 37, who came all the way from Gurajat, India, to honor his “leader,” Al-Husayn ibn ‘Ali, the third Shia imam. Even as fierce battles and terror attacks […]
It is the nature of the job, not the people who occupy it, that is ultimately to blame for an endless series of scandals at the top ranks of Brazilian politics.
GENEVA — There are those few rare researchers through the ages so devoted to science that they have used their own bodies as a laboratory for their experiments. After inventing the hallucinogenic substance LSD, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann unintentionally, and then intentionally, took doses of the drug. In his autobiography published in 1980, Hofmann […]
-Essay- TAIPEI — I still recall the long journey I made in 1987 during my first visit in China, traveling in crammed buses with the smells of caged poultry on board. Through Guangzhou in Canton, and the famous mountain landscape of Guilin and Yangshuo in the southeast province of Guangxi, I recall being amazed that, […]
Many are up in arms after UNESCO granted a small Japanese island World Heritage Site status in June. On face value, Okinoshima Island, home to a 17th-century Shinto shrine, is a worthy World Heritage Site. But it’s not what the island has that has caused controversy — rather, what it lacks: There are no women […]
Guédelon, an attraction in Burgundy, recreates the Middle Ages in a way that aims to make visitors smarter while they’re having fun.
Categories
German Folklore In The Flesh
Is that you, Rübezahl? See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
The ‘brand’ of Il Duce is doing particularly well on Facebook and Instagram.
Geopolitical and historical intrigue could lead to war-mongering along the Indian-Chinese border, but an open conflict is highly unlikely.
Jeanne d’Arc Girubuntu, a 22-year-old cycling champion, strives to be a role model and to inspire women of Rwanda to fight for their independence.
Like many in Argentina, psychiatrist Martín Reynoso was raised Catholic. But as time went on, his approach to the modern world began to involve meditation and mindfulness.
PARIS — As the editor of what we call a “digital magazine,” I must make lots of choices on any given day as the various streams of news — real and fake and often just pointless — criss-cross on my computer and smartphone screens. Save this, swipe that, assign this, ignore that. Just one of […]
When a woman doesn’t drink, we all suspect her of being pregnant. But what happens when that’s true?
A wealth of hidden, unfamiliar fruits could help protect Colombia’s embattled rainforests by luring peasants and settlers away from coca farming.
Categories
Floating By The Sugarloaves
Near Guilin, my wife and I hopped on a short cruise on the Li River. The makeshift houseboats built from discarded modern materials were interesting to look at, but clashed with the scenic surroundings of sugarloaf hills and gorges in southern China. See more slides from My Grand-Père’s World here.
Libération, July 24, 2017 Leading French daily Libération showed its support for embattled Turkish opposition daily Cumhuriyet, as a trial gets underway for 17 journalists and staff members on charges of aiding a terrorist organization. The front page for this special Libération with Cumhuriyet edition features a cartoon — a meaningful choice of expression in […]
Scientists have the technology to bring extinct species back to life, give or take a few missing DNA strands. But should they?
-Essay- PARIS — For a superficial observer, it is one of the lesser-known cultural revolutions and a rather trivial one at that: the dramatic shift in the Western physical ideal, in just over a generation, from one skin ideal to another, from one tone to another. It is what we in French call “bronzage,” similar […]
High ticket prices and fancy stadiums are making the games of the national pastime off-limits for most of Brazil’s population.
SpongeBOZZ’s new album quickly shot up the German hip-hop charts, but his irreverence is telling, part of a growing trend to treat World War II as distant history.
Some 3,000 women gathered on the beach of Annaba to protest the mandatory wearing of burkinis — a reminder that women must choose for themselves and their bodies.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has done his best to stay close to the president, but that doesn’t translate into influence over American diplomacy.
PALMA — You live in one of those special places where people travel from all around the world to visit. A dream? More like a neverending tourist hell, says Venice resident Elisa Crepaldi. “Some of the most beautiful areas in the city are no longer accessible to locals. We have to renounce living in some […]