Rue de Ponthieu is one of the French capital’s choice spots for late-night partying. But it also has a reputation for dodgy encounters and pre-dawn street fights.
Author: Alidad Vassigh
Born in Tehran, educated in Britain and France, I have been a freelance translator since the late 1990s.
If Trump wants to seal off U.S. borders, Latin Americans can respond by boycotting American brands.
Illegal border crossings won’t stop, but prices will rise.
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How Death Makes Us Human — For Now
Thinking of death is inherent to being human. Technological advances, like so many human activities, reflect our desire to avoid it. But that may all be bound to change.
Invoking religion against one’s enemies is a sure way to perpetuate resentment and war. It stretches from the Crusades to the internet where you are reading right now.
-Editorial- SANTIAGO — Finally. The Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto reacted correctly to the new U.S. President Donald J. Trump, canceling the meeting they were scheduled to have last week. Mr. Peña Nieto seems to have come into his own! Trump had asked for the meeting, to discuss trade, immigration and above all, frontier security. […]
-Analysis- BUENOS AIRES — It must be a sign of the times. Echoing the clampdown of foreign visitors by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, Argentina is set to tighten its border controls in a country that has long received migrants from around the world. The move was taken ostensibly to target crime, which many Argentines […]
Foreign scientists working in the U.S. are seeking job prospects in Switzerland as they contemplate leaving a country under an unfriendly administration. For one Swiss agency, that’s not necessarily good news.
-OpEd- BOGOTÁ — The declarations Donald Trump made in last week’s inauguration speech mark a major shift for the United States on both the domestic and international fronts. His nationalist exhortations, and call for other countries to follow the same path, are the kind of dangerous demagoguery that often leads to war and misery. Trump’s […]
Climate change is giving meteorologists an added incentive to make accurate, ever more timely predictions. Supercomputers are helping them do it.
Mexico does not need more reforms. It needs a complete overhaul of the political system that was put in place a century ago.
Trump’s vow to end NAFTA and bring back factories to the U.S. isn’t typical right-wing ideology. Or is it that we’ve misunderstood the purpose of ideology?
-OpEd- GENEVA — When it comes to choosing a future leader, a candidate’s personality tends to be as important as his or her proposed policies. In the case of Donald J. Trump, the political ideas he expressed in his presidential campaign were simplistic, outrageous and Manichaean. His conduct was deliberately extravagant and he made no […]
Xi Jinping’s calls in Davos to protect free trade are not a jab at Donald Trump, but in keeping with China’s march toward a market-led consumer society.
It seems only the Church has managed to curb the ambitions of recent Congolese rulers Mobutu and Joseph Kabila. Now Church leaders are trying to peacefully nudge Kabila from power to avoid the bloodshed many are predicting.
Donald Trump is not the free market’s executioner, but a coroner appointed to quietly confirm its demise. Sadly, in its place, is a gaping void of alternatives.
TEHRAN — When a major political leader dies, the labels and comparisons acquired over a lifetime can tell us much about both the leader and the nation itself. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a veteran of the 1979 Iranian Revolution who later evolved into a reformist, has been called over the years everything, from the “General of […]
BUENOS AIRES — Places speak through their names, and the stories of their foundational origins constitute an intangible heritage as significant as any famous building or monument. Toponymy is the study of place names and their origins, the relationship, in other words, between a place and its name. And names often give us information on […]
PUNTA DEL ESTE — From this Argentine beach resort, it was business as usual this week for the Trump family empire. But the appearance of Eric Trump, the second-born son of the next U.S. President, to promote the family company’s new luxury flats in Argentina was also another flash of the unresolved questions about major […]
Trade with Asia will be all the more important for Latin American countries once President Obama leaves office.
Venezuela is not running out of banknotes due to criminal or speculative hoarding.
-OpEd- MEXICO CITY — “Little civil wars’ are proliferating in Mexico. Yet the simmering cauldron fomenting these conflicts could also prove transformative. It would depend on how the dynamics are managed and, more importantly, if anyone will be able and willing to take charge of this process of change. These low-grade conflicts are being fought […]
Enough with the praise the Left has shamelessly heaped on Fidel Castro. He was simply a dictator who deprived Cubans of their basic human rights. Looks the same from the right.
TEHRAN — Since Boeing’s announcement Sunday that Iran Air would buy 80 new planes, the deal has been dissected for both its economic and geopolitical significance. The $16.6 billion purchase comes in the wake of the 2015 Iran nuclear accord and marks the U.S. aircraft company’s first deal with the country since the 1970s. Boeing […]
BOGOTA — Freeze! The Mannequin Challenge, the latest internet craze where groups of people make a video of themselves frozen in time, has an unlikely new participant: the Colombian rebel army FARC. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which has spent much of the past half-century waging a bloody insurgency and holding hostages for […]
-Analysis- In his half-century as leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro oversaw grand changes on the island. In the wake of his death, new changes may — or may not — be on their way under the helm of the late leader’s brother, President Raul Castro. Nowhere is the future more uncertain on the island nation […]
-OpEd- MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto recently told a gathering of CEOs at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit that his country sees no need to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States. Instead, it merely should be “modernized” or updated. That, he stated, would mean adding […]
French President Hollande, who announced he will not seek reelection, led a series of mishaps and failures, down to the indignity of his last public speech.
A town in southwestern Colombia is trying to clamp down on catcalling — “piropos’ (compliments) as they’re known locally — that is all too common in a country long plagued by machismo. In a rare public move against sexist behavior, the mayor’s office in Timbío, in the department of Cauca, recently issued a “non-binding” decree […]
Not unlike a zealous Christian, Castro learned from Catholicism a dogmatism and opposition to pluralism that he imposed on his island nation for decades.
Animal rights activists in Argentina are testing the limits of democratic rights on behalf of elephants they say are being mistreated at the Buenos Aires Zoo.
BUENOS AIRES — City living often means getting to know your neighbors well, though not necessarily by choice. Whether its late-night partying or that leak from their floor through your ceiling, apartment dwellers often find themselves face-to-face with very tangible conflicts with their fellow citizens. Buenos Aires, a city where people increasingly live in tight […]
As officials plan a cleanup of the foul Matanza-Riachuelo River Basin, in Buenos Aires scientists are awed by the handful of creatures that manage to survive there.
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Trump And The Ayatollah
With the choice of controversial retired Gen. Michael Flynn to be White House National Security Advisor comes a new flurry of anticipation (and worry) that American foreign policy will be turned on its head with the election of Donald Trump. Take the Iranian nuclear accord negotiated by the Obama Administration, which Trump has called “the […]
Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist who died in 2012, wrote more than a decade ago of a U.S. president who, through punitive measures, would almost shut Mexico down and accidentally revive the art of letter-writing.
Donald Trump shows disdain for both Latinos in his own country, as well as some basic tenets of international relations.
A new surge in deforestation can be traced to an unauthorized road connecting La Macarena to San Jose del Guaviare. What is the origin? What will be done?
Complaining out loud (and on social media) about the high prices at exclusive restaurants is the epitome of upper class lack of self-awareness. A VIP case study in Bogota.
Carmen Balcells, literary agent to some of the greatest Spanish-language writers of our time, died this past weekend in Barcelona. One of the novelists she discovered, Isabel Allende, pays tribute.