WorldcrunchBorn in Tehran, educated in Britain and France, I have been a freelance translator since the late 1990s.
Green technologies are crucial to reducing carbon emissions, but they require ramping up the need for mining of minerals. And since mineral extraction can cause grave natural destruction, how can we ensure renewables are truly good for the environment?
Didi Food, a delivery startup that struggled in East Asia, has found a growing market in Latin American cities, where appetite for home deliveries has yet to be fully satisfied.
Russia’s attack on Ukraine has exacerbated tensions not only in its neighborhood, but around the planet, making the world’s hotspots even hotter.
With the complicity of leftist rulers in Venezuela, Bolivia and even Argentina, Iran’s sanction-ridden regime is spreading its tentacles in South America, and could even undermine democracies.
The dominance of a single narrative of globalization and liberal democracy is over.
Gustavo Petro’s victory is not only a response to the social ills of today, but having been part of a Marxist guerrilla group that negotiated with the state decades ago, and returned to the social fold, he embodies the nation’s democratic future.
Two years of restrictions and millions of deaths brought on by the pandemic might have had us reflect on the reality of suffering and death, but as booming pharmaceutical and retailing figures suggested, nothing can distract modern folk from their love of distraction. A view from an Argentine physician.
The Persian Gulf has become lucrative fishing territory. Sharks, a threatened species, are being hunted to be used in cooking and medicines. Local fishermen are being arrested, but the operation involves people much higher up the food chain.
With Washington’s attention fixed on Russia, Ukraine and China, the upcoming Summit of the Americas will likely not be the “breakthrough” gathering to forge the equal ties Latin America has long sought from the United States. But Washington would be wise to invest in stronger unity in its own hemisphere.
Colombians spurned the establishment candidates in the first round of presidential voting. In the second round, on June 19, they will have to choose between Gustavo Petro, a former Marxist guerrilla, and Rodolfo Hernández a “tough-talking” businessman being compared to Donald Trump.
The war in Ukraine is hastening the fall of major world powers Russia and the United States. There can only be one true victor from their protracted battle — China — and far too many risks for the rest of us.
Digital currencies may be volatile, but one company in Argentina has found a way to allow farmers to purchase goods and services online using surplus grain.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, aka AMLO, says his plans to reform the electoral system are a way to save taxpayer money. A closer look tells a different story.
The Colombian president recently said that the country had exported one million barrels of carbon-neutral or offset oil. But in an unregulated carbon market, such a claim is pure greenwashing.
In his early journalistic writings, the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez showed he had an eye for factual details, in which he found the absurdity and ‘magic’ that would in time be the stuff and style of his fiction.
As cannabis is legalized in more places, investors are taking note. One Luxembourg-based, Uruguayan-led fund has found an innovative way to bypass banking obstacles and raise capital.
After becoming Chile’s youngest president in December’s elections, former student activist and socialist Gabriel Boric has disappointed his most radical voters. Will they prolong the social unrest and creative chaos that have smashed the country’s fame as a conservative backwater?
Like other Western countries, Argentina is struggling with an obesity epidemic. As young city dwellers adopt more diverse diets, the less well off rely on monotonous diets with low quality food.
The European far-right’s sympathies for “white and Christian” Ukrainians shows its devotion to the idea of the “clash of civilizations.” But it fails to see the basic paradoxes of war, where you may be fighting those who most resemble you and be forced to welcome those who look different.
The United States has no treaty obligation to send troops to protect Taiwan against China, but it has a “fairly clear” commitment to aid its defense, unlike in Ukraine. The economic stakes are also a source for worry.
There are instructive, and dismally repetitive, precedents for the war in Ukraine in the histories of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, but also U.S. aggression from Vietnam to Iraq.
When humans care about the natural world, it means revising our place in it and acting accordingly, not giving nature “rights and concessions” that are figments of our self-serving imagination.
Russia’s President Putin may speak of denazifying Ukraine, but his words and actions — from the Mariupol maternity hospital to the atrocities of Bucha to Friday’s missile attack on the Kramatorsk railway station — show that he’s taken up the mantle of Europe’s line of fascist dictators. Take a look at those today who still lend him support.
Colombian officials and conservative opponents of the socialist presidential candidate fear he may win in late May’s polls with help from Russia and Venezuela. The Left and the Russian embassy have called the charges “fake news” and nonsense.
China is already profiting from the West’s economic divorce from Russia. But its biggest interest may be to learn from Russia’s experience of invading a land it claims for itself.
It may sound like science-fiction, but firms are already developing prototypes for this cheaper alternative to the helicopter. And for Latin America in particular, the sky’s the limit for what Flying cars can bring.
Audiovisual spectacles like Imagine Van Gogh offer a completely new way to experience art. But as museums embrace digital tools, what does that mean for the physical work of art.
Russia’s president is neither clearly right-wing nor left-wing. As his dubious allies around the world suggest, he simply hates Western liberal democracy and seeks to expand his personal power, at home and abroad, by sowing unrest and conflict.
The Cuban government has once again jailed dissenting artists or forced them to flee. But anger at the 60-year dictatorship has spread far beyond artistic circles and the regime no longer has the power to silence people.
Most Latin American countries fear civil conflicts more than international invasion. A regional union is the best way to assure stability and lawfulness in a troubled but culturally cohesive continent. The EU shows us what that would look like and how to make it happen.
A recent tender for Brazil’s 5G network once again highlighted the growing rivalry between the two superpowers. Now, the Biden administration may even have a formula to free countries of their debt to Beijing.
With Mexico’s prized cash crop increasingly targeted by criminal networks, local police have begun to provide protection for those delivering them to wholesalers and markets. Prices have risen more than 200% in the past two months.
As Russia and China push their way to the top of the power heap, and the United States balks at playing global police force, expect fundamental changes to accepted norms governing international affairs.
At least 20 people have died after taking toxic cocaine bought in a poor suburb of the Argentine capital. Police have doubts that it was just an accident, and may have been a diabolical attempt by a drug gang to discredit the product of its rivals.
A resurgent, ambitious Russia has taken the West by surprise, just when the United States was pivoting and bracing itself to face down China.
Like other intellectuals of his time, the celebrated Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez admired Cuba’s Fidel Castro. What’s just been revealed, however, is also, as one text reveals, the Sandinista rebels who have stifled Nicaraguan democracy in past years.