LA PRESSE (Canada) After three straight months of strikes, including several violent clashes, the Quebec student movement can finally claim a tangible victory. Quebec’s Education Minister Line Beauchamp resigned Monday evening, to be replaced by Michelle Courchesne. The province’s new minister is expected to meet leaders of the student associations later Tuesday, to “evaluate the […]
Author: Worldcrunch
Categories
Germany Says Yes To Growth, Yes To Rigor
Op-ed: Germany has been accused of being anti-growth. But Germany’s Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble argues that growth goes hand-in-hand with the budgetary discipline that Europe’s biggest economy holds so dear.
During the just concluded campaign, France’s incoming Socialist President François Hollande had vowed to push through gay marriage during his first year in office. Conservative Catholic groups are already gearing up for a fight.
A unpaid $7,000 tab at Copacabana’s Porto Bay hotel was traced to a 53-year-old American, whose hotel bill showed 30 caipirinhas a day. Employees say the suspect was constantly surrounded by women… apparently also with drinks in hand.
NOVAYA GAZETA, KOMMERSANT (Russia) MOSCOW – In the aftermath of the “March of the Millions’ on May 6th and the arrest of several hundred protesters that night, an improvised camp sprung up overnight in Moscow in the Park of Chistye Prudy, Novaya Gazeta reports. The camp looks in many ways like the protest camps that […]
The making of a hoax: how a story about a law allowing Egyptian men to have sex with their dead wives went from rumor to front page of the Daily Mail, the Huffington Post and Al-Arabiya.
EL MUNDO (Spain) SEVILLA – Veteran American rocker Bruce Springsteen kicked off his European tour Sunday night in Sevilla with a special nod to Spain’s indignados, a grassroots movement launched in 2011 to protest austerity measures and high unemployment. Addressing the crowd of some 30,000 in Spanish, the 62-year-old musician dedicated one of his new […]
Why take the train when you can ride a bicycle? What better way to take in the gorgeous Italian countryside than to ride along the Po River, a route dotted with cathedrals, national parks and beautiful cities.
At least 30 people – including 23 soldiers – have died in heavy overnight clashes in the central Syrian city of Rastan.
Categories
Eurozone worries still pressure stocks
Markets are having difficulty establishing a bullish platform as continuing worries over the eurozone counteract news of more monetary easing in China.
Categories
Nepal plane crash kills 15 in Himalayas
A plane crashed into a mountain in the Himalayas while trying to land at an airport in northern Nepal, killing 15 people and critically injuring six.
If Athens opts out of the euro zone, the economic union as a whole will probably survive. But it won’t be pretty, especially for Germany, which stands to lose upwards of 100 billion euros, according to economists.
EL MERCURIO (Chile) SANTIAGO – In the heart of Providencia, a populous middle-class district of Santiago, you might find yourself walking along Avenida 11 de Septiembre. Of course, anyone familiar with modern Chilean history knows that street commemorates “the other 9-11,” the military coup of Sept. 11, 1973 that toppled Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president […]
LA NACIÓN (Costa Rica) SAN JOSE – An American man accused of running a sex slave operation in Costa Rica is on the lam while his associates – a Colombian, a Costa Rican and an Egyptian man – are now behind bars following a series of raids this past week. Police in San Jose, the […]
Italy loves its indigenous red squirrels – so much so that it is waging a full on war, at a cost of millions of euros, to get rid of the American grey squirrels, which have invaded the northeastern region of Liguria.
More than two decades after its political reunification, Germany continues to be divided along religious lines. Christianity still holds a fair amount of sway in the West. Not so much in the East, where two thirds of the population – young and old – are d
Color expert Katrin Trautwein “could never live anywhere that has white walls.” Her three-room apartment in Uster, Switzerland is proof of that. But she rejects the “naïve” notion that yellow is necessarily sunny, or that beige is always bland.
The Chinese people are fed up with their justice system which is rife with corruption and lack of due process. There have been too many cases of wrongful convictions and confessions obtained through torture.
Despite political highjacking, corruption and lack of information, a campaign to promote insecticide-treated mosquito nets is helping the Democratic Republic of Congo fight its number one child killer: malaria.
NOVAYA GAZETA (Russia) MOSCOW – Roughly 60% of synthetic narcotics in Europe are made with an ingredient that is illegally exported from Russia, possibly with the help of high-ranking officials in the Russian Drug Enforcement Agency and Security Agency, Novaya Gazeta reports. The allegations stem from an audit started after a former top-level officer in […]
LIBÉRATION (France) CRÉTEIL – The planned deportation from France of a Bangladeshi immigrant has been suspended after his son was crowned French junior national chess championship, Libération reports. Nura Alam, a member of the political opposition in Bangladesh, taught his son Fahim how to play chess in their native country, where the boy evenutally became […]
Categories
Text Messaging Turns 20
EL CRONISTA (Argentina) BUENOS AIRES – This week marks the 20th anniversary of a technology that has changed the way the world communicates: text messaging. Also known as Short Message Service (SMS), texting is “simple, every day and cheap, and is now used by more than 4 billion people the world over,” El Cronista reports. […]
The Pentagon plans to shutter its air base in Mannheim, Germany, meaning the property – which is significantly bigger than the city itself – will soon be on the market. The local government wants to incorporate the space, but fears it’ll end up in the han
KYODO (Japan) SENDAI – Kenichi Yamamoto, 63, was driving through Tagajo prefecture, in northeastern Japan, when the March 11, 2011 tsunami struck. The former Toyota employee, a science and engineering professor at Ishinomaki University, narrowly escaped death. “His car immediately started filling with water, tipping it 45 degrees. He barely managed to escape by breaking […]
CORRIERE DELLA SERA (Italy) MILAN – An anarchist group claimed responsibility Friday for the recent shooting of a top Italian nuclear energy executive, calling the victim “one of the many sorcerers of the atom.” The Milan daily Corriere della Sera received a lengthy text by regular post from the “Olga cell” of the Federazione Anarchica […]
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon says the firm suffered a $2 billion trading loss after an “egregious” failure in a unit managing risks, jeopardizing Wall Street banks’ efforts to loosen a federal ban on bets with the
A relative of one of those killed by Anders Behring Breivik has thrown a shoe at the defendant, interrupting his trial in Oslo.
Four people, including a village chief and a police officer, were killed in a shootout that stemmed from a misunderstanding in a bikini competition in Jaro, Iloilo City.
An Air France male flight attendant is suing the airline for discrimination and violation of his dignity. The cause of turbulence: his cornrows, which the aviation company believes are undermining its glamorous image.
EL PAÍS (Spain) BUENOS AIRES — Just days after finalizing the hostile takeover of Spanish-owned oil and gas company YPF, the Argentine government got even more hostile, freezing imports of Spain’s signature delicacy: ham. The Cristina Kirchner administration agreed to the measure at the behest of the Argentine meat industry and farmers, who are looking […]
Thilafushi Island, in the Maldivian archipelago, is a giant garbage dump where mountains of toxic trash are burned in the open, threatening to turn the Indian Ocean paradise into an ecological nightmare.
Analysis: The Obama administration has made its intentions clear in shifting US foreign policy attention toward Asia. Why has Beijing failed to understand the importance of strong diplomacy in its own backyard?
An Italian mother, now 58, and father, 70, are fighting to have their two-year-old back from foster care. The couple appealed in court to get the child back, claiming that she was taken away from them because of their age. Now a judge has ordered a new pr
Thieves in and around Sao Paolo are employing an effective, albeit not very delicate, tactic for robbing ATM machines. They blow them up. In the island town of Ilhabela, a gang of 20 men recently stormed ashore, exploded five ATMs, and took off with a sm
LE QUOTIDIEN D’ORAN (Algeria) ALGIERS – Algerians are turned off and tuned out when it comes to today’s legislative elections, Le Quotidien d’Oran reveals. The Algerian newspaper expects just a fraction of the country’s estimated 21 million voters to cast their ballots in the election, which will decide the next People’s National Assembly. Here’s a […]
EL MERCURIO (Chile) SANTIAGO – A pair of farm workers in northern Chile died Wednesday after being attacked by a raging bull that was captured – several hours later – with the help of a bulldozer. “After its capture the bull was killed,” El Mercurio Online reported. “According to witnesses, its furious reaction could have […]
LES ECHOS (France) PARIS – François Hollande, the French President-elect, has chosen the car he (or rather, his chauffeur) will drive down the Champs-Elysées on Inauguration Day. While outgoing President Nicolas Sarkozy favored the Vel Satis by Renault five years ago, his Socialist successor picked the hybrid DS 5 by Citroën in a “metallic grey” […]
CHINA TIMES (Taiwan) SEOUL – In 35 separate drug raids, South Korean customs officials say they have confiscated 17,000 “capsules of human flesh” originating in China. These capsules are allegedly made from the corpses of dead babies or fetuses, according to information first reported in JoongAng Ilbo, a South Korean newspaper. This so-called “medicine” is […]
Editorial: From Spain’s indignados to Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, fringe groups are gaining strength in Europe. And while they don’t tend to share much common ground, together they are posing a region-wide challenge to
A rescue team found no survivors but several bodies when it reached the wreckage of a Russian plane that crashed into an Indonesian mountain during an exhibition flight with 45 people on board.