The former German Chancellor has had a troubling second act in global politics.
Author: Worldcrunch
BEIRUT — Lebanon appears to be mobilizing for the mass return of Syrian refugees, disregarding warnings that conditions in their home country are not conducive to voluntary returns in safety and dignity. Last week, ahead of Sunday’s parliamentary elections, Lebanese President Michel Aoun asked the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to help secure the return of refugees. After the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR) stated that it was not involved in last month’s return of around 500 Syrians from Lebanon due to conditions in Syria, the UNHCR’s representative to Lebanon, Mireille Girard, was summoned by the foreign ministry […]
-OpEd- MUNICH — Donald Trump may have extended the grace period by one month, but make no mistake about it, he’s still holding a gun to Europe’s head in the tariffs dispute. The EU shouldn’t have any illusions: To get what he wants, Trump will continue his attempted extortion. And why not? It’s worked elsewhere, […]
Bright ideas to limit ways that motherhood so often leads to gender pay gaps and blocked careers for female scientists.
The shift toward electric cars is picking up pace, but the road ahead has plenty of obstacles still.
Tim Cook’s company is a rock of common sense in an industry that’s gone rogue.
A popular tourist destination in the Adriatic sea is bracing for the construction of a floating, 400-million-euro regasification facility.
Israel’s offensive against the Iran nuclear deal could be an opportunity for European leaders to improve it.
CAIRO — On a hot summer day in 2012, two smartly clad Filipina women arrived at the JW Marriott Hotel on Cairo’s ring road, toting handbags in the crooks of their arms as they had often observed their female employers doing. They lingered in the lobby for hours over small cups of coffee as they […]
-OpEd- PARIS — Public opinion was outraged, and rightly so, by revelations from the so-called Paradise Papers investigation and the publication, before that, of the Panama Papers. But no one ever questions the root causes of these tax scandals. It’s not enough to complain and condemn. We must deal with the root causes of the […]
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Robot Brains Need Human Rules
Artificial intelligence is too useful and advanced and to ignore. But it also comes with huge risks, and should be limited accordingly.
SAN FRANCISCO — On Amazon, customer comments can help a product surge in popularity. The online retail giant says that more than 99 percent of its reviews are legitimate because they are written by real shoppers who aren’t paid for them. But a Washington Post examination found that for some popular product categories, such as Bluetooth headphones and speakers, the vast majority of reviews appear to violate Amazon’s prohibition on paid reviews. Such reviews have certain characteristics, such as repetitive wording that people probably cut and paste in. Many of these fraudulent reviews originate on Facebook, where sellers seek shoppers […]
NEW DELHI — Despite India’s recent progress, its international influence is not commensurate with its size, might and tradition. India is often criticized for being unable to punch above its weight, or even according to its weight. Time and again, we have noticed that economic strength and military might have their limitations. The potential for Indian soft power, however, is enormous, but has remained underutilized. On the occasion of Gautama Buddha’s birth anniversary, I posit that India should reclaim Buddha and his philosophy, including his practice of Vipassana, as an Indian ideological, philosophical and lifestyle export to the world at […]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/qxUNvx5QDpc expand=1] OneShot — Men working in a backyard, 2014 (©Andrea Bruce/NOOR) OneShot is a new digital format to tell the story of a single photograph in an immersive one-minute video. Follow OneShot:
Today’s terrorism is different, with a specific way of scripting the violence that echos popular culture. Of course, these aren’t actors. Especially, the victims.
In the age of Trump, there are innumerable issues and arguments that go unnoticed or underreported because this president is sucking up the oxygen of the entire American media universe, with his indecisive tweets and resulting indecisive policies. This is one of those topics that escaped the public eye. It centers around Trump’s announcement to […]
Kim Jong Un’s historic call for peace also included an unspoken message to U.S. President Donald Trump: North Korea won’t surrender its nuclear weapons easily. The agreement Kim reached Friday with South Korean leader Moon Jae-in declared “a new era of peace” and sought a formal end to the seven-decade-old Korean War. While it said both countries committed to a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula, it gave no details on concrete steps to achieve it. More ominously, North Korean’s state-run media released a commentary shortly after the agreement was announced calling on the U.S. to drop its “anachronistic hostile policy” and “bad […]
-Analysis- WASHINGTON — Americans love to contemplate – and legislatively promote, to whatever degree possible – the virtue of hard work. Here in the United States, we already work more hours per year than our English- speaking counterparts in Britain, Canada and Australia – not to mention those enviable denizens of European social democracies, who enjoy the kind of leisure time only our highest-paid workers can afford. So perhaps it’s not surprising that several new pro-work policy ideas are enjoying attention on the left and the right. On the right, work requirements for Medicaid, food stamps and housing assistance represent […]
The German chancellor’s upcoming visit to Washington will be a sober affair, particularly in contrast to the glitzy, red-carpet welcome the White House gave her French counterpart.
Upstarts no longer, the so-called BAT companies — Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent — are a force to be reckoned with.
Alaa, a civil society worker in the Syrian capital weighs in on the impact and the perception of civilians on the ground toward foreign intervention in her country.
GENEVA — One day last October, during the morning talk show on Swiss state broadcaster RTS, still groggy viewers were brutally awakened by a sentence dropped live on-air: “Schools train children who will be decimated by artificial intelligence.” The voice that dragged them out of their reverie belonged to a French doctor and entrepreneur named […]
Women’s bodies have become proxy battlegrounds for prejudice and intolerance, a brutal means of imposing power over a community or caste.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/bu1gqxkrQ70 expand=1] OneShot — Sadr City bus stop, 2008 (©Andrea Bruce/NOOR) OneShot is a new digital format to tell the story of a single photograph in an immersive one-minute video. Follow OneShot:
-OpEd- WASHINGTON — It’s good that Starbucks, with its announcement this week that it will close thousands of stores for a day of “racial bias training” in May, is taking steps in the right direction after a video of two black men getting arrested in one of its coffee shops went viral. But white America’s habit of needlessly calling the police on black people is not just a Starbucks culture problem. It’s an American culture problem. The tragic examples are all over the Internet. In McKinney, Tex., in 2015, after a neighbor called police about a pool party, a responding […]
LONDON — The plot to reverse Brexit is missing a key ally: U.K. business. Companies have been among the most outspoken critics of the split from the European Union, and have much to lose from a divorce gone wrong. But as a group of lawmakers tries to engineer a second referendum, business leaders are recoiling. “Business likes certainty and I can’t see how discussion of a second referendum helps create that certainty when the negotiations are not even concluded,” says Miles Celic, chief executive officer of TheCityUK, the finance industry’s lobby group. Businesses are uninterested in politics. They want commercial […]
Even the most anti-democratic election can reveal much about the system.
With Castro’s retirement as Cuban President, Cuba is left to face ongoing issues of the communist party — primarily the shambling economy.
We should not be proud of of the insufficient response against the Damascus regime, but total inaction would be even worse.
Better than nothing? Too little, too late? Settling their own scores? The people on the ground in Syria have no false illusions as to what’s at play with Western attacks in response to reports of the use of chemical weapons.
NEW DELHI — In the uproar over the southwestern state of Karnataka“s decision to have a separate flag for the state, New Delhi-based television channels warned that the move was a threat to national unity in India. Meanwhile, Bengaluru-based Kannada-language channels largely hailed the move, as simply a worthy symbol of Kannada pride. This latest example of the cocoons that hinder both journalism and India as a whole, depending on where people are looking from. This is not about patriotism or about being Indian, but about a disconnect in understanding India between the capital of New Delhi and a southern […]
From Saudi Arabia to Iran, Moscow to Washington and beyond, the rising global tensions over the Syrian war could explode in unpredictable ways.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/Dj8myWqT_nU expand=1] OneShot — Jewish boy surrenders, 1943 (Anonymous Nazi photographer) The Warsaw Ghetto uprising against Nazi occupation started in April 1943. Jürgen Stroop was sent by Himmler to pacify it. He documented the liquidation of the ghetto in a report that would later be used against him and other SS officers during Dachau and Nuremberg’s trials. This picture was one of the photos found in the report, and went on to symbolize the evil of Hitler’s Final Solution. OneShot is a new digital format to tell the story of a single photograph in an immersive one-minute video. Follow […]
FOREST CITY — It was slow at the thrift shop, and manager Stephanie Henderson, 38, was looking at her laptop, trying to discover all that Facebook had collected on her: the posts, the memes, the photos, the messages to her family. She had been meaning to do this for weeks, ever since outrage over Facebook’s handling of user privacy first burst into her timeline. Now, she clicked a button. Her request for her Facebook data was sent. As she waited, Henderson tried to imagine what a decade’s worth of personal details might look like. “I’m afraid to see what Facebook […]
China has quietly become a major coffee producer — mostly for export. But its people are developing a taste for the beverage as well, much to the delight of vendors like Starbucks.
AFP photographer Ronaldo Schemidt has won the prestigious 2018 World Press Photo of the Year Award. Check out our special OneShot video of his winning photograph: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/1EET4lFsXMw expand=1] 2018 World Press Photo of the Year (©Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP) José Víctor Salazar Balza, 28, catches fire amid violent clashes with riot police during an anti-government protest in Caracas, Venezuela. Salazar was set alight when the gas tank of a motorbike exploded. He survived the incident with first- and second-degree burns. OneShot is a new digital format to tell the story of a single photograph in an immersive one-minute video. Follow OneShot: […]
-OpEd- Tensions are reaching a bursting point over Syria! Just as Saddam Hussein’s (hypothetical) possession of weapons of mass destruction led U.S. President George W. Bush to invade Iraq, the (alleged) use of lethal gases on Douma, a district in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta controlled by Islamists, now allows Donald Trump to announce harsh reprisals. Once […]
As the state’s efforts to secure churches become more centralized, church scouts play an increasingly pivotal role.
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Watch: OneShot — Saving Mosul
[dailymotion //www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/k4OfmxI2yTFG6qqyXUK expand=1] OneShot — The Battle for Mosul, 2017 (©Ivor Prickett) An unidentified young boy who had survived the siege of last ISIS-controlled area in the Old City of Mosul is cared for by Iraqi Special Forces soldiers. This photo is among the World Press Photo of the Year 2018 Nominees. OneShot is a new digital format to tell the story of a single photograph in an immersive one-minute video. Follow OneShot: [rebelmouse-image 27068863 original_size=”320×320″ expand=1][rebelmouse-image 27068864 original_size=”174×174″ expand=1][rebelmouse-image 27068865 original_size=”128×128″ expand=1][rebelmouse-image 27068866 original_size=”227×227″ expand=1][rebelmouse-image 27068867 original_size=”256×256″ expand=1]
-Analysis- The Western world isn’t short of public enemies right now. There are, of course, the usual suspects: Putin, Assad, even Mark Zuckerberg seems to have joined the club. But there’s another, more discreet nemesis that may loom closer than the rest: acrylamide, a natural chemical that’s produced as part of the cooking process for […]