Worldcrunch
-Analysis- PARIS — Michiel Van Aarnhem is a young and elegant advisor to the Dutch finance minister. He’s also an award-winning video producer. The educational video Bitcoin, Money of the Future?, which he made with his friend Jason Halbgewachs, a Justice Ministry official, took first prize in the European Central Bank (ECB)-sponsored Euro Video Challenge […]
LAUSANNE — Is wildlife a world of bullies? We like to imagine the relationships among living beings as a no-holds-barred struggle for survival, a twisted vision of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, conveyed by the political and economic doctrine of social Darwinism. And yet, examples of cooperation abound in the animal world. Mammals, insects and […]
WASHINGTON — As he heads to Florida this weekend, President Donald Trump is following in the footsteps of former President Barack Obama, a man he loathes and a leader whose time in office in many ways came to be defined by mass shootings. Obama bequeathed on his successor an almost ritualistic response to gun tragedies, beginning with the 2011 attack on then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and ending with the 2016 Dallas attack that left five officers dead. There were 15 speeches from the White House, countless prayers for the fallen and more than a dozen visits to the crime scenes. […]
For Afghan asylum seekers arriving in cold Sweden, the transition isn’t always simple — but a new project is aiming to ease the way.
PARIS — It all started with a video shot late last year on the banks of the Seine, between the Musée d’Orsay and Pont Royal bridge in the French capital. The video, which has gone viral around the world since first being posted by the daily Le Parisien, shows garbage collectors discovering with horror dozens […]
India’s police and political leaders need to find better ways to halt regular acts of vandalism on Valentine’s Day by those who want to block Western influence.
-OpEd- PARIS — While leafing through the newspapers in an English pub last weekend, I was surprised to see The Sunday Times, hardly a tabloid, portraying the three fiercest Brexiters as “musketeers.” A rather flattering image assuming Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg — the three men in question — are not offended by […]
Weighing collateral damage in the wake of Oxfam prostitution scandal.
CAIRO — “Angry” was the way many described President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s improvised speech during the inauguration ceremony of the Zohr natural gas field on January 31. The president declared that the only way Egypt’s national security could be compromised was over his “dead body” and the “dead body of the military.” But with whom […]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/0Bb3dVG29c0 expand=1] OneShot — Condemned man, 2011 (©Robin Hammond/NOOR) OneShot is a new digital format to tell the story of a single photograph in an immersive one-minute video. Follow OneShot:
War has dismantled Syria’s healthcare system, preventing women and children from receiving life-saving treatment for preventable illnesses. Exiled doctor Khaled Almilaji is determined to do something about it.
OneShot — Fairest of them all, 1996
-OpEd- PARIS — At the Beauval Zoo in central France, visitors line up every day for a chance to glimpse at His Majesty Yuan Meng. The animal’s birth, on Aug. 4, 2017, was followed by 26 million people on social media. Baptized with great pomp and circumstance by French First Lady Brigitte Macron in a […]
Nuclear policy in the age of Trump (and Kim) is a scary proposition. But deterrence should still be front and center in light of Moscow’s aggressive posture.
Egypt’s Zohr gas field is the largest ever natural gas find in the Mediterranean. But reshaping the global energy balance of power must factor in other equations.
François-Xavier Mousin and Caroline Buechler used to do marketing for Switzerland’s watch industry. But that was before they went cuckoo for cacao.
-Analysis- The PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games finally kicked off Thursday with the riveting-if-baffling sport of curling and a first victory for hosts South Korea. But all eyes will be on the official opening ceremony tomorrow, especially since a disproportionate dose of the attention for this edition will be focused off the ice and snow. Coming […]
Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA’s famously frugal founder died last month at 91. In southern Sweden, where his mega-business began and continues to thrive, locals remember him fondly.
The old, retired cardinal has had enough. He does not like what the Vatican is doing in China. He takes a plane and asks to be received by the pope. But instead of bringing it to an end, the encounter between the two men escalates the tensions around the Vatican’s pending agreement with China, a […]
-OpEd- PARIS — A people brings glory upon itself up when it is able to confront the complexity of its history. On the contrary, it dishonors itself when it takes on a defensive posture with its past. In Poland, both houses of the legislature have now voted in favor of a law criminalizing any reference […]
ISTANBUL — Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a historic visit to Rome on Monday, the first time a Turkish leader has met the Pope at the Vatican in nearly six decades. But the visit to Italy, which included meetings with top Italian leaders, comes as Turkey’s military is engaged in heavy conflict with Kurdish […]
President Xi Jinping demands ‘inflexible atheism’ from his fellow Communist Party members. But he also has a soft spot for Buddhism, sources suggest.
NEW YORK — Amazon.com Inc., Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are publicly traded, profit-oriented corporations. So it is interesting that when they announced their new joint health-care venture this week they made a point of saying it would be “an independent company that is free from profit-making incentives and constraints.” Interesting but maybe not all that surprising: Around the world, health, life and property insurance, as well as various other financial services, have long been provided by nonprofit organizations, mostly in the form of customer-owned mutuals. From the 1960s through 2000s, wave after wave of conversions turned […]
LAUSANNE — Margaux and her partner, Séverine, have spent more than a year traveling in a van from the United States to Patagonia. It makes sense then that they’ve come across #Vanlife, an Instagram hashtag van users like themselves use for posting pictures of their lives on the open road. The couple, from Lausanne, enjoy […]
MINYA — Anba Makarios, a bishop in the governorate with Egypt’s highest number of violent sectarian incidents, does not employ the usual appeasing rhetoric of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox church. He is a man who makes his voice heard but avoids being seen, expressing himself through official statements and brief phone calls to television talk shows. […]
‘Love jihad’ is a brutally constructed political agenda combining patriarchal notions of ‘our women’ and communal notions of ‘their men.’
-Analysis- It’s now more than a year since Donald Trump“s inauguration as the 45th President of the United States, and the media’s animosity towards him continues unabated. After his surprise victory against the wishes of the establishment, Trump remains the target of a never-ending campaign against his legitimacy, his very presence at the White House […]
Even in a pre-internet era, the impact was almost immediate. Eddie Adams’ Feb. 1, 1968 photograph of Lt. Col. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a North Vietnamese prisoner hit the Associated Press wires, and would soon appear in newspapers in the United States and around the world. The graphic image stunned the public and politicians alike, quickly adding to the mounting opposition to the war in Vietnam. Some historians say it may have changed the course of the war itself. Adams, who would win the Pulitzer Prize for the image, had mixed feelings about the work. For a seasoned AP war […]
BAGHDAD — Her hands, covered in magnesium carbonate for a better grip, are white. Her face is flush. Her gaze fixed. Huda Salem, 20, exhales loudly — twice — into the already sweat-saturated air. Her face contorts. Then, a shout as she lifts 70 kilos of cast iron. Behind the young woman’s massive, muscular figure, […]
When a freshly inaugurated Donald Trump issued his infamous travel ban exactly one year ago, the message was clear, not only to Muslims but to the entire world, that the United States was suddenly a very different place. But in some way, the policy can be viewed as just an official confirmation of a disturbing […]
ROCKVILLE — Her mom always smiled — except when the family made its annual summer drive to visit the grandparents in Magnolia, Arkansas. “The smiles were gone while we were traveling,” said Gloria Gardner, 77. It was the 1940s, and traveling to her parents’ hometown was not approached lightly after the family moved to Muskegon, Michigan, during the Great Migration. Stopping for food or bathroom breaks was mostly out of the question. For black families, preparing for a road trip required a well-tested battle plan in which nothing could be left to chance. There were meals to cook and pack […]
The global economy is doing wonderfully well. And yet, its key players are wary. Why? Because for all the good news about GDP growth, there are signs of deepening divisions in society, and a sense that for many people around the world, life will be harder for their children than it has been for themselves. […]
LAUSANNE — A few decades from now, that steaming cup of coffee you enjoy (and rely on) every morning won’t taste the same. Climate change, a multitude of alarming forecasts tell us, is threatening the precious bean, prompting researchers and industrialists alike to work on ways to make the plant more adaptable. The trick is […]
The war in Syria has transformed the place women hold in the workforce, providing opportunities previously reserved for men.
When the masses descend upon snow-covered Davos for the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering, Esther Heldstab is determined to swim against the tide. The purveyor of tourist mementos on the town’s main street is one of the few shopkeepers who won’t hand over their keys to multinational conglomerates who transform shoe stores and bakeries into lounges and cocktail party space for the week. While the likes of Zurich Insurance, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank take over prime space on Promenade, Heldstab and her sister who run Swissalp Fantasy at no. 79 — where the window display features a stuffed Bernese […]
PARIS — Ever heard of the Fermi paradox? In 1950, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Enrico Fermi, the famed Italian physicist and father of the first nuclear reactor, estimated the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way, based on the number of stars in our galaxy with a planetary system gravitating […]
FORT POLK — In training exercises in a mock Afghan village constructed here on a base amid swampland, the U.S. Army is applying the military lesson of the war against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq: Help your partners beat the enemy, but don’t try to do the fighting yourself. Letting others fight the battle hasn’t been the American way in modern times, to our immense national frustration. The U.S. military became bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, much as it had a generation earlier in Vietnam, by trying to reshape societies with U.S. firepower. For the military, the […]
The authoritarian and religious men leading Saudi Arabia, Iran and India are using women’s rights progress for purposes other than helping women.
-OpEd- PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron recently announced his determination to take on so-called fake news, false pieces of information that are published in the media to reinforce a political agenda or a school of thought, can mislead public opinion, and can even change the way people vote. Macron has talked of controlling the […]
TURIN — From vacuum-cleaner robots that clean your house all by themselves to virtual assistants that can keep track of every appointment in your work agenda to self-driving cars that will soon be circulating on the streets of our cities: One of the most important applications of Artificial Intelligence is the ability to make our […]