Worldcrunch
GAZA CITY — Their world doesn’t extend much beyond this piece of sidewalk that never seems to change. Glued to their white plastic chairs, Khaled, Mohammed and Abdel Rahman spend their time talking about everything and nothing while fiddling with their smartphones. There’s no 3G coverage, so their only connection to the rest of the […]
An Egyptian writer shares her struggle with keeping bipolar disorder from invading everything she does and everyone she knows.
In the Indian state of Odisha, the Khond, a large Indigenous community, are losing their forest and their food sources. There are environmental and nutritional consequences.
Ground has been broken on the signature domestic project of the Chinese leader’s next term. It is meant to be a massive model city of innovation, forever linked to Xi’s Chinese Dream.
They were the brides of ISIS. These days, they are detained in a camp for the internally displaced north of Raqqa city. They speak about life in the caliphate, and their hopes for the future.
The rapid rise in part-time employment has undermined what was, until now, the instrument of choice to evaluate the job market. What comes in its place?
In Switzerland, a provocatively mundane location for top avant-garde art. But can you find something more important than a full tank of gas?
SIRTE — If it were theater, it would be bad theater. Too incongruous, too unreal. The stage — buildings in ruins all along the boulevard — just doesn’t fit the happiness on the people’s faces. Some are busy decorating their cars with ribbons for a wedding. Others are drinking coffee or shopping. The cars are […]
The current challenge in rural electrification is not just connecting households, but providing sufficient, affordable and high-quality supply.
You shouldn’t play with fire, with the deepest feelings of a people. That counts for Catalonia, but also for smaller battles of belonging, like those in Swiss cantons.
U.S. President Donald Trump is raising the threat of an arms build-up, and even nuclear confrontation itself. But he’s not the only one.
KABUL — In the crowded old city of the Afghan capital, dozens of shops are lined with piles of colourful dried herbs, sitting out in the open. Their fragrance wafts into the street. Hindu shopkeepers wear red, blue and black turbans, and have long, bushy beards. They tell they’ve been making and selling herbal medicine here for generations. Darmander Singh is a Hindu sage – a wise mystic. People here call him La La Dil Soz, which means ‘Kind big brother” in Persian. He sees more than 30 patients a week, asking them detailed questions about their body, before setting […]
Hellish firestorms in northern California have killed at least 17 people and razed entire neighborhoods, destroying more than 2,000 structures. Dozens of other people have been reported missing, raising fears that the death toll could rise sharply. The “disaster is relentless,” Wednesday’s front page of the San Francisco Chronicle reads above a photograph of the […]
Backers of Catalonia’s quest to break away from Spain had just eight seconds Tuesday night to savor the moment they’d long been waiting for. “I accept the mandate of the people that Catalonia become an independent state in the shape of a republic,” Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont said in a highly anticipated address before […]
-OpEd- SAO PAULO — Barbarism has actually become popular in the Philippines. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, 78% of Filipinos support the “license to kill” President Rodrigo Duterte has given the police against those accused, or even just suspected, of dealing or consuming drugs. The government proudly announced the death […]
-Analysis- The fraught drama of politics landing in the arena of sports has popped up recently in several different places around the world. It also happens to date back (at least) as far as Ancient Rome, as historian Sarah Bond recently explained in Forbes. In the U.S., the NFL is currently roiling in controversy over […]
-OpEd- BOGOTÁ — After more than half-a-century of fighting, Colombia’s FARC guerillas have surrendered their weapons and officially transformed themselves into a formal political party. But still, the U.S. government apparently isn’t satisfied. “The FARC hasn’t followed through on the issue of drugs,” the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Kevin Whitaker, said matter-of-factly in a recent […]
Sexual violence is being used by almost all the warring factions in the Syrian conflict. When victims are forced to suffer in silence, documenting instances of rape is nearly impossible.
—Analysis— WASHINGTON — More than any other issue that has threatened transatlantic cohesion this year, President Donald Trump’s decision to decertify Iranian compliance with the nuclear deal could start a chain of events that would sharply divide the United States from its closest traditional allies in the world. “After the Paris climate decision,” in which Trump withdrew the United States from a widely supported, painfully negotiated accord, “this could push multilateralism to the breaking point,” said a senior official from one of the three European signatories to the Iran deal. None of the three – Britain, France and Germany – […]
KABUL — You see the images everywhere in the streets of Kabul: bare-chested men posing with their protruding and pulsating muscles. Scattered across the Afghan capital, the posters are eye-catching in there own right, but stand out even more in a place where men typically sport the traditional long trousers and puffy shirts known as […]
Will China’s unfulfilled promises of real market reforms finally come to pass? Eyes on the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party, opening on Oct. 18.
SAN FRANCISCO — I can’t help but feel disappointed that TaskRabbit, the San Francisco-based startup and “sharing economy” pioneer, has agreed to become a unit of Ikea. Although the company has tried to cast the deal as an expansion opportunity, this outcome is a far cry from the lofty expectations of its early days. TaskRabbit’s fate illustrates Silicon Valley’s unbounded idealism when it comes to optimizing everything. The company was a catalyst for “collaborative consumption,” a movement in which everyone would share their homes, their vehicles and their time. In a seminal TED talk, Rachel Botsman declared that the currency […]
Sandy makes big money stripping down, but never all-nude.
It is the great challenge (and paradox) of our time: Far from erasing identity claims, globalization reinforces them. From Spain to Myanmar to Trump’s America, it must be confronted head-on.
-OpEd- PARIS — Donald Trump’s task on Tuesday should have been simple enough. Traveling to the storm-ravaged island of Puerto Rico, the American president was supposed to offer some comforting words, distribute emergency supplies, and commit the federal government to rebuild the U.S. territory as quickly as possible. But rather than disaster relief, Trump was […]
The carnage in Las Vegas is evil and tragic, but is it terrorism?
SERTÃOZINHO — In a simple house here, 330 kilometers northwest of São Paulo in Brazil, Glauber Pereira Souza, 36, is the head of a four-legged family: He owns five dogs, two cats and two rabbits. The youngest member of his household is Preta, a mongrel female who had been run over by a bus, but […]
Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oct. 2, 2017 “Mass shooting on Strip,” reads the front page of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, just hours after a man opened fire on a crowd of an open-air country music festival in Las Vegas. At least 50 people were killed and 406 people transported to hospitals according to the latest report […]
With the arrival of tech-heavy, self-driving vehicles, makers of traditional cars will have to adapt. But so too will everyone from real estate agents to insurers and tax collectors.
-Analysis- PARIS — Imagine if a foreign entity neutralized the public health system in the Paris region. Or if it went on to attack the electric grid, interfering with the meteorological services, manipulating French President Emmanuel Macron’s emails and targeting the military and police communication systems. All from a computer keyboard. Nobody would get killed, […]
Historically for Madrid, there is no such thing as delicate diplomacy. But that approach has boomeranged in the face of the Catalan push for independence.
-Analysis- PARIS — It was a final gift from the American patron of beauty and pleasure: The sight of Hugh Hefner’s silk-robed portrait, splashed across the top of the internet as Paris woke up this morning, was an odd kind of relief from the neverending stream of terrorism, natural disaster and nuclear threats. The death […]
Ammar Abd Rabbo covered two Assad presidencies from the inside, but his view changed when the Syrian civil war started.
French President Emmanuel Macron has just set himself up as the European Union’s would-be savior. Seen from a Swiss point of view, there’s no better option out there.
High education levels and salary expectations have created something of a disconnect between South Korean job seekers and employers.
-Analysis- Is there ever a good time to hold an independence referendum? Of course the answer to that question, from Kurdistan to Catalonia, depends on whom you ask. For those looking to declare a new nation based on ethnic, economic or political claims, there’s no time like the present to take destiny into your own […]
Once again, life imitates art. In his masterpiece 1984, George Orwell wrote, “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.” This quote has proven particularly relevant in recent weeks as activists in the West suddenly […]
China, for one, sees the incumbent German Chancellor as the ‘mother if not grandmother’ of all of Europe. Her likely victory will be good news for her nation, and the planet.
Facebook has agreed to give the government information on political ad campaigns. But the social media giant must behave more like other media companies in a functioning democracy.
-OpEd- In his account of the 1985 earthquake, which killed between 6,000 and 30,000 people (there are no precise figures) and destroyed more than 800 buildings in Mexico City, Carlos Monsiváis, one of the country’s greatest writers, described what he saw as the “emergence of civil society.” At the time, Monsiváis, who died in 2010, […]