WorldcrunchThat disturbingly flexible phrase “fear of the other” appears to be driving electoral politics around the world right now. Perhaps the intellectual center can be found in central Europe, specifically Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Since taking office in 2010, the smooth-talking right-wing prime minister has been a singular voice for those who see the West as […]
Churches are besieged by a specific type of thief — those hired by art collectors to steal specific pieces. The intrinsic loss caused by these actions is often irreparable, but church communities in Germany are starting to fight back.
There are 400 pleats in the kilt-like fustanella worn by the Evzones guards who patrol Athens’ Syntagma Square. That’s one pleat per year of Ottoman occupation. Now I wonder what the pompoms on the clogs stand for …
-OpEd- BOGOTÁ — On Sunday, Colombians will decide whether to ratify a peace deal that makes the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, lay down their arms. But if that happens, what will the future of FARC look like? Will it become a socialist party like the one that has driven Venezuela into an […]
Steak or avocado, which is worse for the environment? And other pressing questions for an omnivore flirting with a flip to the vegan life.
Millions of Russians were given plots of land when the former USSR collapsed. Now, as land rises in value, small farmers are the targets of intimidation of powerful forces.
“Ab crack,” “thigh gap,” “bikini bridge” — these new body trends get thousands of likes on Instagram. Experts say they are terrible for women’s health of mind and body.
Shimon Peres, whose six decades of public service included stints as both Israel’s prime minister and president, has died at the age of 93, two weeks after suffering a stroke. The joint 1994 Nobel Peace Prize laureate played a defining role for Israel since its founding in 1948, serving as an aide to the first […]
JAKARTA — Teuku Akbar Maulana, 17, is from the westernmost Indonesian province of Aceh. He was a brilliant student and was offered a scholarship to study in Turkey. Akbar left for the Turkish city of Kayseri in 2013 to attend the International Imam Khatip High School but grew tired of it after a few months. “We were studying something that I had learned before so I wasn’t getting what I wanted,” he says. Bored, Akbar, who was 15 at the time, started to spend more time on social media, including Facebook. His feed was flooded with brutal videos of what […]
The Bay of Fundy, on the Atlantic coast of Canada, boasts the highest tides in the world … and apparently some of the tallest suds as well.
Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 27, 2016 Most pundits agreed that Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton scored a solid victory over Republican Donald Trump in the highly anticipated first debate of the 2016 U.S. general election. Here is a quick video recap of Monday night’s debate that includes questions about Trump’s tax returns, Clinton’s flip-flop on trade deals, […]
Donald Trump has few supporters in liberal Silicon Valley: Even Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and Facebook board member, who spoke for Trump at the Republican National Convention, hasn’t given a cent to the campaign. Yet the tech world doesn’t unanimously favor Democrats. Consider, for example, the financial support that Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has given to a pro-Trump trolling campaign. Luckey, 24, sold his virtual reality startup to Facebook for $2 billion after Oculus became a crowdfunding star. He has confirmed to the Daily Beast that he’s donated money to a group called Nimble America to produce memes and […]
For centuries, the thick walls of the Saksaywaman citadel have been looking over the valley of Cuzco, the historic capital of the Inca Empire.
-Essay- PARIS — Will reality become a rare commodity? The digital revolution has given humans the greatest power — that of creating and manipulating reality. We make machines and algorithms that can imitate our world so well that they manage to deceive our brains. For example, Applied VR, a U.S. startup, offers a therapy based […]
Our planet has actually grown greener. Really. You can thank yourself.
The United States, and much of the rest of the world, will turn its collective attention tonight to the campus of Hofstra University, where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will hold their first presidential debate. A quick look at the American and international press today shows just how much anticipation there is ahead of what’s […]
There’s something striking about Southeast Asian countries: More than any of the countless other places where I’ve pulled out my camera, people like this rickshaw driver on the Indonesian island of Java, would naturally just smile back at me.
British rocker Pete Doherty is signed up for a November gig, though other artists have opted out of playing in the venue where terrorists killed 90 people last year.
From architecture to food, history lives on in the Andean city, where residents continue to celebrate their Inca heritage and traditions.
Donald Trump is a master of TV. Monday night’s one-on-one showdown with Hillary Clinton will be a new test.
Global warming, population booms, rising urbanization, industrialization — an explosive mixture that may make water supplies the world’s new spark for armed conflict.
The current deadly war on drugs in the Philippines echoes what happened in Thailand in the early 2000s — massive arrests and a wave of extrajudicial killings. Officials in Bangkok now admit the crackdown didn’t work, th
Amid extraordinarily high tensions on the Korean peninsula, Switzerland managed to get diplomats from Pyongyang to sit down with counterparts from Seoul.
SPOTLIGHT: NORTH AND SOUTH KOREA SECRETLY MEET Just how dangerous is a nuclear-armed North Korea? Run by Kim Jong-un, the unpredictable 32-year-old scion of an autocratic dynasty, the country has been virtually sealed off from the rest of the world for decades. What we know is disturbing: The pace of both nuclear weapons and missile-delivery […]
MADRID — The political gridlock in Spain is getting just a bit silly: two general elections and endless soap-operatic negotiations since December 2015 have yet to produce a stable government among the bickering parties. No doubt, as Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy searches in vain for a ruling majority, there are real-life ramifications across the country. […]
Kaciane do Nascimento’s love of reading led to her open a library in the backyard of her house, in a low-income housing development in São Paulo state. Now she’s working on a book of her own.
El Nuevo Dia — Sept. 23, 2016 “Complex recovery” reads the front page of Puerto Rican daily El Nuevo Dia“s Friday edition, as the Caribbean island is still struggling to restore power two days after a massive blackout left most of its 3.5 million inhabitants in the dark. Power was shut off Wednesday on the […]
Swedish telecom network giant Ericsson plans to shut down all its remaining production plants in Sweden, Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) reports in a front-page exclusive Thursday. The Stockholm daily cites internal documents, which would confirm the end to the Swedish company’s more than 140-year-old tradition to keep at least part of its production at home, a […]
Next to the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra lay several funerary towers known as the Valley of the Tombs. You can see them in the background of this photograph, as my wife Claudine walks among local ethnic Druze. Sadly, we know that the first-century necropolis was destroyed by ISIS terrorists last year. Some Druze villages, […]
It would not be surprising if a mural on government surveillance that went missing last month turned up for sale on the art market. The Spy Booth artwork in the town of Cheltenham in England, created by British artist Banksy, was removed from the wall it had lived on for two years. The mural, which […]
EZUZ — Ask a 1970s kid to imagine bringing his favorite video game to life, and you might hear some weird stuff involving Ms. Pac-Man. Or, he might dream about playing the legendary arcade video game Space Invaders — for real. Well, the latter is now (kind of) possible, thanks to drones and the work […]
PARIS — Technology is changing the way people secure legal services, turning clients into “consumers” by allowing them to bypass traditional law firms. Need help drafting that shareholders agreement? There’s an app for that — at just a fraction of the normal cost! The past few years have seen a boom, in France, of “legal […]
Who knew what and when? Questions linger two months after the coup attempt was quickly stamped out.
Driverless cars used to seem like the stuff of sci-fi. But as the U.S. unveils a list of guidelines about self-driving vehicles today, it’s safe to say that these cars have zipped from the realm of a distant future to the regulatory thicket that’s an all too clear reminder that this is very much a […]
The famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant spent most of his life in Königsberg, in what was then known as Prussia. HIs mausoleum has seen borders and names change: The city is now a Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania called Kaliningrad.
More and more coffee growers are going organic in Colombia. A boost for the environment, the trend is also improving lives, as producers in the coastal Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta can attest.
Since Rodrigo Duterte was inaugurated two months ago, some 2,000 people have been killed across the country in the past two months in what experts say are extra-judicial vigilante murders. Fear and silence make it all possible.
New York is again testing the limits of its status as “the city that never sleeps.” A week after marking the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks at Ground Zero, an explosion a bit farther uptown Saturday injured 29 people. And now, even as the investigation continues into that attack in the Chelsea […]
Die Tageszeitung, Sept. 19 Another election, another humbling defeat for German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In a Berlin state vote, Merkel’s CDU party polled 17.6% — its lowest showing since 1990, figures from public broadcaster ARD showed on Monday. It’s the second poll drubbing as CDU got crushed just two weeks before in an eastern German […]