Worldcrunch
MISRATA — This Libyan coastal city is bearing the brunt of the ongoing offensive to defeat the Islamic State in its nearby stronghold of Sirte. Flooded with hundreds of injured people streaming in from the fighting, its recently renovated central hospital is buckling under the pressure. With only 120 beds, two operating rooms, and a […]
-OpEd- PARIS — In the northern German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) defeated Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union in local elections. In the United States, the Republicans chose Donald Trump as their candidate for the White House. The British voted for Brexit. Italians elected as mayors of Rome and […]
BREMEN — Murat Kurnaz, a German native of Turkish origin, likes to joke around. And considering his story, the humor can sometimes turn rather dark. Today, he speaks about the journey from the Guantanamo detention facility in Cuba to the Ramstein U.S. air base in Germany at the end of his five-year imprisonment in August […]
Slovenian-born Andrej Mrevlje has lived all around the world, sharing his stories and ideas. Now, after five years in the Big Apple, it’s time for life inside the beltway.
In towns and cities around the Nile delta, fishermen are selling their boats to a local mafia outfit, which controls a burgeoning human trafficking racket.
The weakening power of the “Mother of Europe” comes at a bad time for both Germany and the rest of the continent.
Not since Pope John Paul II’s health woes a decade ago has the world been so focused on one person’s medical updates. Forced off the campaign trail for four days following a woosy exit from a 9/11 commemoration, Hillary Clinton has the global media zooming in on her every move. The Democrat’s return to the […]
There is an economic explanation for why more Syrian refugee families in Jordan were able to make it to Mecca this year.
After seven years of research, a determined academic says he has definitive proof that Capa’s legendary Spanish Civil War photograph ‘Falling Soldierâ’ was a fake.
The French capital is weighing whether to issue its own unique currency. But can I buy a baguette with that?
Ever since the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore last year, the Black Lives Matter movement has been growing exponentially, both in citizen participation and in media attention. The Black Lives Matter cause was even exported abroad, with similar protests in Paris, Rio de Janeiro and other cities around the globe. Right now, much of […]
Thousands of Afghans are making their way home after years and years living as refugees in neighboring Pakistan. For many of the migrants, their native country is now a foreign place.
The statue of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges (Our Lady of the Snow) marks the top of the Bavella Pass, in central Corsica. In this photograph, the serene but somewhat austere statue stands in stark contrast with our playful daughter Cécile posing under the road sign.
A new Brazilian report shows that far more babies born with microcephaly and other conditions linked to the Zika virus are black or mixed race. There are troubling explanations for this fact, including access to (illegal) abortion.
Science has determined a variety of actions you can take aimed at keeping people cancer-free: diet, avoiding sun exposure, exercise, et al. Now your smart phone can help.
MUNICH — The field of epigenetics is being lauded for its discoveries, which some describe as revolutionary. There’s talk of a wide range of scientific textbooks being rewritten. But are the findings really that groundbreaking? First, what is epigenetics? It is any additional information that gets tacked on top of the genome. Epigenetics refer to […]
A photograph of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, covered in dust and blood after an Aug. 17 airstrike in the Syrian city of Aleppo wrenched our hearts, and reminded us that the country’s civil war is not just some geopolitical football. Omran was lucky to survive. Tens of thousands of other children have not, including Omran’s own […]
History mostly knows him as the disgraced architect of the Vietnam War, but McNamara first made his mark in the corporate world with his mastery of numbers before it was as fashionable as it is today.
In Philadelphia, a group of U.S. Marines were petitioning to change the Constitution and make any desecration of the American flag a crime. That hasn’t happened, though the debate over national symbols is apparently still very much alive across the Atlantic.
Every November, the erudite British council behind Oxford Dictionaries picks a word of the year to signify the term that most influenced society in the previous 12 months. They picked the word “selfie” in 2013. “Vape” was the winner in 2014. Last year, it wasn’t even a word. It was an emoji (the one with […]
Some 800,000 Catalans used Sunday’s annual La Diada, national day in Catalonia, to renew demands for independence from Spain. “Another spectacular Diada,” read Monday morning’s front-page headline of the Barcelona-based La Vanguardia daily. The newspaper noted the separatists’ determination to achieve independence, with Catalonia’s regional president Carles Puigdemont proposing that the government hold a secession […]
Whether killing with their own hands, orchestrating or quietly aiding and abetting, a disturbingly high number of people in voluntarily fell in line with the Nazi killing machine.
CAIRO — “Everyone wants a tattoo now in Egypt,” says 23-year-old Kareem Shaheen as he sits on his bed sketching the outline of a flash of lightning. Shaheen started to tattoo less than a year ago under the name “Monkey Tattoo,” and hopes to open the first street tattoo studio in Cairo. “People relate getting […]
It is a philosopher’s job to debunk prejudice and foregone conclusions. But isn’t there also a duty to not ignore the facts? A look back 15 years later from a prominent Paris thinker.
At first, most thought it was another earthquake. But the 5.3-magnitude rumble coming from the northeastern corner of North Korea was a potentially much more frightening event: Pyongyang had set off its most powerful nuclear weapon test ever. World leaders were quick to react to this latest act of defiance. South Korea denounced Pyongyang leader […]
Under the authoritarian regime of Josip Broz Tito in then Yugoslavia, lots of shop windows were empty. Roadside vendors were a more reliable source of food there, with watermelons being a staple of domestic agriculture.
PARIS — So far, so good. The collapse of the British economy predicted by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, in a case of a Brexit victory, has not materialized. The services sector, which represents 80% of the UK’s GDP even rebounded unexpectedly in August, and business activity recovered its level of March, […]
The 2016 Summer Paralympics opened at Rio’s iconic Maracana Stadium on Wednesday evening, 17 days after the end of the Olympics. Brazilian daily O Globo devoted its front page Thursday to the opening ceremony, with the headline “The Paralympics move the Maracana” alongside a picture of Amy Purdy dancing with a robotic arm. The American […]
A clearer picture is emerging of the socio-political profile of those who recently voted to oust Dilma Rousseff from the Brazilian presidency: right-wing males with a penchant for more “traditional,” submissive women.
Turkey, past and present, is a particularly tough balancing act for Angela Merkel. On the one hand, Germany’s own past means its leaders face a bigger responsibility than those of other nations to officially recognize the 1915 killings of 1.5 million Armenians as a genocide. But Berlin knows that it is an immensely sensitive topic […]
For anyone truly concerned with climate change, trends like rooftop gardens and sustainable badges for office buildings are a distraction, at best.
MANILA — Heavy clouds in the sky over Manila, soon it will start to rain. Jennilyn Olayres must hurry up if she wants to whisper a few more words to her fiancé. How she’s feeling, what she has been up to all day long. And that she’s really mad at him. What a bastard for […]
Foreign correspondents, and their editors, have long wrestled with translations of newsworthy words from one language to another — both those quotable quotes from colorful personalities, and the jargony langue de bois of international bureaucrats and businessmen. We like to think of ourselves at Worldcrunch as experts in the field, and watched with some amusement […]
This is one of two rostral columns opposite the Old Saint Petersburg Stock Exchange on the Neva river. The red stucco columns, adorned with bronze ship prows, were meant as beacons — the torches at the top are still lit on ceremonial occasions.
Swiss developers turn the business model of online gaming on its head.
Last year, the price of vegetables surged 140% during the high holiday season, yet the Israeli government still opposes the import of cheap, high-quality produce from Gaza.
The crew here at Worldcrunch is busy scouring the best foreign-language journalism in search of untold local stories and points of view from different countries: like this German story from deep in Bavaria or a Chinese op-ed about China’s Olympic performance. Sometimes, though, it’s also useful to zoom back out, and weave together the whole […]