A truth and reconciliation commission is investigating crimes committed during Nepal’s decade-long internal conflict (1996-2006) between state security forces and Maoist rebels.
Author: Worldcrunch
The past few months have left a feeling of an ever less stable future. But a clean defeat of the Republican in November is the quickest way to bring back some order to the world.
Germany suddenly faces hundreds of young girls who have disappeared from schools because their parents have found husbands for them. Lawmakers appear powerless to face the new phenomenon of child brides brought by the arrival of immigrants.
WASHINGTON — The morning after Donald Trump once again embraced his hard-line immigration posture in a shouted speech, at least four members of his two-week-old Hispanic advisory council said they might not vote for the Republican presidential nominee and warned that his harsh rhetoric would cost him the election. At meetings Thursday on the 14th floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan, the candidate’s top aides held the opposite view. They thought his tough talk on immigration — combined with a whirlwind trip to Mexico on Wednesday — had, in the words of one adviser, “won him the election.” “How do […]
Categories
On This Day – September 3
Categories
Tech Giants With Feet Of Clay
It was the week two U.S. tech giants saw their seemingly unstoppable sprint toward global domination hit a wall. First, on Tuesday, Apple was ordered to pay up 13 billion euros in back taxes after the European Union ruled that a series of sweetheart tax deals made with the Irish government were illegal. That’s a […]
Categories
Studying Hard — Video Quote Of The Day
Little is known of what Dilma’s successor actually plans to do to lift Brazil out of its crisis. Temer, whose career has been defined by discretion, must now show his hand.
The EU Commission is taking a tough stance on tax evasion, as shown with the 13 billion euro bill leveled at Apple.
Categories
It Is A ‘No’ For Rajoy
Spain’s political crisis has deepened, after the country’s acting prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, lost a parliamentary bid for a second term in office. “84 times no,” daily newspaper La Razón wrote on its front page, referring to the socialists who refused to back Rajoy’s attempt to stay in power. The leader of the opposition, Pedro […]
Categories
Shifting Relations In The Americas
Donald Trump dominated global headlines once again this morning after meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto in Mexico City, and later reaffirming his hardline stance on immigration in a speech in Phoenix, Arizona. In front of a cheering crowd, the Republican presidential candidate delivered enough anti-immigrant applause lines for his supporters’ hands to get […]
Categories
Birds Of Prayer
In the Bharatpur bird sanctuary, these long-billed vultures had built their nests in the trees. These vultures are more widely found around the cities of Mumbai and Karachi, where the Parsi community’s rituals include leaving its dead outside to be eaten by the scavenger bird species.
Our itinerant Slovenian-born New Yorker takes a long-awaited voyage to the land of Joyce and good drink, and a certain singular brand of modesty.
Oscar-winning Hollywood hunk Leonardo DiCaprio pulled out of hosting a fundraiser for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton last week, saying there was a problem with the timing. Well, kind of. The FBI needed to question DiCaprio about his apparent links to two suspects accused of embezzling a sovereign fund in Malaysia, Swiss newspaper Le Temps […]
Most Indians are vegetarians. But omelets, a colonial legacy, remain popular in India.
Terrorism and social networks contribute to the exacerbation of a general feeling of fear, as recent incidents in New York and the South of France have shown.
In big and small companies alike, security risks have entered a whole new era.
Categories
A New Kind Of Space Race
The quest for the final frontier is still very much on. But rather than the Cold War-era space race between the two governments of the United States and Soviet Union, the competition now has many players, both public and private. The public sector these days includes China, which recently announced plans to send an unmanned […]
O Globo, Aug. 29 Brazil’s suspended president, Dilma Rousseff, will address the Senate today as part of the final moments of her trial before a vote on her impeachment tomorrow. Rousseff studied each and every senator in detail last week “to have something up her sleeve if she gets attacked,” Brazilian newspaper O Globo reported […]
This is the third and final installment of a three-part series “Couchsurfing In Palestine.” Read Part 1: Keeping Secrets and Part 2: Where Are You From? -Essay- I meet Saber in a cafeteria in central Jenin, just after noon. He welcomes me with a vigorous hug, the kind that people give to friends they haven’t […]
Social network searches have become common practice among police forces. But now victims, too, are searching online for offenders. What is legal, and what isn’t?
Aleksei Arbatov, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, analyzes Kremlin’s foreign policy and offers an inside look at where international relations are headed.
Categories
Making Peace — Video Quote Of The Day
CHINON — Serge Desazars’ bodyguards are very hairy. Hip-Hop, a two-year-old Springer, jumps whenever a new visitor arrives. Serge lets out a smile, surreptitiously materializing on the unemotional farmer’s face. Hip-Hop is clearly too playful for this former international director for the clothing brands Petit Bateau, Céline and Holland & Holland. Desazars, who abandoned carpeted […]
La Repubblica, Aug.25 At least 247 people have died and 368 were injured in the devastating 6.2-magnitude earthquake that struck in the early hours of Wednesday. Small towns and villages were destroyed in the mountainous area where the regions of Umbria, Lazio and Le Marche meet in central Italy. The horror of the quake was […]
LANZHOU NEW AREA This city is supposed to be the diamond’s on China’s Silk Road Economic Belt a new metropolis carved out of the mountains in the country’s arid northwest. But it is shaping up to be fool’s gold, a ghost city in the making. Lanzhou New Area, in Gansu province, embodies China’s twin dreams of catapulting its poorer western regions into the economic mainstream through an orgy of infrastructure spending and cementing its place at the heart of Asia through a revival of the ancient Silk Road. Hundreds of hills on the dry, sandy Loess Plateau were flattened by […]
-OpEd- As I walk through central London, I see many women wearing burqas passing me by. And as I’ve always felt in that sort of situation, I was uncomfortable. Physically and morally uncomfortable. They say you’re not supposed to feel such things. Nor to write about them. What right, indeed, do I have to impose […]
Categories
Hacking, From Submarines To A News Bureau
Although conventional warfare makes headlines, a more insidious conflict also warrants attention. Cyber warfare, in its many forms, is arguably still in its infancy. But the new-age combat is a growing concern — so much so that the latest NATO summit in Warsaw, Poland, chose to focus on cyber defense. The list of government agencies, […]
Police officers probing the attack on a priest in the quiet northern French town of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray were led to an unusual location in their investigation: Telegram, a messaging application that has 100 million active users worldwide. With both private and public chats, the application’s flexibility, as well as its policy on privacy, makes it attractive […]
LINYI — Dr. Yang Yongxin first garnered attention a decade ago when he opened the “Young People Risk Behavior Intervention Center” in this city in the eastern province of Shandong. The “risk behavior” in question was not drugs or sex, but wasting time online. The Nanfang Daily reports that Yang, who used to work in […]
Categories
The Art Of The Cart
Brightly-decorated Sicilian carts don’t just look great. The scenes carved in the wood of the carretti siciliani used to be a good way to teach history, and pass on folklore, to illiterate workers.
Libération, Aug. 23 Former right-wing French President Nicolas Sarkozy, 61, announced he’s running for the 2017 presidential election. “What is worse is that he may win,” leftist newspaper Libération lamented on its front page. The daily has a point: Socialist President François Hollande faces record unpopularity, making re-election an uphill battle if he plans to […]
After the Indonesian defense minister compared LGBT people to a nuclear threat, Islamists targeted a gay community that used to be widely tolerated.
INGOLSTADT — Math is the first class of the day. Only two students, who are clearly aces at math, are raising their hands to answer the teacher’s questions. Almost everyone else is dozing off. But Mahmoud, who is seated in the first row, appears to be wide awake. He does not, however, raise his hand. […]
Since its creation, the Hebrew state has adapted to a permanent terrorist threat, thanks to a dynamic model of which the central elements are intelligence and the involvement of the civil society.
The humanitarian drama of the besieged city deepens. The people are simply not able to trust the alliance between Assad, Russia and Iran. And the West just looks on.
Small-scale miners on the island of Lombok and elsewhere in Indonesia are playing a dangerous game by using mercury, a toxic heavy metal, to extract gold.