WorldcrunchBertrand Hauger is a graduate of La Sorbonne Nouvelle school of bilingual journalism, and joined Worldcrunch after working briefly as a reporter in a local newspaper in his native eastern France. He now serves as Worldcrunch’s deputy editor-in-chief and director of content.
RAMALLAH – The smiling receptionist indicates that I should take a seat, so I settle into one of the lobby’s leather chairs. On a glass table, there’s the latest issue of an American business magazine and a day-old local paper. Flowery wall art contrasts with the space’s cool modernism. But this high tech company is […]
FEZ – Everyone should go to the Moroccan city of Fez at least once, if only to get lost in the medina, around the mosque of al-Karaouine, the oldest university in the world. You could choose to spend the hot hours of the day in the Bou Inania Madrasa, the religious school built in the […]
SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG (Germany) Worldcrunch BERLIN – Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis murdered 500,000 Sinti and Roma Gypsies. Now, nearly 70 years after World War II, a memorial is being inaugurated today in Berlin to honor those murdered. German President Joachim Gauck, Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Berlin’s Mayor Klaus Wowereit are expected to attend the […]
LE MONDE (France), L’ÉQUIPE (France), CYCLING WEEKLY (UK) Worldcrunch PARIS – Le Tour d’Après. Literally “The Tour, After.” This is the name Christian Prudhomme, the French race’s organizer, has decided to give to the 2013 edition of the Tour de France, which he will be presenting this week at Paris’ Palais des Congrès. “After,” as […]
-Editorial- BEIJING – In response to a letter sent by a women’s rights NGO regarding quota on enrollment of women in certain colleges and universities, China’s Education Ministry said that this restriction was based on “considerations of national interest.” The officials probably thought they would subdue any unruly voices with such a pompous answer. However, […]
THE WEST CHINA URBAN DAILY (China), CHINA TIMES (Taiwan) Worldcrunch YANSHI – Xie Guizhi came onto the stage to a burst of applause at a community concert in Yanshi City. The 58-year-old sat at the piano and played a well-known folk song called The Waves of Hong Lake, a so-called red song of China’s Cultural […]
UCI (Switzerland), LE FIGARO (France) Worldcrunch GENEVA – The International Cycling Union (UCI) said it will recognize the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA)”s sanctions against Lance Armstrong, thus stripping the former champion of his seven Tour de France titles and banning him from cycling for life. International Cycling Union president Pat McQuaid revealed Monday that […]
AP, BBC NEWS (UK), AL JAZEERA (Qatar) Worldcrunch BEIRUT – Overnight clashes in Lebanon have killed at least three people in the northern city of Tripoli and left dozens injured, following the funeral of senior intelligence official Wissam al-Hassan. Al Jazeera reports that violence erupted after protesters tried to storm the offices of Lebanese Prime […]
Why it is time for British art to leave its bad boy behind.
The Luxemburg-based European Court of Justice ruled this week a product the Czechs call butter is not butter, which means that the beloved spread known as “pomazankove maslo” (“spreadable butter”) can no longer be labeled as such. Non-Czechs would never have called it butter, which it bears no resemblance to – it doesn’t even really […]
REUTERS, KATHIMERINI (Greece) Worldcrunch ATHENS – For the second time in three weeks, crowds are gathering in central Athens today for marches against a new wave of spending and pension cuts. Trade union leaders says they hope to show EU leaders meeting in Brussels that a new round of austerity measures will only worsen the […]
GRANMA (Cuba), AP Worldcrunch HAVANA – Cuba’s Foreign Ministry has announced that it will no longer require its citizens to apply for an exit permit before travelling abroad. Starting January 14 next year, Cubans will no longer have to go through a lengthy and expensive process – citizens have to pay between $150 and $200 […]
BONN – “You have to use violence to defend Islamic values?” asks the judge. “Yes, of course,” Murat K. replies. Five months after he attacked police officers with a knife, the 26-year-old Salafist came clean in the courtroom: it was his duty, he said, to wound the police officers. The officers in question are veterans, […]
CHINA TIMES, ORIENTAL MORNING POST, SINA (China) Worldcrunch LANZHOU – The Yellow River has no lid, why don’t you jump in…!? For Chinese who live along the river, this old expression is used when an argument heats up. But in the last few days, with reports by the Oriental Morning Post that hundreds of corpses […]
NOBELPRIZE.ORG (Norway), TWITTER Worldcrunch OSLO – The 2012 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the European Union for having “contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe” for more than six decades, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced. Thorbjørn Jagland, head of the Oslo-based Nobel Committee, said the EU […]
TABOÃO DA SERRA – It was Tuesday, 2 a.m., and D. was lying on her sofa, trying to get some sleep. Bang…Bang…Bang. “It sounded like somebody was shooting inside here,” she recalled. D. crouched, waited for the shots to stop, and left home to check the street. She opened the front door and, three meters […]
NOBELPRIZE.ORG (Sweden) Worldcrunch STOCKHOLM – The 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to 57-year-old Chinese writer Mo Yan. 2012 #NobelPrize in #Literature was awarded to Mo Yan “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” — Nobelprize_org (@Nobelprize_org) October 11, 2012 The official site of the Nobel Prize describes Mo […]
AP, BBC NEWS (UK) Worldcrunch A Moscow appeals court has freed Yekaterina Samutsevich, one of the convicted women from the punk band Pussy Riot, but upheld two-year jail terms for the other two. The judge ruled that Yekaterina Samutsevich’s sentence should be suspended because she was thrown out of Moscow’s main cathedral by guards before […]
TAP (Tunisia), RT (Russia), AFRIK.COM Worldcrunch TUNIS – Tunisia’s Ministry of Women and Family Affairs has filed a complaint against Kaws Kouzah (“Rainbow”), an Arabic-language children’s magazine that published disturbingly detailed instructions of how to make a Molotov cocktail, Tunisia’s news agency TAP reports. The article, published under the “Knowledge Garden” section of the #302 […]
THE NEWS INTERNATIONAL, NEWS PAKISTAN, GEO NEWS (Pakistan), BBC URDU (UK) Worldcrunch SWAT – Malala Yousafzai, a 14-year-old peace activist has been shot in her hometown of Swat in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province in northern Pakistan. The children’s rights activist was injured along with two other girls when unknown assailants opened fire on the vehicle […]
Cruise lovers come in all shapes, sizes and inclinations. Some climb aboard for the pleasure of getting decked out in their sharpest evening wear. Others like to keep it as casual as they can. Dress codes, indeed, vary from ship to ship. UK-owned Cunard Cruises may still require tuxedos and evening gowns on its ocean […]
SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG, DPA, DAPD, HGN, WOJA (Germany) Worldcrunch ATHENS – Some 7,000 police, including reinforcements brought in from across Greece, will be ensuring extra-tight security during German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s first visit to Athens since the breakout of the financial crisis. The government fears the visit on Tuesday could unleash hostility from citizens who hold […]
AKRUN – Far beyond the brown plain and the shimmering blue waters of Qatinnah Lake, the outlines of a city can just barely be made out. “That’s Homs, that’s where there’s war,” says a refugee turning away from the empty window opening. Then there’s the sound of an explosion at some distance behind him. “And […]
GENEVA – Marie-Gisèle Sandoz lives by herself, and has no children or siblings. When the retiree decided it was time to make a will, it didn’t take long to decide who would be the benificiaries: three-quarters of her assets will go to the World Wildlife Fund for Nature. “Ecology has always been an interest of […]
Worldcrunch The world’s most famous secret agent is turning 50 – the James Bond film franchise is marking five decades since the October 5, 1962 release of Dr. No, the first movie of the series produced by London’s Eon studio. Twenty-two movies and countless shaken-not-stirred martinis later, moviegoers are trying to sum up — and […]
CHINA NEWS SERVICE, XINHUA (China) Worldcrunch KUNMING – At least 19 people, including 18 school children, have been buried in a landslide in southwestern China. The landslide struck the village of Zhenhe village in in Yiliang County, Zhaotong City, where two farm houses as well as the Youfangtai Primary School, were caught in its path, […]
SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG (Germany) Worldcrunch Halfway into the 2012 edition, incidents of sexual abuse at Munich’s Oktoberfest are on the rise as compared to last year, Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reports One woman was raped behind a beer tent. “One rape is a rape too many,” says a report covering the first half of Oktoberfest by […]
BBC PERSIAN, AL JAZEERA (Qatar) Worldcrunch TEHRAN – Iranian riot police clashed with demonstrators and foreign exchange dealers in Tehran on Wednesday, over the plunge in the value of the country’s currency. The Iranian rial lost a third of its value against the dollar in a week. Protests erupted after the arrest of illegal currency […]
-OpEd- BERLIN – In a recent appearance on German TV, former chancellor Helmut Schmidt repeated something he had already said earlier about Germans bearing more responsibility for Europe than other nations because of the “”industrial” killing of “six million Jewish fellow citizens.” Bulls**t. And on three counts. First of all, the overwhelming majority of Holocaust […]
SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST, THE STANDARD (Hong Kong), BBC NEWS (UK) Worldcrunch HONG KONG – A large-scale rescue search is still looking for potential survivors after two ferries collided southwest of Hong Kong on Monday night, leaving at least 36 people dead, Hong Kong’s The Standard reports. “All of Hong Kong’s emergency forces are focused […]
METRO (Sweden), SPIEGEL ONLINE (Germany) STOCKHOLM – Need more space in the room? IKEA may have found a new solution. Sweden’s free newspaper Metro noticed that women had been airbrushed out of the Saudi edition of the Swedish home furnishings store’s 2013 catalogue. Sweden’s Minister for Trade Ewa Björling told Metro: “You cannot erase women […]
REUTERS, THE NEW YORK TIMES (USA), AL JAZEERA (Qatar) Worldcrunch KABUL – A suicide attack Monday killed at least 14 people, including three NATO soldiers and four Afghan police, and wounded dozens in Afghanistan’s volatile eastern Khost province. Six civilians and an Afghan interpreter also died in the attack carried out by a bomber wearing […]
BERLIN – Everybody should have a car like KITT — the black 1982 Pontiac Trans Am that David Hasselhoff, in the TV series Knight Rider, fought crime with. Hasselhoff’s character couldn’t believe what happened the first time he drove the car. As he was driving 140 miles an hour on the highway, a truck appeared […]
We often hear about the rise of the middle class in Asia, and in particular in the fast developing countries such as China and India. However, what exactly is the “middle class”? The term is widely cited around the world, applied without hesitation by all sorts of people. Nevertheless, it means different things to different […]
BBC NEWS (UK), TIMES OF INDIA (India) Worldcrunch KATHMANDU – A plane carrying trekkers to the Everest region crashed and burned just after takeoff on the outskirts of Nepal’s capital, killing all 19 people on board, including seven British and five Chinese passengers. According to eyewitnesses, the small plane operated by Sita Air crashed into […]
EL PAIS (Spain), CLARIN (Argentina), REUTERS Worldcrunch MADRID – The showdown over Spain’s tottering economy continued Thursday, as embattled Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy unveiled a 13-billion euro package of austerity measures. After a six-hour cabinet meeting, Rajoy’s government emerged with details of the budget for 2013, which appeared as a last ditch attempt to avoid […]
HERAT – The withdrawal of Italian soldiers here in Afghanistan has already begun, even if nobody back in Italy knows it yet. For several months now, Italians have stopped being on guard at several bases they used to protect. The smallest, the most inconvenient, or the furthest from the contingent’s center of gravity, have been […]
NFL.COM, AP, REUTERS (USA) Worldcrunch After two days of marathon negotiations, the National Football League (NFL) has reached an agreement to end a labor dispute with its regular game referees, ending three weeks of questionable calls that had threatened the integrity of the sport, Reuters reports. Welcome back regular refs; it’s been too long: yhoo.it/PqxvF7 […]
In the face of the European debt and financial crisis, Hamburg-based economist Dirk Meyer has a “third way”: a system of parallel currencies. A professor at the Helmut Schmidt University of the armed forces, Meyer is convinced that in its present form the euro zone is simply not sustainable in the long term. He used […]
REUTERS, AP Worldcrunch Is it a bird? Or a plane? No, it’s just Vladimir Putin, taking time out of his busy Kremlin schedule to teach caged birds to fly. The Russian President’s latest publicity stunt involved him doning a white costume and flying a motorized hang glider to help introduce into the wild a flock […]