The unexpected rise in highway deaths, even with far fewer drivers on the road, is a reminder of the many ways the virus is killing us even if it doesn’t enter your body.
Author: Carl Karlsson
Just go, leave everything behind and relax. We sent our reporter to Jodhpur, India’s blue city, where he is desperately trying to disconnect with all his worldly stress.
One of Mao’s most grandiose ideas — an aqueduct stretching 3,500 kilometers — is becoming reality decades after his death. The project promises relief for China’s thirsty north, but has already displaced thousands of people in its path
“The city is a complex form for which there exists no equivalent in nature…”
Maxima Acuna, an illiterate farmer in the northern Peruvian region of Cajamarca, faced years of litigation — and police beatings — to protect her property from the bulldozing and toxic dumping of a US-based mining firm.
A generation ago we saw the Berlin Wall come down and Nelson Mandela go from prison to the presidency. Today, we have Orban, Erdogan, Trump. What happens next?
Why do we refuse to admit that discrimination and poverty help the spread of Islamic fanaticism? Understanding is not justifying, explaining is not forgiving.
-Analysis- BEIJING — After 30 years of domestic reform and opening up to the world, China is a changed country. Society has progressed, but also diversified, resulting in a true plurality of opinions about various issues. With a wink to earlier liberalizations in China, included Mao Zedong’s aborted call to let “100 schools of thought […]
Categories
Venezuela To Public Workers: Stay At Home
Venezuelan public workers woke up Wednesday to newspaper headlines that told them to stay home. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced in a televised address Tuesday that the government is slashing additional working hours for the country’s 2.8 million public workers in a bid to save energy, reducing the working week from four to two days. […]
A cooperative that’s giving formerly jobless Argentines a second chance has evolved from a recycling enterprise into a flourishing sustainable-design business. Many of its partners could never have seen this coming when they lost their jobs back i
In the absence of a professional industry, amateur sex videos pose legal, ethical problems in a country that’s among the world’s biggest consumers of online porn.
“Enough!” writes the Mexico City daily La Prensa on the front page of its Monday edition, a day after more than 5,000 women participated in Mexico’s first national march against gender violence. Marches took place in more than 40 cities, including the Mexican capital, where a sizeable crowd protested what they see as government apathy […]
Under the watchful eye of the Indian government, yoga master Sri Sri Ravi Shankar wants to resolve the world’s conflicts through a breathing technique. At a gathering last month, he attracted 3.5 million followers in New Delhi.
Even in the small Danish town of Holbæk, officials have resorted to taking out their enemies with a campaign of drone strikes. The target: a flock of seagulls (not that flock) described as aggressive and, well, messy. After constant reports of the seagulls threatening citizens and stealing their food, the town in northern Denmark has […]
“Patricio Aylwin, president of the peaceful transition to democracy, died,” reads Wednesday’s front page of the Chilean establishment newspaper El Mercurio. The former head of state (1990-1994) died Tuesday in his Santiago home surrounded by his family. He was 97. Aylwin, a law professor and leader of the centrist Christian Democratic Party for over half […]
A Latin American consultant argues that excellence is an end unto itself, something that often gets lost in the pursuit of business
Categories
Ecuador Earthquake Toll Tops 400
The death toll from Ecuador’s worst earthquake in decades has topped 400, as rescue workers continue searching for survivors three days after the 7.8-magnitude quake hit the South American country’s northwest coast. The government put the death toll at 413 late Monday, including six foreign nationals. The total number of wounded has risen to 2,068. […]
Many refugee families after World War II took generations to get on their feet. A new German study finds today’s influx of refugees face the same risk, and new ones too.
Though the Earth is covered with water, 95% of it is undrinkable, and water scarcity threatens millions of people. But researchers in Egypt have found an inexpensive way to turn salt water into drinkable water, and its implications could be enormous.
A few decades ago, researchers dreamed of creating a machine capable of thinking as well as, or better than, humans. As the world becomes increasingly specialized, artificial intelligence can undermine the art of perspective.
Categories
Charlie Hebdo Cover: “Je Suis Panama”
“Fiscal Terrorism,” the front page of this week’s satirical French weekly Charlie Hebdo reads in the wake of the Panama Papers leak, which implicates heads of state and other wealthy notables in a global money laundering and tax avoidance scandal. In parodic reference to last year’s Charlie Hebdo terror attacks, after which “Je suis Charlie” […]
Joachim Gerhard’s two sons joined the terror group ISIS, severed ties with home and may very well be dead. None of that will stop this German father’s quest to bring his boys home.
The terrorists attacks in Brussels last week provided instant fodder for the U.S. presidential campaign. Republican front-runner Donald Trump had already boasted last month that he would order the U.S. military to “target the families of terrorists,” also pledging to reinstitute waterboarding and “a whole lot more” as a tactic to extract information from terrorists. […]
SANTIAGO — China has been one of Latin America’s main trade partners in recent years, driving the engine of development in the region with a hungry demand for raw materials to help sustain the Asian giant’s growth. But the recent slowdown of China’s economy has been felt acutely in the economies of several Latin American […]
In the Paris neighborhood of Belleville, home to a thriving Chinatown, prostitutes with no other prospects work to support families here or in China. And now, new dangers loom.
Modern society has it wrong: Beauty is about love, not looks.
By next year, there will be three times more connected objects than humans on earth, all containing information that can be mined to improve public services, benefit consumers and boost economic growth.
PARIS — Jihadism in Europe seems to always be one step ahead of European security services, which despite enhanced cooperation remain fundamentally national operations. Paradoxically, terrorism is unifying Europe with a sense of common identity in the face of the attacks in Paris and Brussels, which seem as if they could have just as well […]
Coming four months after the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, the series of explosions Tuesday in Brussels show that terrorist networks in Europe are one step ahead of authorities, who struggle with the Schengen border loopholes and collaboration between nationa
MARCILLAC — From the edge of the vineyard, one can see a small wooden hosting shed for honeybees and other insects with translucent wings. The vegetation along the ground is dense with phacelia, rumex and crimson clovers to nurture biodiversity. Here in the French department of Gironde, more and more producers in and around the […]
Can we determine whether a certain writer actually penned a certain work? Using technological analysis, the answer is a reliable ‘yes.’
The temptation to get rid of coins and paper bills is evidence of the failure of the monetary policy of central banks, which has led to negative interest rates.
Five years since the devastating Japan earthquake prompted a tsunami that washed tons of refuse into the Pacific Ocean, ocean creatures in and around that underwater wreckage is burgeoning.
BERLIN — Employees at German companies say they don’t get enough pats on the back, their superiors too stingy in praising a job well done. But even amid such rising expectations for positive reinforcement, some experts warn that managers must dole out praise in moderation. Too much approval, for a variety of reasons, can prove […]
WASHINGTON — In November 1968, a young Rhodes Scholar by the name of Bill Clinton was “mad as hell,” as he told a friend back in Arkansas in a letter penned from Oxford University. Clinton’s absentee ballot hadn’t arrived in time for him to cast his vote for the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, who lost […]
Cardinal George Pell, Australia’s most powerful Catholic Church official, is facing growing scrutiny amidst a national inquiry into priest sex abuse. Pell, featured on the front page of Tuesday’s edition of Sydney-based The Daily Telegraph, is being forced to testify over several days in the Royal Commission probe into decades of alleged abuse of children […]
BEIJING — Zhang Wenyi is bullish on Amazon in China, which he says is already the U.S. retailer’s fastest-growing market in the world. Zhang is Amazon’s vice-president and general manager of Amazon Kindle in China, and the recent press conference of Kindle’s annual eBook reading behavior report was a chance to demonstrate how fast growth […]
PARIS — One of France’s state institutions is under fire for what critics call a textbook example of “biopiracy,” an issue that is also at the heart of a new bill the French Senate approved just last month. Last year, the country’s Research Development Institute (IRD) earned a patent on a molecule extracted from the […]
-Essay- CAIRO — Growing up in the United States in the 1980s through the noughties made most of my generation pretty hard to offend. Not because America itself is offensive, though some might argue that point, or because it is so idealistic about free expression that people there respect individuality too much to be offended, […]
The Finnish vigilante group Soldiers of Odin has been successfully spreading its anti-migrant, anti-Islam across northern Europe over the past few months. But now, Islamists in neighboring Norway have begun mobilizing their own organization to counter the movement. Soldiers of Odin was formed in Finland in November following an influx of Syrian refugees. Members of […]