Worldcrunch
TBILISSI – A new French prime minister will soon be installed. But not in France – in Georgia, in the former Soviet Union. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has nominated Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire leader of the opposition, as prime minister. For those who didn’t know: Ivanishvili had been French by citizenship, not Georgian. Luckily for […]
PETRA (Jordan), INDEPENDENT, GUARDIAN (UK), AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE (France) Worldcrunch AMMAN – Jordanian police say they have arrested 11 suspected terrorists who had crossed the border from Syria and were planning a major attack against foreigners in Jordan’s capital. The U.S. embassy in Jordan was among the targets, an embassy spokesman confirmed to the Independent. […]
EL PAÍS, VANGUARDIA, CORREO (Spain), GUARDIAN (U.K.), DER SPIEGEL (Germany) Worldcrunch BILBAO – Two Basque independence parties have triumphed in regional elections in northern Spain’s Basque country this weekend, the latest sign of growing separatist sentiment in crisis-plagued Europe. The two parties together took nearly two-thirds of the vote, 48 of the 75 Basque legislative […]
LES ECHOS (France) Worldcrunch A study published this week by two economists for the German Bertelsmann Foundation says that if Greece defaults on its debts and leaves the euro zone, it would cost the world’s major economies 17.8 trillion euros by 2020, and cause a severe worldwide depression, reports French business newspaper Les Echos. Greece’s […]
PYONGYANG – The austere, angular façade of the Taedongmun movie theater, surmounted by large statues depicting a worker, a soldier and a peasant, gives off an air of power and authority. The date of construction, 1955, is carved into the building, which stands close to Kim Il-sung Square, near the center of the North Korean […]
CASABLANCA – Cafés are a public space like any other. Theoretically, nothing prevents women from entering one. But too many women still will not frequent certain cafés, which are always occupied almost entirely by men. Obviously, we are not talking about chic cafés in the center of town. When they have the choice, some women […]
GOMA – For the past 30 years, Dufina Tabu has been defending human rights in Goma, the capital of the North Kivu province in Congo. Tall and thin, with white hair, Dufina is a forthright man. He inherited his frankness, he says, from his father, a progressive man who worked as an accountant for the […]
BAROLO – One of the wine labels is of Veuve widow Clicquot champagne — when the widow still had a husband. The label bears the name of her now-unknown husband Eugene. Another label comes from one of the oldest vineyards in Burgundy, Labaume l’Ainé. It bears no date but is dated before 1798, the year […]
-Essay- PARIS – Twitter is a great tool, capable of changing lives. It opens a window on the world, an embodiment of a new kind of digital solidarity. All the same, in the past few days, many people in France had an eye-opening experience as they discovered Twitter’s unsavory side. The anti-Semitic hashtag #unbonjuif (#agoodjew), […]
DER SPIEGEL, HANNOVERSCHE ALLGEMEINE (Germany), FRANCE 24, AFP (France) Worldcrunch Twitter has agreed to block content from a neo-Nazi account at the request of German authorities. For the first time in its short history, Twitter has censored tweets in a specific country. The microblogging service has had the capacity since January 2012 to block tweets […]
PARIS – Although Switzerland’s Art Basel is still incontestably the top fair for contemporary art, London’s Frieze, which took place last week at Regent’s Park, and Paris’s FIAC, which begins Thursday, are now sharing the second place on the podium. “Each fair has a different identity and energy. Paris is more established, while London is […]
BBC, GUARDIAN, SYRIAN NETWORK FOR HUMAN RIGHTS (UK), AVAAZ (USA) Worldcrunch According to human rights organizations, at least 28,000 civilians have disappeared in Syria since the beginning of the protests last year, the BBC reports. Most of them seem not to be militants but ordinary people who have been picked up by the regime of […]
HAMBURGER ABENDBLATT, SENCKENBERG INSTITUT (Germany) Worldcrunch FRANKFURT – German scientists discovered what may be the world’s biggest spider species in a limestone cave in Laos, the Hamburger Abendblatt reports. Researchers from the Senckenberg Institut in Frankfurt, biodiversity specialists, reported that they found a spider with legs that span 33 cm (13 inches). The largest spider […]
NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR (France) Worldcrunch One hundred years before Felix Baumgartner, there was … Franz Reichelt. According to French magazine Nouvel Observateur, this tailor from Vienna had moved to France as a young man and become a French citizen — and an inventor. Reichelt created a prototype parachute that he believed could save the lives of […]
ASAHI SHIMBUN, KYODO (Japan) THE GUARDIAN (UK), U.S. ARMY (USA) Worldcrunch Two U.S. Navy sailors in Okinawa, have been accused of raping a Japanese woman, reports the Asahi Shimbun. The case comes amidst American military efforts to combat sex crimes following several high-profile cases over the past decade. The two 23-year-old sailors allegedly perpetrated the […]
-Analysis- PARIS – In Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist, the shepherd Santiago travels to the ends of the earth seeking a treasure that was close by all along. And sometimes, too, we find the key to understanding what is happening in our country today by reading about things far away. Two scholarly articles published last […]
LA RAZÓN (Spain) Worldcrunch Spanish police arrested more than 80 people in a well-orchestrated raid against the Chinese mafia. According to Spanish newspaper La Razón, the police action, nicknamed Operación Emperador (Operation Emperor), was aimed at money laundering by Chinese criminal organizations. Up to 300 million euros a year transited in this way to launder […]
LE MONDE (France), DIE WELT, DIE ZEIT, FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG (Germany), FINANCIAL TIMES (U.K.) Worldcrunch The European Union’s privacy commission issued a sharp reprimand to Google, ordering the company to change its way of informing people how their data is being used, or face sanctions, the Financial Times reported. Le Monde reported that the decision […]
LE MONDE, AFP, (France), REUTERS Worldcrunch PARIS – Like the United States, France now finds itself in front of an open “reparations question” for its past role in slavery. Visiting Africa for the first time since his election, French President François Hollande found himself entangled in the thorny question of compensation for the descendents of […]
MILAN – Amazon was born in a car: Jeff Bezos wrote the first draft of his business plan for the company on a long drive between New York and Seattle. It was symbolic for the company, which arrived on the scene in 1995, selling books over the Internet. Today, Amazon is the biggest store in […]
LE MONDE, L’EXPRESS, LA CROIX, EUROPE 1 (France) Worldcrunch PARIS – Speaking to a group of 600 educators at the Sorbonne, France’s 700-year-old university, President François Hollande declared last week that he hopes that his government will become known as the “education administration,” Le Monde reported. One of Hollande’s most talked about reforms was the […]
SÜDKURIER (Germany), AIR PARIS (France) Worldcrunch PARIS – The first time zeppelins flew over Paris, it was to bomb the city during World War I. Now, a German zeppelin company says it is nearing agreement with a company in Paris that plans to offer flights around the Eiffel Tower. The company, Air Paris, already has […]
Chinese routers from Huawei and ZTE are “a threat” for the United States, or even the world, according to a U.S. Congressional intelligence committee report made public on October 8. The committee suspects that these machines, which transmit Internet communications, could be working for the Chinese government. With this report, the American Congress has launched […]
CEYLANPINAR – “Is the tea good? It comes from those houses over there.” Ramaazen adds sugar to the already sweet drink, pointing at a line of dwellings on the far side of the barbed wire. On this side of the border is Ceylanpinar, a mostly Kurdish town of 45,000 people. It is the farthest outpost […]
PARIS – This time, it was definitely not a bug. Facebook has admitted to spying on all private conversations on its network, looking for Internet links being exchanged and for possible “criminal activities.” The admission opens the network up to many questions concerning privacy and legal rights. The Next Web, a popular technology site, found […]
Worldcrunch One-third of the world population now has access to the Internet, according to the U.N.’s telecommunications agency. The International Telecommunications Union released its annual report, Measuring the Information Society, on Thursday. The agency’s top-ranked country for information and telecommunication technology was South Korea, followed by Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Finland. There are seven billion […]
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL LETTERS, REUTERS Worldcrunch Researchers from France and the United States have discovered a planet twice the size of the Earth, but far denser, which appears to be one-third constituted of diamond, Reuters reported Thursday. Yale researcher Nikku Madhusudhan and Olivier Mousis of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie in Toulouse, France, […]
AP OF PAKISTAN, PAKISTANI OBSERVER, PAKISTANI INTERNATIONAL NEWS (Pakistan), HINDUSTAN TIMES (India), DAILY MAIL, BBC (U.K.) Worldcrunch PESHAWAR – A wave of national and international support was growing for Malala Yousefzai, the 14-year-old girl shot in the head by the Taliban in Pakistan’s Swat province, who remained in critical condition after her latest surgery Thursday […]
On the left, a wall of washing machines and stoves. On the right, a man is taking apart a vacuum cleaner, another a food processor. A little further away, an employee looking through a powerful magnifying glass pokes at a telephone with tweezers. In the background, a television set without its shell is broadcasting a […]
LOS ANGELES TIMES (U.S.), STERN, DER SPIEGEL (Germany) Worldcrunch A virus called Dorkbot is working its way through Skype users around the world. When users click on the English- or German-language come-on, malware is installed in their computer and it becomes part of a botnet, a network of remote-controlled computers that can conduct denial-of-service attacks. […]
LE POINT (France) Worldcrunch PARIS – Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the disgraced former leader of France’s Socialist Party and ex-head of the International Monetary Fund, has spent the past year trying to return the focus of attention to his economic acumen. But no doubt, his first interview since September 2011, set to be published in French weekly […]
FRANCE 24, LES ECHOS (France), GUARDIAN, EVENING STANDARD (UK), BLOOMBERG (USA) LONDON – Are the rich and the entrepreneurs leaving France? Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, certainly hopes so. Pointing to the 240,000 Frenchmen who currently live in his city, he invited those unhappy with the French government’s new tax scheme to move to […]
ATHENS NEWS, ZOUGLA (Greece), FOCUS, DAS BILD, DER SPIEGEL, STERN (Germany) Worldcrunch ATHENS – German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived in Greece this morning to a welcome of police, protestors and armored cars, as well as a “wave of hatred,” reported German newsmagazine Stern, which also called Greece a Pleitestaat, or “broke” country. The Greek government […]
VANGUARDIA, EXCELSIOR, MILENIO, INFORMADOR (Mexico) Worldcrunch MEXICO CITY – Authorities in Mexico were busy Tuesday trying to determine if one of the country’s most feared drugpins had been killed over the weekend in a firefight with military forces. The showdown took place Sunday at a crossroads in the northeastern Mexican city of Coahuila, when the […]
-Essay- On September 18, I was returning from Benin where I had been presenting my latest book, and came to the Aneho border crossing, on the Togo side. After a customs officer spent a long time questioning me on the reasons for my travel in his charming country, writing down where I had been in […]
NEW DELHI – Who will be able to decontaminate Bhopal? During the night of December 3, 1984, a Union Carbide pesticide plant exploded in the north Indian city of Bhopal, releasing toxic gases that killed between 15,000 and 30,000 people. Nearly 28 years after one of the worst industrial catastrophes in history, toxic chemicals abandoned […]
-Analysis- In the financial press, Africa is now hailed as the “go-to” continent. It seems to be at the cusp of a golden age: its growth and direct foreign investment rates recall those of China at the beginning of the 2000s; South Africa has become one of the booming BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa). The continent also […]
HAMBURGER ABENDBLATT, PRESSETEXTE (Germany) Worldcrunch HAMBURG – Aggressive dreams and other unusual sleep-related activity may be an early warning sign that someone will develop Parkinson’s disease, according to a new German neurology study, the Hamburger Abendblatt reports. At the annual convention of German neurologists this week in Hamburg, Prof. Wolfgang Oertel of the University of […]
LE SOIR-LES ECHOS, MAP (Morocco), COURRIER DE L’ATLAS (France), BBC AFRIQUE Worldcrunch SMIR – A Dutch boat that provides abortions to women on the high seas has reached the edge of Morocco’s territorial waters, and was being blocked Thursday from further progress toward the North African shore by a warship, according to the AFP. The […]
RUSSIA TODAY (Russia), BLOOMBERG, REUTERS, FOREIGN POLICY (USA), GLOBALWEBINDEX, TECH WEEK EUROPE (U.K.), IRISH TIMES (Ireland), DER SPIEGEL (Germany), MAIL AND GUARDIAN (South Africa) Worldcrunch PARIS – Facebook reached one billion users today. Now that one out of seven people on earth log on, the ubiquitous site has changed habits and affected lives worldwide. Here’s […]