BOSTON GLOBE, CNN (USA) Worldcrunch NEWTOWN – On Monday the Connecticut town prepares for the first funerals of the mass shooting at an elementary school that killed 20 young children and six educators. President Obama vowed on Sunday to use “whatever power this office holds” in coming weeks to prevent other mass shootings like the […]
Author: Jeff Israely
As he did last year, Charles Landow draws highlights from a range of democracy and development indexes for this year-end edition of Missing Pieces. The UN Human Development Index and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Index of Democracy are not included this time because they were not published in 2012. Enjoy the reading and the holiday […]
PARIS – World leaders expressed their shock and condolences to U.S. President Barack Obama and the victims of Friday’s mass school shooting in Connecticut that left 27 people dead, including 20 children… AUSTRALIAPrime Minister Julia Gillard: “We share America’s shock at this senseless and incomprehensible act of evil.” U.K.Prime Minister David Cameron: “I was shocked […]
NEWTOWN (Reuters) – Residents of the small Connecticut community of Newtown were reeling on Saturday from one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history, as police sought answers about what drove a 20-year-old gunman to slaughter 20 children at an elementary school. The attacker, identified by law enforcement sources as Adam Lanza, who once […]
Twenty of the victims are reportedly children. The gunman, a son of a kindergarten teacher at the school, killed himself.
SOUTHERN PEOPLE WEEKLY (China), MING PAO (Hong Kong) Worldcrunch HONG KONG – Martial arts star, Jackie Chan, has kicked up a fuss this week when suggesting that Hong Kong authorities should crackdown on the nation’s burgeoning protest movement. Chan, who was born in Hong Kong, told China’s Southern People Weekly: “Hong Kong has become a […]
Is the American-born Wang the Jeremy Lin of the fashion world?
Life of Pi shows the Taiwan-born Lee in total command of his storytelling talents.
ASSABAH (Tunisia), FRANCE 24-ARABE (France), Worldcrunch TUNIS – With protests mounting against the Islamist-led government, Tunisia’s leading labor union called Friday for the first general strike since the fall of the Ben Ali regime nearly two years ago. Slated for Dec. 13 in the capital of Tunis, Sfax and other major cities, the strike has […]
MASRAWY, AL AHRAM (Egypt) Worldcrunch CAIRO – Protests against Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi have turned deadly. Egypt’s Health Ministry confirmed Thursday five deaths and 446 injuries from the latest confrontation, which turned violent Wednesday night in clashes between pro and anti Morsi demonstrators, the news site Masrawy reported. As the clashes intensified, presidential security deployed […]
SÃO PAULO – It was February 10th, 2011, Penitentiary No. 2 in Presidente Venceslau, a rural town in Brazil’s São Paulo state. At 4:51 P.M., a secret conference call began by mobile phone with two prisoners and three criminals on the outside – the conversation would go on without interruption for nine hours and 38 […]
MASRAWY, AL FAGR (Egypt) Worldcrunch CAIRO – After a night of clashes outside the Egyptian presidential palace, Mohammed Morsi is reportedly back in his office Wednesday and “resuming his duties normally,” according to Cairo-based website Masrawy. Protestors continued to camp through the night in front of Itihadiya Palace (Heliopolis), Morsi’s residence since he was elected […]
New rules on school uniforms in Turkey will now allow young girls to wear headscarves while attending religious vocational schools. The move comes as a part of a new regulation that will no longer force children in state schools to wear secular school uniforms. Children will be able to wear their own choice of clothes, […]
GLOBAL TIMES (China), CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY (Taiwan) Worldcrunch BEIJING – As a recent wave of corruption has been denounced in China, we have heard of the important role played by bloggers and a progressively more open press. But there’s another segment of society that has been absolutely crucial in busting bad politicians: their mistresses. And […]
The Republican Party’s losses in last week’s election have brought about a moment of reckoning for conservatives, as GOP leaders, grassroots activists, and political strategists try to make sense of their defeat and figure out how the party can rebuild itself before the next election cycle. By most accounts, Republicans were stunned by the election […]
ISTANBUL – Members of the Pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) have joined more than 700 Turkish citizens on the 60th day of a hunger strike aimed at drawing attention to the imprisonment of Kurds linked to an alleged terrorist organization. Some 65 prisoners linked to the Union of Kurdistan Communities (KCK), which Turkey, the […]
Barack Obama’s victory on Tuesday was very different than his win four years ago. In 2008, he won the White House with a powerful message of change; a fresh start for the nation. Charming a majority of Americans back then was a young, black senator, breaking both the political status quo, and longstanding racial barriers. […]
FLORENCE – It is an obvious point, but holds a hidden meaning. The last century did not have many artists who merit the “adjectivization” of their name, like Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Rembrandt or Goya, to define an entire genre. Writers have given us Kafkaesque and Chekhovian, but can we say “Baconian”? The current exhibition at Florence’s […]
XINHUA, GLOBAL TIMES, PEOPLE’S DAILY (China) BBC (UK) LA STAMPA (Italy) Worldcrunch BEIJING – Barack Obama’s hard-fought reelection coincides with the once-in-a-decade handover of power in China, as the Communist Party Congress opens this week in the capital. But all this superpower politics has produced comparably little mainstream Chinese coverage — either of Tuesday’s noisy […]
BEIJING – At the final debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, which was focused on foreign policy, the subject of the rise of China was clearly on the agenda. But when the moderator posed the question: “What do you believe is the greatest future threat to the national security of this country?” Obama cited […]
NEW YORK – In the focus groups he organizes to understand American voters, Democratic Party pollster Stan Greenberg says lately participants have actually broken down emotionally when answering questions about their lives. “Three-quarters of the population are struggling. Families are overwhelmed, salaries have decreased by 20% and health benefits are falling,” Greenberg, co-author of the […]
POLITICO, WASHINGTON POST, BUSINESS WEEK, NEW YORK TIMES (U.S.) Worldcrunch Sure, it may come down to a few undecided voters in some sleepy town in Ohio, but U.S. presidential elections are also by now very much global events. So as the world prepares to follow the final countdown to Tuesday’s showdown between President Barack Obama […]
Last week at an unlicensed Montessori kindergarten in Taiyuan, in the western province of Shanxi, a teacher slapped a five-year-old girl in the face more than 70 times and kicked her twice because she didn’t manage to do her arithmetic. While an online video of the abuse was setting off a huge public outcry, another […]
ANKARA – Turkish opposition groups plan to defy a government ban of a rally outside parliament to mark Turkey’s Republic Day. The Oct.29 rally has been banned by the Ankara Governor’s office, who claim to have received intelligence that warns of mass provocation at the rally. If the banned protest takes place as planned, legal […]
CAIRO – Mohamed Gad al-Rab, more commonly known as Sambo, was not a committed revolutionary. He did not participate in the 18-day uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak, nor the immediate events that followed it. Inadvertently, he became an icon in events after much of the history had been made, having been caught up in the […]
PHILIPPINE DAILY INQUIRER (Philippines), CHINA TIMES (Taiwan) Worldcrunch BANGKOK– A new survey that ranks cities with the “most promiscuous men” has been making the buzz all over Asia over the past few days, the China Times reported. The survey was conducted by SeekingArrangement.com, an American-based dating website. According to the Bangkok Post the study involved […]
LA STAMPA, CORRIERE DELLA SERA (Italy) Worldcrunch MILAN – Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was sentenced Friday to four years in prison for tax fraud in his dealings with the Mediaset televsion network, which he owns. The case, which took six years to arrive at a verdict, is the latest in a long string […]
SUDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG (Germany) Worldcrunch MUNICH – Extreme-right wing British writer David Irving, infamous as a Holocaust denier, has filed a suit to challenge a ban on his travel to Germany after local authorities in Munich had denied his request to visit the city, Suddeutsche Zeitung reports. Irving, 74, is barred entry into Germany until 2022, […]
-Essay- Chinese-Americans account for 1.5-2% of the population in the United States, while Asian-Americans taken altogether account for 6%. In comparison, Jews account for only about 2%, but the positions that the two ethnic groups occupy in the eyes of American politicians are not comparable. Rudolph Giuliani, the New York mayor, once rushed to the […]
RADIKAL, KEHABER (Turkey), FINANCIAL TIMES (UK) Worldcrunch ISTANBUL – A Turkish education union has pressed charges over the distribution of anti-Semitic books to schools in Istanbul’s Maltepe district, the daily Radikal reported. “The books include phrases that are unscientific, anti-Semitic, anti-Armenian and humiliate Christians, non-religious people and people with a left-wing philosophy,” read a statement […]
Worldcrunch PARIS – The third and final presidential debate is slated to cover the major foreign-policy issues of our times: the rise of China, Iran’s nuclear program, Harry’s crown jewels. For the two candidates, suddenly having to shift gears to global concerns in the midst of a domestic, pocketbook-centric campaign means lots of extra homework. […]
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Erdogan Raises Stakes With Syria
HURRIYET, MILLIYET, PRESS TURK (Turkey) Worldcrunch ANKARA – Turkey shows increasing signs that it wants to raise the pressure on the neighboring regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. A full week after a Syrian passenger plane was forced to land in Ankara, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to insist publicly that the jet was […]
MONTREAL – She’d been preparing for this day for 30 years. On September 4, Pauline Marois became Quebec’s first Prime Minister, though her victory wasn’t as clear-cut as she’d hoped. As the leader of the Parti Quebecois (PQ), best known for its call for the independence of the French-speaking province, the 63-year-old told constituents during […]
FOLHA DE S. PAULO (Brazil) Worldcrunch SÃO VICENTE – With his twin five-year-old sons in tow, South Korean university professor Kim Haeng-Chang has been to Thailand, India, Turkey, Croatia, Germany and Senegal. Part of the months-long journey is done on a bike that tows a small wooden wagon adorned with a sign that reads: “Your […]
AL MASRY AL YOUM, AL WATAN (Egypt), AL CHARK AL AWSAT (Saudi Arabia) Worldcrunch CAIRO – ‘Chaotic’ is the only word to describe the Egyptian political scene right now. There is of course the ongoing battle among and within the three main movements in post-Mubarak Egypt: Islamists, secularists and those who still support the old […]
FRANKFURT – Even before the world’s biggest book fair opened this week in Frankfurt, figures from a study conducted by the PwC consulting firm added more worry for printed book dealers about the uncertain future of their trade. According to the study, released Tuesday, demand for e-books is getting ever-larger in Germany. By 2015, the […]
AL WAFD, JANUARY 25TH PORTAL (Egypt), TWITTER, GUARDIAN (UK) Worldcrunch CAIRO –Among the central demands of Egypt’s pro-democracy movement was for Mohamed Morsi to set free all those imprisoned during the many protests linked to the January 25th Revolution. Yet when reports that the new Egyptian president had marked his first 100 days in office […]
CORRIERE DELLA SERA, LA STAMPA, TG5 (Italy) TWITTER Worldcrunch ROME – For one brief, shining moment, he was back. For those who like their politics, well, colorful, the prospect of another run for office by controversial three-time Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had hung in the air for the past two months in Italy. But on […]
GUARDIAN (UK), NOBEL COMMITTEE (Sweden) Worldcrunch STOCKHOLM – The 2012 Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to British and Japanese researchers who, decades apart, helped show that mature cells can be pluripotent, the Nobel committee announced Monday. “John B. Gurdon discovered in 1962 that the specialization of cells is reversible,” noted the press release announcing […]
AL JAZEERA (Qatar), FRANCE 24-ARABE (France) Worldcrunch AMMAN – Led by Jordan’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, thousands of protesters marched in the capital on Friday demanding democratic reforms from King Abdullah. Following the Friday prayers, protestors who’d come from across the country descended on the Husseini mosque in downtown Amman, chanting: “Listen Abdullah, our […]