THE BOOKER PRIZE FOUNDATION, TELEGRAPH, GUARDIAN, INDEPENDENT (UK) Worldcrunch LONDON – The 2012 Man Booker Prize has been awarded to British author Hilary Mantel for her novel Bring Up The Bodies. Mantel is both the first woman and the first British author to win the prize twice, the Booker Prize Foundation noted Wednesday in announcing […]
Author: Marion Girault-Rime
A Die Welt exclusive explores declassified German documents 50 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
CHINA TIMES (Taiwan), APPLE DAILY (Hong Kong), DAILY MAIL (UK) Worldcrunch BEIJING – One week after the end of the Golden Week holiday, when more and more of upwardly mobile China travels abroad, the bills are rolling in. And once again, Chinese purchasing power is stunning the world. During the nine-day-long holiday, which this year […]
CAIRO – One of the most memorable scenes from the Libyan revolution was when the rebels, in wretched clothes and advanced weaponry, seized a house of the oldest son of Muammar Gaddafi. They famously entered his living room, sat in his couch, watched his TV, ate his food and slept in his bed. Mohamed Morsi […]
Contemporary French historian Henri Rousso’s seminal book Syndrome de Vichy (The Vichy Syndrome) came out in 1987. Its subject was the way the French dealt with the Nazi occupation, and it in Rousso coined an iconic phrase: “The past that does not pass…” Now, however, Rousso says, “The past is past. It’s not forgotten, but […]
NOBELPRIZE.ORG (Sweden) Worldcrunch STOCKHOLM – The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2012 was awarded on Monday to Alvin Roth of Harvard University and Lloyd Shapely of UCLA “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.” The work concerns a central economic problem, explained the […]
SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG, SUDWEST PRESSE, RHEINISCHE POST, BERLINER ZEITUNG (Germany) Worldcrunch Germany’s Minister of Education and Research, Prof. Dr. Annette Schavan, has criticized the University of Düsseldorf for allegedly informing the press about the results of a report on plagiarism in her doctoral thesis before she herself had been informed of the existence of the report. […]
CAMBODIA DAILY (Cambodia), BBC (UK), NEW YORK TIMES (USA), ABC (Australia) Worldcrunch King Norodom Sihanouk died in Beijing early Monday morning, reports the Cambodia Daily. The former monarch was about to celebrate his 90th birthday. Prince Sisowath Thomico, chief of cabinet for the late king said he had suffered a heart attack, after suffering fragile […]
BERLIN – This truck has been shipped from China, where it was bought from the country’s biggest truck maker, CIMC. It looks just like the kind of truck a child would draw: bright red, very long, very high, with massive wheels. Everything about it is just a tad too big for German roads. The truck […]
TAMAQUITO II – When a new baby is born in Tamaquito II, a Wayúu indigenous settlement in La Guajira, in northern Colombia, the child’s family digs a hole near its pichi (hut) and buries the umbilical cord. The Wayúu practice this ancestral ritual as a way to connect to the land, to remind themselves where […]
MUNICH – In central Munich an Arbeiterstrich is a crossroads where day laborers from southeastern Europe hang around waiting for low-paid work. Some say they are modern-day slaves, ready to take whatever job comes along, even at the risk of not getting paid. All Ilya* has to offer is his physical strength. “I don’t give […]
GELSENKIRCHEN – It was just a few days before summer break that nine-year-old Lisa Bahlhaus (not her real name) came home in tears. The teacher had announced that after the school holidays the whole class would be presenting a play, and she’d assigned roles. Of all the kids, only Lisa didn’t get a role. The […]
NOBELPRIZE.ORG (Sweden) Worldcrunch STOCKHOLM – The 2012 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to two American researchers for their studies on how body cells react to their environments. Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka were recognized for their “groundbreaking discoveries that reveal the inner workings of an important family of receptors, known as G-protein-coupled receptors,” […]
CAIRO – Abdallah Seleem doesn’t watch the news anymore. It’s disheartening, he says, to see how far Egypt has slid from its initial optimism after Hosni Mubarak stepped down last year. It causes him too much stress about the future. “You’re too frustrated to talk about it,” says Seleem, 25, who is unemployed. “It’s like […]
BERLIN – Despite considerable efforts, the economic gap between eastern and western Germany is not shrinking fast enough. While the East is indeed becoming more dynamic, it still lags far behind the West, according to the 2012 statistics compiled by the Initiative for a New Social Market Economy (INSM), which ranks German states for dynamism […]
-Opinion- A few weeks ago, the world’s biggest coffee chain, Starbucks, opened a new shop in the commercial district near Lingyin Temple. This temple, whose name means the Temple of the Soul’s Retreat, is in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. Founded in the 4th century, it houses one of China’s most famous monasteries for Chan Buddhism (known […]
THE WORLD BANK, REUTERS Worldcrunch SINGAPORE – The World Bank cut its 2012 growth forecast for East Asia and the Pacific region on Monday, with China’s GDP growth outlook down from 9.3% in 2011 to 7.7% this year. Markets reacted quickly to the news: Oil and gold prices push sharply lower as World Bank cuts […]
A Tel Aviv Tale Of Manners
RIO DE JANEIRO – The area surrounding the house of Eomar Freitas, 36, looks like a war zone after air strikes. The shopkeeper’s home neighborhood is Rio’s Favela do Metrô, a slum tucked between Radio Oeste Avenue and the metro, next to the Maracanã station. Located just 500 meters from the Maracanã stadium, where the […]
NEW YORK – Chen Guangcheng, the blind self-taught lawyer and one of the best-known Chinese human rights activists, arrived in New York last spring after an incredible escape from his village in the coastal Shandong province. He finally arrived thanks to a last-minute compromise reached between the Chinese authorities and U.S. diplomats who had sheltered […]
BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS, WASHINGTON POST, CNN, SALON (USA) Worldcrunch The U.S. unemployment rate fell below 8% for the first time in nearly four years, according to the September jobs report released on Friday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate decreased to 7.8% in September, while total non-farm employment rose by […]
BEIJING – What exactly is the Chinese dream? You could define it using current key words buzzing on the Internet: “the counter-attack of the diao-sze”, meaning the little people, and in particular the poor who succeed in raising their status in society through their own great efforts. The Chinese dream is related to the “American […]
Viruses have become world travelers, thanks mainly to the growing mobility of humankind – and of insects. Climate change is also a source of the exotic infections currently spreading in Europe. According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the German government institution responsible for disease control and prevention, we will increasingly have to deal with […]
RUE 89 (France), YOUTUBE Worldcrunch Hiding for months in plain view on YouTube, a grainy video has begun to circulate of longtime Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser laughing off the Muslim Brotherhood demands that the state uphold Islamic traditions. The clip is charged with historical significance in light of the Brotherhood’s rise to power earlier […]
MONTEVIDEO – Uruguayan President José “Pepe” Mujica placed his country in the global drug-policy spotlight when he presented a bill earlier this year seeking to decriminalize marijuana. Many observers – including Nobel Prize winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru – pointed to the move as an example of what countries can do to prevent […]
BEIJING – It took five long years for You Lian to understand that fine words are more important than good food and the capacity to hold your drink. He can still recall the first dinner party he attended at his old state-owned enterprise. Not only did he not understand the polite words one is supposed […]
At the very mention of the words “male jewelry,” scary images come to mind: super loaded pizzeria owner, rings gleaming on fat fingers, shirt open down to here, gold chain nestling in a dense forest of dark chest hair. But you could also imagine a turbo-tanned pimp on Hamburg’s red-light district, or German reality-show star […]
SYFIA (Democratic Republic of Congo) Worldcrunch MBANDAKA – For centuries, Maria, Luke and Matthew sufficed for those among the faithful eager to give their newborns a biblical name. For something a bit more original, others could always turn to Jacob, Jeremiah or Jonah — not to mention Amaziah, Basemath and Zebedee. But now in the […]
-Analysis- MUNICH – Last month, for a moment, crisis-plagued European nations seemed to have reason to rejoice: Germany’s Constitutional Court had cleared the way for the European Stability Mechanism, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced its plan for potentially unlimited purchases of government bonds in crisis countries, and the EU Commission laid out a new […]
DIE WELT, FRANKFURTHER RUNDSCHAU (Germany) The new book of poems, Eintagsfliegen (Ephemera), by German Nobel prize winner Günter Grass, 84, is already causing controversy. Reviewers who received advance copies describe “touching texts about aging and death,” and call the collection “a declaration of love to Germany.” But the poem called A Hero In Our Time […]
EUROSTAT (Luxembourg) Worldcrunch LUXEMBOURG – Unemployment in the euro zone remains at record high levels, with 18.2 million people out of work in the most recent count released Monday by EU statistics agency Eurostat. Compared with August 2011, unemployment rose by 2.1 million in the euro zone. The number of people out of work remained […]
BERLIN – The issue is as old as Christianity: who belongs to a church? Some Catholic scholars in Germany defend the position that it is possible to be Catholic without paying church tax – but the country’s bishops don’t agree, and after months of negotiations they have voted a law that makes further discussion moot […]
SANTIAGO – The U.S. Federal Reserve’s recently announced stimulus package, designed to strengthen the American economy, offered a clear reminder of the huge gap that exists today between Mexico and the rest of Latin America. While Mexico enthusiastically applauded the Fed’s decision to begin pumping $40 billion per month into the U.S. economy through the […]
ORIENTAL DAILY, SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST (Hong Kong), LONDON EVENING STANDARD (UK) Worldcrunch HONG KONG – Cecil Chao Sze-Tsung, a Hong Kong real estate tycoon, has offered a $64 million “marriage bounty” to any young man “who can impress my daughter and give her happiness,” reports the China Times. Oriental Daily reported a week ago […]
CHINA DAILY, XINHUA (China), BBC (UK) Worldcrunch BEIJING – Bo Xilai, who had once been destined for a top position in the Chinese Communist Party ranks, has been expelled from the party and faces corruption charges, reports state newspaper China Daily. The decision was made at a Central Committee meeting on Friday, presided by Chinese […]
CNN, LA TIMES, ABC NEWS, NY TIMES (USA) Worldcrunch LOS ANGELES – The filmmaker behind the anti-Islamic video that has sparked violence across the globe was arrested on suspicion of violating the terms of his probation, including allegedly lying about his role in the film’s production, reports the Los Angeles Times. Federal Judge Suzanne H. […]
ISTANBUL – Mornings around nine, when shop owners on Galip Dede Street open their doors, dozens of cats appear out of nowhere. They know it’s breakfast time. Not right away: the men first have to unpack new merchandise, stock the shelves, and check the till. But then they put out bowls of water for the […]
JERUSALEM — While it is a community that has lived in the city for centuries, not many have heard of the Dom in Jerusalem. “Few people know that we are the Gypsies of the Middle East,” says Amoun Sleem, director of the Domari Society of Gypsies in Jerusalem. The cultural center she runs was founded […]
MUNICH – The shelving is pink. The armchairs are pink. The bath salts are of course pink too. The air is heavy with a strawberry scent, and in front of the mirror sits Luisa, 11, having her long blonde hair combed. It must look a little like this at Barbie’s house. Kerstin Kobus, decked out […]
BEIJING – In many countries, being a doctor is regarded as a highly prestigious job. So why are so many Chinese medical students dropping out in the middle of their studies? According to Li Ling, a professor at the National Development Research Institute of Beijing University who is also China’s medical reform expert, “China trains […]