A recent bilingual edition of Shakespeare’s complete works has turned new attention to the English playwright’s lasting (but not always appreciated) influence on French literature.
Author: Nour Alahiane
The over-50 age group holds enormous purchasing power, yet advertising aimed at older people often looks like cartoons of semi-active people happily going to the pharmacy. What can be done?
JEJU ISLAND — Kang Ok-ja, 75, looks out toward the ocean from the roadside. It’s not a good day for diving, she tells me. Waves crash against black volcanic rocks that line a stretch of Jeju Island’s north coast. Wind and rain are common on this South Korean island. “The waves don’t look so high now but the wind is picking up and they’ll get bigger,” says Kang. “It won’t be safe for us to dive today.” She would know. Kang is a haenyeo, or “sea woman,” and has been diving in these waters since she was a teenager. For […]
BORNHOLM — A meadow on this Danish island looks like it’s straight from the Middle Ages. Small, robust cows, sheep, geese and pigs are kept cool by the rains. Only a history expert would be able to recognize the small details that contradict what appears to be the perfect historical accuracy in depicting a medieval […]
Nuray ÇeÅŸme arrived from Turkey as an infant, and yet still struggled to integrate. She worries that today’s refugees will have an even harder time making into the mainstream.
In August, Chile broadened the protected sea zones under its watch to create a marine park that covers an area of 300,000 square kilometers, the largest such reserve in Latin America. Fishing and mineral extraction will now be banned from this area, which surrounds the Desventuradas islands in the Pacific Ocean. “At a time when […]
Many young Muslim women in the West have a modern lifestyle, yet want to be a virgin on their wedding day. But what if they aren’t? One woman’s story from Germany.
SAN FRANCISCO — A billboard for a new housing complex being built in San Francisco caught people’s attention last spring. Its sales-pitch slogan? “From the low 1,000,000s.” Some may have chuckled at the absurdity, but the price of the new units reflects the current reality of the market. The median price of a house in […]
-Essay- BERLIN — My body is that of a man but I am a woman and I want to live my life as a woman. In our minds, our bodies define who we are. We are either male or female. This belief makes me a person that should not exist. I did not question this […]
-OpEd- ISTANBUL — After a woman was kicked in the face on a public bus for wearing shorts, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan described the event as an “individual” act of discrimination. His ruling party, the AKP, expressed a similar opinion, calling it an “isolated incident.” What they failed to acknowledge is the role their cultural […]
BUENOS AIRES — In the Argentine capital, always aiming to be on top of the latest trends, is part of the wave of turning staid office culture into hubs of creativity through shared workspaces. These workspaces, which are offices that freelancers share as a workplace, are found to foster useful interaction and creative activity. Many […]
Decades of war between FARC guerrillas and the government seem to have made aggression a widespread social trait in Colombia that’s reflected in cases of domestic violence, bullying at school and a tendency to talk tough. The peace deal could help
Investigators assume that ISIS instructors are looking for new candidates for becoming potential terrorists on the Internet. Chat protocols reveal how they proceed.
In the scenic Loire Valley southwest of Paris, a town was designated to accommodate the first center of “deradicalization” of Islamic extremists in France. Since then, the community in Indre-et-Loire has been consumed by anger and fear.
Brussels punishes Apple and the call from Washington follows promptly: Deutsche Bank owes them $14 billion. The race for the White House doesn’t help matters.
Both city officials and business leaders take note of where artsy types, LGBT and creative young people move to live, as these are the new “influencers” who can give the decisive spark to cities.
Whatever the hopes for Cuba, the country’s regime seems keen to follow the profit model for the economy to shore up its political grip. Just like China and Russia.
India’s northern state of Bihar recently imposed a complete ban on alcohol in the state, driven largely by women’s rights groups. The prohibition is now blamed for a dozen recent deaths from bad booze.
PARIS — Breaking more than two years of public silence, actress Julie Gayet, the long presumed companion of French President Francois Hollande, appears on two major French magazine covers this week. Gayet has guarded her privacy after her affair with the French President was revealed in January 2014 in a gossip magazine while Hollande was […]
SHEIKH ZUWAYED — In front of a house located in this bedouin town in the North Sinai, a masked man sits next to his companions, each of whom are holding a weapon. The man proudly speaks about their “Death Squad,” the name they have given to their armed civilian troop. The residents of the area […]
PARIS — Ten months after the terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 130 people, including 89 at the Bataclan concert hall, it is now possible to virtually “conquer” the tragic music landmark thanks to the latest distasteful twist to the augmented-reality mobile game Pokémon Go, which sends players to find and catch more than 100 […]
HAVANA — Cuba“s belated embrace of the Internet has people packing into places like the Plaza de la Revolución and the colonial fort Castillito, two of the island’s just 114 public WiFi hotspots. Overall, the number of Cubans who regularly access the Web is still relatively small. But things are changing, and quickly. The Internet […]
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Extra! Mass Protests In Venezuela
El Nacional, September 2 “Massive, without fear and in peace” reads Friday morning’s front-page headline of Venezuelan daily El Nacional, after one of the largest protests to date against President Nicolas Maduro’s reign. Tens of thousands of chanting protesters marched Thursday through the streets of Caracas demanding a vote on recalling Maduro. In recent years, […]
A widely used approach in Norway to limit youth mob culture and violence has long been exported. Now look for it in Germany, following the July 22 attack in Munich by a teenaged victim of bullying.
Decades of civil war have ravaged Colombia’s environment and undermined opportunities at oil exploration. Now with peace looming, big and small firms alike are ready to pursue the government’s “sustainable” energy plan.
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Why Erdogan Is Soft On ISIS
-OpEd- ISTANBUL — Turkey’s government and the media that support it have an odd attitude when it comes to violent acts carried out by ISIS: It’s as if the “cultural/ideological dialects” of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government somehow malfunction. For starters, the government has a hard time condemning the vicious massacres carried […]
Is simulation turning people into escapists, wonders this Argentinian philosopher and science-fiction expert.
Sociologist Ernest Meccia explains how Argentina — one of the first countries in the world to introduce gay marriage — accepted and even embraced homosexuality.
BEIJING — China’s Ministry of Public Security has weighed into a national debate about citizens filming police actions with an attention-grabbing video of its own. The video, released last month, confirms the public’s right to film or photograph police with the caveat that citizens must “not affect the execution of normal law enforcement.” It also […]
Patrick Jan barely scratches out a living. He is too busy making his childhood dream come true.
Capital flows back into Latin America suggest Brazil’s economic free fall may have stopped.
BOGOTÁ — Suicide used to be rare among the native communities of Vaupés, a region in eastern Colombia with the largest proportion of indigenous residents. That’s not the case anymore. Decades of hostility between the region’s native inhabitants and outsiders has had devastating results. El Espectador sent me to investigate this increase in suicides, now […]
-Analysis- BEIJING — As the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro come to an end, the Chinese delegation’s “failure” seems to be a foregone conclusion. Even in gymnastics, where it had excelled in the past, China won only two bronze medals, making it the worst performance of the past decade. The first reaction of the […]
WARSAW — Even as change spreads from such historically Catholic countries as Ireland and Mexico, same-sex marriage rights still look to be years away in Poland, home to a diehard traditional Catholicism that some say was even too pious for Pope Francis. The 2015 Eurobarometer survery found that just 28% of Poles favored same-sex marriage, […]
No, it’s mostly not about censorship …
-OpEd- BERLIN — The ministers of the interior of Germany’s 16 federal states have presented their plan against terrorism. Among them, the abolition of the dual citizenship and a public ban on wearing the burqa. As far as is known, no dual citizenship holder has committed a crime of a terrorist nature. The number of […]
Tensions remain high in Turkey following the July 15 failed coup attempt, with the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan focusing most of its wrath on the exiled imam Fetullah Gulen and the purge of his Gulenist followers. But could Erdogan’s reaction backfire? -OpEd- ISTANBUL — You don’t want Fethullah Gulen to be deported back […]
The virtual hunting game Pokémon Go, for which players have to walk and walk in search of monsters and objectives, has just taught the eHealth sector a valuable lesson.
TIME, Aug. 22 Cuban illustrator Edel Rodriguez turned up the heat on Donald Trump in TIME magazine“s latest issue. In a cover story entitled “Inside Donald Trump’s Meltdown,” the New York-based magazine explores the Republican candidate’s disastrous summer, marred by public blunders and controversial remarks.