Worldcrunch
-Essay- PARIS — I do my best not to get pulled into the rabbit hole of U.S. election coverage. It’s hard to imagine, at this point, how any poll or tweet or scandal could possibly affect the outcome. Can our global news site really find a new angle to help explain Donald Trump? Can anyone? […]
Argentina must boost its scientific activities in the South Atlantic and maintain diplomatic pressures on Great Britain as part of its efforts to recover the Falklands.
The bombastic president seems to have little regard for precedence or decorum. But is he just an anomaly? And if not, what happens if he loses?
From Zoom changing the way we work to artificial intelligence changing the way we shop, we’ve gotten used to reading about how information technology influences our daily habits and drives the world economy. But lately, we’re also seeing technology make more and more front-page headlines in the realm of politics and diplomacy. U.S. President Donald […]
Argentines were hoping Alberto Fernández would be autonomous from his VP and former president Cristina Kirchner. But he’s beginning to look like the puppet that former Russian President Dimitri Medvedev was to Putin.
BERLIN — Over the past two weeks, since the allegations of election rigging in Belarus, there have been calls for Germany to open a dialogue with Russia. As if the country with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and a permanent seat in the UN Security Council is nothing more than a wayward child that Germany […]
A self-described American aesthete has no good answers for her French friends aghast at the reality show in the White House.
Mexico’s socialist president is fanning class resentments and threatening Mexico’s fragile social peace, while delivering little of the welfare he promised in 2018.
Owing, it would seem, is a part of the human experience, and not just in modern times … and so is debt forgiveness.
It’s official: Zoom parties are here to stay. And to anyone who ever attended an actual party, no need here to spell out why there’s no comparison. Yet there I was last week in a text exchange with a friend turning down my invitation to our bi-weekly drinks at my … er … place, suggesting […]
The pandemic has thrown the sector into a tailspin. But if European states are willing to work together, there’s an real opportunity to revamp it — and help the planet in the process.
The Amazon jungle provides benefits that extend well beyond the river basin itself. It stands to reason, therefore, that countries like Colombia be paid to protect it.
How is the pandemic panning out in the world’s second most populous country? Science editor for The Wire, Vasudevan Mukunth, offers some statistical insight.
Protests, slumping economies and the clear erosion in some countries of democratic institutions plagued the region even before the pandemic hit. So what now?
In the movie version, the contagion would lead to lawlessness and chaos. But in reality, institutions are encouragingly resilient.
Slovenian-born writer Andrej Mrevlje tries once again to get a read on the fiercely reserved first lady, this time with the help of new book called The Art of Her Deal.
There are important lessons to be learned from how the world mobilized to contain the novel coronavirus.
Latin America can do a lot more to right history’s wrongs than topple the bronze effigies of its conquest-era villains.
An outright ban on wildlife trade may exacerbate the situation. Could carefully controlling these animal markets be the best answer?
The long lockdown period has only added to the frustrations people feel about their country’s unresolved class disparities, crass politics and history of violence.
Leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro don’t just bend the truth. By using lies as a consistent political tool, they try to destroy it — as did the fascist regimes of the last century.
-Analysis- NEW DELHI — In a discussion on NDTV about the contents of the third tranche of Prime Minister Narendra Modi”s stimulus package for the economy, Yogendra Yadav, one of India’s most respected psephologists, called it “entertainment.” Yadav is a gentle human being who goes out of his way to avoid giving offense, above all on TV. So “entertainment” was the most civilized word he could think of. I will be a little more blunt. Not just the third tranche, but the entire “stimulus package” advertised by Modi on May 12 is a gigantic confidence trick being played upon a […]
The socialist strongman has plenty of critics. But he also has a remarkable amount of staying power, in part because of the tacit support he receives from certain fellow presidents.
What if, instead of pretending to care about the welfare of the elderly, we just wrote them off completely? A dose of satire about public attitudes toward seniors in the era of COVID-19.
-Analysis- LONDON — “We’re at the end of our rope,” is a phrase you may hear these days among lower-income Iranians struggling to survive in a country heaving under economic sanctions and the coronavirus pandemic. It’s also a statement recently issued by a national pensioners association, which has been seen as a “warning” to a […]
Anti-Muslim attitudes are ‘eating away at the idea of India’ and finding expression even among the country’s cosmopolitan elite.
Coronavirus travel restrictions have been a wake-up call for Europeans, especially since nearly a third of the population lives in cross-border areas like France and Belgium’s Eurometropolis Lillle-Kortrijk-Tournai.
-OpEd- Chinese tanks have not rolled through the streets of Hong Kong, but Beijing’s legislative coup Tuesday, on the eve of the 23rd anniversary of the territory’s handover to China, is provoking a similar fear. Pro-democracy business owners have hastily removed the slogans that lined their storefronts and thousands are applying to emigrate, with Australia […]
The protests, pandemic and poor U.S. jobs numbers all seem to spell trouble for President Donald Trump. But his challenger has a few disadvantages of his own.
Beijing seems to be abandoning the very strategy that allowed it to not only survive the collapse of the USSR, but also prosper.
-OpEd- Let’s talk about the words that are at the center of this wake-up-call of a debate. There’s the word “racism,” for starters. It’s a garbage dump of a word, one that embodies a stinking reality, that brings to mind filth like Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan. That’s what comes to the mind of […]
Unlike the SARS and H1N1/09 outbreaks, which caused friction between the two countries, the COVID-19 pandemic has, if anything, improved Chinese-Mexican relations.
The late American essayist Susan Sontag theorized that people are drawn to watching disaster films to help normalize and rationalize what we find psychologically unbearable. Watching a fictionalized apocalypse on the screen, she argued, inures us to the possibility that a real one may arrive. Sontag’s idea in 1965 about the need for a remedy […]
The chief foreign policy correspondent for Die Welt chimes in on Trump’s decision to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Germany from 35,000 to 25,000.
Latin American media have joined the chorus that has condemned institutional racism in the United States, but rarely denounce discrimination and violence targeting non-white groups in their own countries.
An activist and Oxford professor of anthropology of South Asia recounts her experience, and reflections, during a Black Lives Matter protest in the UK.
Beijing imposed a national security law in Hong Kong on May 28 to counteract its secessionist tendencies. What is at stake here for the former British colony?
Compared to other EU member states, Poland was barely affected by the international financial crisis or the refugee crisis of 2015. Now, the country could emerge from the coronavirus pandemic in a stronger position than before.
If the pandemic has taught us one thing, it’s that no one is safe until everyone is safe.
PARIS — That people should be judged by the content of their character was one of those rare elementary-school concepts that actually stuck. It was no doubt the candor and simplicity of the idea, but it may have helped that my history teacher Mr. Hansson for once deviated from his trademark text-heavy PowerPoints — and […]