Governments in several Latin American states are facing angry voters who may remove them from power, but perhaps of greater concern is the spreading wrath against all politicians, everywhere.
Category: Ideas
After last week’s sham election, the international community — starting with the nations of Latin America — need to isolate Maduro and encourage peaceful, democratic regime change.
It’s time for other countries to push back rather than just sit back and accept the consequences of Trump’s me-first approach to trade and diplomacy.
-Analysis- BUENOS AIRES — As then President Juan Domingo Perón made clear in a 1951 speech, concerns in Argentina over the price of the U.S. dollar are nothing new. “I ask you this,” he said. “Why do you want dollars? Who’s ever seen a dollar?” Perón posed the question to political opponents who were complaining […]
-Essay- MUNICH — Artists are now using anti-Semitism and Islamism to shock, and that’s not surprising. But if both listeners and rappers started to finally take music seriously, this could change. Since Germany’s top music prize, the Echo awards, honored the rappers Kollegah and Farid Bang, there has been a misunderstanding that both sides of […]
Climate change is a real and alarming problem. But there’s another — and intimately related — ticking time bomb threatening our planet: overpopulation.
Robotization, AI and other technological advances will change the nature of work in the coming decades. How will it play out in poorer parts of the world?
-OpEd- MUNICH — Donald Trump may have extended the grace period by one month, but make no mistake about it, he’s still holding a gun to Europe’s head in the tariffs dispute. The EU shouldn’t have any illusions: To get what he wants, Trump will continue his attempted extortion. And why not? It’s worked elsewhere, […]
The shift toward electric cars is picking up pace, but the road ahead has plenty of obstacles still.
The German chancellor’s upcoming visit to Washington will be a sober affair, particularly in contrast to the glitzy, red-carpet welcome the White House gave her French counterpart.
Upstarts no longer, the so-called BAT companies — Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent — are a force to be reckoned with.
Latin American states, as major sea-trading nations that are also vulnerable to climate change, must act now to find ways to curb shipping pollution.
The world has mostly embraced technological advances. But as fallout over the Facebook data-breach scandal suggests, the reaction could get nasty.
-Essay- PARIS — This is not news, but dating today is a completely different animal than it was even five years ago, as new apps keep arriving to create “matches’ between people online who may have never come face-to-face otherwise. Personally, online or off, the whole “dating” thing has never really been my strong suit […]
The U.S. may boast the world’s largest economy on one hand and a deeply problematic president on the other. But under the surface, things are bleak.
The U.S. trade deficits that have prompted the Trump administration to raise tariffs have a result of the universal use of dollars and are unrelated to ‘unjust’ trading practices.
We should not be proud of of the insufficient response against the Damascus regime, but total inaction would be even worse.
From Saudi Arabia to Iran, Moscow to Washington and beyond, the rising global tensions over the Syrian war could explode in unpredictable ways.
-OpEd- Tensions are reaching a bursting point over Syria! Just as Saddam Hussein’s (hypothetical) possession of weapons of mass destruction led U.S. President George W. Bush to invade Iraq, the (alleged) use of lethal gases on Douma, a district in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta controlled by Islamists, now allows Donald Trump to announce harsh reprisals. Once […]
Youth who neither work nor study number in the millions in Mexico, though not exclusive to it. The state should be laser-focused on this mostly female segment of the population.
Categories
Syria, How Did It Come To This?
-Analysis- PARIS — The Syrian population continues to endure various armed conflicts. Despite all the attention this war gets from international, political and humanitarian organizations, it is now more than seven years since it began — and Syria is suffering from three open wounds. On April 9, at dawn, the Tayfur air base, located between […]
-Analysis- The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Rarely has the old expression had as much global echo as it does this morning. Over the past 48 hours, no fewer than three former heads of state, in three different continents, have had to face judges over accusations of corruption. In Brazil, South America’s biggest […]
Albert Camus’s iconic novel is a relevant today as it was when it first hit bookstores, in 1942.
Electing a first-ever prime minister could resolve the current Italian post-election impasse, and send a message abroad.
Like the the UK and U.S. election surprises before, Italy’s recent populist triumphs marked a revolt by voters outside the major urban centers.
WASHINGTON — How many times have we heard that this is the year of the woman? Let’s just say, several. Each decade for the past century or so seems to have presented a fresh feature to justify yet another proclamation of historic import. From suffrage (1920) to the pill (1960) and legalized abortion(1973) to Gloria Steinem and Ms magazine (1972) to “Reviving Ophelia” (1994) — fast-forwarding to the recent pink-capped Women’s March (2017) and the #MeToo movement (2017) — women have been pushing their way forward to reach parity with men. Many of the original goals have been reached. Women […]
-OpEd- MUNICH — We are making the world a better place: That has been a central promise that helped Silicon Valley’s Internet giants seduce the public, on their way to gaining unprecedented power over our lives. That vow remains at the heart of the message of Mark Zuckerberg and his company Facebook. The goal, as […]
-Analysis- The term “techlash” has been around for awhile, but get ready to see and hear it more and more. The company that stands at the center of this “technology backlash” is no doubt Facebook, with the world’s largest social network experiencing its worst week in memory amid snowballing revelations around its relationship with Cambridge […]
–OpEd- PARIS — The year is 2050. Cash has disappeared. People now pay for their purchases with their smartphones. And as in so many other sectors, Apple and Google are the big winners — along with Microsoft, who makes a small chip, which people implant under their skin to use as an electronic wallet. For […]
-Essay- PARIS — Growing up in Northern California, acts of public protest were never far away. It felt perfectly natural for me to join fellow students in the annual “Day of Silence,” refusing to say a word in any of my classes to draw attention to discrimination against the LGBTQ community. My favorite English teacher […]
In the place of narcissistic and subjective dignity wrongly invoked by procreation militants, we need a return to the transcendent and objective dignity of human nature.
-Essay- CAIRO — I dropped her off at the first of many stops that make up the long journey back to her home, and I went back to mine. We both like “homemaking;” we hoard the smallest of things, collect candles, eat what we grow – both of us are lovers of life, even fighters […]
WASHINGTON — For the moment, at least, it appears to be a clear-cut victory — the biggest foreign policy win of his young administration. President Donald Trump has brought his arch-nemesis, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a.k.a. “Little Rocket Man,” to the table to negotiate away his nuclear arsenal. Optimists declared a major breakthrough. Even pessimists acknowledged that Trump’s hard line against Pyongyang, after decades of less forceful U.S. effort, played a significant role in moving one of the world’s most vexing and threatening problems in a potentially positive direction. But in the afterglow of the surprise announcement — […]
-Analysis- Good news for the people of Cape Town: “Day Zero,” when South Africa’s second most-populated city is expected to run out of water has been pushed back. But it’s only a very temporary reprieve. The city is now expected to go waterless — and confront all the chaos that it implies — on July […]
-Analysis- PARIS — It’s a plan of titanic proportions, with a budget of close to $1 trillion and transport projects, for both land and sea, on almost every continent. No single fund can finance it, and the development bank created for it brings together more than 60 countries. The “New Silk Road,” and the figures […]
-Analysis- PARIS — He is “a man of about forty-two years of age, of large build, but slightly round-shouldered. His massive head momentarily shook a shock of reddish hair, which resembled a lion’s mane.” This isn’t a description of Elon Musk, but of Michel Ardan, one of the characters in Jules Verne’s 1865 novel From […]
-Analysis- PARIS — Michiel Van Aarnhem is a young and elegant advisor to the Dutch finance minister. He’s also an award-winning video producer. The educational video Bitcoin, Money of the Future?, which he made with his friend Jason Halbgewachs, a Justice Ministry official, took first prize in the European Central Bank (ECB)-sponsored Euro Video Challenge […]
WASHINGTON — As he heads to Florida this weekend, President Donald Trump is following in the footsteps of former President Barack Obama, a man he loathes and a leader whose time in office in many ways came to be defined by mass shootings. Obama bequeathed on his successor an almost ritualistic response to gun tragedies, beginning with the 2011 attack on then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and ending with the 2016 Dallas attack that left five officers dead. There were 15 speeches from the White House, countless prayers for the fallen and more than a dozen visits to the crime scenes. […]
-OpEd- TURIN — Fifty years ago, in January 1968, the reformist leader Alexander Dubcek rose to power in Czechoslovakia. His ascent began a brief era known as the Prague Spring, which ended when peaceful protests against the presence of Soviet troops in the country were violently put down by Russian tanks as the West passively […]
-Analysis- The PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games finally kicked off Thursday with the riveting-if-baffling sport of curling and a first victory for hosts South Korea. But all eyes will be on the official opening ceremony tomorrow, especially since a disproportionate dose of the attention for this edition will be focused off the ice and snow. Coming […]