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Geopolitics Ideas

Turkey, A Failed Coup And Faith In Democracy

-OpEd- ISTANBUL — Years ago I told myself: “If there is another coup in this country, I will quit this profession…” Last night reminded me of that promise. My conscience, my sense of self, my education… My faith in democracy… They were all saying the same thing. Once again I realized, democracy is the only […]

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Ideas Society

Erdogan’s Cynical Call To Grant Citizenship To Syrian Refugees

Since the start of Syria’s civil war in 2011, more than 2.7 million Syrians have registered as refugees in neighboring Turkey, making it the largest host country for Syrian asylum seekers. The influx, combined with a rise in terrorist attacks in the country, have become pressing issues in Turkish politics. -OpEd- ISTANBUL — Refugees… They […]

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Economy Geopolitics Ideas

How A Wider Panama Canal Can Free Panama From Its Past

From a republic struggling to rid itself from overbearing U.S. influence, then its own political shenanigans, Panama has come of age as a sovereign state.

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Future Ideas

Teaching Human Failings To Robots, That’s The Hard Part

PARIS — Try to imagine that an intelligent robot is out to kill you. It remembers all your passwords and has access to all your data. Equipped with facial recognition technology, it can identify you wherever you go, even though you have no idea what it looks like. This nightmare is actually possible. Drone assassins […]

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Ideas Syria Crisis

When Turkey Plays Nice With Russia And Israel, It Plays With Fire

ISTANBUL — Since Turkey made conciliatory moves towards Russia and Israel last week, critics have pointed to the inconsistencies between what has been said before and what is being said now. But that is not the real issue here: The real issue is about the roots, the true nature and the costs of these changes […]

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Geopolitics Ideas

Colombian Peace, Some Good News On The Globalization Front

For Chile’s former president, Ricardo Lagos, peace between Bogota and leftist FARC guerrillas could signal a new path well beyond the borders of Colombia — though a post-Brexit Europe may be hard to reach.

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Ideas

The Istanbul Attack And The Cost Of Erdogan’s Syria Policy

ISTANBUL — When it was time to make a victory speech, all the cities of the Muslim world were being cited, “Not just Turkey, but also Baghdad, Islamabad, Kabul, Beirut, Sarajevo, and Skopje won today,” declared Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after being elected the Republic of Turkey“s 12th president back in August 2014. “Damascus, Aleppo, Hama, […]

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Ideas Rue Amelot

Couchsurfing (And Keeping Secrets) In Palestine — Part 1

-Essay- There must be an infinity of good stories to tell about the bus from Jerusalem to Ramallah. At its starting point, the streets are well kept, like in a first-world country, and the white stone buildings standardized. At sunset, they give the Israeli city a golden yellow hue. When you reach Ramallah, the dusty […]

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Geopolitics Ideas Syria Crisis

Defeating ISIS Does Not Mean Peace For Syria And Iraq

-Analysis- The “caliphate” of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi will not last. His self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS), announced two years ago, is on the defensive. It will vanish as quickly as the morning mist on the Euphrates River. But what about jihadism, Islamist terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Syria — all factors that feed this Middle […]

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Ideas Syria Crisis

How The Istanbul Airport Attack Unfolded

Exclusive details on how three terrorists launched their bloody attack that killed more than 40 people — and how two police officers helped avert an even higher death toll.

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Geopolitics Ideas

Little Britain, Petite Europe — Lost In This Big Bad World

The once Great Britain has just gotten smaller. But Brexit has also rendered the meekness of the European project evident to all. And the big players like the U.S. and China will eat them for lunch if something doesn’t change quickly.

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Ideas

Brexit, The Tough Lessons Europe Must Learn

The editor-in-chief of top French daily Le Monde says the UK’s departure from the EU must be a wake-up call for the remaining 27 countries. But the answer may be more Europe, not less.

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Ideas Society

What Unites Donald Trump And A Radical Muslim Theologian

Inflammatory speech, whether you’re the Republican candidate for the White House or a Turkish professor of theology, should be held directly responsible for ensuing violence.

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Geopolitics Ideas

Brexit Would Leave Germany Stranded Against Freeloading South

If the UK leaves the European Union, the members of the free market camp in the EU would be severely outnumbered.

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Ideas Rue Amelot

In France, The Sky Is Falling — Still

-Essay- PARIS — Nothing ruins the cheese course more than the smell of burning tires. Yes, it seems, the hour of camembert and brimstone is at hand. Angry mobs are burning Michelins at the picket lines. Congestion at the gas pump. Travel chaos as metro and rail lines strike. Power outages and the River Seine […]

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Ideas LGBTQ Plus Society

Gay In Turkey, Facing Orlando And Istanbul Ban On LGBT Pride

ISTANBUL — Pride Week traces its roots back 47 years to a New York bar called the Stonewall Inn. On June 28, 1969 in response to a sudden police raid, gays who no longer wanted to cope in silence with the social pressure, violence and discrimination trapped the police officers that assaulted them in the […]

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Geopolitics Ideas

Berlin’s Past Holds Warnings For Brexit And U.S. Elections

-Essay- BERLIN — “No other place recalls so vividly the fragility of democracy in Europe in the 20th century.” On the streets of Berlin, passersby may notice this line etched on a building plaque in German, French and English. It can be found in the finance ministry complex that used to house Nazi Germany’s Ministry […]

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Geopolitics Ideas Terror in Europe

The Poisonous Link Between Underground Economy And Terror Financing

-Analysis- PARIS — Little is known about the financing of terror. Where does it come from? What part did it play in the Paris shootings and Brussels bombings? Are we able to fight it effectively? We are, on all counts, poorly equipped to deal with this challenge. In France and our neighboring countries, there is […]

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Eyes on the U.S. Ideas

Divided We Stand: Why Orlando Hurts Three Times More

Three of the most contentious questions in American culture and politics — gay rights, gun control and terrorism — collided in a horrific way in an Orlando nightclub early Sunday. It is not entirely clear what inspired Omar Mateen to commit the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, or what might have been done to stop it. But it happened in a gay club, just two weeks shy of the first anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, and on a weekend when cities across the country, including Washington, were holding gay pride festivals. It was perpetrated […]

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Ideas Society

The Rush Of Capitalism Defies Eternal Concepts Of Time

Our linear, utilitarian view of time may be simply a construct of this modern, materialist civilization. What’s the rush? What does it mean?

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Geopolitics Ideas

What Turkey Needs If It Wants Peace: A Real Democracy

-OpEd- Turkey has never been a stranger to terror attacks. But it seems that the spiral of violence we have entered since the June 7, 2015, general election is so severe that it cannot be compared to anything that came before. Worse: There’s no resolution in sight, no sign of an end to this violent […]

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Ideas Society

Naked And At Peace, Public Art As Cure For Troubled Colombia

Some 6,000 people gathered in Bogota for artist Spencer Tunik’s latest outdoor photo shoot. The clothes-free event was a stunning splash of hope for a country torn for so long.

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Ideas Society

Beyond The Gorilla Cage, Moral Costs Of The Modern Zoo

The killing of a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo after a toddler fell in his enclosure is just the latest example of the twisted concept of the zoo industry. What lessons for your kids?

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Ideas Society

Why Friendship Is Overrated, A Grown-Up (And Grumpy) Reflection

Friends are the new family! Friendships are the greatest love affairs you’ll ever know! Nonsense. Take a journey to the dark side of your so-called friends.

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Ideas

Indonesia, Learning To Talk About Sexual Violence

A brutal gang rape in Sumatra has sparked street demonstrations, candlelight vigils and calls for stricter punishment for sexual predators. Grassroots groups, in the meantime, are focusing on survivors, helping them live with the trauma, not just ingore i

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Eyes on the U.S. Ideas Trump And The World

Trump Is Not The Problem — I Blame My Fellow Americans

-OpEd- WASHINGTON — What word comes to mind when you see the name Donald Trump? For some people, it might be “anger,” since he provokes it and stokes it. For others, it might be “ignorance,” since he knows so little and, like many unburdened by knowledge, is untroubled by facts. Some might say “fear,” since it would take some scary police tactics to push 11 million people over the border to Mexico. For me, none of those words suffices. I would say “betrayal.” It is the word that comes to mind almost on a nightly basis when I see some […]

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Ideas

How Swings Can Make You Happy And More Intelligent

BERLIN — The sight of a swing causes not only children, but also many adults, to impulsively sit down, push off with their feet and swing back and forth for as long as possible. This very impulse was a stroke of luck for Oliver-Selim Boualam and Lukas Marstaller, when the management of the Cologne Furniture […]

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Economy Ideas

The Truth About Lula And Dilma’s Record On Poverty

-Analysis- SAO PAULO — Brazil’s leftist Workers’ Party always liked to think of itself as a crusader for the poor. Yet in the wake of the party’s 13 years in power, there are still 73,327,179 citizens living below the poverty line in the country — a staggering 36% of the population. Don’t take it from […]

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Geopolitics Ideas

Europe, Why Today’s Far-Right Surge Is Not A 1930s Replay

-Analysis- PARIS — There is something rotten in Europe. A kind of fetid wind, or foreboding gust, is blowing through. The far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) nearly won the presidential election, the best result for a far-right party since World War II. The FPÖ candidate, Norbert Hofer, might have shown the friendly face of […]

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Future Ideas

Ours Is The Age Of Plastic, And It Needs To End

The legacy of our time will not be our literary or architectural monuments, but all the plastic trash we leave to poison the seas and choke our future. Fortunately, change is in the air.

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Geopolitics Ideas

Even If Far Right Lost, Fear And Hatred Now Rule In Austria

The far-right candidate may have lost the Austrian presidential election in the end, but the campaign has already changed the country for the worse.

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Ideas

The Victims Of Erdogan’s Ambitions Just Keep Piling Up

Will the Turkish President’s discarded former allies ever dare to form a new party to challenge him?

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Economy Geopolitics Ideas Society

Doomsday Scenarios, The Problem With History’s False Alarms

From ancient religions to contemporary ecology, dire warnings that the end of the world is upon us are not only false — they bring a damage of their own.

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Ideas Society

A Hospital In Bogota, Mirror Of Colombia’s Civil War Scars

Bogotá’s Central Military Hospital has seen the worst of decades of civil war in Colombia — from severed limbs to longstanding traumas, Amid prospects of peace with the FARC guerrillas, its work begins a slight, and welcome decline.

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Ideas Society

Tunisia’s Ennahda Movement Redefines Muslim Democracy

Ennahda’s founder Rached Ghannouchi calls for an end to ‘political Islam,’ a groundbreaking shift for a key Tunisian leader and intellectual long identified as Islamist.

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Ideas Society

Why Bullying is Getting Worse In China

Amid more and more incidents of bullying in China, schools and the legal system appear to be doing very little to stop it.

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Ideas Society

The Smoking Generation: Where 1946 Babies Are Today

What has become of the generation of people born in 1946? Le Temps‘ Joëlle Kuntz ponders the past seven decades and the findings of a watershed study of her age group.

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Ideas Society

“Because Of Who I Am” — Sexual Harassment, A Plague In French Politics

-OpEd- PARIS — A sex scandal is again shaking up politics and media in France. Denis Baupin, a a Green Party member and vice president of the National Assembly, who also happens to be husband to the current housing minister, is being investigated after accusations that he harassed many women, including colleagues and elected officials, […]

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Green Or Gone Ideas

In Uruguay, A Sustainable School Built With Cans And Tires

Borrowing techniques developed by U.S. architect Michael Reynolds, a group of Uruguayan amateurs turned piles of trash into an innovative and one-of-a-kind education center.

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Future Ideas

China’s Robot Industry And The Trap Of State Subsidies

-Analysis- BEIJING — An in-depth report recently published by this newspaper, titled Robot Industry Development, Great Leap Forward-Style depicted the sector’s troubling situation in China. The article, needless to say, triggered plenty of discussion. According to Caixin’s investigative data, China currently has as many as 800 robot enterprises, although this statistic already excludes those which […]

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