Soumaila Diawara, a refugee living in Italy, addresses Matteo Salvini’s remarks made on live television last week, where Italy’s deputy prime minister compared unregulated migrants to dogs and pigs.
Category: Ideas
The cognitive skills that helped us live on the savannah still exist in our brain’s survival kit, and it may be the reason we fail to tackle climate change.
Any other nation would cultivate the myth of a figure like former Polish President Lech Wałęsa, marginalizing his flaws, errors, and weaknesses. But in Poland, we have marginalized the greatness of a legend, whose modern thinking is relevant in present-day politics, writes Gazeta Wyborcza columnist Magdalena Środa.
Lebanese writer Tarek Ismail, who fled his village in southern Lebanon in September, reflects on his new life as a displaced person: “I am now facing a fate that is not in my hands.”
As Donald Trump makes his third bid for the White House, Catalina Uribe Rincón considers, in the Colombian daily El Espectador, why so many Hispanic-Americans back a racist and anti-immigrant candidate.
The death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack is just the latest Israeli strike against those who have tried to monopolize the notion of “resistance” as a purely military pursuit. The result has been the absolute destruction of Gaza, and now Lebanon, and the reinforcement of the Israeli occupation.
The devastating loss of loved ones during war leaves families grappling with grief and trauma for decades, often destabilizing entire communities. War-related bereavement not only affects mental and physical well-being but also intensifies cycles of violence, as feelings of injustice and desire for retribution take root. Addressing the long-term needs of these survivors is essential for breaking the patterns of conflict and fostering lasting peace.
The German Parliament has taken up discussion on a bill for an outright ban on the AfD, the country’s increasingly popular far-right party. Here’s the case to remove a political force that wants to dismantle the institutions of democracy from within. Germany, of course, has its own history on the question.
Honoring the research of Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson marks a comeback for the importance of public institutions in economics.
Israel is on the hunt in Lebanon one more time, with apparent early successes. But it has again ignored the fact that something always rises from the ashes.
When Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, chose not to invite King Felipe VI to her inauguration, Spain could have reacted differently. It could have taken the opportunity to evaluate its colonial past and apologize to the native peoples of the Americas. But imperial nostalgia and a conflictual relationship with diversity are leaving Spain in the past.
Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly urged the Lebanese to turn on Hezbollah, as he drops bombs that kill thousands of civilians. But every citizen knows what an occupier looks like.
Nowhere is loneliness celebrated as much as in literature and music. For centuries, this celebration of proud or penitent solitude was an artistic luxury, but it has also inspired a powerful political concept.
Calls for negotiation between Russia and Ukraine are growing louder. But peace would require strong security guarantees for the invaded country.
Advances in the fight against direct and indirect censorship have forced the enemies of freedom of expression to seek other, more subtle methods to distort and weaken public debate.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea, in 2014, warned Europe over a changing geopolitical scenario and the bloc’s vulnerability in terms of security. Now, the war in Ukraine has pushed EU member states to strengthen their defense policies and reopened the debate over the need for a European army.
For a long time, contemporary art was the rage room of a conformist society. Now, it is filled with educational purposes. Where have all the angry artists gone?
A new gruesome case of the rape and murder of a young female doctor trainee in India is bringing once again to the forefront the issue of women’s safety in the country. Why does this keep happening?
Critics are right to denounce crooked politicians or elected leaders for undermining the democratic system of checks and balances. But defending those checks and balances is not the key to restoring democracy — because people’s pervasive distrust and discontent with politics is a much deeper problem to address.
The porn industry and amateur and professional adult content plays a role in the Israeli war on Gaza. Some pornographic companies did not only provide support to Israel, but adult content also contributed to drawing a violative imagination about Israeli soldiers and their relationship with the battlefield and the Gazan victims. It is part of a long history linking pornography and war.
Cuba is approaching a state of economic collapse and has turned to the UN for food assistance for the first time in its history. While Havana blames the U.S. embargo for its economic woes, the reality is quite the opposite.
Bezos, Branson, Musk, Isaacman. Will the billionaires throwing untold resources into private space travel prove to be visionaries or just thrill seekers? The latest, Isaacman’s Polaris dawn mission, launched Tuesday with the objective to feature the first ever private spacewalk.
In both Algeria and Tunisia, societies were on the move to demand change. In two presidential elections scheduled so close together, on Saturday in Algeria and next month in Tunisia, the powers that be made sure that nothing would change.
If there is a real peace project and an Israeli intention to solve the Palestinian tragedy, Hamas would have lost its justification for existence. Not just Hamas, but all the resistance factions.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s choice of new prime minister isn’t without irony. Michel Barnier negotiated Brexit’s terms with the British, who were as divided at the time as the French are today.
The armed forces have been dragged into political and electoral spats across the Americas, from the United States to Brazil to Venezuela. Is this another sign of liberal democracy’s decline in the West?
Russia’s pro-war influencers, or so-called ‘Z’-bloggers, have sought to blame those responsible for Ukraine’s breakthrough into the Kursk region. Yet Russian President Vladimir Putin’s name never comes up. Fear of reprisals is only one reason; another is belief in Putin’s infallibility.
In Sunday’s regional elections in Thuringia, yes, 400,000 people voted for the extreme-right party AfD. Is that a lot? Depends on how you look at it. But looking at overall electoral trends, we know that the vast majority of Germans do not want right-wing extremists in power.
As good as the Paris Games have been to the French capital, does that mean we must forever fix the Olympic rings on the Eiffel Tower? It looks like Mayor Anne Hidalgo may have drunk her own Kool-Aid — or too much water from the Seine.
For two decades Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah spoke about destroying Israel, but in recent speeches, he’s just demanding it pull out of Gaza. It’s one more sign that its patrons in Tehran have made a calculation to try to salvage a status quo in the region.
France has accused Telegram CEO Pavel Durov of complicity in managing an online platform to allow illicit transactions by an organized group. But should businesses be left responsible for making decisions about the costs of risks?
We live in a political, social, economic and fundamentally cultural environment that viscerally rejects all pain and suffering as irrelevant. For the modern individual, it is not so much a case of being free to do this or that, as to be free from whatever limits us.
The author’s mother shares a name with the Democratic nominee for U.S. president. How our names are spoken in different countries and cultures has some surprising twists, even if Donald Trump’s weaponizing Kamala Harris’ name is pure bigotry and bullying.
Modern times and capitalism have given the words failure and success an emotive charge and excessively personal connotations, turning mechanical, humdrum notions into engines of angst.
Imane Khelif not only won a boxing gold medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics, but she also triumphed over brutal stereotyping and ignorance about women that is part of a broader story of sports and politics that traces back to Hitler and Jesse Owens..
The global fight against climate change is essential, but the solutions are not universal. Measures must account for the local realities of the Global South, where economic development is equally important and where the imposition of strict environmental standards by the North has devastating social and economic consequences.
Today, Venezuela is barely recognizable as the prosperous and liberal state of the late 20th century that gave refuge to regional dissidents, thanks to the resolve of the late Carlos Andrés Pérez — the “roguish” president whose commitment to democracy has put his socialist successors to shame.
Maria Branyas Morera, the world’s oldest person who has just passed away at age 117, once talked about the importance of socializing in old age. Even if the aging and elderly tend to wind up confined to family circles, studies have shown the often untapped benefits of friendship in our later years.
As the world marks International Hawaiian Pizza Day (yup!), Worldcrunch’s cuisine lover Agnese Tonghini extends an olive branch to Hawaiian makers of the world’s favorite Italian invention and shares deep reflections on the marriage of sweet and savory — in what is also a plea for understanding to la famiglia back home in Cremona.
The Hungarian prime minister has long been known for his conflictual relationship with the European Union. But Viktor Orbán’s recent diplomatic world tour, together with his proximity to Donald Trump, shows that he should not be underestimated.