Horsemeat in our pure processed delights! Are we innocent victims or willing suckers of the consumer marketing machine?
Source: LE MONDE
This leading French daily newspaper Le Monde (“The World”) was founded in December 1944 in the aftermath of World War II. Today, it is distributed in 120 countries. In late 2010, a trio formed by Pierre Berge, Xavier Niel and Matthieu Pigasse took a controlling 64.5% stake in the newspaper.
SATKHIRA – In the district of Padmapukur, a few dozen kilometers from the Bay of Bengal, tin shacks balance delicately on scraps of land coming out of the sea, like makeshift boats lost in the middle of the ocean. Only children, women, old people and the severly handicapped still live in the homes scattered along […]
ISTANBUL – The treasure of Troy is back. The collection of golden jewelry from the ancient city, which had been stolen during the 19th century, was handed back to Turkey by the University of Pennsylvania last September. The precious jewelry – known as the “Troy gold” – had been looted after the first excavations of […]
Once mercenaries for Ivan the Terrible, the Cossacks were known as great fighters before being wiped out by the Bolsheviks. Now, they are on the frontline of a nationalistic revival.
PARIS – For the past eight years, the Western world has loved to hate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Propelled onto the front of the political scene by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian president declared, before being elected in 2005, that the Iranian people hadn’t participated in the revolution for democracy. Since then, Ahmadinejad hasn’t missed an opportunity […]
PRISTINA – Before General Xavier Bout de Marnhac can walk up to the second floor of the Gagi restaurant in the center of Kosovo’s capital, his security escort must inspect the premises. This is standard procedure. The French general, whom we were meeting only a few hours before he was leaving Kosovo, is the outgoing […]
MAKASSAR – The nostalgic traveler who goes to Indonesia with the idea of walking in the footsteps of Joseph Conrad and living out their own Spice Route literary adventures will be stunned by the sheer luxury of Makassar’s airport. A symbol of Indonesia’s rapid modernization and economic growth, this city of 1.5 million inhabitants does […]
NIAMEY – The small restaurant sits on the corner of two sandy streets in Niger’s capital city, Niamey. It is here, at Le Toulousain, that two Frenchmen were kidnapped by AQIM (Al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb) on Jan. 7, 2011. The two young hostages – an aid worker and his friend – were killed during […]
TOKYO – While he was Prime Minister of Japan from September 2009 to June 2010, Yukio Hatoyama did not demonstrate a particularly acute political vision. But when he visited Beijing recently, he showed common sense shared by many Japanese but seldom seen in their leaders – he admitted that there was a “territorial disagreement” between […]
PARIS – Temptations for children take many forms: video games, computers, TV, tablets. According to French audience measurement company Mediametrie, children between four and 14 spend more than two hours in front of the TV every day. On Jan. 22, the French Academy of Sciences issued a warning about children watching television or movies from […]
SWEDEN – Sagas are epic tales full of symbolic details, and the IKEA saga is no exception. The story of the Swedish furniture giant, founded in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad, who is now 86 years old, definitely qualifies as a saga. It combines successes, setbacks and the carefully maintained mythology around the patriarch, who even […]
Police have arrested “yakuza” mob members, who recruited people who owed them money or were mentally disabled to do cleanup work in contaminated nuclear zones.
PARIS – Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the famed Swedish superstar striker of the Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) soccer team has just released his autobiography, entitled “I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic.” He spoke with Le Monde. LE MONDE: This book sold 700,000 copies in Sweden. Did you expect it to be such a hit?ZLATAN IBRAHIMOVIC: That is more than 7% […]
PARIS – Kevin Kelly is a stimulating iconoclast. How many books are bought but not read? Probably many more than we think. Hence the idea of paying readers who read a book from the beginning to the end. Kevin Kelly thought about patenting his idea, but, since ideas don’t necessarily make a project, he decided […]
Categories
Will Plastic Bags Ever Disappear?
A technological marvel, the plastic bag has become a symbol of humankind’s ecological footprint. Laws and habits are decreasing their use, but the alternative is sometimes worse.
PARIS – It is a new stain on the already tarnished reputation of biofuels. After being accused of aggravating food insecurity and driving up food prices, accelerating tropical deforestation and even increasing greenhouse gas emissions, crop-based biofuels are now being accused of worsening air pollution and creating health problems. The European Union’s target of 10% […]
A new study offers fascinating evidence that men who have no sense of smell have serious difficulty finding partners. For women, there is no such clear correlation.
-Editorial- PARIS – The problem with making statements when you are the President is that you have to follow through. Before the French intervention in Mali, President François Hollande said on Jan. 11 that in Mali, France had “no other purpose than to fight terrorism.” On Jan. 15, he revised his motives: now, on top […]
MOPTI – Each dugout canoe that arrives on the banks of Mopti, unloads its passengers, cargo — and the latest news. In this dry and cold season, it takes a few days to reach Gao and Timbuktu, which are further up the Niger River. These two cities are now seeing a crucial phase of the […]
GENEVA – It’s called simply, “Human Brain Project” (HBP), and it is as audacious as it is ambitious: 256 individual labs scattered across 24 countries in order to create a virtual human brain. Though only officially awarded a one-billion-euro grant Monday by the European Union, the debate around the endeavor has been brewing for years […]
BEIJING – French Minister of Economy Pierre Moscovici was recently in Beijing to convince Chinese officials that the French debate over the transfer of the nuclear technology to China was nothing to worry about. “We are discussing the way the strategic clauses will be applied in regard to technology transfer and intellectual property,” said Moscovici. […]
PARIS – Industrial-style metallic chests, steel chairs, and workshop lamps – as soon as they were featured on the pages of mail-to-order furniture catalogs, French hipsters shunned them. Industrial-style is done, dead. It has been replaced by colorful Formica, linoleum and oilcloth fabrics. “Plastic is fantastic!” sang French pop band Elmer Food Beat in 1991 […]
SAINT-NAZAIRE- “Business is slow these days, too slow…” says 34-year-old restaurant employee from Saint-Nazaire in western France, Cedric Derouin. As he dries drinking glasses, he talks about the consecutive closings of dozens of local businesses, the laying off of his only coworker a few months ago. He shares his uncertain future with the workers from […]
FRANCE – They are the “invisibles.” Behind closed doors, they cook, clean, take care of children and the elderly. They are often the victims of abuse – sexual and physical – they are underpaid and overworked – sometimes for more than 65 hours a week, they don’t get benefits and rarely have organizations to defend […]
Sources tell Le Monde that the Syria regime fired rockets with a non-lethal chemical agent during a deadly Dec. 23 attack in Homs. So why didn’t Western leaders follow through on their threats?
Algerian-born, French-bred Haim Amsalem is a member of the Knesset, and now the sworn enemy of the ultra-orthodox Shas party that he helped found.
WASHINGTON – It’s called the “curse of the second term.” American political commentators can go through each of the past two-term presidents and point to an unexpected phenomenon, a political error or some other trip wire set off in the second four-year stint in office. All the occupants of the White House have experienced it, […]
A reporter travels to the Thai-Burmese border to find the rebel army of the Mons, an ethnic minority for whom little has changed despite the opening up of the Myanmar regime.
ALGIERS – On Wednesday, an estimated 41 Western contractors were taken hostage inside the jointly run BP natural-gas facility in Amenas, in eastern Algeria, near the Libyan border. The man believed to be responsible for this assault goes by the name Mokhtar Belmokhtar – also known as Khaled Aboul Abbas – one of the region’s […]
PORT-AU-PRINCE – What’s left of Haiti’s dreams of reconstruction? Three years after the earthquake that devastated the country – one of the world’s poorest – 360,000 people are still living in displaced person camps and shantytowns. The cholera epidemic is spreading and more than 80% of the population is still living below the poverty line. […]
The terrorist attack and hostage-taking in neighboring Algeria is just one of the ways that France’s intervention in Mali could spread across Africa, and beyond.
French sex symbol turned animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot is shining a light on Baby and Nepal, two former circus elephants infected with tuberculosis, now facing euthanasia.
France’s just launched military intervention in Mali has earned the old colonial power praise from those fearing Islamist extremists. The fight, however, has only just begun.
LAMINGAN – It’s late November, patches of a green mountainous landscape are piercing through the morning fog. They follow a regular pattern, typical of palm oil plantations. The trees’ bases are surrounded by burned vegetation – a sign that pesticides were used. The palm oil plantation, started in 2005 by Nakeen, a subsidiary of the […]
GURGAON – Shoes are not allowed on the foam mat. We are surrounded by the noise of fists hitting the leather of the punching bags, the high-paced breathing of two fighters training one-on-one. We are in Gurgao, in the suburbs southwest of New Delhi, a snapshot of the fast-developing India with its shiny new buildings. […]
TUBUAI – For the past 30 years, local residents from the Austral Islands have been dumping their garbage just a few kilometers from the Tubuai airport, in the swamps. “When the hole starts to overflow, we pack it with machines, we fill the hole and dig a new one,” explains Therese, who owns a bed […]
Smuggled in from Burma and North Korea, meth is flooding Chinese mean streets.
RAMNICU VALCEA – To the tourist eye, Râmnicu Vâlcea is a quiet, leafy city. Located at the bottom of the Carpathian mountain range, in central Romania, no one would guess this town’s secret, buried in its working-class neighborhood, Ostroveni. You have to leave the boulevard that stretches across the city to end up in narrow […]
In Colorado, meet the nation’s first newspaper weed critic.
Meet Captain Fu, who runs the Piraeus Container Terminal, which has been owned since 2009 by Chinese giant Cosco. So far, at least, business has barely been touched by the Greek crisis.