Worldcrunch
A special meeting of Cardinals has reportedly been scheduled, though the Vatican denies that it is linked to any announcement of the 88-year-old pontiff stepping down. Still, others ask why the Pope hasn’t at least appeared from his hospital window. In both cases, the example of his two predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI hang over the question of resignation.
Robust winter babies? Allergic autumn infants? Researchers are finding increasing evidence that the month and season of birth can have an influence on our health. For Die Zeit, health editor Andrea Böhnke explores how light, weather, mother’s diet and other factors linked to the time of the year we are born shape us throughout our lives.
Chicken soup and vitamins are all fine and dandy, but there’s a world of uncommon ways to fight the common cold out there!
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 […]
It marked the end of an epoch: on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell — and seemingly in an instant, the decades-long Cold War was over. Built in 1961 by the German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany) to keep the different sectors of Berlin separated, the wall became the singular symbol of the Cold War divide, and a concrete example of the limits and repression of the communist system. The final chapter of the Cold War began when East Berlin’s Communist Party announced that, from midnight, citizens of the GDR could cross the Iron Curtain. “Tor auf!” (“Open […]
-Analysis- MOSCOW — The list is long: the scandal around the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, an unprecedented expulsion of Russian diplomats, sanctions leading to the fall of the ruble and a hit on aluminum giant Rusal, retaliatory sanctions, strikes on Syria and over-the-top rhetoric of official Moscow during and after all-the-above crises. […]
The pay is good. And much of the work is automated. But life at the isolated Gahcho Kué diamond mine, in northern Canada, isn’t for the faint of heart.
WORLDCRUNCH NOTE TO READERS: This article was originally published in Kommersant on Nov. 10, two days after Donald Trump’s election win. Since then, there have been reports that Russian computer hackers may have interfered in the U.S. election in Trump’s favor. Also Trump had since called Taiwan’s president, sparking a diplomatic row with China. Nevertheless, […]
SALLA — On the door of the tourism bureau in Salla, Finland, there’s a poster proudly informing visitors that they are “in the middle of nowhere.” That much is indisputable: Salla is a dark, remote place, lost in the middle of hundreds of miles of Laponian pine forests and covered in a thick mantle of […]
Life is about to get even bleaker in Homs, as the third winter arrives since the city fell into the center of the Syrian civil war.