Worldcrunch
PARIS — According to an ever expanding list of accusers, Harvey Weinstein has been sexually harassing and assaulting women for decades. As of Friday, 28 women have come forward to denounce the mogul, including some of Hollywood’s most celebrated stars like Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie, who fended off his advances early in their careers. […]
The sex robot market is expanding, but women must play a core role in the development of all artificial intelligence to avoid a future designed with a male bias.
It is the great challenge (and paradox) of our time: Far from erasing identity claims, globalization reinforces them. From Spain to Myanmar to Trump’s America, it must be confronted head-on.
With designs that imitate fakes, luxury fashion brands try to attract a younger and more connected clientele.
Each year, about 200 soldiers from the elite military unit become naturalized French citizens.
With the arrival of tech-heavy, self-driving vehicles, makers of traditional cars will have to adapt. But so too will everyone from real estate agents to insurers and tax collectors.
-Analysis- PARIS — Imagine if a foreign entity neutralized the public health system in the Paris region. Or if it went on to attack the electric grid, interfering with the meteorological services, manipulating French President Emmanuel Macron’s emails and targeting the military and police communication systems. All from a computer keyboard. Nobody would get killed, […]
French President Emmanuel Macron has just set himself up as the European Union’s would-be savior. Seen from a Swiss point of view, there’s no better option out there.
With each passing day, war with North Korea seems to draw closer. Kim Jong Un continues to test his arsenal; Donald Trump issues new threats and nicknames his nemesis “Rocket Man“; Kim responds in kind, saying the U.S. president’s speech yesterday at the United Nations was “the sound of a dog barking.” Some say the […]
The French coastal city was home to the infamous makeshift village of migrants seeking to cross to the UK. The ‘Jungle’ was dismantled less than a year ago, but immigrants are now back in town.
Libération, Sept. 19, 2017 Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Tuesday broke her silence on the violence in her Buddhist-majority country that has forced hundreds of thousands of minority Muslim Rohingya to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. French newspaper Libération featured a picture of her with the headline “A Nobel and a massacre” splashed on […]
-Analysis- The blueprints of the Middle Ages are back. Even as metal and glass have long since replaced stone and mortar, there is an unmistakable parallel to be drawn between medieval fortifications and the walls rising in all corners of the world: from the U.S.-Mexico border to Hungary, from São Paulo to the West Bank. […]
There is no contradiction between feeling French (or Catalan, or Berliner) and becoming a European citizen. But it is time for that citizenship to have real civic meaning.
-Analysis- The honeymoon is definitely over. Just four months after he was elected to lead France, Emmanuel Macron faced his first major nationwide protest Tuesday against major labor reform plans that are seen as the central pillar of his presidency. Tens of thousands of workers have gone on strike for the day, causing some travel […]
-OpEd- PARIS — Can a leather ball turn into a bubble? After the extravagant sums of money spent by French soccer team Paris Saint-German to sign Brazilian star Neymar Jr, as well as other splurges by British, Spanish and Italian teams this summer, there’s no avoiding the question: Has soccer become a speculative bubble? The […]
Libération — Sept. 7, 2017 Hurricane Irma has wreaked destruction across the Caribbean, and the situation is about to get worse. “Irmageddon” was the front-page headline Thursday of French daily Libération, as the most violent cyclone to strike the Antilles in the region’s history struck the island of Barbuda and the French territories of St. […]
Donald Trump’s Mexican border wall has been a rallying cry and all-purpose metaphor since his improbable campaign began in 2015. But if and when it gets built, the wall would also be, well, a wall. The U.S. president’s decision Tuesday to let the so-called DACA program expire is aimed at pushing Congress to find a […]
An online platform helps refugees find jobs and companies find motivated, skilled employees.
LAUSANNE — First you notice all the tattoos, including one drawn with bamboo by members of a Fillipino tribe. But Sarah Gysler is far from the archetypal modern trend setter. The 23-year-old Swiss woman doesn’t have a Snapchat account or an Instagram profile filled with retouched pictures. She doesn’t even have a smartphone. What she […]
Pope Francis is not afraid of speaking freely, with his sermons and writings — and a fair share of press interviews — stirring up the Catholic establishment since his election in 2013. Yet a new book based on transcripts of 12 separate conversations with a French sociologist is particularly rich in revelations. The 432-page Politique […]
PARIS — What becomes of psychoanalysis in our hyper-connected digital world? The question is ripe, as new technologies capture the psyche and absorb the libido of each and every one of us. As relations among individuals are now broadcast to everyone, your relationship with yourself is fundamentally altered. This changes the status of speech and […]
NICE — You can spot an IKEA store from a mile away: The classic blue-and-yellow box design of every outlet of the Swedish home goods giant is as much a part of its identity as the quirky names of its chairs and the meatballs at the snack bar. Get ready, though, because IKEA’s look is […]
-Analysis- Do GIFs have a place in serious publications? Where the hell is my giraffe emoji? Do androids dream of electric sheep? The digital world is presenting us with questions we never could have imagined we’d have to answer — and maybe we don’t. But there are also those brand new mind-boggling questions of a […]
I’ve taken shots of fishing boats around the world. There were the ever colorful luzzus of Malta and the Phoenician-inspired shapes of the vessels of Nazaré, The traditional fishing boats here in the southern French port of Cassis are called “pointus,” for their pointy shape.
Elle, Aug. 28, 2017 President Emmanuel Macron’s popularity may be plunging right now but his wife, Brigitte, is in hot demand, in part over a controversy surrounding her status as France’s First Lady. The latest issue of women’s magazine Elle features Brigitte Macron’s first public interview since her husband’s election in May. The weekly sold […]
Restaurants around the world take the meat and dairy out of food to make traditional food trendy.
PARIS — European nations are bracing themselves for the return of their citizens who had left to fight the wars in Syria and Iraq. “The EU member states most affected expect a slow but gradual rise of returnees,” noted a recent Radicalization Awareness Network (RAN) report submitted to the European Commissioner for Security, Julian King. […]
PARIS — What if the very different Chinese approach on debt held the key to a solution for the crisis of public finances in the West. In Europe and North America, the notion of a contract holds a central role: Whoever borrows money has to pay back, no matters the circumstances. Chinese people instead tend […]
What kind of a world do we live in, when Turkey can’t even give us a proper coup anymore? Unable to sleep for the summer heat in Valencia, I remember that twisted thought coming to me as the July 15 coup — or at least its broadcast version — was unfolding on the radio. Typically […]
Marketing firms are embracing a strategy called ‘femvertising’ to challenge the sexist gender molds of the past. Are they pushing equality for equality’s sake, or just trying to woo consumers?
The record-breaking transfer of the Brazilian superstar to French club PSG is part of much bigger plans by Qatar, which owns the Parisian club.
-Analysis- PARIS — Wednesday will mark “Earth Overshoot Day,” the moment when humanity uses more of the Earth’s ecological resources than the planet can regenerate in a year. This awkwardly named annual event, first conceived by the UK think tank New Economics Foundation in 2006, is a way to track the accumulating effects of climate […]
PARIS — A series of major terrorist attacks since 2015 has changed life in France in big and small ways. Now it is about to change training requirements for French medical students. Beginning in September, every Faculty of Medicine in France must provide a training class for all of its students on how to treat […]
We French call our country “la France.” But when we speak of “le France,” that’s the SS France — once the biggest ocean liner in the world. In my 60 years of travels, I’ve found myself twice in its wake: here in the late 1960s, off the pier of Cannes in southern France; and some […]
Guédelon, an attraction in Burgundy, recreates the Middle Ages in a way that aims to make visitors smarter while they’re having fun.
-Analysis- PARIS — The nation of France has become a new sort of Ground Zero for Islamic terrorism’s attack on the West. Over the past 30 months, images have spread around the world of both wanton and targeted terror on French soil: from the January 2015 shooting at the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices, to the […]
-Essay- PARIS — For a superficial observer, it is one of the lesser-known cultural revolutions and a rather trivial one at that: the dramatic shift in the Western physical ideal, in just over a generation, from one skin ideal to another, from one tone to another. It is what we in French call “bronzage,” similar […]
Large technology companies need to be stopped before they crush our cherished freedoms, argues a new book by two French economists.
Our ability to forget helps us to learn, make decisions … and remember a face. This seeming paradox has intrigued writers and led to important new research on how the brain functions.
The French city of Nice was torn apart by the terrorist truck attack that killed 86 and left 458 injured during national holiday festivities. Victims struggle to return to normalcy.