Worldcrunch
On the Moroccan beaches, near Tangier or Casablanca, the dunes have disappeared – leaving a lunar landscape. They were not destroyed by storms, but stolen night after night by squads of trucks – to build vacation homes for the tourists who come for the coast’s warm waters and soft sands. For many years now the […]
Lance Armstrong hasn’t told “the whole story” yet. Ever since his long-awaited January confession with Oprah Winfrey, the high priestess of American talk shows, the now former seven-time winner of the Tour de France hasn’t uttered a word, just a rare tweet from time to time to his four million followers on Twitter. So when […]
PARIS – Jessica is the pseudonym she used. Her real name is Vasvija Ferhatovic. She was born in Rome on Jan. 24, 1985 and the only “job” this young woman ever had is thief. In May, a Paris criminal court convicted her and 15 other girls to sentences between one and five years in jail. […]
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court has delivered a landmark victory for gay rights, by striking down the California law defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. This ruling forces authorities to recognize same-sex weddings in states where it is authorized already, though it stops short of forcing the remaining 30 […]
Beyond the playboy billionaires and international tax dodgers, people work regular jobs in this slice of Mediterranean paradise.
-Essay- PARIS – From the Turkish protests in Istanbul to the French anti gay-marriage protests, and from euthanasia rights to fledgling forms of participatory democracy, it is difficult to ignore the growing aspirations of Europeans toward autonomy and freedom of choice. This new individualization dynamic is silently revolutionizing European values. Individualization is the the power […]
NANTES – “Do not touch…” When she ran her fingers over this Braille inscription on the wall of the Sainte-Croix church, in the city of Nantes, western France, the young blind woman burst out laughing. After translation, her sighted friends were also won over by the irony of the artist. Working under the pseudonym The […]
GRENOBLE – Since 2009, a team of 30 researchers from the Clinatec biomedical platform of the French Alternative Energies And Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) has been tackling a huge challenge: allowing quadriplegics to walk and open a door thanks to a brain-controlled implant system. For this to happen, the CEA is relying on different technologies […]
PARIS – A cheeky move, one might say. To retrace the history of the undergarment – from the XXL fig leaf on Adam’s attributes taken from a 10th century manuscript to the tighty-whities of the 1980s (called kangaroo briefs in France because of their front pocket) – is a daring, er, undertaking indeed. A challenge […]
Iranian voters rejected the regime’s hard line on the nuclear issue that led to a deep economic crisis. Now whether Hossan Rohani softens Iran’s stance also depends on the West.
SALOU – It’s about 4 p.m. in the lobby of a hotel in the Costa Dorada, on the Catalan coast of Spain. A brunette sporting micro-shorts and a boy without a shirt are miming a sexual act amongst a sweaty and inebriated crowd. The deejay shouts into his microphone: “Have you had enough?” Of course […]
Founded in Latvia, Ask.fm is exploding around the world. Its users communicate with questions and answers. Here’s one: How cruel can young people be with each other?
Worldcrunch Over the past year, China’s outbound investment set new records. Although North America jumped to the forefront of Chinese business activity, it is likely to be temporary: Chinese companies move as a group from region to region, from sector to sector, according to a survey by the Heritage Foundation. Wine, treasury bonds, soy, ports… […]
PARIS – Baptiste Langlais shows off his new watch proudly. “In my sector, we like beautiful mechanics,” jokes the car salesman from the Paris region. His latest whim? An 8,500-euro Jaeger-LeCoultre wristwatch. “A big investment, especially these days,” he admits. But he has found a way to reconcile reason and passion. Launched a few months […]
PARIS – It is past 9 a.m. when Laurence Cote arrives, and throws her things on her desk. The 20 or so students scattered around the room, far from falling silent at once for the arrival of their teacher…getting even louder instead. They run, shout, trample. “Does anyone have a blazer?” asks someone. “I do. […]
PARIS – After years at Dior, designer Hedi Slimane was named creative director at Yves Saint Laurent in 2012, where he has embarked on a strategy to revolutionize the legendary French fashion house. He has just opened a new flagship store on Paris’s luxurious Avenue Montaigne and renamed the brand “Saint Laurent.” Black, white and […]
Jo-Wilfried Tsonga knocked off Roger Federer to advance to the semi-finals of the French Open. Can history repeat itself?
Friday, June 6, 2014 D-DAY COMMEMORATIONS TODAY This morning, French President François Hollande launched commemorations for the 70th anniversary of D-Day, describing the Normandy landings as a day that “began in chaos and fire, would end in blood and tears, tears and pain, tears and joy at the end of 24 hours that changed the […]
SAINT-PAUL-TROIS-CHATEAUX – Three steps in from the side of the path are enough for Cédric Denaux to identify a veritable pantry. Where we only see a field of flowers and weeds exploding in springtime chaos, this botanist-cum-cook spots the pointed flower of the buckhorn plantain, the bubble-shaped one belonging to the bladder campion, a tuft […]
PARIS – News media startups like ours cannot sit still. Not only are we busy each day hunting down great stories, but we must always be on the lookout for new ideas. And so my eyes lit up when my Worldcrunch co-founder Jeff Israely first started talking about applying our own unique formula to a […]
BORDEAUX – There are always a handful of professional wine-tasters who will question the legitimacy of the Bordeaux “primeurs” week. Still, the event not only endures, but actually gets bigger and better-attended every year. The skeptics note that the entire process is built around rating a wine that is only just beginning to age in […]
GLOBAL TIMES, SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST (China) Worldcrunch BEIJING – “My fellow Chinese citizens, it brings me no pleasure to report to you this terrible news. A great calamity has befallen our nation. Our pride, our dignity, nay, the very integrity of our national soul is at stake,” writes the South China Morning Post in […]
How can the Internet run more efficiently? A growing number of experts say so-called “band-aid” fixes are insufficient — and the entire system of communication needs to be rebooted.
Thursday, May 29, 2014 UKRAINE HELICOPTER SHOT DOWN Pro-Russian militants near the eastern Ukrainian town of Sloviansk shot down a military helicopter, killing 14 soldiers, acting President Olexandr Turchynov said. This came after local media reported intense shooting around Sloviansk and Kramatorsk and the shelling of the two cities. Media described the situation as a […]
French police probe links to London’s machete murder of a British soldier three days earlier.
LA CROIX (France), LE PARISIEN (France), AFP Worldcrunch PARIS – Some 350 people were arrested over the weekend in Paris, during protests against gay marriage. Meanwhile in the south of France, the Cannes Film Festival celebrated gay romance, awarding the top Palme d’Or prize to a love story about a lesbian couple. Despite the law […]
PARIS – Retake control of your personal data and get paid for it. This is the straightforward concept behind the recently launched French startup Yes Profile. On its platform, Yes Profile allows the user to create a profile with a certain amount of information – from email to age to interests and preferences such as […]
A French journalist upset by the shuttering of local book shops gets a temp job with Amazon, where only the “supermotivated” survive to work under conditions that violate labor codes.
Worldcrunch CANNES – Most of the pictures emerging from the film festival in the south of France are from press photographers and paparazzi, but some of the most candid photos are being snapped by the festival’s long-time president, Gilles Jacob. Jacob, who turns 83 in June, is a film critic, writer, director and producer. He […]
On the 30th anniversary of her landmark discovery, French Nobel Laureate Françoise Barré-Sinoussi calls for a new approach for definitively defeating AIDS.
LA VOIX DU NORD (France) Worldcrunch SECLIN –A mini flock of three crows have been terrorizing a neighborhood in this northern French town, attacking children on their way to school and people walking their dogs. Three black birds, obvious fans of Alfred Hitchcock movies, have launched a series of attacks on the inhabitants of the […]
A proposed bill that would allow the use of English in universities has set off an uproar among intellectual champions of the French language.
LE MONDE, LE NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR, EUROPE 1 (France) Worldcrunch PARIS – The Notre Dame Cathedral was evacuated on Tuesday after a man committed suicide in front of the altar. The man was soon afterward identified as Dominique Venner, essayist, historian and far-right militant with close ties to the anti-gay marriage movement, reports Le Nouvel Observateur. […]
New polls finding Germany has few fans in Europe should guide neither Berlin’s policies nor Germans’ own sense of self-worth. Other Europeans will come around, for their own good.
PARIS – Using a three-pronged ice crusher, the bartender strikes the massive frozen block with practiced precision. In no time at all, he is able to shape the ice block into a tiny ball – small enough to fit into a whisky glass. He pours the Hibiki 12, a 12-year-old whiskey, one of the prime […]
While the movie world descends on Cannes, there are those up north who note that there is no more glamorous French face than that of the capital herself.
Whether alcohol or absinthe, LSD or heroin, some of humanity’s creative geniuses produced their greatest work as mind-altering substances did theirs. A Paris exhibit connects the dots.
-Op-Ed- PARIS – Guerilla scenes, an intolerable gratuitous violence, hundreds of angry youths looting shops… this is not Aleppo in Syria, but central Paris. On May 13, violence broke out in one of the French capital’s ritziest neighborhood as supporters gathered to celebrate the soccer team Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) winning the French League 1 championship […]
As the 66th edition of the world’s top film festival opens in the south of France, a rare glimpse at its tumultuous origins and ever sparkling history.