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Hélène Pillon

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Tis The Season: What The World Is Drinking
food / travel

Tis The Season: What The World Is Drinking

(Fa la la la la, la la la la....)

For many corners of the world, the holidays are arriving. And though drinks of course are flowing all over the world, all year long, we wanted to take this moment to look around and raise our glass to 11 places and their spirits of choice.

The Wine and Spirit Research publish a list on global alcohol consumption annually and these figures both reinforce and contradict some of the most popular clichés about people’s drinking habits.

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La Rinconada's trash still piles up high
Peru

In Peru, A Troubled City On Top Of The World Tries To Rise Out Of Purgatory

Once a simple gold-mining camp, La Rinconada is considered the world's highest city. But its 30,000 inhabitants live amid ice melt and endless piles debris. Can Peru finally clean it up?

LA RINCONADA — Wrapped in his parka, sergeant Heriberto takes his hand out of his pocket so he can read the daily police record. “First, there was this blast in a mine gallery that killed a man, and then this miner who was stabbed as he was going out of a bar, and eventually this man was arrested with 90 smuggled dynamite sticks.”

Just another day in the Peruvian town of La Rinconada, the old gold-mining camp that is considered the highest city in the world.

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On July 28, the Swedish brand celebrated its 70th birthday
Sources

Homes Are Us: The World According To Ikea

In seven decades, Ikea has spread to 41 countries, shaping the globe's domestic habits. But looking closer at the Swedish standard also shows national cultural differences holding strong.

What is the most printed publication after the Bible and Mao’s Little Red Book? The IKEA catalogue. That's right. About 3.9 billion Bibles have been printed since 1815, more than 900 million copies of President Mao Zedong’s Quotation are circulating in China and elsewhere. Beginning August 19, 220 million catalogues of the Swedish furniture retailer will be dropped in mailboxes all across the world.

Roughly speaking, one billion people will have within reach images of these perfectly "lived-in" homes, filled with just-boisterous-enough children, that classy-without-letting-it-show look.

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There are currently 47,611,563 pictures under the #food hashtag...
food / travel

Berlin Restaurant Sparks Debate With Ban On Food Instagrams

BERLIN - Denise from Sossenheim does it. "Mmm...," it says under the picture of ochre-yellow lentil soup. David from Berlin does it too. On his Facebook page he shows what looks like the pizza he ordered for lunch with the words "Super Pizza" written underneath the image.

For many young people, photographing their food and posting the pictures online on social networks is simply part of the meal. With so many such pictures on Facebook and Instagram, specialized psychology magazines are writing articles analyzing possible underlying causes of the phenomenon.

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A "Don't Touch My Kids" demonstration in Morocco
Sources

King's Controversial Pardon Shines Light On Pedophilia Taboos In Morocco

Mohammed VI pardoned a Spanish pedophile, before reversing himself. The case raised questions about the monarchy, but also exposes Morocco's inability to confront the plague of sex abuse.

KENITRA - It is just a detail, but it is indicative of the taboos surrounding pedophilia: Moroccans do not know the home neighborhood of Daniel Galvan, the pedophile at first pardoned by King Mohamed VI in a case griping the nation and raising questions about the monarchy's arbitrary application of justice.
Though the address of the convicted Spanish citizen was no state secret, the Moroccan media has not published a picture of the white building complex where he'd lived — nor even reported the name of this modest neighborhood, in the suburb of Kenitra, one of the country's main industrial cities, 40 kilometers from Rabat.
The stated reasons for this discretion? The need to “protect” children. But most of all the concern about the protection of families’ reputation. When Mohammed VI met the families, on August 7, after he'd decided to reverse the clemency following a nationwide uproar, all faces were blurred in photos and videos. Important measures were then taken to avoid committing a new blunder in the eyes of the Moroccan society that had never before faced this topic so publicly.
Najia Adib knows it well. In 2004 she created one of the two associations in the country helping sexually abused minors, called "Touche pas à mes enfants" (Don’t Touch My Kids). Her commitment results from a personal tragedy. In 2002, this dynamic civil servant in her forties was the first mother of a pedophile’s victim who openly testified on Moroccan television.
A few months earlier she had discovered her four-year-old girl had been abused by a school employee. Adib could identify the aggressor thanks to a DNA test carried out on her daughter's underwear. “Despite that, I heard all kinds of things,” she says. In a country where you can buy fake testimony for a few dirhams, she heard people saying her complaint was part of a plot to have the school closed down.
It was not an easy battle, even in court. In spite of the DNA test, the defendant's confessions that he'd abused several children, he was only sentenced to two years in prison. It would take several sit-ins in front of the school and an appeal to obtain what is now a standard punishment: five years in jail.

A twisted exemption
On paper, Moroccan laws are not permissive. The rape of a minor is punishable by up to 30 years imprisonment. “The problem is not the law, but the way these types of acts are viewed. They’re not regarded as serious crimes and punished as minor crimes,” says Yassine Krari, the association's lawyer.
The sentencing of Daniel Galvan to 30 years in prison in 2011 was indeed an exception. The punishment was only possible thanks to photographic and video evidence: Galvan had broadcast and made money from his sexual abuse of children.
Because of the weight of taboos, numerous cases end up quite differently: without making any noise, with an amicable settlement. Especially thanks to the controversial article of the Moroccan penal code: the article 475 that allows the aggressor of a “nubile” minor to be exempted from serving his sentence if he marries her.
“The Arab Spring brought a lot of changes”, says Hamid Krairi, lawyer of several victims of Daniel Galvan and an activist with the Moroccan Human Rights Association. “But this movement did not deeply modify a society influenced by the Muslim religion.”
Pedophilia is not only the result of sexual tourism. “Street children prostitution is just as important,” Abid notes, “but they never press charges.” So in her fight she focuses on middle-class people, the main victims, and then on the upper class within which “children are poorly monitored.
The means for changing attitudes — and actions — are still modest. Doctors and lawyers to whom she referred the victims are volunteers, and funds for the foundations are limited. Abid says she hopes the Galvan case could “be a message addressed to the judges.”
Sources

Quotes Of The Week: Manning, Maduro, Bolt ... And MORE!

Take a tour of what the world has been saying this week...

Egypt

After The Bloodshed In Cairo, A Call For New Protests

AL JAZEERA (Qatar), THE GUARDIAN (UK), BBC

Worldcrunch

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Economy

German And French Economies Grow Faster Than Expected

THE LOCAL (Germany), LES ECHOS (France)

Worldcrunch

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Misquoted?
LES ECHOS

How The French Far Right Is Perverting Voltaire

To counter Islam, conservative groups are twisting the ideas of the Enlightenment writer famous for his advocacy of freedom of religion.

PARIS — A recent headline on the French anti-Islam website Riposte Laïque (Secular Response) read: “On Islam, Voltaire was three centuries ahead of us.”

To support his thesis, columnist Maurice Vidal quotes a famous article about fanaticism from Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. In the Enlightenment writer’s work published in 1764, there was absolutely no mention of Islam. Instead, he targeted the Catholic upper-class involved in the killings of thousands of protestants during St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Oh well.

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Geopolitics

Magazines, Mapped! Week Of August 9-16

What has the world been reading this week?

Check out our selection of covers from top magazines around the world...