In southern Italy, mob clans have entered into an unlikely alliance with the Islamic terror group, exchanging Kalashnikovs for ancient artifacts pillaged in war. One reporter went undercover looking to make a deal.
Category: Geopolitics
The controversial new Filippino president, who arrives in China today, has mostly garnered attention for his brutal crackdown on drug dealers. But his ambitions go far beyond.
The town in Indiana of Terre Haute is a mix of organized labor and university students, traditional values and growing immigrant communities. It has picked the president the last 15 elections.
PARIS — With all its historical warts, the United States has managed to hold on to its status as a model of a robust democracy. But the spectacle of Donald Trump’s run for the White House is reminding the world just how fragile democracies can be. Trump has used his campaign for the presidency to […]
Momentous national referendums in Colombia and Britain have shown how dangerous it can be to put complicated decisions in the hands of a fickle populous.
Viktor Orban is the only leader in the European Union who has benefited from the refugees crisis. But his ambitions know no boundaries.
ISTANBUL — There is an Italian saying: “Una faccia, una razza.” It means “One face, one race,” and is used by Italians and Greeks to note the characteristics the two peoples share. When it comes to Turkish and Greeks, I use this phrase as “One face, one mentality.” I don’t know how similar Greeks and […]
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No, The West Is Not In Decline
Europe, the United States and other parts of the so-called West may not be booming, but they’re not about to be superseded either. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Like other Latin American countries, Bolivia has squandered commodity revenue and failed to make the hard reforms necessary to bolster the economy for the long haul.
His beloved hometown grows more dangerous every day, but he can’t kiss her goodbye.
LIPUA LIPUA — He’d been away for some time in Mbandaka, the capital of the northwestern Équateur province along the Congo River. But when Pierrot Mawambe returns to Lipua Lipua, a fisherman camp on an islet 80 kilometers downstream, he was stunned by the void where huge waka trees used to stand. “Timber harvesters cut […]
In August, Chile broadened the protected sea zones under its watch to create a marine park that covers an area of 300,000 square kilometers, the largest such reserve in Latin America. Fishing and mineral extraction will now be banned from this area, which surrounds the Desventuradas islands in the Pacific Ocean. “At a time when […]
The worst fear in the capital is a lasting truce between Russia and the United States, which they believe would halt the Assad regime’s offensive and delay the total victory.
PARIS — Can we one day live in a world where there’s zero trash? A German chemist named Michael Braungart believes it is possible. He encourages companies to put a complete end to waste in The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability — Designing for Abundance, a book he co-wrote with U.S. architect and designer William McDonough. “The […]
-OpEd- BOGOTÁ — Colombians have now had their say, voting Sunday to reject the peace deal signed between the government of President Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), intended to end more than 50 years of fighting in the country. The No vote triumphed against all odds it seems, against […]
SKARA — As Bert Karlsson enters the refugee center’s cafeteria, dark-haired boy greets him with a “Hey!” The four-story building called Stora Ekeberg is just one of many refugee centers started by Karlsson’s Jokarjo AB group, which respond to Sweden’s burgeoning need to house refugees. This center is reaching its capacity of 570 people. “Here, […]
Who are we? A referendum in Hungary raises fundamental questions in the West about how the fear of otherness turns culture into a weapon in the hands of populists.
NOGINSK — Knowledge Day falls on Sept. 1 and marks the traditional start of the school year in Russia. But for the children of Syrian refugees who live in Noginsk, a town of about 100,000 inhabitants that’s a 90-minute train ride from Moscow, it’s a day like any other. These refugee children can’t go to […]
Churches are besieged by a specific type of thief — those hired by art collectors to steal specific pieces. The intrinsic loss caused by these actions is often irreparable, but church communities in Germany are starting to fight back.
-OpEd- BOGOTÁ — On Sunday, Colombians will decide whether to ratify a peace deal that makes the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, lay down their arms. But if that happens, what will the future of FARC look like? Will it become a socialist party like the one that has driven Venezuela into an […]
Millions of Russians were given plots of land when the former USSR collapsed. Now, as land rises in value, small farmers are the targets of intimidation of powerful forces.
JAKARTA — Teuku Akbar Maulana, 17, is from the westernmost Indonesian province of Aceh. He was a brilliant student and was offered a scholarship to study in Turkey. Akbar left for the Turkish city of Kayseri in 2013 to attend the International Imam Khatip High School but grew tired of it after a few months. “We were studying something that I had learned before so I wasn’t getting what I wanted,” he says. Bored, Akbar, who was 15 at the time, started to spend more time on social media, including Facebook. His feed was flooded with brutal videos of what […]
Global warming, population booms, rising urbanization, industrialization — an explosive mixture that may make water supplies the world’s new spark for armed conflict.
Amid extraordinarily high tensions on the Korean peninsula, Switzerland managed to get diplomats from Pyongyang to sit down with counterparts from Seoul.
Hundreds of atomic bombs were detonated at the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in eastern Kazakhstan during the Soviet regime. Scientists are now conducting research on the site, which was shuttered 25 years ago, to evaluate how radiation affected the reg
British Prime Minister Theresa May is just the latest female world leader who’s not a mother. A hard look at a gender double standard that reaches all the way to the top.
Who knew what and when? Questions linger two months after the coup attempt was quickly stamped out.
Since Rodrigo Duterte was inaugurated two months ago, some 2,000 people have been killed across the country in the past two months in what experts say are extra-judicial vigilante murders. Fear and silence make it all possible.
MISRATA — This Libyan coastal city is bearing the brunt of the ongoing offensive to defeat the Islamic State in its nearby stronghold of Sirte. Flooded with hundreds of injured people streaming in from the fighting, its recently renovated central hospital is buckling under the pressure. With only 120 beds, two operating rooms, and a […]
-OpEd- PARIS — In the northern German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) defeated Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union in local elections. In the United States, the Republicans chose Donald Trump as their candidate for the White House. The British voted for Brexit. Italians elected as mayors of Rome and […]
BREMEN — Murat Kurnaz, a German native of Turkish origin, likes to joke around. And considering his story, the humor can sometimes turn rather dark. Today, he speaks about the journey from the Guantanamo detention facility in Cuba to the Ramstein U.S. air base in Germany at the end of his five-year imprisonment in August […]
In towns and cities around the Nile delta, fishermen are selling their boats to a local mafia outfit, which controls a burgeoning human trafficking racket.
The weakening power of the “Mother of Europe” comes at a bad time for both Germany and the rest of the continent.
Thousands of Afghans are making their way home after years and years living as refugees in neighboring Pakistan. For many of the migrants, their native country is now a foreign place.
A new Brazilian report shows that far more babies born with microcephaly and other conditions linked to the Zika virus are black or mixed race. There are troubling explanations for this fact, including access to (illegal) abortion.
The withdrawal of the ambassadors of Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela from Brazil to protest Dilma Rousseff’s ouster is a good example of partisan zeal harming the national interest.
Whether killing with their own hands, orchestrating or quietly aiding and abetting, a disturbingly high number of people in voluntarily fell in line with the Nazi killing machine.
It is a philosopher’s job to debunk prejudice and foregone conclusions. But isn’t there also a duty to not ignore the facts? A look back 15 years later from a prominent Paris thinker.
Instead of global stability, the end of the Cold War has ushered in an age of high-tech changes and social turmoil. New tales of two cities for the 21st Century.
PARIS — So far, so good. The collapse of the British economy predicted by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, in a case of a Brexit victory, has not materialized. The services sector, which represents 80% of the UK’s GDP even rebounded unexpectedly in August, and business activity recovered its level of March, […]