When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Already a subscriber? Log in .

You've reached your limit of one free article.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime .

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Exclusive International news coverage

Ad-free experience NEW

Weekly digital Magazine NEW

9 daily & weekly Newsletters

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Free trial

30-days free access, then $2.90
per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch
Geopolitics

Paris Shooting, AirAsia Tail, Alien Earth

The tail of the missing AirAsia flight QZ8501 was found Tuesday
The tail of the missing AirAsia flight QZ8501 was found Tuesday
Worldcrunch

Wednesday, January 7, 2014

DEADLY ATTACK AT FRENCH SATIRICAL NEWSPAPER HQ
At least 10 journalists and two policemen were killed after two heavily armed men opened fire at the Paris offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo Wednesday morning. Four other people were seriously wounded in the shooting; the gunmen managed to flee and a large manhunt is now underway in Paris.
"This is a terrorist attack, there is no doubt about this," French President François Hollande told reporters.
The headquarters of the provocative weekly were already firebombed in 2011 after it published cartoons mocking the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Developing

TAIL OF AIRASIA PLANE FOUND
The tail of the missing AirAsia flight QZ8501 has been found on the sea bed around 30 kilometers away from the plane’s last known location, an Indonesian search team announced during a press conference in Jakarta on Wednesday. It is a breakthrough that could lead investigators to find the black boxes — located in the tail — and understand what may have lead to the crash. The head of the Indonesian search and rescue agency, Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, said the plane part was identified by divers after it was spotted by an underwater machine, Reuters reports. Photographs of the wreckage were released Wednesday morning by the authorities.
Flight QZ8501 had vanished from radars over the northern Java Sea on Dec. 28, during a two-hour flight from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore. Authorities say there are no survivors among the 162 people on board, most of them Indonesian. Another body was also found Wednesday, bringing the total recovered to 40.

DEADLY BLAST IN YEMEN
A car bomb killed at least 30 people and injured more than 50 outside a police college in Yemen’s capital Sanaa on Wednesday. An Al Jazeera journalist on site said the number of casualties is likely to be higher. The blast was heard across the city and a large plume of smoke was visible in the area, located near the defense ministry and the central bank. Yemeni police said the victims included students from the college as well as people waiting to enroll and passers by. No claim for responsibility had yet been made.

WORLDCRUNCH-TO-GO
To the surprise of many, the family of legendary novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez sold his personal papers to the University of Texas. It's nothing political — but all about posterity, and money of course, writes El Espectador’s Pablo Ximénez de Sandoval: “José Montelongo, Texas University's Librarian for Mexican Studies, says the archive's information on the novelist's self-editing process will be a "treat" for Gabo researchers. Among the papers are a first draft of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the novel that catapulted the writer to fame in 1967, several versions of Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Love in the Time of Cholera, and 10 versions of the unpublished We'll See Each Other in August. The last copy contains corrections, which means he considered it premature to publish.”
Read the full article, How The Garcia Marquez Papers Wound Up In A Texas Library.

OIL BARREL PRICE DROPS UNDER $50
Brent crude oil has fallen below $50 a barrel — going as low as a dollar to $49.92 in early trading Wednesday — for the first time since May 2009, The Wall Street Journal reports. Observers also expect prices to drop further as North American shale producers supply increasing quantities of oil and gas, and the oil-producing group Opec is not reacting to support prices, according to Forbes.

DEFLATION HITS EUROZONE
Euro zone consumer prices fell by more than expected in December because of much cheaper energy, a first estimate by the European statistical office showed in data that is likely to trigger the European Central Bank's government bond buying program, Reuters reports.

MY GRAND-PÈRE’S WORLD


TURKISH FAR-LEFT GROUP CLAIMS ISTANBUL ATTACKS
A suicide bombing that killed a policeman in central Istanbul Tuesday has been claimed by the “Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front” (DHKP/C) on social media. The group wrote "our sacrificial fighter... carried out the sacrificial action on the tourist police department in Sultanahmet,” the Turkish daily Hürriyetreports.

BY THE NUMBERS: 6
Overtaken by the United Kingdom’s GDP, France has dropped from 5th to 6th position in the list of the world’s most powerful economies, Le Figaro reports.

ON THIS DAY

What happened to the Leaning Tower of Pisa on Jan. 7, 1990? Find it out (and much more) in your daily 57-second shot of history.

NEW “MOST EARTH-LIKE ALIEN WORLD”
Astronomers announced during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society Tuesday that a recently discovered planet resembles our Earth more than any other previously identified planet. It is part of eight new planets observed in distant solar systems by Nasa’s Kepler space telescope.

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Geopolitics

The Trudeau-Modi Row Reveals Growing Right-Wing Bent Of India's Diaspora

Western governments will not be oblivious to the growing right-wing activism among the diaspora and the efforts of the BJP and Narendra Modi's government to harness that energy for political support and stave off criticism of India.

The Trudeau-Modi Row Reveals Growing Right-Wing Bent Of India's Diaspora

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the G20 Summit in New Delhi on Sept. 9

Sushil Aaron

-Analysis-

NEW DELHICanadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has brought Narendra Modi’s exuberant post-G20 atmospherics to a halt by alleging in parliament that agents of the Indian government were involved in the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian national, in June this year.

“Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty,” Trudeau said. The Canadian foreign ministry subsequently expelled an Indian diplomat, who was identified as the head of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India’s foreign intelligence agency, in Canada. [On Thursday, India retaliated through its visa processing center in Canada, which suspended services until further notice over “operational reasons.”]

Trudeau’s announcement was immediately picked up by the international media and generated quite a ripple across social media. This is big because the Canadians have accused the Indian government – not any private vigilante group or organisation – of murder in a foreign land.

Trudeau and Canadian state services seem to have taken this as seriously as the UK did when the Russian émigré Alexander Litvinenko was killed, allegedly on orders of the Kremlin. It is extraordinarily rare for a Western democracy to expel a diplomat from another democracy on these grounds.

Keep reading...Show less

The latest