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
BBC

The Latest: Global Mob Sting, Internet Crash, Canadian Hate Crime

A devastating fire swept through one of the largest slums in Bangladesh’s capital city Dhaka, leaving hundreds of people homeless
A devastating fire swept through one of the largest slums in Bangladesh’s capital city Dhaka, leaving hundreds of people homeless

Welcome to Tuesday, where an encrypted messaging app leads to a major global organized crime bust, many of the world's biggest websites were hit by global internet outages and there's a new basketball-court-long dinosaur in town. Jeune Afrique also dives into the Rastafari ital diet, a precursor to some current food trends.

• Report: Intelligence breakdown prior to U.S. Capitol insurrection: A bipartisan Senate investigation has outlined how thousands of protestors were able to breach the Capitol building in January. New revelations show that intelligence agencies, including Capitol police, had greater prior knowledge than previously thought that violence could erupt.

• Global internet outage downs leading websites: A number of major websites such as Amazon, Target, CNN, Reddit and Twitch have been affected by global internet outages. Many of the impacted websites are displaying the error code: "Error 503 Service Unavailable." Early reports link the issue with the Cloud service, Fastly.

• Hundreds arrested in organized crime sting after cops enter encrypted app: More than 800 organized crime suspects have been arrested after communicating using ANOM, a messaging app infiltrated by the FBI. Law enforcement in the U.S., Europe and Australia were able to monitor encrypted messages on the app, many of which were related to organized crime.

• Killing of Canadian Muslim family premeditated, hate crime: A driver struck five people in Ontario, Canada, killing four of them on Monday. Police believe the attack was planned, and the victims are thought to have been targeted due to their Islamic faith.

• "Butcher of Bosnia" faces verdict: Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb warlord who took part in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017 after being found guilty of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. A final decision on Mladic's fate will be made today when the Hague announces its verdict on his appeal against genocide charges.

• U.S. recovers most of ransom paid to hackers: After the Colonial Pipeline hacking last month which severely impacted oil and gas production, particularly for the U.S. east coast, authorities have been able to recover 63.7 Bitcoin ($2.3 million). The ransom had been paid to the hackers from the eastern European based group, DarkSide, with the seizure being viewed as a potential message to dissuade future cyber criminals.

• Basketball-court length dinosaur discovered in Australia: Palaeontologists in Australia have discovered a new species of dinosaur: the Australotitan cooperensis. The dinosaur is among the top five largest to ever be discovered, measuring two stories in height and 82-98 feet in length — the equivalent of a basketball court.


"Let's also vaccinate children," titles Slovakian daily Dennik as the country opens vaccination for children aged 12 or more.

The ital diet, a rastafarian recipe for eating right

For a combination of spiritual and political reasons, Rastas developed a diet based on healthy, local ingredients that was a precursor, it turns out, to some current food trends, reports Eva Sauphie in weekly news magazine Jeune Afrique.

The "ital diet" was born with the Rastafari movement in the 1930s. The word "ital" is a contraction of "vital" and "I" (the unifying English pronoun "I" favored by Rastafaris), and the diet that goes with it consists mainly of vegetables and unprocessed products. Homemade is the key word for ital followers. "For Rastas, preparing their own food means rejecting consumerist society," says Alexandre Grondeau, founder of reggae.fr. "We can see a political interpretation, because to consume what we produce is to be anti-Babylon, anti-colonial."

Cooking at home, cultivating and eating locally: a triptych that is reminiscent of the consumption patterns encouraged by environmental protection activists in the context of the current ecological crisis. Like vegans, followers of ital cuisine do not eat meat or animal products such as milk and eggs. Environmentally-friendly before its time, their approach is less political and social than spiritual.

At a time when being a city dweller in Western capitals is synonymous with chia seeds and yoga, the ital diet is slowly beginning to be accepted in practice. But for a long time it was an oddity, something associated with out-there 1970s eating habits. "Today, concert organizers no longer receive Jamaican artists the way they used to, by laughing at them and serving them platters of cold cuts," says Alexandre Grondeau. "Society has changed its view and has understood that Rastas were avant-garde in their way of eating."

➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com


24,000 years


Russian scientists have discovered that microscopic animals called Bdelloid rotifers have gotten their fair share of beauty sleep — 24,000 years of it! Found in Siberia's deep permafrost, these tiny multicellular creatures were previously thought to only be able to survive 10 years when frozen.

Face masks for burping cows, a new way to fight climate change

For more than a year now, humans around the world have been masking up to limit the spread of COVID. Now, masks may be deployed among another species to combat a very different global ill: cow burps.

The agricultural multinational Cargill is inaugurating a new kind of face mask designed to absorb cows' gaseous emissions. The idea might sound odd, but as French radio station RTL reports, the blue masks could help cut down as much as half the world's farming gas emissions. Contrary to popular belief, it is indeed the belching part of a cow's digestive output that is responsible for most of its noxious methane (yes, bovine farts get more laughs, but cause less damage to the environment).

All in all, the methane produced by cows — whichever way — is said to be responsible for 14% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

This led the British start-up Zelp to develop a muzzle-mask which relies on small ventilators, powered by solar batteries, able to absorb and filter the ruminants' burps. Fixed on the cows' nostrils, the masks allow them to keep grazing and drinking at leisure.

"Our research shows that these masks don't affect our milk production," Cargill France's director of technology additives Deplhine Melchior tells RTL.

Starting this summer, farmers will be able to start renting the masks deployed by Cargill, at 65 euros a piece, reusable for a year, with at least part of the cost covered by environmental subsidies. And if you hear extra moo-ing while driving past the pastures, it may just be the anti-maskers among the herd...?

➡️ Keep up with all the planet's police reports and plot twists on Worldcrunch.com


Exclusive: Russia hacked Dutch police systems in 2017

Russian hackers penetrated deep into the Dutch national police's digital system in 2017, during a period that Russian separatists were being investigated for the downing of a Malaysia Airlines flight that had departed from the Netherlands, Dutch daily De Volkskrantreports in an exclusive investigative probe.

The cyber attack, reportedly carried out by hackers belonging to the Russian security service SVR, was cause for great concern, De Volkskrant reports, because the police were working on the criminal investigation into the downing of flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down on July 17, 2014 over eastern Ukraine.

Of the 283 passengers and 15 crew that were killed on July, 17 2014, when MH17 was shot down, 196 were Dutch. Multiple investigations have shown that MH17 was hit by a BUK missile, fired from a field in eastern Ukraine that was in the hands of pro-Russian separatists at the time. Russia has been blamed for consistently trying to undermine the enquiries.

The news of this new hack comes to light following the opening day of the Dutch MH17 criminal trial.


Do not come.

— U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris used her first overseas trip to warn would-be migrants in Guatemala not to try to enter the United States, saying they would be turned back at the U.S. border. The administration of President Joe Biden is under pressure to stem a surge in migrant arrivals from Central America since the start of 2021.

✍️ Newsletter by Genevieve Mansfield, Meike Eijsberg, Bertrand Hauger & Anne-Sophie Goninet

Badge
AL JAZEERA
Al Jazeera is a state-funded broadcaster in Doha, Qatar, owned by the Al Jazeera Media Network. Initially launched as an Arabic news and current-affairs satellite TV channel, Al Jazeera has since expanded into a network with several outlets, including the Internet and specialty television channels in multiple languages.
Badge
CNN
CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational news organization and TV channel. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, it is part of the Warner Media group and was founded in 1980 by Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld.
Badge
DE VOLKSKRANT
De Volkskrant (The People's Paper) is a Dutch daily headquartered in Amsterdam. Founded in 1919, it was originally a center-left Roman Catholic publication, it took on a clear left-wing stance in the 1960s and later evolved to a more centrist stance. It was named the European Newspaper of the Year in the category of nationwide newspapers in 2013.
Badge
Denník N
Slovak daily and online news site.
Badge
THE NEW YORK TIMES
The New York Times (sometimes abbreviated to NYT) is an American daily newspaper, founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. It has won 117 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization. Its daily circulation is estimated to 1,380,000.
Badge
JEUNE AFRIQUE
Jeune Afrique is a French-language weekly news magazine. It was cofounded by Bechir Ben Yahmed and other Tunisian intellectuals in Tunis in 1960, and is now headquartered in Paris.
Badge
BBC
The BBC is the British public service broadcaster, and the world's oldest national broadcasting organization. It broadcasts in up to 28 different languages.
Badge
THE GUARDIAN
Founded as a local Manchester newspaper in 1821, The Guardian has gone on to become one of the most influential dailies in Britain. The left-leaning newspaper is most recently known for its coverage of the Edward Snowden leaks.
Badge
WORLDCRUNCH
Premium stories from Worldcrunch's own network of multi-lingual journalists in over 30 countries.

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.

Society

Brazil's Evangelical Surge Threatens Survival Of Native Afro-Brazilian Faith

Followers of the Afro-Brazilian Umbanda religion in four traditional communities in the country’s northeast are resisting pressure to convert to evangelical Christianity.

image of Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Agencia Publica
Géssica Amorim

Among a host of images of saints and Afro-Brazilian divinities known as orixás, Abel José, 42, an Umbanda priest, lights some candles, picks up his protective beads and adjusts the straw hat that sits atop his head. He is preparing to treat four people from neighboring villages who have come to his house in search of spiritual help and treatment for health ailments.

The meeting takes place discreetly, in a small room that has been built in the back of the garage of his house. Abel lives in the quilombo of Sítio Bredos, home to 135 families. The community, located in the municipality of Betânia of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco, is one of the municipality’s four remaining communities that have been certified as quilombos, the word used to refer to communities formed in the colonial era by enslaved Africans and/or their descendents.

In these villages there are almost no residents who still follow traditional Afro-Brazilian religions. Abel, Seu Joaquim Firmo and Dona Maura Maria da Silva are the sole remaining followers of Umbanda in the communities in which they live. A wave of evangelical missionary activity has taken hold of Betânia’s quilombos ever since the first evangelical church belonging to the Assembleia de Deus group was built in the quilombo of Bredos around 20 years ago. Since then, other evangelical, pentecostal, and neo-pentecostal churches and congregations have established themselves in the area. Today there are now nine temples spread among the four communities, home to roughly 900 families.

The temples belong to the Assembleia de Deus, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and the World Church of God's Power, the latter of which has over 6,000 temples spread across Brazil and was founded by the apostle and televangelist Valdemiro Santiago, who became infamous during the pandemic for trying to sell beans that he had blessed as a Covid-19 cure. Assembleia de Deus alone, who are the largest pentecostal denomination in the world, have built five churches in Betânia’s quilombos.


Keep reading...Show less

The latest