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Newsweek
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Nov 7, 2008 11:04 AM
By Michael Levitin With far-right anti-immigrant parties strengthening in Austria, and growing opposition to the mosques and minarets shooting up from Berlin to Cologne, xenophobia is in the air in Europe. Pending job losses from the financial fallout...
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Newsweek
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Oct 9, 2008 03:43 PM
By Amber Haq Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, the French Mauritian winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature, is known for his quiet demeanour and solitary living. So it came as something of a surprise that the announcement today by the Nobel committee...
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Melinda Liu
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Mar 8, 2008 04:51 PM
Beijing isn't alone in its "edifice complex," the massive urban
makeover that has transformed the Chinese capital in the run-up to the
Summer Olympics. In Shanghai the remodeling of the city's famous Bund
waterfront has led to some raised eyebrows. My colleague Duncan Hewitt
writes from Shanghai:
When Shanghai does something, it doesn't do it by halves. For years,
local urban planners have admitted that the city made a mistake in the
1990s, when it routed one of its major highways right along the famous
Bund waterfront. Since then conservationists have dreamt of the day
when the traffic would be rerouted, or even put underground in a
tunnel, to spare the historic structures from pollution and improve the
view of the famous old stretch of colonial-era buildings.
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Christian Caryl
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Oct 30, 2007 05:36 PM
So who was the winner of this year's World Series? No question - it was the Japanese. Okay, so maybe the Red Sox won too. But, let's be honest - how many Red Sox fans are there in the world? 20, 30 million tops? Still can't hold a candle to 127 million Japanese, the vast majority of whom tuned in to every minute of this year's Series between the Sox and the Colorado Rockies. They were rooting not only for Boston pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, who made headlines earlier this year when he signed a $52-million contract with the club and became the first Japanese to start a World Series; they were also pulling for Rockies star Kazuo Matsui, formerly of the New York Mets. As pretty much every Japanese fan knows, Dice-K and Matsui used to be teammates on the Seibu Lions pro team back in their home country. So Japanese fans had plenty of potential drama to savor. Could Matsuzaka redeem himself by staging a comeback from his weak performance in the playoffs? Would Matsui manage to put his more famous ex-teammate in the shade - and take revenge on the hated Mets who so clearly failed to appreciate his gifts? Thanks to the Sox' victory, of course, Matsuzaka is now being hailed as a hero back at home.
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Mac Margolis
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Sep 21, 2007 12:05 PM
What do you get when you mix Steely Dan, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell with bossa nova? Babel, you might think. But leave it to Luciana Souza, the Brazilian-born, California-based singer and composer, to bring off this unlikely mission of cultural entente...
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Owen Matthews
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Sep 17, 2007 08:02 AM
If you are in Central London on Tuesday or Wednesday, be sure to look into Sotheby's on Bond Street. The art collection of the late Mtislav Rostropovich, considered one of the greatest cellists of the last century, and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya is on display. The 450-odd lot of paintings, ceramics and objects d'art were due to go under the hammer tomorrow, but the auction was canceled when Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov made a successful pre-emptive bid for the entire collection yesterday. Sotheby's says that the offer was "substantially higher than the highest pre-sale expectations" -- in other words, well over the 20 million pound catalogue valuation of the collection. Russian art sales at Sotheby's have risen twenty times since 2001; this year alone the London-based auction house has sold over $101 million worth of Russian art, with another major sale planned in London on November.
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Christian Caryl
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Sep 4, 2007 03:57 PM
Asashoryu, come back! We're sorry! We didn't mean it! Somehow I don't think we're going to be hearing that collective cry from the Japanese any time soon - not after what's been going on here over the past few weeks. The media in this country have been...
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Mac Margolis
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Sep 1, 2007 11:59 AM
If affirmative action in the United States has you confused, imagine what it's like in Brazil, where everything is muddier. Half a millennium of mingling by Africans, Europeans and Indians gave this New World nation a hundred faces and more colors than Crayola. (One famous national census turned up 136 terms by which Brazilians classified their complexion, from "dawn white" to "cinnamon.") The record-keepers, hoping to tidy things up, reduced the official lexicon of racial types to just five: white, oriental, indigenous, black and pardo (brown). But to this day, most Brazilians simply shrug and say they are a mixed-blooded people.
Blurry as that seems, this fluid self-image has been key to the country's identity. Now, thanks to an aggressive new brand of racial politics, the picture is about to change.
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Silvia Spring
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Aug 31, 2007 09:41 AM
Not everyone was celebrating when Bill Murdoch and Bill Atwood were consecrated as Anglican bishops on Thursday at Nairobi's All Saints Cathedral. Well, certainly not anyone in favor of a united Anglican Commune anyway. The two American priests' decision to become bishops in Kenya signals not only their opposition to gays in the episcopal hierarchy but also a deepening division in the already fragile Anglican Church between its conservative African and liberal American branches, which have rowed ever since the U.S. consecrated its first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, in 2003. Even at the consecration, there was no mistaking exactly what had motivated the American priests to travel to Africa. Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi said of gays, "We need to love them we need to preach to them, but not to make them lay readers, pastors, bishops."
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William Underhill
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Aug 28, 2007 07:06 AM
She was beautiful, glamorous and wronged. Her compassion touched the lives of millions. No other member of the Royal Family could match her universal appeal. In the words of the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, she was "The People's Princess."
So much for the first hasty draft of history. Since then the revisionists have been at work, and with reason. It's ten years this week since Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a Paris car smash. The British nation has had plenty of time to mull the record, and it's no longer quite so sure about her legacy.
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Mac Margolis
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Aug 13, 2007 04:05 PM
Imagine this. A sightly miss has an unseemly liaison (and a love child) with a senior legislator. The lawmaker, hoping for discretion, deploys a shadowy envoy to send her child support in the form of regular wads of cash. Then the whole affair blows up...
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Joseph Contreras
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Aug 7, 2007 05:33 PM
It began, at least for the world at large, with the 2002 biopic that starred Mexico's very own Salma Hayek as the tortured Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Hollywood's imprimatur made it officially cool to climb aboard the bandwagon of Fridamania, and the rush to cash in hasn't ceased since: Vogue and Harpers Bazaar ran Frida-themed fashion spreads that same year, Madonna started collecting some of her under-appreciated (and presumably under-priced) paintings, and a trendy Mexico City hotel unveiled a Frida Kahlo suite priced at $550 a night that featured a refrigerator emblazoned with a larger-than-life likeness of the deceased artist decked out in a trademark indigenous costume. Now the cultural establishment of Frida's native land has, however belatedly, decided to welcome her into Mexico's rich artistic pantheon on the centennial of her birth: a major retrospective exhibition modestly entitled "Frida Kahlo 1907-2007: National Homage" opened last month in the local equivalent of Carnegie Hall, Mexico City's ornate Palace of Fine Arts, to great fanfare and fawning reviews in the national and international news media.
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