Marseille's battle between culture and crime
The city is spending millions on its stint as Europe's culture capital in 2013 – but it is also fighting murderous gang crime
In the old port of Massalia, where the Greeks arrived 2,600 years ago, the yachts, fishing boats and pleasure craft bob in the dappled water, as nut-brown fishermen sell the morning catch.
A few streets away, the chic restaurants are packed and the luxury goods shops are doing brisk business in monogrammed handbags and gold watches. In the neighbouring quartier, prostitutes and drug dealers duck and dive to avoid the police patrols. These are the two faces of modern Marseille: the cosmopolitan, cultured pearl of the Mediterranean on the one hand; Rio-sur-Mer, as certain papers have nicknamed it, a lawless badland full of gangsters who could hold their own in the most dangerous Brazilian favela, on the other.
Syria unrest: Arab League to vote on economic sanctions
Members of the Arab League are set to vote on an unprecedented array of economic sanctions against Syria.
The proposals include the halting of dealings with the Syrian central bank, the suspension of commercial flights and a travel ban on senior officials.
Arab ministers drafted the sanctions at a meeting in Cairo, in the latest move to punish Syria for its continuing brutal crackdown on protesters.
China's younger generation: lifestyle counts as much as work
China's younger generation is leading a shift away from a job-is-everything work ethic in favor 'naked resignation' – leaving one job before finding another in order to pursue personal interests.
Early this year Song Hao, a stocky, bearded video editor in his late 20s, began to feel that the job he'd been doing for nearly four years was boring, leading nowhere, and certainly not worth the overtime he was made to do every evening.
"I wanted to take a break and use the time to do something I really liked, even if it didn't earn me any money," Mr. Song said one recent evening over a cappuccino in a Beijing cafe.
So he quit.
He had no other job lined up, or any immediate plans to find one. He did, though, have enough savings to keep him going for a few months and a burning desire to make a short movie with some friends. And that's what he did. Three months later he went back to work, at a different company.
Cannibal kingdom
Natalie Angier
November 27, 2011
WHEN Richard Shine, a biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia, first heard the mystery of the missing eggs, he feared it was another case of what might be called invasive toadkill. He and his colleagues were studying the cane toad, Rhinella marina,a big, warty, sludge-coloured Latin American amphibian that was brought to the continent years ago in an ill-fated effort at beetle control.
The researchers already knew that many large Australian carnivores, such as freshwater crocodiles and marsupial quolls, had died after naively feasting on the highly toxic adult toads. Now it seemed that smaller predators were going after the toad's equally poisonous eggs, and Shine worried that they too would be doomed.
US troops fear final spectacular attack in Iraq
Military is eager to do what it can to shape the legacy of a war that has witnessed the worst violence in Middle East in recent decades
By Scott Peterson
KALSU BASE, Iraq — As he watches yet another US military column prepare to drive across Iraq’s southern desert wastelands and withdraw into Kuwait, US Army Col. Scott Efflandt fears the impact of any final strike against his troops.
"What we worry about is a disproportional attack that taints the overall accomplishments," says Efflandt, speaking at this dusty staging post 30 miles south of Baghdad
"So a spectacular rocket attack – which has happened in Iraq repeatedly in the years we've been here – if that's the last thing that happens in Iraq, you know, like a chef at a restaurant, you're only as good as your last meal,” says Efflandt.
From its first "shock and awe" moments in March 2003, the American invasion of Iraq was about shaping perceptions. The bombing of Baghdad, live on TV, was meant to be so overwhelming that Saddam Hussein's regime would crumble – and along with it, the resolve of America's enemies from Al Qaeda on down.
Tahir Square in Cairo is filled with tear gas, fury and hope
After a week of violence Egyptians make ready for an election they hope will put them on the path away from authoritarian rule and towards democracy
Clad in a hooded top and showing just a hint of smile, the face that launched Egypt's revolution stares out from a gilt-edged frame in Zahraa Saaed's 14th-floor Cairo flat. It is a passport photograph of her younger brother Khalid, a fresh-faced, good-looking 28-year-old, which now has pride of place on a small mantelpiece of family portraits.
The family snapshot that sparked President Hosni Mubarak's downfall, however, is not on display. That was the grainy image shot by his brother on a mobile phone as Khaled lay on a mortuary slab last year, his delicate features mangled into a gargoyle-like death-mask from a savage beating by two Egyptian policemen.
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