IHT Rendezvous: Environmental Warning Fatigue Sets in

Record levels of industrial smog? A dwindling number of fish in the world’s oceans? A 4° Celsius warming in global temperatures by the end of the century?How about environmental warning fatigue?Global concern for major environmental issues is at an all time low, according to the results of a global poll of more than 22,000 people in 22 countries, released earlier this week.“Scientists report that...

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IHT Rendezvous: IHT Quick Read: March 1

NEWS As the sun set on Rome and on his turbulent eight-year papacy, Pope Benedict XVI, a shy theologian who never seemed entirely at home in the limelight, was whisked by helicopter into retirement on Thursday. Rachel Donadio reports from Vatican City.As President Obama and congressional Democrats have tried to force U.S. House Speaker John Boehner back to the table for talks to head off the automatic...

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IHT Rendezvous: Q and A: Keeping ‘A Chorus Line’ in Step

LONDON — For a musical that’s all about dancers, there’s not a huge amount of dancing in “A Chorus Line,” which opened last week at the London Palladium — the first West End revival of the musical since it opened here in 1976, a year after its smash-hit debut on Broadway.But the most dance-intensive moments are fundamental to our very idea of “A Chorus Line”: the “Aaaah-5-6-7-8!” that unleashes...

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India Ink: ‘Hole in the Wall’ Wins Indian Educator $1 Million TED Prize

Sugata Mitra, an Indian education innovator, was awarded the first $1 million TED Prize for what the global organization called his “innovative and bold efforts towards advancing learning for children.”“Sugata and his colleagues carried out experiments for over 13 years on the nature of self-organized learning, its extent, how it works and the role of adults in encouraging it,” said TED, which announced...

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The Lede: Comedian’s Blog Morphs Into Major Political Force in Italy

Last Updated, Tuesday, 10:08 a.m. Although an aide to the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi demanded a recount late Monday, after his center-right coalition appeared to lose the battle for the Italian Parliament’s lower house to the main center-left coalition by less than 0.4 percent, a look at the raw vote totals reveals a sharp decline in support for him. According to the provisional count,...

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IHT Rendezvous: Horsemeat Scandal Grows More Serious and More Bizarre

LONDON — As European governments struggle in vain to draw a line under the scandal over horsemeat being sold as beef, the affair seems only to be widening, in sometimes bizarre ways.Two German politicians, for instance, suggested over the weekend that one practical use for tainted products, such as tens of thousands of packs of lasagna pulled from supermarket shelves because they contained horsemeat,...

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IHT Rendezvous: As Oscars Fever Builds, Some Chinese Ask: ‘What About Our Films?’

BEIJING — As Oscar fever grows around the world with the 85th Academy Awards set to begin in Los Angeles just hours from now, excitement is building in China, even though it has no films in competition. There is also a sense of frustration here about why China’s movies aren’t nominated for the world’s biggest awards?China sees itself as advancing in many ways, growing richer and more powerful, so...

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U.N. Rejects Claim for Direct Compensation to Victims of Cholera Epidemic in Haiti

There will be no direct financial compensation from the United Nations for the more than 8,000 Haitians who died and the 646,000 sickened by cholera since the disease struck the earthquake-ravaged country in October 2010, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the Haitian president this week. More than 15 months after the United Nations received a legal claim seeking to hold peacekeeping troops...

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IHT Rendezvous: Russian Nationalists Say ‘Nyet’ to Foreign Words

LONDON — Nationalist Russian legislators have introduced a bill to hold back a tide of foreign words, specifically English ones, which they claim is swamping the Russian language.A bill submitted by the minority Liberal Democratic Party would impose fines of up to $1,700 on officials, advertisers and journalists who use foreign words rather than their Russian equivalents.Their main gripe appears to...

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The Lede: Reporters in Syria See No End in Sight

It has been nearly two years since Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, deployed troops to clear the streets of first peaceful protesters and then armed rebels intent on overthrowing him.The ensuing war, a mix of the sectarian, political and personal, has turned bustling streets, workplaces and homes across the country into rubble-strewn battlegrounds, contested bitterly for the smallest strategic...

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The Lede: North Korean Video Shows Obama in Flames

North Korea has released a new propaganda video that shows President Obama and United States troops in flames and credits Washington with leading the impoverished country to become a proud nuclear power.Songs, operas and novels that stoke hatred against the United States and belittle South Korea are daily fare for North Koreans living under a leadership that uses propaganda as a critical tool of governing....

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IHT Rendezvous: As Europe Moves to Cap Bonuses, Britain Hesitates

LONDON — It is hard to imagine any European politician losing votes these days by promising to curb bankers’ pay, which may explain why members of the European Parliament are enthusiastically pushing for the toughest restrictions on bank bonuses since the 2008 financial crisis.Representatives of the Parliament and of the 27 European Union governments were meeting on Tuesday to finalize a deal on banking...

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IHT Rendezvous: Human Rights and Sports Events

Earlier this month, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sacked a senior Russian Olympic Committee official over rising costs and a delay in the construction work for the 2014 Winter Olympics.Page TwoPosts written by the IHT’s Page Two columnists.The cost of the games, to be held in the southern resort of Sochi, is expected to reach the equivalent of $50 billion. Mr. Putin said corruption had pushed...

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IHT Rendezvous: Should Common Plastics Be Labeled Toxic?

THE HAGUE — Hoping to reduce one of the most ubiquitous forms of waste, a global group of scientists is proposing that certain types of plastic be labeled hazardous.The group, led by two California scientists, wrote in this week’s issue of the scientific journal Nature:We believe that if countries classified the most harmful plastics as hazardous, their environmental agencies would have the power...

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IHT Rendezvous: Should Common Plastics Be Labeled Toxic?

THE HAGUE — Hoping to reduce one of the most ubiquitous forms of waste, a global group of scientists is proposing that certain types of plastic be labeled hazardous.The group, lead by two California scientists, wrote in this week’s issue of the scientific journal Nature:We believe that if countries classified the most harmful plastics as hazardous, their environmental agencies would have the power...

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The Lede: Video of Meteorite Fragments Streaking Over Siberia

Video posted on YouTube Friday appeared to catch an explosion caused by a meteor streaking over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.Last Updated, 9:55 a.m. As our colleagues Ellen Barry and Andrew Kramer report, Russians recorded video of bright objects, apparently debris from a meteor, “streaking through the sky in western Siberia early on Friday, accompanied by a boom that damaged buildings across a...

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IHT Rendezvous: Horse Meat Scandal: Is the Era of Cheap Food Over?

LONDON — With Europe’s expanding horse meat scandal escalating from a drama to a crisis, consumers are being warned that the era of cheap food may be over.In less than a month, the scandal has spread from Ireland, where prepared foods sold as beef products were found to contain horse, to Britain and much of the Continent.The crisis deepened on Thursday when British officials said tests showed that...

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Six More British Journalists Are Arrested in Hacking Investigation

LONDON – Adding fresh momentum to police investigations that have already cost Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire in Britain hundreds of millions of dollars, Scotland Yard said on Wednesday that six more journalists who previously worked for The News of the World tabloid were arrested at dawn on suspicion of hacking into cellphone messages. The latest police swoop followed others in the past...

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Vatican Discloses That Benedict Has Heart pacemaker

ROME — A day after Pope Benedict XVI stunned Roman Catholics by announcing that he would resign at the end of the month, the Vatican disclosed new details about his physical well-being on Tuesday, saying he had been fitted with a heart pacemaker a decade ago but that had not influenced his decision to become the first pope in almost 600 years to step down. The disclosure about the device,...

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Journalists’ E-Mail Accounts Targeted in Myanmar

BANGKOK — Several journalists who cover Myanmar said Sunday that they had received warnings from Google that their e-mail accounts might have been hacked by “state-sponsored attackers.” The warnings began appearing last week, said Aye Aye Win, a senior journalist in Myanmar and longtime correspondent for The Associated Press who was among those who received them. Other journalists...

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