María Elvira Salazar wore a dark blouse and a striking pearl necklace when she arrived at journalist Juan Manuel Cao’s studio in Miami. She took a seat, tucked her hair behind her ears, made sure she had good lighting and found the best camera angle. She’s well trained in the ways of television.
© Elizabeth Frantz (REUTERS)
On the day of his sentencing hearing in New York this summer, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada read a letter overflowing with remorse. After a decades-long career in drug trafficking, the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel said his goodbyes with a mea culpa for everything he had done, without expanding greatly. Given his expected influence over the regional underworld, he dared to send a message to young people. “Choose a different path,” he said. “There is no honor in violence nor anything lasting in crime; they only bring pain and loss.” It is not known whether his second-born son knew about his father’s letter. But it is fairly clear that, if he did, he paid it no heed.
Russia is stepping up its hybrid war against Europe. From sabotage, drone incursions, and arson to plots (mostly foiled) to assassinate pro‑Ukraine activists and Russian dissidents on European soil, the Kremlin is testing the allied response, and incidents against NATO’s European partners are becoming more serious, such as the explosive‑laden drones found this summer at Leipzig Airport in Germany. That gray line between a hybrid attack and a conventional one is blurring, and several European intelligence sources warn of the risk that one of those incidents could escalate — either by a deliberate Kremlin decision or a miscalculation.
© Kateryna Klochko (AP/LaPresse)
Brazil is in the final stretch of a tightly contested presidential election, but the campaign is almost absent from the streets of São Paulo, the country’s most populous city. On Paulista Avenue, only a few small banners with candidates’ photos remind people of this Sunday’s ballot, to which nearly 159 million Brazilians are summoned. Framed by towering office blocks, Paulistanos walk among street vendors, offices, shopping and cultural centers and show an enthusiasm for the spring day that vanishes when the conversation turns to the vote. Fewer people passionately defend their own candidate’s platform than those who want to stop the one they despise from winning.
© Brian Snyder (REUTERS)
Five months ago, four excited girls walked into a maximum-security area with their mother wearing the same black T-shirt printed with a photo of their father. Minutes later, he emerged from a building guarded by the military, amid camera flashes and television cameras, and looked at them with moist eyes from the other side of the fence. He could not approach or touch them. He had to respect quarantine, because in a few hours he would board the most powerful crewed rocket in history and head to the Moon. Without speaking, they said everything to each other, and the rest of the world understood them.
© Ashley Landis (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)
A team of engineers and scientists has brought a machine from the future to the Tabernas desert in Almería, Spain. In a landscape familiar to fans of Sergio Leone westerns, before the sun had truly warmed the ground, they lifted Charlie onto a small cart — the prototype rover that the European Space Agency (ESA), Airbus, and much of European industry and science have been designing for years. They took it to an area that alternated between very fine dusty soil, rocky scree and salt-encrusted ground. They wanted to test how the machine would cope in an environment as close as possible to Mars. That is the ultimate goal of the ExoMars mission to which it belongs: to reach the Martian surface in 2030 — after more than a year of space travel — with the first European rover to touch down there, and drill into it in search of past or present life on the red planet. At least in the dry Almería scrub, Charlie seems to have convinced the scientists.
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Orthodox monks rise to pray at 4.00 am at the Monastery of Saint Gregory, located on Mount Athos, considered by Orthodox Christians to be the Garden of the Virgin Mary. Not even at that hour do the lap of the Aegean Sea and the birdsong prevail over the hum of the electric generators. Hours later, the roar of an infrastructure project funded by the Greek government and the European Union will join the soundscape. Modernity marches on by way of EU funds at this location that is home to 20 monasteries, where some monks drive up the slopes in all-terrain vehicles. Maybe in a few years electric cars will be seen on the streets, or maybe drones will carry food to the most inaccessible spots. What will probably not be anywhere in sight, however, are women.
Culture has once again placed the Palestinian cause at the center of social conversation, while political leaders — especially those from the Global North — have progressively dropped the issue from their public remarks. In less than a month, rapper Macklemore was dropped from opening for Ed Sheeran on his tour after shouting: “Free Palestine!” Actresses Susan Sarandon and Hannah Einbinder were arrested in New York for calling on the United States to stop funding Israel’s war while Benjamin Netanyahu was attending the UN General Assembly. Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, directors of NAZA, after being branded traitors by the Israeli government and threatened with revocation of their citizenship, decided to release online and for free the documentary that won an award at the Venice Film Festival. The Festival of Ideas in Madrid hung by a thread when more than 30 participants demanded the organizers withdraw Allianz’s sponsorship because the company holds Israeli bonds. At the same time, at the Cultura Alh festival in Granada, the exchange of manifestos continues between those who oppose and those who support the decision to rescind an invitation to Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz for denying a genocide in Gaza.
© Javier Hernandez
In his latest book, La respuesta (The Answer), 71-year-old paleoanthropologist Juan Luis Arsuaga, from Madrid, explores the pivotal moments of human evolution. There are the living — us — the extinct — like the Neanderthals — and those on the verge of extinction — the great apes such as chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas. Unlike his previous work, the co-director of the Atapuerca archeological site in northern Spain takes a firm stance: he clearly states his opinion on numerous theories that attempt to answer the most fundamental questions: Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going?
Although Tom Cruise has maintained his star status on the big screen, the 64-year-old has avoided giving interviews to mainstream media for the past 20 years. Instead, he has focused on being an actor exclusively associated with his roles, someone who only generates conversation for his spectacular stunts in the sequels to Mission Impossible, done without doubles, or for his commitment to the seventh art, to theaters, and to Hollywood.
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On December 6, 2022, hours before facing Switzerland in the last 16 of the Qatar World Cup, Portugal coach Fernando Santos summoned Cristiano Ronaldo to his room at the team hotel. “I explained to him that he would not start that night because he lacked match rhythm, and he took it badly,” the coach recalled. It was the trigger for a crisis that four years later still consumes time and energy at a federation that has failed to promote an extraordinary generation of talent without subordinating it to the contradiction of playing for a footballer who achieved greatness thanks to his dynamism but is now 41 and has long struggled to move around the field.
© PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA (AFP)
Never before have so many Brazilians held a job, but never have so many families — eight out of 10 — been strangled by debt. Paying it off consumes a third of household budgets in Latin America’s largest economy. And it is there that much of the discontent weighing on Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s electoral prospects is born. His 2022 promise that, with him in power, the glorious days of the picanha, the grilled meat, the Sunday barbecue, would return remains a dream for most. For his compatriots, the cost of living is too high. Paying the bills is often impossible, even though the president insists unemployment is at a historic low (5.3%), inequality is falling, and inflation is under control.
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One way Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy confronts Russian attacks and seeks to show resolve is by appearing in the most dangerous places. He has done so since his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022. At that time, Kyiv was the Kremlin’s primary target, but the attempt was beaten back. In recent weeks, Moscow has increased its aerial attacks and bombs the city day and night, hitting numerous civilian targets. “They want Ukrainians — especially those in the capital — to leave. In fact, that’s what they were aiming for when the full-scale invasion began,” Zelenskiy said during a conversation with EL PAÍS while visiting a school that had been attacked on Thursday morning in Kyiv.
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Joel René Cárdenas Carrillo, a Mexican immigrant who became a U.S. citizen and works as a welder, has lived in the United States for more than 25 years. For his father’s birthday, he decided to return to his home state of Colima in Mexico after a long absence. On August 12, as he was preparing to return to California, he went for a walk on a hill and later attended a soccer match held on a field in Manzanillo. But when he left the game in his car, several police patrols blocked his way. Officers detained him, beat him and accused him of stealing fuel, an illegal activity in Mexico known as huachicol. That is the account provided by his wife, Verónica Sánchez.
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In recent weeks, I have received messages from Kazakhstan to Peru about the alleged sexual assault on Cornell’s campus. As a Cornell student, I’ve tried to defend the university due to the quality of the faculty and the amazing possibilities for research, but I cannot do it in good faith any longer.
© Matt Rourke (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Sandro Castro, Fidel’s influencer grandson who runs several Havana nightclubs, was asked a question on Instagram a few days ago that was seen by his more than 165,000 followers. “When will change come to Cuba?” The young Castro posted a photo of himself with a Cuban flag draped over his back while gazing at Havana’s cracked skyline from afar: “Cuba is already changing, or haven’t you noticed?” he replied. Certainly, the country that existed in January is not the same nine months later: most people still watch life slip away amid shortages and long power outages, but a new private class is taking on roles that used to belong to the state — supplying pharmacies, importing and distributing diesel, and ensuring food sales.
© Ricardo Arduengo (REUTERS)
Her life could inspire one of those biopics about personal triumph, but Jahel Queralt, 43, says her fate is pure chance. The jurist, PhD and professor of political law at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona went from growing up in an isolated house without water or electricity to feeling “like you’ve gatecrashed a party in the wrong shoes” when she arrived in the world of academia. It happened in 2007, in Oxford, when she met Gerald A. Cohen, a leading figure in analytical Marxism and one of the mentors of her theses. He was so approachable that the young woman let her guard down while eating with the other fellows in the All Souls dining hall, inside the most elitist of the Oxford colleges. There she uttered the forbidden word that starts with F: “You do this in Spain and you are totally fucked,” she stated, and immediately heard the rest of the diners clear their throats. People still ask her at parties if she is “the girl who said fucked in the All Souls dining hall.” That, she says near her son’s public school a few yards from the Barcelona zoo, is what happens when “you learned English watching The Wire.”
Digger is like a mango. It’s an acidic film, but also a bit sweet; outwardly it seems one thing but inside it contains surprises, and it needs time to ripen. Like a mango, its flavor can’t be explained. In fact, it’s better not to even try, says its director, Alejandro González Iñárritu: “The only way to know what a mango tastes like is to put it in your mouth. And you have to put this film in your eyes to understand it, because if I explain it to you, you won’t get it.”
© Mario Guzmán (EFE)
A comprehensive atlas of the 18 main respiratory viruses circulating in Catalonia, produced for the first time in Spain by researchers from that northeastern region, reveals that the coronavirus that caused the Covid-16 pandemic — SARS-CoV-2 — “is currently not a winter virus. In recent years, it has shown clear peaks during the spring and summer, which is different from what was initially expected.”
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Asked by reporters about Brazil’s upcoming presidential election, to be held on Sunday amid heightened tension between Washington and the leftist government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, U.S. President Donald Trump said that he is following it “very closely.”
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