Brasilia, 2016: Congressman Jair Messias Bolsonaro votes in favor of impeaching left-wing President Dilma Rousseff. And he dedicates his vote to the military officer who tortured her during the dictatorship (1964-1985), when she was a guerrilla fighter.
© MAURO PIMENTEL ( AFP / GETTY IMAGES )
If there is one thing no one can deny about Donald Trump it is that he is a lucky man. The president has beaten the odds more than once. Notably, when he left the presidency in January 2021 after the shameful assault on the Capitol, his political career seemed to have hit rock bottom. But not only was he acquitted in a second impeachment trial, and spared from an AR-15 rifle round that came within millimeters of blowing off his head (to name just two examples of his extreme luck); he also easily defeated Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the presidential election.
© Kevin Lamarque (REUTERS)
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is approaching its fifth year. Since February 24, 2022, Europe and the United States have rolled out a battery of sanctions intended to strangle the Russian economy to the point where regime change would be the only viable outcome for the Kremlin. The wave of restrictions, however, has several loopholes — some deliberately left by the West to preserve certain exchanges, such as a limited purchase of hydrocarbons.
© Vyacheslav Prokofyev (Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Pool Sputni)
“This guy is a monster,” Donald Trump said in front of Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive. “And nobody knows him. What a great life! To be a monster and not have to go through this,” Trump continued, pointing at the reporters who follow him everywhere. Pichai stood beside him, waiting to speak with an expression of resigned disbelief. Before the exchange ended, Trump joked about his Indian name: “Sundarrrrr is his name.” When Pichai finally spoke, he tried to play it down: “Hopefully, that will be a better tagline than ‘I’m a monster,’” he said.
© Alex Brandon (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
What happens when happiness ceases to be a desire and, instead, becomes an obligation? This is a question that Carl Cederström has been posing for years. The sociologist teaches at Stockholm Business School and is the author of several critical essays on workplace culture and the happiness industry. His popular book The Wellness Syndrome (2015) is a sharp and engaging work, co-authored with André Spicer, dean of Bayes Business School in London.
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A Spanish police patrol car passes through one of Valencia’s largest parks and Lorena López, a 29-year-old Colombian woman, freezes and completely loses focus in her boxing class. She remembers the U.S. agents who held her for a year and a half at the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona and the officers from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who deported her, handcuffed at hands and feet, to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on April 15, 2026. When she sees the officers, she also recalls the armed men she and 14 other Latin Americans encountered at the hotel where they were held in Kinshasa for two months. But then she immediately realizes that since she was able to leave that African country in June she is free and safe in Spain.
Pollution crosses any border. Residents of Seville saw this in August when the huge Niebla wildfire in Huelva province collapsed air quality levels in the Andalusian capital. Madrid residents experienced it days earlier when the regional government asked them to stay indoors because smoke was arriving from out-of-control fires in the Sierra Oeste and Ávila province. This pollution, laden with harmful particles, travels tens or hundreds of miles, and sometimes crosses countries and oceans. “Air quality in our cities, towns or countries is not only influenced by local activities but can be affected by pollution from neighboring or quite distant nations,” explains Ian Marnane, head of the Environment and Health Unit at the European Environment Agency (EEA).
© NICOLAS TUCAT (AFP)
There was a time when moderation was a virtue and the middle ground, wisdom. Hyperbole was no more than a literary or rhetorical device. But not anymore. We live at the extremes. Raising everything to its highest possible level is the zeitgeist fate has handed us, and it comes with a suffix that colonizes the internet: maxxing. A highly versatile suffix: placed after the right word it means that, whatever you do, you are giving it your all.
© CASSIDY ARAIZA ( New York Times / Europa Press / CONTACTO )
Lili Reinhart isn’t interested in being a celebrity… and the 30-year-old actress has proven this throughout her career. The moment her name started making headlines for her starring role as Betty Cooper in the TV series Riverdale (2017-2023), control over what she wanted (and didn’t want) in her life seemed to slip from her grasp. And, as her fame grew, she also had to confront her insecurities: subjected to constant media exposure, her life suddenly belonged to the public.
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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.
© Stuart C. Wilson (Getty Images)
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)
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