There are issues — some crucial, others trivial — with a proven capacity to divide humankind. Among the trivial, let’s include soccer, politics, cuisine, and countless other subjects. And, among the crucial ones — setting aside the growing global inequalities and the misery faced by the poorest people — we must include perspectives on death.
© Ximena y Sergio (EL PAÍS)
For the first time in over a year, Google Maps has updated its satellite imagery of the Gaza Strip, allowing anyone with the app to see how a territory devastated by the Israeli military has changed. By updating imagery in 2024, 2025 and now 2026, Google has taken a step that other apps such as Apple Maps have not.
A fake story, with the Virgin of Aparecida, patron saint of Brazil, as an unwitting protagonist, has sparked a major controversy and poisoned the final stretch of the electoral campaign in Brazil. The contention, which harms Bolsonarismo, grew until it drew the direct intervention of the two leading candidates — President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro — the Bishops’ Conference, and the Supreme Court. Since Thursday night there have been statements, official notes, mutual accusations, and conflicting judicial rulings. The falsehood, which continues to circulate on social media, could affect an election that promises to be extremely close.
© Miguel Schincariol (Getty Images)
Polls are unfavorable for Texas attorney general and Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton. With 38 days until the midterm elections, some Republican politicians have all but conceded the Lone Star seat and remain haunted by the belief that the safer bet would have been to give the nomination to veteran congressman John Cornyn. Paxton isn’t gaining traction, not even after President Donald Trump himself urged voters at the unprecedented Republican convention in September in Dallas — his “Trumpapalooza” — to imagine that on November 3 they would be choosing him instead of the controversial Southern politician.
© JIM LO SCALZO (EFE)
Jesse Burgess, host, filmmaker and co-founder of the award-winning food and travel channel Topjaw, says his role in the documentary series Knife Edge: Chasing Michelin Stars is a dream job. In reality, it’s an even more polished extension of his earlier social media work: he travels the world to introduce viewers to the intense realm of haute cuisine. He visits (and samples) the planet’s most acclaimed restaurants as they face the Michelin Guide’s annual season.
© APPLE TV+
They came to Madrid to counterprogram one of Europe’s largest real estate fairs, The District. What they found was an 87-year-old woman who was about to be evicted from their home — and was, before their eyes. Around 200 housing activists from more than 20 countries across Europe decided to join the demonstrations against the eviction, and later joined a spontaneous encampment in front of the Madrid regional government headquarters at the historic Puerta del Sol plaza.
The Mohamed Embarek Fakal·la Pharmaceutical Production Laboratory is sometimes called “a desert rose,” because no one expected something like this to grow here. Mulai Mesaud Jarrachi, the lab’s logistics manager and deputy director, explains it to EL PAÍS. And, when he says “here,” he gestures broadly toward the Algerian hamada: a stony, hostile desert with scorching temperatures, where the wind constantly whips up sand that seeps under doors (and even gets between your teeth).
© Monica Torres
© Monica Torres
© Monica Torres
Naomi Lautier is 14 years old. Born in 2011 in Paris, she paints as if the world were speaking to her in its own language. There isn’t a single learned gesture in her work, nor any desire to fit into recognizable traditions. Her art springs from elsewhere: it has a direct, almost physical connection with what she sees, what she feels and what she needs to express.
© Naomi Lautier y Eugine Hrotchuk
© Naomi Lautier y Eugine Hrotchuk
© Naomi Lautier y Eugine Hrotchuk
© Naomi Lautier y Eugine Hrotchuk
© Naomi Lautier y Eugine Hrotchuk
© Naomi Lautier y Eugine Hrotchuk
In 2024 I sketched a map to situate what experts and commentators expected from artificial intelligence. It had two axes: how much will it advance? and will it be beneficial or dangerous? People fell into every quadrant, even the inconsistent one —“it’s nothing special and it’s extremely dangerous.” I was clearly on the “wow” side of the power axis and moderately optimistic. Two years later, the consensus has shifted in one direction: more power and more fear.
© Owen Humphreys (AP)
Lena Dunham — the child prodigy who wrote the HBO series Girls (the millennial version of Sex and the City) and later became the fallen star of her generation — published her second memoir this past April. And it reads quite differently now, after she recently announced that she has become a mother via surrogacy.
© Gilbert Carrasquillo (GC Images / GETTY IMAGES) (EL PAÍS)
Thirty years ago, Leonardo DiCaprio, at just 21, won the hearts of half the world starring opposite Claire Danes in Romeo + Juliet, a modern adaptation of William Shakespeare’s classic directed and adapted by Baz Luhrmann.
© 20th Century Fox (Getty Images)
The El Niño phenomenon has not yet reached its peak intensity, which the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) expects to occur at the end of this year, and seawater temperatures in the tropical Pacific area considered the epicenter of the event are already at record levels. The anomaly in that zone exceeded three degrees Celsius in mid‑September and has risen to a level similar to the peak of the El Niño event 11 years ago, in November 2015.
© DPA vía Europa Press (DPA vía Europa Press)
Colombian Julián Palacios Obregón spent 650 days in immigration detention in the United States. He was sick for most of that time. A month after being transferred to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington state, he began vomiting and suffering diarrhea with fecal incontinence that forced him to wear diapers. Although he was prescribed antibiotics that temporarily improved symptoms caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, the underlying problem repeatedly returned: he remained exposed to cloudy water and to food he often described as raw or foul-smelling.
Among so many faces, Roberto Mosquera remembered one in particular the day he arrived in Eswatini, a small country tucked away in southern Africa. He kept seeing that face over the following 14 months, which passed slowly and unbearably in the compressed world between the white and gray walls of the maximum-security cell at Matsapha prison. The man is serious, tall, dark-skinned and wears round glasses. His name is Jabulani Kunene and he is the prison official in charge. For more than a year, Mosquera has asked him the same question every time he passes by: “How long are you going to keep me locked up here?” Kunene has always given him the same answer: “I don’t know, Roberto, I don’t know.”
© Eduardo Ramón Trejo
The catastrophic avalanche of rock and ice on Langtang Lirung mountain, on Nepal’s northern border — which caused 1,300 deaths and as a result of which, 22 days later, more than 5,000 people remain missing — was the result of a combination of factors that simmered until they triggered an unprecedented disaster in the Himalayas. A report published on September 17 by World Weather Attribution (WWA), the group of scientists that specializes in calculating the influence of climate change on extreme weather events, sheds light on the catastrophe. Among the factors, the authors note “unusually warm conditions before the failure, supporting enhanced snow and ice melt and more precipitation falling as rain rather than snow” around the site where the collapse occurred.
© Ritesh Shukla (Getty Images)
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