Since its inception in 1984, Cirque du Soleil has taken its intoxicating mix of acrobatics and theatrics around the world. The Montreal-based troupe has staged tent shows in every major North American city, traveled Europe and Asia, and built permanent shows — all-time marvels like O and K — in Las Vegas, Orlando, Tokyo and Macao. This week, with the official premiere of its new show Zarkana, Cirque finally found its ideal home: New York's Radio City ...

Rodrigo Duterte, the mayor of Davao City, is sitting in his favorite bar, After Dark, a glass of brandy in front of him, a .38 pistol tucked in his waistband. He's wearing jeans and a short-sleeved shirt loudly adorned with wine bottles and bunches of red and green grapes — the same outfit he wore to work. While other guests take turns singing along with the piano player, Duterte tells a strange and disturbing story. In 1993, Davao's San Pedro ...

*Harbert, Mich., is a crossroads town about 60 miles east of Chicago across the lake. To get there you have to drive through the gritty desolation of South Chicago, through Gary, where in autumn the blast furnaces at night make a glowering sheet lightning, through the smoke of Michigan City and into clean air again, along Lake Michigan behind some of the biggest sand dunes in the world. Carl Sandburg's place is on top of a dune a mile or ...

Ten measures of beauty came into the world: Jerusalem took nine and the rest of the world one. There are ten measures of suffering in the world—nine in Jerusalem and one in the rest of the world. There are ten measures of wisdom in the world—nine in Jerusalem and one in the rest of the world. —The Babylonian Talmud For Christians, Jews and Moslems alike, Jerusalem is infinitely more than just an embattled city in the Palestine desert. To Jews, ...

It was evening rush hour in New York City. 42nd St. was packed, and I was hoping I would make the bus. His voice came out of the crowd. "Take that rag off!" Huh? In my four months of working in New York, that was a first. Actually, that was a first in the seven years since I started wearing a hijab. A lot of people turned to look at me as he shouted those words. I don't know exactly what I was ...

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global-news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Le Monde. A journalist, Clanet managed to enter Syria on a tourist visa . On May 25, he arrived in Deraa, the southwestern city that was the first to rise against Bashar Al-Assad's regime before authorities cracked down, reportedly killing scores of locals, and cutting it off from the outside ...

One billion people will die from tobacco-related causes by the end of the century if current consumption trends continue, according to a global report released Thursday by the World Health Organization . At a press conference held in midtown Manhattan, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose charitable organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies, contributed $2 million to conduct the study, joined top WHO officials to present the findings. Among the litany of sobering statistics: 5.4 million people die each ...

At 3:15 on a recent Friday afternoon, a 1959 green Oldsmobile was parked alongside the curb in a middle-class residential neighborhood of New York City. Two men got out, removed the license plates, and opened the hood slightly to make the car look as if it had been stolen or left alone while its owner went for help. Then they withdrew to a nearby window, where—unseen—they could watch what was to happen.Vice squad cops bent on entrapment?No. In fact, the two men were psychologists, interested ...

You would not think that TV would be a sphere of life where men feel endangered. Katie Couric is being replaced by a dude. Men host every late-night show outside cable. Entourage has somehow managed to run for more seasons than Sex and the City. But at May's upfronts — where networks announce their fall schedules to advertisers — there was a pattern: sitcom after sitcom about how today's men are besieged and need to rediscover their masculinity. ...

The high-pitched, nasal call of the neighborhood scrap collector is a familiar weekend sound in most Indian neighborhoods. In Noida, a quiet satellite city of Delhi, Ashu Kumar has been collecting old newspapers, phones, computers, digital recorders and refrigerators for the past five years. And for years, at the end of each month, Ashu treks down a dusty road leading to the Seelampur scrap market — the largest graveyard of India's ever-growing electronic waste — to sell ...