"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. On a warm spring day in Paris' 20th arrondissement, the couple says their respective vows and exchanges rings in a room designated for civil wedding ceremonies. Both are wearing ties. Their parents sit in the front row. And when the couple leaves the city hall building, they do so under a traditional shower of ...

Convened in Washington, in November 2008, the first G-20 summit was a hasty attempt by top economies to forge common cause against a rapidly escalating financial crisis. That initial consensus risks unraveling at the G-20's fourth summit, in Toronto on June 26-27, with the U.S. and the European Union notably parting ways on how best to restore economic health. The summit follows an extraordinary austerity drive by European economies as they attempt to redress their public finances. In ...

As the antiausterity demonstration in Athens on Tuesday, June 28, devolved into familiar violent, tear-gas-soaked clashes between fringe anarchists and police outside Parliament, Giorgos Rallis shut off his television and stewed quietly about the immense dilemma facing his country. On Wednesday, Greek lawmakers are due to vote on an unpopular austerity bill that includes more tax hikes and a controversial plan to privatize state-owned enterprises, including the Public Power Corporation , where Rallis has worked as a technician ...

One down, one to go. A robust rescue package for Greece suddenly seemed a reality on Friday after Germany caved in to France and the European Central Bank by abandoning their demand to roll over Greek debt maturities. Details remain to be finalized on the Franco-Germany deal, but even as the Euro zone's two biggest economies reached agreement, a major obstacle remains — whether the Greek government can survive a vote of confidence next week following this ...

"Barack Obama has failed America," Mitt Romney said unequivocally at his first New Hampshire town meeting, repeating the signature line of his presidential-campaign announcement speech a day earlier. Unequivocal is not a word that traditionally has been associated with the former Massachusetts governor, but that was then, and the retooled edition of candidate Romney is much improved. He proceeded to lay out the economic case against Obama: 16 million out of work, home values collapsed, higher gas ...

You'd expect the headquarters of Telenor, Norway's biggest telecom company, to reflect at least some of its Scandinavian side. Sure enough, meeting rooms are furnished with wooden floors, sleek tables and angular armchairs; there's even a breathtaking view of the Oslo Fjord. But look closer. The small silver plates and golden sculpted boats in one such room are from Bangladesh; the green-and-gold tea set, with its five matching cups, from Thailand. And the black-and-gold rug hanging on a wall is ...

Leonard Lauder, chief executive of the company his mother founded, says she always thought she "was growing a nice little business." And that it is. A little business that controls 45% of the cosmetics market in U.S. department stores. A little business that sells in 118 countries and last year grew to be $3.6 billion big in sales. The Lauder family's shares are worth more than $6 billion. But early on, there wasn't a burgeoning business, there weren't houses in ...

The pharmaceutical industry is one of the few sectors around that appears to be weathering these difficult times with relative ease. On Friday the European Commission suggested why that might be: it claims Big Pharma systematically rigged the market to squeeze out copycat medicines. By using patent lawsuits and other delaying tactics to prevent cheaper generic medicines from entering the market, the drug majors cost European consumers up to $4 billion over an eight-year period until 2007, ...

Xenophobes in homogenous European countries often complain that immigrants will erase their most precious cultural norms. The race riots in southern Italy last weekend may be one indicator that change is inevitable, as African immigrants who don't live by the country's infamous omert code of silence violently protested against the powerful Mafia clans that control their lives, says Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah, an anti-Mob book that earned him both critical praise and a 24-hour police guard. ...

Even before Dominique Strauss-Kahn announced from New York's Riker's Island prison on Wednesday that he was stepping down as head of the International Monetary Fund , world powers were already jostling over who could replace him. Indeed, since Strauss-Kahn's arrest last Saturday on charges of attempted rape, European officials have been swift to argue that Europe should maintain the hold it has had on the IMF's top job ever since the Washington D.C.-based organization was created in 1945. Europeans, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, say ...