"Names make news." Last week the following names made the following news: George V. A motor ambulance suitable for transporting His Majesty to the Sussex seaside where he will recuperate was driven into the courtyard of Buckingham Palace, last week, and later the Royal physicians announced that they had "thoroughly tested its suitability." Paul von Hindenburg, President of Germany, eyed last week, for the first time in his life, a cinema. It was shown for his especial benefit at ...

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 the leading Italian daily La Stampa. — Adel Ben Mabrouk has seen the inside of Italian prison cells from Milan in the north to Benevento in the south. He also spent eight years behind the barbed wire of a certain U.S. military prison on the island of ...

Not for many years has a Christmas season begun with so many tidings of spreading discomfort and lack of joy about the U.S. economy. Already racked by a devastating double-digit inflation, the nation is now also plunging deeper into a recession that seems sure to be the longest and could be the most severe since World War II. Consumers who a few weeks ago worried mostly about rising prices now fear for their jobs and incomes as well. For many ...

So obscure, so ignominiously in the shadow of Dictator Benito Mussolini, is bantamweight King Vittorio Emanuele III that news last week that he had actually done something important came to most Italians as a pleasant shock. His Majesty, after deliberating off & on for 22 years, finally handed down his decision as arbiter between France and Mexico in the forgotten matter of minute Clipperton Island, 700 miles off the Mexican shore, annexed by France in 1857, seized by Mexican Dictator ...

Recently the University of Wisconsin and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released its second annual County Health Rankings, a within-state comparison of county health covering each county in every state the United States. Newspapers and TV news programs jumped all over the results — particularly local outlets serving counties that were ranked comparatively lower than their neighbors. "If you are looking for a healthy county, head north," read a March 30 article in the Inland Valley ...

IT passed without notice when it occurred in mid-March 1968, at a time when the war news was still dominated by the siege of Khe Sanh. Yet the brief action at My Lai, a hamlet in Viet Cong-infested territory 335 miles northeast of Saigon, may yet have an impact on the war. According to accounts that suddenly appeared on TV and in the world press last week, a company of 60 or 70 U.S. infantrymen had entered My Lai early ...

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 the leading German daily Die Welt. Germany's ongoing struggle with integration, usually carried out with grim zeal and intellectual debates, experienced a surprisingly sensual turn last week. The appearance of Turkish-German actress Sila Sahin's attractive, naked body in the May issue of Playboy magazine shows how young women ...

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 the leading Italian daily La Stampa. VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI isn't alone in his apartment at the Vatican. Four "guardian angels" help him, and recently there has been an addition to the personnel at his service. For the past six years, the pontiff's Vatican apartment has been run ...

President Obama has called the BP oil spill "the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced," and so has just about everyone else. Green groups are sounding alarms about the "catastrophe along the Gulf Coast," while CBS, Fox and MSNBC are all slapping "Disaster in the Gulf" chyrons on their spill-related news. Even BP fall guy Tony Hayward, after some early happy talk, admitted that the spill was an "environmental catastrophe." The obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh has ...

Greatest single news event of 1938 took place on September 29, when four statesmen met at the Führerhaus, in Munich, to redraw the map of Europe. The three visiting statesmen at that historic conference were Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain, Premier Edouard Daladier of France, and Dictator Benito Mussolini of Italy. But by all odds the dominating figure at Munich was the German host, Adolf Hitler. Führer of the German people, Commander-in-Chief of the German Army, Navy & ...