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 Figaro. On this rainy spring morning, the Pic de Bugarach in southern France is completely shrouded in mist. But though the peak, at 4,000 ft., is invisible today, its rugged outline is known all over the world. Hundreds of websites are claiming that after an apocalypse on December 21, 2012, only the small village ...

Residents across New Mexico might be wondering what they did to anger Mother Nature. Ever since 2011 arrived on the scene, the weather has been nothing but ugly, beginning with a terrifying winter and now terrifying fires with the nebulous possibility of nuclear contamination. It began with a mass of arctic air in early February that sent temperatures plummeting to depths never seen in the state before. Pipes froze and many schools and government offices were closed ...

For Brad Pitt, the Cannes Film Festival is almost a perennial rite of spring. He's been there four of the past five years, either with his own films A UNIQUE SHOT Your part of the movie was shot ages ago. Yes, in the spring of 2008, after I did Burn After Reading and before Inglourious Basterds. I remember that Angie was pregnant then [with the twins she gave birth to in July 2008] and we were trying to ...

I hate gas grills. Perhaps hate is too strong a word. No, hate is the word. While I love gas ranges, and only wish I still had one instead of the electric coils beneath ceramic glass in my new apartment, when it comes to outdoor meat cookery, gas is a perversion and a corruption, effete and decadent. It justifies every jeer we heard from behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War: voices that said that America ...

Spring flowers bloomed and soldiers could be seen goose-stepping across Tiananmen Square as I walked through the recently renovated National Museum in Beijing. A new exhibit, "The Road of Rejuvenation," promised to highlight "the glorious history of China under the leadership of the Communist Party." So what's included in a permanent show that contains 2,220 "First-Rank Cultural Objects" and occupies roughly one-fifth of the massive museum's exhibition space? I made my way through room after room of obscure communist artifacts, ...

In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada's wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while ...

In July, 64-year-old Patrice Fike sold her home in Coral Gables, Fla., and her Mercedes, stored most of her furniture and moved into a one-room studio where many of her meals are provided. If she sounds like a retiree relocating to an assisted-living facility, guess again. Fike is living in dormitory housing for the Episcopal Church's General Theological Seminary in New York City, where she will spend three years and $100,000 of her savings and retirement income to prepare ...

The kids in Caldwell Parish will be ditching a lot of school this year. Every Monday, to be precise--and they're doing so with the principal's permission. Starting Aug. 11, this rural school system in northeastern Louisiana will hold classes only four days a week, following the lead of more than 100 school districts in 17 states. The reason? To save gas money. As the price of diesel--which most school buses run on--topped $4.70 per gal. last spring, school officials across ...

Fungus that grows on rot might not, at first, seem the perfect image of our culinary ideals. And yet, if there is one food that can most perfectly symbolize America's values in the way we eat and cook, it might well be mushrooms. All kinds of mushrooms: the otherworldly morels that have started to appear in the moist morning of the Great Lakes, yellowfoot chanterelles in the steep woods of the northern states, rugged Hen of the ...

Last spring, Manon Slome was walking down a street in New York City when she noticed something odd: "Store after store was closed. When stores are empty it's like, 'What's going on?' It was a feeling of siege." Plenty of people in America could make the same observation. Nationwide, 10% of shopping center stores sit empty, according to the real-estate analytics firm Reis. That's the highest percentage of vacancies since 1992 ...