By Christopher Alexander Gellert The country was littered with flags this past weekend. You couldn’t walk down a street without seeing them flying in yards and from apartment windows. In Chile, September 18 marks the South American nation’s independence from...
This article is part of a News-Decoder series of “decoders” that explain crucial background to big issues. For more decoders, click here. By Pauline Bock Waves of migrants and refugees are threatening one of Europe’s bedrock achievements — the...
By Nelson Graves Here at News-Decoder we take stock on Fridays and look ahead to the next week’s news themes. It’s a way of making sense of developments that in the digital age can go by in a flash and confuse more than illuminate. Here’s a note I...
By Colin McIntyre At a time when the European Union’s borders are under siege from thousands of refugees and immigrants fleeing war, persecution and poverty, the prospect of enlarging the 28-nation bloc would seem a distant dream. Yet negotiations continue with a view...
Cocaine seized by police in Panama City, 21 September 2011. (AP Photo/Arnulfo Franco) This article is part of a News-Decoder series of “decoders” that explain crucial background to big issues. For more decoders, click here. It’s the stuff of...
By Léa Surugue Patrick Roca never used to consider himself a rebel. But times have changed. “We Catalans do not reject Spain, but we feel very disillusioned,” said Rocca, who was born in France of parents from Spain’s Catalan region. Rocca is one of...
By John Mehaffey An Olympic quiz question, which usually surprises sports followers, is to name the current rugby union gold medalists. The answer is the United States, victors over France at the 1924 Paris Games. Rugby was dropped from the Olympics after the Paris...
The world is grappling with its biggest migrant crisis since World War Two. To understand, it’s important to distinguish between refugees and migrants. See also our Decoder on migration crises. If it were a country, the “nation of the displaced” would be the...
This is the second in a series of articles on the U.S. presidential election. To read about the election process, click here. For more “decoders” explaining big issues, click here. The 2016 presidential election is 14 months away, but candidates are...
By Diana Montaño As the guide led us through the dimly-lit concrete tunnels of Josip Broz Tito’s socialist era military bunker, I pieced together fragments of my American education. The bunker, an underground compound able to hold more than 300 people in the event of...