A. Craig Copetas

Cannibalism occurs more frequently among bears than among any other animal group. The world’s largest terrestrial carnivore with an incessantly antagonistic disposition and an innate ability to camouflage that fact, the bear uses his viciousness as a weapon. With stocky feet, small eyes, a broad head, and 28 highly curved claws that are impossible to retract, the bear strikes without notice and eats his victim completely.

Paris

PARIS—The massacre at Charlie Hebdo—and the manhunt for the suspected assassins that has just led to their killing by French forces—have obliged the millions of visitors who had mostly perceived the City of Light as a theme park of luxury goods, well-behaved children and romance along the Saint-Germain-des-Pres to sit down for a violently intense and long overdue French lesson.

As cyber-currency magnates promote bitcoins festooned with hypnotic barcodes, spare a thought for the officially non-existent nation of Somaliland.

In the run-up to the Paris mayoral election in March 2014, politicians of all stripes this holiday season are mired in a existential quarrel: Has the City of Light turned into the Bronx?

The Pharaohs of Egypt—who developed the luxury industry of enlarging a duck’s liver to some 10 times its normal size and then slathering the harvest on toast to enrage film star Kate Winslet—have handed French president François Hollande a formidable gastroeconomic stimulator as his Socialist government waddles towards the end of its second year of fiscal crises.

BASEL—Among the 122,000 enormously rich watch fanatics assembled here last week, you’d have been hard-pressed to find any who didn’t think the rumored iWatch is daft and the reported Samsung watch phone is a waste of time. Anyone who believes differently, they would tell you, likely needs professional help to discover a life outside of social media.

“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it,” was Rudyard Kipling’s foremost recommendation to adventurous 19th century tourists intent on visiting troublesome locations like the ruins of Carthage in the French Protectorate of Tunisia. Some 150 years later, Tunisia’s prime minister, Hamadi Jebali, recently told holidaymakers that the new prime directive for enjoying a vacation in his roiling Islamic North African nation is ”not being afraid of the beards.”

The annual Alpine burlesque of some 2,630 global economic and political leaders billed as the World Economic Forum raises the curtain on its 43rd performance this week in Davos, Switzerland. Choreographed by German marketing impresario Klaus Schwab, the show-in-the-snow “committed to improving the state of the world” will once again display the precision of Harry Houdini’s observation that “an old trick well done is far better than a new trick with no effect.”

Back in 1958, Pete Brock made General Motors cool.

Looking for a way to wipe out your country’s national debt, miraculously generate job growth and cut the cost of laundering those environmentally-unfriendly hotel towels soiled by tourists? The United Nations, in its infinite wisdom, selected St. Lucia’s Day in Madrid to offer the world a billion solutions.

After some 2,500 years of calling Transalpine Gaul home, the French national hero Obelix is skipping town. The actor who plays the brutish superhuman—Gerard Depardieu—is moving to Belgium, which does not impose a tax on personal wealth.

The last time an absolute monarch turned out the lights in Paris, “the darkness was so complete that the city guards could report 15 unsolvable killings on a nightly basis,” says French historian Andrew Hussey.

Ur: a cautionary tale about economic collapse.

General Motors Co. and PSA Peugeot Citroen, in search of a snug institutional solution to rising gas prices and plummeting car sales, dispatched five senior executives to a supercharged steering committee in Germany eight months ago. Their mission: create a global Franco-American alliance to stem the red tide of idle manufacturing plants, discounted automobiles, and thousands of laid-off workers. Perhaps it could also help GM pay back the outstanding $24 billion of the $49.5 billion bailout it received from the US Treasury Department, which now controls 30% of its shares.

To understand how Popeye, the popular cartoon sailor man, who made his debut in the year of the Great Depression, has returned 83 years later to thwart a solution to the European financial crisis, it helps to know something about German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble’s muscular Bluto approach to this week’s critical European Council meeting in Brussels.

The Nobel Prize Committee is distinguished in many ways, but it mainly operates like a Loyal Order of Moose lodge for potty Norwegians, who nowadays know little about literature and even less about peace. The Grand Herder of Oslo is Nobel Chairman Thorbjorn Jagland. Known to his friends as Jurij, the former Norwegian Prime Minister announced Oct. 12 that he would hand his politically bilious and financially bungled European Union neighbors $1.2 million for bagging the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize.

There’s no deficit of black bile inside the psychiatric office of Dr. Konstantinos Kanellakis in Athens. With ever increasing numbers of Greece’s 11 million citizens frightened, despondent and bankrupt from five years of financial turmoil, Kanellakis says the disease Hippocrates called μελαγχολία (black bile) and modern physicians identify as clinical depression has reached epidemic proportions, releasing a further contagion on the country’s economic recovery.

The Internet took the drab out of junk. eBay made debris desirable. Yet it took a 44-year-old Industrial Age stalwart like Bill Angrick to make the online auction of 500 oxidized South African railway haulage wagons as amusing a home shopping experience as bidding on antique toys and slightly used iPads.