Yemeksepeti, an online food ordering service, achieved the dream of many startups on May 5, selling itself for $589 million to Delivery Hero, a German online food service. Yemeksepeti’s CEO, Nevzat Aydın, celebrated the success in an unusual way: by handing out bonuses totaling $27 million to his 115 employees.
Today, Silicon Valley may be the seat of innovative business culture, but the model for this arguably dates back to Italy in 1932, the year Adriano Olivetti took over his father’s typewriter business.
New York Magazine’s blockbuster story about the women who have accused comedian Bill Cosby of rape has struck a major chord online. The interviews by reporter Noreen Malone and Amanda Demme are portrayed in a striking cover image, showing 35 Cosby accusers along with an empty chair to represent rape survivors who have been forced into silence:
Things haven’t been great for Silvio Berlusconi in the past couple of years. Kicked out of parliament (albeit still enjoying some influence) due to his criminal convictions, and forced to help out the elderly while serving out his sentence, his repeated attempts at a comeback are on even shakier ground than usual.
The world—and not just the Catholic world—loves Pope Francis. But in the US, at least, the love’s not as strong as it used to be.
On July 24, 2015, it will be exactly one year since the last case of poliomyelitis was detected in Nigeria. Once that’s officially confirmed, the country will get off the list of areas where the wild polio virus is endemic—and with it, so will the entire African region.
Germany has lost quite a bit of its hard-won reputation for beneficence in the past few weeks. Thanks to Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble’s tough position in the Greek debt negotiations, the whole country is now back to being seen like a land of intransigent, hard, merciless people.
Lately Airbnb can’t seem to keep its foot out of its mouth. Right after releasing a much-derided, creepy ad that suggested the service helps you understand whether humankind is good by allowing you to sleep in people’s beds (that generated this fun spoof) the home-rental company has a new campaign comparing its homestay service for travelers to the treatment that immigrants endured coming to America via the iconic and notorious processing center at Ellis Island, in New York.
It’s a big week in Greece, as some of the austerity measures demanded by the country’s European creditors—and reluctantly agreed to last week by Greece’s parliament—begin to kick in. Among them: a 23% value-added tax (VAT) now charged on certain items previously taxed at a 13% rate.
AirBnb wants you to think about mankind—and it’s willing to drop some wordplay to make sure you do. “Is man kind?” it asks, through a voice over, in its new commercial featuring a lonely diaper-wearing toddler running through a dark hallway toward a house’s front door. “Are we good?” the ad continues.
As the holy month of Ramadan approaches its end on July 17, Muslims the world over are observing the prescribed rituals. The rituals perhaps take on a special significance for those observing Ramadan in Mecca—the holy site where every adult Muslim is meant to make a pilgrimage at least once.
Despite being home to only 2% of the world’s automotive vehicles, the sub-Saharan Africa region leads for the rate of deaths on the road, with an average of 24.1 deaths per 100 000 population that rises up to 27.8 deaths per 100,000 in the 19 middle income countries on the continent (as a comparison, the global average for middle-income countries is 20.1 per 100,000 people).
This item has been corrected.
While Greece’s economy and government teeter on the edge of the abyss, many have suggested that the best way to help the floundering country—and get a bargain holiday to boot—is to take your tourism there. From the Guardian:
On July 11, 1995, during the Balkan war, the ”worst crime on European soil since World War II” occurred in Srebrenica, Bosnia. Over 8,000 Muslim Bosniaks, mainly men and boys, were killed by the Bosnian Serb Army, under the command of Ratko Mladić—a military leader whose ominous crimes during the Balkan war gained him the nickname of “Butcher of Bosnia.”
The human tragedy unfolding in the Mediterranean has done so at a slower pace since April, when hundreds of migrants seeking refuge in Europe were killed after their boat capsized. That single disaster elicited broad acknowledgment that the resources provided under the European border protection operations known as Triton and Poseidon, which replaced the much larger Italian search and rescue program Mare Nostrum, were insufficient.
According to the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), insurance companies (with few exceptions) have to cover the costs of birth control to women. While several insurance companies in at least 14 states still fail to comply with the requirement (pdf, p.12) of offering all FDA-approved methods of birth control free of cost, the savings for women are still significant.
Kindergarteners in Venice are no longer be allowed to read Qual è il segreto di papà? (What’s dad’s secret?) or Rosso micione (Big red cat).
Emma Murphy is a 26-year-old mother of two from Dublin, and a manager at nutritional supplement company Forever Living Products. On Facebook, she often publicly shares recipes and tips, as well as pictures of her young children. But the video she posted on July 6 was on a considerably darker subject. Speaking directly into the camera, with a dark eye and distress in her voice while her toddler son plays in the background, she talks about the domestic violence she says she suffered at the hands of her partner, the father of her children.
Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister, has set a new standard for “leaving on a high note.” He resigned immediately after the landslide victory of the “όχι” (no) in the Greek referendum refusing further austerity in exchange for further bailout.
Since Greek voters rejected austerity measures in a referendum on July 5, the country has ventured into unknown territory. Cut loose from financial aid, the bills are piling up. Some of the more important unpaid invoices are for medicines, which accounted for 5.5% of the country’s imports in 2014. Foreign pharmaceutical companies are owed more than €1 billion ($1.1 billion) for supplies shipped in the first half of this year, according to the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).
While Europe is busy dealing with Greece, there is another emergency that’s remained quietly unresolved over the past several decades. Mario Draghi called it (pdf, p.6, in Italian) “the largest and most populous backward territory of the Euro zone.” It’s southern Italy, called Mezzogiorno, where over 21 millions Italians live—over a third of the population—and are responsible for producing under a fourth of the country’s GDP. This area has historically been problematic in terms of its economy while the productive heart of the country lies in the north.
It’s no secret that people from Hong Kong see themselves as separate from the people of mainland China, even though the independently-administered city is meant to be absorbed fully by China in 2047. Last year’s so-called “Umbrella Movement” made that clear in the eyes of the rest of the world as well.
Greece is in arrears on its sizable debt, and Europe is busy trying to understand how to handle the crisis. One approach is the stance taken by German chancellor Angela Merkel, who—like her government’s hard-lined finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble—is showing little mercy for Greece, and putting “the rule of law and responsibility” above all else in determining how Europe should proceed.
