Newsweek International articles from August 2004

Newsweek International archives from August 2004

The Gipper's Legacy.(Letter to the Editor)
August 2, 2004... Readers of our June 21 obituary praised Ronald Reagan for ending the cold war but were radically divided over the president's legacy. "It's a privilege to have lived in his time," wrote a fan. Others recalled Reagan's budget deficits, the...

The Chirac Doctrine; France gives the nod to Turkish membership in the European Union. What is Paris up to?
August 2, 2004... Byline: Christopher Dickey (With Owen Matthews in Istanbul and Tracy McNicoll in Paris) When French presidents invoke "the national interest," often as not it means they've cut a deal they'd really rather not explain. But when Turkish...

Moving In For the Kill; The Yukos affair enters its final phase. Investors are rightly outraged. But they miss an important point.
August 2, 2004... Byline: Frank Brown After months of circling, the Kremlin last week moved in for the kill. Russian courts laid claim to the sweetest and biggest piece of the embattled oil giant Yukos--a Siberian subsidiary that pumps 60 percent of the...

Fight for Fathers' Rights; Dads say separation laws are stacked against them.
August 2, 2004... Byline: Rana Foroohar (With Tracy McNicoll) A militant new movement is sweeping Britain, generating headlines and sparking protests. In one, a young man dressed as Spider-Man dangled himself from a crane near London Bridge late last year,...

The Militants Strike Back; Musharraf sent troops to the tribal areas to close the net on extremists. But they are bringing the fight to him.
August 2, 2004... Byline: Owen Matthews and Sami Yousafzai Mohammad Bilal's personal jihad against the enemies of Islam was rudely interrupted about two months ago. President Pervez Musharraf ordered the deployment of 70,000 Pakistani troops into his refuge...

Virtual Villains; Global gangsters are extorting money from online casinos with a novel threat: we'll spam you to death.
August 2, 2004... Byline: Avraham Karshmer It's been 60 years since Bugsy Siegel and his cronies ran Vegas, but gangsters are back in the gambling game, big time. Only now, rather than seeking control of real casinos, they are extorting cash from virtual...

Recasting Hong Kong; Filmmakers are overhauling the way they make movies to please mainland customers--and censors.
August 2, 2004... Byline: Alexandra A. Seno It's a familiar plot in Hong Kong films: hero down on his luck is transformed by a new sense of purpose, and amid a rain of gunfire and dazzling kung fu, finds himself in a heartbreaking romance. Only this time,...

Building a Bigger Star; With the music business flagging, industry execs are looking for European acts that have real global appeal.
August 2, 2004... Byline: Tara Pepper Zucchero--a.k.a. Adelmo Fornaciari--may be Italian, but he is well on his way to becoming part of a rare musical breed: the European rock star. Though his biggest fan base remains at home, his gravelly blues style has...

Dancing for Their Lives; Nothing illuminates Castro's Cuba better than music.(Last Dance in Havana: The Final Days of Fidel and the Start of the New Cuban Revolution)(Book Review)
August 2, 2004... Byline: Malcolm Beith Visiting Cuba tends to produce more questions than answers. How has the country's unique brand of socialism managed to stay afloat in the face of a strict U.S. embargo? How can the Cuban people remain so proud of...

The Power of the Past; Two new London productions tackle the meaning of history.( The History Boys)(Old Times)(Theater Review)
August 2, 2004... Byline: Tara Pepper For 19th-century historians like Macaulay and Trevelyan, the past was a steadily unfolding narrative of great events driven by heroic men, a map to inspire boys to create a nobler world. Future generations developed new...

Everyone Loves Brazil; The world has fallen hard for the boisterous culture that gave us caipirinhas and capoeira.
August 2, 2004... Byline: Mac Margolis (With Rana Foroohar in London, Karin Bennett in New York and Hideko Takayama in Tokyo) Roberto Dultra knows his way around. For better than three decades, the Rio de Janeiro travel agent has lured foreigners to Brazil...

China's Campus Killers; A recent spate of bloody rampages is forcing the country to grapple with its widening rich-poor divide.
August 2, 2004... Byline: Sarah Schafer Xue Ronghua, 24, a shy and studious eldest child, grew up in the poorest county in one of China's poorest provinces, Jiangxi. But even there, his family is considered a charity case. Residents of his home village...

Bernardo Bertolucci; Still on the Barricades.(Interview)
August 2, 2004... Byline: Jennifer Barrett Bernardo Bertolucci has been making provocative films for more than four decades. His latest movie, "The Dreamers," is no exception. It details the sexual awakening of a young American who moves in with a troubled...

How 5 Billion Got Left Behind; At best, the Doha Round will look pretty much like its predecessors--a deal cooked up in the back room between Washington and Brussels.
August 2, 2004... Byline: Jeffrey E. Garten (Garten is dean of the Yale School of Management.) It's high noon for global trade negotiations. since the breakdown of talks in Cancun, Mexico, last September, Supachai Panitchpakdi, the director-general of the...

Of Klezmers and Conciliation.(14th annual Jewish Culture Festival in Cracow, Poland)
August 2, 2004... Byline: Belinda Cooper When I first visited Kazimierz, the former Jewish ghetto of Cracow, it felt empty. Its 60,000 Jews had perished in Nazi concentration camps and, even in 1985, few Poles had moved in. The place was an eerie void. My...

Perspectives.
August 2, 2004... Byline: Sources From Top To Bottom: AP, The Washington Post, Reuters, Guardian.Co.UK, Agence France-Presse, Financial Times, AP "Time is not on our side." Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission, on the need to overhaul America's...

Periscope.(political changes in Palestinian Authority)(NATO's failure in Kosovo)(Sandy Berger controversy)
August 2, 2004... Byline: Dan Ephron, Michael Meyer, Mark Hosenball, Michael Isikoff, Rebecca Sinderbrand, Rana Foroohar, Mark Russell, Sarah Sennott, Sean Smith, Kathryn Williams, Alan Cordova What's going on in Gaza? After a series of kidnappings of local...

Snap Judgement: Books.(The Coma )(The Dog Fighter)(Public Enemies )(Brief Article)(Book Review)
August 2, 2004... Byline: Michael Hastings, Peter Plagens The Coma by Alex Garland The story is simple, readable, desolate: Carl, an office worker taking the last train home, gets severely beaten by thugs. So his coma begins, on page seven. He spends...

iPod World; In just three years, Apple's adorable mini music player has gone from gizmo to life-changing cultural icon.(Cover Story)
August 2, 2004... Byline: Steven Levy (With Brad Stone in San Francisco, Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop in Singapore, Tara Pepper in London, Dana Thomas in Paris, Kay Itoi in Tokyo and bureau reports) Steve Jobs noticed something earlier this year in New York City....

Tip Sheet.
August 2, 2004... Byline: Peter Suciu, Ginanne Brownell, Henk Rossouw, Sandy Lawrence Edry, Sue Caporlingua TECHNOLOGY Your Next DVD Player By Peter Suciu Introduced in 1997, the DVD format has reshaped the way we watch movies at home. Now...

UNCORKED / PORTUGUESE WINE.
August 2, 2004... Portugal has long been known for sweet port and simple rose. But today's drinkers prefer dry table wines, so Portuguese wine producers are adding new reds to their repertoire. Most are made from indigenous grapes, giving them distinctive...

Mail Call: A Regime in Trouble.
August 9, 2004... Our June 28 investigative report on Saudi Arabia led many Muslim readers to share the rage inspired by Saudi royalty. "Superb coverage!" praised one. Another bemoaned the "royals' corruption, nepotism and decadence," while a third lamented the...

Tony's Second Chance; The crisis in Sudan gives Britain's prime minister a shot at redemption. Can he lead the world on a new moral crusade?(Cover Story)
August 9, 2004... Byline: Stryker McGuire (With Eve Conant in Washington, Tracy Mcnicoll in Paris, Ginanne Brownell in London, Stefan Theil in Berlin and Edward Pentin in Rome) It's a long way from the beaches of Barbados to the killing fields of Darfur....

Europe's Real Big Spender; Quietly, Blair's "third-way" Britain is inflating government to virtually continental size.(Cover Story)
August 9, 2004... Byline: Rana Foroohar Here's a pop quiz: guess which European government has expanded the public sector at a rate almost unheard of since the 1970s. It has added 50,000 new government jobs, boosted overall public spending by 63 percent...

Does Terror Take a Holiday? Amid warnings of a summer 'bloodbath,' the coordination of antiterror efforts in Europe is lagging.
August 9, 2004... Byline: Eric Pape and Christopher Dickey (With Friso Endt in The Hague, Stefan Theil in Berlin and Tracy McNicoll in Paris) Ah, summer. A time when Europeans make their annual exodus to the beach, to the mountains, to hiking paths and...

A Bitter War of Words; Chavez and the private press can't seem to get along.
August 9, 2004... Byline: Phil Gunson President Hugo Chavez calls Venezuela's four main television stations "the four horsemen of the Apocalypse," and photos of various media bosses adorn the walls of a so-called hot corner in a downtown Caracas plaza. The...

Return of the Jews; For decades the story of Russia's Jews has been one of fear and flight to Israel. Now many are coming home.
August 9, 2004... Byline: Frank Brown It's not easy being Jewish in Russia, original home of the pogrom. But sometimes it's even harder to be Jewish in Israel. That's why an estimated 50,000 Jews have returned to Russia in the past five years. They come...

Off the Hook? U.S. officials are worried that Uribe may let paramilitary drug kingpins go free.(Cover Story)
August 9, 2004... Byline: Joseph Contreras and Steven Ambrus The swarthy, 65-year-old warlord cut an odd figure in his dark business suit, white dress shirt and red striped tie. And when it was time for Ramon Isaza to address a session of the Colombian...

China's Glasnost; The country's communist leaders are beginning to embrace the avant-garde art and literature they once considered taboo.(Cover Story)
August 9, 2004... Byline: Melinda Liu (With Craig Simons and Jen Lin-Liu) A decade ago avant-garde photographer Rong Rong lived in a ramshackle farmhouse and took odd jobs to support himself. "No one was interested in buying my work," he recalls. On the...

Where Art Meets Cash; Banned in Beijing? No need to fret. Just look for a wealthy real-estate developer.(Cover Story)
August 9, 2004... Byline: Jonathan Ansfield They were an odd couple: the Armani-clad property developer Zeng Wei and the scraggly-haired rocker Cui Jian, together at a bash last month at Zeng's new condo complex, Beijing Palm Springs. The developer welcomed...

Bullets for Beijing; The big EU powers are moving to lift the ban on arms sales to China in a frontal challenge to U.S. policy and power in Asia.
August 9, 2004... Byline: Stephen Glain Bush administration officials call it the "new great game." It threatens to rival the war in Iraq as a source of transatlantic tension and poses a serious, if subtle, challenge to U.S. hegemony in the world's most...

Europe After Monti; The race is on to replace the controversial competition czar, and its outcome is critical to the EU's future.
August 9, 2004... Byline: Stefan Theil For five years Mario Monti has been the most powerful man in Brussels. As the European Union's competition commissioner, the former economics professor has busted cartels, stopped mergers and fought the protections EU...

The Museum Wars; Europe's great art institutions are racing to transform themselves into modern centers of entertainment.
August 9, 2004... Byline: Tara Pepper (With Stefan Theil in Berlin, Barbie Nadeau in Rome and Mike Elkin in Madrid) At the Prado museum in Madrid visitors can peer into the past in a new exhibit of 19th-century photographs, which show artworks crammed on...

A Gold Medal for Brutality; Today's Olympics are tame next to the ancient Games.(Naked Olympics)(Book Review)
August 9, 2004... Byline: Michael Meyer The games begin. Let us brace ourselves for an unprecedented orgy of commercialism, jingoistic hype, logistical chaos and hubristic athleticism. Oops. Unprecedented? Not quite. As it turns out, the Olympics have...

A Dangerous Peace; Political tensions in Kabul have put the country on edge. If the rifts aren't healed, much could be lost.
August 9, 2004... Byline: Seth G. Jones (Seth G. Jones is an associate political scientist at the RAND Corporation.) Kabul has slipped into a nervous tension. Early last week President Hamid Karzai surprised his fellow Afghans and foreign diplomats by...

The Devil You Know; It is often assumed that Afghanistan's warlords are choking off any chance at progress. In fact, they may not be all bad.
August 9, 2004... Byline: Radek Sikorski (Sikorski, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, was Poland's deputy minister of foreign affairs.) When I first met Ismail Khan in 1987, he had been living in the saddle for years, leading...

A Harsh Light On Associate 82; A declassified Pentagon report claims Uribe once worked for Pablo Escobar.(Cover Story)
August 9, 2004... Byline: Joseph Contreras In September 1991 the U.S. Department of Defense compiled a list of individuals believed to be associated with Colombia's notorious Medellin drug cartel. There are 106 names on the newly declassified intelligence...

Red Belt of Love.(Russian life)
August 9, 2004... Byline: Valery Drannikov No doubt about it! this is a match! Look at yourself--a graceful, beautiful woman. And now look at him. A king--33 centimeters! Have you ever seen anything like it? A breakthrough for our industry!" Here I am,...

Hail to the Chief; DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION: John Kerry portrayed himself as a sober, credible commander in Boston. But his rival is already questioning the image. The battle is joined.
August 9, 2004... Byline: Howard Fineman and Tamara Lipper (With Susannah Meadows) By the time John Kerry reported for duty at the Democratic convention in Boston at 2200 hours, the president was asleep in the White House. So George W. Bush did not hear the...

Perspectives.
August 9, 2004... Byline: Quotation Sources From Top To Bottom: AP, New York Post, Reuters, AP, Reuters, BBC "America can do better, and help is on the way." Presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry , in his speech at the Democratic National Convention in...

Periscope.
August 9, 2004... Byline: Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff, Toula Vlahou, Peter Hudson, Dan Ephron, Marc Peyser and Ayesha McAdams-Mahmoud, Anna Arutiunova, Devin Gordon, Nicki Gostin UNITED STATES Looking for Targets Days after 9/11, a senior...

Snap Judgement: Books.(Little Scarlet)(The Generation of 'Uchira' and 'Osoro')(Country of Origin)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
August 9, 2004... Byline: Kay Itoi, Malcolm Jones Country of Origin by Don Lee It's 1980, and Lisa Countryman, an exotic young American, goes missing in Tokyo. She had been working as a hostess at an exclusive bar, claiming to be doing research on...

The New Infidelity; Overworked and underappreciated, more American wives are seeking comfort in the arms of other men.
August 9, 2004... Byline: Lorraine Ali and Lisa Miller (With Vanessa Juarez, Holly Peterson, Karen Springen, Claire Sulmers, William Lee Adams And Raina Kelley) When groups of married mothers get together, especially if there's alcohol involved, the...

Mind Reading; The new science of decision making. It's not as rational as you think.
August 9, 2004... Byline: Jerry Adler (With Mary Carmichael) In the control room next door are Steven Quartz, a Caltech neuroscientist, and Colin Camerer, an economist, who are looking inside my brain to help understand some of the most vexing problems in...

Tip Sheet.
August 9, 2004... Byline: Ron Gluckman, Sue Caporlingua, Marialuisa Plassmann TRAVEL Adventures In Luxury By Ron Gluckman The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan remains one of the most remote places on earth. Sealed until the mid-1970s, Bhutan allows...

Mail Call: Mission of a Lifetime.(Letter to the Editor)
August 9, 2004... Readers praised the subject of our July 5 report, Lt. Gen. David Petreaus, the man assigned to rebuilding Iraq's security forces. One called him "an invaluable asset to any army." Others weighed in on the war. "The U.S. should have no further...

Letter From France: Call Me in September.(European vacations)
August 9, 2004... Byline: David Ray Who could blame her for laughing? Not a giggle, but a guffaw held in so tight that tears welled in her eyes. My wife, a big muckety-muck at a French fashion house, thought she had seen it all. But never had an employee...

France: Paris Rising; Can the City of Light escape the shadow of its past and get its groove back?
August 16, 2004... Byline: Eric Pape (With Marie Valla and Tracy McNicoll) It was supposed to be a modernist marvel, an architectural icon of the space age. Nowadays most Parisians don't see the sprawling shopping center known as Les Halles quite that way....

Pakistan: Might Makes Right; Under Musharraf, the military has become more powerful at the expense of just about everything else.
August 16, 2004... Byline: Ron Moreau and Zahid Hussain In the war on terror, few foreign leaders produce results like Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. His security forces have arrested some of Al Qaeda's most-wanted leaders, including Osama bin Laden's...

Britain: Battle of the True Faiths; It's Islam vs. Christianity at Ye Olde Speakers Corner.
August 16, 2004... Byline: Sarah Sennott Jay Smith is a Christian on a mission, and he has the scars to prove it. Earlier this year, he says, two Muslim men attacked him in London's Hyde Park, nearly throttling him. A couple of years ago he was beaten up at...

On The Border: The Boomerang Effect; Musharraf has cracked down on the jihadis' infiltration into Kashmir. But the militants may now have a mind of their own.
August 16, 2004... Byline: Ron Moreau, Sami Yousafzai and Zahid Hussain Rafiq Bahai has seen better days. His Pakistani-based group of jihadis, the Al Badr Mujahedin, once led fierce raids on Indian troops in the disputed territory of Kashmir. But last year...

Hong Kong: A Message for Beijing; Hong Kong's democrats are gearing up for a fight.
August 16, 2004... Byline: George Wehfritz and Alexandra A. Seno The businessman delivered "a message from Beijing," says Albert (Taipan) Cheng, Hong Kong's undisputed king of talk radio. Early this year, he claims, a shadowy contact with close ties to...

Venezuela: A Latin Enigma; The recall vote may show whether Hugo Chavez is a new version of Fidel Castro or Daniel Ortega.
August 16, 2004... Byline: Phil Gunson In January 1999, Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez interviewed Hugo Chavez on a flight from Havana to Caracas, a month after Chavez had won Venezuela's presidential election. The Nobel laureate came away from...

Will Athens Shine? The big sports machines share an increasingly businesslike model. That could make these Games cleaner and fairer than any in recent memory.(Cover Story)
August 16, 2004... Byline: Tony Emerson (With Kathryn Williams in New York and Stefan Theil in Berlin) For tourists now descending on Athens, it may matter that the Greeks failed to finish the roof on the Olympic swimming pool. That ticket sales disappoint....

The Putin Revival; Russia's top sports fan inspires powerful patrons to adopt the Olympic team.(Cover Story)
August 16, 2004... Byline: Frank Brown (With Nadezhda Titova and Anna Arutiunova) Like so much else in Russia these days, the development of the Athens Olympic team reflects the very personal tastes of President Vladimir Putin. When the former KGB chief and...

China: Yuppie Flight; China wants medals. But rising prosperity is creating a crisis for its sports programs.(Cover Story)
August 16, 2004... Byline: Craig Simons Wang Junxia's decision to quit distance running was an early sign of the revolt now reshaping China's Olympics program. A skinny prodigy, she rose through state sports schools to the national team under Ma Junren, a...

Archeology: 'The Bay Was Packed With Ships'; How did a 'divine wind' save Japan from Mongolian invaders 700 years ago?
August 16, 2004... Byline: Hideo Takayama Kublai Khan was a conqueror of boundless appetite. When Japan refused to obey and pay tribute to the Mongolian ruler, he was outraged. Twice during the 13th century he sent massive fleets to invade Japan, possibly...

United States: Sink or Swim; The U.S. now runs its Olympic program on a venture-capital model, funneling money to likely medal winners, and leaving the rest to pay their own way.(Cover Story)
August 16, 2004... Byline: Adam Piore (With Jon Boroshok, Devin Gordon and Stefan Theil) The U.S. water-polo team was tired of losing. So team executive director Bruce Wigo came up with a plan that didn't require a Speedo or any underwater rough stuff. He...

The Bronze Syndrome; Germany revamped the way it picks and rewards its team after a slim gold haul in Sydney.(Cover Story)
August 16, 2004... Byline: Stefan Theil The swimmers were bickering and unmotivated, finishing far slower than their personal bests. The track-and-field team watched medal after medal fall to small-country upstarts such as Ethiopia or Belarus. That was four...

Brokering the Peace; An insider's account of mediating the Mideast conflict.(The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace)(Book Review)
August 16, 2004... Byline: Dan Ephron In the waning days of his presidency, Bill Clinton received a call from Prime Minister Ehud Barak. The Israeli leader was about to lose an election to his right-wing rival, Ariel Sharon. But if Clinton could make one...

Germany: Road to Better Days; Germany and Poland squabble anew over history. The good news is that the past has lost much of its power.
August 16, 2004... Byline: Stefan Theil The news was dismally familiar. Last week the Prussian Claims Society, a nationalist organization of Germans whose prewar estates were annexed by Poland in 1945, announced it would sue the Polish government in the EU...

Transition: An Eye Without an Equal; Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1908-2004.(Obituary)
August 16, 2004... Byline: Dana Thomas When Henri Cartier-Bresson was a young photographer in Paris in the 1930s, the artist Max Jacob took him to see a psychic. She recounted very precisely the path his life would take, to his death. As the years went on,...

A New Era For 'Big Oil'.(Interview)
August 16, 2004... Byline: Rana Foroohar Energy markets have never been more turbulent. Fear of terror, Middle East instability and the fate of the floundering Russian petroleum giant Yukos have driven oil prices to new highs--and stock markets to yearly...

There's Gold in Them States; From the Czech Republic to Brazil, winners are more and more likely to hail from beyond the big powers.(Cover Story)
August 16, 2004... Byline: Tony Emerson (Stephen Gibbs Alexandra Polier) Why are small powers rising? One clear reason is the fall of the Soviet Union, which freed nations like Ukraine, Belarus, and Bulgaria, all double-digit medal winners in Sydney. Another...

Perspectives.(notable quotes from around the world)
August 16, 2004... "America is our enemy." Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, remaining defiant as U.S.-led forces staged a bloody campaign against al-Sadr loyalists in the holy city of Najaf "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we....

Periscope.
August 16, 2004... Byline: Rod Nordland and Scott Johnson (Zoran Cirjakovic Joe Cochrane and Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop Mark Hosenball Michael Hastings and Sarah Sennott Kathryn Williams Ayesha McAdams-Mahmoud William Lee Adams) Iraq: A Question of Timing ...

Snap Judgement: Books.(America Alone)(The Likes of Us: A History of the White Working Class)(Dark Voyage)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
August 16, 2004... Byline: Stryker McGuire (John Ness Andrew Nagorski) America Alone by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke To see into the soul of President George W. Bush's government, you have to understand the neoconservative movement in the United...

Technology: Beam it Down, Scottie.(satellite radio)
August 16, 2004... Byline: Sandy Lawrence Edry (With Brad Stone) In the United States, satellite radio has become the newest must-have entertainment gadget for the digerati, following right behind DVD and MP3 players. Now the rest of the world is starting to...

Travel: Looking For Love.(Mauritius)(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... Byline: Emily Flynn Honeymooners, take note: Mauritius, a small sugar-cane island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, is fast becoming a top spot for romance, especially among Brits, Cypriots and South Africans. With no chartered flights or...

Festivals: Edifying Edinburgh.(Brief Article)(Calendar)
August 16, 2004... Byline: Ginanne Brownell For cultural enthusiasts, there is no place like Edinburgh in August, when the Scottish capital plays host to a variety of festivals (edinburghfestivals.co. uk ). TIP SHEET investigates: Edinburgh Festival...

Mail Call: A Tyrant on Trial.(Letter to the Editor)
August 23, 2004... Our July 12 article on Saddam Hussein's first court appearance drew little sympathy for him. One reader said "the only possible punishment" for Saddam is death. Others criticized America for censoring the video of the trial. "What freedom and...

Jews Fighting Jews? Israeli extremists are planning to resist Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw from Gaza--perhaps even violently.
August 23, 2004... Byline: Dan Ephron They call it summer camp, though no one on this pearly stretch of beach in the Gaza Strip was running underwear up a flagpole or draping toilet paper over the girls' bunk. Instead, about 25 Israeli teens trained for four...

Cross-Chunnel Fusion; With Eurostar, London has become a suburb of Paris.
August 23, 2004... Byline: Tracy McNicoll and Emily Flynn Paris? London? What's the difference, when you can hop a train after work as if it were the Metro and be in one or the other in time for dinner? This autumn, the superfast Eurostar celebrates its...

The Baltic Closet: If Asked, Don't Tell.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Byline: Steven Paulikas Who rules the world? So read a headline in Respublika, a leading Lithuanian daily newspaper. The answer: gays, along with Jews, of course. Respublika's unabashed bigotry reflects an ugly fact of life in the new...

Racism's Rising Tide; Instances of anti-Semitism receive global attention. But the new antipathy toward foreigners of color, especially in Italy, is a far more worrisome trend.
August 23, 2004... Byline: Christopher Dickey (With Eric Pape in Paris and Alessandra Fava in Genoa) Foreigners are not strangers to the old spice shop on Genoa's Via del Campo. The narrow little street near the port was first built up during the Crusades....

Invasion of the Critters; Seemingly harmless marine organisms are wreaking havoc on the world's coastal water ways, rivers and inland lakes.
August 23, 2004... Byline: Mac Margolis (With Tom Masland, Sudip Mazumdar And Liat Radcliffe) Cleanup crews are used to thankless tasks. But when maintenance men at the Sao Paulo Electrical Co. (CESP) descended to the bowels of the huge Sergio Motta hydro-...

Voice of the People; Protests in China are spreading like wildfire, and local officials have no idea how to put out the flames.
August 23, 2004... Byline: Sarah Schafer Two years ago Ma Yinxia and her husband, Zhang Yuanli, withdrew their savings and borrowed from friends to buy a shabby red taxicab in the western Chinese city of Yinchuan. The couple, laid-off factory workers,...

Opening Old Wounds; Nestor Kirchner wants justice for victims of the 1970s junta, but critics say his ideas are out of date.
August 23, 2004... Byline: Joseph Contreras and Peter Hudson (With Jimmy Langman in Santiago and Mac Margolis in Rio de Janeiro) Between 1976 and 1983, tens of thousands of Argentines were murdered or "disappeared" under a brutal military dictatorship. Some...

A Government Of Survivors; 'Our task is to write a new history for Argentina. It won't be easy. These days we are known mostly as a society that does everything wrong.'.
August 23, 2004... Byline: Hector Timerman (Timerman is Argentina's consul general in New York.) At 2 a.m. on April 15, 1977, 20 armed men in civilian clothes staged a violent, Gestapo-style assault on our home. My father--the publisher of La Opinion, at the...

When the Mood Strikes; Teens and young adults are now the group most threatened by sexually transmitted infections.
August 23, 2004... Byline: Emily Flynn and Malcolm Beith (With Karin Bennett In New York, Joe Cochrane In Bangkok, Khieu Kola In Phnom Phen, Marites Vitug In Manila, Sarah Schafer In Beijing, Sudip Mazumdar In Delhi, Mac Margolis In Rio And Marina...

Every Reason to Be Afraid; A terrorism insider tries (and fails) to be optimistic.
August 23, 2004... Byline: Christian Caryl In October 2001 the White House found itself scrambling to respond to a threat that could have made 9/11 look like a pinprick. Just weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Bush...

The Landscape as Star; A sensitive new filmmaker puts Mongolia on the map.
August 23, 2004... Byline: Mark Russell The call came over the walkie-talkie: the vultures were feeding. Byambasuren Davaa and her film crew scrambled into their SUVs and sped to where they had left goat carcasses to attract the scavengers for a scene in her...

Some of the Small Survive; Niche players are finding ways to battle the biggest of big boxes.
August 23, 2004... Byline: Daniel McGinn Joseph Diaz is standing in a Wal-Mart in suburban Boston surrounded by "shut-up toys." That's his name for the cheap playthings--93-cent blocks, 88-cent kites--shoppers buy to quiet their kids. But amid the...

Of Gods and Games; Despite construction delays and fears of terrorism, the Athens Olympics have already produced moments of splendor.(Brief Article)
August 23, 2004... Byline: Devin Gordon Before Sydney in 2000, the world was dazzled by the city's harbor with its soaring opera house. But the run-up to the Athens Olympics has been relentlessly bleak. While the hosts have extolled their heritage, the rest...