Newsweek International articles from December 2004

Newsweek International archives from December 2004

The Right Stuff; Road Ahead: Great men balance pragmatism with true belief, and George W. Bush can look to his dad for some key lessons.
December 1, 2004... Byline: By Jon Meacham He was, as he put it, "a nervous, out-of-control dad." By Election Eve 2004, George H.W. Bush, a friend said, had turned into a "nervous wreck." To calm himself the 41st president of the United States first tried to...

Behind Bush's Back; New Term: While the president was blowing his chance at leadership, China was taking advantage. What he must now do.(George W. Bush)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Michael Hirsh George W. Bush did get one big thing right in the post-9/11 era. His campaign to spread democracy and freedom to a part of the world that the great transformations of the 20th century had bypassed--the Middle...

It's the Job Stupid; Europe: The power of its capital is slipping, but that doesn't mean the continent can't exercise global leadership.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Andrew Moravcsik (Moravcsik directs the European Union program at Princeton University.) Those in Brussels who dream that their new leader will be a powerful figure in the mold of Jean Monnet or Jacques Delors were thrilled, for a...

Look West, Europe; Go Further: Spain's former president urges the Continent to ally more fully with America in the war on terror and in economic reform.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Jose Maria Aznar (Aznar was president of Spain from 1996 to 2004.) There is a war being waged by Islamic terrorism against Western values. And Europe must commit itself more strongly to this struggle. In recent years, particularly...

The Fab Blair Boys; Youth Movement: In Central Europe, the rise of center-left politicians who follow Tony Blair may be a harbinger of leaders to come.
December 1, 2004... Byline: William Underhill (With Katka Krosnar in Prague) Stanislav Gross is a political prodigy. At 35, the former railway engineer ranks as Europe's youngest prime minister. Even before taking charge of the Czech Republic's ruling Social...

The Politics of Confusion; Hungary's rags-to-riches leader is on the left, and criticizes anticapitalist rivals on his right.(Interview)
December 1, 2004... Byline: William Underhill Three years ago Ferenc Gyurcsany was a self-made millionaire, little known outside Hungary's business community. Today he's the country's prime minister, championing a new-look brand of social democracy in Central...

Here Lies Peace; Inevitable? With no moderate leaders on the once dominant Sunni side of Iraq's divide, it's amazing that a civil war has not begun. One may soon.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Rod Nordland Imagine an alternative America for a moment, in which the black minority had ruled for hundreds of years. Whites were excluded from public office, rarely allowed in the police or Army and largely disenfranchised. Jails...

Israeli Intifada; World Of Trouble: Sharon has plenty of enemies, but his toughest are at home.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Joshua Hammer When Ariel Sharon swept into office as Israel's prime minister almost four years ago, Israel's religious right breathed a collective sigh of relief. In his three decades in politics, the Likud hard-liner had become...

Runs Like a Camel; Group Think: China is a nation governed by committee. That approach may work for fine-tuning the world's hottest economy. But it has also muddled Beijing's strategic vision.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Melinda Liu (With Jonathan Ansfield in Beijing and Jonathan Adams in Taipei) If a camel is a horse built by committee, why is China a thoroughbred? The world's fastest-growing economy is also the only one governed by a committee,...

Stealth Reformer; Japan: Koizumi has the charisma of a rock star, but as an agent of change he keeps a low profile. His approach may be working.(Junichiro Koizumi)
December 1, 2004... Byline: George Wehrfritz (With Hideko Takayama in Tokyo) Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi knows the danger of taking credit for success in Japan. Two years ago he appointed a tough new bank regulator, Heizo Takenaka, who declared in a...

There Is No Turning Back; Koizumi says he's done more to reform Japan than any other leader.(Interview)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Christian Caryl and Hideko Takayama Junichiro Koizumi spoke with NEWSWEEK's Christian Caryl and Hideko Takayama in a special reception room in the Kantei, the prime minister's official residence in Tokyo. Excerpts: On George W. Bush...

A Gaping Silence; Free Riders: If logic drove history, China, India and Japan would be leading the effort to define a new world order. But they're not.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Kishore Mahbubani (Mahbubani, a former diplomat, heads the school of public policy at the National University of Singapore.) There are two great certainties of the early 21st century. First, Asia's role in the world will increase....

The TV Democracy; No Joke: Everyone likes to laugh at the Philippines for actor-politicians, but they're a prototype for your next leader.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Jessica Zafra (Zafra is an author, journalist and former Manila television talk-show host. She has no plans to run for office, yet.) The Philippine movie industry is in a slump, but many actors have adapted nicely to the crunch....

Gods of Politics; Church And State: The head of Tibet's Buddhist faith, and its government in exile, talks about scandal, desire and the line between spirituality and power.(Dalai Lama)(Interview)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Melinda Liu and Sudip Mazumdar At 15 the Dalai Lama--whom followers consider the reincarnated Buddha of compassion--became leader of both the Tibetan government and the Tibetan Buddhist faith. After a Tibetan uprising against...

Globoquiz: Guess the Leader; Twin Regimes: One is a cold, calculating Russian, the other a gregarious and irreverent Latin, yet they rule as though separated at birth. How come?
December 1, 2004... Byline: Moises Naim (Naim, a former Venezuelan minister of Industry and Trade, is the editor of Foreign Policy magazine.) Let's play "Guess The Leader": What is the name of the president of this oil-rich nation? The following facts provide...

Not So Super Anymore; New Era: America is still No. 1, but no one is at the wheel of the global economy any longer. Who will run the next crisis?
December 1, 2004... Byline: Robert J. Samuelson The United States is the world's leading economic power--but perhaps no longer the world's economic leader. There's a difference. No one doubts the singular wealth or position of the American economy. It's...

At the Crossroads; Warning: As the U. S. deficits rise, so do the risks. The time to change course is now, before a crisis hits.
December 1, 2004... Byline: ROBERT E. RUBIN (Rubin is the director and chairman of the Executive Committee of Citigroup Inc. and the former U.S. secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton.) The economy of the United States is at a critical...

The Red and Blue; Agendas: How Bush could re-establish the American claim to global leadership by borrowing heavily from John Kerry.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Jeffrey E. Garten (Garten is dean of the Yale School of Management.) President Ronald Reagan used to say that America was a shining city on a hill. Former secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the United States the...

Oracle-in-Chief; Tilting Right: No successor can match the role of Greenspan, an archconservative who has become a rare bipartisan icon.(Alan Greenspan)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Rich Thomas Alan Greenspan took the traditional pledge to avoid the limelight when he became chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in 1987. He even made a joke of it: "Since I have become a central banker," he cracked, "I have...

The New Strongmen; Economic Rule: A fresh breed of leaders has put state control back in style, and with surprising success. Can it last?
December 1, 2004... Byline: Stephen Glain Mahathir Mohamad must be smiling. At the height of the Asian financial crisis, Mahathir ignored Western free-market advisers by imposing a very personal form of state control. The problem was money fleeing the...

Why CEOs Fail in Washington; Moving The Wrong Cheese: All the gurus say that government needs to run more like a business, but these days, the reverse is increasingly true.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Richard Haass (Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "The Bureaucratic Entrepreneur: How to Be Effective in Any Unruly Organization.") Walk into any bookstore, and you'll find shelf after shelf of...

Mission Impossible; Embattled: As he nears the end of his second term in June, Wolfensohn has to admit that his hope of reforming the World Bank is beyond reach.(James Wolfensohn)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Sebastian Mallaby (Mallaby is a Washington Post columnist and the author of "The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations.") When James Wolfensohn landed the job of World Bank...

Power to the Middle Guys; Future Shocks: Emerging markets resent taking orders from the IMF. So let them invest their own reserves in better global governance, says the fund's former top economist.(International Monetary Fund)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Kenneth Rogoff (Rogoff, the IMF's former chief economist, is professor of economics and Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University.) There has been a lot of rhetoric the last few years about how governance of...

In the Quiet Crowd; Low Profile: The age of the supercelebrity CEO is coming to a close, replaced by a new generation who focus on staying out of the news.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Karen Lowry Miller As 2004 came to a close, one could be forgiven for wondering if the lessons of Enron, WorldCom and Tyco had ever registered where it counts. Corporate scandals kept popping up with amazing regularity as Marsh &...

Why the Worry? Fundamentals Rule: Stan O'Neal of Merrill Lynch waxes confident on leading a Wall Street investment house through this tumultuous era in the global markets.(Interview)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Rana Foroohar Ascents don't get much steeper than Stan O'Neal's. The grandson of a slave and now CEO of Merrill Lynch, O'Neal remembers picking cotton in an Alabama field before earning his M.B.A. at Harvard and working his way...

The Fight Plan; Jet Set: Rainer Hertrich talks about the battle to defend Airbus's lead over Boeing, and Europe's effort to crack the U. S. military market.(Interview)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Rainer Hertrich (Hertrich is CEO of EADS, the owner of Airbus) The decades-long dog-fight between Europe and the United States for command of the commercial-airline market has recently turned ugly. In 2003 Airbus delivered more...

The Hot Zone; Real Competition: The CEO of market-leading Nokia says his rivals are finally getting their act together. But he plans to regain the edge.(Interview)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Karen Lowry Miller Nokia, which has long controlled more than a third of the global mobile-phone market, was shocked out of complacency in early 2004 when rivals were better prepared with midrange models and fashionable clamshell...

The Indian Edge; Job Hunt: The CEO most responsible for India's rise as an outsourcing power discusses how it will hold its lead--and produce its own Rockefellers.(Interview)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Sudip Mazumdar In 1981, seven left-leaning engineers collected 10,000 rupees (about $1,200 then) to found a company that is now Infosys, the leader of India's dramatic rise as a global leader in information services. Headquartered...

The Buy Side; Homebody: The race to establish China's first global brand is now led by a little-known contender that wants to purchase a name, not be one.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Alexandra A. Seno Most of the world may never have heard of a rough southern Chinese city called Huizhou. After all, it is an unremarkable factory town, at least three hours' drive from Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province. But...

Enrons of China; Scoops: They reveal a business culture that is now teetering on the brink between cronyism and capitalism.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Hu Shuli (Hu is the editor of Caijing magazine, a leading business publication.) Feng Mingchang seemed a wonderful success story, and he had his government to thank. The party secretary of Nanhai city accompanied Feng, a former...

The Alpha Bloggers; 'A-Listers': Meet the feisty elite of super-bloggers who set the tech agenda. They show how power can shift in the age of the Internet.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Steven Levy A few months ago no one had heard of "podcasting" because it didn't exist. Last summer an MTV veejay turned technophile named Adam Curry wanted to do an Internet-based radio show, distributing it through his Weblog. (A...

The Googlets; Followers: Google, the high-tech phenom of 2004, is inspiring a host of me-too competition from giants like Microsoft, as well as a raft of start-ups.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Brad Stone Standing guard over the 101 freeway into San Francisco these days is a 30-foot-tall anachronism: a billboard for a dot-com. In huge, multicolored letters, the sign says blinkx, and underneath it, linking your world: web,...

Victory of Voice; Mobile Futures: The CEO of Vodafone talks about the role of the handheld phone in the dawning age of ubiquitous computing, and who will control the traffic.(Interview)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Rana Foroohar If you own a mobile phone, chances are you're putting money into Arun Sarin's pocket. The CEO of Vodafone runs the world's largest wireless company, with 147 million customers in 26 countries. After his highly...

Take No Loafers; New Deal: Siemens told workers to accept pay cuts or see their jobs go to Hungary. As Siemens goes, so goes Germany.
December 1, 2004... Byline: With Stefan Theil in Berlin German CEO's don't dole out threats lightly. Tough labor laws and some of the world's strongest unions have made it too dangerous. But that came to an end last summer, when Siemens AG gave 4,000 workers...

Field Command; Digital Age: The rise of 'the Koreans' usually means Samsung, but a local rival is emerging as a global player, too.(LG Electronics)
December 1, 2004... Byline: B. J. Lee Kim Ssang Soo, 59, is a mobile man. As CEO of LG Electronics, he spends 70 percent of his time on the road, which is where he likes to make decisions. While traveling in the Middle East recently, he decided to make a...

Latino Invasion; Oscar Moment: The class of 2004 could produce more nominations for Latin Americans than the previous 74 years combined.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Sean Smith Foreigners are the best thing that ever happened to Hollywood. Some of the most celebrated directors of "American" films weren't born in the United States at all: Billy Wilder, William Wyler, Frank Capra, Elia Kazan,...

Art of the Tube; Market This: HBO has put America ahead of Britain as the leader in quality TV, and it's rolling in profit, to boot.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Carla Power About a decade ago, a bunch of top executives at the cable channel HBO were sitting around when Chris Albrecht, then president of original programming, dared to ask a dangerous question. "Are we what we say we are?" he...

McFashion Design; The End Of The Lines: Rather than fight, some of the biggest names in couture are either closing up luxury shops or going to work for the former knockoff artists of fast fashion. It's a seismic shift in power.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Dana Thomas (With Jenny Barchfield in Paris and Marie Valla in London) On a frisky Friday night in September, Paris's chic and hip flocked to the rooftop restaurant of the Centre Pompidou to celebrate fashion's coolest new...

A Grand Alliance; Let's Hope: That Bush can transform himself into a unifying global leader. Others have done so.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Zbigniew Brzezinski (Brzezinski, a former U.S. national-security adviser, is author most recently of "The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership.") Before President Bush steps to the podium to deliver his second Inaugural...

Gamal-nomics; Egypt: Nasser led the Arab economies into corruption and long-term decline. Can a young Mubarak lead them out?
December 1, 2004... Byline: Rana Foroohar (With Gameela Ismail in Cairo) Even by Middle Eastern standards, Egypt has never been an easy place to do business. Its inwardly focused economy has stagnated for the past seven years. Inflation is rife, tariffs and...

I Hate the Word 'Cheap'; Karl Lagerfeld on why he is about to introduce a line of 'inexpensive' clothes for H&M.(Interview)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Jenny Barchfield Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld, the Kaiser of Couture, has decided to give the rag trade a try. The German-born couturier recently presented his debut collection for Sweden's fast-fashion company H&M. Lagerfeld...

After Arafat; Power Struggle: Whoever is acceptable to the Palestinians and their Arab allies may not be to Bush, and vice versa.(Yasir Arafat)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Gilles Kepel (Kepel is professor and chair of Middle East studies at Sciences Po in Paris and author of "The War for Muslim Minds.") The last picture of Yasir Arafat before he left Palestinian soil and was flown to a French...

Free the Leaders; Urgent: Decision-makers boxed in by short-term, national interests need a new platform to attack global problems.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Klaus Schwab (Schwab is founder of the World Economic Forum.) As the list of challenges facing the world grows ever longer and the time to address them grows shorter, global leadership and governance have reached a defining moment....

A Matter of History; Legacy: Why do our leaders seem so small compared with the World War II generation? Wait for the secret memos to come out, and Bush and Blair may someday look much larger than they do now.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Sir Martin Gilbert (Martin Gilbert is a leading historian. Among his books are "Churchill: A Life" and "Israel: A History.") People often ask how history will remember our generation of leaders in comparison with the second world...

Still on Top; Leadership deficit? No way, says Bush's top economic adviser. Despite its problems, he believes America will continue to dominate and be a role model to the global economy.(Interview)
December 1, 2004... Byline: Michael Hirsh Gregory Mankiw's intellectual honesty has occasionally landed him in trouble. Not long after he became chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in Washington, Mankiw suggested that the "outsourcing" of jobs, a...

Periscope: The Leaders to Watch in 2005; On the Horizon: The turmoil of our time raises the stakes for leaders, whether the task is calming China, uniting Europe or clearing up scandals at the United Nations. Here are 11 heavy hitters on the rise in '05:.
December 1, 2004... Byline: Jonathan Ansfield, William Underhill, Karen MacGregor, Stryker McGuire, Michael Hastings, Karen Breslau, Carla Power, Mac Margolis, Joe Cochrane, Eve Conant Will Wen Be China's Next Big Fall Guy? By the tightly scripted...

Mail Call: American Elections.(Letter to the Editor)
December 6, 2004... As soon as the U.S. election results came out, many readers shared their own unanimously negative views on the Bush re-election. "I feel nauseous," wrote one. Another said, "The first time he won with voter fraud; this time with war and fear."...

The West's Moment; Protesters in Ukraine sang a new anthem: Vstavay! Rise up! But Moscow didn't like it, and some warn of a new Cold War. Shades of 1989?(Cover Story)
December 6, 2004... Byline: Michael Meyer (With Frank Brown in Kiev, Stryker Mcguire in London and Eve Conant in Washington) It's hard to escape the echo of 1989, the year the Berlin wall fell and oppressed peoples rose up to unseat communist dictators across...

Survival Mode? With his economy in tatters and international pressure rising, Kim Jong Il may be running out of options.
December 6, 2004... Byline: Hideko Takayama and Christian Caryl (With B. J. Lee in Seoul) You have to give credit to Kim Jong Il for one thing--he knows the score. The North Korean leader's subjects may be largely ignorant of the bleak situation in their...

No More Secrets; A transparency law is opening sensitive government files to public scrutiny. It's a positive step, if it lasts.
December 6, 2004... Byline: Scott Johnson Arturo Fernandez Lopez, a midlevel accountant in a division of Mexico's Interior Ministry, got a lump in his stomach two years ago as he was crunching numbers. The 55-year-old bureaucrat began to notice what he calls...

Les Miserables, Indeed; We're depressed, very depressed. Please, put us to bed!
December 6, 2004... Byline: Eric Pape Wanted: 24 women to lie in bed, largely immobile, for 60 consecutive days as part of a test to simulate weightlessness on behalf of the European and French space agencies. Participants cannot sit or stand, and must...

The People's Bank; As it dies out in London, private banking emerges in informal Chinese style, ready for entrepreneurs.
December 6, 2004... Byline: Craig Simons Most bankers would be worried if Li Qiyou walked into their office. Dressed in a cheap blue suit, the 45-year-old resident of Wenzhou, a city in China's coastal Zhejiang province, grew up in the countryside during the...

End Of The Line; The sale of Cazenove, broker to the queen, marks a milestone in the decline of Britain's elite private banks.
December 6, 2004... Byline: Rana Foroohar Twenty years ago, when British investment banks began selling out in a wave that would transform the City of London from a bastion of "gentlemanly capitalism" to a hub of American-style wheeling and dealing, one firm...

Big Brother and 'Little Russians'; The very notion that Ukraine would turn into a Western outpost on Russia's southern flank is a nightmare for Russia's ruling elite.(Cover Story)
December 6, 2004... Byline: Richard Pipes (Pipes is professor emeritus of Russian history at Harvard. His latest book is titled "Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger" (Yale University Press).) The dramatic events unfolding since Ukraine's presidential election can...

The Golden Age; The number of old people in the world is soaring. Soon they will change everything from politics to tax structures to the width of doorways.(Cover Story)
December 6, 2004... Byline: Ginanne Brownell and Carla Power (With Kathryn Williams in New York, Sarah Schafer in Beijing, Stefan Theil in Berlin, Karen Macgregor in Durban, Sudip Mazumdar in New Delhi, Jenny Barchfield in Paris, Cristiana Fabiani and Edward...

Retirement Homes: A Final Bow for Aging Stars; In The Retiro dos Artistas is a place where Brazil's aged thespians can kick back. It's become a symbol for elderly rights.(Cover Story)
December 6, 2004... Byline: Mac Margolis Tucked away on the scruffy outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, the Retiro dos Artistas, or Artists Retreat, is hardly Golden Pond. The concrete walkways are uneven and cracked, the boxlike homes are cramped and often the...

Home Care: Watching Out for Mom; A Japanese town comes up with a novel way of helping residents care for their parents: a network of electronic sensors.(Cover Story)
December 6, 2004... Byline: Hideko Takayama Katsuhiko Takano was worried about his mother. At 78, Yoshiko Takano was still independent, energetic and very attached to her friends, home and gardens--as well as her favorite karaoke class--in Maruko, a peaceful...

Dumb and Dumber; Were Neanderthals our ancestors or just a bunch of evolutionary deadbeats? The evidence is coming in.
December 6, 2004... Byline: Tara Pepper They vanished from the earth 35,000 years ago but Neanderthals continue to prowl through our imaginations, clad in fur and wielding clubs. Since the skeletal remains of these archetypal cavemen were discovered by...

The Addict's Brain; Scientists think they're close to finding a single drug that can dampen the yen to smoke, drink and do drugs.(topiramate)
December 6, 2004... Byline: Temma Ehrenfeld (With Mike Elkin in Madrid) Jose Galan was 30 years old when he realized that alcohol was consuming his life. As a student at the Complutense University of Madrid, Galan would often go out with his friends in the...

How the Big Freeze Killed the Buffalo.
December 6, 2004... Byline: William Underhill Picture a bison. He's curly-headed, low-slung and huge. The male, the largest land animal in North America, may stand two meters high and tip the scales at one ton. Despite this formidable profile, the bison was...

The Way Forward; We've outpaced the U.S., Europe and Japan, writes Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. Now we need a plan to stay at the head of the pack.
December 6, 2004... Byline: Gordon Brown (Brown is the Chancellor of the Exchequer.) Can Britain become an enterprise economy so dynamic that it rivals the United States? For decades such a comparison was unthinkable. Postwar Britain was the stop-go economy of...

Nadine Gordimer; Writing for a New Cause.(Interview)
December 6, 2004... Byline: Henk Rossouw Since the fall of apartheid and South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, Nobel Prize-winning author and vocal apartheid critic Nadine Gordimer has rallied behind her country's fight against HIV/AIDS. Inspired...

Glory, Glory, I've Been Fired!
December 6, 2004... Byline: William Dresser If Donald Trump appeared on a French version of "The Apprentice" and yelled "You're fired!" the producers wouldn't need to hit the applause button. Everyone would already be clapping. Getting fired in France is like...

Perspectives.
December 6, 2004... Byline: Quotation sources from top to bottom: BBC, Reuters, BBC, UPI, Reuters, New York Daily News "We are not lying anymore." A reporter from state-owned Ukrainian TV, announcing that it wouldn't bow to censorship. Instead, it joined...

Periscope.
December 6, 2004... Byline: Mark Hosenball, Jason Overdorf, Scott Johnson, Rod Nordland, Alexandra A. Seno, Kay Itoi and B. J. Lee, Ramin Setoodeh, Yasmine Mohseni, John Ness U.S. Affairs: Picking No. 2 A popular parlor game in Washington is figuring out...

Travel: Picture-Perfect Trips.(traveling to film locations)
December 6, 2004... Byline: Michelle Jana Chan Film-location scouts don't pull in the big bucks for nothing. They scour pristine beaches, chic nightclubs and gritty neighborhoods for the most memorable spots on earth. Trouble is, the credits roll by faster...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
December 13, 2004... America split in its choice for president, but most responses to our Nov. 15 election issue came from Kerryites dejected by George W. Bush's win. "Who can look at this man's achievements and say, 'Give him another chance'?" asked one. But Bush...

Dangerous Liaisons; Europeans are swept up by 'Sinophoria.' But this love affair is double-edged.(Chinese relations)
December 13, 2004... Byline: Stefan Theil (With Eric Pape in Paris) Jacques Chirac played the perfect guest. Touring Beijing with 30 French executives in October, the French president called for an end to Europe's arms embargo on China. He labeled Taiwan's...

Tussle at the Top; Are conflicts within the Politburo stalling reforms, from revaluing the yuan to slowing the economy?(China)
December 13, 2004... Byline: Melinda Liu and Jonathan Ansfield (With Craig Simons in Beijing) Not so long ago many Western CEOs couldn't even say what the renminbi was, much less whether it should appreciate. Today China's currency, also known as the yuan, is...

The Peru Paradox; Toledo has boosted the economy. And he's more unpopular than ever.(Alejandro Toledo)
December 13, 2004... Byline: Joseph Contreras and Sharon Stevenson There must be times when Alejandro Toledo wishes he had been born an only child. In the three years since he was sworn in as president of Peru, Toledo has been rocked by a series of scandals...

Land of Ruins; Italy is falling apart, literally.
December 13, 2004... Byline: Barbie Nadeau The reopening of Rome's magnificent Palazzo delle Esposizioni this month was to be the premier social event of the year. Romans proudly called it "our MoMA," destined to become one of the most prominent cultural...

Reaching Out; But does Beijing really want to hear what President Chen Shui-bian has to say?(relations between China, Taiwan)
December 13, 2004... Byline: George Wehrfritz and Jonathan Adams (With Tim Culpan in Taipei) Alex Hsu says he defected to Taiwan's ruling party because of old-fashioned political pork--specifically, two marinas and a highway for his remote county of Taitung,...

Behind the Curtain; The country is at peace and still receiving lots of aid money. So why are its citizens growing ever poorer?(Cambodia)
December 13, 2004... Byline: Joe Cochrane Veal Kandal is the kind of village the Cambodian government doesn't want anyone to know about. The 40 farming families that live among dusty, drought-stricken paddies were facing ruin last week as the crops they need...

Air Travel: Upgrading First Class; The corporate jet has long been an American staple. Now European frequent fliers are discovering it, too.
December 13, 2004... Byline: Emily Flynn Americans used to be the bigguns of corporate travel. They puffed cigars on private jets, leaving underlings and foreigners to fly business class, one seat ahead of the tourists. When companies like Warren Buffet's...

Bird-Flu Challenge; An avian-flu outbreak could kill millions. Will we have a vaccine in time to stop it?(Cover Story)
December 13, 2004... Byline: Michael Hastings and Fred Guterl (With Sarah Schafer in Beijing and Joe Cochrane in Bangkok) For Zhang Jianxin, a poultry farmer at the forefront of the virus wars, the threat of an influenza pandemic wasn't something that should...

People's Television; Two German geeks are trying to do for TV what Napster did for music--make it free, and litigious.(televsion web service trades digitized programs)
December 13, 2004... Byline: Andreas Tzortzis Guido Ciburski and a few friends had gathered around a computer screen to watch live coverage of the 2002 Olympic Games opening ceremony in Salt Lake City, Utah, over the Internet. Apparently other cyberfans had...

Beyond Beckham; Does any other player have what it takes to become a global brand?
December 13, 2004... Byline: Malcolm Beith (With Ginanne Brownell in London) Nursing a broken foot, Wayne Rooney hobbled off the pitch just 27 minutes into England's Euro 2004 quarterfinal against Portugal to the applause of millions of television viewers...

The Curse of Red Ink; An ex-government minister attacks India's bureaucracy.(Governance, and the Sclerosis That Has Set In)(Book Review)
December 13, 2004... Byline: Jason Overdorf Arun Shourie, who has captained a half-dozen different ministries, knows what ails India's government. But reading his latest book, "Governance, and the Sclerosis That Has Set In" (262 pages. Rupa & Co. ), one gets...

False Prophets, Bad Economics; The question is whether we spend money to do a little good in a rich nation far into the future, or great good in a poor Bangladesh now?
December 13, 2004... Byline: Bjorn Lomborg (Lomborg is the organizer of the Copenhagen Consensus and associate professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark.) Global warming gets more scary by the minute. the European Union calls it "one of the most...

The Great Wall; Forget the rampaging growth numbers. China today looks much like Japan in the 1970s: about to slam into reality.
December 13, 2004... Byline: Ruchir Sharma (Sharma is co-head of global emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management.) Smart investors don't like tall buildings. Too often a country has announced a plan to build the world's highest structure in the...

Farewell to Troubles; Peace has come to Northern Ireland, at last. The surest sign is Belfast's renaissance.
December 13, 2004... Byline: Sarah Sennott On a cold November evening in Belfast, an eclectic group of students, writers and politicians gathers for a book party near Queen's University. Two old hands in the Northern Ireland peace process discuss the latest...

Trapping the Superbugs; Antibiotics are losing their punch as microbes learn to resist them. Can we stop the new killers?(Cover Story)
December 13, 2004... Byline: Anna Kuchment (Graphic text by Josh Ulick Graphic by Karl Gude) Nicholas Johnson nearly died from what he thought was a shoulder sprain. Last year the 13-year-old from Stafford, Texas, made an awkward tackle in football practice...

Risk Factors: In Search of Bone Health.( bone mass loss)(Cover Story)
December 13, 2004... Byline: Celeste Robb-Nicholson, M.D., and Meryl S. Leboff, M.D. (Robb-Nicholson is editor in chief of the Harvard Women's Health Watch newsletter; Leboff is associate professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. For more information go to...

Salameh Nematt: An Assault on Hypocrisy; The first democracies we're going to have in the region--potentially--are the ones that were forced upon the regimes in those countries.(Interview)
December 13, 2004... Byline: Michael Hastings Salameh Nematt's in box regularly over-flows with hate mail. The 42-year-old Jordanian columnist for Al-Hayat, a London-based Arabic daily, courted his biggest controversy in 1995, when he broke a story alleging...