Newsweek International articles from January 2004

Newsweek International archives from January 2004

Praying for Health.
January 12, 2004... Our Nov. 17 cover story on faith and healing resonated with lots of readers. An oncologist wrote, "Many recoveries cannot be explained." An atheist credited not God but "the skill of my doctors." One reader asked, "Why would God heal only...

Corrupt Officials.(Latin America)
January 12, 2004... The plague of money laundering in Latin America is of breathtaking proportions. According to Charles Intriago, a former U.S. federal prosecutor who publishes the authoritative monthly newsletter Money Laundering Alert, an estimated $5 billion...

Muzzling a Whistle-Blower.(Mordechai Vanunu (Israel))
January 12, 2004... Sometime last year Mordechai Vanunu received a visitor at his prison cell in the southern Israeli town of Ashkelon. The guest was an Israeli security official, and the proposal he was carrying would have made Vanunu--a former nuclear technician...

The Parmalat Problem.
January 12, 2004... When Enron launched an era of scandal in 2002, Old Europe had a good sneer about the ugly excesses of American capitalism. Now Europe has a scandal as large as any uncovered in the United States. Between 8 billion and 14 billion euro have gone...

Is Paris Back on Board?(U.S./France)
January 12, 2004... They are called les visiteurs du soir, or visitors of the evening. Mostly top business executives and trusted friends, they drop by the Elysee Palace after hours to offer discreet advice to Jacques Chirac. These days, their nocturnal appeals...

A Failure to Communicate.(China/Korea)
January 12, 2004... Chinese diplomats are losing their patience over the tensions on the Korean Peninsula. The source of their frustration isn't so much the tough talk coming from Pyongyang as much as the apparent unwillingness of Washington to say much at all....

The Bold Coast.(Thai economy)
January 12, 2004... Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra rang in the new year with his trademark: sensational promises. Addressing supporters at an open-air stadium in Bangkok, the tycoon turned populist foretold a nation transformed in "a golden year for Thais...

The Axis of the Underestimated.(Thaksin Shinawatra, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva; Vladimir Putin )
January 12, 2004... Sharma is co-head of global emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. There is no apparent link between them, they have shown up on three different continents and not one of them was expected to change the course of his...

Buddha Unveiled.(''Treasures of a Great Zen Temple: The Nanzenji'')
January 12, 2004... Like many of her compatriots, Tokyo housewife Sachi Takeda describes herself as an "otera [temple] maniac" --a fan of the panels, sculpture and other religious-inspired artwork that can be found in Buddhist shrines in Japan. "Looking at somber...

High Stage for Low Brow.(musicals)
January 12, 2004... There are certain borders you mess with at your peril. Up there with the lines separating India from Pakistan and North from South Korea is the one that divides opera from musical theater. Conventional wisdom holds that operas are High Art,...

Friendly Brain Bug.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2004... When scientists discovered the defective gene that causes Huntington's disease back in 1993, half a million patients worldwide had reason to believe that a cure of the neuro-degenerative disease would be forthcoming. So far they've been...

War of Fire and Ice.(global warming)
January 12, 2004... Scientists agree that something is heating the atmosphere--they just can't agree on what. Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide from auto engines and power plants have something to do with it. Now scientists think soot--tiny bits of carbon that...

A Climb That Wasn't 'Fun'.(mountaineering)
January 12, 2004... Imagine a snowstorm close to the summit of a 6,100-meter peak in the Andes. On the descent, your climbing partner slips in treacherous conditions. His leg is badly broken. For hours you struggle to winch him down the mountainside. The cold is...

Leaving a Bad Taste.(mad cow disease)
January 12, 2004... Japan is a nation of beef lovers. Each year its citizens eat roughly a million metric tons of the stuff. So when Japanese scientists diagnosed a cow with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in September 2001, it was nothing less than a...

Sounds Fishy.
January 12, 2004... For healthy eaters, the choice between beef and fish can seem like a no-brainer--one is linked to heart disease, and the other is linked to its prevention. Over the past decade, the pro-fish chorus has only grown louder as scientists have...

Cashing In on Sin.(taxation)
January 12, 2004... Gregoire Chassaing, 25, sped into the southern French city of Montpellier in his mother's stylish PT Cruiser, disregarding the 50-kph speed-limit signs lining the road. After all, the average French driver is pulled over only once every 15...

A Nose for Trouble.(trained rats)
January 12, 2004... Shortly after the crack of a November dawn, in a sandy field near the Maputo-Harare railroad in Mozambique, Jullie, Josse and Johan went to work. These African pouched rats pressed their snouts to the ground in a 100-square-meter boxed-off...

The Virtues of Engagement.(U.S. military policy)
January 12, 2004... War is too important to be left to generals, so usually it isn't. And U.S. presidential elections are certainly far too important to be left to Americans--yet they still are. For most of 2004 the rest of the world will stand by while debate...

'We Are 25 Years Late'.(Iraq War)(Interview)
January 12, 2004... Remember the old days when France and the United States joined together in bold nation-building experiments? Before George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac began battling it out on the world stage, Bernard Kouchner, France's former minister of Health...

No Time Like the Present.(Burma)
January 12, 2004... Time stands still for no man. Time takes its toll. Time is of the essence. During a recent visit to Burma's Shan state, the heart of the infamous Golden Triangle, I thought often of those commonplace English expressions--partly because almost...

Perspectives.(quotations )
January 12, 2004... "This is the apocalypse." Mohammed Karimi, resident of Kerman province in Iran, where an earthquake killed more than 30,000, including his wife and 4-year-old daughter "They certainly didn't need the almanac to locate the Twin...

Periscope.(international events)
January 12, 2004... IRAN Reading the Fault Lines By the end of last week, after a Dec. 26 earthquake in the mud-walled city of Bam had killed more than 30,000 people, Tehran was sounding prickly again. Although U.S. supplies and small relief teams had...

Tip Sheet.
January 12, 2004... HEALTH Cold Comfort Indeed By Mary Carmichael All the flu going around in the past few months has eclipsed that usual winter complaint: the common cold. But sniffles and coughing have one problem the flu doesn't. While antivirals...

The Long Road Ahead.(Ahmed Qurei; Ariel Sharon)
January 19, 2004... Our Nov. 24 interviews with Ahmed Qurei and Ariel Sharon did not elicit much hope in our readers for peace in the Middle East. One called them a "dialogue between the deaf." Others vilified Sharon as a "terrorist" or Qurei for "maneuvering...

Man for All Seasons?(Michael Howard )
January 19, 2004... "He's a grown-up." It's said so often about the new leader of the Conservative Party, by friend and foe alike, that it might one day become an apt epitaph. At 62, though, Michael Howard is not only very much alive but the single best hope for...

The Migration Economy.
January 19, 2004... The foreign worker is many things to many people. For conservative politicians and trade-union organizers in industrial countries, he is the illegal migrant--a lawbreaker who deserves a one-way ticket back to whatever country he came from. For...

An Exercise in Self-Deception.(Mexican immigration)
January 19, 2004... Massey is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. The United States wants to have its cake and eat it, too. Since 1986 we have moved in two diametrically opposed directions in our policy toward Mexico. In that...

Another World.(NASA Mars rover)
January 19, 2004... Morton is author of "Mapping Mars." If you saw this patch of rock-studded wasteland in the Mojave Desert, a few hours from Pasadena, California, you wouldn't look twice. After a trip of 300 million miles, though, it's a sight for sore...

An End of Innocence.(Roh Moo Hyun)
January 19, 2004... Twenty visitors is all the home of Syngman Rhee, South Korea's first president, rates on an average day. The few who explore the traditional courtyard residence, set beneath a hillside in downtown Seoul, find relics of a young man's heroic...

The Curse of Celebrity.(Fernando Poe Jr.)
January 19, 2004... Few people would have guessed that Fernando Poe Jr., the popular Philippine movie star, even followed politics. On the silver screen, Poe, 64, is known best to his fans as the strong, silent hero who's always looking out for the little guy....

Tolerating Intolerance.
January 19, 2004... Like most of Western Europe, Germany considers itself a secular democracy. Article Four of its Constitution guarantees equal treatment of all religions. But that hasn't kept the governments of Bavaria, Baden-Wurttemberg and five other German...

Going Too Fast?(Chinese economy)
January 19, 2004... On the big bed in their one-room apartment, Tang Lihua and his wife, Guo Jine, cuddle under a fluffy blanket as candles flicker on a night table. The couple's 9-year-old daughter is bopping around the room, lighting more candles out of boredom,...

Behind the Bailouts.(Chinese finance)
January 19, 2004... It was an expensive week. First Beijing dropped almost $1 billion to rescue the country's fifth largest brokerage. Then a few days later the government plunked down $45 billion to help wipe bad loans off the books of two of its biggest banks....

Putin Versus Big Oil.(Vladimir Putin)
January 19, 2004... The writing is on the Kremlin wall: oil taxes are going up this year. All that remains to be seen is exactly who will pay and how much, and the answers are critical for an oil industry that makes up nearly half of Russia's GDP. They also will...

Boomer Blues.(album sales)
January 19, 2004... A world without the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" or Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" is hard to imagine. Musicians have long considered the album to be the pinnacle of their art, the rich,...

A Leader Foiled By an Old System.(Vicente Fox)
January 19, 2004... Castaneda was foreign minister of Mexico from 2000 to 2003. Mexico and Vicente Fox are at an impasse. Halfway through Fox's term as president, Mexicans are disconcerted with his government, and so, increasingly, is the international...

Michael Caine.(Interview)
January 19, 2004... Love him or loathe him, 70-year-old Michael Caine is as much a British institution as rain. In fact, his name actually means that in Cockney rhyming slang. (His critics will be pleased to note it can also stand in for "pain.") During his...

It Doesn't Take a City.(stress control)
January 19, 2004... I began last year as a stressed-out journalist in New York City. I never expected to begin this one as a stressed-out Buddhist shrinekeeper in the Colorado Rockies. My latest professional challenge has been to put together a shrine...

Perspectives.(news quotations)
January 19, 2004... Quotation sources from top to bottom: Financial Times, Reuters, Associated Press, ABC News, USA Today, BBC, Ananova, Slate, Houston Chronicle "It's not the whole enchilada, but it's a nice little tlacoyo." Mexican governor Ricardo...

Periscope.(news stories)
January 19, 2004... Turkey: The Missing Link? Already an ally of the United States and Israel, Turkey has stepped up cooperation in the war on terror ever since the Istanbul suicide bombings last November. Now it's building ties with semi-rogue states in the...

Sex, Love and Nursing Homes.
January 19, 2004... At 86, William Depippa is one hip dude. Sporting an earring and suspenders, he sparked the interest of Rosemary Gould, 62, a kindly grandmother who lived down the hall at the Barn Hill Care Center in Newton, N.J. In a six-month courtship-- much...

An All-Seeing Outsider.(John L. Allen, Vatican reporter)
January 19, 2004... Outside of the North Korean government in Pyongyang, no bureaucracy is harder for a journalist to crack than the Vatican's. And no one does it better than John L. Allen Jr., Rome correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, an independent...

Tip Sheet.
January 19, 2004... Travel: Writing As You Roam By Malcolm Beith While working as a photojournalist in Africa during the summer of 2000, Joseph Kultgen ran into problems sending out mass e-mails to his friends and family back home. For one, he was limited...

A Return of the Rings.(Lord of the rings)(Letter to the Editor)
January 26, 2004... Our Dec. 1 cover story on the last film in the "Rings" trilogy led fans of the epic and of author J.R.R. Tolkien to thank us effusively. Other readers were not so happy. Wrote one, "The world of these films is dreary and depressing." Complained...

The Iraq Effect.
January 26, 2004... Like a meteor crashing into a lake, the American invasion of Iraq made a lot of waves last year. Every one of the leaky, rotting regimes afloat in the Middle East had to worry it might be swamped by the cataclysm. Which would be next? Syria?...

Assad Holds Out a Hand.(Bashar Assad)
January 26, 2004... Benn is the diplomatic correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Bashar Assad, the Syrian president, scored a diplomatic coup with his proposal to renew peace talks with Israel. While peacemaking or even mere negotiations appear...

Alone on the Sidelines?(Nort Korea foreign relations)
January 26, 2004... The Japanese diplomats traveled to North Korea on a secret mission. Ostensibly, these envoys to the Hermit Kingdom--the first dispatched by Tokyo since 2002-- arrived last Tuesday to extradite a suspected drug smuggler. But the item likely...

Pulling for Putin.(Vladimir Putin)
January 26, 2004... In most countries, presidential candidates tend to have the same concerns. How to formulate a program, raise money, get the voters' attention. But Vladimir Bryntsalov, a millionaire businessman, has something else on his mind. Campaigning for...

The Life of the Party.(Communist Party)
January 26, 2004... The red flag flew briefly over an idyllic patch of Shizuoka prefecture last week. At a hot-spring resort nestled amid tangerine orchards, the Japanese Communist Party staged a congress aimed at reversing its declining performance in national...

Bad Days for Il Cavaliere.(Silvio Berlusconi)
January 26, 2004... It's only January, and 2004 is already looking like a bad year for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The cancerous Parmalat scandal has roiled the Italian economy, and prosecutors warn they'll soon finger a handful of "high- ranking...

A Lefty Takes Bogota.(Luis Eduardo Garzon)
January 26, 2004... Eloisa Garzon was an 18-year-old peasant in 1949 when she moved from rural Guatavita, in Colombia's Cundinamarca state, to the capital city of Bogota. She became pregnant by a laborer who insisted she have an abortion. She refused, and got a...

Where to Find Prosperity.
January 26, 2004... The world' s major economies are picking up, and 2004 looks likely to be the best growth year for the United States since the tech bubble burst. There are signs that Japan and Germany may finally be turning the corner after years of...

Landing Hard on Europe.(U.S. foreign exchange)
January 26, 2004... The White House is an increasingly lonely home for those who think "deficits don't matter," as Dick Cheney famously put it. With the U.S. current-account deficit at $550 billion and rising, and investors dumping the dollar, the camp of deficit...

Gardening Therapy.(gardening reduces anxiety and improves life for Alzheimer's patients)
January 26, 2004... On a bright autumn day, visitors at the Edenham Day Centre for people with dementia in West Kensington, London, visited a tiny courtyard garden. One man explored a tomato plant, another fingered ivy on the wall, and a woman painted flowers on a...

The Latest Homegrown Diet Craze.(Okinawan diet)
January 26, 2004... Tokyo resident Sakiko Hayashi was watching television when she first heard about the fabled Okinawan diet, which experts believe is largely responsible for the remarkable longevity of the island's natives. Now Hayashi has embraced the Okinawan...

The Two-Minute Virus.(computer viruses)(Interview)
January 26, 2004... When the next killer computer virus strikes, who are you going to call? Most probably ponytailed Mikko Hypponen, a Finnish virus hunter with the Helsinki- based firm F-Secure. He and his team, who track and crack several new hacker codes each...

Giving Back.(war photography)
January 26, 2004... Photographer Stanley Greene sees himself as a witness to life, and the pictures he takes as evidence of its capriciousness. For the past 10 years he has observed the war in Chechnya, and the evidence--now on display in Paris--is among the most...

Errol Morris.("The Fog of War")
January 26, 2004... As a student at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1960s, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and in particular the U.S. secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. Under John F. Kennedy McNamara had defused...

So You Wanna Write a Screenplay?(award season attention on actors, not screenwriters)
January 26, 2004... Recently, I spent a few hours arguing with an actor friend of mine over who has it worse in Hollywood, actors or writers. He told this story: He is on an audition for a small part on a top-rated comedy series. He is, by way of background,...

Going Beyond Beef.(low carbohydrate diets)
January 26, 2004... Willett and Skerrett are the authors of "Eat, Drink and Be Healthy," published by Simon & Schuster Source. A middle-aged man, tired of being fat and having trouble losing weight, happens on a low-carbohydrate diet. He tries it for a few...

Starve Your Way to Health.(practitioners of calorie restriction movement hope to slow aging process)(California based Calorie Restriction Society)
January 26, 2004... If the world is divided into people who live to eat and those who eat to live, perhaps there ought to be a third category for Brian Delaney. At nearly 1.8 meters and 63 kilograms, Delaney, 40, is really, really thin. Thin, and hungry. He...

Now, Reduce Your Risk of Alzheimer's.(diet, exercise, and weight control lower risk of vascular dementia )
January 26, 2004... Just days into 2004, are you already struggling with those New Year's resolutions to eat right, exercise and shed excess pounds? Here's added incentive to stick with the program. It turns out that the healthy measures most of us vow to take...

Older Parents, Younger Kids.(late life parenthood has both risks and benefits)
January 26, 2004... Fifteen years ago, older adults at the playground were generally assumed to be grandparents. These days they're just as likely to answer to "Daddy." Life expectancy is rising; couples are postponing marriage and childbirth. New fertility...

You Will Start to Feel Very Sleepy...(regular and ample sleep important as food and exercise)(Excerpt)
January 26, 2004... Adapted from "Improving Sleep," published by Harvard Medical School. For information on sleep, go to health.harvard.edu/NEWSWEEK. We don't need a scientist or a study to tell us that there's a price to be paid for losing sleep. You sag...

In a Race Against Time.(mature athletes training in record numbers)(fitness routine standards)
January 26, 2004... Ching Teng soon started lifting weights in his teens and for a decade competed on the amateur body-building circuit in Singapore. Then came marriage, three kids and a day job as a clerk for a trading company, which meant putting aside his...

Perspectives.(news quotations)
January 26, 2004... Quotation sources from top to bottom: Los Angeles Times, Indianapolis Star, Reuters, Associated Press, Newsweek, Bbc, Reuters, Associated Press "Let us continue the journey." U.S. President George W. Bush, announcing plans to send...

Periscope.
January 26, 2004... HEALTH Flu Fears Take Wing Last year's SARS outbreak terrified people around the world because of how easily the virus could jump from country to country in an age of frequent-flier travel. Now another virus is causing a flap thanks...