Newsweek International articles from July 2001

Newsweek International archives from July 2001

Letters.
July 2, 2001... Just Say 'No' to Bush's Star Wars Readers responding to our May 28 story on the reaction to President George W. Bush's nuclear missile defense program were unanimous in condemning the policy. Dubbing it "costly," one warned, "it sets the...

Mexico's History Test.
July 2, 2001... In the early hours of Aug. 11, 1976, Margarita Lopez Portillo was riding through Mexico City when a taxi swerved in front of her car. Four urban guerrillas, three men and a pregnant young woman, jumped out firing submachine guns. Margarita's...

Handle This Box of Dynamite Very Carefully.(secret police files, Mexico)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... You who wronged a simple man Bursting into laughter at the crime, Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date. The inscription, from a poem by...

Dancing Into Exile.(Japanese artists, musicians, sports figures)
July 2, 2001... Ryuichi Sakamoto gazes out the window at the homeland he abandoned more than a decade ago. With his jeans and long hair, he plainly does not belong here, in this staid and proper teahouse on the 41st floor in Tokyo's Shinjuku district. The...

Hip-Hop About Pol Pot.(Prach Ly rap music in Cambodia)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... Prach Ly seems an unlikely voice for Cambodia's lost generation. The skinny 22-year-old spends his days hawking karaoke videos to middle- aged Cambodian women out of a closet-size shop on a gritty street in Long Beach, California. He wears...

Battleground Bosporus.(Caspian Pipeline Consortium)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... Last week, ecowarriors from a pair of Turkish environmental groups, Greenpeace and One Earth, set out into the choppy waters of the Bosporus, armed with the usual paraphernalia of protest--banners, a megaphone and a jostle of cameramen. Their...

A Conversation With Putin.(Vladimir Putin, interview)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... Vladimir Putin will never call me by my nickname. He'll never invite me over to the Kremlin for sports. Neither will he ever identify a continent as a "nation," misname an allied leader or flub his lines in a Q&A on foreign policy. And he will...

Mountain Maoists.(Communist Party revolution, Lung, Nepal)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... Deep in Nepal's mountainous countryside, kilometers from the nearest dirt road, locals in the village of Lung are gearing up for the next proletarian revolution. Two weeks ago thousands of locals gathered to hear underground Maoist cadres and...

A Portrait of True Grit.(Park Choong Il)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... Park Choong Il is lucky to be alive, but is prepared to die. He keeps a small plastic bag filled with rat poison in his pocket. "I would rather kill myself than be taken back to prison in North Korea," says the 23- year-old former street...

Eat, Drink, and Go Slow.(Europe advocates slow pace of life)(Statistical Data Included)
July 2, 2001... Between red terracotta roofs just outside the northern Italian town of Bra, there rises a church tower with a clock that is a half hour slow. In Bra, that's close enough to be right on time. Though not far from the bustle and industrial stench...

Techies Turn to Organized Muscle.(Internet cos employees turn to work councils, Germany)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... This time last year, Pixelpark was New Economy to the core. At the high-flying Web-design agency, in a converted east Berlin light-bulb factory, proud staffers called themselves Pixels. They pulled all- nighters alongside CEO Paulus Neef in a...

The Old Monster Is Back.(inflation)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... Can you even remember inflation? It was a long time ago, but the soaring prices that ravaged U.S. and European pocketbooks through the 1970s and '80s may be back. Prices are moving again. Economic growth is actually slowing, even threatening a...

This Is an Appliance?(Sony eVilla)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
July 2, 2001... The Audrey by 3com was discontinued after six months. AOL's Touchpad and the MSN Companion haven't exactly been leaping off store shelves. But Internet appliances--computers with no hard drive that let you browse the Web and read e-mail--live...

Computing Your Karma.(virtual tour of Tibet)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... There's a free Tibet, after all--in cyberspace. At tibetgame.com virtual tourists can dance on the rooftop of the world by clicking through 24 interactive panoramas of Tibet. Explore Lhasa, chat with natives and buy cow pies. But keep your...

A Life at the Louvre.(Pierre Rosenberg)(Brief Article)(Interview)
July 2, 2001... Pierre Rosenberg began working at the musee du Louvre in 1961, and for the last seven years served as director until his government-imposed retirement in April on the eve of his 65th birthday. During those 40 years, Rosenberg witnessed great...

Letter From America.(Las Vegas wedding)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
July 2, 2001... Robert Venturi apotheosized Las Vegas as an icon of American culture. What would the great post-modern architect say of it today? There is the Luxor, with pyramids and a Great Sphinx. Paris, with a half-scale Eiffel Tower. The Venetian, with...

Floating on the Bubble.(TiVo shares high)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
July 2, 2001... The end of the Internet stock bubble would also seem to mean the end of the "story stock"--those shares that trade at lofty prices on the basis of their imagined potential. But there's at least one company that has still managed to retain an...

Perspectives.(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... "There are two tragedies. One is my children and the other is my wife." Russell Yates, a NASA computer engineer whose wife, Andrea, has been charged with drowning their five children, ages 6 months to 7 years, in their Houston, Texas, home ...

The Last Word on Flight 990?(EgyptAir Flight 990 crash investigation)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board is expected to release its final report on the 1999 crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 later this year. As currently drafted, the report concludes that control inputs by the plane's reserve copilot, Gamil...

The Lion King.(Junichiro Koizumi)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... Japan's prime minister Junichiro Koizumi is making all the right moves. He's soaring in the polls--his latest disapproval rate was only 6 percent. (Take that, Yoshiro Mori, Koizumi's predecessor, disapproved by 66 percent just last year.) More...

Mario Rules.(Mario Monti, European Union's Competition Commissioner)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... Europe's top monopoly cop, (Super) Mario Monti, risks sparking a transatlantic war with his preliminary veto of the merger of General Electric and Honeywell. Most assumed he based the decision on his antimonopolistic inclinations. But American...

Reality Bites.(China uses Himalayan valley site for television program)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... On China's version of "Survivor," airing in July, contestants will battle high altitudes and fatigue in Shangri-La. (Yes, the Chinese claim to have found the tiny Himalayan valley near the border of the provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan.) If...

Supreme Leader?(General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... As he heads into his first summit meeting in India, Pakistan's leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, decided he needed a boost. So he cast aside his olive green Army uniform last week and donned a black sherwani, or long coat, appointing himself...

Peace and Quiet.(Group of Eight summit, location site in Genoa)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... After violence marred the recent EU meetings, Italian officials worry about hosting next month's G8 summit in Genoa. Its alleylike streets, winding around historic buildings, make the old seaport a perfect place for serious trouble. Prime...

Ironies.(solar eclipse, Africa)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... A little sunlight: When it comes to geopolitics--or tourism--Africa is eclipsed by events almost anywhere else. Curious, then, that many tens of thousands of foreign tourists descended on Zambia, Zimbabwe and other southern African nations last...

Calling Slobo.(Yugoslav officials to send Slobodan Milosevic to trial)(Brief Article)
July 2, 2001... The Yugoslav government put it plainly last week: Slobodan Milosevic now can be sent to face justice. Slobo and "all of these indicted individuals will go to The Hague," said the deputy prime minister. "There is no doubt about that." But when?...

Correction.(Correction Notice)
July 9, 2001... A photo caption accompanying the story "Botswana's Hope" (SPECIAL REPORT, June 11) incorrectly identified the drug being given to AIDS orphans. They were receiving medicine to relieve thrush, an AIDS- related ailment.

International Mail Call.(Letter to the Editor)
July 9, 2001... Sex, Drugs and Euthanasia Our June 4 report on Dutch liberalism inspired numerous readers to share their admiration of those values with us. "What a rare jewel Holland is!" gushed one. Another soberly pointed out that in the Netherlands,...

What the Spy Chief Knows.(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... Call it poetic justice. Barely four days after he was captured hiding in Venezuela and whisked back to Lima, former Peruvian spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos found himself in a familiar place: the maximum- security prison that he had personally...

The Amazing Euroman.(European Union's global presence)
July 9, 2001... Europe's leaders may not even fully understand what they're doing. The rest of the world hasn't a clue. But in a series of seemingly unrelated decisions, Europe has seized control of much of the global economic agenda. This is certain to...

Why Are These Two Heads Smiling?(Philippe Camus and Ranier Hertrich, CEOs of EADS)(Brief Article)(Company Profile)(Statistical Data Included)
July 9, 2001... Jet fighters screech overhead as Ranier Hertrich ponders the strangeness of his situation in a dimly lit room at Le Bourget air show in Paris. He is co-CEO of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS), the new all-European...

'We Have to Act'.(interview with billionaire)(Brief Article)(Interview)
July 9, 2001... Late last month Masayoshi Son, the billionaire CEO of Japan's leading Internet firm, Softbank, announced what might be his boldest venture: founding Yahoo BB, a company whose mission is to provide super-high- speed ADSL Internet connections to...

Recession Rags.
July 9, 2001... Japanese fashion designer Shinichiro Arakawa is seeing red --literally. His fall collection, revealed at the Paris pret-a-porter shows, is filled with red dresses, jackets and pants. Why is the 34-year-old from Gumma prefecture so attached to...

A Political Dogfight On the Korean Front.(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... South Korea calls it Project FX: a plan to buy 40 next-generation jet fighters to defend the last cold-war front. Boeing is the assumed front runner to get the $4 billion contract, relying on American ties to the Seoul military establishment...

War Seen Through The Lens of a Soldier.(Review)
July 9, 2001... When I was growing up, I used to thumb through my mother's photo album of her post-World War II years in occupied Germany, where she worked first as an American Red Cross "girl," then as a journalist for Stars and Stripes' Weekend magazine. I...

The Incredible Vanishing Plastic Eggshell.(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... For most people in Hans Rausing's shoes, retirement would be a sweet option. He has a custom-built mansion on a 900-acre estate in tony Sussex in the south of England, complete with grazing deer and boar. He has a second home on the beach in...

The Profit of Doom.(interview with)(Brief Article)(Interview)
July 9, 2001... Barely a year ago, Asia-based financial analyst Marc Faber--known as "Dr. Doom"--predicted that the high-tech bubble would burst, eviscerating stock earnings, deflating the Nasdaq and pushing the global economy toward a recession. Vindication,...

Cyberscope.(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... DATA PRIVACY Will Europe Get Tough on Internet Rules? If the United States is leading the charge in technology, Europe is on the cutting edge of regulation--especially when it comes to data privacy. Europeans view data privacy as a...

Perspectives.(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... "We sold him for money, and we won't really get very much money for it." Belgrade political scientist Aleksa Djilas, on the transfer of Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague, where he will be tried before the United Nations war-crimes tribunal ...

Setting Sail Again Soon?(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... The U.S. Federal Reserve took another step to fight off a recession last week, slashing rates by a quarter point. This brings total cuts this year to an astounding 2.75 percent--the steepest in 19 years. Americans were once again relieved that...

The Case of The Kursk.(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... In September, Russian naval crews and two Dutch companies will finally lift Russia's ill-fated Kursk submarine from the depths of the Barents Sea. But why have officials decided to leave the nose--which holds all the secrets to the sub's...

Talking Time's Over.(Abu Sayyaf Group)(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... Negotiations with the Muslim extremist group Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines have gone on long enough, with little result. Twenty hostages--including three Americans--have been abducted since May 27, though some have been released. Abu Sayyaf...

Meow! Woof! Ahhhhh-Choo!(transgenic pets)(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... Transgenic pets, based in New York, is trying to create a genetically engineered allergen-free cat to spare pet owners those awful coughs and sneezes. Then how about engineering humans to ease the suffering of our pets, too? They also suffer...

Baby Boozers.(Limburg Beer Friends suggests beer for school use)(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... Belgians love beer. So much that a group called Limburgse Biervrienden, or Limburg Beer Friends, has proposed serving low-alcohol (2.5 percent) suds... in elementary schools. It's healthier than sugary sodas and lemonade, they claim. The group...

Overexposed?(television coverage of Argentina's president, Fernando de la Rua)(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... Television often hits politicians where it hurts. And President Fernando de la Rua of Argentina is no exception. Twice a week, a presidential impersonator stars in "Big Brother-in-Law," Argentina's TV spoof of the global reality hit "Big...

Will Kim Win?(Kim Un Yong contends for International Olympic Committee)(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... When International Olympic Committee delegates convene in Moscow next week, they face two huge decisions: whether to entrust the 2008 Games to Beijing, and even more critical, who should succeed Juan Antonio Samaranch as the IOC's president....

DINING OUT.(Bluebird Cafe, London, offers dog menu)(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... A dog's dinner: Dog owners may want to walk their pup down to the swanky Bluebird Cafe in London this summer. While humans eat top-notch grub, so can their pets--ordering the likes of Pooch's penne with chopped bacon ([Pound sterling]5.75) and...

The Prison of the Veil.(Taliban rules over Afghan women)(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... She timidly cries out to a passing foreigner on a Kabul street: "Sir, I am not a beggar." Her face is hidden beneath a burqa, the head-to-toe shroud all Afghan women must wear in public. Even an accidental flash of ankle can get them beaten or...

Growing Up In Africa's Cruelest War Zone.(child soldiers of Sierra Leone)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
July 9, 2001... It's terrible to be a child anyplace without adequate food, shelter or access to education. Add war, and society's youngest members face a life of relentless horror and uncertainty. But even war seldom produces the kind of cruelty endured by...

Punishable By Death.(homosexuality)(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... There are few societies around the world where homosexuals are not persecuted in some way. Namibian President Sam Nujoma regularly calls lesbians and gays "unnatural." Slovakian Justice Minister Jan Carnogursky recently said that gays needed...

Heading For An Early Grave.(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
July 9, 2001... White males may be king in most places, but not in Russia. In addition to rampant alcoholism, men there face rising AIDS and tuberculosis rates, as well as the stresses of unemployment and the military draft. The average life expectancy for...

The Silence of the Damned.(North Korea)(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... Are you pining for the lost glories of the great information-technology gold rush? Believe it or not, there's a virtually untouched market of 20 million people--hardworking, motivated and desperate for the freedom and mobility exemplified by...

Desecrating The Art Of The Deal.(John Presland of Caribbean Finance Corp.)(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... John Presland moved to Havana in 1996 with hopes of bringing high finance to Fidel Castro's island of anticapitalist hostility. The Briton was hired that year to manage the Caribbean Finance Corp. (CFC). The plan was to help bankroll ventures...

The Class Barrier.(Myanmar)(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... At his house in Rangoon, Tin shows off black-and-white photos of his brothers and sisters in university cap and gown. In a nation where education is revered, Tin is proud of his family, and worried for himself. Since students led an uprising in...

Skeletons Working In A Closet.(the press in Iran)(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... Three years ago Iranian President Mohammed Khatami promised press freedom, and dozens of excited publishers rented spacious villas and set up shop in style. The hard-liners who control Iran's courts started closing newspapers within months. But...

The Rape of Paradise.(Madagascar)(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... Legend has it that the king of one of the warring Betsimsaraka clans climbed a mountain peak in what is now southern Madagascar and spoke with the gods, who ordered him to sacrifice a son. The boy's blood flowed, and then came the eternal...

120,000 People, One Doctor.(Democratic Republic of the Congo)(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... It started with a slight swelling in the eye. A doctor gave 3-year-old Juma Hangi some drops, but his condition worsened. The doctor then prescribed an antibiotic, and then another. As Juma's father sank into debt to pay for the drugs, the...

The Dark Island.(England)(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about England that one of the most significant drawbacks of this otherwise lush and prosperous nation was the "darkness of its sky." As he put it, "Night and day are too nearly of a color." A century later, Britons are...

Prowling Poachers.(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... Foreign tourists once came to Zimbabwe in droves to see the country's big game, but these days the animals are more apt to wind up as stew. Poachers, using wire taken from electric fences, are snaring thousands of kudus, giraffes, impala, eland...

Your Money or Your Life.(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... It's been two years since men in police uniforms abducted Pedro Gomez in his swank Bogota neighborhood. But the wealthy rancher and businessman is still afraid to venture far from home or let a journalist use his real name. Who can blame him?...

Bottom Of The Heap.(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... It's not just the poverty that's so appalling in Luanda. Africans have a saying: when a politician takes power, he and his cronies get "to eat"--to enjoy the spoils of office through corruption, perks or patronage. And in a world of haves and...

Money for Nothing.(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... Think you have it bad? Last year the Belgian state extracted more than 40 percent of the average taxpayer's earnings in taxes and social- security contributions--the highest figure for any country in Europe, according to U.S.-based consultants...

No Justice, No Peace.(tax collection)(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... You'd think an authoritarian state would have no problem collecting taxes. But for three years the remote Chinese village of Yuntang refused to pay. Fed up with arbitrary taxes and alleging embezzlement by local officials, the 1,400 villagers...

Broken by the Iron Fist.(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... Indonesian children sound like kids everywhere when choosing their favorite jobs. Most want to be doctors, according to a recent poll, followed by engineers. It's in their least favorite job--president, a career goal chosen by only 0.4 percent...

Pride Of Place.(Balkans)(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... In the Balkans, everyone is a minority somewhere or other. Croats are a majority in Croatia, but a large minority in Bosnia and Herzegovina and a tiny minority in Serbia, where they still live in fear of their lives. Serbs may dominate Serbia,...

Not Even Any Pens To Push.(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... Not having a state to serve is merely one of the challenges facing civil servants in Somalia. "There are no roads, no hospitals, no police," says Hirsi Ismael, a member of the country's fledgling General Transitional Assembly. He's still...

Hell Away From Home.(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... Until recently the horrors that surrounded Guinea made the country an attractive haven for refugees: an estimated half-million people fleeing civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia have sought shelter within its borders in the past decade. But...

Why North Korea is Number One.(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... A couple of months ago, the White House held a screening of a movie about the life of Varian Fry, the great prewar humanitarian who rescued innumerable artists and writers from Nazified Europe. Several current leaders of humanitarian and relief...

The Worst Countries in the World.(Brief Article)
July 9, 2001... We live in fortunate times. At first glance our age would seem to be characterized by an inexorable, if not unbroken, march toward ever greater freedom and prosperity. More people live in free or liberalizing societies than ever before. More...

International Letters.
July 16, 2001... AIDS and the Global Village Readers responding to our June 11 Special Report on AIDS stressed the importance of global responsibility. "The great powers of the Western world speak of equality for all," one wrote, "but millions of people in...

Why the IRA Should Decommission.(Brief Article)
July 16, 2001... The exercise was cloaked in secrecy, but it probably went something like this. Two international dignitaries with no expertise in armaments pile into a car with blacked-out windows--or maybe they are blindfolded--and are driven by a wheel-man...

The Balkan Flip-Flopper.(Brief Article)
July 16, 2001... Albanian rebels in Macedonia signed a NATO-brokered ceasefire with the Macedonian Army last week. If the ceasefire holds, NATO is committed to sending in 3,000 troops to disarm the guerrillas. Whether that happens may depend on the mercurial...

Still 'Haider's Austria'?
July 16, 2001... They came from Innsbruck and Salzburg, Munich and Milan. Grooving to techno beats and house music, they marched through the streets wearing brightly colored face paint, homemade costumes or next to nothing at all. Lesbians on motorcycles...

'Nor Any Drop to Drink'.(Singapore )(Brief Article)
July 16, 2001... Ever since Singapore was founded in 1965, it has used its role as a center of commerce to compensate for its dearth of natural resources. But one resource has been especially troublesome: water. Singapore, an island nation, has none of its own...

Land Grab.(South Africa)
July 16, 2001... Thousands of poor south Africans stood quietly for hours, some for days, in mile-long queues along a road leading to dusty fields in Kempton Park, near Johannesburg. Where the queue began, local activists were "selling" tiny plots of land they...

The Beijing Swing.
July 16, 2001... Beijing is not pretty. the polluted air burns your eyes, but it's less painful than much of the city's architecture. The old temples and palaces seem lost and out of place. Most of them are practically eclipsed by the neon razzle- dazzle of...

Still China's Second City.(Shanghai )(Brief Article)
July 16, 2001... Shanghai's first Congress Hall, where the Chinese Communist Party was born 80 years ago, now sits amid a capitalist wonderland of upscale restaurants and bars--a $150 million property development that includes everything from a Brazilian...

The Golden Handcuffs.(human rights in China)(Brief Article)
July 16, 2001... The argument is constantly made that Beijing should not be awarded the 2008 Olympics because the Chinese regime suppresses its own people, is stirring up unhealthy and belligerent nationalist fervor and is seeking to become a monster power that...

Transplanted Trouble.(the Burmese drug syndicates)
July 16, 2001... Hill 1200 is a long way from Afghanistan. But the view from the Thai military outpost, which sits along the Burmese border, is awfully familiar. Until the Taliban banned its cultivation last year, the fields of arid Afghanistan were filled with...

Flight of the Dot-Coms.
July 16, 2001... Talk about trampling the dead. The recent collapse of dotcomfailures.com seemed to spell the end, even for the dot-com funeral industry. In fact, Web sites that track, mourn and otherwise wail over the corpses of the dot-com era are thriving....

We All Work For Dot-Coms Now.(Internet marketplaces)(Brief Article)
July 16, 2001... Early in the dot-com era, gurus of the age hailed the power of the Internet to "change everything," even to topple the old order and build a brand-new "Internet Economy." Since the Web-stock bubble burst it sometimes seems that the era was...

The Revolt Against Right Angles.(office furniture design, Knoll Inc. and Herman Miller Inc.)(Brief Article)
July 16, 2001... Crowded inside a white-washed showroom in Chicago, office-furniture professionals are gawking at the cubicle of the future, which is notable mainly for the complete absence of solid walls or right angles. That absence, explains designer Hani...

A Crisis of Biotech.(international embryology research laws)(Brief Article)
July 16, 2001... The package that Wolfgang Franz received at his laboratory at the University of Lubeck was nondescript, but the contents were explosive. The molecular biologist had ordered a sample of 100,000 or so stem cells to use in his medical experiments....

Saved by the Paintings.(Dina Babbitt claims art she produced in Holocaust)(Brief Article)
July 16, 2001... When an SS officer asked 20-year-old Dina Gottliebova to get into his jeep, she was sure she was headed for the gas chambers. The Auschwitz inmate was not only a Jew but had also had the temerity to paint on the wall of a children's barracks a...