Newsweek International articles from July 2006

Newsweek International archives from July 2006

Mail Call.(Letter to the editor)
July 3, 2006... A Remedy for Nepal Readers of our May 1 report on the crisis in Nepal blamed both King Gyanendra and the Maoists. One advocated democracy: "The king should be a ceremonial head." Another, furious with the king for firing on "peaceful"...

The Politics of Pipelines; Yes, the hoary Great Game is back, pitting Russia, the United States and Europe in a tug-of-war over energy.
July 3, 2006... Byline: Owen Matthews Half a century ago, Hungarians learned the price of defying Moscow. So when George W. Bush recently chose Budapest to send a message to today's masters of the Kremlin, marking the 50th anniversary of the 1956 uprising...

After the Pharaoh; Who, or what, will replace Hosni Mubarak? Some say democracy, others chaos. It's the question all Egyptians are now asking. No one has an answer.
July 3, 2006... Byline: Christopher Dickey (With Stephen Glain and Vivian Salama in Cairo) During his recent weeks in prison, one of Egypt's best-known bloggers, Alaa Abdel Fateh, had a terrible fantasy. What would happen to him if Egyptian President...

South Korea: The Pendulum Swings; Buoyed by massive local victories, the opposition starts to focus on who could lead them back to the presidency.
July 3, 2006... Byline: B. J. LEE (With Christian Caryl) South Korea's presidential election is 18 months away, but the race is already underway. Contrary to what one might expect, it's not shaping up as a competition between the incumbent (Roh Moo Hyun)...

Signs of Stress; Why is former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad taking swipes at his successor? It may be because Malaysia's cozy consensus is beginning to unravel.
July 3, 2006... Byline: Joe Cochrane and Lorien Holland Ungrateful" and "gutless." Those are some of the harsh words used by former Malaysian strongman Mahathir Mohamad to describe the government led by his successor, Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi. "I...

The Rise of American Arias; Opera lovers needn't head to Europe this summer. In U.S. venues from Seattle to New York, great performances abound.
July 3, 2006... Byline: Andrew Moravcsik When opera lovers dream of summer festivals, their minds turn naturally to Old World spots like Verona, Salzburg, Bayreuth, Glyndebourne or St. Petersburg. Yet summer opera abounds in the New World as well. No...

Singing in the States; Whatever your American destination, first-rate opera will be nearby. Our picks for the season's hottest tickets.
July 3, 2006... From classics like "The Barber of Seville" to innovative new operas, summer is the time to see some of America's best productions. Colorado: Central City Opera performs in the restored opera house of a gold-rush mining town outside Denver....

Your Name is Everything; In Iraq, the wrong ID in the wrong place can get you killed.
July 3, 2006... Byline: Sarah Childress (With bureau reports) Tahsin Ahmed couldn't believe his son Omar, 14, wanted to change his name. A Shiite married to a Sunni, Ahmed had raised his children not to believe in sectarian differences. The boys were proud...

Portraits of Despair; Eight months after the earthquake in Kashmir, the survivors can only grieve.(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... Byline: Photographs by Paolo Pellegrin for Newsweek Last october's earthquake in kashmir was the worst natural disaster in Pakistan's history. The temblor killed more than 80,000 people and injured hundreds of thousands. Eight months after...

A Sucking Sound; The old job-for-life is on the way out across Europe. The new trend is temp-time. Now for the backlash.
July 3, 2006... Byline: William Underhill (With Tracy McNicoll in Paris and Mike Elkin in Madrid) For several million Spaniards, work began in earnest during the mid-1990s. That's when increasingly business-friendly governments took an ax to the country's...

High Convenience; Late-night shoppers rejoice: Japan's high-tech minimarts are going global.(FamilyMart Company Ltd.)
July 3, 2006... Byline: Christian Caryl and Andakiko Kashiwagi (With Tara Weingarten in Los Angeles) Noritsugu Miyazaki is a clerk in a convenience store. Slacker job, right? Not. Miyazaki works for Family Mart in Japan, where the seemingly mundane task...

Unlikely Boomtowns; The last half-century was the age of the megacity. The next will belong to their smaller, humbler urban relations.(Cover story)
July 3, 2006... Byline: Rana Foroohar (With Jason Overdorf in New Delhi) Great cities like London, New York and Tokyo loom large in our imaginations. They are the places people still associate with fortune, fame and the future. They can dominate national...

China's Golden Cities; Amid the greatest wave of urban migration in history, a few standouts are emerging.(Cover story)
July 3, 2006... Byline: David Dollar (Dollar is the World Bank country director in Beijing.) The common assumption about China's boom is that its impact, good and bad, is concentrated in the coastal cities where economic reforms first began 25 years ago....

Sex, Birth, Death and God; An intriguing new museum in Paris helps explain Picasso's life-changing fascination with primal art.(Pablo Picasso)(Musee du Quai Branly, Paris, France)
July 3, 2006... Byline: Christopher Dickey In 1907, Pablo Picasso caught what he called the "virus" of African art in the musty halls of what was then known as the Ethnographic Museum in Paris. Jumbled together in dimly lit cases were masks and sculptures...

The Ten Most Dynamic Cities; In this list of cities from key economic regions of the world, even the big names will surprise you.(Cover story)
July 3, 2006... Byline: Rana Foroohar, Akiko Kashiwagi, William Underhill, Tracy McNicoll, Quindlen Krovatin, Owen Matthews, Jason Overdorf, B. J. Lee, Mac Margolis Beyond the Strip Long the fastest-growing metropolis in America, Sin City is building...

The New Megalopolis; Our focus on cities is wrong. Growth and innovation come from new urban corridors.(Cover story)
July 3, 2006... Byline: Richard Florida (Florida is author of "The Flight of the Creative Class," with University of Maryland geographer Tim Gulden.) China isn't the world's most ferocious new economic competitor--the exploding east-coast corridor, from...

The Gilded Cities Club; Tokyo is slipping, Moscow and Seoul are rising. What new lists of most expensive cities can (and can't) tell us about power.(Cover story)
July 3, 2006... Byline: Karen Lowry Miller (With Owen Matthews in Moscow, Caroline Cooper in Tianjin, Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo and B. J. Lee in Seoul) Try naming the most expensive cities in the world, and the image that springs to mind is probably a cross...

How Population Lies; True, big cities no longer draw big numbers. But that doesn't mean their power is slipping too.(Cover story)
July 3, 2006... Byline: Saskia Sassen (Sassen's new book is "Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages.") Why are New York, Paris and Seoul losing people? To some observers, particularly the champions of the small and the suburban,...

Sailing to Success; Valencia is sure it can dodge the financial storms that often slam host cities, and it might be right.(2007 America's Cup, Valencia, Spain)(Cover story)
July 3, 2006... Byline: Eric Pape As Valencians watch some of the world's most high-tech sailboats run sprints on the Mediterranean, they hope to blow past a group of perennial losers: the hosts of sports spectacles. Spain outbid Marseille, Porto and...

Money Changes Everything; Lots of oil cities are doing well, none as weirdly as Astana.(City overview)(Cover story)
July 3, 2006... Byline: Owen Matthews (With Anna Nemtsova in Astana) Oil cities are now lit up by windfall profits around the world, but only Kazakhstan has one where none existed before. It's the brainchild of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who declared...

'The Art of Shrinking'; Europe finds it's not so easy to demolish the suburban housing experiments of the 1960s.(Cover story)
July 3, 2006... Byline: Stefan Theil and Tracy Mcnicoll Mayor Jurgen Polzehl calls it "the art of shrinking." On the outskirts of the eastern German city of Schwedt, bulldozers have razed a series of 11-story prefab housing units, once known to residents...

Living Little in Paris; A new industry is rising up, devoted to making the mini-flat feel a few meters more roomy.(France)(Cover story)
July 3, 2006... Byline: Tracy Mcnicoll For all its august grandeur, Paris is remarkably petite. At 105 square kilometers, Europe's smallest capital is 16 times less roomy than London. The City of Light isn't even the biggest city in France--it ranks...

The New Jungles; Think wildlife loves a country setting? Turns out that many animals, birds and plants now prefer the city.(Cover story)
July 3, 2006... Byline: Stefan Theil A walk across the abandoned railyard in Berlin's Schoneberg district gives new meaning to the words "urban jungle." Between a noisy commuter train line on one side and apartment blocks on the other, a carpet of rare...

Tailing the X-Commuter; As extreme commutes go global, business follows. But who needs three cupholders?(Cover story)
July 3, 2006... Byline: Keith Naughton (With Anup Kaphle) The drive to get out of big cities is turning the United States into a land of nomads. "Extreme commuters" who travel more than 90 minutes to work, one way, are the fastest-growing group of...

Building up the Burbs; The suburbs are the world's future because most people love them, so why fight the sprawl?(Cover story)
July 3, 2006... Byline: Joel Kotkin (Kotkin is an Irvine Senior Fellow with the New America Foundation and author of "The City: A Global History" (2005).) Sorry, city sophisticates, but the metropolis of the future may prove far less intensely urban than...

Islam in Office; If fundamentalist parties take power, how will they do business?
July 3, 2006... Byline: Stephen Glain Judeo-Christian Scripture offers little economic instruction. The Book of Deuteronomy, for example, is loaded with edicts on how the faithful should pray, eat, bequeath, keep the holy festivals and treat slaves and...

The Last Word: Elie Wiesel; The moral dimension.(Interview)
July 3, 2006... Byline: Michael Meyer Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, born in Romania in 1928, was 15 years old when he and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz. The experience defined his life. A philosopher, teacher and founder of the Elie...

Global Investor: Barton Biggs; Don't Blame the Hedge Funds.(Viewpoint essay)
July 3, 2006... Byline: Barton Biggs is a managing partner of the Traxis Partners hedge fund in New York. Hedge funds, like Moby Dick, are mysterious and potentially threatening, but are they the principal cause of the speculation and mad volatility in...

The Good Life.
July 3, 2006... Byline: Kris Anderson, Kristin Luna, Tara Weingarten, Brian Byrnes, Karla Bruning, Alex McRae Style: The Stuff of Summer Whether you're heading to the beach or the pool this summer, chic accessories are a must. "It's a huge market,"...

Perspectives.
July 3, 2006... "Surrender is not a solution." Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, opposing calls to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq "They all took their dinner meal." An unnamed U.S. military spokesman, on Saddam Hussein and his...

Periscope.
July 3, 2006... Byline: Christian Caryl, Tracy McNicoll,Susanna Schrobsdorff, John Sparks, Holly Bailey, Devin Gordon, Johnnie L. Roberts, Nicki Gostin North Korea: Diplomatic Misfire Will North Korea launch an intercontinental ballistic missile? At...

Mail Call.
July 17, 2006... Osama's Fading Call Readers of Fareed Zakaria's May 8 column on Islamic terrorism challenged his views. Said one, "anti-Americanism is not 'mindless'--it is a reaction to U.S. foreign policy." Another wrote, "I doubt Osama's on the...

What's Wrong with Russia; As G8 leaders gather in St. Petersburg, the Country's 'Window on the West' provides an unsettling perspective on Putin's rule.(Cover story)
July 17, 2006... Byline: Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova Peter the Great built St. Petersburg three centuries ago as Russia's window on the West. But for a few days this week, the old tsarist capital will become the West's window on Russia. While the city...

Mexican Stand Off; A close, bitterly contested election may have echoes of Florida 2000. But it's a sign of the times in Latin America.
July 17, 2006... Byline: Joseph Contreras and Monica Campbell (With Mac Margolis in Rio de Janiero) The black and white t shirt bore the legend smile, we're going to win, but Abraham Flores was all frowns on election night last week. Earlier that day the...

The World's Toughest Job; Mexico's institutions were constructed under the 20th century's longest-lasting regime and are totally dysfunctional under democracy.
July 17, 2006... Byline: CastaÑeda, a former foreign minister of Mexico, is now Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American Studies at New York University This may be a long hot summer in Mexico, but the outcome seems not to be in...

Why W Should Learn from WW; As an advisor described Wilson, "Once a decision is made it is final." But strength of character is no substitue for organizational competence.
July 17, 2006... Byline: Joseph S. Nye Jr. (Nye is Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University and author most recently of "The Power Game: A Washington Novel." This piece draws on his article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.) George W....

Bigger, Faster, Better; India's top tycoon hopes to kick the country's nascent boom into hyperdrive by remaking its stores, farms and even its biggest cities.(Mukesh Ambani)
July 17, 2006... Byline: Ron Moreau and Sudip Mazumdar Mukesh Ambani has been India's Mr. Big for a long time. By all accounts, he is the country's most influential private citizen, and the businessman who thinks bigger than the rest in this rising economic...

Interview: 'Something Out of Nothing'; India's leading industrialist on his plans for a nation, and a company, on the rise.(Mukesh Ambani)(Interview)
July 17, 2006... Byline: Sudip Mazumdar Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Industries, aims to reinvent his petrochemical giant as a retail powerhouse, catering to India's booming consumer class. He spoke to NEWSWEEK's Sudip Mazumdar and Ron Moreau...

Trouble in the Cockpit; As Airbus sales slump and executives fall, the future of its two-headed Franco-German parent company is in doubt.
July 17, 2006... Byline: Tracy McNicoll and Stafan Theil And so the dogfight over the Rhine came to a head. Two heads, actually. A round of midair musical chairs last week saw Noel Forgeard, the French co-CEO of EADS, the European Aeronautic Defense and...

See Sephardic Spain; Jewish landmarks are enjoying a dramatic comeback.(Country overview)
July 17, 2006... Byline: Michael Levitin Toledo, Spain's mythic city on a hill, has sold its cultural lucre to tourists for years: the Roman Catholic past, the Arabic past, the Visigoth past and El Greco past. Now travelers are coming to embrace another...

'Krrish' to the Rescue; India's new superhero sings, dances and fights crime.
July 17, 2006... Byline: Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop Superman may have returned, but if he doesn't perform up to snuff his job could soon be outsourced to India. Bollywood's first superhero, Krrish, can not only run faster than a speeding bullet and leap over...

Your Name Is Everything; In Iraq, showing the wrong ID in the wrong place can get you killed. That's led to a growth industry in fakes.
July 17, 2006... Byline: Sarah Childress (With Bureau Reports) Tahsin ahmed couldn't believe his son Omar, 14, wanted to change his name. A Shiite married to a Sunni, Ahmed had raised his children not to believe in sectarian differences. The boys were proud...

Who Needs the G8? Why should the new powers of the 21st century listen to yesterday's elite when they won't even play by their own rules?
July 17, 2006... Byline: Denis MacShane (MacShane is a Labour M.P. and a former minister of Europe in the U.K.) If the G8 did not exist, would anyone want to invent it? the forum started in 1975 as a fireside chat among six national leaders, all of whom...

Japan: Countering the Threat; Pyongyang's saber-rattling is driving the once pacifist Japanese to start shopping for some serious hardware.
July 17, 2006... Byline: Zvika Krieger North Korea's test missiles landed with a harmless splash in the Sea of Japan. But they set off shock waves in Japan itself over how the country should respond to an increasingly belligerent Kim Jong Il. Under Prime...

The Last Word: Jeroen van der Veer; Why Oil Will Get Cheaper.(Interview)
July 17, 2006... Byline: Rana Foroohar With oil reaching another record high last week, it may seem odd that Jeroen van der Veer is expecting the price of crude to drop significantly. But the CEO of Shell and oil-industry veteran isn't given to rash...

The Mood Swing Meter; Turkey finds itself at the core of a debate over whether the market boom was fueled by easy money, or more responsible management.
July 17, 2006... Byline: Ruchir Sharma (Sharma is a co-head of global emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management.) There's an old saying on Wall Street: only when the tide runs out will we know who is swimming naked. With the sea of liquidity...

The Good Life.
July 17, 2006... Byline: Karla Bruning, Marian Smith, Raina Kelley, Sana Butler Archipelago Resorts: Water Worlds By Karla Bruning Have you always dreamed of vacationing on your own private island? It's still possible, even in heavily trafficked...

Perspectives.
July 17, 2006... Our military will continue with missile launch drills. A North Korean Foreign Ministry statement on the nation's recent missile tests "I wanted to cuddle him like a kitten and it came out in this gesture." Russian President...

Periscope.
July 17, 2006... Byline: Marc Peyser; Rana Faroohar; Mark Hosenball; Julie Scelfo; Jonathan Mummolo; William Underhill Business: Merge Like It's 1999 Champagne corks are popping from Wall Street to Sao Paulo, as global dealmaking has reached its...

Gadgets: The Mobile Web; People can guess Web-site names like google.mobi without their phone's crashing from too many pop-ups.(dot-mobi)
July 17, 2006... Byline: Emily Flynn Vencat Remember how small the Internet of the early 1990s was? CompuServe, America Online and some other private, for-profit firms charged content owners rent for virtual space and banked membership fees from users for...

'A Sad Way of Doing Big Science'; Stanford's Christopher Thomas Scott on America's stem-cell research.(Interview)(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... Byline: Jennifer Barrett Stem cells that come from days-old human embryos hold vast promise to cure diseases, but in 2001 the U.S. government withheld funding for research on new stem-cell lines. Private funding is flowing to new programs...

Digg This; The Web is all about taking control--especially when it comes to media.(Digg.com)(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... Byline: Brad Stone Magazines are prepared by professional editors. San Francisco-based Digg.com is laying assault to that notion. The site's 300,000 registered users submit links to articles they find on the Web, and then vote on the most...

Addicted to Oil?(Letter to the editor)
July 24, 2006... Readers of our May 15/May 22 report on Iran and oil prices took issue with us. "It's not Iran," wrote one, "U.S. aggression's keeping oil prices high." Another said, "Who's more addicted? America, which has enjoyed its fix for decades, or...

More Terror on the Tracks; Investigators say two jihadist groups, including a homegrown terrorist organization, are behind the Mumbai bombings.
July 24, 2006... Byline: Sudip Mazumdar, Zahid Hussain and Ron Moreau They seem to have drawn little notice as they squeezed aboard the packed first-class carriages. Most passengers were concentrating on getting home from a long, rainy Tuesday at the office...

Down the Drain; Many of Eastern Europe's most talented graduates and professionals are seeking their fortune in the West. Can their economies withstand the brain drain?
July 24, 2006... Byline: William Underhill (With Katka Krosnar in Prague) Eastern Europe is losing its youth--not to age, but to the West. More than 60,000 citizens have quit Latvia since the country joined the European Union two years ago, opening up the...

Britain: How To Be Blairer Than Blair; Gordon Brown is busy 'Tony-fying'himself to maintain Labour's edge.
July 24, 2006... Byline: Stryker Mcguire (With KARLA ADAM) The voice was prime ministerial and firm. The British government must be "strong in defense, in fighting terrorism, upholding NATO, supporting our armed forces at home and abroad, and retaining our...

Troublesome Twins; With one Kaczynski as president and now another as prime minister, a rising nation could be in for a bumpy ride.
July 24, 2006... Byline: Andrew Nagorski They are, quite simply, the twins--and identical ones, at that--who now rule Poland. Elected president last fall, Lech Kaczynski swore in his brother Jaroslaw as prime minister last week, stripping away any pretense...

Interview: 'We Must Continue to Run'; Infosys chairman N. R. Narayana Murthy says the bombings only prove how resilient the Indian economy has become.(Interview)
July 24, 2006... Byline: Vibhuti Patel Last week's bombings hit India's financial capital, Mumbai, when it was down. A recent tumble in the stock market, followed by the government's halt to privatizations, led to worries that the country's boom might be...

Opinion: A Cause for Comfort; The bombers failed in their goal--to foment violence between Hindus and Muslims.(Correction notice)(Viewpoint essay)
July 24, 2006... ***** CORRECTION: CORRECTION: In Shekhar Gupta's original submission of the story "A Cause for Comfort" (July 24), Gupta wrote, "They [terrorists] bombed Jama Masjid, the stately 17th-century mosque in old Delhi... " Unfortunately, due to...

I'm the Right Guy for GM'; Embattled CEO Rick Wagoner warily welcomes talks on an alliance with Renault-Nissan and its famed savior, Carlos Ghosn.
July 24, 2006... Byline: Keith Naughton (With Tracy McNicoll in Paris) On the Friday morning before all of General Motors was to go on its Independence Day holiday, a surprise letter hummed over CEO Rick Wagoner's fax machine. It was from GM's largest...

The Challengers: A New Honda, Or a New Yugo? There are dozens of Chinese carmakers, and many aim to crack the U.S. market. But not all are created equal.
July 24, 2006... Byline: George Wehrfritz (With Duncan Hewitt in Shanghai) Two decades after Toyota, Nissan and Honda began grabbing market share from the Big Three American automakers, South Korean upstarts Hyundai and Kia proved that the model could be...

Tibet Rides the Rails; From yak yogurt to appliances and a copper mine, a new Lhasa-to-Beijing line is opening up the economy.
July 24, 2006... Byline: Melinda Liu Lhasa is not quite hot enough to have its own stock exchange, not yet. But on the trading floor of the Tibet Securities Company, a large hall where share prices from the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges roll across...

Stop-Rocks; In his taut new drama, the prolific playwright returns to his native land of Czechoslovakia to explore the uneasy relationship among dissidence, consciousness and creativity.
July 24, 2006... Byline: Tara Pepper When the long-haired, politically apathetic Czech rock group the Plastic People of the Universe were arrested in 1977 by the country's hard-line communist government, Vaclav Havel, then a dissident playwright, worried...

Strength From Their Faith; More civic activists are becoming Christian and finding support for their causes in the Bible.
July 24, 2006... Byline: Sarah Schafer and Jonathan Ansfield Growing up in communist China, Li Heping had always been taught that religion was nonsense. But when friends invited the Beijing lawyer to an underground Protestant service six years ago, he felt...

The Last Word: Madeleine Albright; Unintended consequences.(Interview)
July 24, 2006... Byline: Zvika Krieger You wouldn't be alone if you thought the world was spinning out of control: war in Lebanon, North Korean missile launches, Iran's nuclear program, Iraq's civil war and real disagreements among world leaders at the G8....

Chickens Coming Home to Roost; Israel is like an aging boxer who packs a mighty punch that is no longer effective because its intended victims know how to absorb it.(Cover story)(Viewpoint essay)
July 24, 2006... Byline: Rami G. Khouri (Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper and a syndicated columnist.) If you've never seen chickens come home to roost in real time, turn on your television. Watch the expanding military...

An Elegant But Dangerous Idea; The Federal Reserve has waged a noble battle against inflation without any targeting rule.
July 24, 2006... Byline: Stephen S. Roach (Roach is the chief economist at Morgan Stanley.) We draw a false sense of comfort by thinking of economics as science. We risk an equally false sense of security by relying on central bankers who claim they can...

The Good Life.
July 24, 2006... Byline: Zvika Krieger, Silvia Spring, Amber Haq, Karla Adam, Michelle Jana Chan, Brian Braiker, Travel: A Fine Hotel Gone Mobile By Zvika Krieger The golden age of yachting was not during the 1930s, it's now, says William Smith,...

Perspectives.
July 24, 2006... We've decided to put an end to this saga. Israeli security-cabinet member Isaac Herzog, on Israel's decision to attack the militant group Hizbullah in Lebanon "We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy as they have in...

Periscope.
July 24, 2006... Byline: Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova, Zvika Krieger, Barbie Nadeau, Malak Hamwi, Zvika Krieger Russia: Looking Beyond Basayev When shamil Basayev was killed last week, Chechen rebels lost their most daring and bloodthirsty leader....

BlogWatch.(Alaa Abdel Fateh imprisonment)(Brief article)
July 24, 2006... Byline: Zvika Krieger The imprisonment of Alaa Abdel Fateh, the Egyptian blogger, set in motion a flurry of online activity. Activists drew upon a grab bag of technologies--flash animation, online petitions, video blogs and a special...

PowerToGo.(Brief article)
July 24, 2006... Byline: Benjamin Sutherland PowerToGo It looks like one of those handy USB flash drives for transporting computer files like text documents and photos from one PC to another. But PowerToGo, to be released in July by Fremont,...

The Next Front; Pressure is building on Ankara to deal more harshly with cross-border terrorist attacks from Iraq.
July 31, 2006... Byline: Owen Matthews and Sami Kohen Israel launched airstrikes on Lebanon in response to attacks by Hizbullah earlier this month, and George W. Bush called it "self-defense." But what to tell the Turks, who over the last week lost 15...

Border Backlash; Musharraf's attempt to police the tribal areas with the Army has bred a new generation of extremists.
July 31, 2006... Byline: Ron Moreau and Zahid Hussain Just over three years ago, under pressure from Washington to stop Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters from crossing the porous border into Afghanistan, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf began dispatching...

Africa's Taliban; The Islamic Courts Union has tamed a chaotic land of warlords with strict Islamic discipline. Sound familiar?(Somalia)
July 31, 2006... Byline: Rod Nordland It might seem that somalis were put on this earth to suffer. For the past 15 years, they've had civil war. For most of the past decade, there's been drought. The few times the drought has eased, there've been floods....

A Question of Graft; As gushing petrodollars stick to the wrong hands, corruption threatens the regime of Hugo ChAvez.(Venezuela)
July 31, 2006... Byline: Phil Gunson Luis Velazquez alvaray is an unlikely whistle-blower in the Venezuela of Hugo ChAvez. The 54-year-old, mercurial provincial lawyer rose to prominence as a congressman from ChAvez's Fifth Republic Movement, and as a...

Computer Genius; German giant SAP had one big idea. Now can it survive what some are calling the death of software?(Company overview)
July 31, 2006... Byline: Rana Faroohar When you think of technology visionaries, names like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs spring to mind. One that probably does not is Hasso Plattner. It should. As the founder of the German firm SAP, the world's third largest...

Philanthropy: A Man and His Money; SAP founder Hasso Plattner has been an innovator in private life, too, sparking a wave of corporate giving in Germany.
July 31, 2006... Byline: Stefan Theil The billionaire founder of SAP, Hasso Plattner, is a rare species in Germany. Taking a cue from his software buddies in Palo Alto, California, where he lives part time, he's put his money where his mouth is--[euro]230...

A Plan for Afghanistan; It is shameful that we've only built one stretch of highway since the Taliban.(Viewpoint essay)
July 31, 2006... Byline: Anatol Lieven is senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. Rajan Menon is a fellow at the foundation and Monroe J. Rathbone Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University. On his recent trip to Kabul, U.S....

Interview: The Taliban's 'Last Chance'; NATO's top commander in Afghanistan is optimistic.(David Richards)(Interview)(Excerpt)
July 31, 2006... Byline: Emily Flynn Vencat NATO has a war on its hands in Afghanistan. Beginning on July 31, it will take control of the U.S.-led Coalition in the increasingly violent south, where six British soldiers were killed last month. British Lt....

Raising Beast People; Science is blurring the line between humans and animals.
July 31, 2006... Byline: Lee M. Silver (Silver is a professor at Princeton's Department of Molecular Biology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is also the author of "Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality...

A Mission Unaccomplished; Washington has become partisan, deaf to Arab views. It has lost much (if not most) of its leverage in alienated Arab capitals.
July 31, 2006... Byline: Gilles Kepel (Kepel is chair of Middle East studies at Sciences Po in Paris. His latest book is "The War for Muslim Minds.") The war unfolding in the Middle East marks a new era. For Israel and the Palestinians, it is the end of...

Global Investor Saskia Sassen; Why Hong Kong Is Happening.
July 31, 2006... Byline: Saskia Sassen, a sociologist at University of Chicago, is author of "Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages." Like New York, Hong Kong has been declared dead more than once. The 1990s were particularly...

The Good Life.
July 31, 2006... Byline: Sana Butler; Charlie Ferro; Emily Flynn Vencat; Marian Smith; Tara Weingarten; Tara Pepper Travel: Before the Baby Sana Butler; Charlie Ferro; Emily Flynn Vencat; Marian Smith; Tara Weingarten; Tara Pepper Expectant...