Newsweek International articles from June 2004

Newsweek International archives from June 2004

Mail Call: Vietnam Revisited.(Letter to the Editor)
June 7, 2004... Our April 19/April 26 story comparing the Iraq war with Vietnam struck a nerve with readers. Said one, "Both were a bad idea." Another wrote, "Terrorism stopped once we got out; communists didn't take over the world." Some compared this...

Poland's Silent Spring; Will EU membership destroy a traditional way of life?
June 7, 2004... Byline: William Underhill For Szczepan Master, 62, self-sufficiency is the rule on his tiny farm in view of the Tatra mountains of southern Poland. The makeshift barn attached to his house shelters a few pigs, goats and a cow, as well as...

How Charming; With Washington bogged down in Iraq, Kim Jong Il is now trying to play nice with his Asian neighbors.(North and South Korea)
June 7, 2004... Byline: George Wehrfritz, With B. J. Lee in Seoul and Hideko Takayama in Tokyo Crab season is always tense along the world's most heavily defended frontier. Each June, as rival fishing fleets from North and South Korea begin to harvest...

Tiananmen Now; Did the 1989 uprising matter? A student leader answers that question, alongside never-before-seen images of that fateful day.
June 7, 2004... Byline: Wang Dan, Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Harvard University. Fifteen years later people are still trying to divine the significance of the events that led to the Chinese government's brutal crackdown in Tiananmen Square....

Serious About Smog; New rules force 'green' business to do more than talk.
June 7, 2004... Byline: Karen Lowry Miller Enron in its day was big on "corporate social responsibility," which tells you all you really need to know about that fad. Nine parts PR, one part charity, the movement was the boardroom response to a growing...

The Body Electric; From Rome to Dublin, Europe's art museums offer a dazzling range of works that glorify the human image.(Calendar)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Peter Plagens Perfect living bodies will be in Athens this summer, working up a competitive sweat. But perfect marble, bronze and painted bodies can be found all over that other glorious classical city, Rome--not to mention much of...

The Art of the Olympics; There's a lot more to see than swimming and sprinting.
June 7, 2004... Byline: Toula Vlahou You don't have to be a sports fan to find thrills in Athens this summer. The Greeks are putting on quite a cultural show to go along with the Aug. 13-29 Summer Games. Not surprisingly, much of the art on display is...

The Best of The Rest; Big shows, big crowds.(art galleries and museums)(Calendar)
June 7, 2004... There's no shortage of crowd-pleasers this summer. So reserve your tickets, and line up early. Our favorite don't-miss shows: * Tutankhamun--The Golden Beyond: Treasures From the Valley of the Kings , at the Antikenmuseum in Basel,...

Hidden Arias; Can't get a ticket to Glyndebourne? Don't despair. Other good opera abounds.
June 7, 2004... Byline: Andrew Moravcsik, Moravcsik teaches government and directs the European Union Center at Harvard University. Of the 2 million fans who will attend an opera in Europe this summer, one third will visit a single spot: the ancient Roman...

Backing Winners; A new U.S. foreign-aid plan is spurring change.(Millennium Challenge Account)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Tom Masland In May an elite group of development experts, culled from U.S. government agencies, private firms and universities, slipped unnoticed out of Washington and scattered across the planet. They visited 16 of the world's...

Europe's Enron; A lurid corporate scandal highlights the weaknesses in the German system. Too bad no one seems to care.(Bankgesellschaft Berlin)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Stefan Theil It is a spectacular tale of incompetence, greed and charges of corruption. It has pushed one of Germany's biggest banks to the brink of collapse. It allegedly involves ingenious pyramid schemes, runaway debts and...

Sharing the wealth; Two new books take on the critics of globalization.(In Defense of Globalization)(Why Globalization Works)(Book Review)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Robert J. Samuelson Wham! bam! now come two intellectual heavyweights, armed with statistics and studies, determined to prove once and for all that globalization is not just an economic necessity but also a moral...

The Pacific wave; Europe may have the best art, but no one can match Asia for smart, compelling films with mass appeal.(2046)(House of Flying Daggers)(Tropical Malady)(Old Boy )(Nobody Knows )(Movie Review)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Dana Thomas Hollywood is the home of the blockbuster, and Europe of the auteur film. But Asia has been steadily combining the two schools to come up with a whole new genre: the artful and intelligent crowd-pleaser. Smart, expertly...

Dressed for success; A Johannesburg designer creates a sassy new style.(Nkhen-sani Manganyi's clothing is symbolic of a new attitude in South Africa)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Henk Rossouw The clothes inside Nkhen-sani Manganyi's Johannesburg boutique reflect the muted colors of the city's skyline at dusk: orange linen corsets and skirts in brown taffeta and golden silk. Now the streets of South Africa's...

Ralph Nader; Playing the Spoiler Again.(Interview)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Michael Hastings In the famously close U.S. Presidential election of November 2000, Ralph Nader ran as the candidate for the Green Party. Frustrated Democrats and liberals blamed him for taking votes away from Al Gore and ushering...

The Quality of Justice.(Cambodia)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Joe Cochrane In Cambodia, a friend once told me "life is worth less than a chicken." I was reminded of this recently when, witnesses say, a speeding car full of drunk, affluent young Cambodians jumped the curb on a crowded street...

Suspect Motives; Besieged by the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, Team Bush turned attention to the hunt for Al Qaeda.(George W. Bush)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Evan Thomas, Daniel Klaidman and Michael Isikoff, With bureau reports John Ashcroft was in familiar form, part Sgt. Joe Friday, part Prophet of Doom. Standing by giant mug shots of seven terrorist suspects, the U.S. attorney...

Perspectives.
June 7, 2004... Byline: Quotation Sources From Top To Bottom: Guardian.Co.Uk, Associated Press, BBC, New York Times, BBC, Reuters, BBC "I think they must be dead." Cap Haitien, Haiti, resident Pepe Dematin, 18, after a fruitless search for relatives...

Periscope.
June 7, 2004... Byline: Steve Friess, Joe Cochrane, Michael Hastings and Liat Radcliffe, Rana Foroohar, Andrew Murr with Michael Isikoff, Jonathan Adams, Marc Peyser, Sarah Sennott, Jac Chebatoris WORLD AFFAIRS The Biggest Impact Money can't buy...

Tip Sheet.(revival of wallpaper)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Anna Kuchment, Michelle Jana Chan, Chee Pearlman, Raina Kelley, Karen Springen Design: Wallpaper Gets Down By Anna Kuchment Knitting needles, brooches and swing skirts aren't the only vintage accessories making a comeback....

Cutting Loose; Believe the hype. Wi-Fi technology may well change the world, mostly because of the efforts of those who, like its creators, are seeking out the rebel potential of wireless.(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Steven Levy In the '90s, people went bananas about wireless. Electronic communications once thought bound permanently to the world of cables and hard-wired connections suddenly were sprung free, and the possibilities seemed...

Biggest Network.(Seoul, South Korea)(Brief Article)(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: B.J. Lee Lee Hye Ryung's life revolves around the wireless Internet. During her 45-minute morning subway commute to school, the graduate student at Yonsei University in Seoul chats with her friends or plays online games through her...

Living the Wireless Lifestyle.(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Kay Itoi Chika Matsumoto rarely puts her cell phone down, even when she's hanging out with friends at a hamburger shop or soaking in the bathtub. The 17-year-old high-school student is constantly e-mailing her friends. "I want to...

Freedom in the Airwaves.(Estonia)(Brief Article)(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: William Underhill The grim decades of Soviet rule in Estonia gave the Cafe Pegasus, an austere '60s building just inside Tallinn's towering medieval walls, a reputation as a clandestine meeting spot for writers and intellectuals....

Keeping Watch.(wireless surveillance cameras in Soho, London)(Brief Article)(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Emily Flynn Police Sgt. John Baldock had spent many evenings staking out the door-way of the family-run Italian eatery Rosticceria Rusticana, where drug dealers plied their trade away from the surveillance cameras that dot London's...

Higher Calling.(Vatican Web site)(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Barbie Nadeau When you walk through the doors of St. Peter's Basilica these days, you might just catch the glow of a laptop or wireless PDA through the smoky haze of burning incense. The distant hum of Gregorian chants may even be...

The Humblest Digital City.(Pirai, Brazil)(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Mac Margolis You won't find Pirai in a Fodor's guide. Nor is this poky town of 23,600 inhabitants, whose renown peaked during the 19th-century Brazilian coffee boom, exactly the nerve center of Latin American high technology. But...

Only Way to Communicate.(wireless telecommunications in Baghdad)(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Scott Johnson Twenty-two-year-old Hasanen Nawfal studies computer science at a private college in Baghdad, but he may be learning more on the streets. He and his buddies honed their computer skills looking for ways to circumvent...

All Over The Place.(Auckland,New Zealand's wireless internet access)(Brief Article)(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Brad Stone Auckland is famous for sailing, aquariums, Maori culture and dinosaur skeletons. Wireless Internet access is perhaps not far behind. In most cities, connecting wirelessly to the Internet means scoping out a Wi-Fi hotspot...

Gratis in Gotham.(INternet connectivity in New York)(Brief Article)(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Brad Stone The Big Apple now blasts Internet connectivity into the air along with taxi exhaust, the smell of honeyed peanuts from sidewalk vendors and the blare of honking horns. Some of it is official: traffic police in the...

Gambler's Link.(Las Vegas Wi-Fi connections)(Brief Article)(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Brad Stone Even inveterate gamblers need to check their e-mail once in a while. Hotels on the Strip like the Rio, Circus Circus and MGM Grand are joining the worldwide wave of hotels offering guests Wi-Fi access in their rooms....

Googling at 5,000 Meters; Wireless revolution aside, a large portion of the planet's surface is still beyond range of cell-phone and Wi-Fi networks. For some people, that is just not acceptable.
June 7, 2004... Byline: David H. Freedman Eric Duneman wanted the facts on a construction firm that was bidding on a project he's overseeing. So the 34-year-old Iowan dug up the information the way millions of people do every day: he Googled it. Unlike...

The Ultimate Remote Control; One day, our brains might be able to beam our very thoughts wirelessly to the machines around us.(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Carl Zimmer Wireless technology lets us talk on cell phones with people thousands of miles away, surf the Web without a cable and control our stereos, DVD players and televisions. But none of this technology works without pushing...

The Future of Shopping; Tiny silicon identity chips being put in everyday objects and even implanted under the skin are changing the way we consume. Will they also invade our privacy?(radio frequency identification)(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Rana Foroohar, With Jonathan Adams in New York and Kay Itoi in Tokyo Antoine Hazelaar has a chip on his shoulder--or rather just beneath the skin of his left arm. It's a piece of silicon the size of a grain of rice, and it emits...

Pocket Full of Power; Did you think those wireless gadgets were going to run on AAAs? Try tiny jet engines and nuclear reactors.(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: David H. Freedman Alan Epstein proudly points to a new jet engine his group at MIT has developed--a device designed to exceed the thrust per weight of a Boeing 737 engine. Have a look, he says, and then tosses the device across the...

Reinventing the Foot Soldier; The American military wants to bring a vast range of battlefield knowledge down to the grunts on the ground.(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Adam Piore Iraqi soldiers had a name for America's fleet of M1 Abrams tanks--they called them "whispering death." That's because the M1 can obliterate the kind of Soviet-era tanks employed by the former Iraqi Army before a crew...

Your Next Computer; There are 1.5 billion mobile phones in the world today. Already you can use them to browse the Web, take pictures, send e-mail and play games. Soon they could make your PC obsolete.(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Brad Stone, With Emily Flynn in London, Kay Itoi in Tokyo and B. J. Lee in Seoul One hundred nineteen hours, 41 minutes and 16 seconds. That's the amount of time Adam Rappoport, a high-school senior in Philadelphia, has spent...

Unplugged Gurus; When most people in high-tech were focusing on selling stuff over the Internet, a few were thinking outside the box.(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: N'Gai Croal, Sudip Mazumbar, B.J. Lee and William Underhill We know Bill Gates as the father of Windows, Steve Jobs as the man behind the iPod, and Sergei Brin and Larry Page as the geeks who brought us Google. When it comes to the...

The Singles Scene: Bleep! She's Your Type! Add matchmaking to the list of things mobiles are good for.(Symbian Dater)(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Emily Flynn Christoph Oswald has no problem approaching women. As he makes his way through the crowd at his favorite Frankfurt club, his cell phone scans a 10-meter radius for "his type": tall, slim, sporty, in her 30s--and, most...

A Future With Nowhere to Hide? Tracking turns the freedom of mobile telephony upside down.(Cover Story)
June 7, 2004... Byline: Steven Levy We're all too familiar with the concept of technology as a double-edged sword, and wireless is no exception. In fact, the back edge of this rapier is sharp enough to draw blood. Yes, the idea of shedding wires and...

Nice Place to Visit; But you don't necessarily want to invest there. Consider this: China's economy more than doubled over the last decade, but an index of its stocks was down two thirds.(Cover Story)
June 21, 2004... Byline: Allan Sloan, Sloan is NEWSWEEK's Wall Street editor. His e-mail is sloan@panix.com. Think of the opportunities to make money investing in an enormous, rapidly developing country that spans a continent. It's a place that welcomes...

Mail Call: State of the Union.(Letter to the Editor)
June 21, 2004... Many readers thought our May 3 report on the future of an expanded European Union was too pessimistic. "Diversity has always been and will always be the key to understanding one another's cultures and beliefs," wrote one, "and recognizing this...

Europe's Slow Triumph; Extremist electioneering, diplomatic haggling, disputes over the name of God--these make for great headlines, but in fact are soon forgotten.
June 21, 2004... Byline: Andrew Moravcsik, Moravcsik is director of the European Union Program at Harvard University. Europeans seem to agree on nothing these days, except their dislike of the European Union. Begin with the European Constitution, likely to...

Key to the Mideast; If the G8 nations really want to spread reform throughout the region, they should look first to Cairo.(Cover Story)
June 21, 2004... Byline: Christopher Dickey When a handful of Arab leaders sat down to lunch with presidents and prime ministers from the world's most industrialized countries at the G8 summit last week, Egypt's wasn't at the table. The topic was democracy...

Now It's Round Two; The opposition has hurt Chavez, but can it knock him out?(Hugo Chavez)
June 21, 2004... Byline: Phil Gunson For the past year, the political spotlight in Venezuela has been on leftist President Hugo Chavez. The world watched as he tried every means at his disposal to thwart a recall referendum campaign organized by his...

A Crowd Pleaser; Six years after the political reign of Suharto came to a tumultuous end, Indonesians are once again looking for a strong leader to take their country's reins.
June 21, 2004... Byline: Joe Cochrane, With Peter Janssen in Jakarta Indonesian military leaders aren't known for their fan bases. But the baby-faced Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is turning out to be an exception. Last week 15,000 people flocked to a football...

Interview: 'I Will Never Give Up'; Yudhoyono is leading in the race to become Indonesia's next president. If he wins, though, his work will have just begun.(Interview)
June 21, 2004... Byline: Joe Cochrane Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is flying high. The former Indonesian Army general and government minister has a huge lead going into the country's first direct presidential election on July 5, and his campaign is only...

The Talking Cure; The spread of depression to new parts of the world is rejuvenating the field of therapy.(Cover Story)
June 21, 2004... Byline: Tara Pepper and Jaime Cunningham, With Carter Dougherty, Scott Johnson, Peter Hudson, Frank Brown, Nadezhda Titova, Jen Lin-Liu, Joanna Chen and Hideko Takayama, Graphic by John Sparks Within a decade Ugandan villager Josephine...

The Neverending Story; How does Wong Kar-wai know when a film is done? When he runs out of funds--or a festival looms. Thank goodness for Cannes.
June 21, 2004... Byline: Dana Thomas In April of last year Cannes Film Festival artistic director Thierry Fremaux called Chinese filmmaker Wong Kar-wai in Hong Kong to see if "2046," the highly anticipated follow-up to his 2000 hit, "In the Mood for Love,"...

The Actress: A Gamble Worth Taking; After keeping a low profile for five years, Gong Li appears in not one but two new films by director Wong Kar-wai.
June 21, 2004... Byline: Dana Thomas For most of the 1990s, Gong Li was China's leading lady. Starring in such films as "Farewell My Concubine," "Red Sorghum" and "Raise the Red Lantern"-- the latter two directed by her then boyfriend, Zhang Yimou--she...

Empty Starting Blocks; Canada toughens its standards for Olympic athletes.
June 21, 2004... Byline: Susan H. Greenberg and Barry Brown Carol Howe is Canada's third fastest female marathoner, with a best time of 2 hours 34 minutes. That's a full three minutes faster than the International Olympic Committee's qualifying standard....

A Gold Medal for Generosity?(Badri Patarkatsishvili)(Brief Article)
June 21, 2004... Byline: Frank Brown Things are looking up for the tiny Olympic squad from Georgia, thanks to a $2.25 million gift from Badri Patarkatsishvili, the country's richest man. The sum will cover 80 percent of the team's costs. Athletes and...

The Realist; As a spy and diplomat, James Lilley was always the China hand.(China Hands)(Book Review)
June 21, 2004... Byline: Andrew Nagorski Born in 1928 in Tsingtao, China, where his father worked for Standard Oil, James Lilley has returned repeatedly to the Middle Kingdom, discovering traces of his family's past even as he charted his own path as a CIA...

Nuclear Families; Lukashenko urges citizens to return to Chernobyl.
June 21, 2004... Byline: Michal Kacewicz How many years has it been since Chernobyl? Eighteen? In the contaminated zone of southern Belarus, time seems to stand still. Thick woods. A forest path. Slowly, the village of Dubrovannoye comes into view--or...

Youth: A Different Way of Healing; When treating depressed kids, do drugs work better than therapy?(Cover Story)
June 21, 2004... Byline: Tara Pepper When 18-year-old Gemma Tovey went to her doctor complaining she felt low, had trouble getting out of bed in the morning and dreaded the thought of leaving her house, he prescribed Prozac. Gemma, who lives in Birmingham...

What Could They Be Thinking? France riles neighbor Germany with its efforts to promote 'national champion' companies.
June 21, 2004... Byline: Stefan Theil, With Eric Pape and Marie Valla in Paris It violates every tenet of European integration. It contradicts all wisdom on how to reform economies, create growth and maximize competitiveness. And it's becoming a political...

Mahmoud Abbas; 'Someone Was Going to Kill'.(Interview)
June 21, 2004... Byline: Dan Ephron When he was named Palestinian prime minister more than a year ago, Mahmoud Abbas was touted as the un-Arafat. He was soft-spoken and clean-shaven, and looked forward to working with President George W. Bush, Israeli...

Revenge of the Garbage Nazi.
June 21, 2004... Byline: Kay Itoi In Tokyo, we live in fear of getting caught putting out gomi, or garbage, at the wrong place, at the wrong time. And the scariest thing about gomi is the ladies--usually older and very proper--who police the rules. ...

Gotta Turn Chinese; To profit in China, companies have to go native from design to sales, says a top CEO who has done it.(Yun Jong Yong)(Interview)(Cover Story)
June 21, 2004... Byline: B.J. Lee Since Yun Jong Yong became its CEO in 1996, Samsung Electronics has emerged as the most profitable consumer-electronics giant in the world, with 2003 profits of $5 billion on sales of $36 billion. Its success is...

Microsoft's Cultural Revolution; Battered by pirates and struggling to turn a profit, the brash American software giant is no longer trying to change China. Instead China's changing the company.(Cover Story)
June 21, 2004... Byline: Sarah Schafer Microsoft's largest beachhead outside the United States is in the state most hostile to it: the People's Republic of China. Since arriving in Beijing in 1990, the Gates empire has assembled a network of business...

Vegas Rolls the Dice in Macao; With American moguls pouring in billions, the Chinese are building another Strip on the South China Sea.(Cover Story)
June 21, 2004... Byline: Alexandra A. Seno A few blocks from Macao's eerily vacant international airport, the wind blows a bamboo basket through wild grass. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Las Vegas tycoon Sheldon Adelson sketches his vision for...

Automobiles: China Hits the road; A new nation of car buyers is catching up with Japan.(Cover Story)
June 21, 2004... Byline: Keith Naughton, With Craig Simons in Beijing For decades You Xiaoyi rode a bike to his job at a state-run factory in China. In the 1980s he upgraded to a Beijing public bus. But today You, 70, owns his own factory, and he's ready...

A Prince Among Beers; Budweiser claims a victory in a bloodthirsty industry.(Brief Article)(Cover Story)
June 21, 2004... Byline: Alexandra A. Seno For decades, Anheuser-Busch has called Bud the "King of Beers" at home, but after spending 10 years and $1 billion to break into China, it's just another pretender there. Competition from some 400 local breweries...

Perspectives.
June 21, 2004... Byline: Quotation sources: Associated Press (2), New York Times, Associated Press, BBC (3) "He is home now. He is free." Ron Reagan, the son of the former president, in remarks about his father at his California memorial service...

Periscope.
June 21, 2004... Byline: Stryker McGuire and Emily Flynn, Frank Brown, Sarah Sennott, Jonathan Adams, Michael Isikoff, Vibhuti Patel, Anne Underwood, Aubrey Oman, Lorraine Ali INDIA-PAKISTAN A Bleak Beginning India's shocking election upset last...

Snap Judgment: Books.(Book Review)
June 21, 2004... Byline: Barbara Kantrowitz, Michael Hastings, Jonathan Adams The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler The plot of this witty novel revolves around six Californians who decide to read an Austen novel every month. Fowler...

Portugal: Forget The Football.
June 21, 2004... Byline: Emily Flynn More than 1 million sports fans are expected for this month's European football championships in Portugal, which kicked off on Saturday. Don't fret if you haven't booked your tickets yet: six matches--including two...

Books: Beyond Bloom.(James Joyce)(Brief Article)
June 21, 2004... Byline: John David Sparks One of the few things knottier than James Joyce's "Ulysses" was the author's relationship with his hometown, Dublin. But on the 100th anniversary of the day Joyce sent Leopold Bloom wandering through the Irish...

Mail Call: Scandal in Iraq.(Letter to the Editor)
June 28, 2004... Readers of our May 10 report on the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse were outraged by the scandal. "Most disturbing is the reluctance of those at the top to act," wrote one. Said another, "I'm angry, I'm ashamed of America." One hated our headline: "...

Dangerous Straits; Military ties between Washington and Taipei are starting to deepen. It's a shift that has Beijing seeing red.(China reacts to U.S. - Taiwan relations)
June 28, 2004... Byline: Melinda Liu, With Tim Culpan in Taipei The Taiwan Strait has long been at the center of a war of words. Beijing and Taipei frequently exchange statements full of vitriol--each accusing the other of bringing them closer to the brink...

Innocents Abroad; American tourists are flocking back to Europe. Will they leave their cowboy boots home?
June 28, 2004... Byline: Adam Piore, With Barbie Nadeau in Rome, Ginanne Brownell in London, Stefan Theil in Berlin, Andrew Ehrenkranz and Marie Valla in Paris and Owen Matthews in Istanbul June 4 in Rome was the kind of day when police chiefs keep the...

Blending In: Americans Don't Wear Speedos... But I Do. What's a poor U.S. expat to do to escape a public stoning? Don political camouflage, of course, and pretend to be native.
June 28, 2004... Byline: David Ray Afraid I was "going French" after living on the Riviera for three years, my parents express-mailed me several American-flag lapel pins, similar to the kind worn by President George W. Bush and bearing the words, PROUD TO...

The Gay-Marriage Flap; The government is out of step with public opinion.
June 28, 2004... Byline: Eric Pape, With Marie Valla in Paris At the Begles town hall, near Bordeaux, Stephane Chapin and Bertrand Charpentier stepped out of a chocolate-colored Rolls-Royce--one in a pinstripe black suit, the other in white. Watching...

The Re-election Risk; Uribe aims to alter Colombia's Constitution so he can run for a second term. But if history is a guide, that may be a bad idea.(Albaro Uribe)
June 28, 2004... Byline: Joseph Contreras, With Steven Ambrus in Bogota and Mike Kepp in Rio de Janeiro Alvaro Uribe is on a roll. When he was sworn in as Colombia's 43rd president in August 2002, Uribe inherited an economy in full recession and stalled...

Business: Joburg's New Vibe; After a decadelong decline, South Africa's commercial hub is buzzing again. Crime has fallen sharply, and both businessmen and investors are coming back.(Johannesburg, South Africa)
June 28, 2004... Byline: Tom Masland The annual Gemini party draws together some of Johannesburg's best and brightest--thirtysomething achievers in business, the arts, info tech, law and the media. So it was a sign of the times this month when the nine...

The Fear Factor; Many analysts believe it's the No. 1 reason for today's high oil prices, and that it will last as long as Al Qaeda does.
June 28, 2004... Byline: Karen Lowry Miller and Rana Foroohar How big is the fear factor? On June 1, the first day of trading after the deadly terrorist shooting spree on oil expats in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, the price of a barrel of oil spiked more than $2...

The Life in a Cell; Stem-cell researchers find fresh hope for curing deadly diseases--along with new controversies.
June 28, 2004... Byline: Claudia Kalb, With Liat Radcliffe in London Under the microscope, they look like luminous stars in a black-and-white galaxy. They are dazzling, mysterious, magical. They are human embryonic stem cells. Hailed by some as a cure...

European Idol; Moore reinforces all Europe's stereotypes about Americans: that they're violent, feckless and arrogant. But he also embodies the national bluntness that Europeans have come to admire. Plus, he's fat and wears a baseball cap.(Michael Moore)(Cover Story)
June 28, 2004... Byline: Christopher Dickey, With Dana Thomas in Cannes, Stefan Theil in Berlin and Ginanne Brownell in London French author Gilles Delafon was feeling a little jealous, perhaps, as he sipped his coffee and ate his croissant in a civilized...

Was the Bard a Woman? A new contender for authorship of Shakespeare's works.(Mary Sidney)
June 28, 2004... Byline: Anne Underwood For more than 150 years, literary sleuths have questioned whether William Shakespeare--a man with a grammar-school education, at best--could possibly have penned some of the greatest works in the English language....

Muddling Through, Take 2; The new Europe soldiers through its first tough week-- the so-called Acrimony Summit. It won't be the last.
June 28, 2004... Byline: Stryker McGuire, With Steven Paulikas in Vilnius, Eric Pape and Marie Valla in Paris, Stefan Theil in Berlin and Barbie Nadeau in Rome By the old rules, British Prime Minister Tony Blair is a bad European. Britain is not a member...

Beauty and the Beast; Peter Robb takes a colorful look at Brazil, tripe and all.(A Death in Brazil)(Book Review)
June 28, 2004... Byline: Mac Margolis The late composer Antonio Carlos Jobim once said famously that Brazil is not for beginners. Peter Robb, a seasoned Australian travel writer, knows that at gut level. In his new book, "A Death in Brazil" (329 pages....

A Free Press, for Sale; Too often, the Russian media is its own worst enemy.
June 28, 2004... Byline: Frank Brown It's no secret that the free press in Vladimir Putin's Russia has taken a severe beating. Not one of the four major television networks now veers from the Kremlin line. That became all the more apparent earlier this...

A Few Words Conveying a Lot; Russia should once again be one of the fastest-expanding economies in the world this year, with GNP growth north of 7 percent.
June 28, 2004... Byline: Ruchir Sharma, Sharma is co-head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Black humor is an integral part of Russian culture. And there's plenty of it going around Moscow these days, centered on the travails of...

Secrets Of Unit 1391; Uncovering an Israeli jail that specializes in nightmares.
June 28, 2004... Byline: Dan Ephron, With Joanna Chen in Jerusalem and Samir Zedan in Nablus Sometimes a country's darkest secrets have a way of surfacing in the most offhanded manner. Gad Kroizer, an Israeli historian, was researching old British police...