Newsweek International articles from October 2005

Newsweek International archives from October 2005

Mail Call.(Letter to the Editor)
October 10, 2005... Mom Knows Best? Readers of our Aug. 15 cover story on new research on babies' brains veered between praise and anxiety. "Great job!" cheered one; "fascinating reading," echoed another. But "what should we do with all this new information?"...

Time To Deliver; He's one of the three greatest P.M.s in postwar British history. But Tony Blair's ambitious agenda is also unfulfilled.(Cover Story)
October 10, 2005... Byline: Stryker McGuire (With Martin Stabe in London) The other day, a NEWSWEEK reporter called the office of one of Tony Blair's closest associates. He wanted to set up an appointment to talk about the British prime minister's legacy. An...

The Enemies Within; Not all Turks want to join the European Union.
October 10, 2005... Byline: Owen Matthews And Sami Kohen It looked like the bad old days when Turkey's universities were hot-beds of political strife. On one side of the police barriers were dozens of young students, many with their mouths taped shut to...

Rising Again; Japan's economy, plagued by a decade of ennui and false starts, is showing signs of real vitality.
October 10, 2005... Byline: Christian Caryl Haruhiko Okamoto is visibly enjoying his visit to the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Beaming, he lifts his 7-year-old daughter Yuriko off the ground. The little girl, clad in a blue and white school uniform, swings a hammer...

Kill Fewer, Kill Carefully; Ordinary Chinese are now saying their legal system is medieval, unjust--and too eager to execute suspects.
October 10, 2005... Byline: Sarah Schafer Ten years ago, police in a small village in China's southern Hubei province discovered the mostly decomposed body of an unidentified woman. Local villager She Xianglin had recently reported his wife, Zhang Zaiyu,...

Hong Kong Bull Rush; The enclave is winning the race with Shanghai to become the de facto national stock market of China.
October 10, 2005... Byline: George Wehrfritz Investors eager for a piece of China have traditionally had to buy the whole hog. Yet as China Yurun Food Group illustrated last week, it is now possible to grab a thin slice. The mainland's third largest meat...

Context Is Everything; A new Tate Britain exhibit explores how different painters approached the same subject matter.
October 10, 2005... Byline: Tara Pepper The first exhibition of works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in London, at the Goupil Gallery in May 1898, was part of a carefully planned attempt to launch the French artist in a wealthy new market, building on the...

The Real Crisis For Europe; The anti-Turkish mood is rooted in the EU's broader malaise. People living in economic insecurity are afraid to embrace change.
October 10, 2005... Byline: Charles Grant (Grant is director of the Centre for European Reform in London.) So, is Turkey to start membership talks with the European Union? The reception could hardly be more hostile. As the public sees it, the EU is big enough...

Poland and The Pope; Shedding new light on John Paul II's views.
October 10, 2005... Byline: Andrew Nagorski John Paul II made no secret of his intense interest in the political upheavals and religious controversies in his native Poland. But a book of his private correspondence about to be published in Poland demonstrates...

Conflicted Commies; The force that could determine India's capitalist future is one of the world's strongest communist parties.
October 10, 2005... Byline: Jason Overdorf As its name implies, the Communist Party of India-Marxist still employs the dated rhetoric of the left, down to calling its ruling body the Politburo, in old Soviet style. So it came as a surprise this summer when...

Hugo Chavez; 'A Terrorist Administration'.(Interview)
October 10, 2005... Byline: Lally Weymouth Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez is a bete noire of the Bush administration. He's a populist on the Castro model who wants to steer Latin America firmly to the left. He also rules a key oil-producing country, which...

The Good Life.(trends)
October 10, 2005... Byline: Rukhmini Punoose, Ginanne Brownell, Ramin Setoodeh To See And Be Seen By Rukhmini Punoose Feel like you've got-ten all the fashion mileage you can out of your scarf, belt or purse? Try a new pair of custom glasses--and never...

Perspectives.
October 10, 2005... Byline: Quotation sources from top to bottom: The Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, CBS, Baltimore Sun, Newsweek Correspondent, The Washington Post "Everything was in chaos." Paramedic Agus Mustofa, on the...

Periscope.(meshed briefings)
October 10, 2005... Byline: Dan Ephron and Michael Hirsh, Eric Pape, Holly Bailey, Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, Rana Foroohar, Bao Ong, Ramin Setoodeh, N'Gai Croal, Andrew Romano Israel: Disengagement, Part II? To longtime observers of Israeli politics, it...

Snap Judgment: Books.(The City of Falling Angels)(Tango: The Art History of Love)(The Game)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 10, 2005... Byline: Anuj Desai, Jessica Coen The City of Falling Angels By John Berendt Unlike the author's previous book, the runaway hit "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," Berendt's latest reconstruction of a real-life mystery does not...

Mail Call: Moving the Settlers.(Letter to the Editor)
October 17, 2005... Readers of our Aug. 22 report on Israel's pullout from Gaza offered mixed reactions. One found our image of an armed Jewish settler "provocative... unwise and unhelpful." Another said, "The withdrawal will not bring security." A third insisted,...

Looks Can Be Deceiving; SBY vows to crack down on extremists but hasn't yet acknowledged that a major terrorist group exists. Will he speak out?(Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, president of Indonesia)
October 17, 2005... Byline: Joe Cochrane Last week Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono showed why more than 90 percent of his countrymen rate him a good leader. The retired Army general, who has broad shoulders and a stern gaze, inspected the sites...

Big Brother Is Talking; China's ubiquitous e-police are using the Web themselves to shape political discourse.
October 17, 2005... Byline: Melinda Liu (With Quindlen Krovatin) Like many Chinese twenty-somethings, Lu Ruchao loves to surf the Internet. He often visits a local chat room to sample the neighborhood buzz. One day, Lu noticed that Netizens were complaining...

Rise Of The Left; The country's muddled search for a chancellor produces a fundamental shift in its political landscape.(Germany)
October 17, 2005... Byline: Stefan Theil and Michael Meyer Politics Italian style? Normally, that's the last way anyone would describe the German political scene. But these days? It's apt. To speak of the Sept. 18 election results as "confusing" would--well,...

Fabulous Fashion; Low-cost companies like Zara and TopShop are emerging as defining and dominant players, not just followers.
October 17, 2005... Byline: Rana Foroohar (With Martin Stabe) As the season of fashion shows in the U.S. and Europe draws to a close in Paris this week, one of the hottest trendsetters is also one of the newest. TopShop, the 41-year-old British retailer known...

Beyond 'The Scream'; Munch's self-portraits reveal the breadth of his talent.(Edvard Munch exhibition at London's Royal Academy of Arts)
October 17, 2005... Byline: Ginanne Brownell A skeletally thin figure, hunched in what could be midmotion, stands in a darkened blue-black room. Part of his face is bathed in soft light, but his eyes remain in shadow, haunting charcoal sockets aimed straight...

Rediscovering America; When Columbus landed in the New World, he found a society more advanced in some ways than Europe.(1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)(Book Review)
October 17, 2005... Byline: Fred Guterl Of all the stories people tell, the least grounded in fact tend to be those about origins. Only a few decades ago, Christopher Columbus was the discoverer of America and a hero of the second-grade classroom. In recent...

Soaring on Feet of Clay; Making the new Wallace and Gromit movie was arduous but well worth every painstaking frame.(Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit)(Movie Review)
October 17, 2005... Byline: Tara Pepper Over the past two decades, the gentle humor of the man-and-dog duo Wallace and Gromit has won a cult following through a series of Oscar-winning short films. When word spread that their creator, Nick Park, was working...

The Polish Plumber; Guess what? He's here--and there's nothing to fear. So why not welcome Turkey into the European Union?
October 17, 2005... Byline: William Underhill (With Tracy McNicoll in Paris, Wojciech Rogacin in Warsaw, Stefan Theil in Berlin, Ginanne Brownell in London and Anna Sofia Martin in Dublin) It took more than 40 years of stop-start diplomacy and a final round...

Sinan Shabibi; Iraq Is Open For Business.(Interview)
October 17, 2005... Byline: Lally Weymouth The son of a respected family of Shiite intellectuals, Sinan Shabibi is governor of the Central Bank of Iraq. His may be the toughest such job in the world: while inflation has been brought under control and a new...

A World Without Laughter; Houellebecq sees a future of clones and hedonists.(The Possibilite d'une ile = The Possibility of an Island)(Book Review)
October 17, 2005... Byline: Eric Pape In the future there will be no sex, intimacy or love. Desire and passion will endure only in the typed word. Forget about laughter and tears. People no longer will be humans, but rather "neo-human" clones, looking back on...

Should We Be More Worried? Wall Street is notorious for being too optimistic for too long, and then too despairing when things go bad. I fear it is in its Pollyanna phase now.
October 17, 2005... Byline: Jeffrey Garten (Garten is the Juan Trippe Professor at the Yale School of Management. He can be contacted at Jeffrey.Garten@Yale.edu) Hurricanes Katrina and Rita did not roil global financial markets. Neither did the terror attack...

The Good Life.(Grasse, France; flight schools; cruise ships; Luxe City Guides' online travel tips)
October 17, 2005... Byline: William Underhill, Leah Purcell, Ethan Porter, Kay Itoi TRAVEL: SMELL THE FLOWERS By William Underhill Think of grasse and flare your nostrils. Every ancient city boasts its own distinctive smell; Grasse has thousands. For...

Perspectives.
October 17, 2005... Byline: Quotation sources: The Washington Post, AP, BBC, New York Times (2), BBC (2) "We will see freedom's victory." U.S. President George W. Bush, claiming that the United States is responding to "a global campaign of fear with a...

Periscope.(meshed briefs)
October 17, 2005... Byline: Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff, Barbie Nadeau and Jacopo Barigazzi, Dan Ephron, Marc Peyser, Ginanne Brownell, Emily Flynn Vencat, Steven Levy, Emily Flynn TERROR Determining the Threat How are Americans supposed to assess...

Snap Judgment: Books.(I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir)(Spook)(In the Fold)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 17, 2005... Byline: Jack Livings, Malcolm Jones, Shailaja Neelakantan I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir by Rafi Zabor In the first installment of his projected four-volume autobiography, writer and jazz drummer Zabor casts a line into the bottomless well of...

Mail Call: A Cool Muslim Metropolis.(Gaza, Turkey, Colombia and other meshed briefs)(Letter to the Editor)
October 24, 2005... Many readers of our Aug. 29 report on Istanbul's new identity were excited to find the spotlight on their favorite city. Said one, "It was a breath of fresh air for Turks living abroad." Another warned against overlooking its problems, saying,...

The Price Of Power; Has Merkel given away too much? Maybe not.(Germany)
October 24, 2005... Byline: Stefan Theil Angela Merkel will be the first woman to lead Germany since Empress Theophanu in A.D. 991. Yet what's greeted her unwieldy coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, to be painstakingly hammered out over...

HELPING HANDS; Killer Quake: Is there is a chance Islamabad and New Delhi can find common cause in this horrific tragedy?
October 24, 2005... Byline: Ron Moreau and Zahid Hussain (With Sudip Mazumdar in New Delhi) Early last week, three days after a 7.6-magnitude earthquake devastated Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, Lt. Col. Chiragh Haider dispatched a group of Pakistani Army...

Line of Defense; Beijing is worried about 'alarming' levels of social unrest, but a policy of local crackdowns is backfiring.
October 24, 2005... Byline: Melinda Liu In the '90s, the Chongqing Special Steelworks was touted as a modern state-run enterprise, with fat profits and grand plans to expand. In fact, its managers were cooking the books to feign profitability. They couldn't...

Aristide Agonistes; Are U.S. officials working up to an indictment of the ex-president for alleged links to drug runners?
October 24, 2005... Byline: Joseph Contreras Ever since a nationwide rebellion forced Haiti's President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to flee the impoverished island country in February 2004, federal prosecutors in Miami have systematically tracked down and...

State of Fury; If the meltdown comes, it will begin in Manchuria, long a vortex of intrigue.
October 24, 2005... Byline: Stephen Glain A senior U.S. security official on a visit to Beijing last year was having drinks with Chinese counterparts when the talk turned to rising social strife. The American assumed China's poor western provinces, plagued by...

Broken Borders; Trafficking: Globalization has lowered barriers to illegal as well as legal commerce, and international smuggling now threatens to derail the world economy.(Cover Story)
October 24, 2005... Byline: Moises Naim (NAIM is the editor of Foreign Policy magazine. His book, 'Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy,' is released this week by Doubleday.) Last week a British sting operation...

The Devil in Pictures; The Vatican is steadfast in its defense of exorcism.(The Exorcism of Emily Rose)
October 24, 2005... Byline: Barbie Nadeau For the first 22 years of her life, Anneliese Michel was an unremarkable young woman--a teacher in training and part of a devout Roman Catholic family in Germany. She also happened to be an epileptic, and prone to the...

Winning Argument; Take him on at your own risk. Amartya Sen is more than just a leading economist.
October 24, 2005... Byline: Shashi Tharoor One Indian, the old joke goes, is a monologue; two Indians are a debate; three Indians, two political parties. That Indians are argumentative seems beyond dispute. But it takes an economist of Nobel laureate Amartya...

Public Health: No Cause for Panic; The spread of bird flu to Europe has officials worried, but the likelihood of the disease spreading to humans remains low.
October 24, 2005... Byline: Emily Flynn Vencat Predicting the severity of a natural disaster is a tricky business. David Nabarro, the coordinator for avian and human influenza for the United Nations, found out firsthand just how tricky earlier this month...

A Spreading War; A bloody gun battle spotlights the bitter mix of resentment and Islamic extremism bubbling in the Caucasus.
October 24, 2005... Byline: Kevin O'Flynn and Anna Nemtsova They came early in the morning. More than a hundred, and perhaps as many as 500 armed men attacking the quiet Russian town of Nalchik in the shadow of Europe's highest mountain. A bloody battle over...

Immigration: AT THE GATES; As the European Union expands, it's come face to face with a new world.(Cover Story)
October 24, 2005... Byline: Christopher Dickey (With Eric Pape and Tracy McNicoll in Paris, Jenny Barchfield in Madrid, Jacopo Barigazzi in Milan, and Stefan Theil in Berlin) The Africans had walked for days from the vast Sahara to reach those high fences...

A Costly Disease; Europe and the rest of the world braces for the economic fallout of a possible bird-flu pandemic.
October 24, 2005... Byline: George Wehrfritz and Rod Nordland (With John David Sparks in New York and Emily Flynn Vencat and Martin Stabe in London) The remote Danube delta village of Ceamurlia de Jos in Romania is a busy place these days. Squads of men in...

Silence Is Golden; An antiwar playwright wins the Nobel Prize.
October 24, 2005... Byline: Tara Pepper The TV news report last Thursday announcing that renowned British playwright and poet Harold Pinter had died was surprising only to the few who did not know he had been diagnosed with cancer in 2002. The corrected...

Burning the Furniture; Steve Miller.(Interview)
October 24, 2005... Byline: Keith Naughton Steve Miller, CEO of newly bankrupt U.S. car-parts maker Delphi Corp., has always known how to cut the tension in difficult situations. Last month, with Delphi in feverish (and ultimately fruitless) negotiations for...

Deja Vu All Over Again; China is an aspiring superpower, with economic and military ambitions; it is even less likely to cave [to U.S. demands] than Japan.
October 24, 2005... Byline: Jeffrey E. Garten (Garten is the Juan Trippe Professor at the Yale School of Management. He can be contacted at Jeffrey.Garten@Yale.edu.) During this past week, secretary of the Treasury John Snow, Federal Reserve chairman Alan...

Double Vision.(LCD panel with dual-view introduced in Japan)(Brief Article)
October 24, 2005... Byline: Hideko Takayama Tired of staring out the car window while the driver gets to have all the fun with the navigation system? If you're in Japan, relief is on the way: Sharp Corp. recently introduced a dual-view LCD panel that allows...

Perspectives.
October 24, 2005... Byline: Quotation sources from top to bottom: CNN, BBC, The Washington Post (2) AP, Reuters, The Washington Post "I fear we're losing this cruel race against time." U.N. emergency-relief coordinator Jan Egeland, on delays in...

Periscope.(Syria, North Korea, Taiwan and other meshed briefs)
October 24, 2005... Byline: Christopher Dickey, John Barry, Mark Hosenball and Dan Ephron, B. J. Lee, Jonathan Adams, Mark Hosenball and Richard Wolffe, Ginanne Brownell, Elise Soukup, Nick Summers, Emily Flynn, Benjamin Sutherland SYRIA: Buried With Secrets...

Mail Call: Protecting Privacy.(Letter to the Editor)
October 31, 2005... Readers of our Sept. 5 cover story on identity theft shared their ordeals or offered solutions. Said one, "Your report brought back bitter memories of my brush with this crime." Wrote another, "It affected my credit score and took months to...

Sunset on the Liffey? Europe's 'Celtic Tiger' still roars. But some fear the much-lauded Irish miracle may be losing its bite.
October 31, 2005... Byline: William Underhill (With Diarmaid MacDermott in Dublin) Ireland has a new hero. He's beaky, bespectacled and made his career in the unfashionable world of personal finance. But Eddie Hobbs has found a way to the nation's...

A Very Lonely Japan; The country's inability to come to grips with its past has long infuriated the region. But now it's starting to threaten Tokyo's once unquestioned influence.
October 31, 2005... Byline: Christian Caryl (With Hideko Takayama and Kay Itoi in Tokyo) The Japanese tend to expect diplomatic bouquets from even the most insignificant of their foreign visitors. So imagine the audience reaction when German ex-chancellor...

The Not-So-Great Wall of China; It may be the epicenter of an epidemic, and its health-care system is in tatters. That's a recipe for disaster.(Cover Story)
October 31, 2005... Byline: Melinda Liu (With Alexandra A. Seno in Hong Kong and Ralph Jennings and Quindlen Krovatin in Beijing) Nobody in Zhang Rong's village in coastal China knows much about the danger of a bird-flu pandemic. The 37-year-old farmer has...

Too Personal History; Seeing the Middle East through distorted glasses.(The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East)(Book Review)
October 31, 2005... Byline: John R. Bradley (Bradley is the author of "Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis.") In one of three meetings veteran British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk had with Osama bin Laden, the latter tried to convert him...

A Comedy Of Suffering; When clashing cultures misread one another.(Saving Fish From Drowning)(Brief Article)
October 31, 2005... Byline: Malcolm Jones Amy Tan means well, but she knows that's not enough. So she did what she does best and wrote a novel about her dilemma. "Saving Fish From Drowning" is not your usual Tan story. It's not about mothers and daughters or...

Victor: Hugo; Flush with petrodollars and bolstered by the support of poor citizens across the region, Hugo Chavez has succeeded in redefining the debate in Latin America.
October 31, 2005... Byline: Joseph Contreras and Phil Gunson (With Brian Byrnes in Buenos Aires and Mac Margolis in Rio de Janeiro) Inside a dank warehouse in the working-class Buenos Aires neighborhood of La Boca last week, young Argentines were standing...

Economy: A New Consensus; While Chavez's tropical socialism is popular among the people, the region's leaders are set on a different path.(Hugo Chavez)
October 31, 2005... Byline: Mac Margolis In the gospel of Hugo Chavez, Latin Americans are threatened by the West once again. The latter-day conquistadors are "neoliberals" and their Washington Consensus is the free-market dogma of privatization, fiscal...

Can Taiwan Come Back? Overshadowed by big brands from South Korea, the island's small, unsung firms look for a new model.
October 31, 2005... Byline: Jonathan Adams The numbers look like a victory for Taiwan. In recent years, Taiwanese manufacturers watched and worried as Korean rivals rose to the top of the consumer-electronics world, with Samsung and LG Electronics becoming...

Preparing for The Worst; Janos Bogardi: We are always arming for the last battle. We had a tsunami and only now are we working on a warning system. The next one will surely be different.(Interview)
October 31, 2005... Byline: Mac Margolis On Oct. 12, the United Nations' official day of Disaster Preparedness, scholars from the U.N. University's campus in Bonn issued an appropriately gloomy statement. If nothing is done to cushion the blow of natural...

The Oil Shock With No Pain; This time around, the crude-producing nations have done a much better job of recycling oil money into the global economy.
October 31, 2005... Byline: Ruchir Sharma (Sharma is co-head of global emerging markets and a member of the global asset-allocation committee at Morgan Stanley Investment Management.) The inevitable never happens, the unexpected always does. Economists long...

Good Life.(Correction Notice)
October 31, 2005... ***** CORRECTION: In "Better Than Green," (The Good Life, Oct. 31) Pace University was incorrectly placed in Louisiana. The school is in New York. Newsweek regrets the error. ***** Byline: Emily Flynn Vencat CORRECTION...

Center of the Web; Who killed Rafik Hariri? A long-awaited U.N. report points clearly to Damascus.
October 31, 2005... Byline: Christopher Dickey and Kevin Peraino (With John Barry and Mark Hosenball in Washington) Sheik Ahmed Abdel-Al was a busy man last Feb. 14, the day an enormous truck bomb in Beirut killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri...

Perspectives.
October 31, 2005... Byline: Quotation sources: USA Today, BBC (2), International Herald Tribune, Reuters "It could be a lost year." Republican strategist Bill Dal Col, on whether the Bush administration can weather mounting challenges and salvage its...

Periscope.(includes multiple articles )
October 31, 2005... Byline: Mark Hosenball, Ethan Porter, Joe Cochrane, Babak Dehghanpisheh, Ginanne Brownell, Tracy McNicoll, Peter Suciu INTEL: Cooperation Chaos Recent U.S. terror scares have raised questions about efforts to share intel at the local...

Familiar Faces.(visual password system)(Brief Article)
October 31, 2005... Byline: BENJAMIN SUTHERLAND Few things are more annoying than forgetting a password. The typical office worker has 12 of them, according to research firm Gartner, and each time he forgets one it costs his employer $10 to reset it. ...