Newsweek International articles from September 2003

Newsweek International archives from September 2003

Iraq's Guerrilla War.
September 8, 2003... Readers of our July 21 cover story on the Iraqi resistance all condemned the U.S. presence. Wrote one, "I hope this doesn't turn into another Vietnam." Another said, "The only link between 9/11, Iraq and terrorism is the U.S. government." A...

Life on a Knife's Edge.(The Zanzibar Chest: a Story of Life. Love and Death in Foreign Lands)(Book Review)
September 8, 2003... In the charnel house that was Somalia in the early 1990s, Reuters correspondent Aidan Hartley had a strange encounter. Wandering through the nearly abandoned British Embassy in Mogadishu, Hartley stumbled into an aging government clerk named...

Open for Business.(Russia's exports of nuclear technology)
September 8, 2003... They call it the "Berlin Wall." It's a plain, six-foot-high concrete barrier that bisects an unnamed village outside the Iranian city of Bushehr. On one side, about 1,500 Iranians live under Sharia--they lead quiet, spartan lives of work and...

Roads To Riches?(multilateralism in Central America)
September 8, 2003... The impoverished nations of Central America haven't seen a scheme this grand in the 100 years since Teddy Roosevelt decided to dig a canal that would link the Pacific with the Atlantic. Everything about the Plan Puebla-Panama is writ large,...

Japan's Ruthless Recovery.
September 8, 2003... Haruko Sakaida has dressed Japanese beauties for half a century, but these days the 75-year-old kimono maker frets that a critical accessory--her favorite brand of crisp white socks, called tabi--might soon vanish from the shelves. In June, she...

'No Frills' Takes Flight.(AirAsia)
September 8, 2003... When AirAsia started flying out of Kuala Lumpur two years ago, it quickly became the cheapest of the cheap, the lowest-cost airline in the world. AirAsia says it spends only 2.5 cents to fly one passenger one kilometer, compared to 4.5 cents...

A Global Dance Beat.(world fusion music)
September 8, 2003... The song "Tu Es Foutu" (slang for "You're Finished") by In-Grid is a musical salad--an Italian singer, warbling in French, to a funky accordion-infused Latin-tango beat. It may read like a jarring combination but, musically, it works: the song...

Online's Unholy Alliance.(hackers teamed with spammers)
September 8, 2003... Here's how it might happen. While weeding out the morning's spam, you stumble upon one e-mail message that gives you pause. Perhaps it looks like a note of reconciliation from an old girlfriend, or the sender happens to have the same name as...

'Our Town' Via Compton.
September 8, 2003... For the past year the documentary "OT: Our Town" has been bowling over audiences at film festivals around the United States. Now Scott Hamilton Kennedy's movie is finally being released to the public. It's been a banner year for documentaries...

Uneasy Neighbors.(China and North Korea)
September 8, 2003... Within the last two weeks a large number of Chinese soldiers have poured into the remote northeastern frontier bordering North Korea. Troops are preparing for another grim winter, when the Tumen River freezes and desperate North Korean refugees...

A Sequel With Substance?(Infernal Affairs II)(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Hong Kong's film industry is best known for churning out fun, mindless action flicks full of fancy martial-arts stunts. So it came as a pleasant surprise when "Infernal Affairs"--a thriller about a cop and a triad member, rich with suspense and...

Hugo Martinez.(searching for Saddam)(Interview)
September 8, 2003... In the fall of 1989 a Colombian police colonel named Hugo Martinez was given the thankless task of tracking down the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar. Thirty of the 200 cops placed under Martinez's command were killed during the first two...

The U.N.'s Day Of Reckoning.(bombing of United Nations headquarters in Iraq)
September 8, 2003... Holbrooke was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1999 to 2001. The bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Iraq was the United Nations' 9/11. Now a stricken organization must regain its equilibrium, knowing that its personnel are a...

Living Life in the Slow Lane.(mom and pop establishments compete with big corporations)(Column)
September 8, 2003... Ogikubo, at the western end of downtown Tokyo, is known for low-key neighborhood bars, noodle shops and friendly little stores. They're part of the reason why I've lived there for more than a decade. Sadly, though, the spread of chain stores...

Perspectives.(quotes from around the world)
September 8, 2003... "Bodies are just coming from out of the sky." An unnamed man in an emergency call from the World Trade Center on 9/11, in new transcripts released last week "There is no order! There is no government!" Shatha Saleh, an Iraqi woman who had...

Periscope.(new from around the world )
September 8, 2003... CURRENCY Taking Stock of the $ Last spring the U.S. dollar looked as if it was heading for a meltdown. The bears warned that it marked the end of the strong-dollar era, a time when New Economy hype overinflated the price of the dollar...

Back To School Guide.
September 8, 2003... Heading back to school used to mean weeks of wardrobe preparation. Nowadays most kids would rather spend their hard-earned summer-job money on high technology than high fashion. There's plenty out there to choose from--whether for the brainy,...

Daylight Dancing.(long days in northern European cities)(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Not ready for the shorter days of fall? In these northern European haunts, the sun remains close to Earth, and one can dance into the wee hours in daylight: Reykjavik, Iceland: Reykjavik offers all you ever wanted to get your groove on....

This One's No Keeper.(Dakota Digital single-use camera )(Product/Service Evaluation)
September 8, 2003... Cheap disposable cameras are perfect for forgetful travelers. And digital cameras offer terrific flexibility once you've taken a snapshot. But disposable digital cameras--are these two great tastes that taste great together? Ritz Camera Centers...

Evaluating Statins.(Letter to the Editor)
September 15, 2003... Readers of our July 28 cover story on the new cholesterol-lowering drugs were wary. Suggested one: "We should change our diets and exercise." Another warned that "the cure could be worse than the disease." A cynic huffed, "A pill for every ill?...

Dangerous Discovery.(oil exploration in Democratic Republic of the Congo)
September 15, 2003... If there is one thing that the Democratic Republic of the Congo arguably doesn't need, it's oil. The country's northeast Ituri province, abutting Uganda and Rwanda, has been a hellish killing field for the last four years. Fighting between as...

The Dutch Go to Pot.(Netherlands decriminalizes marijuana possession for personal consumption)(Column)
September 15, 2003... Paul van Hoorn, 71, suffers from chronic glaucoma. His wife, Jo, 70, has painful arthritis. So every few days, the two septuagenarians shuffle to their local "coffee shop," ever watchful for robbers, to buy a little marijuana. Last week Dutch...

'The Dirty War'.(Argentina's President Nestor Kirchner's initiatives paves way for prosecution of war criminals)
September 15, 2003... His fellow officers called him the Piranha, and Juan Antonio Azic's interrogation techniques lived up to that nickname. When a young Peronist activist named Carlos Lordkipanidse and his family were hauled into the Argentine navy's notorious...

The Dalai Lama Looks Home.
September 15, 2003... The Dalai Lama landed in America to the usual swirl of praise and protest. After receiving an honorary degree from UC San Francisco last Friday, he is scheduled to meet with George Bush, attend a reception on Capitol Hill and deliver an...

On the Road to Nowhere.(U.S imposes sanctions on Burma)(Column)
September 15, 2003... Now that George W. Bush is discovering the shades of gray between good and evil, he might want to rethink his black-and-white approach to Burma. Last week the U.S. administration backed off its zero-carrot approach to North Korea, allowing that...

The Next Wall to Fall.(East German entrepreneurs catching up to their countrymen in the west)
September 15, 2003... Wolfgang Neubert used to work in an East German combine making clunky refrigerators for the socialist bloc. The factory went under after German unification. Out of a job at 43 but not content on the dole, Neubert hooked up with a Western...

A Diplomatic Coup--Or Bad Deal?(Column)
September 15, 2003... Crown Prince Bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saudi is the first Saudi leader to visit Russia in more than 70 years. At the Kremlin last week, he and President Vladimir Putin vowed to fight terror and stabilize global oil markets, while signing an agreement...

A People's Revolution?(Turkish Cypriots apply for Greek Cypriot passports)
September 15, 2003... Does this story ring a bell? A country is divided by a frontier running through its major city, leaving one part poorer and politically backward, ruled by an elderly ideologue and kept going economically only by the support of a powerful...

What Green Revolution?(genetically modified food could save lives in Africa)(Column)
September 15, 2003... It was one of those rare inventions that could save the world. Back in the mid-1990s, Swiss scientist Ingo Potrykus and his collaborators came up with a genetically modified strain of rice containing beta-keratin, a precursor to vitamin A. Soon...

Why We Can't Agree.
September 15, 2003... Rayner, professor of science in society at Oxford University's Said Business School and director of the United Kingdom's national Science in Society research program, grew up in Britain but lived in the United States for 20 years. The...

Searching for a Home.(After Mrs. Rochester)(Theater Review)
September 15, 2003... The harrowing, unhinged presence of Bertha Rochester hangs heavy over Charlotte Bronte's classic 19th- century novel, "Jane Eyre." Bertha, a Creole from Jamaica, moves to England after marrying the brooding Mr. Rochester, who proceeds to lock...

A Post-Soviet Surprise.(Mongolia thrives on U.S. foreign investments)(Column)
September 15, 2003... Lee Cashell bounces his four-wheel-drive to a stop on a roadless saddle between two lush green hills about an hour northwest of Ulan Bator. "Here it is," announces the American entrepreneur. "Mongolian Resorts!" Cashell envisions the first...

The Trouble With Bears.
September 15, 2003... Kenzo Kudo got in his car one day last May and drove out to a mountain near Sapporo, on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, to look for wild vegetables. He never returned. Police found his body a few hundred meters away with bite marks on his...

Learning the Hard Way.(trends in higher education)(Column)
September 15, 2003... Rome's La Sapienza university has endured seven centuries of war and political upheaval. But as school begins this fall, students at Europe's largest university face a hardship of a different kind: nowhere to sit. Many of La Sapienza's 180,000...

Far From Home.
September 15, 2003... Every year, hundreds of thousands of foreign students set off for the States in pursuit of an American diploma. Most come to study the sciences. And their numbers keep growing; the Institute of International Education reports that a record...

What's Good for the Goose...(South Korean families make sacrifices so children may be educated in English-speaking countries)
September 15, 2003... Chung Gi Sup hates holidays. That's because the 45-year-old political- science professor spends them all alone in Seoul. His wife and two daughters are halfway around the world in New Jersey, where the girls attend high school and their mother...

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier...(The CIA's Russians)(Book Review)
September 15, 2003... I am a Soviet officer. I wish to meet with an American officer with the object of offering certain services. Time: 1800 hours. Date: 1 January 1953. Place: Plankengasse, Vienna 1. Failing this meeting, I will be at the same place, same time, on...

Jose Bove.(Interview)(Biography)
September 15, 2003... Only in France, it seems, could a farmer like Jose Bove shake the foundations of the nation's political life. The anti-globalization celebrity first gained fame several years ago when he led an assault on a McDonald's restaurant that was under...

Nice Guys Finish First.(Column)
September 15, 2003... The scariest words in the English language are, "You don't remember me, do you?" Well, maybe not the scariest. The actual scariest words are probably, "The chef doesn't believe in printed menus, so I'll just describe what we're offering...

Perspectives.
September 15, 2003... "The price of this crisis will be a lot of blood." Palestinian legislator Qadoura Fares, on the crisis within the Palestinian leadership triggered by the resignation of Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas "We have the formula here for success."...

Periscope.(Saddam's regime; Asian currencies; Mother Teresa's statue)
September 15, 2003... Iraq: Questions, Questions Saddam Hussein was apparently convinced that U.S. forces would never invade Iraq and oust him from power, say U.S. officials familiar with the accounts of captured members of the former dictator's regime. U.S....

You Look Prefabulous, Dahlin'.
September 15, 2003... Buckminster Fuller would have had a field day with this one. A new generation of architects has given prefabricated homes--long derided as shoddy, cookie-cutter postwar structures for low-rent subdivisions--a much-needed makeover. All of a...

Matisse's View.(Places to go and see in the French Riviera.)(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall and Jean Cocteau were captivated by the light in Nice. If you're looking for inspiration, early fall may be the best time to squint into the sunshine on the French Riviera. Take in some of the views favored by the...

Op Art Returns.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... Driving down Madison Avenue in 1965, artist Bridget Riley noticed storefronts filled with eye-catching frocks whose prints had been lifted straight from her wild, colorful paintings. Horrified, Riley threatened a lawsuit, telling newspapers...

Mail Call.
September 22, 2003... Saddam's Sons Our Aug. 4 cover story brought out ire and cheers. Some readers fretted over the morals of a "compassionate nation" killing Uday and Qusay Hussein. Others thought that "nobody should shed a tear." Showdown in Mosul ...

Degrees, But No Jobs.(China)
September 22, 2003... Just east of Beijing there is a tiny shantytown where men shoot pool on tables set up on the street, filthy children play with stray dogs and women sell grapes and apples from makeshift stands. Little Zhang Village has long been home to day...

Here We Go Again.
September 22, 2003... Another Iraq resolution, another go-round at the U.N. Security Council. Surely it couldn't be as bad as the last time, when those warmongering Americans and Brits slapped down the Franco-German "axis of weasels" and invaded--right on schedule....

9/11? It Never Happened.
September 22, 2003... To get a sense of how deep mistrust of the United States runs in Germany, take a look at the bookshelves. Two years after September 11, German bookstores are flooded with such works as "The CIA and September 11," in which a former government...

Koizumi's Big Step.
September 22, 2003... Hiromu Nonaka, the 77-year-old liberal democratic Party stalwart, was arguably the most powerful man in Japan. As a leader of the ruling party's largest faction, which controls 100 seats in Parliament, Nonaka was a political kingmaker. He...

When Elephants Fly.(information technology shifted to offshore)
September 22, 2003... When Jagdish Dalal first got the idea to hire computer programmers in India back in 1983, most people thought he was taking too big a risk. Sure, the engineers there were smart, and cheap compared with Americans. But as the Indian-born head of...

How to Save Africa.
September 22, 2003... The hotly contested World Trade Organization summit that just concluded in Cancun failed to finish the one big deal that could have saved lives in Africa. By refusing to cut billions in support for agribusiness exporters, the United States...

I'll Stab Your Back, If You Stab Mine.(Argentina)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... Since Argentina walked out on a record $77 billion in debt to private banks back in 2001, no such institutions will lend it more money. Prospects for continued recovery rest on loans from organizations like the International Monetary Fund, and...

Off the Radar.(swapping songs through file-sharing services)
September 22, 2003... Why is the global music industry going after Americans only? Of the 261 people sued last week by the music giants of the United States (AOL Time Warner), Germany (Bertelsmann), France (Vivendi), Britain (EMI) and Japan (Sony) for pirating...

'Nothing Has Been Solved'.(Naoto Kan)(Interview)
September 22, 2003... Japan first met him as a young politician with a conscience. In 1996 Naoto Kan, then a leader of a small LDP coalition partner, exposed a scandal in which some 2,000 hemophiliacs had been contaminated with the AIDS virus. Kan was Japan's Health...

Inner Beast.(Theater Review)
September 22, 2003... Acclaimed Shakespearean actor Anthony Sher was in his last year of high school in Cape Town when South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd was stabbed to death in Parliament in 1966. His assassin, a temporary messenger named Demetrios...

Return of a Killer.(SARS)
September 22, 2003... In late summer, the live-animal markets of southern China are usually buzzing with street vendors and their wares--a flurry of fur, scales and feathers, blood and gore, and the inevitable stench. This year, though, the markets are...

The Boys in the Band.(F4)
September 22, 2003... Many southeast Asians are full of worries about China, ranging from the effects of the region's new trade pact to how to compete with Beijing for foreign investment. But for tens of millions of young Asians, there is a far more burning question...

Because I'm Worth It!(spending patterns of Japanese women)
September 22, 2003... Mikiko Handa's eyes were fixated on a diamond horseshoe necklace. The stunning piece, on display in her favorite Tokyo jewelry store, cost 88,000 yen--about three times more than she had planned to spend. But the 32-year-old office manager...

Truth in Government.(Democracy)(Theater Review)
September 22, 2003... When British playwright Michael Frayn first visited Berlin in 1972, German Chancellor Willy Brandt was at the height of his popularity, having just won the Nobel Prize for his efforts to reconcile West Germany with the Soviet bloc. Two years...

Behind the Other 9/11.(September 11, 1973 murder of Salvador Allende)
September 22, 2003... Chileans have long mourned Sept. 11. It was on that day in 1973 that a U.S.-backed military junta overthrew the nation's democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende Gossens. With Gen. Augusto Pinochet at the helm, the coup...

Bernard-Henri Levy.(Interview)
September 22, 2003... To many outside France, Bernard-Henri Levy is the elegant caricature of a libertine Left Bank intellectual. But he also harbors a deep-rooted concern about the dangers of extremism--in all its shapes and forms-- which has led him to a project...

Not My Grandmother's Ireland.
September 22, 2003... Recently I took two American friends to visit a 200-year-old pub, high in the Dublin mountains and famous for its ballads and ancient rebel connections. A "real" Irish experience, in other words. "That doesn't sound like an Irish accent,"...

Perspectives.
September 22, 2003... "Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror." U.S. President George Bush, while paying tribute last week to American soldiers in the Third Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia "Devour the Americans just like the lions...

Periscope.
September 22, 2003... TRADE Cotton, King of Cancun With the world on the warpath against farm subsidies, U.S. cotton was ripe for the pickin' at the WTO summit in Cancun. So why did the $3.2 billion subsidy program survive the talks unscathed? It wasn't...

Mail Call.(Letter to the Editor)
September 29, 2003... Global Gluttony Our Aug. 11 cover story on obesity around the world sparked letters of concern. One reader offered health tips with optimism: "Obesity can be fought." Another worried that the countries have developed a new competition, "a...

The Final Chapter.(Tony Blair)
September 29, 2003... There's an unsettling symmetry to the political lives of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Both cast long shadows around the globe, she as the free-market scourge of communism, he as America's stalwart ally at war. Both are bound in British...

A 'New Dawn' Turns Gray.(Tony Blair)
September 29, 2003... Cartoonists used to draw him walking on water. It was a neat device, hinting at two things we thought we knew about Tony Blair. First, that he was a political miracle worker, able to win landslide victory after landslide victory. Second, that...

Losing Trust in Auntie Beeb.(British Broadcasting Corporation Ltd.)
September 29, 2003... Once upon a time its affectionate nickname was "Auntie Beeb." For generations of Brits the BBC spoke with the voice of an elderly relative, revered if a bit stuffy. Fairness and accuracy were its hallmarks. How times change. The fallout...

Petitioning the Emperor.(growing numbers of activists protesting in China)
September 29, 2003... Not long ago Hua Huiqi lived quietly with his family in a Beijing courtyard house, minding his own business. That changed when authorities forcibly evicted him and his elderly parents in September 2002 to make way for a new development. Almost...

Will the Real Hu Jintao Please Step Forward?
September 29, 2003... The classified report didn't seem all that unusual. It told the story of Li Tiecheng, a Communist Party secretary in an impoverished county in Jilin province, who turned out to be blatantly corrupt. During his six-year tenure, Li took bribes...

Looking for a Legacy.(Mexican telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim Helu believes existing models for economic growth have failed in Latin America)
September 29, 2003... The guest list read like a who's who of Latin America's wealthiest tycoons, and some of the participants in the four-day business summit came from as far away as Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo. The assembled captains of industry, who gathered in...

The Elusive 'Castle'.(Palestine-Israel relations)
September 29, 2003... Israel's Sept. 11 decision to "remove" the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, is obviously self-defeating. Almost two years ago, Ariel Sharon's government declared Arafat "irrelevant," and persuaded the Bush administration to sideline him. Now...

The Poor Get Poorer.(collapse of the Cancun trade summit)(Column)
September 29, 2003... The collapse of the Cancun trade summit is best viewed from within so- called green rooms. Not until 2001 were the poor even allowed into the conference halls where the rich once gathered to write the rules of the trading world. That same year,...

My Fair Monkey.
September 29, 2003... Justice would seem a human concept if ever there was one. Its allure has stirred souls as diverse as American and French revolutionaries, British abolitionists and sign-wavers at the World Trade Organization talks last week in Cancun. Many of...

Paris On The Amazon.
September 29, 2003... The last remote and pristine forest on our distressed and overcrowded earth" is how Greenpeace describes the Amazon River Valley. For decades now, this romantic view of the Amazon, as a vestige of the once free land corrupted by the arrival of...

All About the Shooting.(Once Upon a Time in Mexico)
September 29, 2003... Robert Rodriguez is an anomaly in Hollywood: a director who can make big box-office extravaganzas on the quick and cheap. And he does it all alone; the 35-year-old Mexican-American director of such films as "Spy Kids" and "El Mariachi" eschews...

Mexico's Wild West.(Movie Review)
September 29, 2003... When, in the opening minutes of "Once Upon a Time in Mexico," Antonio Banderas swoops down from a rooftop through a spray of bullets onto a speeding bus with Salma Hayek handcuffed to his wrist, you think, "Ah, El Mariachi is back." Alas, he's...

Going Up In Flames.
September 29, 2003... The global-trade talks in Cancun, Mexico, shut down early, at precisely at 6 p.m. on Sunday, which is very odd. These kinds of negotiations almost always succeed or fail at 4 or 5 a.m. on the morning after the official deadline has expired....

Look at the Small Victories.
September 29, 2003... The Swedes reject the euro by the resounding margin of 56 percent to 42 percent. Politicians and pundits proclaim the European Union has reached a crisis. Well, yes and no. The Swedish vote was no isolated bout of Nordic crankiness. To the...

Prehistoric Fat Rat.(8 million-year-old rodent Phoberomys pattersoni)(Brief Article)
September 29, 2003... The most pampered of guinea pigs, raised on the finest pet food, might, with a bit of luck, grow to more than a kilogram. That makes even more remarkable the massive proportions of Goya, a prehistoric guinea-pig cousin whose skeleton was...

Love, Death and Light.(Book Review)
September 29, 2003... Everything I do is arduous," Sally Mann says as she coats a glass plate with collodion and ether, just the way photographers did it 150 years ago. "Why do I do that? I don't know. Not because I'm better than anyone else..." Mann has always used...

Silvan Shalom.(interview with Israel's foreign minister)(Israel's Cabinet's decision in principle to expel Yasir Arafat)(Interview)
September 29, 2003... Israel's foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, had a rough few days last week. As the country's highest-ranking diplomat, Shalom had to explain to the international community why the Israeli cabinet decided in principle to remove Palestinian leader...

Muslims in Big Sky Country.(Dar al Islam is an Islamic religious center in New Mexico)
September 29, 2003... Viewed from Britain, the New World can seem pretty narrow-minded these days. Read the newspapers or chat to the sweet old guy at the corner shop, and you're easily convinced that the United States is a land of bigoted neocons, where Muslim...

Perspectives.(notable quotes from around the world)
September 29, 2003... "It's over." George Odour Ong'wen, a Kenyan delegate to the WTO meeting in Cancun, after trade talks between developed and developing nations collapsed "In the Middle Ages people were convinced there were witches. They looked for them...