Newsweek International articles from September 2006

Newsweek International archives from September 2006

Letters To The Magazine.(Letter to the editor)
September 4, 2006... An Uneasy America Readers debated whether the United States is losing its dominance. "Americans are complacent consumers in incessant pursuit of happiness," said one. But another declared, "Despite cyclical ups and downs, America isn't...

Taking On the President; Knowing that they're running out of time, even longtime rivals in the opposition are uniting against Musharraf's regime.
September 4, 2006... Byline: Ron Moreau (With Zahid Hussain in Islamabad) After nearly seven years in power, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is suddenly running into heavy political flak. His two main political rivals--former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto...

A Reason To Smile; In a minor miracle, the euro zone is growing faster and creating more jobs than America.
September 4, 2006... Byline: Rana Foroohar (With Stephen Glain in Washington and Stefan Theil in Berlin) Take a drive around Munich or Frankfurt, fly into any German airport or cruise the rust belt of the Rhine, and you will see the same thing--contractors in...

China's Wealth Woes; With its dollar hoard rising at $17 billion a month and about to pass the $1 trillion mark, Beijing is finding out that it is possible to have too much money.
September 4, 2006... Byline: George Wehrfritz Sometime over the next few weeks, a shipment of lawn furniture, brake pads, lamps or the like is going to make history. The manufacturer, one among tens of thousands churning out product 24/7 in China's humming...

Beyond babies: even in once conservative societies, more and more couples are choosing not to have kids; that means good things for restaurants and real estate; but a backlash has already begun.(Cover story)
September 4, 2006... Byline: Stefan Theil (With Toula Vlahou in Athens, Barbie Nadeau in Rome, Silvia Spring in London, Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo, Karen Springen in Chicago and Tracy Mcnicoll in Paris) At the fashionable Da Capo Cafe on bustling Kolonaki Square...

Put those eggs on ice; most couples without children wait too long to have them; but technology may have an answer.(Cover story)
September 4, 2006... Byline: Daren Briscoe The danger of delaying childbearing, of course, is that a woman who eventually wants a baby may be unable to have one because her eggs are no longer viable. But researchers have developed a procedure that, while not...

The Drawings Of a Master; A fascinating show at the Victoria and Albert Museum leads a re-examination of the beautiful mind of the true Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci.
September 4, 2006... Byline: Tara Pepper For half a millennium, scores of writers have struggled to make sense of the mystery that was Leonardo da Vinci. Was the man who made the Mona Lisa smile an artist? Was he a wacky inventor or a scientist? A...

Japan too, YouTube?: the video-sharing site is white hot - maybe too hot.
September 4, 2006... Byline: Akiko Kashiwagi YouTube, the booming American Web site where surfers share short videos, is taking off in Japan, too. The number of Japanese visitors per month has more than quadrupled to 6.4 million since February, an...

The Green Devolution; India's population is growing faster than farm output, threatening one of its most prized achievements.
September 4, 2006... Byline: Jason Overdorf The furnace Australia sailed into Chennai last month carrying a load of wheat and, some warned, ill tidings. India's first wheat imports in six years marked a reversal in the march toward "food independence" that the...

More than a 'bump': a tough defense chief faces tougher questions.(Dan Halutz)
September 4, 2006... Byline: Kevin Peraino At about midnight on July 22, 2002, an F-16 fighter plane dropped a one-ton bomb on the Gaza apartment of Salah Shehadeh, a Hamas militant wanted by the Israeli military. The bomb hit its target, but also left 15...

'A race against time': what does 'seriously talk' really mean?; will the regime seriously discuss its violations of human rights at home?(Reza Pahlavi)(Interview)(Excerpt)
September 4, 2006... Byline: Rachel Makabi Reza Pahlavi was just a teenager in 1979 when an Islamic revolution in Iran ousted his father, the shah. In the years since, Pahlavi, who now lives in Maryland, has been involved with activists both inside Iran and...

What the United Nations needs.(Viewpoint essay)
September 4, 2006... Byline: Shashi Tharoor (Tharoor is under-secretary-general of the United Nations) The United Nations is a 20th-century organization facing a 21st-century challenge--an institution with impressive achievements but also haunting failures,...

How to Make Tehran Blink; The best way to prevent a nuclear Iran is for America to offer the kind of security assurances that might reduce support for a nuclear arsenal.
September 4, 2006... Byline: Scott D. Sagan (Sagan is professor of political science and director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.) Given Tehran's defiant response to the European and American effort to constrain...

'Unhappily ever after': who will laugh last when the final 'Baudelaire' book is released Oct. 13?; Count Olaf - or Lemony Snicket?(The End)
September 4, 2006... Byline: Karen Springen Young readers, already worried about Harry Potter, now face a new threat. Lemony Snicket (a.k.a. Daniel Handler, 36) says at least two characters will die in his 13th and final "A Series of Unfortunate Events" book,...

Behind the Fear In the Markets; The World economy is just right, but the markets are paranoid. I suspect the volatility is attributable to the sociology of hedge funds and their investors.
September 4, 2006... Byline: Barton Biggs (Biggs is a managing partner at Traxis Partners, a New York hedge fund.) Why are the equity markets so paranoid? They're up one day, down the next, and I suspect that this volatility is attributable not so much to...

Silent Sistani; Is the country's most potent voice losing its influence?
September 4, 2006... Byline: Scott Johnson The plea late last week from the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was an unusually modest one. With thousands of American troops sweeping through the streets of Baghdad to prevent an escalation of civil war, and Sunni...

Perspectives.
September 4, 2006... Dude, no offense, but who cares if Pluto is a planet or not? A Kuwait-based blogger on Pluto's demotion to "dwarf planet" "The firm commitments we have received... have given me confidence that we can begin to put together the kind of...

Periscope.
September 4, 2006... Byline: Joseph Contreras, Owen Matthews, Mark Hosenball and Emily Flynn Vencat, John Sparks, Malak Hamwi, Jonathan Mummolo, Barrett Sheridan Mexico: Obrador Burns His Bridges Only Mexico's electoral tribunal has the authority to...

The NASCAR network: dozens of cars, dizzying speeds, split-second calls; welcome to the toughest gig in TV sports.
September 4, 2006... Byline: Devin Gordon There are three notable differences between watching a NASCAR race from the grandstands and watching it in the Fox Sports production truck parked just beyond the speedway. In the truck, it's a crispy 60 degrees...

Not Human Enough; As Japan's robot experiment shows, creating a lifelike android is beyond the reach of science.
September 4, 2006... Byline: Brad Stone If she were anything other than a robot, Saya, the receptionist at the Science University of Tokyo, would have a strong lawsuit against her employers. On a hot summer day recently, engineering students peered into her...

Carbon Dioxide.(Brief article)
September 4, 2006... Byline: Allan Madrid What are we going to do with all the carbon dioxide that's causing global warming? In a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from several universities propose pumping it into...

BlogWatch.
September 4, 2006... Byline: Zvika Krieger Former U.S. Marine lieutenant Wade Zirkle came home from Iraq in 2004 determined to correct the media's coverage of the war. He and former Army staff sergeant David Bellavia decided to become freelance war...

Hidden Treasures in Secret Spaces.(Travel narrative)
September 4, 2006... Byline: Tara Pepper, Jaime Cunningham, Tracy McNicoll and Ginny Power, Sana Butler, Karla Bruning, Malak Hamwi Hidden Treasures In Secret Spaces By Tara Pepper Visiting a great museum doesn't have to mean enduring crowded lines of...

Letters To The Magazine.(Letter to the editor)
September 11, 2006... Rana Foroohar claims ("unlikely Boomtowns?" July 3/July 10), that the typical population growth rate within a megacity has probably slowed to a minimum over the last few years. I agree with her if we are talking about U.S. megacities. But it is...

Living underground: this is the real clash of civilizations - a brutal war for the bottom rung of Europe's ladder.(immigrant workers)(Cover story)
September 11, 2006... Byline: Christopher Dickey (With Karla Adam in London, Eric Pape in Tenerife, Tracy McNicoll in Paris, Barbie Nadeau in Orta Nova and Jacopo Barigazzi in Milan) The drinking water ran out seven days into the voyage. The cheap Global...

Roads to nowhere: more and more migrants from poor countries are heading to other former backwaters for work.(Cover story)
September 11, 2006... Byline: Mac Margolis (With Joe Cochrane in Jakarta, Joseph Contreras in Tijuana, Karen Macgregor in Johannesburg, Jason Overdorf in New Delhi and Jonathan Kent in Kuala Lumpur) When he left Luanda six years ago, fleeing the draft and the...

Making Room; Argentina finds a place for its local immigrants.(Cover story)
September 11, 2006... Byline: Brian Byrnes The fire that swept through a Buenos Aires textile plant on March 30, killing six Bolivian immigrants, left behind more than wreckage. The victims of the sweatshop blaze had no permits to work in Argentina, and their...

This is the new Japan; immigrants are transforming a once insular society, and more of them are on their way.(Cover story)
September 11, 2006... Byline: Christian Caryl and Akiko Kashiwagi A few years ago, when Milton Minoru Takahashi first set out to improve conditions for Brazilian guest workers living in Nagoya, he thought he'd be telling Japanese about soccer, samba and...

Up in the sky, it's ... the spectacle of plummeting hedge funds, burdened by new scrutiny and weakening returns.
September 11, 2006... Byline: Rana Foroohar When Sumner Redstone, the much-respected head of media conglomerate Viacom, unceremoniously booted toothy megastar Tom Cruise from his perch at Paramount earlier this month, there was plenty of talk about how studios...

My kingdom for a what?: how barter became big business on the Internet.
September 11, 2006... Byline: Benjamin Sutherland Last weekend Montreal blogger Kyle MacDonald threw a party to celebrate the fact that he got his new Saskatchewan home in exchange for a red paper clip. Starting a year ago, MacDonald bartered the clip for...

Relief when you need it: can FedEx, DHL and TNT bring the delivery of emergency aid into the 21st century?
September 11, 2006... Byline: Silvia Spring When disaster relief absolutely, positively has to arrive on time, it often does not. According to a 2005 study by the Fritz Institute of San Francisco, California, which studies aid operations, humanitarian agencies...

The new science of cosmetics: skin creams no longer merely cover up blemishes and wrinkles; now they help slow the process of aging.
September 11, 2006... Byline: Tara Pepper And Karla Adam Though she's just 27 years old, with a flawless complexion, account manager Bianca Bailey is on the hunt for scientific skin care in the beauty hall of Harrods. When it comes to aging, Bailey isn't taking...

How Popular Is He Really? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad presents himself as a man of the people. But his support among the poor seems to be eroding.
September 11, 2006... Byline: Maziar Bahari You haven't lived 'til you've driven a BMW 740," exclaims Reza, Tehran's self-proclaimed No. 1 Ladies' Man. He accelerates past posters of Iranian, Palestinian and Lebanese martyrs as other drivers eye his...

A Bittersweet Victory; Mexico may have a new president. But putting together a government will be another story.
September 11, 2006... Byline: Joseph Contreras Felipe Calderon's long and winding road to the presidency of Mexico may have reached its end. Last week a federal electoral tribunal announced the results of a partial review of the votes in the July 2 presidential...

A Russian Woodstock: rock and roll and revolution?; not for this generation.(Nashestviye Festival)
September 11, 2006... Byline: Anna Nemtsova Try free-associating the words "Russian" and "Woodstock" for a few seconds, and you'll likely have a fair idea of the scene. Mud. Vodka. Pouring rain. Grumpy police. Imperfect to nonexistent sanitation. Eighty...

'We can't stay together'; if you need to ask if you're successful or not, you failed; after the Six Day War, no one asked if Israel was successful.(Avigdor Lieberman)(Interview)
September 11, 2006... Byline: Kevin Peraino Avigdor Lieberman is one of the most controversial figures in Israeli politics. Critics deride the 48-year-old founder of the far-right Israel Beitenu ("Israel Is Our Home") party as a "racist" and a "fascist" for his...

In Search of Big Spenders; American consumers spend nearly $9 trillion a year, or 20 percent more than Europeans. But the binge is now coming to an end.
September 11, 2006... Byline: Stephen Roach (Roach is the chief economist at Morgan Stanley.) The world has never seen such big spenders. In the United States, private consumption accounts for 70 percent of the economy, far more than in Japan (57 percent),...

The Good Life.(spas, restaurants, travel, gadgets)(City overview)
September 11, 2006... Byline: Ginanne Brownell (Malak Hamwi Allan Madrid Rebecca Hall Meghan McCain) Travel: Medicinal Spas By Alexandra A. Seno Traditional Chinese medicine has come out of the apothecary and into the most chic five-star spa resorts....

Perspectives.
September 11, 2006... "There must be consequences for Iran's defiance. " U.S. President George W. Bush , on Iran's rejection of U.N. demands to halt its uranium-enrichment program "Gaza is suffering under the yoke of anarchy and the swords of thugs." Hamas...

Periscope.(Chinese dissidents)(Oji Paper Co. takeover bid)(California carbon-dioxide emissions rules)
September 11, 2006... Byline: Sarah Schafer (Akiko Kashiwagi Tony Skaggs and Tony Dokoupil Tony Dokoupil Karen Springen Lorraine Ali David Gates) China: Summer of Silence It may be the slow summer season in China's capital, but the courts sure have been...

Mao's revenge: subsuming one's identity into an electronically aggregated mass is akin to Mao's China.(Jaron Lanier)
September 11, 2006... Byline: Steven Levy Jaron Lanier is a man of many talents--virtual-reality pioneer, New Age composer, visual artist and artificial-intelligence scientist. Now Lanier has taken on another role: dyspeptic critic of the surging trend of...

Feels like falling: virtual balance; coming soon.(Brief article)
September 11, 2006... Byline: Karla Bruning Bionic humans have come a step closer to reality. A new device can measure the motion of the head and send signals to an electrode implanted in the inner ear, providing patients who suffer from poor balance or blurry...

Alternative energy sources.(Brief article)
September 11, 2006... Byline: Allan Madrid Flywheels are not the first alternative energy source that comes to mind, but they may help prevent blackouts. Beacon Power, an energy firm in Boston, has built power plants based on dozens of magnetically levitated...

Mao & Stalin, Osama & Saddam; Bush is starting to repeat one of the central errors of the cold war: treating our enemies as one entity.
September 18, 2006... Byline: Fareed Zakaria I'm glad George W. Bush is using the bully pulpit to clarify the war on terror. Many of Bush's basic ideas--such as the need for reform in the Arab world--are sensible; it's their simplistic and botched execution,...

Letters To The Magazine.(Letter to the editor)
September 18, 2006... A Goliath of Indian Industry Awesome! Your cover story on the goliath of Indian industry, Mukesh Ambani, has served to inspire all progressive Indians with a newfound sense of capability and empowerment ("India's Mister Big," July 17). With a...

And Now, Adieu; Britain's longest-running political drama is finally coming to an end. Blair is dead. Long live Blairism.(Cover story)
September 18, 2006... Byline: Stryker Mcguire (With Karla Adam and Rebecca Hall) The weather was fine during his beach vacation in Barbados toward the end of August. But Tony Blair returned to a political hurricane in London. The cause of the storm: his handling...

Poor But Sexy; Germany's capital has fallen on hard economic times. Berliners like it that way.
September 18, 2006... Byline: Stefan Theil Berlin's coolest new club, Kubik, hides behind an unmarked gate across from a crumbling house full of squatters in a derelict downtown lot on the river Spree. It's built entirely from refashioned industrial containers...

A Risky Game Of Chicken; Japan and China's growing assertiveness in the East China Sea could start a military skirmish--or worse.
September 18, 2006... Byline: Christian Caryl (With Akiko Kashiwagi) It's a glorious late-summer day over the East China Sea, cobalt blue ocean beneath a warm and hazy sky. But this mission is all business for the crew of a P3-C Orion flown by the Japanese...

Long Marching; 'Red tourism' is on the upswing, as Chinese look for the good in Chairman Mao.
September 18, 2006... Byline: Melinda Liu and Benjamin Robertson Tourists crowd into Jinggangshan, a mountainous retreat in Jiangxi province that was Mao Zedong's base before the legendary Long March of 1934-36. Some lay white funerary wreaths at a memorial...

Elvis Has Left The Building; Under Koizumi, social change ripped the pillars out from under the old political system.
September 18, 2006... Byline: Gerry Curtis (--Curtis is a professor of political science at Columbia University.) Junichiro Koizumi, the most dynamic, popular and idiosyncratic prime minister in recent Japanese history, will leave behind an impressive record of...

Chasing Cancer; New directions in research may finally break the stalemate.
September 18, 2006... Byline: David H. Freedman (Freedman is co-author of "A Perfect Mess," a book about the benefits of disorganization, to appear in January 2007.) You've probably never heard of Theodor Boveri , but his insight into cancer might save your...

Japan Takes a Dive; Self-flagellating as always, Japanese moviegoers are flocking to a film about their ultimate destruction.
September 18, 2006... Byline: Akiko Kashiwagi America isn't the only place that wows summer audiences with blockbuster disaster flicks. Japanese--never shy of self-flagellation--have been flocking to a new movie that features the destruction of the country....

Asia's Mystery Man; Shinzo Abe, likely to be the country's next leader, has a slim track record. But he's already worrying the neighbors.
September 18, 2006... Byline: Christian Caryl and Akiko Kashiwagi (With B. J. Lee in Seoul) When Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited the controversial Tokyo war memorial known as Yasukuni Shrine last month, the story made headlines around the...

A Man to Watch; A Fresh-Faced member of the cabinet might just be a future P.M.(Cover story)
September 18, 2006... Byline: William Underhill He's the only member of the British cabinet with enough 21st-century savvy to post a blog. His good humor and optimism attract almost as much praise as his brainpower. And in the snake pit of Labour Party...

We Need to Be More Fair; Labour's Heir apparent on what he and Blair and the world can all agree upon.(Cover story)
September 18, 2006... Byline: Gordon Brown When I chaired a recent IMF meeting in Washington, demonstrators flooded the city to disrupt the talks. One placard stood out: WORLDWIDE CAMPAIGN AGAINST GLOBALIZATION. The slogan reflected the contradictory...

No More Poodles? Pro-American sensibilities are ingrained enough to outlive Blair.(Cover story)
September 18, 2006... Byline: Sebastian C. Mallaby (Mallaby is a columnist for The Washington Post.) It wasn't just jobs or taxes or even the occasional whiff of scandal that ultimately did him in. It was poodle-ism. In the end, Tony Blair became too closely...

Bollywood Dreams; Vikram Chandra tries his hand at Mumbai noir.(Sacred Games)
September 18, 2006... Byline: Nisid Hajari Do all novels about India have to be huge? Something about the sprawling, tumultuous Subcontinent lends itself to narratives of similar dimensions. "Midnight's Children," "A Suitable Boy," "A Fine Balance"--the pillars...

Studies in Character; Two moving new indie films start off fall with a bang.(Man Push Cart and Le Petit Lieutenant)
September 18, 2006... Byline: Dana Stevens God bless early September, when summer blockbusters give way to smaller independent fare. This month, two films are opening that have a lot in common: they're both character studies of deeply sad, lonely people who...

'I Knew Nothing'; Pol Pot thought of me as a patriot, but intellectual--in other words, incapable of heading the revolution.(Khieu Samphan, Cambodia's president during the Khmer Rouge reign)(Interview)(Excerpt)
September 18, 2006... Byline: Stéphanie Giry After a decade of stop-and-start negotiations, a United Nations-sponsored tribunal has finally begun to investigate the handful of Khmer Rouge leaders who are still alive in Cambodia. Prosecutors hope to bring...

The New Kings Have No Clothes; Since 2003 companies acquire in LBOs borrowed $70 billion to pay dividends to their LBO owners. Can this business model succeed? I don't think so.
September 18, 2006... Byline: Barton Biggs (Biggs, the famed Wall Street strategist, is now a hedge-fund manager at Traxis Partners) A new path to fame and fortune is attracting the best M.B.A.s--to a new bubble. No, it's not hedge funds, which are stumbling on...

The Good Life.
September 18, 2006... Byline: Karla Bruning (Klara Wyrzykowska Susan H. Greenberg Rebecca Hall Mike Elkin Florence Villeminot) Call it the Michelle Wie effect. With plunging necklines, miniskirts and bright prints, women's golf wear is the newest fashion...

Perspectives.
September 18, 2006... Byline: Quotation Sources, Top To Bottom: Los Angeles Times, CNN, The Scotsman, New York Times, Chicago Tribune The fighting is extraordinarily intense. Brigadier Ed Butler , commander of British forces in Afghanistan, adding that daily...

Periscope.
September 18, 2006... Byline: Mark Hosenball (Akiko Kashiwagi Johnnie L. Roberts Debra Rosenberg and Claudia Kalb from Slate.com William Lee Adams) Defining Civil War Is Iraq in a civil war? The CIA has developed its own secret guideline for answering that...

The Search Is On; "Your search record involves dreams. It's a reflection of what's in one's head".
September 18, 2006... Byline: Steven Levy What could be more revealing than a list of one's search queries? The efficiency of finding what we need on the Web encourages us to quest away--whether we're researching a car purchase, puzzling out some medical...

Energy: Storms.(National Aeronautics and Space Administration is planning to study coronal mass ejections)(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... Byline: Allan Madrid Think storms happen only on Earth? Think again. The sun regularly blasts high-energy particles out into the solar system, disrupting satellites and electronics on Earth. As early as this month, NASA is planning to...

Computers: Chilling Chips.(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... Byline: Karla Bruning Computers are hot--literally. Today's high-speed processor chips--the brains of PCs, laptops and cell phones--generate more heat than ever before, largely because they're doing more work in smaller and smaller spaces....

Letters.(Letter to the editor)
September 25, 2006... Fueling the Fire Readers gave their take on the violence in Lebanon. One said, "By enabling Hizbullah to challenge Israel, Iran has shown the world not to underestimate its capacity for maneuvering." Another noted, "This assertion...

Welcome to Samurai 2.0; Entrepreneurialism has had a tough time in Japan, but a coterie of Internet startups are reviving the art.
September 25, 2006... Byline: Brad Stone Isamu Kaneko hopes to avoid the same grim fate that has struck other prominent Japanese entrepreneurs--not bankruptcy, but jail. A few years ago Kaneko, a 35-year-old former researcher at the University of Tokyo, created...

A Deadly, Spreading Migration; Global warming brings new diseases up North.
September 25, 2006... Byline: William Underhill The Danish angler never saw his killer. Earlier this summer the 62-year-old (whose name was never released by Danish authorities) was fishing with a friend in the Baltic Sea when a microscopic marine bug entered...

Rome Returns; A spate of new books--and a BBC miniseries--on the ancient world's greatest superpower prove eerily resonant.
September 25, 2006... Byline: Tara Pepper When a band of pirates ravaged the Roman port of Ostia in 67 B.C., the Roman general Pompey the Great was granted extraordinary powers to manage the crisis. Despite vehement opposition from the aristocracy, who...

Ramzan's World; The Kremlin is hoping a young strongman can preserve its brutal victory in Chechnya.(Ramzan Kadyrov)(Cover story)
September 25, 2006... Byline: Owen Mathews and Anna Nemtsova Drive down Victory Boulevard in Grozny, and you'd never think there had been a war in Chechnya. Five years ago this broad avenue looked like Stalingrad after World War II. Now it's flanked with new...

Who Needs the IMF? The organization is facing serious questions about its makeup, and its purpose.(international Monetary Fund)
September 25, 2006... Byline: Kenneth Rogoff As the international Monetary Fund holds its big fall meetings in Singapore this week, it faces a financial world that has been turned on its head. Traditionally, the Fund has helped out bankrupt emerging-market...

They Don't Play Fair; A strident critic says the IMF should confront China, possibly with sanctions, over its trade practices.(Allan Meltzer on International Monetary Fund)(Interview)
September 25, 2006... Byline: George Wehrfritz Allan Meltzer ranks as one of the most strident critics of the IMF. As head of a 2000 U.S. congressional inquiry into the Asian financial crisis, which became known as the Meltzer commission, he drew conclusions...

Why Russia Is Really Weak; What happens to Russia when--not if--oil and gas prices begin to retreat?(Cover story)
September 25, 2006... Byline: Rajan Menon and Alexander Motyl News stories about Russia these days follow a predictable theme. The country is resurgent and strong, and the West must adjust to this new reality. But that story line is wrong. Russia is weak and...

An Image Emergency; The gap between how China sees itself and others see it is wide and dangerous.(Country overview)
September 25, 2006... Byline: Joshua Cooper Ramo In the late spring of 2004, several dozen Chinese and international scholars gathered in Boao, a resort town on Hainan Island in the South China Sea. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a new concept...

Wagging the Buffalo; Under fire, the government shifts attention to a resurgent communist rebellion.(Philippines politics)
September 25, 2006... Byline: George Wehrfritz and Marites Vitug (With Tonette Orejas in Nueva Ecija) Death threats don't worry Jovito Palparan. In fact, when communist insurgents declared him a "dead man walking" on Sept. 6, the Philippine Army's most hardened...

Latin America's New Proxy War; Washington has gone all-out to stop ChAvez from winning [a Security Council seat]. He's been personally campaigning for months.(Hugo ChAvez)
September 25, 2006... Byline: Jorge G. Castaneda The summit of nonaligned countries held last week in Havana was an occasion for all sorts of things: speculating on Fidel Castro's health, supporting all the "worthwhile" causes in the world--from Iran's nuclear...

Grozny Live; Sick of war and ruin, young Chechens create dark music.
September 25, 2006... Byline: Anna Nemtsova As hoods go, Grozny definitely qualifies as one of the meanest. Growing up during the Chechen war, young rappers like 27-year-old Yusup Nakhmudov, have seen friends blown apart by bombs. Others disappeared into...

Online: A Virtual Gold Rush; Foreigners think Chinese are money-grubbing and untrustworthy even in the realm of dwarves, orcs and elves.(World of Warcraft: Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game)
September 25, 2006... Byline: Melinda Liu (With Steven Levy in Irvine, California) With his longish hair, casual polo shirt and baggy shorts, Li Zhi looks like the entrepreneurial boss of a small-town computer company, which is what he used to be. Now the...

Investing in India's Art; Entrepreneur Amit Judge opens a huge new gallery in New York to showcase works from his homeland.(Interview)
September 25, 2006... Byline: Vibhuti Patel When Tyeb Mehta's painting "Mahishasura" sold at Christie's New York auction house last year for $1.6 million, artists and art dealers were stunned. In five years, Indian art prices had skyrocketed a thousand percent....

Tooned In To Politics; Mike Luckovich talks about his cruel art.(Interview)(Brief article)
September 25, 2006... Byline: Jonathan Mummolo Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist Mike Luckovich has mocked every U.S. president since Reagan (and even Carter, if you count his high-school sketches). His latest book, "Four More Wars!" takes aim at the current...

The Last Word: Walid Jumblatt; Enduring a 'Dark Period'.(Interview)
September 25, 2006... Byline: Kevin Peraino As leader of Lebanon's Druze community, walid Jumblatt has long been a key man to see in the nation's political circles. But these days he is a virtual prisoner in his family's castle in Lebanon's Shouf mountains....

The Good Life.(Las Vegas haute cuisine)
September 25, 2006... Byline: Charlie Ferro (Karla Adam Florence Villeminot Steven Levy) Haute Cuisine in... Las Vegas? For most of Las Vegas's history, cuisine meant the $2.99 steak special--really a chaser for your whisky. But now you can find food blessed by...

Perspectives.(Brief article)
September 25, 2006... The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. Former U.S. secretary of State Colin Powell "It looks like an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades." Turkish politician Salih Kapusuz,...