Periscope.

Byline: John D. Sparks (John Sparks Joseph Contreras and Phil Gunson Fasih Ahmed)

Bright Lights, Big Ambitions

What do Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Israeli Prime Minster Ehud Olmert have in common? Both are members of a growing class of heads of state who have used jobs as city mayors to fast-track their rise to national office. Conventional wisdom holds that legislatures are the best places for ambitious politicos to build the resumes and alliances that will take them to the top. But the career trajectories of this new crop of city executives show how the rules are changing. Despite predictions of an increasingly "flat" world, wealth and power are in fact gravitating toward a relative handful of political and financial capitals and boosting the stature of those cities' leaders, especially in countries with a single, economically dominant metropolis. The former-mayors club now also boasts the president of Poland, Lech Kaczynski (Warsaw), and both current French President Nicholas Sarkozy (Neuilly-sur-Seine) and his predecessor, Jacques Chirac (Paris). And the membership rolls could soon expand. A key South Korean opposition party has picked former Seoul mayor Lee Myung Pak as its candidate for president. Meanwhile in Italy, Rome's popular mayor, Walter Veltroni, is hoping to snag the new Democratic Party's nomination for prime minister in the October primary elections. Even in the United States, where electoral power has ebbed away from big cities to the ever-expanding suburbs, New York's Rudolph Giuliani is making a credible bid to become the first ex-mayor to win a major party's nomination since Hubert Humphrey (Minneapolis) lost to Richard Nixon in 1968. Still, being a high-profile mayor isn't a foolproof path to power. Just ask former Mexico City mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who--despite his protests to contrary--failed in his bid for Mexico's presidency.

John D. Sparks

By the Numbers

Excessive noise is not just annoying. New research supports earlier studies and shows just how harmful it really is.

210 Thousands of Europeans killed annually by noise-related cardiovascular stress