A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his. --William James, 1890 The palace doors came loose on their hinges, and the inventory began tumbling out of the overstuffed world of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. It was an impressive accumulation: a billion here, 800 million there; an office tower in Manhattan; a waterfront estate on Long Island; dozens of country houses in the Philippines; and even a second palace in Marcos' home province, Ilocos Norte, ...

Grief hangs over the frail face of Bui Thi Me, a communist intellectual contemplating the deaths of three of her sons. For a year in the late 1960s, she had no idea that two of her missing children had perished in central Vietnam while fighting U.S. soldiers. "It took the government a long time to deliver the news in 1969," says the 83-year-old, a retired propagandist and Social-Affairs Minister in Ho Chi Minh City. "I almost gave ...

Konstantinos Sourmelis, a 56-year-old technician for OSE, Greece's state-owned railway, marched to central Athens on Wednesday to send parliament a simple message: Stop selling out the country. Like the thousands of other demonstrators who protested in the country's latest general strike, Sourmelis accuses the government of scapegoating OSE and public utilities as part of its proposed privatization plan, the next in a string of attempts to raise the billions that Greece owes foreign creditors. "In the long ...

Across the rolling farmlands of central Ohio's Morrow County last week lumbered heavy trucks laden with pipe. In the county's once-slumbering towns —Mt. Gilead, Cardington and Edison, roughly 40 miles north of Columbus-dusty station wagons from several states competed for parking spaces. Husky, plastic-helmeted men searched for scarce furnished rooms. The night sky glowed orange, and the air was filled with an acrid stench. "That smell used to make me deathly sick," says one Morrow County resident, "but now it doesn't bother me at all." And why ...

My first real experience of the patriarch Abraham's crossover appeal came on the splendid sun-spangled day in June when I took a crosstown cab to arrange my son's circumcision. Jews have circumcised for thousands of years--ever since God , having made a history-altering pact with Abraham, directed him to "cut my Covenant in your flesh." Some biblical commentators suggest that the circumcision was meant as much as a reminder to the Lord as to the Israelites, a kind of divine ...

Massive crowds were gathered in Yemen's capital, Sana'a, when word broke that Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan. But the al-Qaeda leader's fate was not the issue that had brought thousands into the streets of his ancestral homeland. "We're not interested in Osama bin Laden," said Ibrahim al-Qahlani, an opposition protester at Sana'a's Change Square. "This is just one man, with little connection to our country. Our fight is against Ali Abdullah ...

As the news of Osama bin Laden's death moves from exhilarating novelty to accepted reality, one group in the U.S. government will emerge as key to the win: the Central Intelligence Agency. From the earliest identification of a Bin Laden courier, the pursuit of leads, the assessment of evidence and the execution of the raid in Abottabad, Pakistan, the CIA can rightly claim the most credit for finding and killing the world's most wanted terrorist. Taking credit for ...

Men in border-patrol caps tackle a young Mexican to the ground amid jagged rocks and cacti. "You need papers to come to this country. This is not a game!" shouts one agent as he yanks the man's arms behind his back, almost tearing them from his shoulders. It looks like a scene on the U.S. border that would get human rights groups yelling. But actually, it is a game, and it takes place in the mountains of ...

In the central square of Crystal City stands a statue of Popeye, a symbol of the town's claim that it is "the spinach capital of the world." Otherwise, Crystal City is like a lot of other farm towns in South Texas. Mexican-Americans outnumber Anglo-Americans four to one, but the Anglos run the place.Last week, with Texas Rangers standing by to keep order, hundreds of Crystal City Mexicans gathered round the statue of Popeye. It was election day in Crystal City, and a revolt was ...

Fresh from Ellis Island, Stavros gets a job shining shoes at Grand Central Terminal. It is the last scene of Elia Kazan's film America, America, the story of a young Greek's fierce determination to immigrate to America. Quickly, but as casually as an afterthought, a young black man, also a shoe shiner, enters and tries to solicit a customer. He is run off the screen -- "Get out of here! We're doing business here!" -- and silently disappears. This interloper ...