When you pop a cork this holiday season, there's a good chance that the bubbles in your glass won't be French. Hard times, it turns out, can sometimes be good times — especially if you're a producer of Italian sparkling wine, or spumante. While the recession has taken some of the fizz out of France's champagne industry, in Italy, the bottles of bubbly have been flying off the shelves. According to the Italian farmers' association Coldiretti, exports ...

There are some very important things they don't tell you on career day. Chief among them is that there is a good chance that at some point during your working adult life you will have an abusive boss — the kind who uses his or her authority to torment subordinates. Bullying bosses scream, often with the goal of humiliating. They write up false evaluations to put good workers' jobs at risk. Some are serial bullies, targeting one ...

Hope is Africa's rarest commodity. Yet buried though it is amid the despair that haunts the continent, there is more optimism today than in decades. Francisco Mucavele found hope last September when an armored steel Casspir rolled over the hill and began to blow up the land mines contaminating Mozambique's rich soil. Olga Haptemariam acquired it in Eritrea's war-scarred port city of Massawa when she laid down 2,000 birr for a license to open a building-supply store. The villagers of ...

"Put off today what you can do tomorrow" has long been the motto of many baby boomers. Until, that is, the biological clock began its inexorable countdown. Today even some of the most committed postponers of parenthood are finally deciding to have children, producing a record crop of late-in-life babies. The number of women 35 or over who are giving birth for the first time has quadrupled in the past decade, and is expected to increase further in the next ...

It looked at first like the chance of a lifetime, if not a millennium. On April 10, when Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his entourage died in a plane crash in eastern Russia, the flood of grief from the Russian people struck such a chord in Poland that the long history of war, betrayal and oppression between the countries finally seemed to turn a corner. For the first time since anyone could remember, the two nations' leaders ...

President Nicolas Sarkozy may have triumphed over the millions of protesters and strikers who opposed his effort to raise the retirement age in France by two years. But his law to keep people working longer and paying into the pension system longer won't succeed unless he persuades French bosses to play along; they have a nasty habit of dumping employees older than 50. Bonne chance, Mr. President . Virtually no one in France contests the logic of the law, which Sarkozy ...

Personal-finance guru Suze Orman is famous for her no-holds-barred advice. And in her latest book, The Money Class , she urges recession-battered Americans to be just as honest with themselves. Says Orman, whose past eight books have all been New York Times best sellers: "The whole purpose of this book is to learn how to create a new American dream, a dream that is based in reality, not fantasy." TIME spoke with Orman about credit cards, student loans and the death ...

In a hospital ward in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, Fatmata Conteh, 26, lay on a bed, having just given birth to her second child. She had started bleeding from a tear in her cervix, the blood forming a pool on the floor below. Two doctors ran in and stitched her up, relatives found blood supplies, and nurses struggled to connect a generator to the oxygen tank. One nurse jammed an intravenous needle into Conteh's arm, while another hooked ...

Former champions France have been handed a tough task against Ireland in the European playoffs to qualify for next year's World Cup finals in South Africa. France, who won the World Cup on home soil in 1998, finished a distant second to Serbia after a lackluster campaign in Group 7, while the Irish pushed Italy hard in their group. France coach Raymond Domenech is under pressure going into the two-legged affair on November 14 and 18, but told the official ...

First lady Michelle Obama vowed Monday to "take no prisoners" as she and her husband launch an unprecedented bid for Chicago's 2016 Olympic bid. "It's a battle -- we're going to win -- take no prisoners," the first lady said with a smile at a roundtable discussion with reporters in the White House State Dining Room. She compared the intense lobbying effort to the 2008 presidential campaign, noting that in the election campaign, a lot of voters made their decision ...