From the pulpit where he stood one day last week, Richard James Cardinal Cushing, 68, looked down not at the familiar Irish faces of his own Boston congregation but rather into the docile and questioning gaze of brown Peruvian eyes. The occasion was the blessing of a new brick-and-concrete Roman Catholic church in a slum suburb of Lima. "Mindful of the fact that you live in an agricultural country," rumbled Cushing, "I presume you know what an ass is. ...

Peru is a mining country. Mining accounts for far more than half of the country's exports; taxes paid by mining companies equal more than 10% of the government's annual budget. Peru is the world's top silver producer, second in copper and in the top six of a long list of other metals, including gold. So, when someone tinkers with mining — or even talks about tinkering with it — the country's economic drivers go haywire. President-elect Ollanta Humala, ...

First it was China. Then India. Now Turkey is fast becoming the country du jour on the contemporary-art circuit. A slew of shows at prominent galleries in Europe, record-setting auctions at Sotheby's and Christie's, and a host of new venues in the country's cultural capital, Istanbul, suggest that modern Turkish art is finally coming of age. At the "Confessions of Dangerous Minds" exhibition of contemporary Turkish art, a first-of-its-kind show held at London's trendsetting Saatchi Gallery in ...

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, ...

Ever since the end of the cold War, the U.S. has been the dominant and unrivaled power in the Middle East. That situation is changing, not because another great power is entering the region but because the Arabs are becoming more independent, unlikely to ally themselves submissively to any outside patron. Egypt's decision to establish relations with Iran and Hamas is one part of this trend. Washington cannot change it, nor should it try. This is the ...

A man in a park in Phoenix showed me how to make a home out of cardboard boxes. Not a home, exactly, but something like a backyard playhouse built by an ingenious child. The cardboard boxes interlocked, and the shelter, secret and cozy, kept out the cold of the Arizona night. The man, named Ernest, had once been an engineer at the Boeing Co. Ernest, I came to understand, was a sort of brilliant grown-up orphan: he had an air ...

The cute little couple looked as if they should be sauntering through Great Adventure or waiting in line for tokens at the local arcade. Instead, the 14-year-olds walked purposefully into the Teen Center in suburban Salt Lake City, Utah. They didn't mince words about their reason for stopping in. For quite some time, usually after school and on weekends, the boy and girl had tried to heighten their arousal during sex. Flustered yet determined, the pair wanted advice on the ...

Twenty-five years ago this month, Harvard said no. So did Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia and Williams. I can still see my 18-year-old self standing by the mailbox in stunned disbelief, holding six white envelopes. Six anorexically thin white envelopes. The precise wording of the form letters has been lost to history, but I can still conjure up their face-saving phrases like "many strong candidates" and "very difficult decisions." Reading them one right after another, it seemed like an Ivy League ...

By Sunday morning they were back on station in the central Mediterranean north of Libya: the carriers America and Coral Sea, 14 escort warships and two other support vessels. Once again, as in the clashes around the Gulf of Sidra three weeks ago, the flattops were prepared to launch their 160 fighters and bombers against targets in the desert country of Dictator Muammar Gaddafi. But this time there was no pretext that the exercise was to assert the right of ...

The celebrities and the superrich who live in Isleworth, including Tiger Woods, would like to project a common touch. Every Halloween, residents of the gated golf community near Orlando, Fla., decorate their golf carts and drive trick-or-treaters door-to-door. They share lunches and dinners at the country club, play pickup basketball games and hold community events. "It's pretty normal," says Rav Mehta, CEO of a software-development firm who lives just outside Isleworth's vine-covered walls but has many friends inside. Normal ...