In the 1997 film Seven Years in Tibet, the character of Austrian mountaineer Peter Aufschnaiter escapes an Indian POW camp and declares that he is heading for China to find work. His compatriot-in-arms, Heinrich Harrer, played by a sun-kissed, blue-eyed Brad Pitt, says he's skipping China and going to mountains of Tibet. Harrer goes on to cross the line that separates India from Tibet, where he makes a silver-screen connection with the Dalai Lama among the Chinese ...

As the residents of Moneygall ready themselves to play host to Barack Obama on May 23, many hope the visit will bring the Irish village exactly what the President's great-great-great-grandfather sought when he left there 150 years ago: prosperity. It takes less than a minute to drive through Obama's ancestral hometown, a sleepy and typical rural village whose main attractions are a single pub, a corner shop, a post office and a football field. But days before the President's arrival, the quiet that ...

While much of the world can only dream of democracy, other places have trouble making it work. Tiny Albania emerged from communist dictatorship in 1990 only to tumble into a rough world of gangsters, fraudulent financial machinations and incompetent governance, exacerbated by lawless capitalism and devil-may-care politics. In 1997, popular fury over rigged ballots as well as a plague of failed Ponzi schemes led to a massive uprising that saw army warehouses looted and 1,500 people dead. ...

Just as wars -- two World Wars and, equally important, the cold war -- dominated the geopolitical map of the 20th century, economics will rule over the 21st. All the big questions confronting the world in the century ahead are basically economic. Is the U.S. in an irreversible decline as the world's premier power? Will Japan continue its competitive conquest of international markets? Can Europe manage to hold together the world's largest trade bloc in the face of strong centrifugal ...

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Le Monde. The Strauss-Kahn affair, which began in a Sofitel hotel room, shows that writing endless editorials or making sermons predicting the future does not get us any closer to the truth. When dealing with politics, French media usually call in a troop of editorial writers, rebaptized "commentators," whereas Anglo-Saxon newspapers, even if they ...

When news of the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn broke in France, Emmanuel Pierrat remembered the young woman who came seeking legal advice about half a decade ago. She said she had had an encounter with Strauss-Kahn and, says the lawyer Pierrat, "wanted to know whether I thought what I heard would form the basis for a solid legal case against him." Pierrat says the news out of New York City last weekend was "something I had heard ...

When the news broke that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, 62, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund , had been arrested for sexual assault and attempted rape in New York City, his wife Anne Sinclair wasted no time in declaring her unquestioned belief in his innocence. The heiress to an art-gallery fortune, Sinclair, also 62, is a celebrity in her own right, having been an award-winning radio-and-television journalist in France. She has stood by him in the recent ...

When researcher Karen Clark developed the first probability-based model for measuring the threat of natural disasters in the U.S. in 1987, almost no one cared. Clark, then 30, started her own company in Boston and used tens of thousands of data points--from the wind speeds of hurricanes to the lengths of fault lines--to help insurance firms estimate how often a disaster might strike and how much harm it might do. Then, in 1992, Hurricane Andrew struck, wreaking more havoc than ...

The perennial debate about nature and nurture--which is the more potent shaper of the human essence?--is perennially rekindled. It flared up again in the London Observer of Feb. 11, 2001. REVEALED: THE SECRET OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR, read the banner headline. ENVIRONMENT, NOT GENES, KEY TO OUR ACTS. The source of the story was Craig Venter, the self-made man of genes who had built a private company to read the full sequence of the human genome in competition with an international ...

Lee Kuan Yew towers over other Asian leaders on the international stage, yet he comes from one of Asia's smallest countries. A champion of Asian values, he is most un-Asian in his frank and confrontational style. Lee loves Singapore but has relatively few close Singaporean friends or confidants. He is a man of great intelligence, with no patience for mediocrity; a man of integrity, with an relentless urge to smite opponents; a man who devours foreign news ...