Even before Dominique Strauss-Kahn announced from New York's Riker's Island prison on Wednesday that he was stepping down as head of the International Monetary Fund , world powers were already jostling over who could replace him. Indeed, since Strauss-Kahn's arrest last Saturday on charges of attempted rape, European officials have been swift to argue that Europe should maintain the hold it has had on the IMF's top job ever since the Washington D.C.-based organization was created in 1945. Europeans, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, say ...

This immigration had been different. The Puerto Ricans came not by ship, huddled in the steerage, but by plane. Being U.S. citizens, they beat at no immigration bars, never had their pictures taken in colorful native costume behind the wire enclosures of Ellis Island. They simply seeped in, landing by 20s and 30s from battered planes at La Guardia field, Teterboro and Newark, suddenly appearing beside their cardboard suitcases on the city's sidewalks outside a hole-in-the-wall travel agency. Jobless, speaking ...

At the moment, the project that will transform the future of El Hierro doesn't look like much more than a hole in the ground. Or two, to be exact: one on top of a mountain, another smaller one down below, and in between, a long stretch of pipeline tinted the same color as the scrub that grows so abundantly on this volcanic island. But when this innovative wind-power system goes online at the end of 2011, it ...

It's past midnight in Zamboanga and Benigno Aquino III slouches in his chair, a glass of Coke in one hand and a cigarette in another. He's tired and bleary-eyed and wracked by a cold. A grueling day of audiences, processions and interviews in three different provinces across the southern Philippine island of Mindanao is drawing to a close in the hotel lobby. While aides and well-wishers murmur around him, Aquino stands and holds out his arms as if awaiting ...

More than a year has sped by since, at Premier Mussolini's orders, the dread Mafia was hunted down on the island of Sicily, captured, jailed. For centuries the Mafia protected Sicilians while the island was under foreign rule. When Italy became unified in 1870, the Mafia turned brigands and terrorized the island ruthlessly. Not until the advent of Signor Mussolini and his Fascist! has any government dared to put down their wholesale lawlessness, although many half-hearted attempts have been made.Last week ...

On film, many a desert-island castaway has put a message in a bottle and cast it out to sea, hoping it would someday reach land. Sorry, all you modern-day Robinson Crusoes, try that with a plastic bottle in real life, and your message will probably end up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, bobbing in a floating collection of trash known as the Plastic Vortex. It's an accumulation of plastic debris swept into the Pacific — ...

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 ...

No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us. It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry--a Category 4 storm with wind bursts that reached 125 m.p.h.--exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked ...

The 9.0 quake that hit Japan on March 11 was powerful enough to shift the earth on its axis and make it spin a little faster, shortening the day by 1.8 millionths of a second. It shoved the island nation one parking space to the east. But what felt like the end was just the beginning. The sturdy buildings that survived the quake were ravaged by the wave that followed. The three-story wall of water dissolved coastal towns, dry-docked boats ...

Madagascar is an island nation in limbo. A 2009 coup, in which the opposition leader toppled the country's President with army backing, has created a stalemate with no single party able to form a transitional government. While travel advisories don't caution against visiting Madagascar, they do remind you that unrest still breaks out sporadically — mostly in and around the capital, Antananarivo.