Call it the Davos of nose, the olfactory Olympics, the Sundance of Scent. On June 5, representatives of more than 50 top fragrance-and-flavor companies will converge at the World Perfumery Congress in Cannes, France, to charm potential customers and herald their latest innovations. Gilles Andrier, CEO of Givaudan, the industry leader, will speak on "The Noses of Tomorrow." The latest robotic smell mixers will be on display. International Flavors and Fragrances , Givaudan's closest rival, will fly in most of ...

Scraping together $40 billion in spending cuts in a country already shaved to the bone is a tall order. But try doing it with the lights off while dodging rocks, gas bombs and tear gas and with impatient foreign officials breathing down your neck. Welcome to the Greek debt crisis 2.0. On June 21, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou narrowly skirted political death in a vote of confidence in the Greek Parliament, after weeks of political infighting and escalating protests against ...

"Where is NATO?" the rebel asks, with no small amount of frustration. It is just after midnight, Friday, June 17, and he is holed up in Dafniyah, a hamlet west of the revolutionary enclave of Misratah on the coast of western Libya. Like all the fighters in the dry fields outside the rebel city, Ashrf Ali, 30, had anticipated that the military alliance would launch a bombing campaign in the early hours of the morning last ...

The white-haired, 61-year old exile has come to the hospital to see the refugees from Syria. He used to be a diehard Ba'athist Party member back in that country. But when some Baathists split in the 1980s, he joined the faction associated with the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Eventually, he abandoned it in disgust and chose to live in southern Turkey. For the past 20 years, he has lived away from politics. But now, the trim, mustachioed ...

When Iceland installed Johanna Sigurdardottir as Prime Minister last February, newspapers around the globe printed variations of the same headline: ICELAND APPOINTS WORLD'S FIRST GAY LEADER. Everywhere, that is, except Iceland. The Icelandic media didn't mention Sigurdardottir's sexuality for days, and only then to point out that the foreign press had taken an interest in their new head of state — a 67-year-old former flight attendant turned politician whom voters had consistently rated Iceland's most trustworthy politician. Sure, she was ...

For the first two years of Barack Obama's presidency, Mitch McConnell never got a phone call from the White House. Instead, he sat in his office on the second floor of the Capitol and plotted Obama's political demise. Now, ask the Senate Republican leader when he last spoke to Vice President Joe Biden, and he lets out a laugh, his golden presidential-seal cuff links — a gift from George W. Bush — flashing as his hands go ...

Muammar Gaddafi's options for a peaceful exit may have finally run out. For the second time in seven weeks, South African President Jacob Zuma on Monday failed to persuade the Libyan leader to abandon his 42-year rule. Gaddafi's refusal to heed the advice of longtime friends in the African Union raises the likelihood that his reign will end either with his indictment by the International Criminal Court in The Hague or with his death in ...

Every morning at 8, Maulawi Zahir heads into Waygal district center, a remote mountain village of stone houses stacked almost vertically up granite slopes. As the undeniable man in charge of the Afghan village, the Taliban leader is there to hear and settle disputes. But despite his group's ascendancy, he struggles to burnish his credentials among his constituents, even in an area where loathing for NATO and the Afghan government runs deep. "People aren't happy, but they ...

The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat used to be called "the great survivor." Syria's President Bashar al-Assad may be succeeding to the title. Many observers had expected Barack Obama to use a much-anticipated speech on the Middle East to call for Assad to step down, much as Washington has demanded that Muammar Gaddafi relinquish power in Libya. The signs were not good: the day before, the U.S. had slapped sanctions on Assad himself as well as ...

Aside from trying out for the Olympic decathlon, there may be no more enervating enterprise in the U.S. than campaigning in the presidential primaries. Never before has the ordeal been more punishing than it is this year for the eleven major Democratic candidates, who have no fewer than 24 pre-convention primaries to contend with. It is enough to make strong men weep, and finally one did. The tears were all the more conspicuous because they were shed by the leading ...