One week after its stormy birth, the infant nation of Malaysia was hoping for peace but preparing for war. Two Malayan infantry battalions packed their kit bags and prepared to embark for the steaming jungles of Sarawak and Sabah ; in Sarawak, orders were issued to raise a native infantry battalion. A round-the-clock watch was begun on the Malayan shore of the Malacca Straits, and 6,000 British, Gurkha and local troops and constabulary units doubled their patrols along Sarawak's tangled, ...

At 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 15, as thousands of people gathered to protest against their ruler at a busy intersection in Manama, the capital of the small island nation of Bahrain, you could just about hear over the general hubbub the anthem of the young people who have shaken regimes from North Africa to the Arabian Gulf. It wasn't a verse from the Koran. It wasn't a traditional tune from the region. It was rap. A reedy ...

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 ...

I am neutral on most things that don't involve food or sex or sexfood, which does not yet exist but which I already feel strongly about. But I am against Net neutrality. That's the idea being pushed by the President, the FCC and people who write comments on blogs and want everything to be free except what they happen to do for a living. Net neutrality would set up rules to make sure your Internet provider treats all information equally; ...

It is not every day that the military chief of the world's emerging superpower stops by a tiny Himalayan nation. So when General Chen Bingde, Chief of General Staff of China's People's Liberation Army, touched down in Kathmandu on March 23, all of Nepal was watching. Chen didn't disappoint: he signed a military-aid deal worth $20 million and promised that there was more to come. He also took the chance to comment on Chinese-Nepali relations, saying that ...

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.

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.

At least 52 civilians have been killed in the past week amid escalating violence instigated by an authoritarian President who refuses to heed the will of his people. No, not in Libya, or Yemen, or Bahrain, but in the West African nation of Ivory Coast, which is struggling for media attention amid crises elsewhere. "Ivory Coast isn't considered strategically important enough on the global stage — it is not a Libya, so to speak," one ...

It has taken President Obama three months to reach the decision on Afghanistan that he'll share with the nation Tuesday night, because there are no easy solutions. His chosen path will win applause from some quarters but boos from others. Here's a scorecard outlining the key questions the speech will address, to determine what proposals Obama has embraced and the risks he's willing to accept — and who's likely to be pleased or ticked off as ...