For Anwar Ibrahim, redemption must be feeling pretty sweet. On Aug. 26, the Malaysian opposition leader won a landslide victory in a local by-election, a political comeback for the former deputy prime minister who has been out of office for the last decade. "We won! And our victory is decisive and overwhelming," an exhausted Anwar told thousands of supporters gathered outside a ballot counting center several hundred kilometers north of the capital that night. Taking over 31,000 ...

April Rivera, a four-year-old from Miami, is singing the theme song to Barney with her mother. "I love you. You love me," she chirps. "We're a happy family." Even a purple dinosaur, however, can tell this isn't quite true. April's mom Regla Sanchez, 26, is inmate No. 162850 at the Hernando Correctional Institution, 320 miles away in Brooksville, Fla., and April is looking at an image of her mother on a computer screen. This virtual family visit is part of ...

Ever since Yoon Hyuk-joo, a 16-year-old in Seoul, started playing the popular computer game StarCraft eight years ago, studying has taken the backseat. For six hours every day in dim, smoky Internet cafs known in the South Korean capital as "PC Bangs," Yoon leads a squad of soldiers in Battlefield Online and then maims the undead in Counter-Strike: Zombies. His idols aren't your usual baseball players or pop-music stars: the high school student looks to inspiration from ...

Nelson Mandela didn't know how to fire a rifle when he formed the underground military movement of the African National Congress in the 1950s. For help, he called on Arthur Goldreich, a Jewish South African artist who despised apartheid and had fought in the 1948 war that achieved Israeli independence. He became Mandela's military tutor and landlord, sheltering a fugitive Mandela on Liliesleaf Farm in Johannesburg. And like Mandela, he was captured in the famous 1963 police raid on that ...

"The first step to winning the future is encouraging American innovation." That was Barack Obama in his State of the Union address last January, when he hit the theme repeatedly, using the word innovation or innovate 11 times. And on this issue, at least, Republicans seem in sync with Obama. Listen to Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or Mitch Daniels and the word innovation pops up again and again. Everyone wants innovation and agrees that it is ...

Melinda Amedee was scheduled to have a tumor removed from her kidney at a New Orleans hospital on August 30. She lives far enough away from the city to have missed serious damage from Hurricane Katrina. But when the 17th Street Canal levee broke the day before, she knew she wouldn't be having an operation at the Ochsner Cancer Institute anytime soon. With a 25-year history of kidney problems, Amedee, 39, was worried about the delay, and ...

It wasn't easy for Bill Thielker to believe it when his doctor diagnosed him as depressed--mostly because he wasn't terribly sad. The 54-year-old landscape photographer and graphic designer felt lousy, all right--empty, unmotivated, detached from the people around him. But that was more or less how he'd always felt. "It was normal for me," he says. "I didn't realize anything was wrong. I just assumed life sucks and that's that." If Thielker was depressed and didn't know it, he was ...

For Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen, it all began with orangutans. Four years ago-inspired by the work of primate researcher Jane Goodall-the two friends from Ann Arbor, Mich., collaborated on a research report on the endangered primates to help qualify for their Girl Scout Bronze award, one of the highest prizes offered by the 3.2 million-member organization. Vorva and Tomtishen have both been scouts since they were five years old, and they take their roles and responsibilities ...

Biggest professional organization in the U. S. is the National Education Association, which numbers some 225,000 of the nation's 1,000,000 school teachers. But teachers, who in many communities are expected to be politically as well as physically chaste, seldom raise their voices outside the classroom. Consequently they are perennially startled at the bold talk that springs up at the N. E. A.'s annual conventions, attended chiefly by the outspoken fringe. Last week the 1,680 delegates and 12,000 visitors who ...

There are two things sports fans love to hate, and the first is the epidemic of selfishness and greed: ball-hogging superstars who care only about their stats and their paychecks, teams that don't play defense and don't play like teams, owners with no commitment to winning and no sense of loyalty. Fortunately, the National Basketball Association has a team that defies those stereotypes. Its superstars — as well as its role players — took pay cuts ...