An anthropologist finds a "living stone-age museum " On a chilly September night in 1982, three men approached a police checkpoint at the village of Lotsum, along the tense cease-fire line between India and Pakistan in the Himalayas. The travelers looked like ordinary Kashmiri peasants, and the guards let them pass. But one of them was not what he seemed. French Anthropologist Michel Peissel had disguised himself in garb like that of his two local guides, staining his face with ...

As twilight falls over Mexico City's Buenavista neighborhood, the traditional night shift begins. A woman in suspenders and a pink dress takes up right outside the doors of an American-owned bank. Across the street, two girls in miniskirts entice clients at the entrance of a subway station. A block down, a group of transvestites and transsexuals bare their wares outside a convenience store. Quickly, the streets fill with hundreds of sex workers, while their clients lurk discreetly ...

Xenophobes in homogenous European countries often complain that immigrants will erase their most precious cultural norms. The race riots in southern Italy last weekend may be one indicator that change is inevitable, as African immigrants who don't live by the country's infamous omert code of silence violently protested against the powerful Mafia clans that control their lives, says Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah, an anti-Mob book that earned him both critical praise and a 24-hour police guard. ...

Northern Ireland's troubles aren't entirely over. A police constable was killed by a car bomb in April, and one was seriously injured by a car bomb last year. But despite these sporadic atrocities — dissident republicans are thought to be behind both attacks — peace is finally working there, so much so that enterprising taxi drivers are taking visitors to the capital, Belfast, on tours of once dangerous sectarian areas. Billy Scott is one of several drivers making ...

By Thursday afternoon, it was hard to recognize the voice of Nino Burjanadze, the Georgian opposition leader, who normally speaks as though she has a bullhorn built into her throat. The night before, she had led a street protest meant to overthrow President Mikheil Saakashvili, her former ally turned political nemesis. But riot police had moved in with tear gas and rubber bullets, beating scores of people and arresting hundreds, and the would-be revolution failed. Holed up ...

Really it's a sad story. The Kissels are rich, or used to be, so it's tempting to savor the elaborate murders and betrayals the family has endured as a long lost episode of Knots Landing. But five young kids have lost their fathers, and paterfamilias William Kissel, 78, has lived through the killings of two of his three children. Hong Kong financier Robert Kissel, 40, was drugged and then bludgeoned to death by his wife Nancy in 2003, and now ...

The same Durham area taxi driver cited as an alibi witness for accused Duke university lacrosse player Reade Seligmann may end up hurting some aspects of the defense's argument that no rape at all occurred at the off-campus party that night. Called in by investigators in the Duke rape case for the first time Tuesday, taxi driver Moez Mostafa told TIME in an exclusive interview, he stated he saw exotic dancer Kim Roberts exchange angry words with ...

While on the phone with his son 16 years ago, Pablo Escobar stayed on the line just long enough for Colombian police to trace the call. Minutes later, the world's most violent and notorious drug lord was gunned down on a Medelln rooftop. Fearing for their lives, Escobar's wife, son and daughter sought safety in exile, but most nations shut their doors. After stopovers in Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, South Africa and Mozambique — a whirlwind on par ...

The news of the arrest of IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, 62, was shocking in its own right: late Saturday afternoon, Port Authority police took Strauss-Kahn from the First Class cabin of an Air France flight at Kennedy Airport about to depart for Paris amid allegations he attempted to rape a midtown Manhattan hotel maid earlier in the day. But considering the fact that the former French finance minister Strauss-Kahn was widely expected to run against President ...

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 the leading German daily Die Welt. "Dear Raymond," begins a letter written to Roman Polanski by his sister Annette on Jan. 10, 1957. Polanski was 23 years old at the time, a French-born Polish citizen and was studying film in Lodz, Poland; his sister was in Paris. The ...