For Muslims immigrants in America, the days following 9/11 were a harrowing encounter with fear-fueled American hate. IPod bearing, second-generation techies faced insults in Silicon Valley parking lots; schoolgirls wearing head scarves were attacked; and mosques across the country were vandalized or set ablaze. For many months, it seemed altogether unclear whether America's Muslims — from the cocktail-swilling secular to the mosque-attending pious — would ever live in their communities without apprehension again. That tense period, the Harvard ...

Between 2003 and 2004, Marion Le, a Canberra-based lawyer, made regular trips to the remote island of Nauru in the South Pacific. But she wasn't going for a beach holiday. At the time, Nauru was part of the so-called Pacific Solution, Australia's policy of processing and detaining asylum seekers arriving by boat in offshore detention facilities. From 2001 to 2007, thousands of asylum seekers were in offshore detention centers while Australian immigration officials decided their fate. Le, who ...

Hope is Africa's rarest commodity. Yet buried though it is amid the despair that haunts the continent, there is more optimism today than in decades. Francisco Mucavele found hope last September when an armored steel Casspir rolled over the hill and began to blow up the land mines contaminating Mozambique's rich soil. Olga Haptemariam acquired it in Eritrea's war-scarred port city of Massawa when she laid down 2,000 birr for a license to open a building-supply store. The villagers of ...

Michael Baze arrived at Churchill Downs with the right surname. The Baze clan is legendary in horse-racing. His second cousin Russell is the sport's all-time wins leader. His first cousin Tyler won the Eclipse Award in 2000 as top apprentice. His father Mike B. Baze was a prominent rider in the Pacific Northwest. And his uncle Gary was the career win leader at the legendary track at Longacres Park in Washington state. Young Michael didn't grow up near ...

Two decades ago, a Thai gardener climbed into the palace of a Saudi prince through a second-story window, busted open a safe with a screwdriver and stole some 200 pounds of jewelry. The former Saudi charg d'affaires in Bangkok told the Washington Post that the gardener stuffed "rubies the size of chicken eggs" in his vacuum-cleaner bag, along with a huge, nearly flawless blue diamond, which at 50 carats would be one of the largest blue diamonds ...

A fortnight hence in the Vatican, 2,600 bishops of the Roman Catholic Church will meet in a gathering so rare that only 20 others like it have been convened in the 20 centuries of Christian history. The purpose of the Second Vatican Council is what His Holiness Pope John XXIII, who has the Catholic prelate's traditional wariness of words that suggest drastic change, calls an aggiornamento—a modernization. This self-reform will affect the life, the worship and the discipline ...

The Holocaust is a crime that never seems to quit. Even as the ranks of survivors grow smaller each year, the impact of that dark passage in history continues to be felt. And it's not just the victims who feel the effects; it's their children too. Psychologists have long been intrigued by the emotional profile of so-called second-generation Holocaust survivors. Parents who lived through the camps were forever changed by the horrors they witnessed. In the ...

FALCONER by JOHN CHEEVER 211 pages. Knopf. $7.95. In the 19th century an American dream was 40 acres and a mule. In the second half of the 20th it is a suburban quarter-acre and a maid. For millions, both dreams have meant a significant step up. But for the major characters in John Cheever's fiction, suburbia is a definite step down. His Wapshot family, for example, traced its lineage to colonial New England and to the patriarchal Leander Wapshot who ...

JUST BECAUSE ABORTION IS LEGAL in Illinois doesn't mean that Sheela Paine can easily get one. At the age of 30, she already has five children. Last week she was in the 19th week of a pregnancy she couldn't afford; her husband is unemployed and the family lives on welfare. She also couldn't afford the reduced $425 price of a second-trimester abortion at the clinic near her home in East St. Louis. During her last pregnancy Paine tried to induce ...

Birds of a feather flock to Rio, and so do audiences everywhere. Fox's 3-D animated carnival, the high flyer at last week's box office, saw nothing but blue skies its second time around; it earned $26.8 million, according to early studio estimates, to win the Easter weekend at North American movie theaters. The colorful love story of two blue macaws also keeps charming the rest of the world: it has amassed $204.7 million in foreign climes ...