Here is the world in 2050, as imagined by the U.S. Census Bureau: India will be the most populous nation, surpassing China sometime around 2025. The U.S. will remain exactly where it is now: in third place, with a population of 423 million . And declining birth rates in two of the world's most economically and politically influential countries, Japan and Russia, will cause them to fall from their current positions as the 9th and 10th ...

For the doctors and nurses at the south London hospice it had been a wrenching weekend. Twelve patients had died between Friday and Sunday nights, and by Monday morning death's wide swath had left the staff physically and emotionally exhausted. It was time for a tall, somewhat stout, white-haired woman to provide the reassurance of her presence: standing in a stairwell, in the path of grief-bruised nurses and doctors, greeting each with a jovial smile and concerned questions: "How was ...

"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 ...

Two thousand years ago, when Western civilization was bounded by the laws and legions of the Roman Empire, the proudest words a man could utter were: "I am a citizen of Rome." A century ago, when the world was girdled by the British Empire, the Englishman's voice sounded from the earth's far corners: "I am a British subject." Now, in the middle of the 20th Century, the most arresting tones of history said something else: "I am an American."What did the phrase mean? The U.S. ...

The tip-off, says an American counterintelligence official, came from information collected over many months suggesting that the Warsaw Pact countries possessed "bits and pieces" of top-secret NATO wartime contingency plans. Investigators then discovered proof that Soviet planners had highly classified documents. Last week West German officials arrested retired U.S. Sergeant First Class Clyde Lee Conrad and charged him with being the linchpin in an "especially grave" Soviet intelligence penetration of Western defenses. Conrad, 41, formerly attached to the headquarters company ...

There's a very thin line between being thrilled and being terrified, and Candice Feiring saw both emotions on her son's face. The sixth-grader had just gotten off the phone with a girl in his class who called to ask if he'd like to go to the movies--just the two of them. It sounded a whole lot like a date to him. "Don't I have something to do tomorrow?" he asked his mother. A psychologist and an editor of The Development ...

On the two following pages TIME presents a map of the most important strategic area in the Western Hemisphere: the approaches to the Panama Canal.Until the U. S. owns a two-ocean fleet—and such a fleet cannot be built in less than seven years—the Canal is the only insurance the U. S. has against leaving one of its coasts undefended against attack. If an enemy should succeed in blocking or capturing the Canal, that insurance would no longer exist. Hence the first paradox of U. S. strategy: ...

It's a ritual that boils the blood of whale-watchers everywhere. On Nov. 18, a fleet of four Japanese vessels left Shimonoseki harbor in Western Japan to begin its five-month whale hunt in the Antarctic Ocean. This time, however, the whalers are planning what's expected to be its largest hunt in decades; along with about 850 minke and 50 finback whales, the fleet says it plans to harpoon as many as 50 humpback whales for the first time ...

This would have been his path. According to the gospels, it was in the area of Bethany and Bethphage that Jesus would have stayed each evening of the Passover holiday--on the far slope of the Mount of Olives, where his followers Mary and Martha lived and where he raised their brother Lazarus from the dead. During the festival it was a tradition and a necessity for pilgrims to spend the night on the outlying hills. Each morning Jesus would have ...

In the first chapter of your new western novel Payback at Morning Peak, your 17-year-old protagonist, Jubal, finds his mother dead, shoots his dad in the head as he burns alive and tries in vain to save the life of his 14-year-old sister, who has just been raped. You wanted it to start slow, huh?Yeah, I wanted to dig myself into a hole so that I would have 300 pages to get myself out. I kind of maybe overdid it ...