Imagine you're having a heart attack. Your co-workers call 911, and the medics arrive. Under lights and sirens, traffic cleaves as the path clears to the hospital where doctors and nurses are waiting to administer lifesaving treatment. Now imagine that instead of going to the ER down the street, the medics are forced to take you to another hospital on the other side of town 20 minutes away. You are clutching your chest and dripping with sweat, ...

Which is scarier, the noise or the silence? Long after the attacks of Sept. 11, the clangor of terror echoes worldwide. But for U.S. investigators, what they don't hear is almost as frightening as what they do. Terrorist communications, according to Francis X. Taylor, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, have reached levels "probably as high as they were last summer." Attacks continue. In April, a truck bomb--now thought to be the work of Islamic terrorists with links to al-Qaeda, the ...

The use of rubber bullets by South African police against striking public-sector workers in Soweto — erstwhile cauldron of antiapartheid protest — carries a symbolic significance that will send shockwaves through the country. But it also marks a milestone in the slow transition by the ruling African National Congress from being a rebel movement that reflexively backed striking workers to being a government that can't afford to heed their demands. Police opened fire 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 ...

The capital of Syria has the illusion of calm. But do not trust appearances. In fact, trust is a very precious commodity in Damascus nowadays. The city, according to residents, is swarming with secret police. Nobody dares speak out against the government. In central districts of the capital, the number of street peddlers seem to have quadrupled. The scuttlebutt is that the extra sales force are being employed by the government to spy on and even beat ...

First, Terry Bigley watched the tornado overtake his television screen as it ripped through eastern Kansas toward Joplin, Mo., where he lived on the east side in an apartment with his wife. "They had a big picture of it," he says of the local news station. "And I mean this was a humungous tornado. They told everybody to take cover. Then it was right on us." The Joplin tornado and a less powerful one that wreaked havoc in ...

From the epochal to the mundane, the decisions of Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew have steered the history of his island nation for more than half a century. But as the political party Lee founded in 1954 seeks to shore up its sliding fortunes with a younger and more politically outspoken electorate, the 87-year-old man regarded as modern Singapore's founding father has withdrawn from day-to-day governance by quitting his Cabinet post along with Senior Minister Goh ...

THE competing power groups that make up the American system have never operated in complete harmony. They have moved ahead according to the clout—electoral, financial and sometimes moral—that they could muster. During the 1960s, the blacks, the poor and the young spoke up and pushed forward. The blue collar workers, who sweated in the mines and factories, built the roads and drove the halftracks, seemed to accept stoically the role of providers and members of the Silent Majority. No longer. ...

Updated: Dec. 9, 2009, 6:45 p.m. E.T. The late-November afternoon sun bore down on the park in downtown Kampala, and all along the benches, Ugandan office workers took their siestas. There could have been no less likely setting for criminal conspiracies to topple an East African state. Still, the doctor's voice dropped a notch when an office worker in a brown suit settled in close by. The medic shifted a battered fedora over his eyes. "I am the ...

The transit workers' strike that crip pled Manhattan last month was clearly illegal. And the Transit Authority's will ingness to end the walkout by agreeing to pay an estimated $60 million in wage boosts and fringe benefits was hardly more correct. New York's tough Condon-Wadlin Act not only forbids strikes by public employees but prohibits pay raises to strikers for three years after they go back to work. Still, most New Yorkers — from Mayor John Lindsay to the harried ...