"I'll take this!" says Sabar Hassem, 35, as he snatches a mangled piece of rust from the heap. With the eye of a connoisseur, he recognizes it as an air filter from a Ford pickup truck, perhaps from the 1950s. He gleefully hands over 100 dinars, about a nickel, to the seller. "I will replace the filter and remake it for a newer model," he says. "Then I will get maybe 2,000" -- about $1.05. His day, or maybe even his week, is made.

This is Baghdad exactly 10 years after the start of the Gulf War, a city that has defiantly clung by its fingertips during a decade of Western-led sanctions and embargoes. Before the devastating bombings, Baghdad had long been the envy of the Middle East, with top-notch health care and schools. Iraqis these days have learned to live by their wits.

Continue Reading...

He ought to know. Like countless Cambodians, Meas Tung joined the Khmer Rouge as a teenager during the early 1960s. At age 13, he was swept up in the organization's romanticism about ethnic Khmer pride, and its calls for people to get back to the land. He became a combat soldier at 17, and tells me he helped plant some of the hundreds of thousands of land mines, booby traps and explosive devices still buried in fields across Cambodia.

By the time the Khmer Rouge launched its brutal assault in 1975, soft-spoken, dimpled Meas was a seasoned fighter. And by the time he quit the organization in the early 1990s, he had climbed through the ranks to become the head of a regiment, and a colonel in the army of Pol Pot, one of the most eccentric and brutal dictators in modern history. Meas was even summoned to Pol Pot's jungle hideout in 1993, only a few miles from where we are now sitting eating dinner, to hear an address by the revered Brother Number One, about the internationally brokered Paris agreement that ended Cambodia's decades of war.

Continue Reading...

Norwegian divers who had worked for more than 24 hours in water deeper than 300 feet pried open the rear escape hatches Monday, and found the entire vessel flooded. That ended any last faint hope of life among the seamen, who sank during naval exercises in the Barents Sea on Aug. 12. One corpse was uncovered within minutes of the divers opening the hatch.

For days, Russians have waited for each scrap of news, glued to their television sets at home. Taxi drivers kept a close eye on their watches, raising the volume on the dial at the top of each hour, to hear the latest grim details. When the climax came, the bland words offered little relief. "There is no hope of finding survivors in the submarine Kursk," said a Norwegian statement on Russian television.

With that sentence, the rescue operation was over. Now comes the morbid attempt to extract the bodies from the hull and bring them to the surface, where hundreds of relatives have gathered to grieve their dead and to vent their fury at the government.

Continue Reading...

The conflict comes a time when Zimbabweans face a heavy decision about the future of their nation: whether or not to reject the leader who gave them their independence, but who also, many say, has been a party to its degradation.

Reuben Gwatidzo doesn't look like a man who bears grudges. When I greet him in an elevator downtown, he is wearing a dark suit and silk tie and carrying a briefcase. The vice chairman of this capital's chamber of commerce, he has just come from a meeting about opening up Zimbabwe's telecommunications.

Continue Reading...

When the South African Defence Force rescue helicopter passed overhead more than 10 days ago, it spotted Mahelane and his family perched precariously on the branch of a tree, whose trunk was submerged in 10-foot floodwater. Winching up the children in a hoist, the pilot left the boy's mother behind, perhaps thinking he would return to fetch her. But she has not been seen since.

"Some parents sat in trees for days," says Alda Macuacua, a Roman Catholic nun from Xai-Xai, the capital of the stricken Gaza Province. "They might have fallen down from hunger." Last week, Macuacua made it to this village to help. Since then, she has found 58 children wandering alone in the camp, having lost their parents in the frantic scramble to safety.

Continue Reading...

"They" are the Council of Music, a unique creation
of the 21-year-old Islamic Revolution, which
requires written approval before any bar of music
is played in public anywhere in Iran. Along with
the Council of Poetry, which vets every word of
every lyric written, it is housed within the
Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture. That
department is charged with keeping Iran a pure
Islamic country, by enforcing a mass of rules and
regulations: which books people can read, what
music they can hear, which foreigners they can talk
to.

Continue Reading...

Arriving in Iran to cover the elections, I expected to find a country whose hardcore Muslim rules could not possibly withstand the reality of a globalized new century. After all, heretical talk of sexual pleasure is only a mouse-click away on the Internet. Instead, despite the scene at Shemshak's slopes, a walk through Tehran shows that the revolution is far more set in place than all the talk of change might suggest.

"I have only one thing to say to you," says Marjam Mahmoudi, outside a food stand at Shemshak ski slope, an hour's drive north of Tehran. "Iran is bad. Bad," she says in a low voice. She adds, "Personally, I haven't felt very many limitations from the Islamic government." But that statement belies experiences that have pushed her to seek a life elsewhere.

Continue Reading...

His three brothers were killed in Iran's long
war with Iraq; his office was bombed by Iraqi forces.
In the past 18 months alone, Jalai Pour, now editor of
one of Iran's 35 daily newspapers, has had three of
his publications shut by the police.

So, Jalai Pour speaks with the authority of someone
who has seen more turbulent history than most. And
rushing into his office on Friday afternoon, a few
hours before the polls closed in Iran's parliamentary
elections, he declared: "An avalanche is coming! This
is really a new phenomenon."

The rocks from that avalanche have not yet hit the
ground. With about 6,000 candidates, the results from
the handwritten ballots stuffed into cardboard boxes
on Friday could take nearly a week to tally. But
Friday's elections for Iran's 290-seat parliament, or
majlis, already seem likely to transform this
country, with the hardcore conservatives losing their
legislative majority to a dynamic new generation of
liberal reformers.

Continue Reading...

Beatty gave no final word on his political ambitions. But the legendary
seducer insisted that this time, he's not guilty of flirting. Rather, he claimed, during the seven weeks since the buzz about his presidential potential first began,
the rumors have swirled around him -- set in motion by late-night dinner musings at the Los Angeles home of Arianna Huffington, and more late-night schmoozing at Beatty's home last month with Bill Hillsman, who helped transform Jesse Ventura into an electable commodity. There was little more than that.

Continue Reading...

And where better to buff one's reputation than here, in the city of high-concept image-making? On Wednesday, Starr took a stab at polishing the history of his tortuous, five-year investigations.

Speaking at a luncheon of about 550 people, including several of the city's corporate lawyers, judges and business executives, Starr said he ought never to have been handed the task of investigating Lewinsky's dalliances in the White House. The country could have been spared much of this agonizing chapter in Washington, he noted, had the now-lapsed Independent Counsel Act never existed.

"The statute simply does not work" and should not be revived, he said. "The Congress was trying in effect to create a separate branch of government."

It was hard to square some of Starr's regrets with history. As his digging into the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas turned up ever-multiplying questions about President Clinton's behavior, it was Starr himself who several times requested wider responsibilities from Attorney General Janet Reno. And when Tripp contacted his office with the Lewinsky tapes, Starr asked Reno to expand his jurisdiction to investigate the matter.

Continue Reading...

"You're looking for me," he told officers at the FBI field office in Las Vegas, just before 9 on Wednesday morning. "I killed the kids in Los Angeles."

It scarcely seemed possible that Furrow, 37, had missed the blitz media coverage on television and radio, and the news that he had not in fact killed anyone when he walked into the North Valley Jewish Community Center in the San Fernando Valley and fired about 70 shots from an AR-15 Bushmaster. Incredibly, only one of the five people who were shot, a 5-year-old boy, was critically injured, with four bullets in his stomach and leg. Four others -- two boys, a 16-year-old student counselor and a 68-year-old staff member -- were treated for injuries and listed in good condition by Wednesday.

Continue Reading...

"He doesn't care if he dies, obviously," says T.J. Leyden, who met Furrow through the Aryan Nations, while Leyden was a racist skinhead. "He turned himself in knowing that he'll get the death penalty. After he's dead, they'll make him a martyr."

In April 1996, Leyden and Furrow celebrated Hitler's birthday together by spending the weekend at the Aryan Nations' spread in Idaho. According to Leyden, Furrow was a member of the Christian Identity movement, a right-wing sect that believes Northern Europeans are the true "Israelites," that all other groups are "mud people" and that Jews are evil.

Although both Leyden and Furrow were extremists and racists, the two clashed almost immediately over their religious views.

Continue Reading...

At 33, Leyden has seen it all before. In fact, he has lived it: His life in violent neo-Nazi movements was launched at the age of 14, when he began punching out kids at punk rock concerts.

But unlike Smith's story, Leyden's is one of transformation. Four years ago, after watching his small son recoil in revulsion at the "niggers" on television, he quit the movement and his marriage to a fellow skinhead. Today, he is a full-time consultant to the Task Force Against Hate at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, monitoring racist groups and, more importantly, trying to extract young men and women from them. In fact, while Smith was prowling the suburbs of Chicago and Bloomington, Ind., last weekend, Leyden was at a rally of skinheads in Las Vegas -- this time as an enemy within their midst, hoping to reach some youth before they end up on a rampage like Smith.

Continue Reading...

Psychologists who deal with trauma have seen this before -- in Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Afghanistan -- in corners of the world where children's secure lives have been wrenched from their sockets. When a catastrophe like war occurs, children are tossed upon the emotional high seas and left adrift in the turmoil. As their reality begins to take on some grim new shape, they start drawing pictures of what they have seen -- and of what they wish they still could -- offering tentative glimpses into the chaos within them.

To one walking through this sprawling refugee camp just north of Macedonia's capital, Skopje, that chaos is not at all obvious. Children are squealing with laughter between the tents, jumping elastic tied around garbage cans and shooting hoops on makeshift basketball courts staked out in the mud. Some play elaborate hide-and-seek games between the tent ropes; others walk the paths, their arms linked, as though strolling through a Pristina park on a lazy weekend afternoon.

Continue Reading...

Neighbors and friends gathered with similar bundles and began moving down the street in a convoy of tractors and cars, an attempt at shielding each other from Serbian police. They headed out of the city, south on the Macedonia road.

Within minutes, the two Cecelia boys, Agon, 6, and Ardin, 3, who were sitting on the back of a tractor, complained that they were cold. Without hesitating, Xhavit lifted them down, tucked them into the back seat of his friend's car and told the boys he would see them when they reached the Macedonia border.

When I meet Xhavit outside his new home -- Tent D-258 in this vast camp, which is home to 25,000 refugees -- he chokes on his words as he remembers that fateful moment more than one month ago. "They were cold. I just wanted to make them warm," he tells me, dropping his head in agony. He is a parent whose loving intentions might yet prove to be the most calamitous decision of his life.

Continue Reading...

Slightly built, with big glasses and a blue V-neck sweater, Hong, a27-year-old hairdresser, doesn't look like the avant-garde of a country inthe midst of major social upheaval. His soft voice barely breaks throughthe echoing din in the crowded classroom, and he visibly blushes each timehe looks at his 25-year-old wife, whose hair, drawn back in a ponytail,frames a pale face and drops over a sedate maroon suit. But this couple isas good a mark as any of China's vast changes.

Continue Reading...

"The girls mocked her," Konate recalls. "The boys said, 'You'll never find a husband.'" Buya had come from a village that didn't practice female
circumcision, and Konate, who had begun to have serious doubts about the
operation, hoped the girl could avoid it entirely. But it was too high a price
to pay, to rebel against a tradition that had lasted hundreds of years.
Buya was regarded with repulsion, shunned from casual friendships and sometimes
even conversation, and suspected of being too unclean to cook food or wash
clothes.

Continue Reading...

Remember Rwanda? The tiny East African country, about the size of Rhode Island, broke into our consciousness for a few months exactly four years ago, when we sat watching on our television sets, horrified, as the brutal genocide exploded there. The scale and swiftness of the killings were unheard of: In a country with little more than 7 million people, more than 500,000 were slaughtered in 100 days, mostly minority Tutsis by the majority Hutus. Nearly 2 million others fled in terror.

Clinton's Rwanda stop -- probably no more than a few hours at the airport -- might seem a paltry response. But in Washington, Africa watchers have already taken it as his apology for failing to do a single thing to stop the 1994 genocide. But more than an apology is required if any justice is to be rendered.

Continue Reading...

Despite the parade of witnesses who testified in damning detail to the commission, there were a number of players who didn't make it to the stand: African National Congress supporters, white liberals and scores of foreign and local journalists who had witnessed, close up, Winnie's self-immolation during the late 1980s but had refrained from speaking out. Last week, they muttered quietly to each other over telephone calls and coffee dates.

"It was impossible. You spoke out against Winnie, you got branded pro-apartheid," one seasoned black journalist said privately after the hearings ended. "You know, there were always two parties in South Africa: apartheid and anti-apartheid."

Continue Reading...

even for those who've earned their fame penning clever phrases
for the hungry masses, this item seemed almost too perfect to be real:
Happy champagne socialists gather in Pravda on May Day!

If you weren't in the British town of Sedgefield listening to Prime
Minister-elect Tony Blair expound on the country's "decent values," then the
place to be May 1, Thursday night, was in the dim concrete basement of
Pravda, one of Manhattan's trendier Lower East Side bars. There, the Labor
Party's 100 or so New York exiles drowned nearly two decades of bad memories
with (French!) champagne, ending years when most have slunk around this
little island, rather than their own, having nary a good word to say about
their home.

As Britain's Independent Television News flashed Labor victory after Labor
victory
on the television screens around the bar, the atmosphere
in Pravda became positively tearful.

Continue Reading...