Carla Power

At dusk, immigrants gather on the south side of the Duomo, the famous 15th-century cathedral, in Milan. Peruvian and Filipina maids, construction workers from North Africa, Ukraine and Moldova, and Nigerian and South Asian street sweepers chat, smoke and piazza-watch.

The result of a Hindu-nationalist education can be seen on the outskirts of Delhi, where hundreds of youths in khaki shorts and crisp white shirts stand to attention, their lathis, or long bamboo fighting sticks, at their side.

The BMW dealership on Bradford's Oak Road is a charred husk, full of twisted metal and shards of glass--the casualty of clashes between police, whites and Asians.

This was not the sort of journey I'd have chosen to make while five months pregnant. It's June in northern India, and the road to Rath, 7 hours from Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh is notoriously dangerous.

Next to the hum of crickets and the drip of air conditioners, the world's most summery sound is that of gentle melodies wafting over a lawn strewn with picnickers.

Searching for the Arabic word for "dissidence" a few years back, Egyptian writer Nawal el-Saadawi was stumped. In the end, she discarded al-ihtijaj (protest) and al-muarada (opposition), settling on al-nidal, struggle.

Dozens of young clerics wearing black and white turbans fill the rows of a small movie theater in the Iranian holy city of Qom. They have gathered for a special screening of "Under the Moonlight," the first independent Iranian film about the clergy. "We want to see it for ourselves," says 25-year-old Akbar Esmaili, who dreams of becoming a screenwriter himself someday.

The campaign had all the essential ingredients of a high-visibility environmental crusade: a fashionable cause, an accessible villain and Bianca Jagger. Earlier this month, outside an Esso filling station in London, Jagger helped to launch a "Stop Esso" campaign.

Asked by his own Sunday Telegraph last Christmas to recommend a little-known book, the newspaper tycoon Conrad Black nominated "Napoleon and his Marshals" by A.

The surest sign that Tony Blair was kick-starting an election campaign wasn't his traditional trip to Buckingham Palace to tell the queen. More important was Rupert Murdoch's early-May call on 10 Downing Street.

With his blue blazer, neatly folded pocket square and clipped diction, Jonathan Tokeley-Parry seems every bit the "old-fashioned English gentleman" he considers himself.

As far as the Taliban leaders are concerned, the best way to preserve Afghanistan's culture is to demolish antiquities that aren't Islamic--including the two giant Buddhas of Bamiyan that they blasted to pieces in March.

Is "My Fair Lady" a period piece? At first glance the Lerner and Loewe musical, now enjoying a sumptuous revival at Britain's National Theatre, seems anachronistic.

On Jan. 11, just after London-based GlaxoSmithKline became the world's largest drug company, its new CEO, Jean-Pierre Garnier, spoke to the company's 100,000 employees via satellite.

Sally Sage's wedding dress was beaded cream silk, shot through with rot and mildew after 40 years in her attic. Last week she cried as she watched a model parade it on the catwalk, closing her son's show at London Fashion Week.

Maj. Ehsan ul-Haq would be outraged if anyone called him a terrorist. For 10 days every month, the former Pakistan Army officer runs a garment factory in Lahore, a business profitable enough to keep him and his family in luxury.

The standard props of politics--political parties, broadcast speeches and rallies--are banned by the military regime that rules Pakistan. So on the first day of her local government campaign, 28-year-old Sughra Hussain Imam resorts to the Pakistani tradition of paying condolence calls.

Bodacious Bollywood heroines pout at visitors to the Tate Modern's main hall. Fluorescent tubes dangle over a red fiberglass cow and painted shopfront shutters.

The Root Cause Of The [Bin Laden] Problem Is The Continuing War In Afghanistan. The U.S. Policy Has Not Focused On Ending The War. --Ahmed Rashid

When the great globalization epic is written or filmed, or perhaps pixilated, it will probably be spun as a Boys Own adventure story. Young men in T shirts fiddling with their computers.

In the old days, it was all done with cakes. for Marcel Proust, it was a visit to Mother's for tea and Madeleines that provided the access to "the vast structure of recollection" that was to become his masterpiece on memory and nostalgia, "Remembrance of Things Past." These days, it's not necessary to evoke the past: you can't move without tripping over it.

When man lived in caves and carried clubs, the only form of theater around was the family drama--the spectacle of watching your relatives self-destruct or survive.

It's Friday night in the northern English city of Newcastle, and the streets are thronged with cheerful boozers. Lads cruise the bar-crammed Bigg Market; women squeezed into sequin tops and stiletto heels totter into packed pubs. "Before the night's out, I'll have had 20 bottles," says Angela, a portly blonde weaving her way out of a popular bar. "I'll probably spend about £50 tonight on drinking."This is a New Economy, but there's not a geek or a modem in sight.

Philosophers, physicians and religious scholars have pondered the question for centuries: is it right to kill one person to save the life of another? In Britain last month the theoretical debate became painfully real after conjoined twins were born in Manchester.

The imposing M.I.6. headquarters on the Thames makes tanks look frail. A ziggurat-like fortress of a building nicknamed Babylon-on-Thames, it was designed to keep the international wing of Britain's intelligence agencies safe from terrorists.

Few islands on earth have more cinematic stereotypes swirling around them than Ireland: dashing poets, broke-but-unbowed peasants and people who like their pints.

Two men love one woman, who loves each of them back. It's a neat little plot, the love triangle, so neat that Julian Barnes has used it before. In the British novelist's 1991 "Talking It Over," the witty Oliver wins the wife of his friend Stuart, a dependable dullard.

In the August heat on a Tuscan hillside, a tractor drones, cicadas chirp and the odd cow lows. But there are other sounds of summer in the Italian countryside--the Windows 98 chime as a laptop boots up, the chink of a sculptor's chisel on stone and snatches of chat in English.

Jesus Emiliano Coltorti, a 25-year-old Roman actor, would love to move out of his mother's apartment in the city's fashionable Trastevere district and get his own place.

You know the type. Eleanor Rigby, who picks up the rice in the church where the wedding has been. Austin Powers, proud owner of a Lava lamp, lush chest hair and an equal-opportunity libido.