Charles Lane

This is Bosnia's endgame. Last week, in the Croat-held town of Kiseljak about T18 miles northwest of Sarajevo, three Serbian tanks pulled up to a checkpoint manned by Croatian Defense Council soldiers.

First came the crash of a firebomb. Then the roar of spreading flames. And finally, the phone call: "Fire in Ratzeburger Street! Heil Hitler!" Those words, called in to the fire department in the small Baltic town of Molln, resounded across Germany last week.

Grizzled and hollow-cheeked, Mehmet is 30 but looks about 50. That isn't surprising, given his ordeal. Mehmet is from Kozarac, a Muslim town in northern Bosnia that was "ethnically cleansed" by Serb forces last June.

The convoy of buses had been wandering the remote area of Bosnia for three days, looking for a safe road to Travnik, a town 45 miles northwest of Sarajevo.

A little more than two years ago, Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Mello came to power on a vow to clean up corruption in Brazil. Today, the dashing 43-year-old free marketer has not only failed to live up to that promise-he also faces well-documented accusations that he ripped off the government on a grand scale himself A Brazilian congressional commission has found that Collor personally benefited from an influence-peddling ring operated within the government by his former campaign...

Bernard Aronson, the Bush administration's point man for democracy in Latin America, was wondering why the Peruvian government had asked him to postpone his visit to Lima last week.

A soldier's life is seldom easy, but the Peruvian troops in the Andean town of Puquio are downright pitiable. Short of food, bullets and boots, they are paid $23 a month to battle Shining Path guerrillas.

It was a heady moment-that instant I realized I was about to race down the narrow basement corridor of Perfect Tommy's, a bar on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, spring onto a trampoline and backflip smack into a Velcro-striped wall.

The American-led battle to oust Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait is an increasingly distant memory. U.S. troops may soon be airlifting food to another crumbling former foe, the Soviet Union.

Is Albert Auguste a freedom lover or a fortune seeker? Last week the U.S. Coast Guard returned the 31-year-old to Haiti after plucking him and 141 others from a homemade wooden boat bobbing off the coast of Florida.

HELP WANTED: Secretary-General, the United Nations. Salary: $190,000 per year. Benefits: enormous prestige, opportunities for travel. Responsibilities: flexible.

France's ambassador to Haiti was one of the first to see armored cars moving in on President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's Port-au-Prince home. He raced to the house and managed to pull the president into his bulletproof car, but not before soldiers had killed one Aristide bodyguard.

One spring day in 1976, Stephen Carter's phone rang. It was, seemingly, a miracle: a Harvard Law School official, calling to apologize for rejecting his application and to offer him a spot in the class.

George Bush has made only four Oval Office addresses to the nation, two of them to rally the people against Saddam Hussein. Last week he was contemplating a fifth TV appeal, this time to take on an old ally: Israel.

Revelations about China's brutal labor camps raise questions about Bush's tolerance for Beijing Watchtowers and brick walls line the lonely gray highway between Qinghai and Tibet in northwestern China.

As the Soviet Union is crumbling, so is a basic conception which has guided Western foreign policy for the better part of five decades: that a single government would enforce its writ across the gigantic land stretching between Poland and Vladivostok.

Late last month 20 members of Peru's mysterious guerrilla group, Shining Path, stormed an experimental farm in Huaral, 50 miles north of Lima, the country's capital.

The moment Yitzhak Shamir dreaded had arrived: President Hafez Assad of Syria agreed to U.S. proposals for a Mideast peace conference. His enemy's concession confronted the Israeli prime minister with a dilemma: how to avoid snubbing his American patrons without setting his country on the road to territorial compromises.

As many as 40,000 may die in the next three years In a slum near Peru's capital, Lima, Julio Mendoza helps his elderly parents hobble out of the only hospital serving a million people.

The best description of the gulf war's impact on American society came from President Bush himself: "We've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all." For half a generation, the memory of defeat in Vietnam--and the deep national divisions exposed and fed by that defeat--haunted the United States at home and abroad.

The allies' first strike will come from the skies The sign at a U.S. airfield in Saudi Arabia says it all: SEND US IN TO KICK SOME OR SEND US HOME TO GET SOME.

Who is Saddam Hussein? Five months after he invaded Kuwait, changing the course of a turbulent year and perhaps the politics of the Middle East forever, no one really knows for sure.