Joshua Hammer

George W. Bush pledged to restore "honor and dignity" to the White House. Poppy's desk may come back first.The elder Bush was quick to put his personal stamp on the Oval Office.

The newest corner of "liberated" Serbia is a wooden shack at the junction of three dirt roads in the village of Mala Ternovac. Until last week, Serb policemen controlled this ramshackle security post, searching the vehicles of ethnic Albanians and sometimes demanding bribes for safe passage.

Nabil Arair planned his martyrdom carefully. Before dawn last Thursday, the 24-year-old primary-school administrator attended his usual prayers at a mosque near his home in Gaza City. "He acted in a very normal way," his father, Faraj, recalls.

Ever since his unexpected 1998 election victory, Jesse Ventura has been a high-profile advocate of calls to end the nation's two-party system. And this year's White House race, he argues, has highlighted that need still further.

During my stint as Newsweek's bureau chief in Buenos Aires in the mid-1990s, the facade of normality that marked the Carlos Menem era was sometimes shattered by echoes from the recent past.

Ella Nilowa has been an outsider in two societies. Two years ago Nilowa, a Jew from Ukraine, immigrated to Germany with her husband and two daughters. Nilowa's father was a Soviet Army officer, and she had grown up with little knowledge of her Jewish roots. "I begged my grandparents not to speak Yiddish in front of my friends," she says. "I was ashamed of them." That changed after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

It was the perfect photo opportunity. Surrounded by French gendarmes and NATO military commanders, Kosovo's chief administrator, Dr. Bernard Kouchner, strolled jauntily through the wreckage of the Trepca Lead Foundry near the Serb enclave of North Mitrovica.

The four skulls lie in a clearing in the forest, just off the main road through the village of Meja. A Kosovar shepherd spotted them three months ago, and they have remained there, untouched, until the arrival of the United Nations homicide squad on this steamy July afternoon.

"Hotel Aleksandar is open," proclaimed the rusting sign in Cyrillic at the entrance to Budva's most popular beach resort. "Make your tennis club reservations now." A wild-eyed man with long matted hair and a filthy tee-shirt pushed open the front gate, revealing a dirt parking lot filled with Volkswagen Golfs and Zastavas.

The evening of June 11 began like so many others in Wolfen, a run-down town 80 miles south of Berlin in the former East Germany. Frank Miethbauer, 16, donned his bombardier jacket and steel-tipped boots, stepped out of his fifth-floor apartment and made his way down a dimly lit stairwell, past the peeling wallpaper covered with swastikas and anti-immigrant graffiti: "You dirty pig, piss off from our country!" A skinhead with a history of tangling with the police, Miethbauer met up with his...

Milo Djukanovic was not his confident self. As the 38-year-old president of Montenegro strode along Freedom Street in downtown Podgorica, hundreds of policemen formed a tight cordon around him.

= The ten-minute video clip seems irrefutable. Shot by security cameras from the rooftop of a Serb-run auto-repair shop last July, it captures an attack by five armed Albanian men on their Serb neighbor, Mirko Momcilovic, in Gnjilan, Kosovo. "Mirko, come out, we need spark plugs," one Albanian shouts.

Catherine Menschner, 35, has spent the last two weeks staring into the faces of the men she believes turned her into a monster. Between the ages of 12 and 24, says the former East German freestyle-swimming prodigy, she consumed a daily dose of 40 tablets—"vitamins and minerals," her coaches assured her.

In the Spring of 1999, Foday Sankoh, the leader of Sierra Leone's brutal Revolutionary United Front, had at last been brought to the dock. Extradited by the Nigerian government, the cashiered army corporal was locked in a cell in the wretched Pademba Road prison in Freetown, facing a death sentence for high treason.

When Hashem Thaci marched into the Kosovar capital of Pristina in June 1999, he was hailed as a conquering hero. As the supreme commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the rangy, ruggedly handsome guerrilla leader enjoyed the loyalty of a 10,000-man fighting force and the confidence of the U.S. State Department.

The soldiers didn't bother to knock. Shortly after 3 a.m. last Monday, 10 to 15 heavily armed French NATO troops crept up to a house on the outskirts of the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale.

From the time she was a small child, Helga Kahrau always sensed she was different. Born in Nazi Germany at the start of World War II, Kahrau has hazy memories of elegant surroundings, important-looking men in crisp uniforms, a life of privilege and comfort.

Not long ago, Helmut Kohl was voted one of the 10 "greatest Germans" of all time, along with Einstein, Bismarck and Martin Luther. He was a natural choice.

Ever since he stepped down as chairman of Times Mirror 13 years ago, Otis Chandler has largely kept his nose out of the newspaper business. The 72-year-old scion of one of America's great media dynasties spends his days surfing, hiking and tending to his own antique-automobile museum in Oxnard, Calif.

The testimony was riveting. As Aaron McKinney's former girlfriend stepped into a Laramie, Wyo., courtroom last week, the spectators fell silent. McKinney stared expressionless as Kristen Price told the jury how she had encountered the defendant hours after he had left gay student Matthew Shepard battered, bloody and tied to a fence post outside town a year ago. "I heard a scratching at the window," she said. "It was Aaron.

For the better part of two decades, I almost never saw or spoke to my younger brother. Although we had grown up together, played together on the streets of New York and suffered through the trauma of our parents' painful divorce, the rift between us grew so wide by early adulthood that most people who knew me figured that I was an only child.

Ever since the 1989 Velvet Revolution, Prague has been renowned across Europe as a party town. The aroma of marijuana smoke wafts through the parks along the Vlasta River, and the Czech capital's popular rave clubs draw thousands of young revelers, many wired on ecstasy.

The red arrows and white circles taped on the walls of Lulieta Sharani's compound tell a story that still has no ending. At 9 o'clock in the morning of May 10, after days of furious street fighting between Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas and Serb forces, dozens of Serb policemen burst into the family's compound in the old market quarter of Djakovica, Kosovo, and aimed their weapons at the 50 people huddled inside.

When a U.S. Army plane went down in the jungles of southern Colombia, American officials sought to downplay it as a routine anti-narcotics patrol. But this was guerrilla country, a stronghold of the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

When a U.S. Army plane went down in the jungles of southern Colombia, American officials sought to downplay it as a routine anti-narcotics patrol. But this was guerrilla country, a stronghold of the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Journalists covering the wreckage of Kosovo have a general rule about driving into neighboring Macedonia: don't bring your Kosovar staff with you. It's no secret that the pro-Serb Macedonians harbor deep animosity toward Kosovars, fearing that they'll incite a rebellion among Macedonia's own ethnic Albanian minority.

Ivanka and Bogic Milutinovic are living on borrowed time. The Serb couple, both in their 60s, live in Mitrovica, a town 20 miles north of Pristina. During the war, Mitrovica saw some of the worst ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo.

The last enclave of Serbs in southern Kosovo huddles atop a hillside in the town of Orahovac, a few miles north of Prizren. In a medieval warren of gray stone houses and cobblestone streets, 3,000 people waited fearfully over the past weekend to leave for the safety of Serbia.

The newest soldiers of the Kosovo Liberation Army arrived by ferry in the Albanian port of Durres late last week. Hauling backpacks and duffel bags, 150 Kosovar recruits from Germany marched down the gangplank of the ship Adriatica and stood proudly at attention in a stiff sea breeze.

THE TV COMMERCIAL IS AN INSTANT attention grabber. Pierce Brosnan, playing Agent 007, strides down a futuristic corridor toward the inner sanctum of the British secret service.