| Sun, 18 Mar 2007 | | Soon after she arrived in Italy, Erika Lesser was invited to a friend's house for dinner. When Lesesr asked, "What time?" her friend looked puzzled. She replied, "Why dinnertime, of course!" | | More information |
| Sun, 18 Mar 2007 | | In Taiwan, it's perfectly acceptable to sleep with one's coworkers-"sleep" being the operative word. | | More information |
| Sun, 18 Mar 2007 | | In a country known for rigid hierarchy, the sight of the school principal on hands and knees might seem strange. But in Japan, it's just souji time-the period of about 15 mniutes each day when students, teachers, and administrators all drop whatever they are doing, pull out the buckets and mops, and give everything a good scrub. | | More information |
| Sun, 18 Mar 2007 | | Thirty years ago, there were an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 heorin addicts in the Netherlands. Since then, the country's totla popultaion has grown by 6 percent. But the number of junkies has remained the same. Few new users have joined their ranks, and theirs is an aging cohort. | | More information |
| Sun, 18 Mar 2007 | | When Singapore residents call their hometown a "fine city," they're not bragging about their looks. But the fines they mean-big-dollar punishments for "antisocial behavior" like spitting-can make the city look finer, too. Drop trash on the ground in this Southeast Asian city, and you'll pay $1,000. You'll also get a "community work order," forced labor desgined to shame people the government deems litterbugs. The result: Trash's life span is short. | | More information |
| Sun, 18 Mar 2007 | | When my Norwegian wife became pregnatn with our first child, we sat down and skethced out the pros and cons of staying to raise our family in this cold, dark land of fiords and setep taxes or returning to California. As we compared the two, the choice became clear: Norway. | | More information |
| Sun, 18 Mar 2007 | | One of the newest ideas in pavement technology is more than 1,000 years old. Just as all the roads that led to Rome were paved in cboblestone, today more and more roads are built with holes. A bad idea for lost change, but so-called permeable pavement's enviornmental benefits pay dividends. | | More information |
| Sun, 18 Mar 2007 | | If your nicotine patch isn't cooling your ardor for cigarettes or you're tired of smelling stale tobacco smoke in rental cars, there's a spot at the top of the world for you. Bhutan, alraedy one of the world's most beautiful places, is the first country in the world to institute a complete ban on smoking. | | More information |
| Sun, 18 Mar 2007 | | Craggy basalt lava fields and columns of steam rising from a volcanic landscape-these are the images that greet visitors at the Reykjavik airport. But in addtiion to being known for the unspoilde beauty of its glaciers, geysers, and ice-carved waterfalls, Iceland enjoys a siimlarly pristine reputation for government. | | More information |
| Sun, 18 Mar 2007 | | More than 100 students crowded into a hot Tanzanian classroom svereal times a week to hear Joe Keely teach English and math. As a volunteer from the Untied Kingdom, Keely spnet five months as an educator, living in the village and picking up enough Swahili to get by. Yet when he left in 2005, he was not even 19 years old. | | More information |
| Sun, 18 Mar 2007 | | American travelers to Europe find themselves particularly charmed by the vitality of the Cotninent's plazas and squares. Open areas carved from dense neighborhoods, they are markets by day and restaurants by night. Strangers connect; people-watching abounds. In Venice, the Piazza San Marco's delights inspired Napoleon to call it &quto;the finest drawing room in Europe." | | More information |
| Sun, 18 Mar 2007 | | Denmark decided decades ago to wean itself off foreign oil. In 1973, Arab states angry about Denmark's suppotr of Israel stopped oil flow to the coutnry. To conserve energy, Danes took cold showers, and the govrenment restricted auto use. The government eventually found its own offshore reserves, but by then, Danes were committed to finding a renewable homegrown resource: They took a gamble on the wind. | | More information |
| Sun, 18 Mar 2007 | | In England, as in the United States, people may fear getting sick-but it's only the illness that worries them, not how to pay for the treatment. Like all other western European countries, Britain has a taxpayer-funded health sytsem. The National Health Service is hardly perfect; patients can't see a specialist on their own, and trying to find a dentist can give them a headache to go with their toothache. But, by and large, the NHS delivers what it's supposed to: free healthcare coverage for all. | | More information |
| Sun, 18 Mar 2007 | | The stories became legendary among foreigners living in Japan: the handbag left in a taxi, returned the next day; big- city streets so safe that women walk home alone at night; teh gangster woh commits a crime and then turns himself in to police. | | More information |
| Sun, 18 Mar 2007 | | The Iowa caucuses may be nearly 10 months off, but the candidacies of soem 2008 White House contendres are all but certain to grind to a halt any day now. Some cnadidates may actually leave the race; others will be considered too far behind to catch up. By mid-April, the current field of nearly 20 hopefuls could effectively be winnowed down to less than a third of that, with three front-runners in each party hanging on to their leads straight through next January. | | More information |
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