NEWSWEEK: INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS: Highlights and Exclusives, March 19, 2007 Issue

COVER: Defying Gravity (All overseas editions). Latin America Regional Editor Joseph Contreras and Special Correspondent Emily Flynn Vencat report that from San Francisco and Seattle to Moscow and Shanghai, prices for prime residential property are surging, even as overall national numbers in some markets continue to be depressed amid worries of global recession and a real- estate bubble. The triumph of the glamour cities turns conventional wisdom on its head -- for quite a while, experts have been predicting that these cities, having been hyped the most, would likely fall the farthest, fastest. The decoupling of national and local real-estate trends, which were once much more closely linked, reflects the lives of the new "superprime" property buyers themselves, roughly 50 percent of whom are reportedly expatriates.
A decade of bull markets has swollen the ranks of the superrich so much that there is now a class of property buyer who can collect pied-a-terre apartments in Paris and Buenos Aires the way the merely wealthy collect cars or wine. While globalization has allowed money, but not necessarily people, to roam the world more freely, these high-earning, globe-trotting cosmocrats are an exception -- they float on a cushion of international capital, largely immune to regional concerns, and are flush with cash. They are also driving housing prices skyward in the choicest world cities.
Time to Decide. The United Nations will soon take up the thorny issue of Kosovo. Should it become independent? The answer is "yes," writes Morton Abramowitz, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Few are paying attention, but the stakes are high: the stability of the region, the reliability of international promises, the credibility of the United Nations," Abramowitz writes. "Without resolution, neither Kosovo nor Serbia will be integrated into the EU -- essential to their ultimate reconciliation as well as their economic growth."
Sarko, the American? Paris Bureau Chief Christopher Dickey reports that as Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy is caught in a tightening three-way race for the presidency of France, his opponents know, and so does he, that pro- Americanism counts among his greatest political liabilities. Not surprisingly, the Interior minister is trimming his electoral sails to suit the political winds. He may still be "Super Sarko" to supporters, but you no longer hear him describing himself as "a man of action" and "a pragmatic politician" who enjoys being called "Sarkozy the American."
A Tale of Two Numbers. The new budget plan introduced by India's ruling Congress Party-led coalition on February 28 aims to close India's income gap, but it is no more likely to succeed than past efforts, writes Gurcharan Das, the former CEO of Proctor & Gamble India and author of "India Unbound." "The problem is best understood by focusing on two numbers hidden in the document," Das writes. "One represents a promise to hire 200,000 new schoolteachers; the other, to grant 100,000 scholarships. These two figures underscore both what is right and wrong with India today, and why its leaders fail to help their neediest constituents." The scholarships, he notes, will help empower parents to choose schools based on merit and give the public schools an incentive to improve. But the real trick is getting the 670,000 public school teachers who currently don't do their jobs to start performing.
China Exports Trouble, Too. The 9 percent plunge in the Chinese stock market late last month was a shot heard round the world, and the hows and whys of this contagion speak volumes to the new and important role China now plays in driving the global economy and shaping trends in world financial markets, writes Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley. "There are three key pieces to this puzzle -- the first being China's disproportionate impact on the global economy," Roach writes. "Second, the Chinese leadership is now signaling that it is determined to slow its economy ... There is a third consideration at work as well -- China's role as a bellwether for emerging market securities."
While Paris Sleeps. Special Correspondent Benjamin Sutherland reports on the ambitious effort of Paris's Metro authority, the RATP, to slice 20 seconds off train headway time and increase rolling speed by automating the entire line -- eliminating drivers and replacing them with computers. Paris is not the first city to install a driverless metro line -- 30 or so cities already have automated lines, and 20 more are under construction. But these lines were built from scratch. What makes the Paris Metro's effort so extraordinary is that it's planning on renovating the line's aged infrastructure -- replacing switches and control networks and so forth -- without so much as a single day of downtime. The $150 million project, to be finished in 2010, is expected to boost passenger capacity by a third, cut operating costs by a third, and pay for itself in 10 years.
Islam Got It First. Special Correspondent Mary Carmichael reports on the discovery that tiling in some medieval Islamic architecture turns out to embody a mathematical pattern that Westerners thought they had discovered only 30 years ago. No one knows what the architects of the complex pattern in the tiles named it a half millennium ago. Today, scientists call it a "quasiperiodic crystal with forbidden symmetry." It's forbidden not for any religious reason, of course, but because at first glance it appears impossible to construct. Medieval Muslims apparently figured out at least some of this math.
WORLD VIEW: Right Ideas, Wrong Time. President Bush has done the right thing in going to Latin America. But it's too little, too late, writes Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria. Until Bush's election in 2000, American foreign policy toward Latin America had been on the right track for two decades. Bush came into office with few ideas about what he wanted to do in the region (except with Mexico, where he proposed an ambitious and intelligent immigration plan). Latin America was largely ignored, especially after September 11, though here as elsewhere the familiar story of incompetence and ideology categorized regional policy. Over the past year, Bush's people and policies -- now steered by Condoleezza Rice -- have changed significantly. The only problem is that now Bush is operating with almost no room to maneuver. And the tragedy here is a familiar one, Zakaria writes.
LAST WORD: Roger Searle, Durham University geophysics professor. Last week, Searle and a group of fellow scientists set sail to an area halfway between the Canary Islands and the Caribbean to investigate a hypothesis that part of the earth's crust is missing. During a telephone interview last week, Searle talked with Special Correspondent Ginanne Brownwell about their efforts to investigate why this area did not develop a normal crust and how it appears to challenge current tectonic-plate theories. "It's not just a big hole -- it's much more than that," Searle says. "Most of the earth's crust is essentially a buildup of volcanoes and volcanic products. The ocean floor has a six-kilometer stack of volcanoes underneath it. What people have found in the last decade in the area we are going to is that there are 10 to 100 kilometers missing?"
Newsweek