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...China sooner or later. The problem is that if it arrives sooner, the world's fastest-growing economy doesn't have a whole lot to fall back on. Its export markets are still weak and its capacity to increase infrastructure spending again, after the massive increases of the past two years, is limited. With the rest of the world still trying to regain its economic footing, the authorities in Beijing are hoping they can shrink a bubble without bursting it entirely. Delicate business, that. And it's not just the Chinese homeowner who should be praying that they can pull...
Mourad Mwafi has been in charge of North Sinai, Egypt's eastern frontier governorate, for only the past 2½ months. But the broad-shouldered official is comfortable in his new role. He knows the turf well - the northern half of Egypt's arid Sinai Peninsula - and is well aware of its challenges. As a military general and former chief of Egyptian military intelligence, he's already well acquainted with his friends and foes in the region. (Watch a video on the tunnel smugglers of the Gaza Strip...
Smuggling along Egypt's border with Hamas-ruled Gaza via underground tunnels has skyrocketed in the past two years, driven by an Israeli blockade on the Strip. Smuggled goods have become the Palestinian territory's only lifeline outside of aid and a valuable source of income to Sinai's marginalized Bedouin. But from a security standpoint, the trade is a round-the-clock law-and-order concern - particularly guarding against the transport of weapons and persons - and one that Mwafi says yields daily intercepts and arrests. "We are always in a situation because we are near Gaza and Israel," says...
Israel occupied the Sinai Peninsula from 1967 to 1982, and despite a cold peace between the two states for the past three decades, intense animosity toward the Jewish state continues to dominate the Egyptian national consciousness. To the authorities of North Sinai, then, the sheer notion that there were Bedouin willing to side with Israel over Egypt constituted nothing short of the most serious treason. "Journalists should depend on official sources," declared Mosaad Arug, a member of the North Sinai local council, in a meeting convened to confront TIME's reporter about the story. "The people...
...tightly to the U.S. and Canada. That's been especially true under Calderón's more conservative National Action Party (PAN), which has ruled Mexico since 2000 and whose voter base resides in the country's more U.S.-friendly north. And then, perhaps most important, Mexico for the past decade has been waging an increasingly horrific war against its drug cartels, whose narcoinsurgency has afforded the government little time and energy to deal with coups in Central America or human-rights violations in Cuba...