Melinda Liu

Shortly before the Iraq war began in March 2003, I didn't believe Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash when she insisted, in an interview, that Saddam Hussein's regime was not developing biological weapons.

Bungling, delay, cover-up. When such missteps follow a major disaster, officials often have to resign. We saw it unfold in the United States after the killer hurricane Katrina.

As Beijing's economy and global influence continue to grow, so does the relationship between China and the United States. When George W. Bush visited China recently, he asked for greater currency reforms, intellectual-property protection and political freedom.

There's hardly a better spawning ground for a bird-flu pandemic. If the virus makes the leap to human-to-human transmission, the odds are strong that it will happen in China.

Nobody in Zhang Rong's village in coastal China knows much about the danger of a bird-flu pandemic. The 37-year-old farmer has enough to worry about. A nearby business park wants to take over her mushroom farm.

In the '90s, the Chongqing Special Steelworks was touted as a modern state-run enterprise, with fat profits and grand plans to expand. In fact, its managers were cooking the books to feign profitability.

Like many Chinese twenty-somethings, Lu Ruchao loves to surf the Internet. He often visits a local chat room to sample the neighborhood buzz. One day, Lu noticed that Netizens were complaining that local police often drove down the main street of Suquian with sirens blaring, disturbing half the city.

High-stakes diplomacy is not unlike "Celebrity Poker." In both there is a big stage, a rapt audience and swift reversals of fortune. And in diplomacy as in poker, the best players can sense when their opponents are bluffing, wavering--or holding a winning hand.

After George W. Bush greets visiting Chinese President Hu Jintao on the White House South Lawn this week, they'll sit down to discuss many things--trade cooperation and energy needs among them.

He's as shameless as ever. The Arab news channel Al Arabiya aired a video clip of Saddam Hussein last week confidently asserting his rights before an Iraqi Special Tribunal judge. "Is this how the law works?" the jailed ex-dictator demanded. "The defendant doesn't see his lawyer until he is in court?

Tipped off to "suspicious activity" around a house in the restive, Sunni-dominated Ghazaliya area of Baghdad, Iraqi soldiers from the army's Second Battalion, First Armored Brigade decided to mount a cordon-and-search operation Wednesday morning.

Wang Qishan may have imagined that he had foreseen every possible pitfall for the 2008 Olympics--but that was before the World Snooker Tournament came to town.

If there was a script, this wasn't in it. China's president, Hu Jintao, convened an emergency session of the Politburo's powerful Standing Committee two weekends ago, just hours after anti-Japanese protests in the capital first turned violent.

For China's top leaders, the unrest seemed like a recurring bad dream. Last Saturday 20,000 furious Chinese protesters shouting "Japanese pigs, come out!" rampaged through Shanghai, tossing stones and tomatoes at the Japanese Consulate, trashing shops and flipping over a Nissan van.

The new port of Gwadar will be unveiled April 6 as the "Dubai of Pakistan," even if it lacks the theme-park glitz of the Gulf's fantasy city. The point, say Chinese officials, who bankrolled 80 percent of the $248 million project, is that this new deepwater cargo port is "strictly commercial." But hawks in Washington and New Delhi believe Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has given Beijing the nod to use Gwadar as a port of call for the Chinese Navy. "Gwadar's a strategic location, just 400...

THE GREENBACK'S FALL IS STOKING FEARS OF A GLOBAL CRISIS. BEHIND THE SLIDE: A WORLD ECONOMY WILDLY OUT OF BALANCE.

Thanks to economic reforms that began in Zhao Ziyang's time, an estimated 140 million rural-born migrants now live and work in Chinese cities, lending energy and cheap labor to China's economic boom.

Not so long ago, you would have been courting death by trying to drive from Colombo to Kilinochchi. Now aid convoys are rolling all the way from the capital to the nerve center of Sri Lanka's rebel army, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

In the wake of the tsunami, Sippiah Paramu Tamilselvan and his colleagues are scrambling to manage a massive relief operation. Soldiers, medics and even psychological-trauma counselors swung into action with impressive efficiency after the quake-triggered waves struck Sri Lanka's northeastern coast.

As a child, Chen Tianqiao's greatest dream was to fulfill his parents' expectations and become a government official. After graduation he joined a state-owned enterprise for four years--but then jumped into private business.

IBM sells off to the Chinese. Can they compete?

Group think: China is a nation governed by committee. That approach may work for fine-tuning the world's hottest economy. But it has also muddled Beijing's strategic vision

At 15 the Dalai Lama--whom followers consider the reincarnated Buddha of compassion--became leader of both the Tibetan government and the Tibetan Buddhist faith.

From the Taj Mahal to the Great Wall, the Asian landscape is littered with monuments to imperial ambition and engineering. In recent decades, cities from Kuala Lumpur to Taipei have competed to construct the world's tallest building.

Corruption scandals are a battleground for jousting among the nation's top leadership

The produce departments of the future may look like nothing on earth, and with good reason. Chinese scientists have been growing tomatoes the size of softballs, cucumbers as long as baseball bats and other outsize fruits and vegetables, using seeds that have been shot into space.

From the Taj Mahal to the Great Wall, the Asian landscape is littered with monuments to imperial ambition and engineering. In recent decades cities from Kuala Lumpur to Taipei have competed to build the world's tallest building.

The Chinese government does not like being embarrassed. In April 2003 Dr. Jiang Yanyong became a Chinese folk hero after disclosing the true extent of Beijing's SARS epidemic and exposing a government cover-up.

When Guang-Zhou resident Ma Yiyong, 57, went to renew his unemployment certificate last month, something extraordinary happened: he did so efficiently and discreetly, with a few keystrokes. "It used to be troublesome in the past," says Ma. "I would have to stand in line several times, and sometimes officials weren't at their desks.

When Guangzhou resident Ma Yiyong, 57, went to renew his unemployment certificate last month, something extraordinary happened: he did so efficiently and discreetly, with a few keystrokes. "It used to be really troublesome in the past," says Ma. "I would have to stand in line several times, and sometimes the government officials weren't at their desks.