We had been trying to help people in Zimbabwe and Cambodia, and then we found ourselves helpless to assist one of our daughter's best friends.
A few suggestions of ways to help the world's needy.
The liberation of women could help solve many of the world's problems, from poverty to child mortality to terrorism.
A list of some of the groups that specialize in supporting women in developing countries.
It was breakfast time, and the food stand in the village in northeastern Thailand was crowded. Maesubin Sisoipha, the middle-aged woman cooking the food, was friendly, her portions large and the price right. For the equivalent of about 5 cents, she offered a huge green mango leaf filled with rice, fish paste and fried beetles. It was a hearty breakfast, if one didn't mind the odd antenna left sticking in one's teeth. One of the half-dozen men and women sitting on a bench eating was a sinewy, bare-chested laborer in his late 30's named Mongkol Latlakorn. It was a hot, lazy day, and so we started chatting idly about the food and, eventually, our families. Mongkol mentioned that his daughter, Darin, was 15, and his voice softened as he spoke of her. She was beautiful and smart, and her father's hopes rested on her.
Becoming Madame Mao By Anchee Min. 337 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $25.
Shanghai The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City. By Stella Dong. Illustrated. 318 pp. New York: William Morrow & Company. $27.50.
Six years ago, GE Capital's Japanese presence consisted pretty much of Taketo Yamakawa, a one-man show in a small office, scrambling to come up with opportunities in a stifled economy. GE Capital, the biggest and most profitable unit of General Electric, one of America's biggest and most profitable corporations, had just bought a Japanese credit card company that it saw as its gateway to Asia -- and had put Mr. Yamakawa in charge. ''I was struggling, trying to identify businesses and companies that GE could do,'' Mr. Yamakawa recalled.
One of the striking paradoxes of Japan is that this is a country with the greatest savers in the industrialized world, and yet everywhere one looks there is debt. Japanese savers are famous for their ability to salt away money for the future, but as a nation, this country has some of the worst accounts in the industrialized world, and its debt trajectory increasingly looks like that of a third world country like Tanzania.
A bit nervous, Haruo Saito faced his doctor. Mr. Saito, 78, short of breath and slow moving since his stroke a few years ago, had just had his blood pressure and electrocardiogram taken, and now he explained that he had been dizzy lately. The doctor, Shuichi Shigetomi, listened politely but seemed a bit stiff and showed no warmth in his bedside manner -- which was not entirely surprising, since he was 30 miles away.
What Miho Kakuno hated worse than the beatings was the bathtub treatment. It took place once or twice a week, even in winter. Miho says that she and her younger brother were placed in the tub, while their stepfather filled it with cold water and covered them with a wooden top, leaving only a couple of inches of air for them to breathe. They could never push off the cover, she said, because there was something heavy on top.
One of the nicest things the United States ever did for Japan, it seems, was to force it, kicking and screaming, to open its market for cellular phones. That was five years ago. At the time, Japan was aghast at the idea of freeing up a market that was a groggy backwater. Japanese citizens were not even allowed to own cellular phones -- just rent them -- and Japanese companies were afraid that they were going to lose business to American rivals like Motorola.
Masayoshi Son seems an unlikely deal maker in the bubbly and free-spirited world of the Internet. Short, boyish-looking and soft-spoken, Mr. Son -- while in Japan -- wears the Japanese business uniform of a white shirt and an immaculately pressed black suit. In public, he sometimes stands stiffly and smiles only slightly. He bows often to emphasize his humility.
Junichiro Miyazu heads Asia's biggest company, the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, and he is about to make it even bigger. A serious, owlish man, Mr. Miyazu intends to use a new law to transform Japan's telecommunications giant into a global player to battle with the likes of AT&T. The new law, which took effect July 1 after a decade of dithering in Japan's Parliament, reshapes N.T.T. and permits it for the first time to compete directly overseas.
Salesmen on the fourth floor of Marubeni Corporation's building were hunched over their desks late one night earlier this year, blearily working on a deal to sell foreign aircraft to Japan. Suddenly, there was a bang and the only trace was a perfect bullet-like hole in a window. What exactly happened may never be known because the police have declined to investigate. But many people involved in the episode believe that they were fired at.
The gun smoke over the high seas may be gone, but there is growing apprehension here that as relations with the North become more varied, they will also become more vexing. As they watched a push-and-shove naval match in the Yellow Sea erupt into a firefight this week, many South Koreans renewed their belief that even as relations thaw across the Korean peninsula, North Korea remains an irascible, secretive, terrorist neighbor.
Ships from North and South Korea circled cautiously today in the Yellow Sea, where the two sides recently skirmished, but American ships were streaming toward the area in a display of force. South Korean Government officials seem to be playing down the effects of the gun battle, in which they sank a North Korean torpedo boat and killed a number of North Koreans on board. At least 20 North Koreans may have died in the firefight, which took place early Tuesday morning after the two sides had been taunting each other for days in disputed waters in the Yellow Sea.