INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS: Highlights and Exclusives, Jan. 30 Issue

COVER: The Future of Work (All editions.) Thanks to the post World War
II baby boom, healthier and longer-living seniors are reaching
retirement age in unprecedented numbers all over the developed world.
Rock-bottom birthrates in those same countries mean there are far
fewer young workers to take their place, reports Berlin Correspondent
Stefan Theil. The potential consequences for industrialized economies
are now clear: shrinking work forces, soaring health costs and
collapsing pension systems. While the streamlining effects of
international competition are focusing attention on the need to create
and keep good jobs, those fears are likely to give way to worries
about the growing shortage of young workers. One unavoidable solution:
putting older people back to work, whether they like it or not.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20060122/NYSU002 )

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10967825/site/newsweek/

Predator and Prey. The latest audiotape from Osama bin Laden surfaced
at a time when the CIA and Defense Department have stepped up missile
strikes inside Pakistani tribal regions, where many experts believe
bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are hiding, report
Senior Editor Michael Hirsh, Investigative Correspondent Mark
Hosenball and Special Correspondent Sami Yousafzai. January's Predator
strike in the village of Damadola was the fourth inside Pakistani
borders since May 2005. U.S. officials also express confidence that,
after years of infighting back in Washington, they are finally waging
the war on terror in a coherent way.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10967743/site/newsweek/

Iraq's Oil Bust. Only three years ago, before the United States led
the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration dreamed of liberating
the country on the cheap. Billions in untapped oil reserves were going
to pay for reconstruction and nation-building. But hundreds of
billions of American tax dollars later, Iraq's oil still isn't flowing
at prewar levels, report Baghdad Bureau Chief Scott Johnson and
Special Correspondent Michael Hastings. Across the country, there's a
major attack on oil facilities about once every three days. December
was the third month in a row that Iraqi oil production went down, and
it marked the lowest level of exports since the invasion. At a time
when global supplies are stretched thin, the Iraqi oil bust helps keep
world prices near record highs.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965520/site/newsweek/

China 2.0. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see mainland
China's winning formula of cheap labor, heavy investment and nearly
double- digit GDP growth can't last forever. Without a fresh paradigm,
authorities believe, China could suffer increasingly from
environmental degradation, destabilizing income disparity and social
unrest, reports Beijing Bureau Chief Melinda Liu. China's rural
residents are angry about land seizures, pollution and lagging
wages.roughly one-third of what urban workers make. The question is
whether the country can afford to shift gears now.or whether such
concerns could cost it the competitive advantages that have made
China's economy the most-talked-about in the world today.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965510/site/newsweek/

End of a Rebel Culture? Last Monday night, Tokyo prosecutors staged a
carefully choreographed raid on the headquarters of livedoor, Takafumi
Horie's diversified Internet services company. In an instant, the man
whose precipitous corporate rise had transfixed his compatriots, and
whose audacious attempt to stage Japan's first true hostile takeover
last year changed the country's business culture forever, was yanked
unceremoniously off his perch, reports Tokyo Bureau Chief Christian
Caryl. The resulting huge spike in sell orders, including livedoor,
practically overwhelmed the Tokyo Stock Exchange, forcing it to shut
down early for the first time in its 60-year history. By the time the
market closed on Thursday, livedoor had lost nearly half its value,
and seemingly everybody was wondering whether this corporate starburst
would rob other young Japanese firms of investor favor, sending the
improving Japanese economy into yet another tailspin.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10967918/site/newsweek/

Smoother Surfing. Ajax, the technology behind smooth-scrolling Web
sites such as Google map site, is causing a rethinking of the Web's
relationship to PCs. By eliminating the herky-jerky quality of Web
connections, Ajax changes the psychology of Web surfing, enabling Web
sites to pull together information from different sources and present
them -- seamlessly -- to the surfer, reports Correspondent Daren
Briscoe. While no one thinks this technology is going to make desktop
computing disappear entirely, the advent of Ajax means that desktop
programming will likely be increasingly relegated to specialized tasks
that need brute computing power. That means that some of Microsoft's
key products -- Word, Excel, and so forth -- may be vulnerable to
competition from Ajax versions offered by other companies.

A Real-Life Jurassic Park. Last month, writing in the journal Science,
zoologist Alexi Tikhonov of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Ross
MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History announced that they
had decoded 13 million base pairs of DNA extracted from the jawbone of
a frozen mammoth that died 28,000 years ago on the Siberian steppe.
The scientists had assembled half a wooly-mammoth genome, and claim
they can complete the job in three years, reports Special
Correspondent Mac Margolis. Although many experts scoff at the idea of
using science to "restart evolution" through cloning extinct animals,
the prospect has sent waves of excitement through biotech labs around
the world. Scientists call this rewilding, a strategy that calls for
repopulating the earth with bygone species as the best way to repair
an environment out of kilter and prevent even more animals from dying
out.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10964628/site/newsweek/

WORLD VIEW: Time to Face Reality on Iran. American policy towards Iran
needs a fundamental rethink, writes Newsweek International Editor
Fareed Zakaria. We have a worthy goal: trying to stop Tehran from
building nuclear weapons. We have gone about this in a sensible way,
using allies, multilateral organizations, and international agreements
to pressure Tehran. But the policy simply isn't going to work. The
United States should begin the construction of an alliance to contain
Iran.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10966808/site/newsweek/

THE LAST WORD: Tzipi Livni, Israeli foreign minister. Livni, Israel's
new foreign minister and a trusted colleague of Ariel Sharon, spoke to
Newsweek's Lally Weymouth about Sharon's health crisis and the
upcoming elections. "The message is that Israel is no longer the
Palestinian excuse for not fighting terrorism. We took our forces out
of the Gaza Strip; we dismantled the settlements and now Israel is no
longer the excuse," she said. "And now we are back on the track of the
Roadmap; we are not talking now about more unilateral steps. Our
expectation is that the Palestinians will implement their word."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10967971/site/newsweek/ SOURCE Newsweek