Building castles in the sky

Yansong Ma likes buildings to float. He likes them to bend and swivel and – he hopes, one day – to shoot up from mushroom-like stems and spread out in horizontal disks across the sky. It is not only the Chinese landscape that Ma, a 32-year-old architect from Beijing, wants to transform. It’s the Chinese notion of creativity itself.

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Germany’s Greek Tragedy: Review

In the waning days of the first world war, with two million German soldiers dead and more than twice that many injured, a sailors’ mutiny in the northern port city of Kiel kicked off a revolution that would destroy imperial Germany and set the republic on a visionary, democratic course. As a result, striking miners won fewer working hours, factory hands got higher wages, and social improvements after the war ranged from universal healthcare to financial support for working mothers.

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Seeking the Ancient Soul of Modern China

NANJING, China – It was raining when our convoy got lost on a jam-packed freeway outside of Wuxi, a city engulfed in high rises in the Yangtze River delta. Sitting next to me was Usama Tuqan, a Palestinian-born Londoner navigating his 1961 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud II convertible aggressively through the lanes as he discoursed on Muslim identity, wealth inequality and the arguable virtues of Hugo Chavez.

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Belgrade: A capital city springs to life in Serbia

BELGRADE, Serbia—It’s Saturday night and I’m pressed against a crowd of singing, swaying, Champagne- and cocktail-toting Serbs outside one of the nightclubs on Strahinjica Bana, a street in the hip Dorcol district. A rock concert echoes up the hill, convertibles are thumping past, and the buzz feels more like Berlin, London or Barcelona than a war-torn capital in the Balkans.

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Blazing Through the Orient in a Bentley

WU ZHEN, China—Our ’53 Bentley was weaving in and out of lanes on the crowded Shanghai freeway and pushing 80 mph when Jonathon Lyons, donning black leather driving gloves, reached behind his seat and said in a slightly annoyed British nasal: “Where’re my cigars? Somebody give me a cigar.”

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Anatomy of a Terror Swoop

Until now, Medebach-Oberschledorn was best known for its hiking and biking. A tourist town in a quiet corner of North Rhine-Westphalia, its vacation homes are usually occupied by visitors enjoying its acclaimed mountain scenery. But the picturesque spot achieved less welcome notoriety this week when German authorities arrested three men to avert what German Federal Prosecutor Monika Harms called “serious and massive bombings” on targets that may have included the nearby U.S. Ramstein Air Base and the Frankfurt International Airport.

German police officers escort one of the terror suspects out of the German Federal Court of Justice on Sept. 5

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Dressed For Success

When you’re an artist as versatile and productive as Julian Schnabel, you can wear what you want to an opening – even purple pajamas, as he did for the recent premiere of his 25-year retrospective in San Sebastián, Spain. The New York-born painter, sculptor and filmmaker is having quite a year: in addition to the Basque exhibit, earlier in 2007 he exhibited at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, and he is currently the subject of shows in Milan and Holle, Germany. He won best director at the Cannes Film Festival in May for “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” about a man who suffers a stroke and can communicate only by blinking his left eye, and his film about Lou Reed’s cult-classic album “Berlin” premieres at the Venice Film Festival next month. Later this fall, he will have exhibitions opening in Hong Kong, China and South Korea. But when you see the bushy-bearded, barrel-chested artist shuffling around in torn red canvas shoes, his sunglasses pushed back on his leonine head, it’s hard to imagine success looking more relaxed. “I have other clothes,” he says, scanning the crowd of elegantly attired guests who’ve shown up to see his work. “I just put these on earlier, and I didn’t get to go home. I’ve been a little busy.”

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Unfinished Business

Just when politicians in Europe and America thought they’d finally cleaned up the mess in the Balkans, the whole package is on the verge of unraveling. Serbia’s leaders, backed by Moscow, have categorically rejected a U.N. plan to grant independence to Kosovo, insisting that to forcibly redraw Serbia’s borders would violate its sovereignty. The West claims Serbia forfeited that sovereignty when it crushed the Kosovar insurgency in 1998-99. This argument may appeal to human-rights advocates, but it overlooks a dangerous truth. Pushing too hard on Kosovo would nourish Serbia’s legitimate sense of grievance, undermine moderates there and possibly spark a return to political extremism, even war.

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