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With its lemon-scented air, hypnotically repetitive New Age music and bamboo-motif massage rooms offering "essential oil'' treatments, the Natural Beauty spa feels much like thousands of other such places that have sprung up across China as the days of Marxist class struggle grow distant and a burgeoning nouveau riche marches forward — or at least rides along in a luxury sedan.

"If Kim Jong Il had been in complete control then, he might have been a little more daring," said Han Sung-joo, who was South Korea's foreign minister at the time. "Now, we don't have a Kim Il Sung to moderate."

This is the end of the road for the toxic detritus of the computer age. In towns such as this one on China's southeastern coast, vast quantities of obsolete electronics shipped in from the United States, Europe and Japan are piled in mountains of waste.

It looked like nothing more than a working fishing boat, and that's what it was before the crew pulled out the freezer containers and the air compressor, inserting an oil tank in their place.

As caravans continue to truck gasoline into Iraq from Kuwait to relieve critical shortages, a flotilla of tankers is daily carrying hundreds of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel in the opposite direction - out of Iraq, using the same smuggling routes that long enriched the regime of Saddam Hussain, according to state oil industry officials and workers involved in the stealth trade.

Political rhetoric aside, hammering out a common ground will be a fraught task

But it’s Germany’s economic regime that faces an acute test of crisis resolution

Obama's $75b plan to lower mortgage payments has failed to provide permanent relief