Telecom Italia is seven times the size of Olivetti, yet Colaninno had the brio to barge in with a hostile v60.4 billion bid, which will be partly financed with the biggest bond issue in history. During the takeover attempt, it looked like TI might find a white knight in the form of Deutsche Telekom, but regulatory and political hurdles got in the way. Italian shareholders weren’t pleased that the German government balked at reducing its 70 percent stake in DT....

So now we know. Chávez, who once spoke of “improving capitalism” and claimed never to have read Marx, for the first time referred to himself as “a communist.” Like Castro in 1961, he announced plans to nationalize key foreign-owned corporations (in electricity, oil refining and telecommunications), denounced external interference and urged his compatriots to join the “revolution.” He did not (as Castro did) abolish elections. But Chávez did declare that he’ll repeal the Constitution’s two-term presidential limit and merge all progovernment parties into a single bloc....

STI testing is not a routine part of an annual checkup and often needs to be requested. This includes routine tests for certain groups—such as sexually active younger females or sexually active men who have sex with men (MSM)—who are at high risk of STIs like HIV or chlamydia. This article provides details about the types of tests available for STI screening, including which are recommended for at-risk groups. It also helps dispel common misconceptions about STI testing so that you can make an informed choice when asking yourself, “Do I need an STI test?...

At times it seems to be largely a battle between reactionary liberalism and reactive conservatism. Such liberalism circles the wagons to defend existing government programs from challenges (e.g., public education against school-choice voucher programs) or even modest revision (e.g., partial privatization of Social Security). Such conservatism contents itself with moderating enrichments of the entitlement menu (e.g., prescription drugs under Medicare), nibbling at the edges of government’s failures (e.g., Bush’s halfhearted school-choice proposal) and sticking with failures even as evidence against them accumulates (e....

Researchers now think such stories will become more and more common. According to a study published late last month in the journal Science, the real culprit behind much of the rise in infectious diseases around the world may be rising temperatures. Drew Harvell, a biologist at Cornell University, and Andy Dobson, an ecologist at Princeton, surveyed new disease outbreaks and correlated them to data on warming trends. Their report catalogs more than 50 outbreaks that coincided with a rise in temperature....

So it was no wonder that the several thousand delegates from 180 countries who gathered last week in Dakar, Senegal, for the World Education Forum received only a bit of good news and lots more bad news. On the positive side, since 1990, the number of children in primary school has increased by 100 million to 700 million. In particular, East Asia, the Pacific states and much of the Caribbean and Latin America had achieved virtually universal primary education....

Not surprisingly, the people who helped create “Confessions” insist they have nothing to apologize for. Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney who turned over the initial confession tapes after a friend at Court TV asked for them, says he’s unconcerned that they’re being used for a profitmaking TV show. “My position is that anything that’s a matter of public record, the media or anybody else is entitled to,” Morgenthau says....

I know it sounds silly to say that a trillion-dollar trust fund is useless. Let me explain why that’s the case. Let’s say that you set up a $1 million trust fund to pay for your retirement. But instead of putting in $1 million of cash or stocks, you give the fund a $1 million I.O.U. from yourself. When your Golden Years arrive, you want the million bucks. To get it, you need to fork over $1 million to redeem the I....

John F. Kennedy had a different view of the office because he had a different view of the presidency and was temperamentally unsuited to orderly chains of command. He wanted his own mandarin, an intellectual who knew something of the world and of government as well, the sort of man who could discipline other men and with whom you didn’t have to finish every damned sentence you started because you spoke the same language....

But Escalante had a secret that sets him apart from his fellow veterans–he joined the Army using a fake green card he bought on the streets of Seattle for $50. Now the 19-year-old, just 4 when his parents illegally entered the United States from Mexico, faces discharge from the Army and deportation from the country for which he went to war. His family may also be deported. “It’s a loyalty issue,” says a senior Army officer familiar with the case....

The heroine is a “journalist,” but we never see her at work. Here, complete, is the tale of her interviewing Lt. William Calley about My Lai: “The interview with him had been brief, and in some ways very painful.” And after 26 of these novels, Steel can’t write a sex scene. “She responded to him as she never had to anyone,” goes a typically soft-focus passage. “Everything was different with him....

Working mothers are nothing new in the corporate world. But Governor Mom will be a test case of how well a female elected official can juggle work and family. Swift has dropped some balls before. As lieutenant governor she used state employees to baby-sit her daughter, took a state helicopter to fly home for Thanksgiving and accepted a cushy $25,000 teaching gig at a local university (money’s tight since her husband gave up his job to watch their daughter)....

Nearly 50 years later, Coleman is still in the thick of the fight. But this time, she’s president of the University of Michigan and writing the rule book on how to foster diversity. Last June, Michigan won its own landmark case when the Supreme Court upheld its affirmative-action policy for admitting students to its law school. However, the court struck down Michigan’s undergrad admissions process, which, unlike the law school, awarded extra points to minorities to give them an edge....

Only 14 months after Intel rolled out its Pentium Pro processor, the company has done it again: introduced, gads, yet another chip. This new one is a Pentium processor souped up to better run “media-rich” programs, like graphics-intense games and video, up to four times faster. New machines with the MMX logo are already in stores. But MMX isn’t just flash: the new chip helps multimedia applications work more smoothly and also boosts overall performance by 10 to 20 percent....

Now we do. Last week in the journal Nature, White’s team announced that three skulls–from a man, a child and an adult of uncertain gender, from Afar in Ethiopia–dated to the same era as African Eve’s, making them the oldest known Homo sapiens fossils. They look entirely modern, though subtle differences earned them the subspecies name idaltu (“elder”). The skulls demolish the notion that humans evolved on several continents, interbreeding with Neanderthals, and support the “only in Africa” theory....

Diplomatically, militarily and morally, Bosnia has been a no-win war. It’s certainly been nothing but a loser for Clinton. Last week’s events forced him into the fray–in a way that showcased his administration’s inconsistency on this issue. On Wednesday, speaking to the Air Force Academy, Clinton said America “should be prepared” to protect U.N. peacekeepers consolidating into more defensible positions, acknowledging that this might mean the “temporary use of our ground forces....