1. Hunting Festivals, Alaska The Yup’ik and Inupiaq peoples wear masks during special ceremonies, the most important being the midwinter hunting festivals. Carved by—or under the supervision of—a shaman, these masks sometimes represent a shaman’s spiritual helpers and can also be hung in homes to ward off harmful spirits. 2. Mardi Gras, New Orleans The legalization of masks in New Orleans dates back to 1827. Though only legal on Mardi Gras wearing masks is a big part of traditional Cajun and Creole events and minimizes class differences....

Bankruptcy, which carries much less stigma than it used to, has become contagious because the business world has gotten so competitive. Older airlines are threatened by low-cost Southwest and upstarts like JetBlue. Old-line steelmakers are threatened by U.S. minimills and by foreign competitors. Debt-laden telecom start-ups are threatened by competitors who’ve shed their debt in bankruptcy proceedings. “When one participant in a commodity business is using bankruptcy to lower his cost structure, the competitors have to respond,” says Mark Feldman, a veteran bankruptcy expert....

Ramirez’s dream may not have the poignancy of the one made so famous by Dr. Martin Luther King, but it has sufficient power to fuel this portion of his political life. Ramirez was a principal in the spirited, though ultimately failed, campaign last year to make Fernando Ferrer New York City’s first Latino mayor, and he is now engaged in the fight to make Carl McCall New York state’s first black governor....

If you’ve paid even slight attention to the science news pages over the past two years, you already know all about SpaceShipOne. It is among the first manned space ships built by a private company to attempt to breach the ethereal boundary of space. It’s made of a unique lightweight carbon composite, gets hoisted 10 miles into the air by carrier plane White Knight before being dropped, and sports a single-stage rocket burning a hybrid propellant of rubber and laughing gas, which thrusts it into the planet’s atmosphere and treats its pilot to a few minutes of weightlessness....

Yes, in a country where civil rights barriers are being shattered every day, bald men are as visible in Congress as fresh young faces in the Bush cabinet. If we learned anything from the election in November (other than the fact that Florida can’t get its act together, of course) it’s that men with hair have tightened their already-firm grip on the reigns of power. How else can you explain that fewer than 30 percent of all top officeholders in America-governors, Senators and Congressmen-are bald?...

Colorado Parks and Wildlife released a statement on Thursday, saying there is now strong evidence to suggest “a pack of gray wolves may now be residing in Colorado.” According to JT Romatzke, CPW’s Northwest Regional Manager, “The sighting marks the first time in recent history CPW has received a report of multiple wolves traveling together.” There is currently an ongoing investigation by CPW to confirm the presence of the wolves....

But that important advantage over enemy forces could be eroded if a key component—infrared identification patches attached to combat fatigues that can be detected at night—were to fall into the wrong hands. NEWSWEEK has learned that 4,800 used combat uniforms bearing “glo-tape” patches were inadvertently sold to 23 U.S. and Canadian clients of an Arizona-based company between August and October of 2006, despite a determination by a Defense Department office in July of that year that the patches had to be removed and destroyed before such uniforms could be put on sale....

Happily or not, the GOP contenders are planning for the extraordinary panderthon, each hoping to become the new champion of Perot’s potent populist message. One audience will be the Perot voters. The Dole camp will mail audiocassettes to United We Stand activists. Lamar Alexander will be holding private sessions with Perotians who’ve contacted him through the Internet. At least one opposing camp claims that Phil Gramm plans to turn his appearance into a rally by packing the 8,500-seat Dallas Convention Center with home-state supporters (a Gramm spokesman scoffed at the charge)....

It’s the Iranians who are hostages now, prisoners of the tired revolutionary rhetoric that most of them long to discard. That includes the new president, Mohammed Khatami, who won a landslide 70 percent of the vote last May on promises to relax the social restrictions that confine Iran’s 60 million citizens–and cover everything from what to wear to what to read. His election raised hopes that the United States and Iran might finally be able to sit down together at peace talks in Paris....

Marco Antonio Reyes Rojas was first featured on local television earlier this summer where he talked about the challenges of contracting monkeypox and needing to isolate. The 30-year-old Mexican-American, who is openly gay, shared photos of the pustules and rash he developed. He had previously been featured in the local press for his political advocacy on behalf of illegal foreign nationals living in the U.S. On social media, he blamed the United States for his suffering with monkeypox....

As Bill Clinton’s case goes to the Senate, the details of those long-ago days are relevant again. For people trying to sort through what happened back then–and what may unfold in the coming season–there is no better guide than a hitherto-obscure 1992 book called ““Grand Inquests: The Historic Impeachments of Justice Samuel Chase and President Andrew Johnson.’’ Its author? William H. Rehnquist, the chief justice of the United States, who will preside over the Senate proceedings....

G7 finance ministers will discuss the specifics of the price cap plan on Friday, Sept. 2, with the goal of unrolling a framework about how it would operate. The concept is a flawless one, in theory. If Washington and its European partners assemble a widespread “buyer’s cartel” and actually enforce it, Moscow would no longer be able to exploit today’s high market prices and could lose out on tens of billions of dollars a year....

Or so a Russian informant–call him Ivan, a pseudonym-alleges in a confidential Pentagon report obtained by NEWSWEEK. Amid the excitement and doubt raised by President Boris Yeltsin’s talk of POWs in Russia, Ivan’s account tantalizingly suggests that at least one American serviceman could still be among the living. His story may not hold up under scrutiny. But since June 10, Ivan has provided U.S. investigators in Moscow with highly detailed accounts of Marken, whom he claims he befriended between 1982 and 1986 while serving as a fellow inmate of PL-350/5....

Self-described “Prozac survivors” now appear on “Donahue” to accuse the drug of turning sane people into murderers and self-mutilators. Scores of unhappy customers are filing lawsuits against Lilly, seeking huge awards for misfortunes they blame on Prozac (box). Some are using the drug as a criminal defense, saying they shouldn’t be held accountable for crimes they committed while taking it. One activist group, an offshoot of the Church of Scientology, is even demanding that the Food and Drug Administration remove Prozac from the market....

Of course, the White House doesn’t want to say that. It would be politically bad to acknowledge the situation that now exists. To avoid that, senior presidential aides and Cabinet secretaries like the Treasury Department’s Janet Yellen have been forced to turn rhetorical cartwheels while trying to explain that it isn’t really what the data tell us it is. Team Biden has masterfully avoided the invocation of the word usually employed after two consecutive quarters of what the economists call “negative growth....

La Union is part of Colombia’s “peace community” movement: a kind of grass-roots rebellion against the civil war itself. Three years ago thousands of displaced peasants from the war-ravaged rural Uraba region began a mass migration back to their abandoned homes and farms. Community leaders banned all weapons and declared their villages to be neutral territory, off-limits to combatants of any sort–whether government troops, Marxist rebels or members of the right-wing paramilitary groups that terrorize the countryside....

“All food and clothing donations, down this path,” she boomed. “Medical volunteers that way. But this is not a blood donation center, I’m sorry if someone told you it was.” A line stretched from the sidewalk in front of Pier 61 right down 23rd Street, blocks and blocks of people carrying stethoscopes and hard hats and sandwiches and dry clothing for the rescue workers. Surgeons and social workers, priests and electricians, architects and specialists in trauma psychology-it has been a nonstop pilgrimage since the moment of the first blast....