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INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS: HIGHLIGHTS AND EXCLUSIVES, APRIL 27, 2009 ISSUE

COVER: The Anti-Obama (Asia edition). Shortly after Barack Obama's election last fall, a banner appeared in Lucknow, India, reading: OBAMA IS PRESIDENT OF THE U.S. NOW IT IS TIME FOR MAYAWATI TO BE PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA. Mayawati is Uttar Pradesh's chief minister, but now she is gunning for a bigger job.  With national elections beginning this month, her supporters are trying to position her as India's answer to America's youthful black president, reports Special Correspondent Jeremy Kahn. Like America's president, Mayawati is young-just 53 in a country where most political leaders are in their 70s. She is also an outsider who comes from a long-oppressed segment of society: the Dalits, the politically correct term for India's Untouchable caste.  So Mayawati is both a bigger underdog and a potentially bigger threat to the established order than Obama was.  But unlike Obama, who promised a new politics that would transcend not only race but traditional ideology and corrupt Washington ways, Mayawati has built her power on demagogic class warfare.  She would likely be a highly divisive national leader-an anti-Obama-and not only domestically.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/194603

COVER: Blocking the Sun (Europe edition).  After the sudden explosion of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, scientists began to wonder if the volcano hadn't revealed a possible weapon against climate change.  With the eruption, the haze lowered earth's temperature by half the amount 100 years of human industry had raised it. It takes only a back-of-the-envelope calculation to see that it would be possible to do artificially what the mountain did naturally.  A small group of scientists began looking into how this kind of geo-engineering could be done most efficiently and with the fewest side effects.  Now, however, many scientists are starting to take geo-engineering more seriously, if only out of desperation, reports Assistant Managing Editor Fred Guterl. As more and more climate specialists come to believe that even current levels of carbon pollution are warming the globe more rapidly than previously thought, the case for developing an emergency earth-rescue plan is getting difficult to resist.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/194610

COVER: Brazil: The Crafty Superpower (Latin America edition). Special Correspondent Mac Margolis writes that Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is on a roll, recently spending time with Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, and drew effusive praise ("My man!") from Barack Obama at the G20 summit in London.  The former machine-tool worker is now the toast of bankers and boardrooms.  Not so long ago, such scenes would have been improbable. But after decades of false steps, Brazil has become a solid free-market democracy and is asserting itself like never before. Brazil has emerged as a unique regional powerhouse. Relying on the cover of America's security umbrella, Brazil has been free to leverage its vast economic size advantage within South America to befriend, sway or co-opt neighbors. Lula presides over a crafty superpower unlike any other emerging giant. And Brazil has asserted its international ambitions without rattling a saber.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/194604

South Africa Will Survive Zuma. The reasons to fear a Jacob Zuma presidency in South Africa are overblown, write Sasha Polakow-Suransky, an associate editor at Foreign Affairs, and Eusebius McKaiser, a political and social analyst at the Center for the Study of Democracy in Johannesburg.  Zuma surrounds himself with followers who vow to kill on his behalf, threatens to diminish the role of the constitutional court, and has been incapable of articulating a clear vision.  However, South Africa's future depends not only on its leader but on the constraints he faces and on the strength of its political culture and institutions. Zuma can't rule as he wishes: he will likely have to break his populist promises to the poor, for example, because the global financial crisis has squeezed the economy, and the government can't finance more debt.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/194606

Toppling Kim Jong Il.  Bargaining with Pyongyang is pointless and regime change in Korea is the only option, argues Andrei Lankov, associate professor of North Korean history at Kookmin University in Seoul.  Kim Jong Il and his circle know that exposing their subjects to foreign influence would be fatal to the regime. So they're likely to continue clamping down and provoking the West.  The best way to speed things up is for Washington and its allies to push for active engagement with the North in the form of development aid, scholarships for North Korean students and support for all sorts of activities that bring the world to North Korea or take North Koreans outside their cocoon. Such exchanges are often condemned as a way of appeasing dictators, but the experience of East Europe showed that an influx of uncensored information from the outside is deadly for a communist dictatorship.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/194602

A Coup for the Kremlin.  Reporters Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova write that Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili's plan to align himself with the West-which included joining NATO and weeding out corruption-is coming apart. In early April thousands of demonstrators gathered in Tbilisi demanding his resignation. Saakashvili's popularity ratings have slipped to 30 percent, and poor relations with Russia have made the economic downturn particularly painful. Russia completely stopped cross-border trade after the war, and foreign investment has also plummeted. Saakashvili will have to find a way to defuse the political tensions. After all, Georgians don't want a leader who sacrifices his country's prosperity and security for the sake of infatuation with NATO and the West. They want a pragmatist who can cut deals when they're needed, and reopen trade with Russia.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/194608

The Fog of Cyberwar.  NATO is only just beginning to recognize that the Internet has become a new battleground, and that it requires a military strategy, writes Special Correspondent Evgeny Morozov. As economic life relies more and more on the Internet, the potential for small bands of hackers to launch devastating attacks on the world economy is growing. To counter such threats, a group of NATO members last year established a kind of internal cybersecurity think tank, based in Estonia. Experts are wrestling with such questions as: What qualifies as a cyber "attack" on a NATO member? And how can the alliance defend itself in cyberspace? Already the debate is producing strikingly different answers. The trick is figuring out when an attack is hacker mischief and when it's a military matter.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/194605

WORLD VIEW: It Might as Well Be Spring.  Senior Editor Daniel Gross elaborates on "green shoots," the term the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke, coined in mid-March on "60 Minutes" in reference to economic recovery.  Since then, the phrase "green shoots" is being repeated as a soothing mantra by analysts and journalists desperate for any sign of hope.  Gross explains that the optimism exists as of late because banking firms are starting to make profits.  Yet he cautions that for now, every piece of good news-every green shoot-bears caveats.  "Where you stand on the economy may depend in large measure on where you sit."  New Yorkers might be inclined to accentuate the negative, whereas Chicago's diversified economy is less reliant on finance and holding up better.  Yet "for every green shoot of hope... there will be some other growth that makes you realize there are businesses pushing up daisies."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/194648

THE LAST WORD: Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh.  Saleh sits down with Jerusalem Bureau Chief Kevin Peraino and discusses the stability of his regime and Al Qaeda as a growing threat.  The unrest in Yemen stems from Al Qaeda rather than from clashes between his party, separatist rebels or Houthi tribesmen.  "Al Qaeda is damaging our economy...our tourism and business... They're targeting our cultural heritage."  He refutes General David Petraeus' warning that Yemen was becoming a safe haven for Al Qaeda militants.  Saleh points out that his government is taking all steps necessary to arrest and try all who are involved, but according to its own policy and not that of the United States or any other country.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/194611

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