Cyprus

Cyprus and South Africa. Remember those two countries. Cyprus and South Africa.You've heard the news by now. Recently the Third International Mathematics and Science Study released the results of a general math and science test taken three years ago. American students, seniors in elite high schools who had taken advanced courses in physics and calculus, took the test along with students from 20 other countries.To put it kindly, our guys and gals got creamed. Students from every other country taking the test did better than our students, except for two countries.

MANORVILLE, N.Y. - In the late 1950s, when Cristos Alexandrou was a teen-ager, he fled the family farm on the outskirts of Larnaca, a seaport in Cyprus. He worked at a gas station in Larnaca, became a businessman with a small fleet of taxis and rental cars, then moved to New York City in 1972, where he worked in parking garages, drove taxis and tow trucks and spent all his money in nightclubs in Astoria. "Whatever I made, I spent the same day," Alexandrou recalls.Now, at age 56, Alexandrou has rejected the fast life and bright lights and returned to his pastoral roots, a few hundred yards from Exit 69 on the Long Island Expressway.

On an island where every promontory seems to shoulder a romantic ruin from an ancient age, a vast courtyard of Roman columns and crumbling baths sprawls improbably across 16 centuries to a shore where modern beachgoers bob like corks in the buoyant Mediterranean.It's the single most dramatic spot on Cyprus. And most of the island's population has been barred from it for 20 years.Clambering over Cyprus' stones of past millenniums in the Bronze Age city of Salamis is an adventure denied to the Greek Cypriots of the island's southwestern half, just as access to nearly as glorious relics -- the arches of Kourion, the tombs of the Kings in Paphos, the Byzantine-frescoed churches of the Troodos Mountains -- are off-limits to the Turks of the northeastern half.

NICOSIA, Cyprus -- The children on the Countess M hung on the rails of the ferry ship this week watching bright parasails lift from resort beaches, part of a world that did not want them.They are among the latest outcasts in a history of Palestinian statelessness, set adrift this time by an unpredictable, self-proclaimed Arab nationalist. The Palestinians aboard the ship were evicted from Libya by Col. Muammar el Kadafi. They were shoved back on the boat in Syria and refused permission to dock in Cyprus, an island off the Mediterranean coast of Syria.

Nothing could take the U.S. out of the superpower business sooner than the measure to limit U.S. contributions to United Nations peacekeeping that the House International Relations Committee approved Tuesday on a partisan vote of 23 to 18.By charging the cost of U.S. voluntary peacekeeping to the U.N., it would effectively curtail what the U.N. and the U.S. could do.It flows from the plank in the Republican campaign proposals against putting U.S. troops under...

Cyprus: 20 YearsJuly 20, 1994, marked the 25th anniversary of the historic landing on the moon. Quite appropriately The Sun published articles and an editorial commemorating this event.July 20 was also the 20th anniversary of the brutal and savage invasion of the Republic of Cyprus by Turkish armed forces.Unfortunately The Sun did not deem it appropriate to mention this sad anniversary. Could it be that your past naive and unrealistic editorials urging the Congress to lift the arms embargo against Turkey (which action you stated would encourage Turkey to remove its armed forces)

LIMASSOL, Cyprus -- The queen of England got no red carpet when she arrived in Cyprus, but every time the sultan of Brunei pulled up to his hotel here, the staff rolled out the rug and snapped to attention.We are talking important: This guy is said to be worth maybe $50 billion (with a b), the world's richest man. (For two bonus points: Where is Brunei?)The queen, a woman forced to count pennies and charge admission to her palace, suffered a poorer greeting. She was jeered on her arrival in Cyprus, hooted when she got a key to Nicosia, the capital, and her Rolls-Royce was attacked by a crazed doctor in handcuffs.

Few political leaders have had such a clear vision of their nation's place in a changing world as President Turgut Ozal of Turkey. It was no accident that his death of a heart attack Saturday, at age 66, came just after an arduous 12-day tour of five republics in Central Asia with Islamic populations and Soviet pasts. His death leaves a void for Turkey and the free world.Mr. Ozal came to the fore as a politician of the 1980s, the first elected prime minister after a military regime. He championed democracy, secularism and the free market.

Don't toast the reunification of Cyprus yet. But the election Sunday in the Greek-ethnic country, occupying part of the island of the same name, was a step in that direction. It was a ringing mandate for moderation, which is rare these days in little countries with big nationalisms.President George Vassiliou, the candidate of the left, came in first with 44 percent of the vote. That forces him into a run-off on Sunday with Glafcos Clerides, candidate of the right, who won 37 percent, with Mr. Vassiliou the favorite.

NICOSIA, Cyprus -- United Nations forces prevented yet another outbreak of ethnic warfare the other day, this time over a soon-to-be-dead cat.The cat was the pet of a Turkish soldier on one side of a buffer zone separating Turkish Cypriots from Greek Cypriots. It was hit by a jeep, and when the Turk raised his weapon to shoot the injured cat, the Greek Cypriots on the other side brought their weapons to the fore.U.N. soldiers hurried between them, and no shot was fired."A lot of this is pretty petty," said Capt.