Eastern Europe

Mutual fund investors: Emerging stock markets have been red hot in 2005. But what to do about it? If you don't have emerging market holdings, you may want to invest if you're ready, willing and able to fasten your seat belt for a wild ride. And, experts say, be sure to be diversified if you decide to dive in. It makes sense to dedicate a portion of your mutual fund holdings to growth investments in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia based on potential rewards, if it is money that you promise never to cry about.

For nearly two decades, the Rev. Denis J. Madden has worked in some of the most difficult places on earth. As Jerusalem director of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, and then as second-in-charge of the agency, the conflict-resolution specialist tiptoed through the minefield of political, religious and ethnic sensitivities that is the modern Middle East. The experience should prove useful to him in his return to Baltimore. Madden, 65, a licensed clinical psychologist and Benedictine priest, is to be ordained bishop today during Mass at the Cathedral of Mary our Queen.

To paraphrase the old Petula Clark hit: Don't sleep in the subway, darling, or the ticket punchers will beat you to a pulp. Kontroll, the first feature by the Hungarian writer-director Nimrod Antal, takes your angriest thoughts about urban public transportation and magnifies them into a grubby and rousingly antisocial fantasia on post-Communist breakdown and bureaucracy. It's an underground movie in the most literal sense. If you didn't know that the Budapest subway system is the second-oldest in the world (after London's)

WASHINGTON - Sixty years and three months after Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt met at Yalta on the Black Sea and laid out spheres of influence for postwar Europe, President Bush managed to raise the ghost of the famous conference. In choosing to visit Latvia before celebrating in Moscow the 60th anniversary of World War II's end in Europe, the president poked his friend President Vladimir V. Putin in the eye at a time when his objective was to shore up relations.

AT THE RECENT fifth annual Qatar conference on democracy and free trade, there was passionate talk and combative dialogue among delegates from two dozen Islamic countries. The winds of democracy are indeed blowing across the region. But to act as though all of this began with the invasion of Iraq not only disparages years of effort by thousands of leaders and activists in the region but also undercuts the indigenous foundations on which real democratic progress must rest. Some want to say that 2005 in the Middle East is like 1989 in Europe.

Women are being infected with HIV at increasing rates in all regions of the world, and their numbers are nearly equal to those of men, according to the United Nations and World Health Organization's annual report on AIDS released yesterday. The increase among women has been especially steep in East Asia - which has experienced a 56 percent climb in the past two years - and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where rates have risen 48 percent. In sub-Saharan Africa, 57 percent of adults living with HIV are women.

With interest in its home-schooling program continuing to grow in Eastern Europe, the Calvert School in North Baltimore has created a Web site for families weighing their options in the wake of the siege of a Russian school that ended with 330 dead. The Calvert School is an internationally known supplier of educational materials for parents who teach their children at home. It has received more than 200 online inquiries from Eastern Europe since Sept. 15, the day classes resumed at School No. 1 in the southern city of Beslan after militants stormed the school.

The thing that bothers national cultural leaders Martin Sullivan and Gary Vikan most about the looting in Iraq is how little art seems to matter, at least to U.S. military commanders. "That's probably the worst thing," said Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum. The pair - along with Richard S. Lanier, director of a New York foundation, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, that deals with relations between the United States and Eastern Europe - resigned Monday from the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property in protest.

Why do they hate us? If "they" means the rest of the world, the short answer is: They don't. Not all of them. Not even most of them. Not yet, anyway. The bewildered, hurt-feelings question that became a cliche after the shock of Sept. 11, 2001, was as misleading as any sweeping generalization. In fact, the United States remains remarkably popular in most of the world -- though the Bush administration, with its go-it-alone approach to world problems, seems to be undermining that popularity.

SERBIA WOULD BE a democracy except for one thing: The voters aren't interested. Here's a country that emerged from the nightmare of the 1990s with a bloodless rebellion, a drive to reform, and a renunciation of war. It was dawn in the Balkans. The storm clouds have been building ever since. Twice this fall, Serb voters have trekked to the polls to try to elect a president - or they were supposed to, anyway. But both times the turnout fell below 50 percent and the election was declared invalid.