Third World

Mya Arulpragasam has a habit of scrunching up her mouth. In photographs, she often pulls her purple- or orange-painted lips into a hard-core rapper's sneer - or a punk's, a bit of old Sid Vicious creeping into the visage of this 30-year-old, London-born, frequently displaced daughter of Sri Lanka. It's not a pretty girl's look. Her voice, at the center of her continent-hopping, avant-garde, beat-happy songs, emerges from that wry face. It's not always easy to take or, for some, to take seriously.

PROSPERITY in the past decade improved the lives of more Americans than not, and of much of the world. Expansion of world trade brought it about.That is why a successful Millennium Round of trade talks beginning this week in Seattle is in the U.S. interest.But expansion was not without cost. Along with unprecedented job creation came painful job losses. Some Third World industrialization degraded the environment.The massive demonstrations at the World Trade Organization conference that caught Seattle authorities by surprise this week reflected the renewed vitality of organized labor.

Like so many of those whose mission is to struggle for peace, Oscar Arias wears a look of disappointment."We began the 20th century, the bloodiest in history, with a war in the Balkans and we are ending it with a war in Balkans," the former president of Costa Rica said at Goucher College yesterday. "We cannot survive in the 21st century with the values of the 20th century."The winner of the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize, Arias began a two-day residency at Goucher -- including a public lecture last night -- meeting a dozen students in an international politics course.

Kofi Annan gets a lot of press for being polite to Washington policymakers. The reality is that the United Nations secretary-general is a far tougher diplomat and significantly more accountable to the developing countries of the Third World, than he gets credit for.Even when Annan is forced to give in to U.S. pressure, he demands - and gets - something in return. In Geneva last week, Annan for the first time cited the U.S. version, rather than the official U.N. language, of what Iraq must do to end the economic sanctions.

WASHINGTON -- Call it the Third World, Developing World or the Global South. Finally, it's getting respect.President Clinton's foreign travel this year -- through Africa in March, to the Summit of the Americas in Chile this week and to the Indian subcontinent this fall -- points to a formidable challenge for American policy-makers as the next century nears.Whereas the East-West conflict preoccupied Washington for four decades up to 1990, attention is now shifting to America's relations with the scores of nations outside North America, Japan and Europe that represent both a vast new economic market and a source of potential crises.

YOU'VE GOT to hand it to the big banks for sheer brass. First they get the courts to stop what everyone knows is the berserk growth of credit unions. A few days later, they announce mergers creating banks large enough to buy the Third World -- if the Third World could prove it had anything worth buying and laid off its work force.I don't think my father ever went into a bank -- or wrote a check. I think he was afraid of banks. A little guy didn't feel right in those days in a vaulted lobby with marble pillars and forbidding men sitting in polished metal cages.

SOME killjoys in my church (and perhaps in yours) are pushing a calendar for Christmastide called "A Simpler Season." Its purpose, according to the accompanying blurb, is "to equip people of faith to challenge consumerism, live justly and celebrate responsibly."Odd, though, that they should call it a "simpler" season. Only a person of manic energy, fanatic diligence and refined subtlety could stay on top of this schedule.Someone, say, like me.Let's see. Starting from Dec. 1 we are enjoined to wear some item of "Third World clothing or jewelry at least once a week."

Hammond High's restrooms not up to Third World'sOn Feb. 18, at 1: 55 p.m., I arrived for a scheduled appointment with a guidance counselor at Hammond High in Howard County. After an extended ride around the Capital Beltway, I attempted to utilize the men's restroom located next to the main office at Hammond High prior to the 2 p.m. appointment.However, I found the restroom too unsanitary to be used by humans or animals. Both urinals were extremely dirty and one had overflowed.The two toilets were even worse.

"In Light of India," by Octavio Paz. Harcourt Brace. 202 pages. $22. Translated from the Spanish by Eliot Weinberger. The secret to Indian food, writes Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, is that it "is not a mixture of flavors, but rather a graduation of opposites." The progressions are somehow both pronounced and subtle, and come not in the succession of courses but all at once - and threaten to overwhelm you with sensation.His observation about food is a metaphor for India, delightfully mundane and succinctly illuminating.

UNITED NATIONS -- As world leaders converge this week to take stock of the global environment five years after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a growing number of experts say that government subsidies to a range of industries not only squander money that could be spent cleaning up the Earth but also actually damage it.Subsidies for energy suppliers, water services, road building, agriculture and fisheries, and other activities often have side...

WASHINGTON - Them Jews aren't going to let President Obama talk to me." - the Rev. Jeremiah Wright "I hate gay people ..." - Tim Hardaway, former NBA star "A Third World country."

NEW YORK - Bill Gates and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced yesterday that they will spend $500 million to stop people around the world from smoking. The World Health Organization estimates that tobacco will kill up to a billion people in the 21st century, most of them in poor and middle-income countries. In an effort to cut that number, Bloomberg's foundation plans to commit $250 million over four years on top of $125 million he announced two years ago. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is allocating $125 million over five years.

Mya Arulpragasam has a habit of scrunching up her mouth. In photographs, she often pulls her purple- or orange-painted lips into a hard-core rapper's sneer - or a punk's, a bit of old Sid Vicious creeping into the visage of this 30-year-old, London-born, frequently displaced daughter of Sri Lanka. It's not a pretty girl's look. Her voice, at the center of her continent-hopping, avant-garde, beat-happy songs, emerges from that wry face. It's not always easy to take or, for some, to take seriously.

Every day, about 25 babies are born in Baltimore. About three of them will be born underweight, leaving them vulnerable to a variety of developmental disabilities and a greatly increased possibility that they will not survive their first month. But thankfully for all 25, whatever birth complications or infections they suffer during their first few days of life likely will receive prompt medical attention. The three underweight babies will have hospital stays longer than the others, but will soon go home with parents who have been educated about the increased health risks their children face.

Patrick J. Buchanan -- former Nixon speechwriter, gadfly presidential candidate, and perpetual TV pundit -- knows how to stir a pot. This is, after all, a man who once described Earth Day as a great opportunity to "worship dirt" and Capitol Hill as "Israeli-occupied territory." Now 67, Buchanan shows no signs of mellowing with age. His latest book, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, tackles the hot-button topic of immigration. With 160,000 copies sold in three weeks, it has already made the New York Times and Publishers Weekly best-seller lists.

When Clare Anderson eventually retires from Scotland's national women's lacrosse team, she might finally get a good night's sleep. The 31-year-old World Cup veteran works 12- to 14-hour days as a funds manager in London. That doesn't give her much time to work out, so she cycles the seven miles to and from work each day, just in case she's too tired to run or get to the gym afterward. "It's quite tough. I don't excel at either my job or my training. You get used to not sleeping much," said the vice captain of the Scottish side competing in the International Federation of Women's Lacrosse Associations quadrennial World Cup this week at the Naval Academy in Annapolis.

Cardinal Francois Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, 74, whose agonizing account of imprisonment by the communists in Vietnam made him an inspirational figure for many Catholics in his homeland, died of cancer yesterday in Rome, where he went into exile more than a decade ago. Although he was made a cardinal only last year, he had appeared on lists of possible successors to Pope John Paul II, particularly by those believing the next pontiff could come from a...

William Langewiesche entered Lower Manhattan's Ground Zero within a week of the terrorist attack last September. Over the next eight months, the Atlantic Monthly staff writer was granted total access to the site and to the tireless workers who recovered bodies and removed 2 million tons of debris. On Thursday, the symbolic end of the recovery effort will be marked when an honor guard places an empty stretcher into an ambulance and a final steel beam is carried away. For Langewiesche, full immersion into the "culture" of Ground Zero yielded a surprising perspective on the American spirit - and on the contrast between those inside and outside the site's perimeter wall.

V.S. Naipaul, whose life and writings have made him one of the world's most cosmopolitan and controversial writers, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature yesterday. The 69- year-old writer was born in Trinidad, where his parents had emigrated from India, and has lived in Britain since leaving home for Oxford University in 1950. A novelist and travel writer, he has written acerbic, no-holds-barred books about Britain and various Third World countries. His best-known works include the novels A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River and Guerrillas; the nonfiction books India: A Wounded Civilization and Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey and a memoir, The Enigma of Arrival.

JERUSALEM - As I restlessly lay awake early Wednesday, with CNN on my TV and dawn breaking over the holy places of Jerusalem, my ear somehow latched onto a statement made by the U.S. transportation secretary, Norman Mineta, about the new precautions that would be put in place at U.S. airports in the wake of Tuesday's unspeakable terrorist attacks: There will be no more curbside check-in, he said. I suddenly imagined a group of terrorists somewhere here in the Middle East, sipping coffee, also watching CNN and laughing hysterically: "Hey boss, did you hear that?