June 11, 2005

They are the yellowed letters and postcards a teenage girl saved from her camps of long ago, laced with news of giddy crushes and confessions of homesickness. But Sala Garncarz Kirschner's camps were no summertime getaway. Starting in 1940 when she was 16 and until the end of World War II, Mrs. Kirschner was an inmate in seven Nazi labor camps, yet she managed to squirrel away 300 pieces of correspondence and a brief diary.

It took them more than five years and required the star power of Hollywood names like Brad Pitt and leading evangelicals like Pat Robertson. But the potent campaign built by Granola Belt charities, flamboyant rock musicians and movie celebrities, number-crunching economists, conservative and liberal religious groups -- not to mention the Dalai Lama -- finally helped persuade the world's wealthiest nations to forgive the debt of some of the world's poorest. The British and American proposal goes before the industrialized countries meeting this weekend.

Not far from where Hurricane Charley ravaged entire towns along Florida's Gulf Coast last August, Kevin O'Brien is building the fortress of his dreams: a dome-shaped home that stands out on his suburban street like some concrete U.F.O. ''It's not something that is truly accepted yet,'' said Mr. O'Brien, explaining that his 20-by-30-foot home in Venice, about 70 miles south of Tampa, would withstand winds of at least 150 miles per hour. ''But this is the place you and your family know you are going to be safe.''

Even when things are at their worst, Yankees Manager Joe Torre never questions his team's effort. On Friday night at Busch Stadium, he did. Furious after a performance he called the low point of the Yankees' dismal season, Torre tore into his players in a meeting after the game. In comments to members of the news media after a brutal 8-1 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals, Torre did not hold back.

The government abruptly began demolishing shanties and roadside markets here three weeks ago, evicting thousands of people and bulldozing homes or burning them to the ground, in what officials call a cleanup of illegal slums and black-market vendors. But as the campaign, directed at as many as 1.5 million members of Zimbabwe's vast underclass, spreads beyond Harare, it is quickly evolving into a sweeping recasting of society, a forced uprooting of the very poorest city dwellers, who have become President Robert G. Mugabe's most hardened opponents.