Periscope

Is the age of easy money over? After years of cheap credit worldwide, the U.S. Federal Reserve has been raising its short-term rates for two years, and now comes new signs that long-term rates are finally starting to rise, too. The 10-year U.S. Treasury bill broke the 5 percent barrier last Friday, for the first time since 2002. As America goes, so goes the world. The European Central Bank is now tightening credit, too, and the Japan Central Bank looks likely to end a decade-old zero interest rate policy soon.

The first victim could be the U.S. housing market: the price of a 30-year mortgage closed last week at 6.4 percent, up from around 4 percent three years ago. That's likely to dampen a housing boom already showing signs of exhaustion. Soaring house prices made Americans feel rich, and home-equity loans fueled a consumption boom that kept the world economy growing through shocks of all kinds--war, terror, oil. "Rising long-term rates eat into household income, and that will slow growth," says Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute.

The effect on nations from Latin America to Asia that rely on exports to the United States could be huge. With real interest rates in the developed world at or below zero in recent years, investors have been pouring money into emerging markets in search of higher returns. But those risky investments could dry up if Americans and Europeans can find a solid return on safer bonds at home. Morgan Stanley economist Joachim Fels warned last week that the situation could get "nasty" for risky assets of all kinds, from emerging markets to commodities and stocks. Others disagree, and say a gradual return to normal interest rates need not be disruptive. Let's hope the optimists are right.

Steven Glain

After the Iraq invasion, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi became notorious for his well-publicized campaign of gruesome bombings and kidnappings. The most graphic was the videotaped decapitation of U.S. hostage Nicholas Berg, which U.S. officials believed was performed by Zarqawi himself. Since last December, however, few, if any, new messages from Zarqawi have appeared, leading to speculation that he has been sidelined. Reports in March quoted Huthayafa Azzam, the son of one of Osama bin Laden's mentors, saying that a new council of Islamist Iraqi insurgency groups had ordered Zarqawi to give up his public role because his actions were discrediting the movement.

In a video taped last November and released on the Internet last week, bin Laden's deputy, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, appeared to endorse Zarqawi, calling him his "beloved brother." Still, it appears that Zawahiri's message wasn't entirely glowing: "God knows better his hidden intents, which I hope are [even] better than his public ones." Two U.S. counterterrorism officials, who asked not to be identified discussing intelligence issues, say analysts believe Zarqawi still commands foreign jihadist fighters in Iraq. But the officials think the Jordanian-born Zarqawi dropped out of sight because his activities were provoking resistance from fellow Sunnis in western Iran, and because he concluded it was better for the insurgency to be fronted by native Iraqis.

Mark Hosenball

Since the days of Al Capone and the Chicago mob, government investigators have "followed the money" to nail the bosses of La Cosa Nostra. But in Sicily last week, near the legendary town of Corleone, Italian cops captured 73-year-old Bernardo (The Tractor) Provenzano, the boss of bosses, by tracking a parcel of freshly laundered socks and underwear.

The arrest, announced the day after hard-fought Italian elections that ended the reign of billionaire Silvio Berlusconi, was hailed as a triumph of law and order. But fears were raised immediately that succession battles would bring on a new era of gangland warfare, and scandals that could plague Italy's political elite for years to come.

Among the possible successors to Provenzano is Matteo Messina Denaro, who is 30 years younger and has managed to avoid capture himself for the past 13 years. Denaro's name literally means "money," and he's known for his expensive tastes, including the gold Rolex he wears. "He's arrogant, violent, and he only cares about his own business interests," says Francesco La Licata, mafia expert for the Italian daily La Stampa. "He doesn't know how to sacrifice his high life for the sake of the organization." If he becomes the new boss of bosses, he will have to impose his will. "If you don't have charisma," says La Licata, "you have to kill."

Jacopo Barigazzi

Ichiro Ozawa, the 63-year-old head of Japan's leading opposition party, seems to have everything going for him. Elected as interim leader on April 7, he is enjoying unprecedented popularity. And because he is a known quantity in national politics--he was a loyal member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party from 1969 until 1993--many think he could pose a threat to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

The question is whether Ozawa's success will mean anything for his party, the Democratic Party of Japan. Its previous leadership left its reputation in disarray by allowing a rank-and-file member to level corruption charges--which turned out to be false--at one of the LDP's senior members. Then there's Japan's historical inability to back the opposition. Since the cold war, a variety of small parties have risen fast because of voter discontent with the LDP's handling of issues such as the economy. But they've fallen even faster. The reason: Japanese voters seem to prefer the devil they know. As a result, the smartest politicians--Koizumi, for one--have managed to cast themselves as the opposition within the LDP, enabling voters to express their rebellion without risking dramatic change. Given that recent polls show that 70 percent of Japanese doubt the opposition could take power, perhaps Ozawa would have been better off taking that route instead.

Christian Caryl and Akiko Kashiwagi

Meet the point-and-click police. A growing number of U.S. cops are working a new beat, turning to MySpace--an online network of individuals linked through personalized home pages--to collect clues and crack offline cases. Communication between cops and the three-year-old company has surged this year, with MySpace now contributing to 150 investigations a month, according to Jason Feffer, its vice president of operations. A searchable, public scrapbook of images, affiliations and written exchanges, MySpace offers detectives raw data on 70 million potential suspects. MySpace has good reason to cooperate with the cops. A year ago, the company launched a corporate campaign to counter the site's growing reputation as a hunting ground for sexual predators--an effort that culminated last week in the hiring of Microsoft's Hemanshu Nigam, a former federal prosecutor, to oversee security. As more cops log on, privacy advocates warn that investigative tactics will only get more aggressive. Detective Rich Wistocki of Naperville, Ill., has two profiles on MySpace: one under his real name (headline: predator catcher) and one under a pseudonym. "There's not a day that goes by that I'm not on there," he says.

Andrew Romano

If it's true that character is determined not by what happens to you but by how you deal with what happens to you, then David Nicholls is a profile in courage. Three years ago, Nicholls, executive chef at London's Mandarin Oriental Hotel, received news that his 19-year-old son had been paralyzed in a swimming accident in Sydney. Nicholls was determined to fight back, founding the Nicholls Spinal Injury Foundation. As a fund-raising tool, he asked his world-class chef friends to contribute their favorite recipes to a cookbook, "Off Duty: The World's Greatest Chefs Cook at Home." The book is a colorful, delightfully idiosyncratic collection of brisk interviews with 48 chefs and some 144 recipes whose degree of difficulty ranges wildly, from the dead easy to the virtuoso, like Charlie Trotter's Buttermilk-poached Pheasant Breasts with Blue Hubbard Squash-strewn Quinoa. The book's generous spirit is, not surprisingly, best captured in Nicholls's own offering, My Anything Salad, which shows us that great chefs, just like the rest of us, "raid the fridge and make a salad using anything that's available."

Dorothy Kalins

Spiking a volleyball isn't easy when you're wearing a higab . True, most Muslim women go their whole lives without ever facing this dilemma. But for the 25,000 Somali girls stuck in three major refugee camps in northeastern Kenya, the traditional garb ruined the sole recreational activity in the U.N.-funded camps. Standard volleyball uniforms (shorts, skimpy T shirt) were too racy, and playing with the higab, which wraps around the head and drapes over the body, hurt peripheral vision and slowed down players. So the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reached out to global sports-apparel giant Nike to design a volleyball-friendly higab. The result: a garment made from a lightweight terry cloth that keeps players' heads, arms, legs and tops covered without the excess material. There's a cord to shorten dress length during play; cuffs were added to the sleeves so they wouldn't fall down the arms.

The first shipment was delivered earlier this year, and so far the uniforms have been a hit, say United Nations officials. "Many of these refugees have seen things that you hardly want to talk about," says Claude Marshall, a consultant at the UNHCR in Geneva. "If they're into some kind of organized sport, even if it's for two hours a day, at least you've given them a breath of normality."

Silvia Spring

The script is pure Hollywood schlock. A witness under FBI protection is flying from Hawaii to Los Angeles. A mobster wants him dead before he can testify. But how can the bad guy get to him? A selection from the script: "Hundreds of oxygen masks DEPLOY, dangling over the seats--but it's not just oxygen masks. IT'S SNAKES."

Forget Cruise. Forget Hanks. The summer's most buzzed-about movie is a grade-C thriller about passengers besieged by a plane full of snakes, and it's called ... wait for it ... "Snakes on a Plane." Thanks to its ingeniously stupid title, the film, starring Samuel L. Jackson, is already a cult classic four months before it hits theaters. On the Web, fans have made their own "Snakes on a Plane" (or "SoaP") T shirts, cut their own trailers, even filmed their own raps. The ringleader: Brian Finkelstein, a Georgetown law student who hosts an all-"SoaP," all-the-time blog called ... wait for it ... Snakes on a Blog. "My goal was to get invited to the première, but it grew," says Finkelstein. "I never expected to be talking to a reporter about this."

New Line, the studio releasing the film, is paying close attention to the "SoaP" buzz, going so far as to insert a line of dialogue that fans scripted for Jackson. "I don't think you can print it," says director David Ellis. "We didn't use the exact line, but it's really close." Suffice it to say the line includes Jackson's preferred 12-letter swear word. Will Finkelstein's red-carpet dream come true? "Absolutely," says Ellis. "We're gonna fly him out here." Or maybe he should drive.

Devin Gordon