Portugal

With European government bond markets already in severe distress, the credit-rating companies keep delivering their equivalent of a blast of pepper spray. Bond yields surged again across Europe on Friday, one day after Fitch Ratings cut Portugal's debt rating to "junk" status. After markets closed, Standard & Poor's dealt yet another blow to Eurozone debt, cutting Belgium's rating to AA from AA+. S&P cited growing doubts that Belgium will be able to reduce its debt load as the continent's economic situation deteriorates.

With European government bond markets already in severe distress, the credit-rating companies keep delivering their equivalent of a blast of pepper spray. Bond yields surged again across Europe on Friday, one day after Fitch Ratings cut Portugal's debt rating to "junk" status. After markets closed, Standard & Poor's dealt yet another blow to Eurozone debt, cutting Belgium's rating to AA from AA+. S&P cited growing doubts that Belgium will be able to reduce its debt load as the continent's economic situation deteriorates.

The FBI agents wore swimsuits — the better to ensure they were unarmed as they delivered $1 million in cash to the hijackers. The criminals wore beatific looks, traveled with young children and were "polite as possible," a passenger on the ill-fated Delta flight recalled at the time. For one man, it was the perfect crime — for nearly 40 years. But on Tuesday, the FBI said it had caught up with the last hijacker, a convicted killer named George Wright who had escaped from prison in 1970 and resurfaced two years later when he joined members of a radical black nationalist group in forcing the jet to fly to Algeria.

With abundant sunshine, shimmering heat and a diurnal shift in line with many coastal viticultural areas , there is no denying that the Temecula Valley is an authentic California winegrowing region. However, setting aside Pierce's disease and the prevailing party atmosphere, challenges remain. Problems with hygiene, brettanomyces and volatile acidity in particular still taint bottlings from less diligent producers. Farming practices too can be relatively lax, compared with the meticulous care taken by Napa and Sonoma growers.

Remember Angola? Let us rephrase the question: Have you heard of the Angolan war for independence, 1961-75, that brutal, pigheaded attempt by the Salazar dictatorship to hang on to Portugal's prize African colony? If you draw a blank, don't worry. Portugal's most admired living writer, who was drafted as a young doctor into the conflict in 1971, compressed his two-year experience into a short, intimate novel that packs the impact of an exploding mortar shell. Read António Lobo Antunes' "The Land at the End of the World," and you, like the protagonist, may never forget the hallucinatory depravity, degradation and corruption of an unjust war that sent so many young men to Africa while stay-at-home elites reaped the profits.

The dismal U.S. jobs report for June got most of the attention on Wall Street, but the greater risk to the global economy may be the spreading debt crisis in Europe. The contagion that has forced Greece, Ireland and Portugal to seek bailouts from the rest of Europe now is threatening Italy as investors demand ever-higher interest rates on Italian government bonds. "If the Italian situation does not stabilize shortly, it can make the Greek, Irish and Portuguese problems seem like a cakewalk," said Marc Chandler, a currency strategist at Brown Bros.

RUSSIA Landmark sites History professor Bob Feldman leads "The Changing Face of Russia," with tour highlights featuring a ballet in St. Petersburg, a folk dance performance in Moscow and dinner at a Russian family's home. It also hits the Kremlin, the Hermitage (Feldman's guests get a special tour of the Gold Rooms) and important cathedrals and palaces. Itinerary: Moscow and St. Petersburg Dates: Sept. 15-26 Price: $5,990, double occupancy (single supplement $1,290)

There were sweaty palms and sore thumbs Thursday as four of the world's best video game players hunched over their controllers in Los Angeles to compete for soccer's Interactive World Cup. All that was missing at the competition at downtown's Mayan Theater were the deafening vuvuzela stadium horns that drown everything out at real soccer games run by FIFA, the International Federation of Association Football. The federation sponsored Thursday's virtual playoffs, which capped six months of preliminary competition among 869,543 players worldwide.

The unthinkable has become the inevitable three times in Europe's debt crisis: First Greece, then Ireland and now Portugal have all appealed to their neighbors to bail them out after insisting they would never do so. Now a growing number of economists are urging European finance officials to take a rare and drastic step: Let one or more of the countries go into default. Euphemistically it's called restructuring their debt, a move that would involve easing the terms of the loans and possibly writing off a portion altogether.

European officials began scrambling to find ways to lend financial aid to Portugal on Thursday after the debt-ridden Iberian nation bowed to market pressure and decided it had no choice but to ask for help. Lisbon's announcement Wednesday evening that it would seek outside assistance came as little surprise to many economists, who had predicted such an eventuality for months. Unsustainably high borrowing costs in the last few weeks increasingly made the prospect of some kind of bailout for Portugal more a question of when rather than if. But the timing of Lisbon's request for assistance has rendered the situation more awkward than expected, because a political crisis has left Portugal with a caretaker government whose authority to agree to a major financial rescue package is questionable.