Tradition

Pedigree matters in a country where politics is often a family business. Take a look at the top echelon of Japanese politics: Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is the son of a prime minister. His predecessor was the grandson of a prime minister. So was the man he defeated to win his party's leadership last fall. And when he looks across the aisle in parliament, he sees yet another second-generation politician leading the opposition. They are just the tip of Japan's hereditary iceberg.

Cars, bank notes and TVs were going up in flames one chilly winter morning in the parking lot of Universal Chung Wah Funeral Home in Alhambra. Thirteen white-clad relatives of Dam Lam, 87, formed a circle, each cradling a stack of paper models: a foot-long 747 jetliner, a black-and-gold car sitting in the courtyard of a 2-foot-tall, red-tiled paper mansion. One by one, the items were thrown into the fire licking out of a 4-by-4-foot wheeled container, charred from years of use.

In this idyllic Himalayan country that measures progress by its "gross national happiness" index, the stoplight just didn't cut it. Residents here in the capital complained that Bhutan's one and only automated traffic signal was too impersonal. It got taken down. Now, a white-gloved police officer gracefully directs motorists. A lone man in charge: That's what most Bhutanese want when it comes to how their entire country is run, not merely a single intersection.

Many years ago, when she was still a tiny girl in braids, and not the professional she is today, Eufrosina Cruz heard the story of how her father married off her sister to a stranger at age 12: She wondered if a man might come to claim her too. Being a girl isn't easy in Santa Maria Quiegolani, a poor rural village where Zapotec is the native language and most girls are lucky to complete grade school. Cruz left to eventually become a college-educated accountant.

Fourteen months into a campaign that has the feel of a movement, Sen. Barack Obama has collided with the gritty political traditions of Philadelphia, where ward bosses love their candidates, but also expect them to pay up. The dispute centers on the dispensing of "street money," a long-standing Philadelphia ritual in which candidates deliver cash to the city's Democratic operatives in return for getting out the vote.

Abdullah Safar rests his silver 9-millimeter pistol on a bench at his family's bathhouse and talks about the past. His family's memories live here. In the waiting room, with its peeling lavender paint. In the gray-domed chamber, with its hot black massage slab. At the front gate, where a car bomb killed his 14-year-old son. "If I had lost anything but my son, it would have been easier," Safar says. He closed for nine months after the blast, but he isn't ready to give up the bathhouse.

Commencement at this Santa Ana school was a serious ordeal. Boys had to wear ties. Girls' dresses required shoulder straps at least 2 inches wide. Families brought balloons and flowers and decorated their cars with white shoe polish. Five rehearsals ensured flawless filing in and out of the auditorium by students in red gowns. But if something did go awry, it was hardly the end of the world. After all, they were only leaving middle school.

The last king of Toraja was 93 when he took his final breath in July 2003. Five years later, he's still part of the family, quietly residing in a small room in his former palace, shaded by two red parasols decorated with colored beads and gold fringe. By Torajan tradition, he isn't really dead. He's just sick.

Behold the king of the boat jousters. The man-mountain stands silhouetted against the Mediterranean sun, gliding past spectators lining a canal: Aurelien Evangelisti, a.k.a. The Centurion, a Gallic Goliath of Italian and Maltese descent, a baby-faced, hook-nosed Hercules clad head to toe in nautical white, the heavyweight champion of a curious sporting spectacle that has defined this hard-working port town since the 17th century.

Cesar Augusto Castro Gonzalez found his calling when he went looking for a buddy to play some soccer during recess. Castro was attending middle school in the Mexican coastal city of Veracruz and was told he could find his friend, Omar, at a workshop that taught young people how to play traditional music known as el son jarocho. Castro found Omar and was immediately drawn to the sound of an eight-string rhythmic guitar, the jarana. "The happiness of the jarana really just got me," Castro said.