HIGH POINT, N.C.- On a sleepy street corner in the small town of High Point, N.C., customers shuffle into the Oak Hollow Thrift Store, sifting through used household items and secondhand clothes in a town best known for its furniture manufacturing. Next door, in a small, windowless office, Mark Kadel talks about a lesser-known commodity traded in the Southeast: human lives.

Inside one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces, now in the American-controlled Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraqi Lt. Gen. Abboud Gambar is preparing for a monumental task: taking control of a war-torn capital that has become one of the most dangerous places in the world.

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C.- U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) is a presidential candidate with "hattitude." That's according to the purple writing on the bright red cap he sported two days after launching his bid for the presidency in a South Carolina hotel filled with men in dark suits. On this breezy morning, Hunter mingled with a very different crowd: some 500 women, mostly 50 and over, in flamboyant purple outfits and outrageous red hats.

When Lt. Gen. David Petraeus faced a Senate Armed Services committee stacked with anti-war legislators on the first day of confirmation hearings, the three-star general was blunt: "The situation in Iraq is dire. The way ahead will be very hard. But hard is not hopeless."

Amid the sweeping beauty of the 1920s Chinese countryside, myriads of Chinese villagers took their last breaths in squalor, victims of the ravages of disease and abject poverty. In The Painted Veil, a sophisticated British couple that travels to China's remote interior to fight cholera suffers from the ravages of a different disease: their own sin. The story that unfolds presents a painful study in the consequences of bitterness and selfishness and offers a glimpse of the redemption found in looking outside oneself.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C.- During the first week of the spring semester at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), teaching assistant Chad Seales asked students in an afternoon class what they knew about Jerry Falwell. After a brief pause, a young woman near the front of the classroom spoke up: "He's the guy that thought the Teletubbies were gay."

As a somber, black-clad Saddam Hussein marched to the gallows in the early morning hours of Dec. 30, Ralph Ayar thought about his father. Ayar, now 55 and living outside Detroit, was only 12 years old when members of Saddam's Baath Party arrested his father in the family's northern Iraqi village of Tel Kief. His crime: friendly connections to local Kurds, an ethnic group despised by the government. "They gave him no trial," Ayar told WORLD. "They led him straight from the jail to the gallows."