Over the past quarter- century, the Indian-born novelist Salman Rushdie has created a scintillating universe where the past blends with the present, where narrators are suspect and where it is difficult to tell history apart from myth. Angels and devils become confused ideas, and cultures collide, as individuals travel across continents, making the pristine impure and the hybrid feel genuine. With The Enchantress of Florence, his 11th work of fiction, this enchanter from Bombay (he won’t refer to the city of his birth by its parochial name, Mumbai) is in full form, once again dealing with hoary history as fable, without revealing where facts end and imagination begins.

In early March in London, Paul Smith addressed a jam-packed business forum of would-be investors in Vietnam. “You would be surprised how much Vietnam touches your own life everyday,” said the director of recruitment and outsourcing consultancy, Harvey Nash. “Vietnam is the world’s second largest exporter of rice and coffee, the biggest exporter of pepper. Even the gigantic news screen in New York that broadcast live data and interviews during the United States’ presidential primaries have links to this Southeast Asian nation,” Mr. Smith told participants at the forum, which coincided with a visit by Vietnam’s prime minister, Nguyen Tan Dung. “I doubt if McCain, Giuliani or Romney were aware that the software delivering the service to the world for MSNBC was written in Vietnam,” said Mr. Smith. But just as Vietnam reaches out to the world, the world is also coming to Vietnam. Recently the country has been forced to learn some bitter lessons from opening up, and failure to handle mounting economic challenges could bust its economy.

What a difference a year makes. Early last year, a spate of stories appeared in the international press proclaiming Vietnam as “the New Asian Miracle” and “the Next Asian Tiger.” The country joined the World Trade Organization in January 2007, prompting a surge in annual foreign direct investment approvals to more than $20 billion. The Ho Chi Minh City Stock market caught fire, with the index reaching a peak of 1,170 in March, up 140% year on year. Rising global commodity prices drove export revenue to nearly $50 billion, an increase of more than 20% over 2006. For the year as a whole, the economy grew by an impressive 8.5%, the fastest pace since 1996.

At a hilltop observatory overlooking the intersection of the Han and Imjin rivers, where the invisible middle point of the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, runs along the water and out to sea, the young South Korean tourist looked up from a high-powered telescope after her first ever sighting of communist North Korea and asked, “Have you got a Band-Aid?”

the Beijing Number One Intermediate People’s Court convicted Hu Jia, a 34-year-old Chinese commentator and activist, of the crime of “inciting subversion of state power” through publication of five articles and two interviews. It sentenced him to three and a half years in prison and subsequent deprivation of his political rights, including that of free expression, for another year. Although Mr. Hu’s case has remained virtually unknown to the Chinese people, by the time of sentencing it had become famous worldwide. When on April 17 foreign journalists asked Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu about it, she gave the standard MOFA response to inquiries about political prosecutions: “The case was handled in accordance with Chinese law. China is a country under the rule of law, it abides by the law. No person is above the law and no one has a right to interfere with it.”

On April 24 the White House announced that aerial photographs of a Syrian nuclear site prove North Korean involvement in its construction, thereby raising significant doubts about Pyongyang’s intention to disclose its nuclear activities. Equally persuasive evidence of bad faith could have been found by flipping through a North Korean magazine or school textbook, but the United States Central Intelligence Agency isn’t interested in that sort of thing. The general assumption in Washington is that Kim Jong Il is too clever to believe what he tells his people. Indeed, the U.S. State Department seems to negotiate under the premise that he believes the opposite. The louder the North Korean propaganda machine calls for a “blood reckoning” with the Yankee enemy, the more credence Washington gives rumors that Mr. Kim wants a normalization of relations with America.

For the first time in 18 years, the people of Burma will go to the polls this month, in a referendum on a new constitution. But this ballot is very different from the elections in 1990 which saw Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, win 82% of the parliamentary seats.

The tiny island of Guam is at the epicenter of the United States’ plans to realign its military forces in East Asia and the Pacific. This U.S. territory—strategically located in the Western Pacific, a few hours flight time of Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia—is about to undergo a transformation unlike any in the region’s recent memory. A military investment that has been projected at around $14 billion will be pumped into the island over a few short years, turbocharging its economy and swelling its population by almost a third, to 225,000, in only five years.

China’s leadership is faced with the political need to provide its citizens with the fruits of economic development. Yet they must do so at a time when a carbon-fearing world is focusing on how the waste of China’s growth pollutes far beyond its borders. Nevermind that it is the United States that carries the largest natural debt to the rest of the world for its cumulative carbon emissions since industrialization began. It is the rise of China and its rapid urbanization and increased per capita consumption that has been singled out as the greatest threat pushing humanity toward destruction.

Global economic centers yielded some interesting results. The survey confirmed a familiar fact: A significant number of Asian cities are now major global cities, i.e., they possess capabilities for servicing the global operations of firms and markets, for organizing enormous geographic dispersal and mobility, and for maintaining centralized control over that dispersal. Other findings were less obvious. For example, the yawning gap between Asia’s older established global centers such as Tokyo, Hong Kong and Seoul, and the global-city newbies such as Shanghai, Mumbai and even glistening Dubai.