The three central tenets of the Internet are peer-to-peer, distributed control and free speech. If you ask me, the broadband companies are in favor of none of these. Since all of the broadband companies are also involved in the "entertainment" business, peer-to-peer distribution of entertainment, news, movie, books and music has them running scared. After all, if end-users of broadband also can be service providers, the power of the entertainment establishment is lessened.

You can tell that something unusual is going on these days by the way we draw our graphs. In normal times, we would use a linear scale to plot progress. The height of our graph would be proportional to the measure of progress. But we live at a remarkable moment in history, when progress is so rapid that we plot it on a logarithmic scale.

A few years ago, Washington media consultant John Rendon was regaling an audience of cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy with one of his favorite war stories.

When victorious U.S. troops rolled into Kuwait City, he noted, they were greeted by hundreds of Kuwaitis waving American flags. The scene, flashed around the world again and again on CNN, left little doubt that the U.S. Marines were welcome in Kuwait.

"Did you ever stop to wonder," he asked, "how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American, and for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?"

A closer examination of Plan Colombia reveals its true objective to be the preservation of the political, social and economic status quo through the implementation of a "carrot and stick" strategy. As is evident in the initial installment of overseas aid--the $1.3 billion U.S. aid package--the Plan intends to utilize a huge stick while offering a tiny carrot. The stick, approximately 80 percent of the U.S. aid, is for the Colombian military and police. The remainder constitutes the carrot: eight percent is going to alternative development; six percent to human rights programs; four percent to the displaced; two percent to judicial reform; and less than one percent to support the ongoing peace process.

Plan Colombia is based on a drug-focussed analysis of the roots of the conflict and the human rights crisis which completely ignores the Colombian state's own historical and current responsibility. It also ignores deep-rooted causes of the conflict and the human rights crisis. The Plan proposes a principally military strategy (in the US component of Plan Colombia) to tackle illicit drug cultivation and trafficking through substantial military assistance to the Colombian armed forces and police. Social development and humanitarian assistance programs included in the Plan cannot disguise its essentially military character. Furthermore, it is apparent that Plan Colombia is not the result of a genuine process of consultation either with the national and international non-governmental organisations which are expected to implement the projects nor with the beneficiaries of the humanitarian, human rights or social development projects. As a consequence, the human rights component of Plan Colombia is seriously flawed.

We saw many remnants of the old Putumayo during CIP's March 9-12 trip there. It is still a beautiful place, overwhelming the eye with vivid green. But we also saw forests knocked down to grow illegal crops, armed groups operating freely, fields devastated by herbicides, and widespread poverty and fear. We were strongly dismayed by the United States' role there, as Putumayo is the main destination of Washington's controversial plan to fumigate drug crops, supported by hundreds of millions of dollars in mostly military aid.

We had come to Putumayo to evaluate this program in the wake of its first phase, an eight-week blitz of aerial herbicide spraying that had ended one month earlier. The policy's supporters call the U.S.-sponsored effort a "balanced approach." But so far it has been purely military, with not a dime spent yet on economic assistance programs that might prevent farmers from moving and re-planting coca, the plant used to make cocaine. We found that the zone where fumigations occurred is dominated not by so-called "industrial" coca plantations, but by families who are now running out of food. We found truth behind claims that the spraying had negative health effects and destroyed legal crops, including alternative development projects. We were disturbed by evidence that the fumigations proceeded more smoothly because of a paramilitary offensive in the zone to be sprayed. We found that the people of Putumayo want to stop growing coca, and that they have clear proposals for how U.S. assistance can help them make a living legally.

Let us pray that our nation will remember that the unfolding of the promise of democracy in our nation paralleled the striving for civil rights. That is why we must challenge the rationale of the Patriot Act. We must ask why should America put aside guarantees of constitutional justice?

How can we justify in effect canceling the First Amendment and the right of free speech, the right to peaceably assemble?

How can we justify in effect canceling the Fourth Amendment, probable cause, the prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure?

How can we justify in effect canceling the Fifth Amendment, nullifying due process, and allowing for indefinite incarceration without a trial?

How can we justify in effect canceling the Sixth Amendment, the right to prompt and public trial?

How can we justify in effect canceling the Eighth Amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment?

We cannot justify widespread wiretaps and Internet surveillance without judicial supervision, let alone with it. We cannot justify secret searches without a warrant. We cannot justify giving the Attorney General the ability to designate domestic terror groups. We cannot justify giving the FBI total access to any type of data which may exist in any system anywhere such as medical records and financial records.

We cannot justify giving the CIA the ability to target people in this country for intelligence surveillance. We cannot justify a government which takes from the people our right to privacy and then assumes for its own operations a right to total secrecy. The Attorney General recently covered up a statue of Lady Justice showing her bosom as if to underscore there is no danger of justice exposing herself at this time, before this administration.

If you are spending too much time on the internet and are concerned that it is affecting your concentration, you are not alone.

The addictive nature of web browsing can leave you with an attention span of nine seconds - the same as a goldfish.

Throughout Mir's life in space, the number of microorganisms grew continuously, one generation replacing another every 20-30 minutes. If in 1990 there were registered 94 species, in 2001 they numbered 140. But the real problem was not the species increasing in number but their growing aggressiveness: each new generation seemed to be more ferocious than the last.

The Media Monitoring Project of Zimbabwe has analysed the video tape and says that a version broadcast relentlessly on Zimbabwe television has a video timer on the screen, which also demonstrates "that the video had been cut and rearranged in a manner that appeared to suit the assassination conspiracy theory".

"The timer... changed repeatedly from, 9.45am to 9.25am; and from 9.25am to 9.43am and then back to 9.27am; and from 9.52am to 9.44am," says the MMPZ.

"We did a whole series of things that are characterized as influence or strategic influence or information operations," Rumsfeld said. "And we have done that in past, and we will do that in the future ... There's lots of things we have to do. And we will do those things. We'll just do them in different offices."

Asked directly whether disinformation would be part of the effort, Rumsfeld replied, "It most clearly is not."

Neither individual Afghans nor foreign governments have cause to mourn the collapse of the Taliban regime. But in one respect, it is already being missed abroad if not at home: it managed to eradicate most of Afghanistan’s cultivation of the opium poppy. Now the Taliban are defeated, the country may once again reclaim the dubious honour of being the world’s biggest producer, and the dominant force in the world heroin trade. Rival South-East Asian producers are now scrambling to beat them to market. Police and customs forces throughout Central Asia and Europe are bracing themselves for an influx of cheap heroin, and the United Nations (UN) International Narcotics Control Board, in its annual report, to be published on Tuesday February 26th, will appeal for action to prevent renewed Afghan production.

Six weeks ago, President Andres Pastrana threatened to call off peace talks with his country’s main guerrilla army, the FARC, only to back down in a display of brinkmanship as the rebels agreed to speed up talks on a ceasefire. But on February 21st, Mr Pastrana’s government began bombing rebel enclaves, the day after announcing that he was ending the talks, and ordering the armed forces to recapture a guerrilla-controlled “demilitarised zone” he had sanctioned to promote peace. Another negotiating ploy? Not this time, it seemed. The president ordered the arrest of guerrilla leaders even as the air force began to bomb and strafe FARC camps and other targets, such as landing strips, in the zone. In the past few days, Colombian troops have invaded the enclave and retaken the major towns and cities, though FARC guerrillas still control much of the countryside.

As the political situation in unstable petroleum-producing regions continues to heat up, and evidence of global warming continues to mount, more people are beginning to look to hydrogen-powered fuel cells for an escape.

If you want a good idea of what's missing from the news coverage of our ongoing "war on terrorism," take a trip down to your local library or bookstore and check out the anthologies "Reporting World War II" and "Reporting Vietnam," both published by the Library of America.

Compare what you've been reading in the papers and hearing on radio and television over the past few months with the work of such great reporters as Homer Bigart, Ernie Pyle, A.J. Liebling, Martha Gellhorn, Malcolm Browne, Michael Herr, Gloria Emerson and Peter Arnett -- just to name a few -- that are found within the covers of these two collections. The difference is astounding.

The Patriot Act is not antiterrorism legislation; it's antispeech legislation, and is no more a direct response to the September 11 attacks than the Children's Internet Protection Act is a direct result of sincere concern by members of Congress about the safety of minors. The cold, cynical reality is that the Patriot Act is a bloated hodgepodge of speech-chilling law that lurked in congressional corridors not only before September 11 but in large part before the Bush administration. It was hustled into reality in the post-9/11 environment so quickly, secretively, and undemocratically that our Bill of Rights had been clocked with a one-two punch well before any of us realized it was under attack.

The allegations were made by a Canadian political consultancy, Dickens and Madson, headed by former Israeli intelligence officer and Mugabe lobbyist Ari Ben-Menashe.

Mr Ben-Menashe says he was approached by Mr Tsvangirai, who wanted Mr Mugabe "eliminated".

...

A video timing clock was not erased from a poor-quality copy of the recording broadcast on state television, showing that the original secret tape had been heavily edited and even "rearranged", according to the Mass Media Project of Zimbabwe, an independent media monitoring group.

Conspiratorialists, whether their bete noire is Anglophile internationalist bankers, socialist one-world government advocates, neo-fascist state planners, or eugenic proponents of white supremacy, can and do find in the Bushes everything and more than they've ever wanted to imagine about American history and its rulers. Lurking in the shadows of nearly every major episode of recent U.S. history, from World War Two to the rise of the CIA to third world drug running to the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy and King assassinations, Watergate and beyond, the Bushes have emerged as the Zeligs of the global power elite.

President Mugabe is said to be planning secretly his escape route out of Zimbabwe after his private polling predicted he could be defeated in next month's elections.

The ailing 78-year-old has been sounding out some of his African neighbours and his dwindling number of friends abroad about providing him with a safe haven.

Consider the events of the past week, in no particular order:

• Colombia has plunged into civil war.
• Venezuela, a major oil producer, is experiencing a major political crisis over its president, Hugo Chavez.
• In Afghanistan, the CIA has issued a report (published on the front page of the New York Times) warning that internal chaos is looming.
• In the Middle East, Palestinians have shifted tactics toward waging guerrilla war, and Israel is contemplating a major shift in its own strategy.
• In Iran, a majority of the Majlis has signed a petition demanding an investigation of U.S. charges that elements in Iran have aided al Qaeda members in escaping Afghanistan. This action creates a massive internal confrontation between forces around the Ayatollah Ali Khameni and those around President Mohammad Khatami, with a very uncertain outcome.
• What has emerged from U.S. President George W. Bush's meeting with the Japanese prime minister is that Japan has no idea how to manage its intensifying financial crisis. One of the world's major economies appears to be inching toward meltdown.

Back in 1984, we congratulated ourselves on the difference between our lives of liberty and democracy and the dystopian universe George Orwell imagined in his landmark novel, a place where government-operated televisions spied on their viewers and hidden cameras monitored private lives. But while we smugly engaged in what amounted to nearly two decades of back-slapping, engineers were developing biometric technologies that could remake our society into Orwell's Oceania, all in the name of progress. The most disturbing of these technologies are facial recognition systems, computer-powered cameras that can identify an individual based on facial characteristics captured by the camera's lens.

The full sweep of the new Bush Doctrine was on display this past week, as President Bush traveled through North Asia delivering a consistent and powerful message: American security and global security require a determined assault not just on terrorists but on the three-headed hydra of tyranny, terror, and weapons of mass destruction. The imperative of regime change was the core message of Bush's State of the Union address. This week Bush made plain that the implications of his doctrine go beyond North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, the "axis of evil." Just as the Reagan Doctrine-- primarily aimed at overthrowing Communist regimes--ended up toppling right-wing dictatorships in the Philippines and South Korea, so, too, the Bush Doctrine could help undo dictatorships not only in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, but also in, for example, China and Saudi Arabia.

There are now 27 days until the Presedential Elections and every day is one of disbelief. Yesterday, in the space of ten minutes I met two people, the first a white farmer who was recently shot by armed men who had ambushed him outside his farm gate.The farmer is back on his land and waiting to be allowed to grow food. My second meeting was with a "real" war veteran who has had nothing to do with the insanity of the past two years and is waiting to be able to have a normal life and carry on with his small business. We are all waiting now and I continue to wear a small yellow ribbon pinned to my shirt in silent protest at the suffering in my country - I hope in 27 days I wall be able to take it off.
-- February 9th, 2002

A U.S. proposal to integrate Canadian troops into a North American command system that would defend the continent against terrorist attacks has some Canadians questioning how the system would affect their country's sovereignty.

Ottawa's top military brass are pushing to put Canadian troops and warships on the front lines under a U.S. plan for an integrated, continental defence structure in the war against terrorism.

A Pentagon proposal for an "Americas Command" could lead to a single, integrated command, putting some Canadian troops and warships in a continental-defence structure, taking orders from a joint command deep in Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain.

Americas Command would include the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean Basin, and all of South America. The Americas Command would be responsible for the ocean approaches to the United States throughout the Maritime and Air Defense Zones. Its primary missions would be to defend the Americas from foreign threats, deter the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States, and build cooperation among the nations of North, Central, and South America.

To a greater extent than any other armed conflict on the planet, Afghanistan's unfinished 24-year war has been shaped by rival foreign intelligence agencies: The Soviet Union's KGB, America's CIA, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Department and Iran's multiple clandestine services. They primed various Afghan factions with cash and weapons, secretly trained guerrilla forces, financed propaganda and manipulated political conventions.

When spies help construct a civil war, one seed they sow is confusion. Afghans today have little basis to trust their own recent history; too much remains hidden. The country has become a cauldron of interlocking conspiracies, both real and imagined, a maze of fractured mirrors designed by warmakers who embraced deception as a winning weapon. Afghanistan's successful reconstruction as even a semi-normal country, then, must eventually include some reclamation by Afghans of the truth about their recent past.

The reviews are in, and they are bad. President Bush's characterization of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an "axis of evil" has been met by our allies' puzzled annoyance and by massive rallies in Iran that only strengthened hard-line elements there. How, one wonders, did the president and his speech writers blunder into this mess?

Every night, the emigrants from the Zimbabwe side of the border creep to the rushing river and consider the dangers ahead. There are crocodiles ready to topple stealthy boats. There are twists of barbed wire and miles of electrified fence.

But they look across the river and pine for South Africa, a land of stability and hope.

Murders and a bit of mayhem were anticipated during the peace-building process. But nobody expected a lack of international unity to destabilize the interim government in Kabul so quickly.

...

Karzai's high-wire act on the international stage-where he has received accolades from everyone from United States and European leaders to American fashion designers-has faltered at home. This is not due to lack of trying, but because of a lack of international support where it is needed. In recent weeks Karzai has toured world capitals trying to galvanize support for extending the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, to Afghanistan's four other major cities: Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif and Jalalabad. His appeals have so far fallen on deaf ears.

In exhaustive detail, based on close scrutiny of publicly available but seldom publicized Departments of Defense, State and Energy documents, Klare provides a superb primer of the landscape of potential global conflict over the next few decades, and America's likely role in it. Mainstream media pundits present current U.S. foreign policy - in piecemeal fashion - as a series of scattered, seemingly ad hoc responses to individual, isolated "hot spots." Klare argues that there is a thematic thread running through U.S. strategy, whether in the Caspian Sea, China or Columbia. It is focused on guaranteeing U.S.-based multinational corporations steady, uninterrupted access to the dwindling supply of non-renewable resources. With the end of the cold war and the growth of worldwide energy-intensive consumer markets, the ideological blocs and conflicts (between U.S. capitalism and Soviet communism) that defined, and gave a certain perverse stability to foreign policy from the 1940s through the early 90s, have given way to new "geo-econocentric" struggles.

We show a representation of Quantum Computers defines Quantum Turing Machines with associated Quantum Grammars. We then create examples of Quantum Grammars. Lastly we develop an algebraic approach to high level Quantum Languages using Quantum Assembly language and Quantum C language as examples.

This paper is about Peak Oil. It truly is a turning point for Mankind, which will affect everyone, although some more than others. Those countries, which plan and prepare, will survive better than those that do not. It is a large and difficult subject, but the essentials are clear.

In summary, these are the main points that have to be grasped:

• Conventional oil - and that will be defined - provides most of the oil produced today, and is responsible for about 95% all oil that has been produced so far.
• It will continue to dominate supply for a long time to come. It is what matters most.
• Its discovery peaked in the 1960s. We now find one barrel for every four we consume.
• Middle East share of production is set to rise. The rest of the world peaked in 1997, and is therefore in terminal decline.
• Non-conventional oil delays peak only a few years, but will ameliorate the subsequent decline.
• Gas, which is less depleted than oil, will likely peak around 2020.
• Capacity limits were breached late in 2000, causing prices to soar leading to world recession.
• The recession may be permanent because any recovery would lead to new oil demand until the limits were again breached which would lead to new price shocks re-imposing recession in a vicious circle.
• World peak may prove to have been passed in 2000, if demand is curtailed by recession.
• Prices may remain weak in such circumstances but since demand is not infinitely elastic they must again rise from supply constraints when essential needs are affected.

It is ironic that one of the USA's most valuable allies in "Operation Enduring Freedom" was Islam Karimov, who presides over Uzbekistan -- one of Asia's most entrenched dictatorships.

Karimov allowed US forces to use Uzbek bases against its southern neighbour, Afghanistan. Washington rewarded this support with an historic joint US-Uzbek memorandum, signed on 30 November. Hailed by both sides as announcing a "qualitatively new relationship," it promises Uzbekistan significant military and economic backing. A likely legacy of the war will be the bolstering by the US of yet another corrupt and repressive regime that performs useful strategic services.

Who controls the news? After court rulings this week, doors are wide open for new deals that could make the Rupert Murdock/Sumner Redstone world of media magnates even smaller. With fewer and fewer people deciding what stories get covered on radio and TV and in the papers, some say cross-media monopolies are undermining the market. If the only thing keeping editors honest is competition, what's to prevent a 500-channel, but one-view world?

Supposedly, the FCC; the organization charged with protecting the public and keeping stories like Citizen Kane from coming true. But the new FCC chairman thinks more free market and less regulation is good for the economy and good for you. The leaner, meaner media, mergers and the FCC.

Studio owner and band member Vince Von Bastrum, 38, said: "It's very bizarre.

"It's a high-pitched sound which can be heard over the band, no matter how loud they play.

"I have heard it myself and the funny thing is it doesn't happen with my other clients working with more relaxed music.

"It's just Cobra's rock that seems to set it off."

Servitude exists in many forms in Pakistan. Over the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of Afghan families -- eager to flee 20 years of war and three years of drought -- have sought safe haven in Pakistan, only to spend the rest of their lives working to pay off the debts they accumulated to get there. They do so by becoming indentured laborers, often at brick factories, and by sending their children to carpet factories that crave small fingers. Indentured servitude is not only legal but ubiquitous in Pakistan, and servant culture thrives: the wealthy can have a driver, three maids, a cook, and a night watchman for less than $75 a month.

And then there are the slaves. Many Afghan families cross into Pakistan through the lawless tribal areas in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). It's a harsh climate, and they have no contacts, no food, and no money, which leaves them wide open to the predations of slavers. Pakistan's tribal areas -- there are seven in the NWFP and several autonomous cities -- are the last vestiges of the British Raj's failure to conquer Afghanistan. A series of agreements ("treaties" is perhaps too strong a word) includes the tribal areas as part of Pakistan, but confirm their complete autonomy from Pakistani law. The political culture, dominated by councils of fiercely independent tribal elders, hasn't really changed in over 600 years -- only now every house has several machine guns, and most have electricity.

Robert Mugabe is believed to have mortgaged most of his country's most valuable assets to Colonel Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, in exchange for hundreds of millions of pounds in loans to keep Zimbabwe from complete collapse.

Desperate to cling to power in next month's elections, President Mugabe is said to have handed over state-owned farms, hotels and oil refineries in a secret deal with Colonel Gaddafi. As part of the exchange, the Libyan dictator is funding Mr Mugabe's security forces.

"What is Europe? What have I been wanting in Europe? I think it is not a real punishment to us. We can visit other countries in Asia and Africa," Mugabe said. "Why should my money go to Britain? I don't have goats there. I have goats and pigs here."

The US House of Representatives recently passed the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, which enables the sanctions to be applied specifically to targeted leaders. The punitive measures will also affect their children in colleges or schools overseas.

Topping the list of Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) issued in the Anti Money Laundering Guidance Update, Issue 3, of the Joint Financial Crimes Unit, is Robert Gabriel Mugabe, followed by his two vice-presidents, Simon V Muzenda and Joseph Msika.

Others are John Nkomo; Patrick Chinamasa; Stan Mudenge; Simba Makoni; Sydney Sekeramayi; Swithun Mombeshora; Joseph Made; Ignatius Chombo; Timothy Stamps; Herbert Murerwa; Samuel Mumbengegwi; Francis Nhema; Joyce Mujuru; July Moyo; Nicholas Goche; Jonathan Moyo; Grace Marufu Mugabe; and one W Chikukwa (listed as assistant defence adviser--Zimbabwe).

Ideas have consequences, wrote conservative Richard Weaver. So do words, when uttered by the most powerful man on earth.

By threatening war against Iran, Iraq and North Korea in his now-famous "Axis of Evil" address, the president painted himself into a corner. Either Bush now goes to war against one of these regimes, or he will be humiliated and exposed as a bellicose bluff.

Let me say it again: Whoever fed Bush those lines, or did not argue against his delivering them, disserved the president. For that speech has blown our coalition against terror to smithereens.

After 11 September 2001 I was frequently asked, as many scholars of Islamic studies probably were, why certain people are prepared to hijack an aeroplane and plunge themselves and all the other passengers to certain death. I do not have an answer. What I have done instead is to tell three stories - about the cult of martyrdom in Shi'ite Islam, about modern fantasies of salvation through self-sacrifice, and about power politics in the Middle East - which together assemble the elements of a fourth : the unfinished story of the modern world.

Hidden beneath the chaotic surface of mergers and acquisitions lies a distinct pattern that resembles an S-shaped curve (see figure 1). Each consolidating industry passes through four stages:

• Opening
• Focus
• Accumulation
• Alliance

The U.S. military has begun intelligence-gathering flights over the southern Philippines in a significant expansion of its war on terrorism in that country, a senior U.S. defense official said yesterday.

The surveillance flights, which have not previously been disclosed, are meant to complement the growing presence of U.S. soldiers on the ground, projected to peak at 660 troops in coming months.

In this paper we give a self contained introduction to the conceptional and mathematical foundations of quantum information theory. In the first part we introduce the basic notions like entanglement, channels, teleportation etc. and their mathematical description. The second part is focused on a presentation of the quantitative aspects of the theory. Topics discussed in this context include: entanglement measures, channel capacities, relations between both, additivity and continuity properties and asymptotic rates of quantum operations. Finally we give an overview on some recent developments and open questions.

Buy drugs, support terrorism. That was the unsubtle message from federal drug policy officials as they launched a multi-million dollar advertising campaign during Sunday's Super Bowl.

Certainly, they have some evidence on their side. Terrorist groups from southeast Asia to South America are in the drug trafficking business. But in the meantime, another hazardous American addiction goes unchallenged. No crusade has been launched against a national dependency that delivers billions of dollars each year to foreign powers whose support for terror is far from fanciful: Oil.

Can the World Social Forum have a meaningful impact without adopting a more formal structure? The counter-summit's organizers insist it can.

...

Grajew says he conceived of the forum as a positive alternative to protesting at the closed doors of the WEF, normally held in the Swiss resort town of Davos. But would reorganizing the forum into a body -- a democratic body, of course -- that votes and drafts sweeping statements be a more effective means to challenge the WTO and the WEF? Some of the thousands who gathered in Brazil think so.

They say all it takes is a little bit of faith, some cash and a signature, and if everything goes as planned, subscribing Christians (and maybe a few trusting infidels) will be free of Nevada Power--and their power bills--for life.

Call it the Electric Christian Rapture Test.

"I sold all my stock last year because I would rather put it into this company than the stock market," says Conrad Sorensen, who owns Henderson dealership Grassroot Enterprises of Tesla, Inc. "I feel my money's going to be safer here than any stock market."

Sorensen is part of a network of disciples of self-proclaimed anointed one, inventor and Christian evangelist Dennis Lee, who-- though he has actions pending against him by attorneys general and alerts filed by Better Business Bureaus in various states--has been traveling the country, registering people for free power. The would-be, modern-day miracle-maker says that the Fourth of July will take on an extra special meaning this year. This July 4 will not just be Independence Day for our nation. It will be America's Declaration of Energy Independence Day. The day when their fabulous invention will be unveiled and the faithful will receive the free electricity that Lee's brethren have been promising for years.

There was general agreement that the time had come to reposition the movement in affirmative terms--moving from a stance of exposing and protesting to proposing alternatives and solutions. "We are labeled as anti, anti, anti," said Public Citizen's Lori Wallach. "We need to change that perception. It's they who are anti. We are a movement for democracy. For equity. For the environment. For health. They are for a failed status quo." She joked, "You can see I've got who we are down to about fifty words. Now we've got to get it down to bumper-sticker size."

There was also recognition that after the bloody confrontations in Genoa, and certainly after the World Trade Center attacks, the movement could no longer afford any ambiguity about its stance on violence. "Too often we get dragged into a swamp debating what is euphemistically called 'diversity of tactics,'" said one European environmentalist. "Now we need to speak up and say clearly that violence, as a political tactic, just doesn't work either in the United States or in Europe."

One company says Dolly the sheep, as most assume, was the first cloned animal. But another insists that its handiwork, Gene the cow, was the original.

A third firm, Worcester-based Advanced Cell Technology Inc., calls the debate irrelevant because its creations, cow clones George and Charlie, won the company the key U.S. patent to animal cloning.

George and Charlie and Dolly and Gene have given rise to a barnyard squabble between the three companies, culminating in a legal clash over ownership of the animal cloning patent and the potentially lucrative business it could bring.

The plans to spread so-called "black" propaganda emerged earlier this week after the Pentagon hired an outside agency to help target countries friendly to the US as well as hostile nations.

But the Pentagon has been forced into a humiliating climb-down following a backlash in America and elsewhere.

"Consistent with defence department policy, under no circumstances will the office or its contractors willingly or deliberately disseminate false or misleading information to the American or foreign media or public," the Pentagon said in a statement to the New York Times.

Q: Mr. Secretary, there have been reports about the Office of Strategic Influence. Can you give us your comments about whether the Pentagon should be issuing disinformation to foreign press, and any comments?

Rumsfeld: Well, the Pentagon is not issuing disinformation to the foreign press or any other press.

Q: Will they be?

Rumsfeld: No. The United States of America has long had policies with respect to public information, and we have policies where certainly we make a practice of assuring that what we tell the public is accurate and correct. And if in any event somebody happens to be misinformed and say something that's not correct, they correct that at the earliest opportunity.

The Colombian president, Andres Pastrana, has declared his country's three-year-old peace process over and vowed to retake the jungle territory he had granted to rebels as a site for talks.

Mr Pastrana made the announcement in a televised address last night, hours after guerrillas hijacked an airliner and kidnapped Senator Jorge Gechen Turbay, president of the Colombian Senate's peace commission, who was travelling on the flight. The remaining 29 passengers and crew were freed unharmed.

"Today the glass of indignation spilled over," Mr Pastrana said. Calling the hijacking "an international offence classified as terrorism" he added: "It's not possible to sign agreements on one side while putting guns to the heads of innocent people on the other."

Robert J. Lang is respected in the art community for folding a mean swan. He's written a half-dozen books on how to make paper airplanes, ants and animals. An admirer called one of his works "arguably the best moose design ever."

In engineering circles, Lang is known as a guy who can figure the best way to stow a car's airbag.

Millions of dollars of US oil business with Iraq are being channelled discreetly through European and other companies, in a practice that has highlighted the double standards now dominating relations between Baghdad and Washington after a decade of crippling sanctions.

...

Halliburton, the largest US oil services company, is among a significant number of US companies that have sold oil industry equipment to Iraq since the UN relaxed sanctions two years ago.

From 1995 until August this year Halliburton's chief executive officer was Dick Cheney, US secretary of defence during the Gulf war and now Republican vice-presidential running mate of George W.Bush.

On Jan. 27, at 3:30 p.m., four of the six members of the search team, in an undisclosed spot in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area near Slidell, La., heard a series of double raps characteristic of the drumming of the ivory-billed woodpecker. They managed to record the last double-rap of the sequence and some subsequent rapping.

On the same day, members of a Cornell Lab of Ornithology research group heard a similar sound in the same area, and two days later, other members of the team heard loud rapping uncharacteristic of other woodpeckers.

The C.I.A. report does not conclude that a civil war is imminent. But the slow pace of the efforts to set up a police and military force has been of particular concern because of Afghanistan's longstanding ethnic rivalries and the difficulties the interim Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, has had in trying to assert his control over the country, much of which remains in the hands of warlords.

"If it takes six months or more than a year to create a single army, what do we do in the meantime to deter war among the warlords?" a senior official said.

Here is the war of the future. The United States fights. The United Nations feeds. The European Union picks up the tab for postwar "nationbuilding". And Nato? Indispensable, of course. As ... er ... "the only alliance capable of articulating the values of the way we live". An attendant lord, there to swell a pageant, but no longer at the cutting edge of Western power.

In fact, the now-completed interviews and upcoming interrogations of Middle Eastern immigrants who have ignored deportation orders are only the most visible pieces of a broad effort to expand the war on terrorism through domestic intelligence-gathering. The effort will marry 21st-century technology with tactics not seen since the 1950s and '60s, according to federal documents and interviews with informed sources.

The intelligence-gathering system being born will ultimately combine more than $100 million in new funding, powerful new terrorism laws, an expanded role for local police and state-of-the-art computer networks that will link federal agents with thousands of police departments. Local authorities may soon be empowered to obtain virtually all of the FBI's most sensitive information under laws being considered in Congress.

The new role for local police is one of the most significant aspects of the new system. On the FBI's behalf, local police conducted many of the voluntary interviews, returning local law enforcement for the first time in 25 years to the sensitive job of gathering intelligence on political and religious groups suspected of violence.

Anti-globalists, stung by charges that they are too simplistic, idealistic or just plain behind the times, are beginning to develop an alternative global vision, asking what they stand for, not just what they're against.

The anti-globalization movement isn't really the anti-globalization movement any more. Some of its leading activists are beginning to describe their cause in terms that don't imply dismantling the whole network of linkages that now encircle the world in order to somehow return society to a local or regional scale. And some academics are now attempting to stake out a position on the left that promotes a different model of globalization.

In the wake of the Taliban's departure, Afghanistan has begun once more to look at itself, through lenses of its antiquated TV cameras, through tentative stabs at restarting and rebuilding theatre, through cinema and through photographers wielding homemade portrait cameras on the streets of Kabul.

What's happening to me? I didn't think that I would react like this when encountering just such a situation. I didn't cry, I wasn't shocked, I didn't vomit. Am I a human being? Apparently not so much.

They've managed to peel off our humanity. I've seen all these sights already televised at earlier attacks, I've heard all the sounds and voices on the radio reports, I've read these situation descriptions tens of times in the morning newspapers. I was now simply at a live performance of the same events. Everything was just exactly the same.

During his 10 months in prison, Ibrahim (like many on the outside) had plenty of time to ponder just what it was he'd done to draw the government's wrath. At the time of his arrest, the general speculation was of a warning shot to keep the rest of civil society timid in advance of upcoming elections. But the handling of his conviction and the fierceness of the accompanying media smear campaign against him led many to conclude there was a much more personal motivation behind the scenes.

Ibrahim speculates that it was the combined effects of several of his activities and comments-including election monitoring efforts, studies of Muslim-Coptic tensions and his notorious interview with a Saudi magazine about the royal tendencies of Middle Eastern republics.

Clashes among police, Islamic fundamentalists and others have left as many as five people dead during parliamentary elections held over the past two weeks, but the vote is being hailed as one of the freest in recent Egyptian history and a sign that chaotic efforts to bring about democratic reforms are working.

...

"About 60 percent fair, and about 40 percent irregularity. . . . It is a vast improvement, and I give the regime a lot of credit for that," said Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a professor and democracy activist who was arrested in July in what some analysts said was a government effort to diminish independent criticism of the election.

Even if the war on terrorism justifies the creation of this creepy new surveillance entity, it's hard to imagine that the Pentagon couldn't have entrusted its management to someone with a record of honesty. It hardly inspires confidence that the man now in charge of "information awareness" is best known for his cover-ups.

Last Wednesday something strange happened. The American population was instructed to panic. Place themselves, that is, on a state of highest vigilance. Some cataclysmic act of terrorism would happen - within hours. But nothing terrible happened. Something creepy did. On Thursday there was an inconspicuous news item. John M Poindexter had been appointed to head a new agency "to counter attacks on the US", such as Wednesday's no-show. It is equivalent, in British terms, to Jeffrey Archer being made chancellor of the exchequer.

The Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries, military officials said.

For the past few years, the global justice movement has been like the child at the back of the crowd as the parade of history wheels by. As the pundits applaud and the marketeers cheer, we stand and shout that the Empire has no clothes, that its cloaks of finery are woven from financial fictions and economic voodoo.

Yet despite the present system's transparent contradictions and unsustainability, we also tend to imagine that its power is total, and to underestimate our own power to change it. The UN Development Program describes the current gaps between the world's richest and poorest as "grotesque" and "historically unprecedented," and the challenge of this new Empire seems overwhelming. But resistance is inequality's corollary.

Now, if you like technology, as I do, a System Folder crash of this sort is not an insuperable problem. If you want to reinstall software to recover from a computer disaster at home, and if you have the installers at home, you can reinstall. And if you have the serial numbers recorded at home, you can type them in at the appropriate places when you reinstall, so the reinstallation will work. Unfortunately, I wasn't quite that well prepared, but fortunately I had alternatives at hand -- I powered up another laptop I already had at home, and connected the two laptops together over the tiny wireless LAN I run in my apartment. I pulled software and other installation files over the network from one machine to the other, and in doing so I may be said to have violated the installation process that (to invoke the language of the Digital Milllennium Copyright Act) "controls my access" to the technology, to the copyrighted work. Technically, perhaps, I had violated the Digital Millennium Copyright. Please let's not let the news of my transgression leave this room.

The debate over the Tireless has revived another, larger debate--over the political status of Gibraltar. To Britain, Gibraltar is officially an "overseas territory." The United Nations considers it a "non-self-governing territory." The Spanish consider it a colony, and they want it back. Despite years of Gibraltar-related bickering between Britain and Spain, over issues ranging from fishing rights to drug smuggling and money laundering, there have been few high-level talks about Gibraltar's status. The last round occurred in 1999. The controversy over the Tireless could well jump-start another.

The Marines from 45 Commando had planned to sweep on to the beaches of Gibraltar in two landing craft as part of a training exercise. They were armed with SA80 rifles and mortars, although without live ammunition.

However, whether through faulty map-reading or poor visibility, they arrived in the Spanish fishing village of La Atunara. It took two local policemen to point out that Gibraltar was actually a little further down the coast.

It was never going to be an easy decision. When European Union (EU) foreign ministers decided on Monday February 18th to withdraw the EU's election monitors from Zimbabwe and impose sanctions on the country, it was with a heavy heart. All attempts to restrain Robert Mugabe seem to have failed. The country's 77-year-old president is determined to rig presidential elections next month in order to cling on to power after 22 years in office, and has brushed aside foreign criticisms of his bullying and intimidation of the main opposition party and his increasingly repressive policies, which have brought his country to the brink of economic ruin. And yet the EU decision, coming after months of warnings and threats, though understandable, may on balance still prove to be the wrong one.

My aim in this paper is a modest one. I do not have any particular thesis to advance about the nature of entanglement, nor can I claim novelty for any of the material I shall discuss. My aim is simply to raise some questions about entanglement that spring naturally from certain developments in quantum information theory and are, I believe, worthy of serious consideration by philosophers of science. The main topics I discuss are different manifestations of quantum nonlocality, entanglement-assisted communication, and entanglement thermodynamics.

To prevent terrorism by dropping bombs on Iraq is such an obvious idea that I can't think why no one has thought of it before. It's so simple. If only the UK had done something similar in Northern Ireland, we wouldn't be in the mess we are in today.

A Turkish publisher accused of disseminating separatist propaganda was acquitted yesterday after one of his authors, the celebrated American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, appeared in an Istanbul court and asked to be tried alongside him.

On 10 December 1981, in the village of El Mozote in the Department of Morazán, units of the Atlacatl Battalion detained, without resistance, all the men, women and children who were in the place. The following day, 11 December, after spending the night locked in their homes, they were deliberately and systematically executed in groups. First, the men were tortured and executed, then the women were executed and, lastly, the children, in the place where they had been locked up. The number of victims identified was over 200. The figure is higher if other unidentified victims are taken into account.

...

The Atlacatl Battalion arrived at El Mozote in the course of a military action known as "Operación Rescate", which had begun two days earlier on 6 December and also involved units from the Third Brigade and the San Francisco Gotera Commando Training Centre.

The Atlacatl Battalion was a "Rapid Deployment Infantry Battalion" or "BIRI", that is, a unit specially trained for "counter-insurgency" warfare. It was the first unit of its kind in the armed forces and had completed its training, under the supervision of United States military advisers, at the beginning of that year, 1981.

To anthropologists, John Frum was an example of one of the strangest and most exotic phenomena to be observed in traditional cultures: the cargo cult. All across Melanesia, from New Guinea to the Solomon Islands to Tanna's archipelago, the New Hebrides, dozens of unconnected communities, thousands of miles apart and speaking unrelated languages, seemed spontaneously to generate the same set of bizarre beliefs. A new dispensation was on the way, when the white man would vanish from the islands, and his cargo - Western goods - would be diverted by magical means to the local people, who were its rightful owners.

In just a few years, this movement has instituted a real debate about values, economics and power. Through our numbers on the streets, through the work of key dissident thinkers and through the actions of vast grassroots movements in the Global South we have gone from being ignored, or sneered at, to being grudgingly respected.

Already, less than three years after the "Battle of Seattle", we are at the stage where the president of the World Bank can be turned away from our Social Forum (oh, the joy!); at the point where the French government sends twice as many ministers to Porto Alegre (six) as to New York (three).

The Bush administration is taking wide measures to tighten scientific secrecy in the hope of keeping weapons of mass destruction out of unfriendly hands.

Last month, it began quietly withdrawing from public release more than 6,600 technical documents that deal mainly with the production of germ and chemical weapons. It is also drafting a new information security policy, to be released in the next few weeks, that officials say will result in more documents' being withdrawn. It is asking scientific societies to limit what they publish in research reports.

What has al-Qaeda done to our Constitution, and to our national standards of fairness and decency? Since September 11, the government has enacted legislation, adopted policies, and threatened procedures that are not consistent with our established laws and values and would have been unthinkable before.

In a normal country, the police take care of the civilian population. In many Colombian municipalities it is the other way around. Disarmed citizens are the ones who end up saving policemen from being gunned down by guerrillas.

Both Teapot and Enron involved energy policy, privatization and corruption. And like Teapot Dome's "Ohio gang" of ethically loose Harding cronies, oilmen and administration officials--energy deregulation during the first Bush administration, through the Clinton years and George W.'s time as governor of Texas on up till today has been warped and feasted upon by a Texas-led "Enron gang." In both scandals, some Democrats were involved, but the power centers of misbehavior were Republican. Yet, there has been nothing quite like the rise and fall of Enron in U.S. history, certainly no plausible comparison since the late-19th-century heyday of railroads and robber barons. The sums in Enron's collapse certainly overshadow those in Teapot, much as a space shuttle does a Model T Ford. More important, not in memory has a single major company grown so big in tandem with a presidential dynasty and a corrupted political system. Indeed, the Bush family has been a prominent and well-rewarded rung in Enron's climb to national political influence.

When the Taliban caught Haji Shirullah, a Kabul businessman, playing chess in his office with his brother they burnt the chessboard and the pieces. "They put us in jail for two days," he recalled with a rueful smile. "The Taliban believed chess was a form of gambling and distracted people from saying their prayers."

For more than two decades, the inhumane, neocolonial practices of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund provoked angry protests in Third World countries, but few in the Western world took notice. Now, the anti-globalization movement is alive and well in the United States and is expected to have a thing or two to say when world business leaders, heads of state and leading economists meet this weekend in New York City. What follows is a six-point manifesto of what many of the demonstrators want. The list is based on the writings and statements of anti-globalists and contains the demands sought by the Mobilization for Global Justice, a coalition that promised to have 100,000 demonstrators outside the IMF meeting in Washington, D.C., last fall; the meeting was canceled in the aftermath of September 11.

In the next few months, spring will return, we will pay our taxes, and the United States will attack Iraq. The seasons have always returned, with perhaps a few exceptions when asteroids and comets slammed into the Earth. Taxes are often listed among those things considered "inevitable." Why do I put the U.S. attack on Iraq on the same list? Because it is also going to happen, and happen soon. My prediction is not based on hearing three jackals howl in the night, or on the fact that Mars and Venus are flirting in the heavens; it's based on what I consider to be a clear vision of some recent political and technological events. After I review the facts, I think you will share this vision with me.

Why is this more than just a very big business failure? Because the US markets, and the array of institutions that constitute them, are supposed to be a model. When the Asian crisis hit, crony capitalism took much of the blame. The definition of sound policies was broadened to include a call for countries to put into place strong market infrastructure, including more rigorous accounting standards, better regulation, stricter disclosure and stronger corporate governance. As the international community struggled to define this new consensus, it was often to US examples that it turned, albeit grudgingly. And where there were big differences, those of us representing the US were typically reluctant to cede the case. This is harder to justify now.

The single most significant flaw in national security strategy is thinking in constrained games terms, particularly the polarized win/lose. Understanding any game that models real world situations requires the addition of two new strategic positions--Not Lose (NL) and Not Let Them Win (NLTW)

Anyone who comes here to the jungles of Basilan, home to the Abu Sayyaf movement that we're supposed to destroy, discovers pretty quickly that Abu Sayyaf isn't a militant Islamic terror group. It's simply a gang of about 60 brutal thugs.

Ashcroft's broad edict, issued in October in the wake of the terrorist attacks, encourages government officials to find reasons to withhold information, and signals that the Justice Department will back them up. This is a significant departure from the general policy of openness adopted by former Attorney General Janet Reno, who advised officials to release records unless disclosure would result in foreseeable harm. While Ashcroft frames the issue as one of national security in a time of war, his memo also directs officials to be mindful of "institutional, commercial, and personal privacy interests" when considering FOIA requests.

As the Foreign Minister and I were speaking before, that pipeline was closed 266 days last year. Colombia loses probably 40 million dollars a month in revenues. For those of you who are interested in the environment, over the last 15 years the attacks to that pipeline has put out into the Colombian soil almost two million of barrels of oil. That equals eight "Exxon-Valdez" spills in Alaska.

Military and civilian officials here and Basilan island expressed alarm yesterday over US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's admission that 200 American troops are already in a jungle training camp, despite unresolved issues in the Balikatan war games' Terms of Reference (TOR).

Even more alarming was the same official's claim that exercises would be expanding to Jolo, Sulu and "other parts of Mindanao island."

A top ranking Southern Command official, who requested anonymity, expressed anger at Rumsfeld's remarks at a Pentagon press briefing.

"We have been under orders to keep all US troop movements strictly confidential. That is for their (US troops') security. I am surprised that the US defense secretary would admit what we are supposed to keep secret," the official said.

Making her strongest defense yet of the controversial Philippine-US Balikatan 02-1 military exercise in Mindanao, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo declared Friday that anyone opposed to the presence of American forces here to train local troops to fight the Abu Sayyaf Muslim bandit group was "not a Filipino".

Speaking at her weekly press conference in Malacañang, Ms Macapagal said: "If you are not a Filipino, then who are you? A protector of terrorists, a cohort of murderers, an Abu Sayyaf lover.

"You care more for terrorists than for your own soldier who defends you. You care more for bandits and the camp of Osama bin Laden than your country, which seeks to help you."

"No President of the Philippines, and we have had 13 of them, had ever dared say that any Filipino who happens to disagree with the President is not a Filipino," Sen. Joker Arroyo of the ruling Lakas said in a three-paragraph statement in his own handwriting.

"Not even (the late strongman Ferdinand) Marcos denied any of his opponents their birthright," Arroyo said.

"Is this the measure of the President's IQ or that of her advisers?"

Why President Macapagal is suddenly talking like this is puzzling. She is an intelligent person, and it does not require great intelligence to know that there may be Filipinos who are opposed to the American military engagement in Mindanao precisely because they care for their country and the welfare of the Filipino soldier. What they oppose is not the campaign to terminate the Abu Sayyaf, but the use of means that are contrary to law and are likely to produce greater injury to the nation.

It used to be an arrestable offence to walk down a street in Germany wearing a T-shirt bearing the RAF logo of the notorious Red Army Faction terrorist group. These days it amounts to a fashion statement.

In 1996 Mark Stahlman, a former technology analyst on Wall Street, espoused his theories about the rise of the New Dark Age. At that time, he couldn't have foreseen how quickly circumstances would develop to this end. Even so, the new dark age has turned out to be not exactly what he -- or many others like him -- thought it would be. Then, in the heyday of the "Internet Revolution", it was considered that technology would play a fundamental role in the new dark age. In essence, the new dark age would be primarily a digital dark age.

Recent events, however, have shown this not to be the case. Unlike Stahlman's prophecy that we would be psychologically programmed and that new media networks would become the mechanism of psychological destruction and seamless surveillance, the new dark age has descended in a much more simple manner: that of self-censorship and collective amnesia. In other words, the latest in technological wizardry is not required to plunge us into the depths of darkness.

The Common Language Runtime is being sold as a libertarian technology that levels the playing field for minority languages. The CLR would offer to all languages a neutral typesystem, a state-of-the-art back-end compiler, runtime and set of enterprise-class frameworks. VisualStudio.NET makes this complete with a first-rate IDE that can be extended to support any language. It would almost zero the barrier to entry for new languages.

The reality looks much darker instead. The CLR is not truly language-neutral, and it will ostensibly favor languages that look a lot like C#. Those not in this group will be severely bastardized, producing dialects which are really "C# with another syntax"; look at ISE's Eiffel# (or even Microsoft's own VB.NET and J#) for great examples. Programmers' choice will be limited to superficial features: whether to delimit their blocks with curly braces, Begin/End or parentheses. It's also worth notice that the CTS/CTS do not allow use of the full set of CLR features; for example, unsigned integers are supported by the CLR but not considered language-neutral, simply because many languages share Java's abomination for the signed/unsigned duality (this includes Microsoft's own VB) and there's no good solution for this issue.

As shown in this review of our picks for the 12 most destructive pieces of technology legislation introduced in the 107th Congress, there is good evidence that policymakers--whether through conscious design or not--are adopting the telecom regulatory paradigm for the tech sector. It appears that the tech sector may be pigeonholed into that paradigm simply because it offers a familiar set of rules and a bank of regulatory agencies that can be activated on command.

American and Jordanian sources told the Arabic daily Al-Sharq al-Aswat that Iran was "directly and clearly" involved in 17 incidents in which missiles and mortar shells were fired into Israel from Jordan. The attacks were allegedly carried out by members of the Islamic terrorist groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who were trained in Iranian military camps or in similar camps in Lebanon.

We are friends of the United States, we are friends of that people and we will remain so. But we are threatened today by a new simplism which consists in reducing everything to the war on terrorism. That is their approach, but we cannot accept that idea. You have got to tackle the root causes, the situations, poverty, injustice.

Despite questions about the raid, American forces continue to go after what they believe are groups of Al Qaeda or Taliban leaders. An intelligence official said tonight that a Predator drone fired a Hellfire antitank missile at a group of people in the Zawar Khili area of Afghanistan on Monday, and some them were believed killed. Although their identities have not been determined, American officials believe some of the people in the group were leaders of Al Qaeda, based on the number of vehicles in the convoy they had been traveling in.

There has been an historic transition in which Type I terrorism and Type II terrorism are being combined. Type I terrorism consists of acts by individuals or small groups that aim to impose terror on other individuals and groups, and through them indirectly on their governments. Type II terrorism is the imposition by a government on groups of local or foreign populations. The new type of terrorism -- Type III -- is carried out by a substantially larger group of individuals, is aimed directly at a national population, and has all the components for success. The article deals with how this new terrorism, at very little psychic cost on the perpetrators, disrupts personal and historic memory through large-scale catastrophe organized for that purpose. Type III terrorism is made easier by the ready availability of high-level technology. Target nations will not have open to them the conventional responses, and will have to devise new, preventive measures.

What is globalization? Who is it for? What is it going to do to a country like India, in which social inequality has been institutionalized in the caste system for centuries? A country in which 700 million people live in rural areas. In which 80 percent of the landholdings are small farms. In which 300 million people are illiterate. Is the corporatization and globalization of agriculture, water supply, electricity and essential commodities going to pull India out of the stagnant morass of poverty, illiteracy and religious bigotry? Is the dismantling and auctioning off of elaborate public sector infrastructure, developed with public money over the past fifty years, really the way forward? Is globalization going to close the gap between the privileged and the underprivileged, between the upper castes and the lower castes, between the educated and the illiterate? Or is it going to give those who already have a centuries-old head start a friendly helping hand?

What many term the "Grid" offers a potential means of surmounting these obstacles to progress. Built on the Internet and the World Wide Web, the Grid is a new class of infrastructure. By providing scalable, secure, high-performance mechanisms for discovering and negotiating access to remote resources, the Grid promises to make it possible for scientific collaborations to share resources on an unprecedented scale, and for geographically distributed groups to work together in ways that were previously impossible.

You may think it unfair to pull a broader message from this tiny and relatively sweet incident. You may think Ashcroft's gesture does not necessarily bespeak some sort of larger truth about the current administration, its value system, the direction of the country, the overall misogynistic, monastic, dangerously unprogressive, hypocritical attitude of our leaders as a whole, or how we are enjoying at this very moment what is easily the most conservative, sexually terrified, ill-humored, anti-choice regime in 50 years.

You would be wrong.

The dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has denounced research being conducted by Army scientists to infect monkeys with smallpox, saying that it "morally undermines" the war against terrorism and sets a dangerous example for other countries.

Rumsfeld: Exactly. And therefore, our soldiers don't go around killing innocent people. Nor do our soldiers go around pretending they are civilians and blurring that distinction between a combatant and a non-combatant. That's what puts civilians at risk.

Q: Well, you're examining right now the case of Hasam Quedam in which it is said that our Special Forces went in and through a horrible mistake killed 15-21 people who were not Taliban, but in fact supporters of the new government.

Rumsfeld: Is that a question?

Q: Yes, because you just said we don't go around killing innocent people. I take your point --

Rumsfeld: Well, we don't.

Q: -- except you've launched that investigation to see whether we, in fact, did.

Rumsfeld: Of course, we do. We always launch an investigation. I don't -- the commander and the command does. If there are legitimate questions raised about some action, it's perfectly appropriate for them to do exactly what they did and say "stop for a minute, we're going to go take a look. We're going to see what actually happened."

Now, is it possible that everyone's accurate? That is to say, that in that attack there might have been some people who were Taliban, there might have been some people who were al-Qaeda, and there might have also been some people that weren't? And in the same room. Because this is Afghanistan.

Q: Well, sir, we're out of time, but will you pledge that whatever the investigation shows, you will release that information to the American people and the world?

Rumsfeld: Why, of course.

The second target was a former school building. Armed men were living there, and the U.S. military believed the building had become an al Qaeda hideout. But according to local residents and officials, the building was actually the headquarters of a disarmament commission, where officials were collecting weapons from the countryside. The officials had been appointed by the new anti-Taliban governor, Jan Mohammed Khan. -- NPR report

U.S. officials claim the Pentagon did not pay the money, indicating it was provided instead by Hamid Karzai's interim Afghan government, which they say got the money from the CIA. The CIA denies providing the money. Afghan officials say the death toll was 21; the U.S. military puts the figure at 15. -- ABC News report

On January 16, 1979, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, boarded an aircraft at Mehrabad airport in Tehran and flew into exile. Within minutes of his departure the streets of the city were full of people, dancing and singing, hooting their car horns and waving portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini. The clerics rode to power in Iran on a tide of popular support. Now the mullahs must look anxiously out upon the streets they once controlled.

"It's clear in my mind that one president of a friendly country does not threaten another friendly country," Justice Secretary Hernando Perez said. "We don't depend on what the Americans claims to be necessary. We do seek assistance from them in case of need, but that doesn't mean they will run the foreign policy of our country."

Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes said Washington was free to freeze the assets of groups linked with terrorism or pursue diplomatic measures. "But some people would want to interpret it to mean that the US will impose its will, but we're a self-respecting sovereign state, and we will not allow any other country to impose its will on us if it's against our national interest," he said.

Our investigation identified significant problems beyond those Enron has already disclosed. Enron employees involved in the partnerships were enriched, in the aggregate, by tens of millions of dollars they should never have received -- Fastow by at least $30 million, Kopper by at least $10 million, two others by $1 million each, and still two more by amounts we believe were at least in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. We have seen no evidence that any of these employees, except Fastow, obtained the permission required by Enron's Code of Conduct of Business Affairs to own interests in the partnerships. Moreover, the extent of Fastow's ownership and financial windfall was inconsistent with his representations to Enron's Board of Directors.

This personal enrichment of Enron employees, however, was merely one aspect of a deeper and more serious problem. These partnerships -- Chewco, LJM1, and LJM2 -- were used by Enron Management to enter into transactions that it could not, or would not, do with unrelated commercial entities. Many of the most significant transactions apparently were designed to accomplish favorable financial statement results, not to achieve bona fide economic objectives or to transfer risk. Some transactions were designed so that, had they followed applicable accounting rules, Enron could have kept assets and liabilities (especially debt) off of its balance sheet; but the transactions did not follow those rules.

The CIA, Israel's Mossad, and Palestinian security services have conducted their own independent investigations. All three "investigators" have withheld their conclusions up to this point for different reasons. According to the estimates of the intelligence services, Saudi Arabian businessmen paid $10 million dollars to Iran for the weapons carried on the "Karine A." Rent for the ship cost $400,000, and fuel, repairs, and harbor fees cost $1 million.

Is a new world possible? Activists who fight corporate globalization certainly believe so. Those struggling to oppose corporate globalization are more than simply critics of the current system. Though global opposition to the negative effects of the world's current economic and political systems continues to grow, every time those protesting corporate globalization appear en masse to call attention to a global financial body like the International Monetary Fund or World Trade Organization, their critics accuse them of offering little more than condemnation. "We know what you're against," critics say, "BUT WHAT ARE YOU FOR?" The truth is, activists struggling to oppose corporate globalization offer many models of alternative ways to envision a new society. From developing viable economic alternatives to global capitalism to creating more effective ideas for educating children, from envisioning non-hierarchical means of organizing society to conceiving ways to enable more equality in interpersonal relationships, those who hope to create a better world offer infinite visions for a way to do just that.

Just a ruse to justify settling old scores with Iraq, which has long defied United Nations efforts to strip it of its illicit weapons of mass destruction? Or a ploy to help justify Mr Bush's decision to scrap the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia and build new missile defences? To many a seasoned anti-proliferation warrior, the president was simply stating the obvious: in a world of terrorism without constraint, tackling the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons is just as urgent as ripping up the terrorist networks that might seek to make use of them.

As in any war, it helps to know the enemy. There are more than three of them. In a report published just before the Bush administration came into office, America's then secretary of defence, William Cohen, picked out "at least 25" countries that either possess, or are trying to develop, weapons of mass destruction or the means to deliver them. Since chemical and biological weapons are outlawed, and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) allows for only five official nuclear powers--the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France--plenty of governments are clearly up to no good.

The government's plan is to establish a computer network linking every reservation system in the United States to private and government databases. The network would use data-mining and predictive software to profile passenger activity and intuit obscure clues about potential threats, even before the scheduled day of flight.

It might find, for instance, that one man used a debit card to buy tickets for four other men who sit in separate parts of the same plane -- four men who have shared addresses in the past. Or it might discern an array of unusual links and travel habits among passengers on different flights.