Kangaroo Courts
Bush's latest self-justification is his claim to be protecting jurors (by doing away with juries). Worse, his gung-ho advisers have convinced him — as well as some gullible commentators — that the Star Chamber tribunals he has ordered are "implementations" of the lawful Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Military attorneys are silently seething because they know that to be untrue. The U.C.M.J. demands a public trial, proof beyond reasonable doubt, an accused's voice in the selection of juries and right to choose counsel, unanimity in death sentencing and above all appellate review by civilians confirmed by the Senate. Not one of those fundamental rights can be found in Bush's military order setting up kangaroo courts for people he designates before "trial" to be terrorists. Bush's fiat turns back the clock on all advances in military justice, through three wars, in the past half-century.

His advisers assured him that a fearful majority would cheer his assumption of dictatorial power to ignore our courts. They failed to warn him, however, that his denial of traditional American human rights to non- citizens would backfire and in practice actually weaken the war on terror.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/26/opinion/26SAFI.html?todaysheadlines

Learning From Israel and Its Mistakes
The first responses to the attacks sounded quite familiar to me. America, it was said, was attacked not as a result of anything it had done but simply because of what it is. Globalization, cultural domination and support for oppressive regimes were not immediately considered plausible causes for the attacks. In the same way, many Israelis ignore the causes that lead Palestinians to wage a war of terror against them, choosing instead to argue that they have been attacked not for anything they have done but simply for who they are.

The attacks on targets in New York and Washington were perceived as attacks on every individual American; a huge wave of patriotic togetherness gripped the country. Nowhere — except in Israel — have I ever seen so many flags displayed. (In Israel people sometimes put up American flags in addition to our own flag.) Nowhere except in Israel have I seen a similarly enthusiastic wave of voluntarism and donations. Israelis often say that war brings out the best in us; something similar seems to be true in this country.

Other reactions also sounded familiar. Americans say, "We have survived Pearl Harbor; we will survive bin Laden." In Israel people often say, "We have survived the Holocaust; we shall survive Yasir Arafat." Then there is the worry that "the world" (meaning some United States allies in the Middle East) is not supportive enough of America's fight. Israelis, too, often contend that the whole world is against them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/25/opinion/25SEGE.htmlLearning From Israel and Its Mistakes

An Alternate Reality
From an economist's point of view, the most revealing indicator of what's really happening is the post- Sept. 11 fondness of politicians for "lump-sum transfers." That's economese for payments that aren't contingent on the recipient's actions, and which therefore give no incentive for changed behavior. That's good if the transfer is meant to help someone in need, without reducing his motivation to work. It's bad if the alleged purpose of the transfer is to get the recipient to do something useful, like invest or hire more workers.

So it tells you something when Congress votes $15 billion in aid and loan guarantees for airline companies but not a penny for laid-off airline workers. It tells you even more when the House passes a "stimulus" bill that contains almost nothing for the unemployed but includes $25 billion in retroactive corporate tax cuts — that is, pure lump-sum transfers to corporations, most of them highly profitable.

Most political reporting about the stimulus debate describes it as a conflict of ideologies. But ideology has nothing to do with it. No economic doctrine I'm aware of, right or left, says that an $800 million lump-sum transfer to General Motors will lead to more investment when the company is already sitting on $8 billion in cash.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/25/opinion/25KRUG.html?todaysheadlines

Legal Powers Are Expanded in Bush Plan
President Bush's authorization of secret military tribunals for noncitizens accused of terrorism and the systematic interviewing of 5,000 young Middle Eastern men in the country on temporary visas is well known. But broad new powers are also contained in more obscure provisions.

A recent rule change published without announcement in the Federal Register gives the government wide latitude to keep noncitizens in detention even when an immigration judge has ordered them freed.
And under new laws, the attorney general can detain for deportation any noncitizen who he has "reasonable grounds to believe" is "engaged in any activity that endangers the national security of the United States," according to a recent internal Immigration and Naturalization Service memorandum.

Critics have said that the administration's measures, taken together, amount to singling out people on the basis of nationality or ethnicity.

"We have decided to trade off the liberty of immigrants — particularly Arabs and Muslims — for the purported security of the majority," said David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University who often represents detained foreigners.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/25/politics/25LEGA.html?pagewanted=all

“A cynic might think that domestic extremists who share the attorney general's antipathy to abortion and gun control — and are opposed to the likes of Mr. Leahy and Tom Daschle — receive a free pass denied to suspicious-looking immigrants.”

Wait Until Dark
If the administration were really proud of how it's grabbing "emergency" powers that skirt the law, it wouldn't do so in the dead of night. It wasn't enough for Congress to enhance Mr. Ashcroft's antiterrorist legal arsenal legitimately by passing the U.S.A.-Patriot Act before anyone could read it; now he rewrites more rules without consulting senators or congressmen of either party at all. He abridged by decree the Freedom of Information Act, an essential check on government malfeasance in peace and war alike, and discreetly slipped his new directive allowing eavesdropping on conversations between some lawyers and clients into the Federal Register. He has also refused repeated requests to explain himself before Congressional committees, finally relenting to a nominal appearance in December. At one House briefing, according to Time magazine, he told congressmen they could call an 800 number if they had any questions about what Justice is up to.
This kind of high-handedness and secrecy has been a hallmark of the administration beginning Jan. 20, not Sept. 11. The Cheney energy task force faced a lawsuit from the General Accounting Office rather than reveal its dealings with Bush-Cheney campaign contributors like those at the now imploding Enron Corporation. The president's commission on Social Security reform also bent the law to meet in secret. But since the war began, the administration has gone to unprecedented lengths to restrict news coverage of not only its own activities but also Osama bin Laden's. A Bush executive order diminishing access to presidential papers could restrict a future David McCullough or Michael Beschloss from reconstructing presidential histories. To consolidate his own power, Mr. Ashcroft even seized authority from Mary Jo White, the battle-proven U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted both the 1993 World Trade Center terrorists and the bin Laden accomplices in the 1998 African embassy bombings. He has similarly shunted aside state and local law-enforcement officials by keeping them in the dark before issuing his vague warnings of imminent terrorist attacks.

Thanks to a journalist, Sara Rimer of The Times, we now know that one of the attorney general's secret detainees was in fact a local official: Dr. Irshad Shaikh, a Johns Hopkins- educated legal immigrant who serves as the city health commissioner of Chester, Pa. Dr. Shaikh's door was broken down by federal agents who suspected he might be an anthrax terrorist. It's all too easy to see why Mr. Ashcroft wants to hide embarrassing fiascoes like this. But it's also likely that the attorney general wants to hide the arrests he is not making along with the errant ones that he is.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/24/opinion/24RICH.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

We Have the Right Courts for Bin Laden
Two unsound proposals have recently emerged. The first, and by far more dangerous, is already law: the president's misguided and much criticized order authorizing secret trials before an American military commission. The second, more benign approach, offered by prominent international lawyers, is to try terrorists before an as yet uncreated international tribunal.

Both options are wrong because both rest on the same faulty assumption: that our own federal courts cannot give full, fair and swift justice in such a case. If we want to show the world our commitment to the very rule of law that the terrorists sought to undermine, why not try mass murderers who kill American citizens on American soil in American courts?
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/23/opinion/23KOH.html?todaysheadlines

Disaster Gives the Uninsured Wider Access to Medicaid
The need for health coverage is a vexing old problem that has become much worse since Sept. 11. Before the attack on the World Trade Center, one of four people in New York City had no health insurance. Since then, layoffs have driven the number far higher, though no precise figures are yet available. As a temporary solution, on Sept. 19, the state began offering four months of disaster-relief Medicaid to all low-income residents of the city, not just those directly affected by the attacks.

In the last six weeks, 75,000 families have applied. Before Sept. 11, typically only 8,000 New Yorkers a month applied for Medicaid, health care experts say.

Health insurance has always been an important part of physical and financial security. But since Sept. 11, as the people who lined up Wednesday morning at the Boerum Hill Medicaid office explained, it has become something far more elemental, a life's necessity in a city now preoccupied with death.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/23/nyregion/23INSU.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

What Did You Do Before the War?
"There is a whole body of information out there in public records that people are generally not aware of," said James E. Lee, a spokesman for ChoicePoint (news/quote), a company based near Atlanta that compiles and searches public records.

Before the dawn of the Web, most of this personal information remained out of the spotlight. Because records were stored in the offices of individual companies and courts, often in backroom file cabinets or offline computer systems, they were difficult and costly to search. The shift to digital storage has meant that many of those records are now widely available.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the demand for such information has increased — and the inquiries are coming not only from law enforcement agencies. Organizations that conduct background checks report a surge in requests over the last two months from companies that want to screen job applicants and employees. More and more employers are discovering that they can now tap into a new generation of databases that integrate public and some private records, making the search process easier and less expensive than ever.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/22/technology/circuits/22CHEC.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

Cyberspace Seen as Potential Battleground
"While bin Laden may have his finger on the trigger," he added, "his grandson might have his finger on the mouse."

Security experts who monitor attempts at computer intrusion say that other new tools and tricks are coming into use in that arena as well. In recent weeks, computer security experts have come to believe that malicious hackers have developed tools to take over computers using the Unix operating system through a vulnerability in a nearly ubiquitous computer communications protocol known as SSH.

Those experts say that they find the SSH flaw especially worrisome because it could provide a hacker who successfully attacks it unrestricted access to a computer. An intruder could gain access to machines linked to the compromised computer, could destroy all of the data on the machine or could use it to carry out denial of service attacks. "It's pretty nasty," said Dan Ingevaldson, a security researcher at ISS, a major vendor of security software and service.

The weakness in SSH has been identified since early this year, and many system administrators have fixed the problem with patches, but until recently the theoretical vulnerability had not been subjected to actual attack. Recently, however, security experts have noticed a sharp increase in probes by outsiders of a specific spot in their network known as Port 22 — the part of the system that SSH uses — presumably to see which machines are still open to attack. "They wouldn't be doing the scanning if it wasn't paying off for them," said Kevin L. Poulsen, editorial director of a SecurityFocus, a company that provides computer security information.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/23/technology/23CYBE.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

U.S. Hunting Antiviral Drug to Use in Case of Smallpox
Two promising antiviral candidates have been identified, and one of them, cidofovir, has already been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, for use against cytomegalovirus, which causes illness in some people with AIDS.

Last month the National Institutes of Health applied to the drug agency for permission to use cidofovir for smallpox on an experimental basis. The company that makes the drug, Gilead Sciences Inc. of Foster City, Calif., could increase production in three to six months, but so far the government has not placed an order, said Dr. William A. Lee, Gilead's vice president for research.

Drugs that might be used against smallpox are hard to test for that purpose: the disease was eradicated in people more than 20 years ago, and no animal is naturally infected with the virus
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/23/national/23POXD.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

Increased Spending on Drugs Is Linked to More Advertising
Increases in the sales of the 50 drugs that were most heavily advertised to consumers accounted for almost half the $20.8 billion increase in drug spending last year, according to the study. The remainder of the spending increase came from 9,850 prescription medicines that companies did not advertise or advertised very little.

The study attributed the spending increase to a boost in the number of prescriptions for the 50 drugs, and not from a rise in their price.

Only the United States and New Zealand permit advertising of prescription medicines to consumers. The advertising has grown more controversial as both the number of ads and spending on prescription drugs continue to rise.

The Food and Drug Administration is now reviewing whether it should change rules it enacted in 1997 that made it easier for pharmaceutical companies to advertise their products on television.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/21/business/21DRUG.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

News: Web ads watch the clock instead of clicks
Sessions are just one of many new online ad formats bubbling up to lure reluctant advertisers to spend money on the Internet. But online ad experts said the sessions may push advertising out of a rut by recasting the way publishers and advertisers price Web ads and measure their success.

More than changing shape or style, the new format touts the measurements traditional advertisers have come to feel comfortable with in print, television and radio. Known as "reach" and "frequency," they refer to the audience an advertisement reaches and the amount of time people see it.

Such measurements are also common in brand advertising--the Holy Grail for Internet publishers hoping to tap the budgets of major consumer packaged-goods advertisers.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5099772,00.html

News: Privacy suffers at health Web sites
About 65 million Americans have sought health information on the Internet, but many of their online activities are not protected by U.S. medical privacy rules, a report released Monday said.

The Bush administration unveiled the first legal protections for medical information last April. The rules, which take full effect in April 2003, aim to give patients more control over who sees sensitive, personal information.

Consumers should be aware, however, that the rules will not cover most purchases, searches or other actions on thousands of health-related Web sites, the report said.
"Many probably assume that the personal information they provide to health Web sites is covered by the new regulation, and they are wrong," Susannah Fox, research director for the Pew Internet Project, said in a statement.

That means the sites can collect information and are not required by law to keep it confidential, the report said.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5099803,00.html

Earth from Space
Earth from Space provides several ways to search the selected images. Each image is available in three resolutions and includes a cataloging data and a caption. However, this site contains only a small selection of the best of our Earth photography.
Clickable Map
http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov/categories.html
Click on the area you want to search.
Search will return photos within a 5 degree range of latitude/longitude. More specific searches by latitude and longitude can be performed from the technical search page.

http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov/

The Vanishing Act
Seldom in the last half-century has the U.S. been so poorly prepared to assist individuals and families struggling with the effects of a recession. Example: the unemployment insurance system, which was established to ease the pain of temporary joblessness, covers less than 40 percent of the people who are out of work. Example: the food stamp program, which was supposed to slam the door on hunger in the world's greatest nation (and which once served 90 percent of eligible families), now serves just 60 percent of the poverty- stricken folks who qualify for help.

And then there's welfare. In the summer of 1996 Bill Clinton signed the so-called reform bill ending "welfare as we know it." Among other things, it imposed a five-year lifetime limit on welfare assistance to needy families.

The potentially tragic consequences of that legislation were concealed for a while by the extraordinary economic boom in the last half of the decade. But Daniel Patrick Moynihan and others had warned all along of the dire implications of ending the guarantee of federal help to the nation's poorest families. Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund noted that supporters of the welfare bill assumed there would be "no recession in the next decade, which is unprecedented."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/19/opinion/19HERB.html?todaysheadlines

With Water and Sweat, Fighting the Most Stubborn Fire
In a hot flaming fire, many toxic chemicals are incinerated, with little given off except carbon soot, carbon dioxide, water vapor and other fairly innocuous emissions.

But the relatively low temperatures of the trade center fires mean that traces of dozens of toxic chemicals and heavy metals are carried into the air, including benzene, a cancer-causing compound released when fuels are burned, and styrene, a gas emitted by burning plastic. At times the chemicals in the air at the site reach dangerous levels, particularly when fire flares up, as it did on Nov. 8.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/19/nyregion/19FIRE.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

Challenge Revives SAT Test Debate
In the nine months since the university president, Richard C. Atkinson, proposed that his system stop requiring the main SAT exam, he has brought attention to an arcane debate that was being conducted mostly at gatherings of psychometricians and on small liberal arts campuses.

Unlike those previous conclaves, hundreds of professors and administrators from perhaps the nation's most influential public university system gathered this weekend to discuss what many perceive as the exam's major shortcomings: that it is a distraction to too many high school students, and that it further handicaps disadvantaged students, particularly minority students.

Signaling the broader reach of this gathering, which was titled "Rethinking the SAT," representatives of other state university systems, including those of Washington and New Jersey, as well as from private colleges mostly from the West, joined the conference.

But the end of the test, known as the SAT I, is not yet in sight…
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/19/education/19EXAM.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

News: Citibank offers free Web payment service
Who says the days of the free Web are over?

Banking giant Citibank announced Thursday that it will soon remove fees for all U.S. transactions on its c2it online payment service. Previously the company charged people 1 percent of the transaction cost to send money.

Citibank made the change to expand the number of users of its service and of online payments in general, said Antony Jenkins, chief operating officer of c2it. The service has about 200,000 users, compared with about 11 million users for market leader PayPal.

"We think this is a key opportunity for Citigroup," Jenkins said. "Removing the price point is important because it allows us to grow quicker.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5099713,00.html

Powell Outlines Steps Needed for Israeli-Palestinian Accord
Mr. Powell said Israel must be willing to end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and recognize that Palestinians have legitimate grievances, including the building of Israeli settlements, the deaths of innocent civilians and the daily annoyances and indignities of going through checkpoints.

And he said Palestinian leaders must hunt down and prosecute terrorists who attack Israeli civilians if Israel is ever to shed its doubts about whether the Palestinians really want peace. "The intifada is now mired in the quicksand of self-defeating violence and terror directed against Israel," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/19/international/19CND-DIPLO.html

Israeli Tanks Enter Palestinian Territory, Kill Two Policemen
In Monday's incursion, three Israeli tanks drove about 900 yards into Palestinian territory near the town of Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip, police said. Witnesses said troops fired randomly from tank-mounted machine guns. The Israeli military had no comment on the raid.

On Sunday evening, two armed Palestinians were killed by Israeli tank fire about half a mile south of the Jewish settlement of Dugit in northern Gaza, said an army spokesman, Capt. Jacob Dallal.

However, Palestinian police said the officers, members of the naval police, were killed about three miles south of Dugit.

The Palestinian police commander in Gaza, Brig. Gen. Abdel Razek Majaida, said members of the naval police who witnessed the incident told him the two men were lying wounded on the ground when they were killed by Israeli troops.

Dallal denied the charges. ``The armed terrorists were approaching the settlement and they were shot and killed,'' he said.

Palestinian doctors said tanks drove over the bodies. The body of one of the policemen was mangled, his head flattened.

As part of the incident, two Israeli tanks and an armored personnel carrier drove about a half-mile into the coastal neighborhood of Sudaniyeh in the town of Beit Lahia, Palestinian officials said. The armored vehicles fired machine guns and shells.

Two shells punched holes into the private American International School, which has American teachers and is attended by Palestinian children. School officials had no immediate comment. A large American flag flew atop the building.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html

Waiting for America
In the bitterness and violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today, can there be any hope of peace? Two longtime negotiators, Yasir Abed Rabbo of the Palestinian Authority and Yossi Beilin, former justice minister of Israel, insist that there can. But they both say it will require U.S. intervention.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/17/opinion/17LEWI.html

Seizing Dictatorial Power
Misadvised by a frustrated and panic-stricken attorney general, a president of the United States has just assumed what amounts to dictatorial power to jail or execute aliens. Intimidated by terrorists and inflamed by a passion for rough justice, we are letting George W. Bush get away with the replacement of the American rule of law with military kangaroo courts.

In his infamous emergency order, Bush admits to dismissing "the principles of law and the rules of evidence" that undergird America's system of justice. He seizes the power to circumvent the courts and set up his own drumhead tribunals — panels of officers who will sit in judgment of non-citizens who the president need only claim "reason to believe" are members of terrorist organizations.

Not content with his previous decision to permit police to eavesdrop on a suspect's conversations with an attorney, Bush now strips the alien accused of even the limited rights afforded by a court-martial.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/15/opinion/15SAFI.html

News: Chip revolution turns 30
The foundation of modern computing was something of an accident.

The Intel 4004 Microprocessor, which debuted thirty years ago Thursday, sparked a technological revolution because it was the first product to fuse the essential elements of a programmable computer into a single chip.

Since then, processors have allowed manufacturers to embed intelligence into PCs, elevators, air bags, cameras, cell phones, beepers, key chains and farm equipment, among other devices.

But that's not the way the story was supposed to turn out.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2824457,00.html

Al Qaeda Plans for Nuclear Bomb Reportedly Found
Al Qaeda Plans for Nuclear Bomb Reportedly Found
Detailed plans for a nuclear bomb similar to the one used on Nagasaki have been discovered in a hastily abandoned al Qaeda safe house in the Afghan capital of Kabul. The Times of London said that, after Kabul was taken by Northern Alliance fighters, one of its reporters covering the war in Afghanistan discovered the notes, along with applications for Canadian passports and other instructional material about weapons and bomb-making. Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader suspected of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S., has previously claimed that his terrorist organization had a nuclear bomb. Western officials have dismissed that claim, but they say there is evidence that al Qaeda has tried to acquire chemical and biological weapons, as well as materials to build a nuclear bomb.
http://www.publicagenda.org/headlines/headline.htm

The Tower Builder
On September 11th, each building took the impact of a 767 (which is nearly twenty per cent heavier than a 707) and stood long enough to allow most of the people below the crash sites—the ninety-fourth floor to the ninety-ninth floor in the north tower, and the seventy-eighth floor to the eighty-fourth floor in the south tower—to escape. Had the buildings toppled immediately, nearly all those survivors would have died, and there would have been huge losses as well in the buildings and streets around the towers. The fact that the terrorists chose to hit the buildings on opposite faces suggests to some that they intended to knock the buildings over—which would have increased the destruction and loss of life. "Ninety-nine per cent of all buildings would collapse immediately when hit by a 767," Jon Magnusson said.
http://www.newyorker.com/FACT/

Death of a Child: How Israel's Army Responds
Khalil Mughrabi, an 11-year-old Palestinian boy, was resting after a soccer game on July 7 in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, when an Israeli tank fired warning shots to repel nearby protesters. A bullet pierced the boy's head, killing him instantly.

Last week a sheaf of documents from the Israeli Army arrived at the offices of the human rights group B'tselem, containing records of a military inquiry into the incident.
B'tselem had asked the army about the case, and unexpectedly received the military's file of its internal investigation through an unusual — and apparently inadvertent — disclosure. An accompanying letter informed B'tselem that no criminal wrongdoing by soldiers was suspected, and therefore the military police would not investigate.

But the file tells a different story, strongly suggesting culpability by the soldiers. It provides a rare glimpse of how the Israeli Army investigates killings, decides whether to take disciplinary action and formulates public responses.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/13/international/middleeast/13ISRA.html

Ballots Cast by Blacks and Older Voters Were Tossed in Far Greater Numbers
"The finding about black voters is really strong," said Philip Klinkner, a political science professor at Hamilton College who has studied the Florida vote and reviewed the Times study. "It raises the issue about whether there's some way that the voting system is set up that discriminates against blacks."

There is no conclusive evidence of systematic efforts to discriminate against blacks, but this pattern — the same kind that courts look at in determining racial discrimination in voting rights lawsuits — raises suspicions.

"It raises questions about how they administer elections — where they put the best voting machines, how many poll workers they put out, what kind of education is done," Mr. Klinkner said.

Alan J. Lichtman, a political science professor at American University, said, "It suggests there was not just a disparate effect, but disparate treatment — not necessarily deliberate — of black voters in the election." Mr. Lichtman came to a similar conclusion in a study of more limited data for the United States Civil Rights Commission.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/politics/recount/12NUMB.html

Sagging Economy Threatens Health Coverage
A 1986 federal law allows people to keep their health insurance even after they lose their jobs, but they must pick up the full cost of the premiums — a huge burden for someone laid off, as much as $500 or $600 a month for coverage of a family, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

At the same time, state officials and health care experts are warning that the basic government safety net for covering low-income people — the Medicaid program, jointly financed by the states and the federal government — is under increasing strain. Declining tax revenues because of the economy, rising health care costs and an expected jump in the Medicaid caseload because of layoffs all make for a dangerous combination, officials say.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/national/12HEAL.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

Israeli Minister Vacates Home After Assassination Warning
Israeli security agencies have been on alert for possible threats to senior Israeli political and military figures since the assassination on Oct. 17 of Rehavam Zeevi at a Jerusalem hotel. The militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility for that killing, calling it revenge for Israel's assassination of the group's leader, Mustafa Zibri, known as Abu Ali Mustafa, in a helicopter missile strike on his headquarters in August.

The killing of Mr. Zibri, a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organization, marked the first time Israel had assassinated the head of a Palestinian faction as part of its policy of killing suspected militants. Israeli officials said that Mr. Zibri had organized terrorist cells responsible for several car bombings, but Palestinian officials called him a political figure, and warned of retaliation in kind.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/international/middleeast/10MIDE.html

Harsh Civics Lesson for Immigrants
The startling new lesson about this country for the immigrant owner, accountant, maître d' and busboy at the Crazy Tomato restaurant was forced upon them a month ago in a incident known as the perp walk.

This was the photo arranged by law-enforcement officials that saw the four Islamic restaurant workers and five Islamic friends paraded in prison stripes, leg irons and manacles across the front page of the hometown newspaper.

The preceding court hearing had been tightly closed to public view, with the windows taped and a gag order invoked against ever discussing it. So the perp, as in perpetrator, walk would have to do for anyone curious about the innocence or guilt of the nine caught in the terrorist dragnet.

"I am so happy to come back to my real life," declared Khaled Nassr, exultant tonight at surviving the perp walk and standing fetter- free once more as maître d' at the Crazy Tomato.

"All I want to do is make a better future," said Mr. Nassr, more interested in discussing the veal parmigiano than Osama bin Laden.

But diners kept apologetically chatting to him about the experience of the Egyptian newcomers in this American community who, while never charged with crimes, were taken off in chains for a week.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/11/national/11JOUR.html

Single Letter With Anthrax Is Discounted
We're thinking there may be one more letter and maybe more than one," said Kenneth Newman, the deputy chief postal inspector for investigations.

The basis for this view, said John Nolan, the deputy postmaster general, is that experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say it is unlikely that the mail handler at a State Department postal center in Virginia who contracted inhalation anthrax could have been infected by a letter that had merely come in contact with the one to Mr. Daschle.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/national/10ANTH.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

'Afghan Arabs' Said to Lead Taliban's Fight
The "Afghan Arabs," as the foreigners are called, are proving crucial to the survival of the Taliban, whose leaders are former religious students with limited military expertise. The American and Pakistani officials say the foreigners taking leading roles in military and internal security and — unlike their Afghan cohorts — cannot be bribed into defecting or swayed to surrender.

"The Arabs are the best fighters they have," said Anwar Sher, a retired Pakistani general with longstanding influence on Pakistan's intelligence officers and Afghan military commanders. "A group of 30 of them can engage a battalion of 1,000. They will kill 100 before they take a loss."

Aid workers now in Pakistan also identify the Afghan Arabs as the men who have attacked United Nations operations and offices in Kandahar, the eastern city of Jalalabad, Mazar-i-Sharif and other towns. The foreign fighters assaulted Afghans working for the United Nations, stole Land Cruisers and trucks and took hundreds of tons of wheat flour destined for destitute Afghans, the aid workers said.

One Afghan working for a United Nations relief agency described being spat on and threatened by several armed Arabs outside the main United Nations compound in Kabul hours after the first American bombing raids began Oct. 8.

"The Arabs are the ones you have to worry about most," he said. "They will kill you in a moment if they see any sign that you are resisting."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/international/asia/10ARAB.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

Hijackers' Meticulous Strategy of Brains, Muscle and Practice
What has emerged, nearly two months into the investigation, is a picture in which the roles of the 19 hijackers are so well defined as to be almost corporate in their organization and coordination.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/national/04PLOT.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

SearchDay - Build Your Own Yahoo! - 1 November 2001
The itch to create your own online portal eventually strikes just about every web searcher, usually after you've built up a collection of a few thousand choice bookmarks or favorites that you'd love to share with the rest of the world. There are several ways to scratch this itch, and to do it properly, you should make sure you have the right tools for the job.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/01/sd1101-directory.html

The Rich-Poor Division Is in Stark Relief in Talks for Trade Agenda
Brazil and India are leading a coalition that wants trade rules rewritten to make it clear that nations can violate patents and save money on, for example, AIDS or malaria drugs when they face an acute health crisis.

They argue that poor countries often cannot afford vital medicine. Industrial nations, they say, often seek to punish them if they buy or produce knockoff versions of the drugs.

Paulo Teixeira, director of Brazil's anti-AIDS program, told reporters this week that the United States' efforts to reduce the price of Cipro, under threat of breaking Bayer's patent, mimics similar strong-arm tactics that Brazil has used. Washington threatened at one point to file a W.T.O. case against Brazil on behalf of American drug makers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/01/business/01TRAD.html

Rich Nations Have Been Too Insensitive to Poverty
Rich nations are shamefully stingy about aiding the poor, but none more so than the United States. In 1999, the World Bank reported that the United States gave 0.1 percent of its economic output for development, or $9.1 billion, the lowest proportion among the 30 or so wealthiest nations. Japan gave more than $15 billion — still skimpy, but 0.35 percent of its output. Moreover, America stipulates that about two-thirds of the $9 billion must be spent on American products.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/01/business/01SCEN.html

Chicago Tribune | A Soviet general and nation building
Consider Gen. Ruslan Aushev, the most distinguished Soviet war hero in Afghanistan and a Muslim from Russia's North Caucasus. In his native republic of Ingushetia, Aushev has fought and defeated Al Qaeda. More importantly, he won peace without the dirty methods professionals of espionage portray as necessary evils.

Ingushetia, one of the ethnic republics within the Russian Federation, is a tiny mountainous place along the frontier of the rebellious Chechnya. In contrast to Chechnya, Ingushetia remains in obscurity because only wars in distant lands make global headlines.

In Ingushetia, peace is the lesson.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/perspective/chi-0110280314oct28.story?coll=chi%2Dnewsopinionperspective%2Dhed

U.S. Appears to Be Losing Public Relations War So Far
The Bush administration has belatedly deployed its forces for a propaganda war to win over the Arab public. But the campaign, intended to convince doubters that the American attacks on Afghanistan are justified and its Middle East policy is evenhanded, has so far proved ineffectual.

Thousands of words from American officials, it appears, have proved no match for the last week's news, which produced a barrage of pictures of wounded Afghan children and of Israeli tanks rolling into Palestinian villages.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/28/international/middleeast/28PROM.html

Efforts to Calm the Nation's Fears Spin Out of Control
People in the grip of fear want information that holds up, not spin control.

Again and again in recent weeks, administration officials tried to reassure the public; again and again, the situation proved more serious than the officials had suggested. As a result, public trust has evaporated.

While the number of people known to be affected by the disease is still relatively small, and the number of deaths smaller still, the admission that the type of anthrax used was so deadly and so highly refined that it could infect postal workers and contaminate the mail amplified the sense of a situation that was careening out of control.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/28/weekinreview/28SCHW.html

Developing Warning System for Biological Attack Proves Difficult
The military has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop detectors. The truck-based system stationed at the Pentagon can identify four biological agents in less than 45 minutes, according to the latest annual report from the Pentagon to Congress on the status of chemical and biological defenses. Some air bases use a network of these sensors and compare their readings, to cut down on false warnings.

Another system tries to use light to detect aerosol clouds from miles away, but it cannot tell whether the clouds contain pathogens.

The Pentagon's inspector general last year criticized development of a new, more advanced system known as the Joint Biological Point Detection System for achieving only one of 10 critical goals. It broke down often, failed to identify lethal pathogens and sometimes gave false warnings when no danger existed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/28/national/28DETE.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

Bin Laden Family Strives to Re-establish Its Reputation
Despite the family's public disavowal of the terrorist mastermind suspect, federal agents swooped in to question family members' neighbors and friends. Reporters piled up outside their doors. More critically, companies that did business with the $5 billion family construction empire in Saudi Arabia were starting to get jittery about dealing with the family.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/28/international/middleeast/28BINL.html

Nature Pre-publication
Recent events have confirmed that bioterrorism is no longer a threat but a reality. To provide wide-ranging access to the latest scientific information about anthrax and other potential bioweapons, Nature has put together a special online focus on this issue. This focus includes the pre-publication* of two research papers on anthrax toxin, as well as a collection of research, news and feature articles from our electronic archive. Because of the heightened interest in this area, among both the scientific community and the general public, all material in this feature has been made freely available.
http://www.nature.com/nature/anthrax/

All Suicide Bombers Are Not Alike
Whoever kills himself with an iron weapon, then the iron weapon will remain in his hand, and he will continuously stab himself in his belly with it in the Fire of Hell eternally, forever and ever."

A few days after Sept. 11, that quotation from a sacred Muslim commentary turned up on an English-language Web site calledwww.fatwa-online.com. There it was brandished by a Muslim scholar who argued that Islam could never, under any circumstances, justify the practice known in the West as ''suicide bombing.'' Suicide bombers, he seemed to be warning, would blow themselves up through eternity. It was, in its way, a comforting thought, but there was no assurance that this learned discussion on the Internet was being followed in Arab centers where the bombers were found and recruited. In the days after Sept. 11, it also became clear that there was no Arab leadership with the inclination or stature to call a jihad against suicide bombings and the latter-day cult of martyrdom that may date from the Iran-Iraq war, in which Iranian teenagers, sent out by the thousands to be human minefield sweepers, were given keys to wear around their necks. Those keys, they were promised, would open the doors of paradise.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/28/magazine/28TERRORIST.html?pagewanted=all

Videoconferencing May Get Much-Needed Critical Mass
\But people have been forecasting the takeoff of videoconferencing for
decades. In the early 1970's AT (news/quote
)
offered Picturephone service in Chicago for $86.50 a month. Jeff Rohlfs,
a Bell Labs economist who was involved with the project, describes the
history of this technology in his new book, "Bandwagon Effects in
High-Technology Industries" (MIT Press).
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/04/business/04SCEN.html?pagewanted=all

LinkVoyager: Terrorism
This directory exists to educate web users about Terrorism, a subject much on people's minds in the wake of the tragic events of September 11th. Feel free to submit sites.
http://www.linkvoyager.com/cgi-bin/serve.fcgi/terrorism/

ResearchBuzz 911 Coverage
http://www.researchbuzz.com/911.html

SearchDay - Attack on America: Coping with Information Overload - 17 September 2001
Attack on America: Coping with Information Overload

Trying to make sense of the events of the past week has been an enormous challenge, not only because of their complexity, but because of the massive amounts of misinformation that's been generated. Here are a few authoritative sources that are providing comprehensive background, analysis and news and links to trusted sources to help us cope with the information overload we're all experiencing.
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/01/sd0917-news.html

Finding Disaster Coverage At Search Engines
Following the unprecedented terrorist attacks on the United States today, web users turned en masse to search engines for information. It took those services some time to adjust to the demand, but as the day progressed, many came up to speed.
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/01/09-wtc.html

Public Agenda Special Edition: Terrorism
http://www.publicagenda.org/specials/terrorism/terror_sources.htm

In Europe, Some Say the Attacks Stemmed From American Failings
There was no rejoicing or support in Europe for the killing of so many Americans. Many Europeans wept and the continent fell silent for a moment last week in remembrance of the dead.

But it has also become clear that some Europeans feel that ordinary Americans have largely floated on a tide of prosperity, triumphalism and indifference to the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their view is that the United States has now been confronted with a sobering reality, and that it must try to understand. For those critics, Americans are now facing unsurprising retaliation from an important part of the Islamic world that considers America to have declared war on its faith.

The arguments are sometimes simple — America should expect war in return for bombing Iraq regularly. Some Europeans also contend that many Americans have a blinding confidence in their own goodness and so do not see that the acts of the United States are regarded in many quarters as driven by the domineering pursuit of national self-interest.

European writers and intellectuals have pointed to a catalog of actions that include the bombing — in reprisal for the terrorist bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa in 1998 — of one of Sudan's two pharmaceutical factories on the challenged grounds that it was linked to Osama bin Laden, aid to Israel to buy weapons used against Palestinians, or even the American refusal to intervene to stop the mass killings in Rwanda.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/22/international/europe/22DEBA.html

The Strategy: Leaders Face Challenges Far Different From Those of Last Conflict
"I condemn it morally, and I do think it was cowardly," Mr. Kerrey said. "But physically, it was the opposite of cowardly, and if you don't understand that, then you don't understand the intensity of the cause and then you're papering over one of the most important things. There is hatred out there against the United States, and yes, we have to deal with terrorism in a zero-tolerance fashion. But there is anger, too, and they ought to have a place for a hearing on that anger, in the International Court or wherever we give them a hearing."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/15/national/15PREX.html

A dream denied

curdles

like sour milk

as awful

as a stranglers cord

made of the

finest silk

Israeli Kids at School Amid Chaos Arab communities countrywide initiated a three-day school strike, leaving 400,000 Arab students at home and 600 schools closed. Many expressed anger and frustration with the Israeli government, accusing it of neglecting the Arab minority for years.

In Gilo, built on land Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast War, parents delivering their children to their first day at school were apprehensive. The neighborhood came under heavy fire last week, prompting Israel's army to move into Beit Jalla for two days. before pulling out Thursday.

``You have to try to live normally,'' said Hezi Cohen, as he led his daughter Shelli, smartly clad in a white shirt and pleated dress, into her first class, past TV cameramen, photographers and journalists. Moments later the country's premier walked in.

``You have stood up to a hard battle, as if it was no battle at all,'' Sharon told students assembled in the school's gymnasium, under a sign that read ``a year of peace and security for Gilo students.''

``I promise you that I will take the issue of security upon myself, and I won't allow more shooting on Gilo,'' he told the elementary school students.

As the Jewish schools opened on schedule, Raji Mansour, head of a group that is monitoring Arab education, said Israel provides Arab students with only a quarter of the funding it allots to Jewish students.

``The whole country knows there is a wide social division, discrimination and scandal,'' he said. ``There has to be a change of policy -- at least equality (with Jewish schools).''

Schools in the Arab sector need an additional 1,600 classrooms, and the group is demanding a budget increase of $12.5 million, said Atef Moaddi, a member of the monitoring group, called the Follow-up Committee of Arab Education.

In meetings held late last month with the Ministry of Education, the group raised a number of issues, requesting the budget be doubled in order to allow for extra schooling hours, and an expansion of the existing academic system to match standards at Jewish schools.

If the strike does not achieve its demands, educational institutions in the Arab sector will resume their strike Nov. 1, until their demands are met, Moaddi said.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Back-to-School.html

How Not to Win the Battle but Lose the War Unintended consequences have long dogged Israel. Until its army stormed into Lebanon in the early 1980's to root out Mr. Arafat and the P.L.O., it had no real issue with Hezbollah, or the Party of God. Now, Hezbollah is seen by Israelis as a constant menace on their northern border.

Also in the 1980's, searching for a political counterweight to the P.L.O., Israel nurtured a new group called the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by its Arabic shorthand, Hamas. Guess which group became the bigger threat for Israelis.

Then in December 1992, in retaliation for the murder of several Israelis, the army rounded up some 400 Hamas members and dumped them in a barren stretch of southern Lebanon. There they stayed for many months. And there they learned bomb-making techniques from Hezbollah guerrillas, returning to Gaza and the West Bank bigger and badder than ever as far as Israel was concerned.

Unintended consequences have also tarnished attempts at peace, notably the Israeli-Palestinian agreements reached in Oslo in 1993. "Rock-solid assumptions made in 1993 produced radically different results," said Joseph Alpher, an independent strategic analyst in Israel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/02/weekinreview/02HABE.html

And There Was Light, and It Was Good?
There hardly seems a place on earth untouched by social and political hierarchies linked to skin color, which rank the world's rainbow of skin tones according to two shades, light and dark. That distinction is the foundation of the current notion of race.

As how to define racism, much less what to do about it, roils the delegates to the United Nations' World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, it might be wise to remember that the importance of skin color is largely a modern invention.

Certainly, slavery and many other oppressive forms of hierarchy have existed throughout human history, as have differences in skin color. But the idea that the two have a cause-and-effect relationship is relatively new, with its genesis, many academics say, in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the colonialism that emerged with it.

ANOTHER way of thinking about skin color is to ask: When did Europeans start thinking of themselves as white?

"There was no whiteness prior to the 17th century," said Manning Marable, director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. "Whiteness is the negation of something else. The something else are Africans who are described by Europeans not by their religion or nationality but by the color of their skin. And nowhere in Africa did Africans call themselves `black.' "

The word race was used for the first time in a modern sense, it is widely believed, in a 17th-century French travelogue, Dr. Brace said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/02/weekinreview/02SAUL.html

Report Shows Americans Have More 'Labor Days'
American workers have increased their substantial lead over Japan and all other industrial nations in the number of hours worked each year.

The report, issued by the International Labor Organization, found that Americans added nearly a full week to their work year during the 1990's, climbing to 1,979 hours on average last year, up 36 hours from 1990. That means Americans who are employed are putting in nearly 49 1/2 weeks a year on the job.

Americans work 137 hours, or about three and one-half weeks, more a year than Japanese workers, 260 hours (about six and one-half weeks) more a year than British workers and 499 hours (about 12 1/2 weeks) more a year than German workers, the report said. The Japanese had long been at the top for the number of hours worked, but in the mid-1990's the United States surpassed Japan, and since then it has pulled farther ahead.

"It's unique to Americans that they continue to increase their working hours, while hours are declining in other industrialized nations," said Lawrence Jeff Johnson, the economist who oversaw the labor organization's report. "It has a lot to do with the American psyche, with American culture. American workers are eager to make the best impression, to put in the most hours."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/01/national/01HOUR.html?pagewanted=all

South Africa's Mbeki Has Bleak Message on Race
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in his opening speech to the conference, said Israel could not use ``the ultimate abomination'' of the Holocaust as an excuse to never examine its own behavior.

``We cannot expect Palestinians to accept this (the Holocaust) as a reason why the wrongs done to them -- displacement, occupation, blockade, and now extra-judicial killings -- should be ignored, whatever label one uses to describe them,'' he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-race.html

Rancor and Powell's Absence Cloud Racism Parley
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who arrived this morning, warned that the debate over the Middle East threatened to eclipse the conference, which is intended to highlight discrimination in all forms — from concerns about racism in the criminal justice system in the United States, to the plight of women in Afghanistan, to modern-day slavery in Sudan.

Mr. Jackson and other civil rights leaders here including Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, and Wade J. Henderson, director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said it was a mistake not to send Secretary Powell. The delegation will be led instead by E. Michael Southwick, the deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations.

But Mr. Jackson said he and others agreed that the language of the proposed declaration against racism seemed to target Israel unnecessarily, particularly given the dismal human rights records of many countries participating in the conference.

"The issue of racism is too big to reduce it to the controversy about the Middle East," Mr. Jackson said in an interview. "One can be against the settlements, against the assassination of leaders and not have to label Israel as a racist state. If one goes into labeling, there are a lot of labels to go around."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/31/international/31RACE.html?pagewanted=all

More Women Are Losing Insurance Than Men
In the past, because of women's higher rate of poverty and historically greater eligibility for Medicaid, women have been less likely than men to go without health insurance. In 1994, for example, there were 15.7 million uninsured men and 13.1 million uninsured women. But the gap has been closing rapidly. In 1998, there were 16.7 million uninsured men and 15.3 million uninsured women, according to the fund.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/31/national/31INSU.html?pagewanted=all

Under the Nuremberg Code of 1947 and the World Medical Associations Declaration of Helsinki, those seeking to conduct medical tests on human subjects must explain the purpose, risks and methods of the study and obtain each subject's voluntary consent to participate.

Families Sue Pfizer on Test of Antibiotic
During a meningitis epidemic in 1996, Pfizer treated 100 Nigerian children with the antibiotic Trovan as part of its effort to determine whether the drug, which had never been tested in children, would be an effective treatment for the disease. Pfizer treated 100 other children with ceftriaxone, the gold standard for meningitis treatment, but, the suit says, at a lower-than- recommended dose. Eleven children in the trial died, and others suffered brain damage, were partly paralyzed or became deaf.

Vanessa McGowan, a spokeswoman for Pfizer, said yesterday that the company had not yet seen the suit, which was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, and could not comment on the allegations. In the past, Pfizer has said that the number of deaths in the Nigerian Trovan trial was lower than the overall fatality rate for the meningitis epidemic and that the trial had been a philanthropic effort that benefited most of the sick children, not a self-serving effort to obtain quick clinical data, as the suit contends.

In early 1996, within weeks of learning about the meningitis epidemic from an Internet site, Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical company, sent a six-member research team to the Infectious Disease Hospital in Kano, Nigeria, a strife- torn city suffering concurrent epidemics of bacterial meningitis, measles and cholera. The Pfizer team selected children for its test from the long lines of ailing people seeking care at the hospital.
"Pfizer took the opportunity presented by the chaos caused by the civil and medical crises in Kano to accomplish what the company could not do elsewhere — to quickly conduct on young children a test of the potentially dangerous antibiotic Trovan," said the suit, which was filed yesterday by Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, a New York law firm that specializes in representing groups of plaintiffs against large corporations.

Pfizer conducted the trial at the same hospital where Doctors Without Borders, the Nobel Prize-winning relief organization, was already providing free treatment with chloramphenicol, the cheaper antibiotic that is internationally recommended for treating bacterial meningitis.

"Rather than provide the children with a safe, effective and proven therapy for bacterial meningitis," the suit said, "Pfizer chose to select children to participate in a medical experiment of a new, untested and unproven drug without first obtaining their informed consent, or explaining to the children or their parents that the proposed treatment was experimental and that they were free to refuse it and instead choose the safe, effective treatment for bacterial meningitis offered at the same site, free of charge, by a charitable medical group."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/30/business/30DRUG.html?pagewanted=all

Wahmpreneur News Magazine: Website Security Heads Up For Small Business
August 20, 2001 -- Small businesses had better wake up and smell the coffee when it comes to their website security solutions, if a recently published article in Interactive Week is anything to judge by. Credit card fraud and identity theft have consumers concerned not only about perpetrators but also about the privacy practices of the merchants transacting business online.

According to the report, there is apparently growing sentiment among consumer advocacy groups and among politicians about the lack of consequences to online merchants whose shoddy security practices make it easy for hackers to steal sensitive information. The sentiment is understandable, to a degree. It is much easier to sue a business for its privacy practices than it is to catch the Romanian hacker that actually committed the theft of personal information.

And the issue gets hotter every time some high-profile company or institution gets their servers hacked into. Just this month, there was the highly publicized case of RegWeb.com. A hole in their security systems revealed more than 300 customer credit card numbers.
http://www.wahmpreneur.com/articles/Aug2001/security.html

Growing Audience Is Turning to Established News Media Online "National sites will get more and more of a share of the news audience and the smaller sites will get less and less," predicted Vin Crosbie, president of the consulting firm Digital Deliverance.

The Web is still an ancillary news source for most people, after broadcasting and newspapers, Mr. Crosbie said. But he and other analysts also say that new-media news consumers, who tend to be younger than the audiences for traditional media, are increasingly going in search of old media online.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/27/business/media/27WEB.html?pagewanted=all

Did Machete-Wielding Hutus Commit Genocide or Just 'Acts of Genocide'?
One of the issues administration officials debated behind the scenes was whether it was best to avoid using the word genocide to describe what was happening, as that might increase legal and political pressure to act. Documents disclosed last week by the National Security Archive show some of that debate. On May 21, 1994, Secretary of State Warren Christopher agreed to allow department officials to say that "acts of genocide have occurred," and on June 10, he finally flatly called it genocide. Between April 6, when the killing began, and July 4, when the Tutsi rebels took over the capital city of Kigali, an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/26/weekinreview/26WORD.html

Israel Hits Palestinian Posts in Response to Deadly Raids
Israel usually targets Palestinian security installations in its retaliatory strikes because it holds Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat ultimately responsible for attacks on Israelis. Israel says Arafat's security forces do little to rein in the militants, and sometimes participate in attacks on Israelis.

The Palestinians blame Israel for the violence, charging that its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the cause, exacerbated by roadblocks and travel restrictions there. The Palestinians say their police and security are defending themselves against Israeli aggression.

Now the Palestinians charge that the United States is blatantly taking Israel's side in the conflict.

On Sunday, Palestinian police officers inspected the ruins of the four-story building in Gaza City that housed their headquarters, showing reporters a green metal fragment with yellow lettering that said ``for use on M-84'' -- referring to a one-ton bomb that, according to the Pentagon's Web site, can be fitted with a laser guiding device and carried by the U.S.-made warplanes used in the raids.

The Israeli military said only that the bomb was not a new type and has been used before. The U.S. air force dropped thousands of M-84 bombs on Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War.

U.S.-made Israeli attack helicopters hovered near Arafat's headquarters during the air strike, but they did not open fire. Returning to Gaza on Sunday after a trip to Asia, Arafat briefly toured a police structure that was shelled by Israeli tanks in Rafah, near the Egyptian border.

Asked Sunday about the legality of Israel's use of U.S. weapons against the Palestinians, a State Department
official expressed opposition to use of heavy weapons in urban areas, where the risk of casualties is high. Speaking on condition of anonymity, she said the State Department monitors the use of U.S. weapons to ensure they are used according to the terms of transfer under American law.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html

Palestinian Raids Kill 6 Israelis, Including 3 Soldiers at Gaza Base
The raid took place near Bedolah, part of a major bloc of Jewish settlements in southern Gaza known as Gush Qatif. Although the teeming Gaza Strip has been a Palestinian autonomous zone since 1994, significant stretches remain in Israeli hands, with the army in control of key intersections to protect an estimated 6,000 Israelis living in Gush Qatif and more isolated settlements. Like many army posts in Gaza, the one hit on Saturday was near an Israeli enclave.

Clashes between soldiers and Gazans have become routine over the last 11 months. But assaults like the one on Saturday are uncommon. It clearly rattled Israel's military.

"The specific incident reflects a new form of audacity that we hadn't yet witnessed," said Maj. Gen. Doron Almog, the army commander in southern Israel and Gaza.

Undetected, the raiders made their way across ditches and through the barbed-wire perimeter of the base, where they opened fire and threw hand grenades from close range at the soldiers, some of whom were asleep. A major, Gil Oz, 30, and a staff sergeant, Yaakov Nir, 21, were killed. An unidentified medic was fatally shot when he tried to give first aid to Major Oz. At one point, General Almog said, his soldiers and the Palestinians were locked in hand- to-hand combat.

In a firefight said to have lasted about 10 minutes, one Palestinian attacker was killed. The other got away, but was found several hours later, hiding in the greenhouses of a nearby settlement, Atzmona, where he was shot and killed.The two Palestinians were identified as Amin Abu Hatab, 26, and Hisham Abu Jamus, 24.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/26/international/middleeast/26MIDE.html?pagewanted=all

Against Impossible Odds, Sojourners Magazine/September-October 2001
If you were an activist in apartheid-era South Africa, you could be pulled out of bed in the middle of the night and killed. But ordinary South Africans, though poor and oppressed, could still visit their mothers or join their buddies to play soccer, and generally they were able to move freely around the country. Palestinians, however, can't just wake up in the morning and decide to go visit a friend, or end the day by going to see the sunset at the water's edge. The theft of spontaneity. Jean Zaru told me she hadn't worked with her assistant face to face for three months, because they couldn't get in the same room at the same time. It was easier for international visitors to come to the Sabeel conference in Jerusalem than for local Palestinians to get there from their own villages and cities.

There is indeed Palestinian violence against Israeli settlements. Shootings and even mortar shells have been aimed into them. Some people have been killed, and the fear is very high. There have been casualties even among Israeli children. Two 14-year-old boys were found dead in a cave near their settlement, their bodies battered and mutilated with rocks, killed by Palestinians. And we've seen the results of suicide bombers, including at a Tel Aviv disco. In my opinion, attacks against civilian populations are terrorism. Such terror can never be justified. Never.
But the Israelis use such incidents to justify shelling Palestinians in massive, disproportionate retaliation. They've even resorted to bombing Palestinian targets with F-16 fighter planes. The casualties are enormous, including Palestinian children and infants caught in the middle of attacks against civilians that must also be called terrorist.

The Israeli army is shelling the most exposed houses in Palestinian villages directly from the settlements, knowing they're attacking unarmed civilians with families and children. I went into Palestinian homes that had been shelled, met the families. In one I saw the huge shell hole in the wall of the children's bedroom. The kids were scared that night, cowering in their parents' room down the hall, or they surely would have been killed.

By the end of June, 558 people had been killed in the current wave of violence—78 percent of them Palestinians (92 percent of those injured are Palestinians). More than 100 children under the age of 17 had died—86 Palestinian children, and 18 Israeli children. In a very moving moment at the start of the Sabeel conference, we named each victim of the violence, from all sides. Every individual life counts in God's eyes.

Movements are responsible for the images they project. When the Israeli military shot and killed 12-year-old Mohammed Dura in his father's arms as they cowered in fear against a wall in Gaza, the powerful images went around the world. But three days later, two Israeli soldiers were captured and lynched by angry Palestinians in the city of Ramallah in the West Bank. The image flashed around the world was that of bloody hands raised by an angry Palestinian mob over the lynched soldiers' mutilated bodies. If the images from Birmingham and Selma had been dead cops, we wouldn't have won the civil rights struggle in America.

There is no "symmetry" in the violence of the Middle East today. Israeli violence is enormously disproportionate to Palestinian violence. That includes the violence of the settlements and closure policies themselves and the Israeli military practices, especially in their retaliation against Palestinian attacks. Despite this lack of proportionality, there is no moral or strategic justification for the Palestinian violence in response to Israeli domination, especially when it targets civilians. No argument, even lack of symmetry, will suffice.
http://www.sojo.net/magazine/index.cfm/action/sojourners/issue/soj0109/article/010910.html

3-Strikes Law Is Overrated in California, Study Finds
"The real impact of the law is a tremendous distortion of crime-control resources," Mr. Mauer said. "As the 25-year-to-life inmates stack up, California will be housing a disproportionate share of elderly inmates. We know that 50-year-olds commit far less crime than 25-year-olds, and every dollar going into housing a 50- year-old inmate is a dollar not going into dealing with a 16-year-old beginning to get into trouble."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/23/national/23SENT.html

Web Bugs Might Bite Back at Marketers
Some marketers may be violating their privacy policies or collecting consumer data without permission by using Web bugs on their Web sites, according to a study released this week.

Titled "Web Bugs -- A Study of the Presence and Growth Rate of Web Bugs on the Internet," the study was conducted by Internet site tracking firm Cyveillance Inc. Cyveillance gathered data from more than 1 million Web pages and compared a random sample of pages from 1998 and 2001.

Web bugs, also known as clear GIFs or 1-by-1 pixels, are graphics embedded in Web pages or in e-mail messages that can track site visitors or readers of e-mail.

While Web bugs can be used for such benign purposes as tracking the number of visitors to a Web page, its potential for collecting more detailed information worries privacy advocates.

The Privacy Foundation, a nonprofit consumer education group and privacy watchdog, has said the use of Web bugs is tantamount to illegal wiretapping.

Data that can be collected by Web bugs include IP addresses, the URL of the Web page location of the Web bug on it, the time and date it was served, the type of browser used to retrieve the Web bug and previously set cookie values.

It is through cookie values that marketers using Web bugs could collect data such as personally identifiable information and transactional information.

"The results of this study emphasize what we're seeing everyday -- companies want to earn and retain the trust of their customers, and an association with Web bugs has the potential to seriously undermine those efforts," Panos Anastassiadis, president/CEO of Cyveillance Inc., Arlington, VA, said in a statement.
http://www.imarketingnews.com/cgi-bin/artprevbot.cgi?article_id=16686

Palestinian and His 2 Children in Day's Toll
Military checkpoints that dot the West Bank and Gaza Strip have come to embody the great divide between the two peoples since the start of the present conflict last September.

The effect of the blockades is to keep Palestinians virtually locked in their towns and villages for long stretches, making it difficult for them to get to work or even to go on simple excursions like shopping trips.

To Israel, the checkpoints are a necessary security measure, given the squads of suicide bombers that radical Islamic groups say are poised to attack Israeli cities. But Palestinians see only collective punishment. Inevitably, many of them look for ways around the barricades, finding them on back roads and paths that are also known to the Israelis, who often turn a blind eye. Mr. Abu Lawi was taking such a route today when the soldiers opened fire, killing him and wounding five other Palestinians.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/20/international/middleeast/20MIDE.html?pagewanted=all

Yale and the Price of Slavery
Presentism is very often advanced in defense of America's founders. It is comforting to think that their generation, so distant in time from us, lived in a condition of moral ignorance, and thus innocence, regarding slavery. But that is not the case. Even Thomas Jefferson, some of whose statements exhibit an almost demented racism, could see clearly that slavery utterly compromised the nation: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever," Jefferson wrote. "The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us."

George Washington was an enthusiastic slaveholder in his early decades, buying slaves to build himself a plantation empire; but by the end of his life he found slavery repugnant. In his will Washington freed his slaves and specified that the children be educated, believing that with education and training the freed children of slaves could take a more fruitful and productive place in Virginia society. If we accept the statement that "it's downright inappropriate to render a moral judgment" on slavery, we are more willing to accept slavery than George Washington was.

If the founders had such misgivings over slavery, how is it that they allowed slavery to continue? The answer is not that they didn't know any better, but that they kept slavery so the Southern states would join the union. It was a transaction, a deal, just like the deal that put the national capital on the Potomac in exchange for the federal assumption of states' debts — and not unlike the deal the Hairstons made in causing their kin to disappear. With their eyes open, the founders traded away the rights of African-Americans, many of whom had fought bravely in the Revolution, so that the national enterprise could go forward.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/18/opinion/18WIEN.html

Patent Laws May Determine Shape of Stem Cell Research
The patent, held by a foundation at the University of Wisconsin, is apparently the only one of its kind in the world, leaving the university in such a powerful position that next week the health officials will begin negotiations in hopes of reaching an agreement to allow federally financed scientists broad access to the cells.

The patent, which covers both the method of isolating the cells and the cells themselves, gives the Wisconsin foundation control over who may work in the United States with stem cells, and for what purpose. In turn, the foundation has granted important rights to a biotechnology company, the Geron Corporation of Menlo Park, Calif., giving that company considerable say over who ultimately profits from stem cell therapies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/17/health/genetics/17CELL.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

Yahoo - Inability to Type Not a Disability 9th Circuit Rules
A newspaper reporter whose repetitive stress injuries have left her unable to use a computer keyboard isn't "substantially limited" in major life activities under the Americans With Disabilities Act, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday.

The 2-1 majority said Fresno Bee reporter Jacalyn Thornton didn't meet her burden of showing she was limited in her ability to work or perform manual labor.

"In this case, Thornton was able to perform a wide range of manual tasks, including grocery shopping, driving, making beds, doing laundry and dressing herself," wrote Judge Michael Daly Hawkins in Thornton v. McClatchy Newspapers, 01 C.D.O.S. 7070. "Her inability to type and write for extended periods of time is not sufficient to outweigh the large number of manual tasks that she can perform."
http://biz.yahoo.com/law/010815/30247-4.html

A Study's Verdict: Jury Awards Are Not Out of Control
A comprehensive study of nearly 9,000 trials across the country has found that judges award punitive damages about as often as juries and generally in about the same proportions.

The role of judges in awarding punitive damages was "surprisingly prominent," the study found, adding that moves to limit punitive awards by juries "may be a solution in search of a problem."
The study, believed to be one of the largest of punitive damage awards, challenges widely held ideas about jurors' decisions that have influenced state judges, legislators, Congress and even the United States Supreme Court.

Jury punitive damage awards, which are intended as punishment, have been a focus of particular criticism because of occasional huge awards that critics say have no relation to compensatory damages, which are intended to pay injured people for their losses.

A draft of the study, provided by the authors, said that judges and juries each awarded punitive damages in about 4 percent of the cases in which plaintiffs won.

The study, to be published in March in the Cornell Law Review, analyzed court statistics on 8,724 trials in 45 large trial courts across the country. It was conducted by two Cornell professors, Theodore Eisenberg and Martin T. Wells, and three analysts from the National Center for State Courts, an independent research group in Williamsburg, Va.

By showing that judges and juries generally have similar views of punitive damages, the study suggested that juries may be far less arbitrary than is widely believed, said Neil Vidmar, an authority on jury issues at Duke Law School who was not involved in the Cornell research but was familiar with it.

"It is novel," Professor Vidmar said, "because the conventional wisdom is juries are irresponsible, incompetent and don't know how to make an assessment."

The study is expected to be controversial not only because it concludes that jurors may be more rational than they were believed to be, but also because it contradicts other research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/06/national/06LEGA.html?pagewanted=all

Susan Calcari
Susan Calcari 1956-2001

Susan Calcari was born on June 25th, 1956 in Iron Mountain, Michigan -- the daughter of Robert and Carol (Oien) Calcari. She graduated near the top of Iron Mountain High School's class of 1974 and went on to graduate with honors from Michigan Technological University in 1978. Shortly after graduating, she moved to San Francisco, where she began her career.

Susan was the founder and Executive Director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Internet Scout Project, which publishes the Scout Report and does research related to online resource discovery. The Scout Report is one of the Internet's longest-running and most respected publications.

From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2001. http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/about/susan.html

Unmasking the Poor

The poor are pretty well hidden from everyone except each other in the United States. You won't find them in the same neighborhoods or the same schools as the well-to-do. They're not on television, except for the local crime-casts. And they've vanished from the nation's political discussion.

Hiding the poor has been quite a trick, because there are still millions upon millions of them out here. And despite all the rosy scenarios we've been fed — the end of welfare as we know it, rising tides lifting everybody's yachts — they're not doing very well at all.

This has been made clear in a new report from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington and in Barbara Ehrenreich's latest book, "Nickel and Dimed."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/30/opinion/30HERB.html

ZDNet: Smart Business | What's Next
What's Next
The Editors of Ziff Davis Smart Business, Ziff Davis Smart Business
August 2001
E-business reality check: Barry Diller, Sam Donaldson, Mohan Sawhney, Ted Nugent, and other innovators on the future of the Next Economy—and how to profit from it.
http://www.zdnet.com/smartbusinessmag/stories/all/0,6605,2781480,00.html

Overcome by Slavery
The resonance of the Jefferson- Hemings affair provides a reminder of how much slavery has become part of contemporary politics. Bill Clinton realized this early on; hence the debate over The Apology and his appointment of the Commission on Race and Reconciliation. Congress has also gotten into the act, mandating that Civil War battle sites supervised by the National Park Service address slavery. Disputes over the Confederate flag and Confederate History Month have roiled politics in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Virginia, and California has required insurance companies to divulge if they have ever insured slave property. Finally, there is the matter of reparations, which has found advocates in some of the nation's prominent litigators.

It would be comforting to conclude that recognition of slavery's importance to the development of our economy, politics and culture has driven Americans to a consideration of the past. But there clearly is more to the current interest in slavery. There is a recognition that American racism was founded in slavery, and a general, if inchoate, understanding that any attempt to address race in the present must also address slavery in past.

This attempt has become imperative as American society perceptibly grows more segregated, the benefits of economic growth are unevenly and unfairly distributed among races, and a previous generation's remedies for segregation and inequality are discarded as politically unacceptable.

In short, behind the interest in slavery is the crisis of race. The confluence of the history of slavery and the politics of race reveals that slavery has become a language, a way to talk about race, in a society in which blacks and whites hardly talk to each other at all. In slavery, Americans have found a voice to address some of their deepest hurts and the depressing reality of how much of American life — jobs; housing; schools; access to medical care, to justice and even to a taxi — is controlled by race.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/13/opinion/13BERL.html