ZDNet: Printer Friendly - E-Con 101 How would you like to have access to a reliable labor pool with 24/7 availability, practically no turnover, and no benefits? Welcome to the world
of prison inmate labor, a rapidly growing sector of the new economy where annual revenues have topped $1 billion since 1998.

Around 2 million people are currently behind bars in this country, a growth of more than 300 percent since 1980, reflecting the highest per capita
incarceration rate among all developed nations. Combine that with the lowest unemployment and tightest job market in 30 years and you've got
the formula for tapping into what might be the only low wage, labor-intensive workforce left.

In fact, inmate laborers could be the missing variable that pries assembly jobs away from the Third World and back into the American GDP. "The
benefit is that it provides a reliable, productive, motivated workforce that can reduce production costs—and that's the business bottom line,"
claims Knut Rostad of the Enterprise Prison Institute, a company that specializes in leasing inmate labor.

Made in Sing-Sing

Less talked about is what Jenni Gainsborough, communications director of the Washington, D.C.–based criminal policy analysis firm The
Sentencing Project (www.sentencingproject.org), calls a "modern business dilemma" (read: a huge publicity nightmare). Gainsborough, a former
public policy coordinator of the ACLU's National Prison Project, says, "It seems absolutely wrong that individual liberty and public safety should
be put out to bid to companies whose first concern is their shareholders and expanding their market."

South Africa to Ask for International Gem Certification South Africa plans to ask
all nations on Friday to back an international certification
system for gems, saying it is concerned not only that
diamonds are fueling civil wars among other Africans but also that
adverse publicity and calls for boycotts will hurt its own
diamond-mining industry.

Ambassador Dumisana Kumalo of South Africa, who will introduce a resolution in the 189-member General
Assembly, said in an interview today that piecemeal attempts to control diamond exports, which finance
rebel organizations like the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone and Unita in Angola, are not enough.

In two weeks, publication is expected of an expert panel's report to the Security Council on the illegal trade
in what are called "conflict diamonds."

"One thing that they will show in their report is that the same characters who are involved in trading in
Angola are the ones who pop up in the Congo, the ones in Sierra Leone," Mr. Kumalo said. "So there is a
very small network wherever these conflict diamonds are." He said that without concerted action worldwide,
there can be no hope of stopping the trade.

Netscape 6 Browser: Mixed Bag But if Web-page designers are mostly pleased with Netscape 6, ordinary mortals are in for a broad array of
disappointments. The program is a memory glutton, hoarding 20 to 25 megabytes of RAM. (Abandon all
hope, ye with 32-megabyte PC's.) Its speed is fine once you're online, but it takes nearly a minute to start
up, even on fast Macs and Windows PC's — long enough for you to say, "I wish this browser were built
into the operating system" 20 times in a row.

Once Navigator is finally ready to show you some Web, you may be surprised to discover that several
popular features of the previous version, Navigator 4.7, have disappeared. The print-preview feature is gone,
as is the ability to drag a Web site's address-bar icon directly into the Bookmarks menu. You can no longer
copy or paste a Web address in the Address bar by right-clicking there, either. And you have to resize the
browser window every time you begin surfing; Navigator doesn't remember how you had it the last time you
ran the program.

The most alarming flaw, however, is that you can't highlight the entire Address bar with a single click. You
must highlight the current Web address by dragging the mouse over it each time you want to type a new
address, an oversight blatant enough to make you wonder exactly how much time the program's designers
actually tested Navigator by, say, browsing the Web.

Nasdaq Continues to Fall Yesterday, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 121.53 points, or
1.2 percent, to 10,629.11, but the Nasdaq composite index fell 28.05
points, or 1 percent, to 2,706.93. The Nasdaq's decline gave it yet
another new low for this year.

The broader Standard & Poor's 500-stock index advanced 5.82 points, or 0.4 percent, to 1,341.91.

Despite the decline in technology stocks, investors traded with cautious optimism on new evidence that the
nation's economic growth was slowing, analysts said. The Commerce Department said yesterday that the
gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 2.4 percent last summer, the slowest rate in four years and a
steep decline from the 5.6 percent rate in the second quarter.

Lernout & Hauspie Files for Bankruptcy Within the last year, as its stock price soared above $70, Lernout & Hauspie bought two leading American
speech-recognition software makers, Dictaphone and Dragon Systems. But yesterday's bankruptcy filing
accelerated the company's long tumble from the top of the industry, which included the recent resignation of
its founders, Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie.

Lernout & Hauspie's shares were suspended indefinitely this month on Easdaq, the European stock market,
and on Nasdaq, where the price had dropped below $7.

ShopGuideNews

65 percent of shopping trips failed due to usability barriers. Despite the incentive of free money, two out of three efforts to
locate and purchase an item ended in an incomplete transaction.

Major obstacles interfered with completing a purchase. One example, a participant wishing to make his purchase using an
Amex card was forced to abandon his cart when the site only accepted Visa or MasterCard.

Minor obstacles can also get in the way of a completed transaction when enough of these problems pile up. The frustration
of a series of annoyances, especially during checkout, will cause a shopper to abandon the sale.

ShopGuideNews Can "voter intent" be determined in a fair and objective manner by a hand recount of ballots? In an effort to replicate a hand recount of
punch cards (exactly like those at the center of the current controversy in Florida) rejected by election machines, Boston-based online
legal services provider AmeriCounsel.com recently conducted an experiment to simulate the tabulation process.

In the AmeriCounsel election, 373 members of the public were asked to vote for their favorite ice cream flavor and season of the year.
The ballots were then sent to an official election tabulation center, where machines could count the votes. The machines rejected 10
percent of the cards, but hand counters determined that one-third of those ballots were actually valid because voter intent could easily
be discerned.

ZDNet: Sm@rt Partner - E-commerce Tax Update The e-commerce taxation debate, hotly contested for the past two years,
may be losing some of its steam.

The potential turning point? Barnes & Noble last month revealed plans to
integrate its brick-and-mortar and online (BN.com) businesses. The move
marks the end of the bookseller's earlier strategy of maintaining separate
physical and electronic storefronts to free its cyber operation from having to
collect sales tax. Currently, remote sellers—including e-tailers—are not
compelled to collect sales tax in states in which they lack a significant
physical presence. Barnes & Noble's online isolation kept BN.com an
Internet-only play, keeping it on the same tax footing as Amazon.com.

Interestingly enough, "eBrands: building an Internet Business at breakneck Speed" (Library of Congress Number HD69.B7C37) talks specifically about Barnes and Nobles' need to integrate its internet and brick and mortar brands to compete successfully. A book of Harvard Business School case studies, I think it's flawed. It overemphasizes the stock value of companies. All of the studies were done before the bottom fell out of the market.

Often, Parole Is One Stop on the Way Back to Prison Since then, Mr. Peterson has become an apprentice plumber, but he has had his parole revoked three more
times, department records show. Once it was revoked for possession of a dangerous weapon — a serious issue
to the department, given his original conviction — though his mother and lawyer say it was only a
plumber's knife his parole agent found in his toolbox when the agent searched Mr. Peterson's truck.

The next time it was again for possession of a dangerous weapon, what the parole agent described as a hand
grenade in Mr. Peterson's bedroom. Mr. Peterson's sister said it was actually a toy grenade she had bought
for her Halloween costume.

Then last spring Mr. Peterson was charged with assault and making a terrorist threat when he got into an
argument with a former girlfriend, who he said had been harassing his current girlfriend. A department
spokesman said the former girlfriend's mother testified against him, but Mr. Peterson's boss in the plumber's
union, who tried to testify for him, was excluded from the hearing.

So far, Mr. Peterson has spent a year and 11 months in prison on parole revocations, almost as long as he
did on his original two- year sentence. And the total could go on almost indefinitely, because under
California law, each time Mr. Peterson has his parole revoked, he stops earning credit toward his original
three-year parole term. The parole revocations themselves, in California, can last from a few weeks to a year.

Often, Parole Is One Stop on the Way Back to Prison Jason Peterson had lost 60 pounds when he was released after spending almost two years in solitary
confinement at Pelican Bay, California's super maximum-security prison, while serving a sentence for
possession of a pipe bomb.

When he returned to his mother's house in San Francisco, after months without human contact, he refused to
leave his bedroom, his mother, Jeannine Peterson, said in a lengthy interview recently. Her account was
supported by her son's lawyer and a psychiatrist hired by the family.

Concerned about his mental state, Mrs. Peterson, an elementary school special education teacher, called his
parole officer, who offered to take him to the hospital. Instead, she said, the parole officer arrived with police
officers, who handcuffed her son and took him into custody.

The next morning, the parole agent called to say that Mr. Peterson's parole had been revoked for psychiatric
reasons and he had been given an additional year in prison at San Quentin, his mother said.

Often, Parole Is One Stop on the Way Back to Prison This year, a record 600,000 inmates will be
released from state and federal prisons nationwide,
up from 170,000 in 1980.

As the former prisoners return, largely to the poor
neighborhoods of large cities, there is mounting
evidence that they represent what some
criminologists and prison officials now call the
collateral damage of the prison- building boom.

Because states sharply curtailed education, job
training and other rehabilitation programs inside
prisons, the newly released inmates are far less
likely than their counterparts two decades ago to
find jobs, maintain stable family lives or stay out of
the kind of trouble that leads to more prison. Many
states have unintentionally contributed to these
problems by abolishing early release for good
behavior, removing the incentive for inmates to
improve their conduct,

Sins of Emission Why is the United States such a big emitter? Energy use tends to be more or less proportional to gross
domestic product, and we have the biggest economy. But that's not the whole story: We release about twice
as much carbon dioxide per capita as other advanced countries, even though we don't have anywhere near
twice their per capita G.D.P. The main reason for that disparity is that we have much lower taxes on fuel,
especially gasoline. The image of the American filling up his living room on wheels with dollar-a-gallon
gasoline while his European counterpart carefully spoons precious petrol into his mini is a caricature, but gets
at an essential truth.

This comparison suggests that it should actually be much easier for the United States to reduce its energy
consumption and carbon dioxide emissions than it is for Europe. High taxes on fuel have already induced
Europeans to do the easy conservation steps; in America, where gasoline is literally cheaper than (bottled)
water, we haven't even tried.

Ahab vs. The Waco Whale President-elect(?) Mini-Me has not
yet started gnawing on his cat, as the "Austin Powers"
Mini-Me did to the hairless Mr. Bigglesworth.

But W. is starting to weird me out.

Why is our kinda-sorta chief executive the low man on his own
totem pole?

We knew that his political nannies told him stuff only on a need-to-know basis. But now that the guy is
seconds away from the White House, we learn that his handlers deal with him on a needs-not-to-know basis.

Last week in Austin, our Wannabe President George Bush, miniature clone of President George Bush,
happily told reporters that Dick Cheney had "had no heart attack."

The hospital, the Cheney family and Mr. Bush's press aide, Karen Hughes, knew that Mr. Cheney had, that
morning, undergone a heart procedure. But Ms. Hughes did not tell that to her boss before he spoke so rosily
and ignorantly about Mr. Cheney's condition.

When the election ended, Mini-Me was shocked that he had not won in a landslide. His strategists had
apparently failed to inform him that things were getting tight, just as they hadn't alerted him that he was
cratering in New Hampshire. Did they not trust him with the information, fearing he might get cranky?

Presidents get dangerously insulated in the White House. But this boy's in a bubble before he even gets to
the Oval bubble.

U.S. Wrote Outline for Race Profiling, New Jersey Argues New Jersey officials contend that the reason racial
profiling is a national problem is that it was
initiated, and in many ways encouraged, by the
federal government's war on drugs. In 1986, the
Drug Enforcement Administration's Operation
Pipeline enlisted police departments across the
country to search for narcotics traffickers on major
highways and told officers, to cite one example, that
Latinos and West Indians dominated the drug trade
and therefore warranted extra scrutiny.

Since then, the D.E.A. and the Department of
Transportation have financed and taught an array of
drug interdiction programs that emphasize the
ethnic and racial characteristics of narcotics
organizations and teach the police ways to single
out cars and drivers who are smuggling.

U.S. Wrote Outline for Race Profiling, New Jersey Argues New Jersey officials contend that the reason racial
profiling is a national problem is that it was
initiated, and in many ways encouraged, by the
federal government's war on drugs. In 1986, the
Drug Enforcement Administration's Operation
Pipeline enlisted police departments across the
country to search for narcotics traffickers on major
highways and told officers, to cite one example, that
Latinos and West Indians dominated the drug trade
and therefore warranted extra scrutiny.

Since then, the D.E.A. and the Department of
Transportation have financed and taught an array of
drug interdiction programs that emphasize the
ethnic and racial characteristics of narcotics
organizations and teach the police ways to

The 2000 Election "Has
anybody even been able to agree on the time of day

Uniting A Divided Nation, Op-Ed, By Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. Elections are supposed to be about choices, and the policy choices between Gore and Bush were relatively stark. In short, the
fundamental choice was between Bush's emphasis on a greater role for state governments and Gore's emphasis on the need for
continuing a significant federal role.

But, since both campaigns knew that the nation was divided over these very policy options, neither side was confident they could win the
national debate if they revealed their true selves. So instead of making the choices clear, both candidates campaigned to conceal their
differences by tailoring and blurring their message for a relatively narrow voting market of undecided suburban independent voters.

The election confirmed the obvious. We are a divided nation. But what was the divide. The professional pundits have focused on the
division between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. But, if one looks at the electoral map, the division was as old as
the Civil War itself -- North and South. Bush won the old states' rights Confederacy and the states of small western cities and rural
communities whose politics reflect a similar ideology -- plus Ohio, Indiana and New Hampshire. Gore won the Union states of the North
and Northeast, the larger western states of California, Oregon and Washington, plus New Mexico.

The American people chose a virtual tie for governing in the White House, the U.S. House and Senate. If compared to a chess game,
Gore and Bush, Democrats and Republicans, took no chances, played a perfect conservative game and the result was a stalemate. While
the two presidential and party mates checked each other in the campaign, and neither can really be declared a winner or a loser, the
American people may very well end up the losers with neither person or party able to accomplish much. Our politics could end up in an
ugly mess and a nasty feud.

ABCNEWS.com : Nightline Index TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 28

What do members of Congress think about the
never-ending presidential election? Ted
Koppel traveled to Capitol Hill to find out

Jekyll and Hyde If Mr. Bush wins the post-election, it will be,
in part, because he reverted to his true self,
and his party to its true self, after a campaign in which they persuaded
voters that they had become a kinder, gentler, more inclusive G.O.P. If
Al Gore loses the post- election, it will be, in part, because he was never
himself during the real election, but rather somebody else every week.
Therefore he could never ignite the enthusiasm of America's young, or his
own party, so he had to personally solicit supporters for his post-election
campaign.

The 2000 Election

Gore Asks Public for Patience; Bush
Starts Transition Moves;
Administration Withholds Aid