Submarine could prove US started Pearl Harbor

In fact, it's clear that we would be facing large deficits outside Social Security, and probably significant deficits in the budget as a whole, even if neither the recession nor Sept. 11 had happened.

...by the administration's own estimates, 40 percent of the $4 trillion deterioration in the 10-year outlook is due to tax cuts.

KIM KELLY, PRESIDENT & COO, INSIGHT COMMUNICATIONS: I don't mean to be flip, but I did notice the report highlighted two companies that had neither women executives or women directors, NTL and Adelphia. And they are about the two biggest bankruptcies we have had this year.

WOODRUFF (voice-over): No one at today's public release of the report suggested women are more honest, but they did note that women tend to take their responsibilities more seriously, and:

Superior Court Judge William Mudd said photographer Dan Trevan violated judicial restrictions by photographing Danielle van Dam's parents as they reacted to the jury's guilty verdicts last Wednesday.

The newspaper's lawyers argued that Brenda and Damon van Dam, whose 7-year-old daughter was reported missing from her bedroom Feb. 2 and was found dead 25 days later, were trial participants, not spectators, and thus not subject to the rule. Both van Dams testified during the trial, and Mudd allowed their pictures to be taken on the witness stand.

In February, when Westerfield was arraigned before Superior Court Judge Peter Deddeh, several news organizations took pictures of the van Dams as they sat in the courtroom gallery. Judge Deddeh did not order the photographers to stop or complain after the pictures were published and broadcast.

Thousands of pages of previously undisclosed company documents reviewed by The Washington Post, along with interviews with former employees and people familiar with WorldCom's operations, reveal a grow-at-any-cost culture that made it possible for employees and managers to game the system internally and to deceive investors about the health of the business.

Salespeople and managers boosted their commissions by manipulating the company's billing systems. Orders for services or equipment were booked even if they were not provided, so that departments could meet revenue targets. Outside contractors billed for hours they could not have worked, and some equipment was purchased without anyone checking to see whether it was already in inventory.

It's another massive waste of money. Another diversion from the real needs of the poor. Another boondoggle for the rich to jet somewhere exotic to gush over their concern for the poor.

If I sound aggravated, it's because I lived in a desolate African nation (Zaire, not the Congo) for more than two years in the early 1970s. So I've experienced the wrenching misery of Third World poverty -- up close and personal.

It's also because I served as a U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in the early 1980s. So I've learned the inanity of U.N. conferences -- again, up close and personal.

As head of the U.S. delegation to several such conferences, I heard hundreds of speeches urging each conference to increase the "political will" to implement past U.N. conference declarations.

The Johannesburg summit does likewise. It will urge implementation for the U.N. conference 10 years ago in Rio.

Millions of dollars spent on the wealthy traveling to a neat tourist spot to produce multi-lingual speeches and documents about the poor. This U.N. conference has a budget of an exorbitant $55 million. The South African government, plagued by widespread poverty among blacks, will contribute $20 million.

Instead of the 60,000 jetting to South Africa for another round of U.N. speeches and declarations, just imagine how many poor Africans could be helped by $55 million spent on real programs to raise levels to $2 per day.

But families and friends have also honored their loved ones in smaller, more personal ways. A wife makes a dinner she has never made before and when her children turn up their noses, asking what it is, she explains: Their daddy loved Sloppy Joes.

(CBS)-(NEW YORK)-A New York City landlord is demanding more than $27,000 from the estate of a Sept. 11 terrorist attack victim.

Danielle Kousoulis, 29, worked on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center's north tower as a vice president for Cantor Fitzgerald. She signed a lease on a $2,500-a-month loft apartment 10 days before a hijacked plane crashed into her workplace.

In a letter this month, landlord Denise M. Lyman claimed she was an unpaid creditor and threatened to take Kousoulis' family in Haddon Township, N.J., to court.

The New York Daily News reported that one of the complaints against the dead woman was that she failed to give three-months notice that she was leaving.

She said Lyman refused to let the family into their daughter's apartment to get a hairbrush for a DNA sample to identify any remains. The family finally obtained the sample with the assistance of the police.

[R]ound up the usual suspects! George W. Bush's new "Healthy Forests" plan reads like a parody of his administration's standard operating procedure. You see, environmentalists cause forest fires, and those nice corporations will solve the problem if we get out of their way.

Am I being too harsh? No, actually it's even worse than it seems. "Healthy Forests" isn't just about scrapping environmental protection; it's also about expanding corporate welfare.

Everyone agrees that the forests' prime evil is a well-meaning but counterproductive bear named Smokey. Generations of fire suppression have led to a dangerous accumulation of highly flammable small trees and underbrush. And in some -- not all -- of the national forests it's too late simply to reverse the policy; thanks to growing population and urban sprawl, some forests are too close to built-up areas to be allowed to burn.

Clearly, some of the excess fuel in some of the nation's forests should be removed. But how? Mr. Bush asserts that there is a free lunch: allowing more logging that thins out the national forests will both yield valuable resources and reduce fire risks.

Forest researcher Dr. Wayne Shepard told NBC's Roger O'Neil: "The larger trees were more widely spaced so the fire couldn't jump."

In many forests there are 10-20 times as many trees as there were 100 years ago, according to O'Neil.

But it turns out that the stuff that needs to be removed -- small trees and bushes, in areas close to habitation -- is of little commercial value. The good stuff, from the industry's point of view, consists of large, mature trees -- the kind of trees that usually survive forest fires -- which are often far from inhabited areas.

So the administration proposes to make deals with logging companies: in return for clearing out the stuff that should be removed, they will be granted the right to take out other stuff that probably shouldn't be removed. Notice that this means that there isn't a free lunch after all. And there are at least three severe further problems with this plan.

First, will the quid pro quo really be enforced, or will loggers simply make off with the quid and forget about the quo? The Forest Service, which would be in charge of enforcement, has repeatedly been cited by Congress's General Accounting Office for poor management and lack of accountability. And the agency, true to Bush administration form, is now run by a former industry lobbyist. (In the 2000 election cycle, the forest products industry gave 82 percent of its contributions to Republicans.) You don't have to be much of a cynic to question whether loggers will really be held to their promises.

Second, linking logging of mature trees to clearing of underbrush is a policy non sequitur. Suppose Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced that Waste Management Inc. would pick up Manhattan's trash free, in return for the right to dump toxic waste on Staten Island. Staten Island residents would protest, correctly, that if Manhattan wants its garbage picked up, it should pay for the service; if the city wants to sell companies the right to dump elsewhere, that should be treated as a separate issue. Similarly, if the federal government wants to clear underbrush near populated areas, it should pay for it; if it wants to sell the right to log mature trees elsewhere, that should be a separate decision.

And this gets us to the last point: In fact, the government doesn't make money when it sells timber rights to loggers. According to the General Accounting Office, the Forest Service consistently spends more money arranging timber sales than it actually gets from the sales. How much money? Funny you should ask: last year the Bush administration stopped releasing that information. In any case, the measured costs of timber sales capture only a fraction of the true budgetary costs of logging in the national forests, which is supported by hundreds of millions of dollars in federal subsidies, especially for road-building. This means that, environmental issues aside, inducing logging companies to clear underbrush by letting them log elsewhere would probably end up costing taxpayers more, not less, than dealing with the problem directly.

PERC Senior Associate Donald R. Leal compared timber sales on state and national forests in Montana. The growing potential and natural characteristics of these forests were closely matched. Overall, the state's timber sales earned nearly $14 million from 1988 to 1992, while the national forests showed a loss of $42 million. This is particularly startling because the state harvest was just one-twelfth of what the Forest Service harvested.

How could the results differ so drastically? The answer is that the state carries out its responsibilities at substantially lower costs. The Forest Service is losing money on timber sales because its management approach is unnecessarily costly.

Based on state performance, it appears that the Forest Service could reduce costs in many areas. The environmental process could be streamlined without sacrificing environmental protection. Rigid, bureaucratic rules could be eliminated. Less money could be spent preparing timber sales, and expensive permanent road systems could be replaced by temporary roads.

So as in the case of the administration's energy policy, beneath the free-market rhetoric is a plan for increased subsidies to favored corporations. Surprise.

A final thought: Wouldn't it be nice if just once, on some issue, the Bush administration came up with a plan that didn't involve weakened environmental protection, financial breaks for wealthy individuals and corporations and reduced public oversight?

The police officer was on the run. Like others in the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, Fang Lihong had been fired, imprisoned and forced to attend months of intense "deprogramming" classes. Unlike most, he was then committed to a psychiatric hospital -- but he escaped.

"I was terrified," Fang said last year during an interview at a seedy tavern in central China. "I'm not mentally ill, but I was trapped with the other patients for 16 months."

At first, he said, doctors at the Kangning Psychiatric Hospital in the northern city of Anshan forced him to take medication. Later, they let him take the pills to his room and discard them, Fang said. The doctors told him they knew he was sane but were under orders from his superiors in the police department to "treat" him anyway, he said.

During the 45-minute interview, Fang spoke clearly and appeared rational. Afterward, he slipped out a side door and went back into hiding. In February, according to Falun Gong officials in the United States, police caught him in southern Fujian province and he died in their custody, apparently from physical abuse. A doctor at Kangning confirmed the mental hospital had treated Fang and had been informed of his death, but he declined to discuss the case further.

WINSTON-SALEM, NC (AgapePress) - Ergun Mehmet Caner watched in horror as the dramatic and fateful events unfolded on the morning of September 11. Like most Americans, he was shocked at the apparent accidental collision of a jetliner into one of the massive, majestic towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. It was, he thought, a tragic, bizarre accident with a tragic loss of humanity.

Caner recalls that within minutes of that first collision, however, he knew that America was at war. "When the second plane hit, no one had to tell me," he says. Moreover, he knew exactly who America's enemy was, how they thought, and what they wanted, because he was raised as one of them.

Caner is a committed, born-again Christian, as well as a professor of theology and church history at Criswell College in Dallas, Texas. But he was raised in a strict Muslim home in Ohio and was a devout worshiper of Allah until age 17, when he was led to Christ through the witness of one of his high school friends. Caner in turn led to Christ his own brother, Emir, who today is a professor of church history at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

...

"Please understand that this is not about conquering Muslims, but about seeing them find peace and hope in Jesus Christ," Caner says. "It's not about defeating them. It's about winning them and loving them, because it's easy to love the people who love you back, but it's hard to love the unlovable."

Says Caner, "That church loved me, the unlovable. They shared mercy and grace. That is how you reach a Muslim."

At Yankee Stadium, Texas shortstop Alex Rodriguez backtracked from his comments Friday that he would give back 30 to 40 percent of his pay if it would improve the sport.

"I'm willing to do my part. Thirty to 40 percent? Probably not. I was speaking off the cuff," said Rodriguez, who signed a record 10-year, $252 million deal in December 200.

"What I wanted to say is I love the game of baseball and would do anything to help it. Obviously, that was a very drastic statement. I wouldn't take it literally."

Because it plays into anti-Jew stereotypes, this kind of heavy-handed financial intervention to pick the winner of a largely African American race is actually a boon to anti-Semites of the black and extremist left-wing varieties. (See under: “Louis Farrakhan” and “Alexander Cockburn.”) What AIPAC et al appear to be saying is “We will tolerate no dissent of any kind on Israel in American public life.” They do Israel and America’s Jews no favor.

Don't blame the Republicans, Cynthia McKinney --- every Democratic friend of mine, including me, went to the polls for one reason: to vote against you!

Don't blame Andrew Young --- after Sept. 11 he had sense enough to distance himself from you.

No, Cynthia, you have only to look in the mirror, paying special attention to your mouth, to see the reason for your defeat.

I don't care for President Bush, didn't vote for him, but when you said he knew about Sept. 11 but didn't tell us because his friends would benefit from a war, that did it for all of us.

Oh, and tell Daddy Billy I'm not a J-E-W either, but I couldn't blame them for voting against you in droves!

JANE BENTLEY, Decatur

Still, it was the money from campaign contributors motivated by a single issue — one not directly related to problems and concerns in the candidates' districts — that allowed the challengers to get out their messages, a fact that has caused resentment from some black politicians.

"I definitely have some feelings about any outside group exerting this kind of influence in a race, and I've been receiving angry calls from black voters all day, saying they should rally against Jewish candidates," said Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat who is the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

"To have non-African-Americans from around the country putting millions into a race to unseat one of our leaders for expressing her right of free speech is definitely a problem," Ms. Johnson said.

When Harvey Gantt, who is black, ran against Sen. Jesse Helms, lots of people from outside North Carolina donated to Gantt, because they hated Helms's politics. There's no crime in that. But if a white Congresswoman had told the New York Times she had a problem with "non-whites from around the country putting millions into a race to unseat one of our leaders," that Congresswoman would have been rightly denounced from the rafters as a racist troglodyte. Will that happen to Johnson? Don't hold your breath.

"If she comes here willing to work with us and is not skewed by the agenda of her supporters, of course we work with her," Representative Johnson said. "We all know we have to move past this."

Gil Bernardi, mayor of Le Lavandou on the coast 25 km (15 miles) west of Saint Tropez, introduced the ban after a court rejected his plans to build a cemetery in a tranquil setting by the sea.

Bernardi said most locals had obeyed the edict so far, but he was desperately trying to find a resting place for a homeless man who had recently passed away in the town.

"Initially, the decree has been remarkably well followed," the mayor said.

JOLO, Philippines -- Muslim rebels linked to al-Qaida beheaded at least two of the six Jehovah's Witnesses they kidnapped in the southern Philippines, a top army commander said Thursday.

The heads of the two male hostages were found in an open air market in Jolo town along with notes calling for a holy war, said Brig. Gen. Romeo Tolentino, commander of the army on the southern island of Jolo.

This law doesn't just limit speech. It also creates a Byzantine set of rules that will have political operates from all camps peering over everyone's shoulder, in search of anything that can be counted as an expense. An army of regulators saying show me the money will be the only way to ensure that every candidate adheres to the extreme spending limits. Every campaign will have to be scrutinized down to the nanosecond an ad runs, the minutes a volunteer gives a candidate or the value of a borrowed car to make a campaign trip.

"If a citizen uses his or her residence as a place at which a candidate and the candidate's supporters sometimes meet to plan campaign efforts, buy stamps for invitations to the gatherings, and provide snacks and soft drinks for those who attend, then the value of the rooms and the items purchased"--like pencils and paper, Pepsis and chips--must be counted towards the spending limit, Judge Winter said in his dissent. So must "the value of the mileage driven by the candidate and other supporters to the meetings." So must the value of the use of the residence's phone to make a local call, and the proportionate time spent sending an e-mail from a home computer, however that will be calculated.

And since all these costs count against spending limits, candidates must keep meticulous records for years or risk being stricken from the ballot for breaking the law.

You and I cannot take an interest in someone's campaign, talk over the phone about it, send letter to some friends, and have coffee and donuts for 20 people to talk about a campaign. To do so would count against a candidate's limit. Therefore, the candidate must have a firm hand in controlling every single event that could be construed to help his campaign. From phone calls to a short drive to mail a campaign letter, there'll be no room for spontaneous citizen participation. Of course, this amounts to suppressing political activity and silencing the "regular people" Vermont supposedly cares so much about.

Brad Dacus of the Pacific Justice Institute is convinced that if the judges pull this off, religion is next.

No way, (Angela) Bradstreet (president of the Bar Association of San Francisco) countered. Women, for example, may not be able to be Catholic priests, but they can attend church services. There's no reason to target religion. But when I asked Bradstreet, who is a lesbian, how she would feel standing before a Muslim judge from an anti-homosexual mosque, she answered, "You have to start somewhere."

So maybe religion is next.

Boy Scouts first. Catholics later.

Bradstreet added: "Under that argument, we shouldn't have ethics rules at all. We should just say that judges should be able to join whatever organizations they want."

What a novel idea, freedom of association. Maybe someone could write a law about it.

[D]on't tell, maybe they won't ask. That was the message of a July memo from an official at the Department of Veterans Affairs, posted by Joshua Marshall at talkingpointsmemo.com. Citing "conservative OMB budget guidance" for spending on veterans' health care, the memo instructed subordinates to "ensure that no marketing activities to enroll new veterans occur within your networks." Veterans are entitled to medical care; but the administration hopes that some of them don't know that, and that it can save money by leaving them ignorant.

In an interview last night, Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony J. Principi said he directed Miller to send the memo, and he rejected Kerry's call for Miller's resignation.

''We have a serious situation in the VA, and I think it is irresponsible to strongly recruit for new enrollees when we cannot meet the expectations and the needs for the people currently enrolled. ... To me it would just be irresponsible and lead to unfulfilled expectations,'' Principi said.

The VA is required to provide services to all veterans who have suffered a disabling injury or are indigent. The secretary of veterans affairs has discretion to offer eligibility to others. In 1996, Congress allowed the VA expanded its eligibility to all veterans, not just to those who are indigent or have service-related injuries.

It's not the sort of thing you'd expect from an administration that wraps itself so tightly in the flag ? not, that is, unless you've been paying attention. For stories like this are popping up more and more often.

Take George W. Bush's decision last week to demonstrate his resolve by blocking $5.1 billion in homeland security spending. This turned out to be a major gaffe, because the rejected bill allocated money both to improve veterans' health care and to provide firefighters with new equipment, including communication systems that could have saved lives on Sept. 11. Recalling those scenes at ground zero that did so much to raise Mr. Bush's poll numbers, the president of the International Association of Firefighters warned, "Don't lionize our fallen brothers in one breath, then stab us in the back."

Or what about the trapped coal miners? After their rescue, Mr. Bush made a point of congratulating them in person -- and Michael Novak, writing in National Review Online, declared Somerset, Pa., the "conservative capital of the world."

But Mr. Novak didn't mention the crucial assistance provided by the federal government's Mine Safety and Health Administration. That would have raised some awkward questions: although the Bush administration's energy plans call for major increases in coal mining, its spending plans cut funds for mine safety. More conservative budget guidance.

The point is that there is an inexorably growing gap between the image and the reality of the Bush administration's policies.

The federal budget is now deep in deficit, and everyone except the administration thinks it will remain there -- not because of runaway spending, but because most of last year's tax cut has yet to take effect. And as my colleague Frank Rich points out, to offset the revenue losses from his tax cut, Mr. Bush would have to veto a $5 billion spending proposal every working day for the next year. Mr. Bush can no longer pretend, as he did during the 2000 campaign, that there is enough money for everything. Now, to justify that tax cut, he must hack steadily away at programs that matter to ordinary people.

What are the political implications? When Al Gore wrote an Op-Ed article condemning the elitist policies of the Bush administration, pundits -- and many Democratic politicians, including his former running mate -- jumped on him with both feet. Populism, everyone insisted, doesn't work in American politics.

Yet conservatives enthusiastically rely on populism -- fake populism, based on staged shmoozing with ordinary Americans and attacks on the imagined cultural elitism of the liberal media. Why shouldn't liberals, who actually have the facts on their side, try engaging in the real thing?

The judge said the stoning would not be carried out until Amina Lawal Kurami, 31, had weaned her eight-month-old daughter Wasila, which may not be for another two years.

The egregious part of the story was the touting of Henry Kissinger as one of the top Republican leaders breaking with Bush over Iraq. This revelation was based on a Washington Post op-ed that Kissinger had published four days earlier.

How can one possibly include Kissinger in this opposition group? He writes in the very article the Times cites: "The imminence of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the huge dangers it involves, the rejection of a viable inspection system and the demonstrated hostility of Hussein combine to produce an imperative for preemptive action." There is hardly a more succinct statement of the administration's case for war.

Long before Cheney's task force met with Enron officials and included their ideas in Bush's energy plan, Clinton's energy team was doing much the same thing. Drafting a 1995 plan to help facilitate cash flow and credit for energy producers, it asked for Enron's input?and listened. The staff was directed to "rework the proposal to take into account the specific comments and suggestions you made," Clinton Deputy Energy Secretary Bill White wrote an Enron official.

Marwan Barghouti, as I understand it, plans and helps execute attacks against Israelis only in the occupied territories, where right-wing and opportunist Israelis have chosen to put themselves and their families at risk on land to which they have no legal or moral right. He has expressed a willingness to negotiate peace based on Israel's internationally recognized pre-1967 borders. He is, in other words, the very definition of a freedom fighter; a violent one, to be sure, but fighting a violent enemy. If Israel were to come to its senses, he is the kind of leader with whom it would need to make peace. But like Hamas, Ariel Sharon prefers war and occupation to peace and compromise and in seeking to try one of the other side's more moderate leaders for murder, seeks to destroy any hope for the former, thereby presenting himself as the champion of the latter. It is a horrifying spiral of death with Sharon and company leading the whirlwind. The blood of many, Jew and Arab, is on their hands.

May 27, 2000 - a suicide bomber detonated himself outside a mall in Petah Tikva; two Israeli civilians were killed, and 37 injured.

April 12, 2002 - a woman suicide bomber detonated herself in Jerusalem's Mahane Yehuda market; six people were killed and 104 wounded.

March 30, 2002 - a suicide bomber detonated himself in a Tel-Aviv café; one was killed and about 30 others injured.

March 29, 2002 - a woman suicide bomber detonated herself inside a supermarket in Jerusalem; two people were killed and 28 injured.

March 21, 2002 - a suicide bomber detonated himself in the middle of King George Street in Jerusalem; three people were killed and 86 injured.

March 2, 2002 - a suicide bomber detonated himself near a bar-mitzvah celebration in Beit Yisrael neighborhood in Jerusalem; ten people were killed and more than 50 injured.

Jan. 27, 2002 - a woman suicide bomber detonated herself in Jerusalem; one person was killed and more than 150 wounded.

Though he wants to remain in the United States and still believes the judicial system here is better than other countries, he is disillusioned.

"America is considered to be a first-world country that treats everyone good, with justice for everyone, human rights for everyone. The way I see it sometimes I doubt that. It's not justice for everyone, it depends who you are and where you're coming from.

"Even what I've been through, I still believe in this country," he said. "There is more justice here than back home. There is no perfect system, but it is better than the others."

Besides raising claims about the treaty violations in their appeal to the Supreme Court, Suarez's lawyers said his 14 execution dates since his 1989 conviction amounted to unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.

It is true, of course, that religious believers have been prominent among opponents of cloning. But in general, their position has not rested on doctrines about, say, ensoulment, still less on any belief that God has revealed, in some direct way, His opposition to cloning to them. If some opponents do happen to believe that the early embryo has a soul, that belief is more likely to be the result of their view that the embryo is a human being with intrinsic worth than the cause of that view.

That's not a strained comparison. Even when Cisco was riding high, an analysis in Barron's dubbed it the "New Economy Creative Accounting Exemplar." The company's specialty was using its own overvalued stock as currency ? paying its employees with stock options, acquiring other companies by issuing more stock. Thanks to loopholes in the accounting rules ? loopholes defended with intense lobbying ? these transactions allowed executives to progressively dilute the stake of their original shareholders, without ever declaring this dilution as a business cost.

The resulting illusion of profitability sustained the stock price, making more questionable deals possible. Some analysts flatly called Cisco a pyramid scheme.

When Enron's financial house of cards collapsed, $80 billion of market value vanished. Cisco hasn't collapsed, but its market capitalization has fallen by more than $400 billion. Nobody from Cisco management ? ranked No. 13 in Fortune's "greedy bunch" ? has been arrested. But then neither has anyone from Enron.

Some cynics attribute the continuing absence of Enron indictments to the Bush family's loyalty code. But the alternative explanation is both innocent and chilling: Enron executives may have deluded and defrauded their shareholders without actually breaking the law. What Cisco did was definitely legal.

Under intense public and political pressure, government investigators have dramatically accelerated--and apparently broadened--their investigation of Enron.

In recent weeks, FORTUNE has learned, more than a dozen former company executives have been summoned by the Securities and Exchange Commission to give depositions in Washington by early September. Some defense attorneys are viewing the sudden deadline for high-level testimony in the complex case--after a lull that had lasted months--as a prelude to civil charges that could come in a matter of weeks.

HONG KONG, China -- A dense blanket of pollution, dubbed the "Asian Brown Cloud," is hovering over South Asia, with scientists warning it could kill millions of people in the region, and pose a global threat.

In the biggest-ever study of the phenomenon, 200 scientists warned that the cloud, estimated to be two miles (three kilometers) thick, is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths a year from respiratory disease.

By slashing the sunlight that reaches the ground by 10 to 15 percent, the choking smog has also altered the region's climate, cooling the ground while heating the atmosphere, scientists said on Monday.

The potent haze lying over the entire Indian subcontinent -- from Sri Lanka to Afghanistan -- has led to some erratic weather, sparking flooding in Bangladesh, Nepal and northeastern India, but drought in Pakistan and northwestern India.

President Bush exploited the attacks of Sept. 11 for political advantage, sought to manipulate the markets to suit his ends and cannot combat corporate scandals because of his own business background, Democratic National Committee Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe charged here today in a harsh opening to the November midterm elections.

The idea that a pre-emptive strike could save the world a heap of trouble isn't entirely idle. Think, if Genghis Khan could have been taken out when he was still the leader of just a band and not the whole Mongol race, Europe and Asia would have been saved several million dead and the destruction of much of its civilisation. Remove Napoleon from the scene on his return from his ill-fated Egyptian foray and Europe would have been a different place.

The last century doesn't provide such good examples, of course. To have "changed regime" in Berlin in the early Thirties would have meant overturning a democratically elected leader in Hitler. As for the efforts by the allies to stop the course of the Russian revolution with troops after 1918, the results were disastrous despite having well-armed local allies.

Nonetheless George Bush has done something in the last week to set out the parameters to pre-emptive action. "We owe it," he put it in Maine last weekend, "to the future of civilisation not to allow the world's worst leaders to develop and deploy and therefore blackmail free countries with the world's worst weapons." And he went on to define such enemies of the people as regimes intent on building up weapons of mass destruction, oblivious of international law and UN resolutions, governments who imprisoned their opponents without trial and who could not claim democratic legitimacy at home.

Significantly, nowhere in the series of speeches he made this week did Mr Bush actually name these rogue regimes. But it is pretty clear reading the descriptions whom he must have meant. The government which is spending by far the most on weapons of mass destruction, and is now planning to raise its budget by an increase greater than the total defence spending of Europe, is, of course, based in Washington. Not only is it building an arsenal the like of which the world has never seen, it has unilaterally withdrawn from the treaties designed to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, and has refused to accept any kind of international monitoring of its chemical or nuclear weapons facilities.

It has a government in power without the legitimacy of a democratic majority, in the hands of a coterie from a single part of the country and clearly aiming at a dynasty of rule. Its rhetoric is one of violent aggression against anyone seen as its enemies. It opponents are locked up without trial or the right to habeas corpus.

Of course there are those who say the country's threats are greatly exaggerated and the rhetoric of world mastery must not be confused with a real intention of using its weaponry in defiance of international law. True, it has a has a history of interfering with and invading its neighbours ? Panama, Grenada, Haiti et al. But since the long and debilitating war in Vietnam, it has kept largely to its own region.

Of course it has a peculiarly obnoxious regime, ready to poison its own people with corrupt capitalism and deregulated pollution. But give it time, and pressure from the outside world, and it will pay up its UN dues, rejoin the nuclear proliferation pacts and the Kyoto treaty and start behaving as a responsible member of the community again.

Against this, the hard men of the right would say that time is exactly what the world does not have on its side. Washington has showed itself determined to enforce its hegemony, come what may. It has shown itself ready to use weapons of aerial bombardment that make no discrimination between combatants and civilians, to show precious little remorse when it is guilty of "mistakes".

It is no friend of democracy, having announced its refusal to deal with the only two elected leaders of the Islamic world ? Khatami in Iran and Yasser Arafat in Palestine, the latter the only Arab leader ever elected with western observers checking the process. The country has armed and succoured state terrorism and assassination by the Israelis. It has installed the worst sort of warlord gangsters in Afghanistan and, according to "intelligence", been party to upsetting (albeit briefly) the elected president of Venezuela. The world cannot afford to await its next move.

The problem remains the practicalities. Whereas in Afghanistan the allies could rely on a local opposition force on the ground, no such scenario can be relied on in this case. The Spanish speaking minority in the south might be induced to rise up. There could be assistance from Minutemen in the mountains. But the democratic opposition is too defeated and divided to provide much help. The answer could be an "inside-out" strategy using special forces to take Washington and a few key nuclear bases. Provided the rest of the country was left to get on with its business, there would probably be little internal opposition to a seizure of the capital.

That leaves the substantial problem of an "exit strategy". There is no point in a repeat of 1812. But the experience of America in Japan after the Second World War could provide a model. A period of occupation of five to 10 years could provide an opportunity to inculcate ideas of true democracy, with a fair electoral system based on absolute majority, abolition of the death penalty, introduction of unions into hi-tech industries and a break-up of the Zaibatsu, the overweening corporations such as Microsoft, Exxon and General Electric.

Given time, this rogue superstate might then be able to take its place once again among the family of peace-loving nations.

Behind the lawsuit is an old missionary claim that Islam is a religion of violence in contrast to Christianity, a religion of peace. In effect the plaintiffs are suing the Koran on behalf of the Bible. They cite verses that demand slaying the infidel -- case closed. But most Muslims interpret these in the context of early war between Muhammad's followers and their opponents. They no more expect to apply them to their contemporary non-Muslim friends and neighbors than most Christians and Jews consider themselves commanded by God, like the Biblical Joshua, to exterminate the infidels. Like some Christians who may see themselves as new Joshuas, some Muslims portray the West as equivalent to those who attacked Muhammad and his followers and call for jihad. But we can only identify and counter them if we avoid assuming all Muslims interpret the Koran in the same way.

"Approaching the Qur'an" presents the passages that Muslims consider the earliest revelations to Muhammad, those with the most direct account of core theological ideas and literary themes. Similarly, in a college course on Western civilization, students are more likely to read Biblical passages from Exodus than the gruesome accounts of slaughter in Joshua. Do such selections present a deceptively benign view of the Bible? Only if they are used to make generalized claims about the Bible as a whole.