The odds just reached 90% that the White House knows that Lewis Libby, Eliot Abrams, and Karl Rove are three of the N White House aides who tried to get reporters to print that Ambassador Wilson's wife was an undercover CIA operative.
A new drug regimen can markedly reduce the chance that breast cancer will recur in postmenopausal women, a large international study has found. The results were so strongly, and surprisingly, positive that the investigators ended the study early and offered the drug to women taking a placebo.
The study involved 5,187 women at hundreds of medical centers in the United States, Canada and Europe. It asked what to do after they finish the recommended five-year course of tamoxifen, the standard treatment to prevent breast cancer recurrences.
Tamoxifen, which blocks the hormone estrogen, is remarkably effective in postmenopausal women whose cancers are fueled by the hormone, about 100,000 women each year. But women gain no additional benefits after they take tamoxifen for five years, and so doctors have told them to simply stop taking it then and hope for the best. They are better off for having taken it: the drug's effects last for years after it is stopped. But they are left vulnerable to a return of their cancer.
... The new study found that if women take a different drug, letrozole, sold by Novartis under the brand name Femara, after their five years of tamoxifen, they can cut that yearly risk nearly in half.
BAGHDAD — For the first time since Baghdad fell April 9, the capital city and most of the country have enjoyed four straight days without a significant outage.
Coalition officials are optimistic they can keep the lights on because sabotage and looting has dropped and electricity output is near prewar levels. Cooling temperatures have also helped.
'The power situation has not been this good since before the Kuwait war,' says security guard Majid Abdul Reza, 27. Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.
Were the federal government to account for its Social Security obligations under the rules of accrual accounting, which govern public companies, its financial outlook would be far worse. By the end of last year, the Social Security system owed retirees and current workers benefits valued at $14 trillion. The system's assets, in contrast, were only $3.5 trillion. These assets include not only the trust funds' current reserves ($1.4 trillion), but also the present value of the taxes that current workers will pay over the remainder of their working lives ($2.1 trillion).
... In other words, the system's current shortfall — its assets minus its liabilities — is $10.5 trillion. Unless Congress chooses to rescind Social Security benefits that have already been earned, this shortfall must be shouldered by future generations. This implicit debt of the Social Security system is more than two and a half times larger than the government's public debt.
What's more, the magnitude of the Social Security shortfall grew immensely last year. At the beginning of 2002, the trust fund's deficit was $10.1 trillion. Under a system of accrual accounting, Social Security would have had to report a loss of approximately $370 billion. If this figure — and not the trust fund's annual cash-flow surplus — were added to other federal accounts, the federal government would have reported a $930 billion deficit last week. Add in similar adjustments for Medicare and other retiree benefits, and the flow of red ink last year surges even higher.
Speaking to Nightline on condition of anonymity, with her voice digitally manipulated to avoid recognition, an undercover intelligence officer said the implications of the leak were grim.
'Just a few months ago, this administration went out of its way to tell us how important human intelligence is,' she said. 'We cannot find Saddam Hussein because we have no human intelligence. We cannot find Osama bin Laden because there is no human intelligence. And here you are, you have a case officer who is gathering human intelligence, who is running agents, and here you are exposing her and everyone that she came in contact with.'
As an undercover agent, Mrs. Wilson's duties would have included recruiting agents overseas in order to gather human intelligence -- the basic, but extremely dangerous brickwork, experts say, of intelligence work.
Rumsfeld said in an interview with the Financial Times and three European news organizations that he did not learn of the new Iraq Stabilization Group until he received a classified memo about it from national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Thursday.
Rumsfeld was asked several times why the changes were necessary. 'I think you have to ask Condi that question,' he said, according to a transcript posted on the Web site of the Financial Times.
Pressed, he said: 'I said I don't know. Isn't that clear? You don't understand English? I was not there for the backgrounding.'
Rumsfeld's tart remarks offer a window on the tensions among members of President Bush's war Cabinet, which are vividly described by administration officials but are rarely visible to outsiders. Rumsfeld's bluntness has occasionally rankled allies and caused headaches for the White House, but Bush is said to remain supportive.
The new group, headed by senior Rice aides at the National Security Council, gives the White House a stronger role in overseeing the reconstruction effort, which is under attack on Capitol Hill as poorly planned and unexpectedly expensive. Republican sources said the White House realizes that the consequences could be dire if the pace of the reconstruction does not improve markedly before the 2004 presidential election campaign begins.
Rumsfeld said he has not talked to Bush about the changes. When an interviewer said it sounded as though Rumsfeld had not been briefed about the changes before the memo and an interview Rice gave the New York Times, he replied, 'That's true.':
ON MARCH 26th, the Dewi Madrim, a chemical tanker off the coast of Sumatra, was boarded by ten pirates from a speedboat. They were armed with machine guns and machetes and carried VHF radios. They disabled the ship's radio, took the helm and steered the vessel, altering speed, for about an hour. Then they left, with some cash and the captain and first officer, who are still missing.
...The temporary hijacking of the Dewi Madrim was by terrorists learning to drive a ship, and the kidnapping (without any attempt to ransom the officers) was aimed at acquiring expertise to help the terrorists mount a maritime attack. In other words, attacks like that on the Dewi Madrim are the equivalent of the al-Qaeda hijackers who perpetrated the September 11th attacks going to flying school in Florida.
...The Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines kidnapped a maintenance engineer in a Sabah holiday resort in 2000. On his release in June this year, the engineer said his kidnappers knew he was a diving instructor; they wanted instruction. The owner of a diving school near Kuala Lumpur has recently reported a number of ethnic Malays wanting to learn about diving, but being strangely uninterested in learning about decompression.
...On September 16th 2001, America closed the port of Boston, fearing that terrorists would attack the gas terminal in the port. To this day, gas tankers bound for Boston have to be escorted by coastguards from 200 miles away from the port.
An incident on October 18th 2001 increased anxieties about terrorists using shipping, especially container ships, to smuggle people and explosives around the world. Authorities in the southern Italian port of Gioia Tauro found a stowaway in a well-appointed container, fitted out with a bed, toilet, heater and water. He also had a laptop computer, mobile and satellite phones, and airport security passes and a mechanic's certificate for JFK, Newark, Los Angeles International and Chicago O'Hare airports. Fears grew further after a torpedo attack by terrorists on a French tanker, the MV Limburg, in Yemen in October 2002.
The likeliest terrorist target is a tanker carrying liquefied petroleum gas (easier to explode than natural gas), reckons Aegis's Tim Spicer, formerly a British soldier and head of Sandline, a “private military company” (a euphemism for a supplier of mercenaries) that achieved notoriety for its work for the British government in Sierra Leone. He fears that hijacked gas and oil tankers could be used to block the Malacca Strait, or the Panama or Suez Canals. That could wreak economic havoc. The UN estimates that ships carry 80% of the world's traded cargo—5.8 billion tonnes in 2001.
...On October 1st, America's Bureau of Customs and Border Protection was supposed to introduce new rules requiring shipping lines to advise the agency by computer or by fax about the contents of incoming cargo vessels. It now says it has delayed publishing its requirements until later this month—although it is not entirely clear why.
Spam Fighters Turn to Identifying Legitimate E-Mail: "People have been spending all their time creating filters to find the bad guys,' said Nico Popp, vice president for research and advanced products of VeriSign, the largest registrar of Internet sites and a seller of online identification systems. 'We want to turn that on its head and find ways to identify the good guys and let them in.'
Put simply, these efforts are trying to develop the Internet equivalent of caller ID, a technology that will let the receiver of an e-mail message verify the identity of the sender. As with caller ID for telephones, senders will be able to choose whether to remain anonymous. But also like caller ID, recipients may presume that those who do not identify themselves are sending junk.
As I was getting ready to speak at last week's Toorcon 2003 information security conference in San Diego, I finally figured out that privacy was never intended for you and me. The system doesn't care about us at all.
The system doesn't care because the Post Office does nothing to protect our mail. Have you ever met a Postal Inspector? Neither have I. The system doesn't care because our government blithely gives away personal data on millions of citizens. For $3,200 and a couple pages of signatures, I could right now be running for Governor of California, but really harvesting the name, address, date of birth, and Social Security number of every registered voter in the state to be used for identity theft. Government does not protect our privacy, but is actively working to undermine it. Nor are we protected by the people with whom we entrust our money. For ONE DOLLAR I can get quickly this same information on anyone I like along with where they bank and their savings balance. This is supposed to be against the law, of course. We have laws and rules and regulations that supposedly protect our privacy, but they don't work. If we were to test them they would fail, so we don't test and they fail anyway...
...In the middle of this, we find the trinity of banks, government, and credit bureaus who betray us on our behalf. The banks and their bank-like sister companies are the airliners in our big economic sky. They use a modified version of the Big Sky Theory that says as long as theft is kept to five percent or less, it is tolerable. That's what insurance is for. They play the odds to achieve this, which is where the credit bureaus come in. They are the oddsmakers. This system works for us, too, because it enables us to get a mortgage without ever meeting a banker, it increases liquidity and makes easy credit available for nearly all of us. But the system works against us if we are among the five percent who are victims because our time, our reputations, and a certain amount of our money will never be recovered.
The vicious release to news organizations of the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer could serve as a case study of the character of this administration. The Bush II crowd is arrogant, venal, mean-spirited and contemptuous of law and custom.
The problem it faces now is not just the criminal investigation into who outed Valerie Plame, but also the fact that the public understands this story only too well. Deliberately blowing the cover of an intelligence or law enforcement official for no good reason is considered by nearly all Americans, regardless of their political affiliations, to be a despicable act.
According to an ABC-Washington Post poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans believe a special counsel should be appointed to investigate the leak.
Now that so much has gone haywire — Iraq, the economy, America's standing in the world — the tough questions are finally being asked about President Bush and his administration.
Perhaps foreign policy was not Mr. Bush's strength, after all. And even diehard Republicans have been forced to acknowledge that the president was surely wrong when he insisted that his mammoth tax cuts would be the engine of job creation. And nothing has ever come of Mr. Bush's promise to be the education president, or to change the tone of the discourse in Washington, or to deal humbly and respectfully with the rest of the world.
Americans are increasingly asking what went wrong. How could so much have gone sour in such a short period of time? Was it incompetence? Bad faith?
Loud warnings were ignored for the longest time. Now, finally, the truth is becoming more and more difficult to avoid.
