Joshua Kinberg's internet-connected, sidewalk-printing graffiti bike got him a lot of attention ahead of the 2004 Republican National Convention; he was Boing Boinged, Slashdotted and featured on CNN and in Popular Science.

Though he didn't know it at the time, his gadget also landed him a spot in secret files being compiled by the New York Police Department's intelligence arm against protest groups across the country.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) yesterday struck a blow against the human embryonic stem cell patents held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). In response to a request filed last July by two public interest groups (ScienceNOW, 18 July 2006), the PTO ruled that three WARF patents based on the work of University of Wisconsin, Madison, stem cell researcher James Thomson fail to meet its criteria for non-"obviousness." But the battle isn't over, and WARF has vowed to defend its claims.

In what can only be considered a tidal wave of public opinion, a new Yale research survey reveals a significant shift in public attitudes toward the environment and global warming. Fully 83 percent of Americans now say global warming is a "serious" problem, up from 70 percent in 2004. More Americans than ever say they have serious concerns about environmental threats, such as toxic soil and water (92 percent, up from 85 percent in 2004), deforestation (89 percent, up from 78 percent), air pollution (93 percent, up from 87 percent) and the extinction of wildlife (83 percent, up from 72 percent in 2005).

John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82.

His daughter Karen Backus announced the death, saying the family did not know the cause, other than age.

Fortran, released in 1957, was "the turning point" in computer software, much as the microprocessor was a giant step forward in hardware, according to J.A.N. Lee, a leading computer historian.

Homeland Security officials released long-delayed guidelines that turn state-issued identification cards into de facto internal passports Thursday, estimating the changes will cost states and individuals $23 billion over 10 years.

The move prompted a new round of protest from civil libertarians and security experts, who called on Congress to repeal the 2005 law known as the Real ID Act that mandates the changes.

Critics, such as American Civil Liberties Union attorney Tim Sparapani, charge that the bill increases government access to data on Americans and amplifies the risk of identity theft, without providing significant security benefits.

It's a rare specialty that can be dangerous, given parts of the world in which he must operate.

Only a few repo men possess the guile and resourcefulness for such a job. One of them is F. Max Hardberger, of Lacombe, La. Since 1991, the 58-year-old attorney and ship captain has surreptitiously sailed away about a dozen freighters from ports around the world.

"I'm sure there are those who would like to add me to a list of modern pirates of the Caribbean, but I do whatever I can to protect the legal rights of my clients," said Hardberger, whose company, Vessel Extractions in New Orleans, has negotiated the releases of another dozen cargo ships and prevented the seizures of many others.

His line of work regularly takes him to a corner of the maritime industry still plagued by pirates, underhanded business practices and corrupt government officials, waters the Aztec Express sailed right into.

The saga began in 2003 when the vessel's Greek owner died and his company did not keep up payments on a $3.3-million mortgage.

Back in Tennessee on Tuesday, Gore told a crowd of about 50 people at the U.S. Media Ethics Summit II that the presentation's single most provocative slide was one that contrasts results of two long-term studies. A 10-year University of California study found that essentially zero percent of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles disagreed that global warming exists, whereas, another study found that 53 percent of mainstream newspaper articles disagreed the global warming premise.

He noted that recently the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its fourth unanimous report calling on world leaders to take action on global warming.

"I believe that is one of the principal reasons why political leaders around the world have not yet taken action," Gore said. "There are many reasons, but one of the principal reasons in my view is more than half of the mainstream media have rejected the scientific consensus implicitly — and I say 'rejected,' perhaps it's the wrong word. They have failed to report that it is the consensus and instead have chosen … balance as bias.

"As the spokesman of choice for the global warming movement, Al Gore has to be willing to walk (the) walk, not just talk the talk, when it comes to home energy use," said Drew Johnson, president of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, identified as a free-market think tank.

Gore's power bill shows, however, that the former vice president may be doing just that.

Gore purchased 108 blocks of "green power" for each of the past three months, according to a summary of the bills.

Oysterman Jim Aguiar had never had to deal with the bacterium Vibrio parahaemolyticus in his 25 years working the frigid waters of Prince William Sound.

The dangerous microbe infected seafood in warmer waters, like the Gulf of Mexico. Alaska was way too cold.

But the sound was gradually warming. By summer 2004, the temperature had risen just enough to poke above the crucial 59-degree mark. Cruise ship passengers who had eaten local oysters were soon coming down with diarrhea, cramping and vomiting — the first cases of Vibrio food poisoning in Alaska that anyone could remember.

"We were slapped from left field," said Aguiar, who shut down his oyster farm that year along with a few others.

As scientists later determined, the culprit was not just the bacterium, but the warming that allowed it to proliferate.

It isn't just the polar bears that are having the ice pulled out from under their feet.

Arctic melting due to global warming is also undermining the human way of life in the far north, says a team about to embark on a 1,200-mile (1,930-kilometer) dogsled expedition.

The Global Warming 101 project, led by U.S. polar explorer Will Steger, aims to highlight how the traditional world of native Inuit communities is quite literally breaking apart.

The four-month expedition is due to set off tomorrow across Baffin Island in the Canadian province of Nunavut.

Among Steger's team will be U.K. business tycoon Sir Richard Branson and three Inuit hunters, who will guide the sleds.

The Internal Revenue Service today issued the 2006 "Dirty Dozen"––its latest annual tally of some of the most notorious tax scams––along with an alert to taxpayers this filing season to watch out for schemes that promise to reduce or eliminate taxes.

1. Zero Wages
2. Form 843 Tax Abatement
3. Phishing
4. Zero Return
5. Trust Misuse
6. Frivolous Arguments
7. Return Preparer Fraud
8. Credit Counseling Agencies
9. Abuse of Charitable Organizations and Deductions
10. Offshore Transactions
11. Employment Tax Evasion
12. "No Gain" Deduction

On March 25, 2004, Amber and Jeremy took digital photos of themselves naked and engaged in unspecified "sexual behavior." The two sent the photos from a computer at Amber's house to Jeremy's personal e-mail address. Neither teen showed the photographs to anyone else.

Court records don't say exactly what happened next--perhaps the parents wanted to end the relationship and raised the alarm--but somehow Florida police learned about the photos.

Amber and Jeremy were arrested. Each was charged with producing, directing or promoting a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of a child. Based on the contents of his e-mail account, Jeremy was charged with an extra count of possession of child pornography.

In an effort to cut costs and become more environmentally friendly, the city of Raleigh, NC is looking to LED lighting. The city started a pilot LED lighting program last year in a downtown parking deck. As a result, a 40% reduction in power has been recorded as well as substantial increases in light output according to Progress Energy.

Who is responsible for keeping the computers at school clean and child-safe? A Connecticut court is siding with the school system in the case of substitute teacher Julie Amero, who has been convicted for four counts of "risking injury to a child." Amero now faces up to 40 years of jail time for pornographic pop-ups that appeared on a computer she was using in a classroom—pop-ups that she and her lawyers argue were a result of spy and adware on the computer, out-of-date virus software, and an expired firewall license—the perfect storm for pornographic pop-ups, all on a Windows 98 machine running Internet Explorer 5.

The grouper is highly prized in Florida, but what is sold as grouper is sometimes another species.

The alleged grouper at 17 of 24 area restaurants sampled by the investigators was actually another, less desirable species, according to a DNA analysis conducted for the state attorney general's office and released earlier this month. Asian catfish. Emperor. Painted sweetlips. And twice, types of fish that could not be identified.

"It's a rip-off -- like taking a cheap watch and selling it as a Rolex," said Bob Spaeth, who owns six commercial fishing boats and co-owns one of the largest grouper distributors on the Gulf Coast. "Someone should go to jail."

A showdown is scheduled for a federal courtroom in Brooklyn tomorrow afternoon, where words like First Amendment and freedom of speech and prior restraint are likely to mix seamlessly with references to BitTorrent and Wiki.

It is a messy plot that pits Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant at the center of several articles in The New York Times suggesting that the company tried to hide or play down the health risks of its leading antipsychotic drug, Zyprexa, and lawyers representing various individuals, organizations and Web sites all arguing that their online speech has been gagged.

Bloggers' Credentials Boosted With Seats at the Libby Trial

When the trial of Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice opens next week, scores of journalists are expected to throng the federal courtroom in Washington, far too many for the 100 seats set aside for the media.

But for the first time in a federal court, two of these seats will be reserved for bloggers. After two years of negotiations with judicial officials across the country, the Media Bloggers Association, a nonpartisan group with about 1,000 members working to extend the powers of the press to bloggers, has won credentials to rotate among his members. The trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the highest-ranking Bush administration official to face criminal charges, could "catalyze" the association's efforts to win respect and access for bloggers in federal and state courthouses, said Robert Cox, the association's president.

A pair of Los Angeles traffic system engineers have been charged with manipulating traffic signals to disrupt transportation across the city in the run-up to a union protest last August.

Gabriel Murillo, 37 and Kartik Patel, 34, were each charged with one count of unauthorized access of a computer. Mutillo also faces an identity theft charge while Patel has been accused of four disruption of service offences. Prosecutors alleged the pair, engineers at in LA's Automated Traffic Surveillance Center, used purloined supervisor credentials to send commands to reprogram signal control boxes at four critical intersections.

Murillo allegedly accessed codes so that only he and Patel could make changes to the system, blocking other workers from sorting out the escalating chaos. The hack succeeded despite plans by managers to temporarily prevent any engineers making changes to the city's traffic control systems.

Now that California is on record as mandating a 25 percent cut in the state's greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020 - a move that made headlines worldwide four months ago - leaders here are starting to lay out how they intend to hit that ambitious mark. First up: requiring transportation fuels sold in California to contain less carbon, a major greenhouse gas.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) announced Tuesday that he will issue, within weeks, an executive order that sets a new "low carbon fuel standard" in the state. Aimed at petroleum refiners and filling stations, the new standard will give them 13 years, until 2020, to cut the carbon content of the fuels they sell for passenger vehicles by 10 percent.

The intent is twofold: to stimulate investment in alternative low-carbon fuels, and to curtail actual carbon emissions from tailpipes, which the governor said account for about 40 percent of the state's total.

Students such as Felobateer and his eighth-grade classmates, all recent immigrants who are learning English as a second language, are at the center of an intensifying dispute between Virginia schools and the U.S. Department of Education over testing requirements under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Fairfax County school officials are protesting a federal mandate to give most English learners reading tests that mirror those taken by their native-speaking peers. Tonight, the school system is taking a major step toward challenging that mandate and the federal law.

School board member Phillip A. Niedzielski-Eichner (Providence), backed by other members and school administrators, plans to propose a resolution that would authorize officials to refuse to give immigrant students tests that they think most would fail.

Wednesday, Congress formally begins considering helping families like the Hosiers by raising the nation's minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, up from the $5.15 rate that has held steady since 1997.

By one estimate, the expected hike would directly affect the paychecks of 6.6 million low-wage workers like John Hosier. Another 8 million workers have wages that, while a bit too high to be forced upward by the law, stand to gain from an upward ripple effect when the wage floor is adjusted.

A glimpse into the lives of people who live at bottom-rung pay rates illustrates why, to supporters of the change, the minimum wage is long overdue for a raise. But it also reveals that such a boost isn't a one-step solution for the challenges that face America's poorest workers.

In fact, many families are poor today even though they earn far above $7.25 an hour.

Hives erupted across her torso. Her hands swelled to fleshy catcher's mitts. Jennifer Walls, about four weeks pregnant and in a panic, rushed to the hospital emergency room.

The doctor said her pregnancy triggered the skin condition. He gave her steroids and ordered the then-34-year-old mother-to-be to stay home.

She returned to work within a couple of weeks. Four months after that trip to the hospital, Transamerica Occidental Life Insurance Co. in Charlotte fired Walls. The reason: She allegedly lied about calling the help desk to report a computer problem while on a business trip.

A federal agency that oversees workplace discrimination found that Walls was wronged. In October, she joined the growing ranks of women filing pregnancy discrimination lawsuits. Her case recently moved to federal court.

Pregnancy-discrimination complaints rose 14 percent between 2000 and 2005, even as sexual harassment and racial-bias claims dropped. Preliminary numbers for 2006 remain on par with last year, an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission spokesman said. In the Carolinas, pregnancy-discrimination complaints have jumped 35 percent since 2000.

Aquatic ecosystems in the northeastern U.S. and southern Canada harbor dangerous concentrations of the neurotoxin

Researchers have discovered dangerous levels of the neurotoxin mercury (Hg) in the muscle tissue of perch and in the blood and eggs of the common loon in aquatic ecosystems of the northeastern U.S. and southern Canada. The finding led them to identify five "hot spots" of mercury contamination that pose serious health risks to animals as well as humans. In addition, elevated concentrations of the neurotoxin were found in nine other regions labeled as "areas of concern" in the report published in the January issue of Bioscience. High concentrations of mercury, which accumulate in the food chain, can cause brain and nerve damage in developing fetuses and young children.

In some areas the team of U.S. and Canadian researchers, led by David Evers of the BioDiversity Research Institute in Gorham, Maine, found perch containing mercury levels as high as 20 times greater than the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recommended limits. A survey of other ecosystem members discovered that 75 percent of bass and trout sampled contained mercury levels exceeding the federal limits.

Wesley Autrey jumped off of a NY subway platform to help a man who had stumbled over the edge onto the tracks after suffering from a seizure. Both are alive and well.

Mr. Autrey refused medical help, because, he said, nothing was wrong. He did visit Mr. Hollopeter in the hospital before heading to his night shift. "I don't feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help," Mr. Autrey said. "I did what I felt was right."

Spoken like a true hero, Mr. Autrey.

Five minutes. That's how long George W. Bush and John Kerry spent discussing the environment during the three televised debates of the 2004 presidential campaign. It doesn't seem to be an issue that keeps American politicians awake at night.

Indeed in March 2001, only a few weeks after he became president, Bush announced that the United States would not ratify the Kyoto protocol, signed by his predecessor, Bill Clinton. The United States is the world's greatest polluter and releases, according to estimates, between 21 and 25% of total emissions of carbon dioxide.

But things have changed today. Protection of the environment has climbed up the political agenda and regularly hits the headlines of U.S. newspapers. The devastation left by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 has certainly raised awareness among voters. Despite federal opposition to plans to reduce gas emissions, local and state initiatives are popping up across the U.S. And California and states in the Northeast are pioneering a new approach to the environment.

Between Michael Richards' outburst in a comedy nightclub, Mel Gibson's tirade of a few months back, and Michael Irvin's musings about Tony Romo's racial heritage, I'm wondering if we need a clearer definition of what it means to be a racist.

These three cases are clearly not equal: the context in which something is said, and the identity of the speaker obviously make a great deal of difference in how we react to the speech. But if there is in fact a hierarchy to hate speech, on what basis should comments be judged? I'm curious to hear the thoughts of others on this. But here's a try.

Note: The author uses racial language and examples of speech that some readers may find offensive. The intent of the opinion piece appears to be analytical in nature and not to offend the reader. Regardless, users are warned prior to clicking the link.

Creating a new outpost in the battle for transgender rights, both New York City and Spain are expected to soon allow people to officially change their gender without actually undergoing a sex-change operation.

Transgender people are fighting on many other fronts, pushing for free access to public restrooms and insurance coverage for gender-reassignment operations. But the proposed liberalization of sex-change rules brings the movement into uncharted territory.

If people can switch genders in the eyes of the government with only some documentation from a doctor, will fewer feel the need for surgery? And what about military service, marriage and the supposed threat of cross-dressing peeping toms?

A Charlottesville city prosecutor is recommending that no charges be brought against any participants in the scuffle Oct. 31 between a U.Va. law student and backers of Sen. George Allen.

"The balance of evidence reflects that no one sought to hurt anyone," said city Commonwealth's Attorney Dave Chapman.

Toyota engineer, an experienced pilot, was at the controls of experimental craft

Search crews on Sunday morning located the wreckage of an experimental plane that crashed into the ocean off San Pedro, southwest of Los Angeles, on Saturday, killing the pilot, a top engineer for Toyota.

After sonar spotted the submerged plane, divers from the Los Angeles County Fire Department videotaped it to aid a crash investigation, according to Mark Savage, a department spokesman. Savage said plans are being made to retrieve the wreckage, which was found about 70 feet below the surface.

The Saturday afternoon crash killed David Hermance, 59, from Huntington Beach (Orange County). His body was found floating in the water shortly afterward.

Hermance was Executive Engineer for Advanced Technology Vehicles at Toyota's technical center in the Los Angeles area. He played a key role in unveiling to the American market such cars as the Prius, which runs on a combination of gasoline and batteries.

[The] 30,000-person town of Pahrump, Nevada… is close to Las Vegas and even closer to stepping over the line with an idiotic, intolerant and insulting ban on foreign (read: Mexican) flags. The town council voted last week, 3-2, to approve an ordinance that makes it illegal to display a foreign flag -- unless an American flag is flown above it. Scofflaws face a $50 fine and 30 hours of community service.

Pahrump resident Michael Miraglia proposed the ban because, he said, he got upset when he saw immigrant activists marching through U.S. cities last spring, waving Mexican flags. Mr. Miraglia told USA Today that he was especially miffed that "we had Mexican restaurants closed that day."

So that's what started all this -- the fact that some guy who's addicted to Mexican food couldn't get his burrito fix. It's our cultural schizophrenia. Americans love Mexican food, even if they don't always love Mexicans. They never ask themselves: If they succeed in getting rid of all the Mexicans -- as some would, no doubt, like to do -- who's going to make the food?

Switching a large fraction of US energy to renewable sources by 2025 could involve no increase in cost, says an independent US think thank, as long as current price trends hold firm.

Renewable sources currently provide about 6% of the energy used in the US. The new RAND report concludes this could be boosted to a total of 18% by 2025, equivalent to 25% of electricity and motoring fuel, at no extra cost. The provisos are that the price of renewable energy continues its downward trend and that predictions of future oil prices are roughly accurate.

The report was commissioned by the Energy Future Coalition in Washington DC, US. In July 2006, this bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives introduced a congressional resolution calling for a new national renewable energy goal: 25% of the nation's energy supply from renewable sources by 2025.

Owners of flex fuel vehicles who wish to cut the nation's oil dependency will soon have less of an excuse for not filling up with ethanol.

The Department of Energy issued grants that will be used to build 167 new E85 refueling stations across the country. This will increase the number of ethanol fueling stations by nearly 18%, for a total of 1,104 stations. Yes, this is paltry compared to the number of petroleum stations, but most folks should be able to fill up within a few miles of their homes.

When Maj. Margaret Oglesby went to Washington in 2004 for a celebration of black women veterans who had served in combat, she was stunned to feel, for once, not alone.

Throughout her nearly nine-month deployment to Afghanistan, she was accustomed to being in her own category: a woman, an African-American, an officer, a National Guard member.

"When I saw all the other women who had gone through what I'd gone through, it was amazing," Major Oglesby remembers. "There was just unconditional love in that room."

As America recognizes its veterans Saturday, a small but steadily growing number are women - some 28,000 of the 274,000 service members currently deployed. While still officially relegated to support positions and barred from infantry or armored divisions, such distinctions mean little when even the enemy isn't clear and any position can be a target.

Pensacola evangelist and tax protester Kent Hovind winked at his wife and gave her a reassuring smile as he was led away to jail.

Jo Hovind clutched the necktie he had been wearing. She kept her eyes on her husband until he was out of sight.

A 12-person jury deliberated for 2½ hours on Thursday before finding the couple guilty of all counts in their tax-fraud case.

Kent Hovind, founder of Creation Science Evangelism and Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola, was found guilty of 58 counts, including failure to pay $845,000 in employee-related taxes. He faces a maximum of 288 years in prison.

Last week Christopher Soghoian created a Fake Boarding Pass Generator website, allowing anyone to create a fake Northwest Airlines boarding pass: any name, airport, date, flight.

This action got him visited by the FBI, who later came back, smashed open his front door, and seized his computers and other belongings. It resulted in calls for his arrest -- the most visible by Rep. Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts) -- who has since recanted. And it's gotten him more publicity than he ever dreamed of.

All for demonstrating a known and obvious vulnerability in airport security involving boarding passes and IDs.

Federal inspectors have found that a Big Dig tunnel ceiling that collapsed in July and killed a motorist was designed with a smaller margin of safety than other tunnel ceilings in America, according to a report obtained by the Boston Globe.

The Interstate 90 connector tunnel's drop ceiling panels were held in place by steel hangers suspended from bolts that were glued into the tunnel ceiling with epoxy. But there were no beams attaching the ceiling to the walls, and there were half as many bolts used as called for in the original design.

No redundancy was built into the ceiling in the event the hangers failed, according to a preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board obtained by the Globe.

Former President Bill Clinton is one of three people who have been awarded the 2007 TED prize, an annual award given by the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference to individuals whose work has had and will have a powerful and positive impact on society.

The award, announced Monday evening at a reception in San Francisco, was conceived two years ago by TED conference curator Chris Anderson to recognize remarkable people who have the ability to change lives. It provides each recipient with $100,000 and the chance to ask for help from the TED community -- leaders in the worlds of business, science, politics and the arts who gather each year in Monterey, California, -- in achieving one grand wish to change the world.

Carbon offsets: they're not just for celebrities anymore.

Al Gore claims to offset the pollution caused by his jet-setting from lecture to lecture on his An Inconvenient Truth tour by purchasing carbon offsets. In effect, he funds activities that will remove as much carbon dioxide from the air as his heavy travel schedule puts into it.

Online ticketing agency Travelocity is now extending the option of purchasing carbon offsets to ordinary people.

Customers who book vacations packaged through the site have the option of purchasing a tax-deductible carbon offset at checkout: The company suggests a $10 donation to mitigate round-trip air travel, a one-night hotel stay, and car rental for one person; $25 for a longer trip for two people; and $45 for a party of four.

A candidate for state superintendent of schools said Thursday he wants thick used textbooks placed under every student's desk so they can use them for self-defense during school shootings.

People might think it's kind of weird, crazy, said Republican Bill Crozier of Union City, Oklahoma, a teacher and former Air Force security officer. It is a practical thing; it's something you can do. It might be a way to deflect those bullets until police go there.

Crozier and a group of aides produced a 10-minute video Tuesday in which they shoot math, language and telephone books with a variety of weapons, including an AK-47 assault rifle and a 9mm pistol. The rifle bullet penetrated two books, including a calculus textbook, but the pistol bullet was stopped by a single book.

U.S. citizens are beginning to come to terms with the country's energy needs and are finding an answer blowing in the wind, according to electric power industry experts.

Last year, and again this year, wind is going to be the second largest source of new power generation coming online, said Christine Real de Azua, a spokesperson for the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) in Washington, D.C.

Natural gas remains the leader in new generating capacity, but wind, which currently supplies less than one percent of the nation's energy, is booming, she adds.

This year alone, the industry is on course to add 3,000 megawatts of wind power generation. The country's total wind power capacity was just 2,500 megawatts in 2000, Real de Azua says.

A megawatt is enough electricity to power 250 to 300 average U.S. homes, according to AWEA.

The growing doubts among GOP lawmakers about the administration''s Iraq strategy, coupled with the prospect of Democratic wins in next month''s midterm elections, will soon force the Bush administration to abandon its open-ended commitment to the war, according to lawmakers in both parties, foreign policy experts and others involved in policymaking.

Senior figures in both parties are coming to the conclusion that the Bush administration will be unable to achieve its goal of a stable, democratic Iraq within a politically feasible time frame. Agitation is growing in Congress for alternatives to the administration''s strategy of keeping Iraq in one piece and getting its security forces up and running while 140,000 U.S. troops try to keep a lid on rapidly spreading sectarian violence.

Anticipation of the 2006 hurricane season turned countless families here and in a vast swath of the Southeast into survivalists.

Households stockpiled ready-to-eat meals. They scarfed up emergency radios, propane stoves, satellite phones, shutters, candles, canned goods. Hordes plunked down $500 and up for home generators.

The predictions of another scary storm season and the memory of last year''s record-setting disasters inspired fear and a spending spree of hundreds of millions of dollars.

A building boom that would add scores of new coal-fired power plants to the nation''s power grid is creating a new dilemma for politicians, environmentalists and utility companies across the United States.

Should power companies be permitted to build new plants that pollute more but are reliable and less expensive? Or should regulators push utilities toward cleaner burning coal plants, even if it means they will cost more and are based on newer, yet still unproven, technology?

How those questions are answered will have huge implications over the next few decades. It could determine how Americans light, heat and cool their homes and business, the rate of return on utility investments and the potential environmental impact of the new plants.

In a debt for nature swap, the United States has agreed to forgive about 20 percent of the 108 million dollars owed by Guatemala. In exchange, the Central American country will invest 24.4 million dollars to protect species-rich subtropical and tropical ecosystems.

The recently announced agreement is the largest of ten such deals the U.S. government has undertaken in recent years under the Tropical Forest Conservation Act of 1998.

Under the deal, the Guatemalan government is to fund conservation efforts with money it would have otherwise used to begin to pay back the tens of millions of dollars it has borrowed from the U.S.

Loggers, tour companies, farmers, developers, and hunters have battered Guatemala's wildlands, conservationists say. They hope the swap will help protect coastal mangrove swamps, high-altitude cloud forests, and rain forests in Guatemala, a country about the size of Tennessee.

Some time this month, the number of Americans will surpass 300 million, a milestone that raises environmental impact questions for the only major industrial nation whose population is increasing substantially.

The U.S. Census Bureau predicts the 300 million mark will be reached in mid-October, 39 years after U.S. population topped 200 million and 91 years after it exceeded 100 million.

This will make the United States No. 3 in population in the world, after China and India.

Most of the growth is taking place in the South and West, according to the Census Bureau. From 2004 to 2005, U.S. population had a natural increase -- births minus deaths -- of 1.7 million and international migration of 1 million.

The Inupiaq of Shishmaref have lived in this island village for generations, but with the waters rising all around and ever fierce storms blasting the settlement, they are being forced to move far away from the seas they have always depended upon.

The Alaskan village's plight is a stark example of the dramatic effects of global warming as it challenges an entire community's way of life.

Winds sweep across the island from the broad, endless waters of the Chukchi sea, north of the Bering Strait and just 150 kilometers (90 miles) from Russia.

Battering waves have destroyed boats, fish reserves and storage buildings once well away from the water's threat, said an official overseeing the village's move. A house collapsed and about 20 households had to move away from the shore.

He runs Daily Kos, the wildly influential liberal blog. But Markos Moulitsas says he's no political leader. Now he wants you to argue about another great American pastime: baseball.

I am wise to your snarky ways. Superstar blogger Markos Moulitsas won't let me near his house. Instead, he meets me at a Berkeley coffee shop. When the Newsweek guy was there, he saw some workmen putting in my new plasma television and said something about it in the article. He has other examples: the Nightline crew who mocked him for wanting to buy a new piano, the writer for Time – OK, that was me – who called him bug-eyed. As the founder and proprietor of Daily Kos, the nation's most prominent political blog, Moulitsas has been the subject of intense media scrutiny for the past two years, and it's made him touchy.

Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette) interviews Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos) for Wired magazine.

Five years after the anthrax attacks that killed five people, the FBI is now convinced that the lethal powder sent to the Senate was far less sophisticated than originally believed, widening the pool of possible suspects in a frustratingly slow investigation.

The finding, which resulted from countless scientific tests at numerous laboratories, appears to undermine the widely held belief that the attack was carried out by a government scientist or someone with access to a U.S. biodefense lab.

What was initially described as a near-military-grade biological weapon was ultimately found to have had a more ordinary pedigree, containing no additives and no signs of special processing to make the anthrax bacteria more deadly, law enforcement officials confirmed. In addition, the strain of anthrax used in the attacks has turned out to be more common than was initially believed, the officials said.

American Airlines Flight 45departing Charles de Gaulle at 10:40 A.M., arriving J.F.K. at one each afternoonis a tourists delight: timed just right to avoid late checkout, leaving time for one last Kir Royale at Les Deux Magots. On August 22nd, the coach cabin was packed with vacationing New Yorkers. Ralph Jackson (21A) and David Leisner (21B) were returning from two weeks in France, while Huffa Frobes-Cross (21F) had stopped over in Paris on his way back from South Africa. Assigned to seats 20A and 20B were George Tsikhiseli, a television journalist, and his writer boyfriend, Stephan Varnier. Weve been together only four months, Tsikhiseli said last week. So it felt like a honeymoon.

Shortly after takeoff, Varnier nodded off, leaning his head on Tsikhiseli. A stewardess came over to their row. The purser wants you to stop that, she said.

I opened my eyes and was, like, Stop what? Varnier recalled the other day.

The touching and the kissing, the stewardess said, before walking away…

After Tip From Ally, U.S. Sent Muslim to Syria for Questioning

Canadian intelligence officials passed false warnings and bad information to American agents about a Muslim Canadian citizen, after which U.S. authorities secretly whisked him to Syria, where he was tortured, a judicial report found Monday.

The report, released in Ottawa, was the result of a 2 1/2-year inquiry that represented one of the first public investigations into mistakes made as part of the United States' extraordinary rendition program, which has secretly spirited suspects to foreign countries for interrogation by often brutal methods.

The inquiry, which focused on the Canadian intelligence services, found that agents who were under pressure to find terrorists after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, falsely labeled an Ottawa computer consultant, Maher Arar, as a dangerous radical. They asked U.S. authorities to put him and his wife, a university economist, on the al-Qaeda watchlist, without justification, the report said.

Arar was also listed as an Islamic extremist individual who was in the Washington area on Sept. 11. The report concluded that he had no involvement in Islamic extremism and was on business in San Diego that day, said the head of the inquiry commission, Ontario Justice Dennis O'Connor.

Surveys show no evidence of long-term health risks caused by Katrina.

New Orleans' waters and soils seem to have survived the ravages of Hurricane Katrina without being contaminated by any toxic sludge.

The massive hurricane flooded the city in August last year with waters that were expected to be contaminated by sewage, petrol, and various household and industrial pollutants, from asbestos to pesticides. But just how toxic those floodwaters were, and what mess they might leave behind, wasn't known.

By October 2005, researchers from Lousiana State University had reported that the floodwaters themselves were not the 'toxic soup' feared, but instead looked much like the drainage you might expect in a city after heavy rain.

The Egyptian-born academic, [Mohammad Ramadan Hassan Salama,] got a rude awakening June 20 when a consular official, without explanation, stamped "canceled'' on his temporary visa and refused to issue another visa. Instead, Salama said, he was fingerprinted, questioned and told he could not return to the United States until he received security clearance.

It was just a shock for me, he said by phone on Monday. It is very Kafkaesque. They just say, 'We will contact you.' I am Egyptian, and Egypt is a very hot country right now that has produced terrorists. They disregarded my Ph.D., my scholarship. My marriage, my kids were blindly disregarded, and I was told I could not come back.

…

Salama, 38, began teaching at San Francisco State a year ago. He arrived in the United States seven years ago, has an American wife and two children, and received his doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Do websites of brick-and-mortar businesses in the US need to comply full with the Americans with Disabilities Act? The answer may be determined in court following a judge's ruling.

In February, a blind University of California-Berkeley student sued Target over the discount retailer's web site. Bruce Sexton Jr., president of the California Association of Blind Students, alleges that Target's web site violates the Americans with Disabilities Act by not making the site fully navigable by the visually impaired. His lawsuit was filed in conjunction with the National Federation of the Blind and seeks class-action status.

Late last week, a judge ruled that the lawsuit could go forward. In the case of the National Federation of the Blind v. Target, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled that retailers can be sued if their websites are not accessible to the blind. In her opinion for the US District Court for the Northern District of California, Patel wrote that the ordinary meaning of the ADA's prohibition against discrimination in the enjoyment of goods, services, facilities or privileges, is that whatever goods or services the place provides, it cannot discriminate on the basis of disability in providing enjoyment of those goods and services.

Few public building projects have sparked such competing emotions as the Freedom Tower. Patriotism has driven it from the start, with some inevitably kitschy results, starting with its height (1776 feet). The building is a solemn monument to the fallen, but also an obvious target, a test of our will and ingenuity to ensure that history doesn't repeat itself.

Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, or SOM, the architects designing the tower, have taken that imperative literally: If terrorists pilot a fully-fuelled commercial jet into their building, they believe it will stand.

When General Motors was the biggest and most profitable auto manufacturer in the world, its strategy was to provide "a car for every purse and purpose." G.M. offered a panoply of distinctive brands, each targeted at a particular category of buyer—Buick for the successful but conservative driver, Cadillac for the wealthier and more flamboyant, and so on. This was a tremendously successful strategy in the days when G.M.'s domination was unchallenged. But now, with G.M. losing billions of dollars a year and struggling to restructure, it just looks like a waste of time and money. When analysts talk about how to turn G.M. around, most start with the need to slim down the company and get rid of less popular brands. (Buick and Pontiac are perennial nominees.) It's an eminently sensible approach, but it's unlikely to happen anytime soon, because it would challenge the interests of some of the most powerful players in today's auto industry—car dealers.

How many… Californians are angry about gasoline prices - and ready for their state to take action - will be clear this November, when voters decide whether to levy a new tax on oil companies that drill in California and use the money for in-state development of alternative fuels.

The fight over Proposition 87 is no small matter. Not only will the vote give Congress and other states a first reading of public disgruntlement over gasoline prices, but it might even affect the domestic oil market. California crude, after all, accounts for 12 percent of US production - supplying 37 percent of the state's oil demand, according to the Legislative Analyst's Office.

Prop. 87 aims to raise and spend $4 billion on alternative-fuel programs over time, with the goal of cutting Californians' use of gasoline and diesel 25 percent by 2017. It also would prohibit oil companies from simply raising prices at the pump to cover their costs of the new tax.

An alarming engineering report on the 140-mile (225-kilometer) dike around Florida's Lake Okeechobee has prompted emergency management officials to prepare evacuation plans for 40,000 residents living near the lake.

Consulting engineers Leslie Bromwell, Robert Dean, and Stephen Vick wrote in their April report that the Herbert Hoover Dike poses a grave and imminent danger to the people and the environment of south Florida.

The engineers say the dike, which is about 250 feet (76 meters) wide at its base, could fail during a hurricane or even if the lake level becomes too high.

At 730 square miles (1,900 square kilometers), Okeechobee is the second-largest freshwater lake in the continental United States, behind only to Lake Michigan.

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, which transports crude oil from the largest reserve in the United States to a navigable port, is in trouble.

Fuel company BP brought production at the Prudhoe Bay oil field to a screeching halt last week following discovery of pipe corrosion that led to a small spill.

The announcement, which comes on the heels of the system's largest spill ever last March, has triggered a new round of debate over the aging pipeline's future.

It is no surprise that BP has had another accident on the North Slope. There have been 500 spills per year since 1996, said Eleanor Huffines, Alaska regional director for the Washington, D.C.-based Wilderness Society.

The robot that parks cars at the Garden Street Garage in Hoboken, New Jersey, trapped hundreds of its wards last week for several days. But it wasn't the technology car owners had to curse, it was the terms of a software license.

In the course of a contract dispute, the city of Hoboken had police escort the Robotic employees from the premises just a few days before the contract between both parties was set to expire. What the city didn't understand or perhaps concern itself with, is that they sent the company packing with its manuals and the intellectual property rights to the software that made the giant robotic parking structure work.

In the face of the coming onslaught of pollutants from a rapidly urbanizing China and India, the task of avoiding ecological disaster may seem hopeless, and some environmental scientists have, quietly, concluded that it is. But Americans are notoriously reluctant to surrender their fates to the impersonal outcomes of an equation. One by one—and together, in state and local governments and even giant corporations—they are attempting to wrest the future from the dotted lines on the graphs that point to catastrophe. The richest country in the world is also the one with the most to lose.

Environmentalism waxes and wanes in importance in American politics, but it appears to be on the upswing now. Membership in the Sierra Club is up by about a third, to 800,000, in four years, and Gallup polling data show that the number of Americans who say they worry about the environment a great deal or a fair amount increased from 62 to 77 percent between 2004 and 2006. (The 2006 poll was done in March, before the attention-getting release of Al Gore's global-warming film, An Inconvenient Truth.) Americans have come to this view by many routes, sometimes reluctantly; Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, thinks unhappiness with the Bush administration's environmental record plays a part, but many of the people NEWSWEEK spoke to for this story are Republicans. Al Gore can't convince me, but his data can convince me, venture capitalist Ray Lane remarks ruefully. Lane is a general partner in the prominent Silicon Valley firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which has pledged to invest $100 million in green technology. He arrived at his position as a Republican environmentalist while pondering three trends: global warming, American dependence on foreign oil and the hypermodernization of Asian societies.

JOSH WOLF is an imperfect martyr for freedom of the press. The 24-year-old freelance journalist from San Francisco makes no pretense of being fair and balanced. He is a self-proclaimed anarchist. Advocacy, not objectivity, appears to be his driving motivation. The revolution will be televised, his Web site promises.

Wolf was recording a demonstration by a group of anarchists on July 8, 2005. The demonstration turned unruly, with some of the protesters vandalizing buildings and scuffling with police. Wolf posted some of the videos on his Web site.

Today, Wolf sits in a federal prison cell, facing the possibility of staying there until the grand jury's term expires in July 2007.

Conservative Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson said on Thursday the wave of scorching temperatures across the United States has converted him into a believer in global warming.

We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels, Robertson said on his 700 Club broadcast. It is getting hotter, and the icecaps are melting and there is a buildup of carbon dioxide in the air.

With approval for a redesigned high-rise in its pocket, the developer of what may become Nashville's tallest building and the tallest tower in the U.S. outside Chicago and New York City, is moving full-steam ahead. The plan is to break ground in January, after financing is secured for the 1,057-ft-tall, hotel-residential condominium tower.

The goal is to have financing wrapped up in November. But before that happens, the developer must lock in a hotel operator and an equity investor. So far, we are funding the estimated $300-million project out of pocket, says Ted Kromer, development director for Giarratana Development LLC, Nashville.

A study by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) reports that the much-loved landscapes of Yellowstone, Yosemite, and ten other national parks are at grave risk due to climate change.

The parks at risk include Montana's Glacier National Park, Grand Teton in Wyoming, Glen Canyon in Utah and Arizona, California's Death Valley and Golden Gate, Washington State's Mount Rainier and North Cascades, Colorado's Mesa Verde and Rocky Mountains parks, and Bandelier in New Mexico.

Warmer temperatures and less precipitation are threats to many park plants and animals, the report says.

Warming may also spur more frequent and severe droughts and wildfires that could close parks or reduce them to mere shells of their former grandeur.

A few years back, Wired magazine deputy editor Bill Goggins attended the annual TED conference in Monterey, California. He spent the first day in sessions with a cast of tech and entertainment industry luminaries -- Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Matt Groening were on hand that year -- and then stayed up into the early hours of the next morning talking, laughing and drinking with colleagues and new friends. He slept maybe three hours and was up in time for the official TED 5K foot race, which started at about 6:30 a.m. Goggins blew everyone away, winning the 3.1-mile race at a pace well under 6 minutes a mile.

It was vintage Goggins: ravenous intellectual and cultural engagement, an indefatigable love of socializing and seemingly effortless athleticism. So it came as a terrible shock on Sunday when news came that Goggins had died running the San Francisco Marathon. He was 43. He collapsed after he passed the 24-mile mark of the 26.2-mile race. Bystanders came to his aid with CPR, and he was treated by paramedics and taken to San Francisco General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 9:26 a.m. The cause of death is unknown; details are expected from the medical examiner.

Congress will spend more than $2 million to upgrade weather-monitoring equipment in areas prone to hurricanes, National Weather Service officials said.

The government's equipment for monitoring wind speed is run by electricity without backup and often fails during storms, weather service officials said. Hurricane Katrina knocked out power to much of the Gulf Coast as it came ashore last August, leaving meteorologists, homeowners and insurers without a clear picture of the storm's ferocity.

Ten climate experts who are sharply divided over whether global warming is intensifying hurricanes say that this question, a focus of Congressional hearings, news reports and the recent Al Gore documentary, is a distraction from the main hurricane problem facing the United States.

That problem, the experts said yesterday in a statement, is an ongoing lemming-like march to the sea in the form of unabated coastal development in vulnerable places, and in the lack of changes in government policies and corporate and individual behavior that are driving the trend.

Whatever the relationship between hurricanes and climate, experts say, hurricanes are hitting the coasts, and houses should not be built in their path.

Valle Vidal has become a battleground in the drive to expand energy exploration on public land, attracting the attention of a growing coalition of hunters, anglers, environmentalists, ranchers, homeowners and politicians across the ideological spectrum.

Here and elsewhere in the Western United States, this coalition is starting to resist the push for energy exploration in some of the nation's most prized wilderness areas. Although it remains unclear how successful they will be, these new activists -- including many who treasure Valle Vidal as a place to fish for cutthroat trout, hunt for elk and ride horses across its wide expanses -- have brought a new dynamic to the public debate over energy development in the West.

The record level of construction in the U.S. and the swelling wave of retiring Baby Boomers is crushing the construction industry's ability to staff projects, especially in the craft work force. This has been predicted for decades, but the reality finally has arrived and so has the time to take some firm new approaches to recruitment, training and outreach.

While science researchers have embraced open access publishing and online journals, their brethren (and sistren) in the humanities remain enamored with chopping down trees and slicing them into sheets. Once these sheets (or pages) get covered with enough inky marks, the professor in question is eligible for tenure. It's an excellent system.

While most journals now offer online access to subscribers (often through databases like Project Muse and JSTOR), these journals are still printed, bound, and distributed. Purely electronic journals have yet to match their printed compatriots in prestige and authority, but USC's Institute for the Future of the Book wants to change that. Its new MediaCommons program is a test bed for purely digital academic publishing projects.

A Pensacola evangelist who owns the defunct Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola was arrested Thursday on 58 federal charges, including failing to pay $473,818 in employee-related taxes and making threats against investigators.

Kent Hovind, who often calls himself Dr. Dino, has been sparring with the IRS for at least 17 years on his claims that he is employed by God, receives no income, has no expenses and owns no property.

The debtor apparently maintains that as a minister of God, everything he owns belongs to God and he is not subject to paying taxes to the United States on money he receives for doing God's work, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Lewis Killian Jr. wrote when he dismissed a claim from Hovind in 1996.

City officials are examining San Francisco's telecommunications contracts with AT&T and whether to take action against the company for its alleged cooperation with the National Security Agency, Mayor Gavin Newsom said this week.

If what I'm reading is true, I've got some serious problems as a San Franciscan, as a taxpayer and as mayor, Newsom said in interview with The Associated Press. And I don't like it.

An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year, even though spending has climbed sharply because of the war in Iraq and the cost of hurricane relief.

On Tuesday, White House officials are expected to announce that the tax receipts will be about $250 billion above last year's levels and that the deficit will be about $100 billion less than what they projected six months ago. The rising tide in tax payments has been building for months, but the increased scale is surprising even seasoned budget analysts and making it easier for both the administration and Congress to finesse the big run-up in spending over the past year.

Use BugMeNot as necesary.

Hummers and SUVs blamed for high emissions; average US car does less than 20mpg, says study

Americans represent 5% of the world's population but drive almost a third of its cars, which in turn account for nearly half the carbon dioxide pumped out of exhaust pipes into the atmosphere each year, according to a report.

US cars play a disproportionate role in global warming because they are less fuel efficient than passenger vehicles used elsewhere in the world, emitting 15% more carbon dioxide, and because they are driven further across America's wide open spaces, said the report by the Environmental Defence watchdog group.

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

Attacks, Threats and Fights Increase More Than Fivefold

It is getting more dangerous to be a forest ranger -- and it is not because of the animals.

Attacks, threats and lesser fights involving Forest Service workers reached an all-time high last year, according to government documents obtained by a public employees advocacy group. Incidents ranged from gunshots to stalking and verbal abuse.

Consumers who use wireless or Internet-based telephones could see their bills rise, as the U.S. Federal Communications Commission approved on Wednesday an interim new plan for funding phone service subsidies.

The FCC ordered Internet telephone services like Vonage Holdings Corp. (VG.N) to contribute part of their revenue into the Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes phone service to rural and low-income areas as well as communications services and Internet access for schools, hospitals and libraries.

The agency also increased the amount wireless telephone providers would have to pay into the fund. The move may lead to higher wireless and Internet telephone bills because the companies typically pass the fees on to customers.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) told reporters yesterday that weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found in Iraq, despite acknowledgments by the White House and the insistence of the intelligence community that no such weapons had been discovered.

We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons, Santorum said.

Last night, intelligence officials reaffirmed that the shells were old and were not the suspected weapons of mass destruction sought in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.

Businesses in general, and technology companies in particular, tend to regard increased federal regulation with the distaste usually reserved for blind, furry crabs. That's why the recent spectacle of big business petitioning the government to pass the laws is so intriguing. The Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum today released a statement calling on Congress to enact a comprehensive data privacy bill that would help reassure consumers that their private information is safe both online and off.

If the Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum were just another in the long line of consumer-oriented nonprofits who regularly call for such legislation, we in the Orbiting HQ might look down from on high with a shrug. After all, data privacy violations have been in the headlines for years, yet the federal government still has no comprehensive plan to deal with the problem. What makes the CPLF's announcement interesting, though, is that it's signed by major technology players like Intel, eBay, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard.

Melinda Moree met plenty of naysayers who dismissed the prospects of a malaria vaccine. Then she encountered Bill Gates.

No one had developed a human vaccine against a parasite like malaria before, and the monetary incentives simply did not exist for pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs targeted at poor children. Development would require cooperation among scientists, drug companies, health groups and international governments -- an alliance so large it didn't seem possible, she recalled someone telling Gates.

Of course it is, Gates countered, according to Moree, now director of the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative in Seattle, which along with other groups has received nearly $500 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop, test, manufacture and eventually distribute a malarial vaccine. There's something about vision and belief that these things are possible, Moree said.

People in the nonprofit world say Gates, 50, could fundamentally alter the methodology of philanthropy with his announcement last week that he will quit his day-to-day role at Microsoft Corp. in two years to spend more time on his foundation. He will take the same energy he once directed toward software technology to global health, education and other intractable issues, they say.

The 19 skyjackers succeeded not because we failed to flag them -- in fact several of the cabal, including Mohammed Atta, were singled out by the CAPPS-1 (for computer-assisted passenger prescreening system) program then in place -- but because they knowingly anticipated what levels of resistance they would face, from previously gathered intelligence available to check-in staff, and, most important, physical resistance (or lack thereof) from passengers and crew aboard the four doomed Boeings. The attackers took advantage of the skyjack paradigm as it existed at the time. They did not exploit a loophole in airport security; they exploited a loophole in our mind-set and expectations. And whatever can be said of terrorists, they're generally not stupid; the more narrowly we profile, the easier the system becomes to skirt. Routine, as any security or antiterror expert will tell you, is weakness. The trouble with profiling isn't necessarily that it's racist or discriminatory. The trouble is that it doesn't work.

Which data points are we supposed to use? Formulating some religious-ethnic template becomes extremely unreliable. Most of the world's Muslims aren't Arabs. Not all Arabs are Muslims. Nearly half of Lebanon is Christian. Iranians aren't Arabs. Neither are Turks. Plenty of Syrians have red hair and green eyes. The Bali bombers weren't Middle Eastern, they were Asian. And the blabbermouth reactionaries who scream for ethnic profiling were mum when USA Today reported that al-Qaida was actively recruiting white Chechens.

Politics, 9/11 Cited in Lax Enforcement

The Bush administration, which is vowing to crack down on U.S. companies that hire illegal workers, virtually abandoned such employer sanctions before it began pushing to overhaul U.S. immigration laws last year, government statistics show.

Between 1999 and 2003, work-site enforcement operations were scaled back 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which subsequently was merged into the Homeland Security Department. The number of employers prosecuted for unlawfully employing immigrants dropped from 182 in 1999 to four in 2003, and fines collected declined from $3.6 million to $212,000, according to federal statistics.

In 1999, the United States initiated fines against 417 companies. In 2004, it issued fine notices to three.

The government's steady retreat from workplace enforcement in the 20 years since it became illegal to hire undocumented workers is the result of fierce political pressure from business lobbies, immigrant rights groups and members of Congress, according to law enforcement veterans. Punishing employers also was de-emphasized as the government recognized that it lacks the tools to do the job well, and as the Department of Homeland Security shifted resources to combat terrorism.

The US government is on a campaign to protect American intellectual property around the world. Sweden, Russia, and China all feel the heat.

The Pirate Bay may not have been sent to Davy Jones' locker by the recent Swedish police raid on its servers, but the legal assault on the site made a lot of Swedes very förbannade. Some of them apparently thought it would be fun to take down a police website, while others were content to vent their outrage at politicians, who were accused of bowing to pressure from the US. Justice Minister Thomas Bodstrom took to the airwaves to reassure his fellow Scandinavians that this was not, in fact, the case.

Justice Minister Thomas Bodstrom denied allegations in a Swedish television report that the government ordered the crackdown on a U.S. request. "I have never acted individually or spoken about how the police and prosecutors should act, nor will I do it," Bodstrom was quoted as saying by Sweden news agency TT. Sweden's constitution bars ministers from directing police investigations.

It turns out that the minister was choosing his words carefully. While he may not have personally ordered the raid, a new report in the Washington Post claims that US authorities were involved in alerting their Swedish counterparts to the existence of The Pirate Bay. At an April meeting, the US delegation expressed its displeasure at the site.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the U.S. Defense Department Wednesday to demand information it says the government has collected on groups opposed to the war in Iraq.

The group says the Pentagon has been monitoring antiwar groups and individuals and has compiled lists on people it sees as potential threats but who the ACLU says are exercising their free-speech rights.

The suit was the ACLU's first attempt to force the Pentagon to disclose domestic surveillance and followed similar suits by the organization against the FBI and the Justice Department.

It's absolutely improper for the U.S. military to keep databases on lawful First Amendment activities, said ACLU attorney Ben Wizner. These are peaceful, law-abiding groups and individuals that oppose U.S. war policy but pose no threat to the military.

The ACLU said the Defense Department shared the information with other government agencies through the database, known as the Threat and Local Observation Notice, or Talon.

With the sea rising around it, New Orleans could be headed for new lows.

In the midst of preparing for the arrival of another intense hurricane season, the city of New Orleans is continuing to rebuild from the decimation caused by Hurricane Katrina less than a year ago.

Urban planners in the Big Easy have their work cut out for them. But in addition to protecting the city from future storms, scientists are recommending that it be rebuilt as a sinking city.

According to researchers at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, New Orleans is sinking—in some areas up to 20mm per year. This phenomenon, combined with the expected worldwide rise in sea levels resulting from melting glaciers, means that, over the course of 100 years, the city could fall further under sea level, with levees falling several meters below the level where they were originally built. The group says this subsiding should be kept in mind with future levee designs.

Each year, the allotted number of H1B visas seems to be snapped up faster and faster. This year is no exception, as the fiscal year 2007 quota of 65,000 has been reached, four months before the October 1 start of FY 2007. H-1B is a visa classification that allows skilled technology professionals, fashion models of distinguished merit and ability, and scientists to live and work in the US.

Understandably, the H-1B visa classification is a contentious issue. Legislation to raise the visa cap to 115,000 for 2007 along with annual increases of up to 20 percent has passed in the US Senate, but has been ignored by the House of Representatives. Previous attempts to tweak the program to exempt some foreign graduate students from counting against the cap have failed.

Technology companies have called for an increase on the cap, with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates testifying before Congress last year that the limit hindered the company's ability to hire an adequate number of skilled workers. Additionally, as hitting the limit this early indicates, there is a high demand for the visas from foreign tech workers who want to live and work in the US.

At the same time, the technology industry's abuse of the program has led to heavy criticism. Much of the criticism stems from the view that most of the jobs the tech industry gives to H-1B visa holders are ones that could have gone to American workers instead. The IEEE-USA, a US organizational unit of the IEEE, has called for the cap to remain at or under current levels, with income from the program used to train US workers that have lost their jobs.

Roadside bombs. Hostile insurgents. 1,200 extras in Arab dress. Welcome to Louisiana and the Army camp known as the Box, where the violence is fake but the fear is for real.

By Vince Beiser for Wired Magazine.

Something seems not quite right about the half-dozen guys creeping onto the ridge in the predawn light. They're dressed like Iraqi insurgents, in kaffiyehs and camo, and they have the haggard look that comes from having spent a bitterly cold night dodging enemy patrols. They're well armed, carrying M16 assault rifles and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. But then there are those boxy little attachments on the barrels of their rifles and the harness-like vests they're wearing. Plus there's the terrain – scraggly pine forest instead of Iraqi desert.

A rumble of approaching motors swells as the sun clears the horizon: It's a supply convoy, the group's target. Then the relative calm erupts as two ponderous, blunt-nosed Apache helicopters come roaring overhead, sending the men scuttling back down into the concealing woods. They get lucky; the choppers pass without stopping. The squad sprints back up the hill just as a column of heavily armored Humvees and supply trucks comes into view.

A skinny insurgent in a dishdasha lets fly with the rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Then the others start firing, spent shells spitting out of their rifles. The Humvees clatter to a halt and roll this way and that for a minute, utter confusion on the faces of the Minnesota National Guard soldiers driving them. Finally the vehicles' heavy machine guns swing around and return fire. The RPG booms again, and one of the Humvees goes silent. The mock Iraqis scramble off the ridge and scatter into the trees.

Score one for the bad guys in the world's most violent theme park. This is the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, deep in the backwoods of Louisiana – a 100,000-acre US Army training facility that simulates the Middle East in minute detail and on a massive scale. Every year, this literal theater of war is one of the last stops for 44,000 Army and National Guard soldiers before they deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan. Their opponents, including my companions in the roadside ambush, are members of the 509th Airborne Infantry, also called the Opposing Force, or Opfor. In addition to sniper fire and car bombs, trainees also contend with civilians – 1,200 role-players who act as Iraqi mayors, imams, journalists, humanitarian aid workers, and ordinary citizens (with the appropriate mix of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds). All of the action takes place amid 18 faux Iraqi towns, complete with mosques, schools, and hundreds of other buildings, detailed right down to kebab stands and street signs in Arabic.

More than a decade after U.S. troops withdrew from Somalia following a disastrous military intervention, officials of Somalia's interim government and some U.S. analysts of Africa policy say the United States has returned to the African country, secretly supporting secular warlords who have been waging fierce battles against Islamic groups for control of the capital, Mogadishu.

The latest clashes, last week and over the weekend, were some of the most violent in Mogadishu since the end of the American intervention in 1994, and left 150 dead and hundreds more wounded. Leaders of the interim government blamed U.S. support of the militias for provoking the clashes.

U.S. officials have declined to directly address on the record the question of backing Somali warlords, who have styled themselves as a counterterrorism coalition in an open bid for American support. Speaking to reporters recently, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States would 'work with responsible individuals . . . in fighting terror. It's a real concern of ours -- terror taking root in the Horn of Africa. We don't want to see another safe haven for terrorists created. Our interest is purely in seeing Somalia achieve a better day.'

U.S. officials have long feared that Somalia, which has had no effective government since 1991, is a desirable place for al-Qaeda members to hide and plan attacks. The country is strategically located on the Horn of Africa, which is only a boat ride away from Yemen and a longtime gateway to Africa from the Middle East. No visas are needed to enter Somalia, there is no police force and no effective central authority.

According to the police report, this is what happened next: The Malibu pulled up behind the group, and two of the four young men in the car came out holding handguns. One ordered Daly to 'give me what you have.' Daly handed over $400 from her pockets. Riley, meanwhile, allegedly stuck a gun in Volmut's face and asked for her purse, and she, too, gave it up. In it were 200 euros, $100, her passport, plane tickets and a Razr cellphone.

When Copperfield's turn came, Riley was bamboozled.

Copperfield told Page Two he pulled out all of his pockets for Riley to see he had nothing, even though he had a cellphone, passport and wallet stuffed in them.

'Call it reverse pickpocketing,' Copperfield said.

He invented the Internet (sort of). He became President (almost). Now Al Gore has found his true calling: using the power of technology to save the world.

Al Gore? Five and a half years after leaving the political stage, only the fourth man in US history to win the popular vote for president without being inaugurated, Gore has deftly remade himself from an object of pity into a fearless environmental crusader. The new Gore is bent on fixing what he calls the "climate crisis" through a combination of public awareness, federal action, and good old-fashioned capitalism. He's traveling the globe, delivering a slide show that, by his own estimate, he's given more than a thousand times over the years. His one-man campaign is chronicled in a new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which made Gore the unlikely darling of the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and will be released on May 26 by Paramount Classics. He has also written a forthcoming companion volume of the same name, his first book on the subject since the 1992 campaign tome Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit.

Along the way, Gore has become a neo-green entrepreneur, taking his messianic faith in the power of technology to stop global warming and applying it to an ecofriendly investment firm. The company, Generation Investment Management, which he cofounded nearly two years ago, puts money into businesses that are positioned to capitalize on the carbon-constrained economy Gore and his partners see coming in the near future. All the while, he has been busy polishing his reputation as the ultimate wired citizen: Not far from the Stanford campus, Gore sits on the board of directors at Apple and serves as a senior adviser to Google. Farther up Highway 101 are the San Francisco headquarters of Current TV, the youth-oriented cable network he cofounded with legal entrepreneur Joel Hyatt.

A hunter was attacked and seriously injured by a black bear Saturday on a road just outside Olympic National Park in Washington State.

The incident follows a black bear attack nine days earlier that killed a six-year-old girl in the Cherokee National Forest in Tennessee.

Some experts say the bear attacks may be a sign of a growing clash between humans and the wild.

'I think it is probably just a matter of there being more bears and more people in bear range than ever before,' Joe Clark, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, told the Associated Press.

But Lynn Rogers, director of the Minnesota-based North American Bear Center, points out that only a few of the killings have occurred in the eastern United States, which has by far the most bear-human encounters.

Bear attacks are 'freak occurrences' and remain exceptionally rare, he says.

[The Cherokee National Forest] fatality is among only 12 cases of black bears killing humans in the contiguous United States in the last century, according to the North American Bear Center in Ely, Minnesota.

In June 2004, [First Lt. Dawn Halfaker] became the newest soldier to start down a path almost unknown in the United States: woman as combat amputee.

Her body had been maimed by war. She lay unconscious at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, her parents at her bedside and her future suddenly unsure. A rocket-propelled grenade had exploded in her Humvee, ravaging her arm and shoulder.

She was part of a new generation of women who have lost pieces of themselves in war, experiencing the same physical trauma and psychological anguish as their male counterparts. But for female combat amputees has come something else: a quiet sense of wonder about how the public views them and how they will reconcile themselves.

The Washington Post's article In Sports, a Sisterhood, as well as the photos of women in these stories, titled Female Soldiers Linked by Loss.

When federal authorities catch illegal immigrants on the job, some U.S. employers have a ready explanation for how they came to be hired: It wasn't us. It was a contractor.

Although these middlemen, including recruiters and temporary agencies, do not figure prominently in the current debate over illegal immigration, they are playing an increasingly significant role in hiring and managing the nation's workforce. Especially in California, an untold number of contractors employ immigrants — legal and illegal — in such industries as construction, janitorial service, hospitality and agriculture.

'An easy defense … would be to say that they used this subcontractor who they assumed was checking the documents,' said Jennifer Silliman, assistant special agent in charge with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Diego. 'It gives a level of deniability.'

The Monitor takes an in depth look at how and where people are crossing the Southern US border.

Would-be migrants say nothing will stop them from working in US.

They stream in. Today, the same as yesterday. The same as the day before. Backpacks are stuffed with bottled water, soap, chips, maybe an icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe. They wear sweaters and wool hats for the cold desert nights.

It often starts here, in Altar, 60 miles south of the Arizona border, at one of the largest staging points for would-be migrants attempting to cross into the US illegally. The travelers arrive from all over Mexico, Central America, even as far away as Colombia, and Brazil.

They are going to "El Norte." They tell you that, straight out. And if they don't cross this time, they will simply try again.

While debate in the US continues over immigration reform policy, here, on the south side of the border, there seems to be consensus that enforcement measures will deter almost no one. 'Walls and lights and sensors and police fill our heads,' says Dagoberto Martinez, '...but they don't make us turn back.'

If a new law passes, it would be the first state to establish the Bible in its public school curriculum in modern times.

The Georgia legislature seems poised to endorse just such a course [on the Bible and references in literature]. Though students in many states enroll in classes related to the Bible, Georgia would become the first to require its Department of Education to put in place a curriculum to teach the history and literature of the Bible. Schools would use the book itself as the classroom textbook. Specifically the bill would establish electives on both the New and Old Testaments.

It has overwhelmingly passed both chambers, but needs a final vote on a minor House change. The vote is expected as early as Monday. If it passes, the state's Department of Education has a year to establish Bible elective courses in the curriculum.

The Bible is already being used as a course study in as many as 1,000 American high schools, according to the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools in Greensboro, N.C. The US Supreme Court allows it as long as it's presented objectively, and not taught as fact. But the Georgia legislature's unprecedented decision to wade into what is usually a school district initiative has created concerns.

For example, the bill's use of terms such as Old and New Testament reflect a Protestant bias, some critics say. After all, Catholics and Jews have different interpretations and names for the tome. 'To pick one is to suggest that is the right Bible, which is a school district making a faith statement,' says Judith Schaeffer, a lawyer for People For the American Way, which works to maintain the separation of church and state.

Many parents, however, may object to using the Bible as a textbook since doing so may expose their children to the book's various interpretations and criticism, some say.

Luxury sport utilities are becoming decidedly less cool than just three years ago, when they were the hottest things on wheels and dealers had long waiting lists for the most popular models.

On top of the sales drop that has hurt all sport utilities, fewer than half the people who bought luxury S.U.V.'s are going back for another one. Incentives for the vehicles are at record levels and for the first time, luxury automakers are paying out more for rebates and lease deals to entice consumers to buy luxury S.U.V.'s than to buy cars.

The higher cost of gasoline plays a big role, as it has for the last year of high oil prices. But wealthy buyers, who used to shrug off the expense, are shifting gears, as excessive energy consumption is becoming socially embarrassing.

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Able Danger is merely the most recent in a litany of controversial allegations championed by Rep. Curt Weldon (R., Pa.).

Last year, in a book called Countdown to Terror, Weldon detailed the revelations of an Iranian exile code-named 'Ali' who, among other things, described a plot to crash planes into a U.S. nuclear reactor. In the mid-1990s, Weldon made headlines with charges that missing 'suitcase-sized' nuclear weapons produced in the former Soviet Union had been secretly buried throughout the United States during the Cold War.

Neither allegation has ultimately been confirmed.

n an interview last week, Weldon delivered this news from Ali: 'Ali's told me that Osama bin Laden is dead. He died in Iran.' (emphasis added) Weldon said he last spoke to Ali three weeks ago.

In 2003, Weldon's belief that bin Laden was being harbored in Iran drove the congressman to contact then-CIA Director George J. Tenet with information provided by Ali. CIA officials discredited Ali, whom they identified as Fereidoun Mahdavi, an exile living in Paris, because he was a close associate of fellow exile Manucher Ghorbanifar, a discredited arms dealer involved in the 1980s Iran-contra scandal.

At $8.3 trillion, it breaks the legal limit, fueling a fiscal debate in Congress.

Maybe the national debt clock was retired too soon.

Between 1989 and 2000, the electronic display near New York's Times Square tracked the rise of the nation's red ink until it reached $5.7 trillion. When it shut down, the federal budget was running a surplus.

The economic burden posed by the national debt, economists say, is more serious now than in 1980, when a $1 trillion figure stirred national anxiety. Today, the public debt is larger as a share of the American economy, more than half is held by foreigners, and the wave of baby-boomer retirements is no longer decades away.