Mfume, however, has never been to law school.

You do not have a right to good food, though welfare is attempting to take care of that.

In the midst of problems in the economy, we hear from politicians who speak of a "right" to employment. There is no right to a good job.

What is the common problem with all of these so-called "rights"? Each one requires that the government facilitate and provide for these "rights" – something that is not the government's role.

The issue is not that providing food, health care, employment and education is a problem, except for it being unconstitutional. The issue is that if a government were to provide these social services, it brings everyone down to the lowest common denominator in quality.

Just look at health care in Britain and Canada – it's a wreck. Looking at the quality of the rest of our government, I somehow don't see how food and government-funded nutrition would be any better.

Additionally, it's insane to say that we all have a right to employment unless you want to open up the possibility that everyone work for federal and state governments. FDR took a stab at it, but our government was never intended to create and retain programs that employ millions.

Lastly, America is already an example of what happens when we look at education as a human right – our government educational system is in shambles.

LIEBERMAN GOES TOO FAR
by Jason Zengerle

Candidate: Joe Lieberman
Category: Political Courage
Grade: F

Joe Lieberman obviously made a mistake when he skipped the July 13 candidate forum the NAACP held at its annual convention--a move that prompted NAACP president Kweisi Mfume to declare him (along with fellow no-shows Dick Gephardt and Dennis Kucinich) "persona non grata" in the black community. It therefore made sense for Lieberman to try to make amends by calling Mfume the next day to apologize and then, two days after that, to travel to Miami to give a make-up speech to the convention.

But Lieberman's actual speech took things way too far. After offering the NAACP another apology for skipping the candidates' forum and then ticking off his own civil rights credentials, Lieberman praised the NAACP for its work during the Florida recount. That's when things became absurd. "We didn't realize at the time, Al Gore and I, that we not only needed Kweisi Mfume fighting for justice here in Florida counting votes," Lieberman said, "we need him on the Supreme Court where the votes really counted. Maybe that'll happen some day."

So Lieberman--a man who once questioned affirmative action--is now saying that he'll put Kweisi Mfume--a man who, according to his biography on the NAACP website, has not even attended law school--on the Supreme Court? Nothing like compounding an initial mistake.

posted 2:33 p.m.

LIEBERMAN'S CAMPAIGN RESPONDS
by Jonathan Sallet, Communications Director
in response to: LIEBERMAN GOES TOO FAR by Jason Zengerle

The Lieberman Campaign appreciates Jason Zengerle's appreciation of Joe Lieberman's public acknowledgment he made a mistake in not attending the NAACP conference. Unlike the current occupant of the White House, Joe Lieberman has no problem accepting responsibility for his actions.

We did not appreciate, however, Zengerle's lack of appreciation of the joke Lieberman told about having Kweisi Mfume on the Supreme Court. It's a shame Zengerle was not in the room--he would have clearly seen that this was no effort of overcompensation, but a nod to the unfairness of the Supreme Court's decision in 2000 that was delivered in jest and received as such.

In fact, if Zengerle had bothered to check, he would have found that this is a joke that Lieberman has frequently used in the past--most recently at the Human Rights Campaign forum on Tuesday, with Elizabeth Birch as the mock justice.

In light of this, we humbly suggest that TNR put out an APB for its funny bone.

posted 11:39 a.m.

Claims that top official was deposed on tycoon's orders
Festus Eriye: Lagos

Nigeria has been rocked by claims that a state governor was abducted by police and hurriedly replaced on the strength of a fake letter of resignation.

Governor of the southeastern state of Anambra, Chris Ngige, claims that 200 policemen descended on his office and "captured" him last Thursday.

Then, while they detained him, Ngige's apparent letter of resignation was presented to the state house of assembly.

It was read by the Speaker, swiftly debated and hastily adopted. The Anambra assembly then directed that the chief justice swear in the deputy governor as the new governor.

However, when the judge could not be reached at such short notice, Deputy Governor Okechukwu Udeh announced that he was taking over anyway, in order to prevent a power vacuum.

But Ngige was able to trick his captors and inform his countrymen that he had not resigned. In doing so, however, he threw Anambran, and Nigerian, politics into disarray.

Many of those now accused of being behind the attempted ouster of the governor are known associates of powerful figures in the presidency and other top figures in the ruling party.

By Derrick Z. Jackson, 7/11/2003

THERE IS a simple reason American presidents will not apologize for slavery. An apology for the past means asking white Americans to take responsibility for the present. One hundred and forty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, that remains a task too heavy for presidents to perform. The truth remains too terrible for Americans to bear.

Twice in five years a president has gone to Africa. Both said how terrible slavery was. In 1998, Bill Clinton said, ''going back to the time before we were a nation, European Americans received the fruits of the slave trade. And we were wrong in that.''

This week President Bush called slavery ''one of the greatest crimes of history.'' Bush went so far as to speak directly about the ''captors.'' He said, ''Small men took on the powers and airs of tyrants and masters. Years of unpunished brutality and bullying and rape produced a dullness and hardness of conscience. Christian men and women became blind to the clearest commands of their faith and added hypocrisy to injustice.''

Bush admitted that while physical slavery is dead, the legacy is alive. ''My nation's journey toward justice has not been easy, and it is not over,'' Bush said. ''The racial bigotry fed by slavery did not end with slavery or with segregation.''

That sounds like progress, except for one thing. It might be novel for American presidents to go on political safari to Africa to condemn slavery. But they are not the first to say slavery was bad.

This is not merely from the usual suspects of Cliff Notes history, like Lincoln's emancipation and Jefferson's laments of slavery even as he allegedly made a baby with one. John Adams said, ''Negro slavery is an evil of colossal magnitude.'' The slave owner James Monroe still called the international slave trade ''abominable.'' John Quincy Adams in 1820 called slavery ''the great and foul stain upon the North American union.''

Even though he was a slave-owning president, James Madison called slavery an ''evil'' and a ''dreadful calamity.'' After he signed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, President Millard Fillmore said, ''God knows that I detest slavery, but it is an existing evil, for which we are not responsible, and we must endure it.''

James Buchanan, who preceded Lincoln as president, said 31 years before he took office that slavery was ''a great political and a great moral evil.'' He added, ''It is, however, one of those moral evils, from which it is impossible for us to escape, without the introduction of evils infinitely greater. There are portions of this Union in which, if you emancipate your slaves, they will become masters.'' As president, he realized too late that his denial did not stop the infinitely greater ''evil'' of disunion.

A century and a half later, presidents are still calling slavery evil, but we endure the legacy partially because presidents do not hold Americans responsible for fully understanding it.

It all starts with understanding. Understanding starts with an apology. An apology would be the start of a new America. Anyone can acknowledge that evil existed. An apology is personal. If a white president of the United States were to apologize for slavery, it would say that the nation officially recognizes that white wealth before the Civil War came from what this nation did to black people (and Native Americans in the process).

It would officially recognize that European-Americans, whether they come from a long line of American citizens or whether their parents came over dirt poor from Europe in the 20th century, continue to benefit from a white privilege that allowed them to move up the ladder into the suburbs. Meanwhile, slavery's replacement, segregation, blocked generations of African-Americans from building up wealth because of redlining, intellectual capital through inferior public schools, and political capital through disenfranchisement.

As Bush came amazingly close to saying - perhaps because he said it from the safety of his safari and not in front of racist Bob Jones University in the 2000 campaign or while filing a Supreme Court brief against affirmative action - racial bigotry is not over. Because of that, an apology would mark the official end to the I-didn't-own-any-slaves denial of this country. An apology would say not only yesterday's wealth, but today's wealth, was built on yesterday's evil.

An apology would acknowledge that slavery's damage still requires repair. To some people, the repair would be cash reparations to black people. Some call it fully funded public schools. Some call it affirmative action. Some call it serious enforcement of antidiscrimination laws. Whatever form the repair takes, the president needs to deliver his message in America, not just Africa, to Americans, not just Africans.

Calling slavery evil is as old as the Founding Fathers. It would be original to tell America that the white privileges bestowed by the tragic mistake of the Founding Fathers are over. The reason one of the greatest crimes in history has not yet resulted in a great apology is because the reward for the crime remains too great.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is [email protected].

This story ran on page A11 of the Boston Globe on 7/11/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

In the debate about tax cuts and federal budget deficits, both sides are making arguments that can never be proved.

After the White House announced forecasts for record deficits on Tuesday, Democrats rushed to accuse President Bush of guaranteeing future cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits. They have also asserted that the disappearance of $6 trillion in federal surpluses will push up long-term interest rates and dampen spending by consumers and businesses.

But because there is no second chance at history, Democrats can only guess at what might have been had the policies of the Bush administration not been enacted.

Similarly, Republicans have contended that the tax cuts they pushed will generate millions of jobs that would not otherwise have existed. But that contention, like the eventual outcome for the economy, can only be compared against an unknowable alternative.

"We're in the middle of an experiment right now," said John H. Makin, director of fiscal policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a research group. He joined other economists in saying there may be some truth to all three notions — the higher interest rates, the strain on federal programs and the extra jobs — but to what extent depends largely on the frame of reference.

CHICAGO -- Governor Rod Blagojevich signed a bill yesterday requiring police to tape interrogations and confessions in murder cases, calling it a key step in reforming Illinois' death penalty system.

''It is our moral duty to restore the integrity of the criminal justice system as we know it today in Illinois,'' said Blagojevich, whose predecessor gained national headlines for his attack on capital punishment.

The law requires police to use audio or videotape when they question murder suspects; agencies will have two years to come up with procedures.

HOUSTON, July 18 — A coup this week in the West African island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe is reverberating in the corporate suites of the energy industry here, oil company executives said today. Officials from several companies said they were anxiously monitoring events on the potentially oil-rich archipelago, a former Portuguese colony on the Equator in the Gulf of Guinea.

Exxon Mobil of Irving, Tex., the world's largest oil company, and Chrome Energy, a small Houston-based oil and gas company controlled by Nigerian investors, have secured options for oil exploration in the waters off São Tomé, an area just south of oil-rich Nigeria that geologists estimate could hold up to six billion barrels of reserves.

ChevronTexaco, Royal Dutch/Shell and TotalFinaElf are among the other big oil companies that have shown interest in bidding for licenses to explore other areas in auctions scheduled for October. This interest has sent expectations soaring in São Tomé and Príncipe, ae two-island country of 1,000 square miles and 160,000 people where the main export crop is cocoa and the average annual income is $280.

"Oil has created dreams of grandeur for a tiny place that has been on the margins of global affairs for many years," said Gerhard Seibert, an authority on São Tomé at the Institute of Tropical Scientific Investigation in Lisbon. "The army and the political and business elites sense something coming and want a part of it."

…Still, most cabinet members, including the oil minister, Rafael Branco, were being held captive today, adding to uncertainty over the effect the coup may have on oil exploration. The coup has already affected São Tomé's fragile economy: The World Bank said this week that it would suspend all aid to the nation as long as the coup leaders remained in power.

…No oil is expected to be extracted from São Tomé until 2007 or 2008, but the country has nonetheless become a international flash point, leading experts on West Africa to speculate it was only a matter of time before jostling for power ahead of the oil rush would evolve into political instability. Revenue from licensing agreements alone could reach $200 million in the next two years, an amount about four times the size of the national budget.

&hellip"The age of oil is upon São Tomé, so some level of friction is to be expected," he said.

BOBIGNY, France — Mohamed Dia still remembers his first pair of Nikes: a "Dallas" model in gray with the Nike curve in white.

Mr. Dia, now a 29-year-old businessman and fashion designer, was 12 years old and living with his four brothers in a foster home not far from his mother's apartment in Sarcelles, a rough Paris suburb.

"It was a group home for kids whose parents couldn't take care of them," Mr. Dia recalled in an interview in a warehouse he uses in Bobigny, a Paris suburb. "I was rather pathetic. I dressed in used clothes that people donated at Christmas. I had no idea about clothes, but I knew I had to have Nikes."

It took three months of savings — and a hefty contribution from his mother — to buy the $160 pair of shoes.

Now Mr. Dia wears his own brand of clothing, which is sold in four Dia stores in France and is carried in 700 others. Sales are projected at $19 million to $22 million this year, up from $13 million in 2002. He drives a black Mercedes and has bought an apartment in Paris for his mother.

In an effort to break into the American market, Mr. Dia is negotiating to open a store on 125th Street in Harlem with a special line for the United States. He will open the shop with Wyclef Jean, the Haitian-born hip-hop singer and composer.

WASHINGTON, July 18 — The Bush administration, which spurned the United Nations in its drive to depose Saddam Hussein in Iraq, is finding itself forced back into the arms of the international body because other nations are refusing to contribute peacekeeping troops or reconstruction money without United Nations approval.

With the costs of stabilizing Iraq hovering at $4 billion a month and with American troops being killed at a steady rate, administration officials acknowledge that they are rethinking their strategy and may seek a United Nations resolution for help that would placate other nations, like India, France and Germany.

… "It's increasingly clear there was really some underestimation of the number of people who would be required after the regime fell, and the length of time required to stay there," said Paul Saunders, director of the Nixon Center, a nonpartisan research organization whose honorary chairman is Henry A. Kissinger.

Mr. Saunders said there were two reasons for the United States to go back to the United Nations.

"It would be helpful to diffuse responsibility for this massive undertaking, and share any dissatisfaction with others and not be the sole target ourselves," he said. "Externally, it's also helpful in rebuilding some of the relationships that were strained in the dispute over going in."

Rebels in Liberia have captured a strategic bridge outside the capital, Monrovia, in the latest round of fighting with government troops.

The rebels took the Po River Bridge Friday, breaking down one of the last main lines of defense before the city center.

Liberia's government accuses them of mounting a new advance on Monrovia, but rebels of the group, Liberian's United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), say they are only defending their own positions.

In a statement Friday, the rebels said if government troops continue to attack their positions they will be forced to overrun the capital. This latest

Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Kobe Bryant was formally charged today with felony sexual assault.

The Eagle County, Colorado District Attorney announced the charges during a press conference Friday afternoon.

The charges stem from Bryant's alleged assault of a 19-year-old female Vail area hotel concierge.

The incident is alleged to have taken place on June 30th when Bryant was in town for knee surgery.

In a statement released by Bryant's attorney, the NBA star admitted to adultery, but said the encounter was not forced.

He's due in court on August sixth.

By Juliette Eilperin and Albert B. Crenshaw
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, July 18, 2003; 4:06 PM

Months of political tension in the House of Representatives erupted into open warfare today when Democrats stormed out of a Ways and Means Committee session and the panel's chairman called in the Capitol Police.

The day began with a fairly ordinary procedural fight over an otherwise-innocuous pension bill. Committee Democrats complained that the Republican majority had not given them enough time to review a substitute bill that they had received shortly before midnight Thursday. Most of the Democrats then moved to a nearby library to plot strategy after they demanded that Republicans read the legislation line by line.

Infuriated, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) instructed the Capitol Police to remove the Democrats from the ornate library. Republicans said Democrats were being disorderly and did not have the right to occupy the libary.

After the one remaining Ways and Means Democrat got in a spat with a GOP committee member, Thomas dispensed with the reading of the bill altogether and pushed through the legislation, without a single Democratic vote.

4:51 AM PDT, July 18, 2003

TIKRIT, Iraq -- With a thunderous explosion from 12 pounds of plastic explosives, the U.S. military toppled a 30-foot statue of Saddam Hussein on horseback from its perch overlooking the dictator's hometown Friday. Soldiers also defused a huge homemade bomb near Baghdad's airport.

Pvt. Reshaun Richardson of the 555th Combat Engineering brigade, known as the "Triple Nickel," pushed the button that sent the Saddam statue pitching over near the gate to his former palace compound in his northern hometown of Tikrit.

"It felt real good," said Richardson, of Dothan, Ala. "There were lots of smiles around, and I had the biggest of them all."

Minnesota state officials said Thursday that they now have federal permission to implement cost-cutting welfare reforms that could reduce welfare payments to 21,000 poor families.

That should put an end to a class-action suit filed on behalf of those families, the officials said. However, attorneys for Legal Aid, the group that filed the suit, weren't ready to quit.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty said Thursday that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in a letter sent to state officials, has approved cuts in welfare payments passed this year by the Legislature. Those cuts involve the Food Stamp program, which the USDA oversees. Legal Aid attorneys said Thursday they had just learned about the USDA letter and couldn't comment.

"I don't know that everything is fully resolved," said Ralonda Mason, an attorney with St. Cloud Area Legal Services. "The reason we filed the lawsuit is that we believed it was very important that the state follow the law and get a waiver [permission for the welfare changes], because we're talking about changes that will mean very deep cuts that will be very painful."

"If the state has [received a waiver], and it appears that they may have, then that's a good thing," Mason said, adding that federal approval for the cuts doesn't necessarily mean the suit will end. The suit challenges changes in the Minnesota Family Investment Plan (MFIP).

…Now, Legal Aid attorneys are eager to know whether the state will require about 7,000 welfare recipients to repay nearly $1 million in welfare payments. The recipients received the payments after Ramsey County District Judge Judith Tilsen issued a temporary restraining order this month, stopping the cuts before the state could implement them.

One of Tilsen's primary reasons for issuing the restraining order was her concern over whether the cuts were legal without a federal waiver.

Families would lose $125 a month for each person who receives Social Security payments for disabilities.

State Human Services Commissioner Kevin Goodno said Thursday that state officials have not yet decided whether to ask for the money back. It likely will be one of the issues discussed during a scheduled hearing Monday in Ramsey District Court, he said.

…Along with the planned cut in benefits this month, state officials are scheduled to implement two other reductions in welfare benefits:

? A $50-per-month reduction in benefits for families receiving federal housing subsidies. That cut, set to take effect Sept. 1, will affect about 11,000 Minnesota families, according to Legal Aid attorneys.

? Lowering the percentage of working welfare recipients' earned income that is not counted in calculating welfare benefits, from 38 percent to 35 percent.

Only two other states have tried to cut welfare benefits to families who also receive disability payments -- with mixed results. A similar plan was overturned in West Virginia, but another is proceeding in Idaho.

QUESTION: I'm not talking about anybody else's comments. I'm asking the question, is responsibility for what was in the President's own State of the Union ultimately with the President, or with somebody else?
QUESTION: You heard me, boy. Is Prez the man or is he fronting for somebody else?
Scott McClellan: This has been discussed.
Scott McClellan: uhh... uhh...

QUESTION: Well, that's an excellent question. That is an excellent question. (Laughter.) Isn't the President responsible for the words that come out of his own mouth?
QUESTION: Youse a little punk muhfugga, ain't you? (Laughter) Can't your boy back up alla that mouth?
Scott McClellan: We've already acknowledged, Terry, that it should not have been included in there. I think that the American people appreciate that recognition.
Scott McClellan: Come on, man…stop messing with me…

[p6: Sorry. I just had to field that one myself. Carry on…]

QUESTION: Is it nonsense to say that the White House wanted this information in the speech and went through negotiations with the CIA on a way to get it in the speech?
QUESTION: [SMACK!!]
Scott McClellan: That there were discussions? Speech drafts go -- we've stated that these speeches go out to the principals, it goes out to the State, it goes out to DOD, it goes out to CIA, when it's going through the drafting process.
Scott McClellan: Aaaaagh!!

Britain has by now lost its sovereignty to the United States and has become a client state. As Tony Blair flies in to Washington today to be patted on the head by the US Congress, this is the sad truth behind his visit. No surprise, therefore, that the planned award to him of a congressional medal of honour for backing the US invasion of Iraq has been postponed. To be openly patronised in that way, under the circumstances, would be just too embarrassing.

Blunkett agreed that the UK would extradite Britons to the US in future, without any need to produce prima facie evidence that they are guilty of anything. But the US refused to do the same with their own citizens. The Home Office press release concealed this fact - out of shame, presumably. Why did the US refuse? According to the Home Office, the fourth amendment of the US constitution says citizens of US states cannot be arrested without "probable cause". The irony appears to have been lost on David Blunkett, as he gave away yet more of Britain's sovereignty.

The recession that began in March 2001 ended eight months later, the National Bureau of Economic Research, an independent group that tracks the business cycle, concluded in a report released yesterday.

Cheers, if any, were faint.

Economists said the announcement was not a surprise, and politicians said it offered little comfort to the millions of Americans without jobs.

"We've declared victory over the recession, and we're still laying off a couple hundred thousand workers a month," said Representative Pete Stark of California, ranking Democrat on the Joint Economic Committee. "If it weren't so painful for so many people who are out of work, it would be hilarious. But it isn't. It's not funny."

Still, Representative Jim Saxton, Republican of New Jersey and vice chairman of the committee, in a statement called the economic research bureau's decision "a reasonable one."

The recession preceding the recent one lasted from July 1990 to March 1991 in the bureau's chronology. A year after it ended, the nation's economy embarked on six consecutive months of job growth. This time, 20 months after the recession's formal end, payrolls are still shrinking.

"Most households, most individuals, will really not believe that it is a recovery until we see that job growth as part of the picture," said Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Banc of America Capital Management. But she added, "The official declaration of the end should help confidence on the part of businesses, investors and consumers."

Do you want to send an e-mail message to the White House?

Good luck.

In the past, to tell President Bush - or at least those assigned to read his mail - what was on your mind it was necessary only to sit down at a personal computer connected to the Internet and dash off a note to [email protected].

But this week, Tom Matzzie, an online organizer with the A.F.L.-C.I.O., discovered that communicating with the White House had become a bit more daunting. When Mr. Matzzie sent an e-mail protest against a Bush administration policy, the message was bounced back with an automated reply, saying he had to send it again in a new way.

Under a system deployed on the White House Web site for the first time last week, those who want to send a message to President Bush must now navigate as many as nine Web pages and fill out a detailed form that starts by asking whether the message sender supports White House policy or differs with it.

The White House says the new e-mail system, at www.whitehouse .gov/webmail, is an effort to be more responsive to the public and offer the administration "real time" access to citizen comments.

University of California regents handed fellow board member and activist Ward Connerly a defeat Wednesday, voting down his proposal to stop funding ethnic graduations and gay freshman orientation.

Connerly, who led the fight to drop race-based admissions some years ago, had tried to withdraw his item, which had come under heavy criticism. But fellow regents insisted on a vote, defeating it 6-3 in committee.

…UC officials say sponsoring events such as ethnic graduations is legal because the decision to give money is not based on racial criteria but on how many students will be served. They note the events are open to all students.

In any case, it was in my early twenties -- watching Shoa -- that I first understood that Jews were the target of hate that deep and old and evil as well. So now I find myself a bit of an anomaly politically. Firmly on the left in terms of US policies, and firmly on the left in terms of Israeli policy, but I also consider myself a Zionist. I am in favor of a Palestinian state, yes. But I am also acutely sensitive to the reality that many "friends" of the Palestinians use [unconsciously or not] legitimate criticism of Israeli policy as a convenient pressure valve for an enmity they have been carrying deep in their bones for centuries.

DoOS makes available for press conferences and interviews simulated officials virtually identical to the originals with regard to talking points, lucidity and veracity.

How did those 16 words get into the SOTU?
Answer:

I think you'll see more of that kind of activity, a kind of deepening of the relationship at various levels. That was the nature of this. Every regime in the world needs to be responsible, and every regime in the world should be responsible to its own people. Look, the truth of the matter is, though, unless you know where you're going, unless you're clear about where you're going, you will go nowhere.
We've not yet been in a position where the parties were ready to come together in a rather high-profile way because conditions on the ground have just not permitted it. I mean, there's a big agenda there.

We do have a number of instruments of national power and we are employing them already. As the president has said, "The one option that we do not have is to do nothing." The United States is unequivocal in its resolve to do what we must to insure ourselves. As the President said, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.

He then says, "I don't want you to try to talk me out of it because I've been having an affair with your best friend, and she's a better lover than you are." Again the wife stays quiet but speeds up as her anger increases.

"I want the house," he insists, pressing his luck. He says, "I want the car, too," but she just drives faster and faster.

By now, she's up to ninety mph.

"All right," he said. "I want the bank accounts and all the credit cards, too."

The wife slowly starts to veer toward a bridge overpass piling. This makes him a bit nervous, so he says, "Isn't there anything you want?"

The wife says, "No, I've got everything I need."

"Oh, really," he says, "so what have you got?"

Right before they slam into the wall at a hundred mph, the wife smiles and says, "The airbag."

If, for example, we'd stood up publicly and said we were sorry we put Hussein in power and we were sorry we'd given him missiles and we were sorry we'd shipped him the materials to create biological weapons and we sorry we'd sold him the materials to make other weapons and by the way, we're going to Iraq and take him down because we created a monster...well, I think I could have supported that war. (We'd have to promise never to do it again, of course.)

Look at Pakistan and India. Exactly how did these two countries become such a danger to themselves and others? How did they get the money and technology to build nukes? Aside from nukes, exactly where did they get the armaments to wage, if they choose, all-out war on each other?

If you're really curious, look in the mirror.

They got it from us.

We "negotiated" a sort of temporary "peace" between the two of them. We give them money not to kill each other.

But there are strings attached, you see. Most of the money we give them, they're contractually required to spend buying weapons and military technology from USofA corporations.

Yep, you heard me. We enforce peace by demanding that they become more and more heavily armed all the time.

We suck, don't we?

We don't have to suck. We need to demand, from our leaders and from the media, that we be given easy access to the terms of these agreements while they're in negotiation. If they're too ashamed of what they're doing to let the world see it, then they shouldn't be doing it. (All governments should be required to do this.)

We need to demand that our local newspapers carry this material, in full, on a timely basis. We need to read it, discuss it with each other, and send feedback to Washington.

We need to demand that our government stop tying "diplomacy" to the interests of huge corporations and conglomerates including or most especially the defense industry.

And we need to dismantle about 50 percent of the military-industrial complex. Enough is enough, okay?

And you. You're at fault too, okay?

It's more than just national politics. State and local politics are also crucial. They're immediate, too. The decisions being made by a neighborhood council that you might not even know exists can directly affect your life 24 hours from now.

Your urban or suburban city council is negotiating deals and dealing with issues that you care about. You don't see much about it in the papers until after it's a fait accompli because most people pay no attention to local politics, so the papers quit covering it. That's a serious mistake, that "not caring" thing. From mayors can come governors, congressmen, and senators, okay? From them come presidential candidates.

I'm just saying. When they put a landfill in the empty field down the street from your house, don't come crying to me. You should have been paying attention.

Ahem.

You don't want that? Have I just been threatened by the FBI? Confusion and a light dusting of panic conspire to keep me speechless. Was I reading something that morning? Something that would constitute a problem?

The partner speaks up again: "Maybe a printout of some kind?"

Then it occurs to me: I was reading. It was an article my dad had printed off the Web. I remember carrying it into Caribou with me, reading it in line, and then while stirring cream into my coffee. I remember bringing it with me to the store, finishing it before we opened. I can't remember what the article was about, but I'm sure it was some kind of left-wing editorial, the kind that never fails to incite me to anger and despair over the state of the country.

I tell them all this, but they want specifics: the title of the article, the author, some kind of synopsis, but I can't help them -- I read so much of this stuff.

"Do you still have the article?" Probably not, but I suggest we check behind the counter. When that doesn't pan out, I have the bright idea to call my dad at work, see if he can remember. Of course, he can't put together a coherent sentence after I tell him the FBI are at the store, questioning me.

"The FBI?" he keeps asking. Eventually I get him off the phone, and suggest it may be in my car. They follow me out to the parking lot, where Trippi asks me if there's anything in the car he should know about.

"Weapons, drugs? It's not a problem if you do, but if you don't tell me and then I find something, that's going to be a problem." I assure him there's nothing in my car, coming very close to quoting Rudy Ray Moore in Dolemite: "There's nothin' in my trunk, man."

The excitement of the questioning -- the interrogation -- has made me just a little bit giddy. I almost laugh out loud when they ask me to pop my trunk.

There's nothing in my car, of course. I keep looking anyway, while telling them it was probably some kind of what-did-they-know-and-when-did-they-know-it article about the buildup to Gulf War II. Trippi nods, unsatisfied. I turn up some papers from the University of Georgia, where I'm about to begin as a grad student. He asks me what I'm going to study.

"Journalism," I say. As I duck back into the car, I hear Agent Trippi informing his partner, "He's going to UGA for journalism" in a way that makes me wonder whether that counts against me.

Back in the store, Trippi gives me his card and tells me to call him if I remember anything. After he's gone, I call my dad back to see if he has calmed down, maybe come up with a name. We retrace some steps together, figure out the article was Hal Crowther's "Weapons of Mass Stupidity" from the Weekly Planet, a free independent out of Tampa. It comes back to me then, this scathing screed focusing on the way corporate interests have poisoned the country's media, focusing mostly on Fox News and Rupert Murdoch -- really infuriating, deadly accurate stuff about American journalism post-9-11. So I call the number on the card, leave a message with the name, author and origin of the column, and ask him to call me if he has any more questions.

PARIS, July 16 — Representatives of countries contributing to a fund to support the global struggle against AIDS and other diseases that are ravaging the developing world met in Paris today but made little progress toward easing a cash crisis expected later this year.

The United States secretary of health and human services, Tommy G. Thompson, the chairman of the fund's board, said that approval of projects costing $1.6 billion were pending at the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Roughly 40 percent of them, costing $750 million, would likely be approved when the fund's directors meet in October, he said, yet only $400 million has been pledged.

Addressing a one-day conference, which accompanied the International AIDS Society Conference in Paris this week, Mr. Thompson said the fund needed $3 billion by the end of 2004. `'I hope we can negotiate this into real money by October," he said.

At the same time, governments were upstaged by private donors, after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it would pay $100 million into the fund immediately. The foundation originally pledged $50 million as a first installment and a further $50 million over the next 10 years, making it a larger donor than Britain or Germany, which pledged between $40 million and $48 million.

WASHINGTON, July 16 — American intelligence agencies failed to obtain reliable human sources inside the Afghanistan training camps run by Al Qaeda before the September 2001 attacks, according to government officials who have read an unreleased Congressional report on intelligence lapses in the months before the hijackings.

The absence of such sources left counterterrorism officials largely blind to Osama bin Laden's specific intentions before the attacks and contributed to what the joint intelligence committees concluded in their report was a lack of knowledge about Al Qaeda even as the agencies for years collected information that showed the terror network hoped to strike inside United States.

The recent decision by federal regulators to loosen media ownership rules, already under fire in the Senate, took another blow in Congress yesterday. This setback was dealt by the House Appropriations Committee, which approved a budget amendment that would make it harder for big broadcasting companies to acquire more television stations.

The vote represented a defeat for Michael K. Powell, the Federal Communications Commission chairman, who has led the effort to change the rules. It was also a rebuke to the Republican House leadership and the Bush administration, strong supporters of the commission's efforts.

A White House spokeswoman, Claire Buchan, said last night that the "president's senior advisers would recommend a veto" if a bill including the amendment ultimately reached his desk.

By a vote of 40 to 25, with 11 Republican members deserting their leaders to join the 29 Democratic committee members, the appropriations committee approved a measure that would effectively block the commission from enforcing a new rule that would permit broadcasters to own stations that reach more total households across the country than they do now.

The short novel revolves around two women. Irene Redfield and Clare Bellew grew up together as part of Chicago's light-skinned 'black' elite at the beginning of the twentieth century. Though Clare is from a poor single parent family with an alcoholic, ne'er-do-well father, her fair skin makes her acceptable to the petty bourgeoisie and professionals who inhabit the schizoid circle.

As young adults, the two go their separate ways. Irene marries an identifiably African-American physician, has two sons and relocates to New York. She fills her time with charity work for "the race." Clare marries a virulently racist white man to escape her abusive relatives and has spent the last 12 years passing for white. She has a daughter.

… I find a secondary theme of the 182-page book as interesting as passing. Irene is in continuous negotiation with American society of the 1920s over her place in it. She is willing to accept second-class status as long as there are persons worse off than herself, i.e., the majority of Negroes, and she can enjoy the creature comforts that come with affluence, such as servants and fine clothes. An additional sop is her ability to pass for white when family members or friends who are darker are not with her.

However, it is impossible to make such an accommodation in a time when de jure segregation in much of the country and even lynching are the norm. The harsh reality of racial discrimination has impacted Irene's husband, Brian, and is driving a wedge between them. The more realistic Brian wants to decamp to a less discriminatory society, Brazil, or at least face up to the fact of the horrid treatment accorded even 'nice' Negroes. His wife resists doing so.

… Other would-be tour guides took a more prosaic approach. World leaders do not ordinarily spend time in gas lines, but that is just where Franklin Okoye would have directed the president.

If he had, Mr. Okoye, a civil servant, pointed out, he would have been forced to cancel all his talks with Nigeria's politicians, and scrap the ceremonial functions as well. Instead, Mr. Bush would have sat in his limousine all day long inching toward the pump, perhaps sticking his head out into the choking smog from time to time to curse the fact that an oil-lush country has too little gas to go around.

"This is the real Nigeria," fumed Mr. Okoye, who spent six frustrating hours baking in his Honda Prelude recently as he sought to fill his tank after the stations opened after an eight-day strike. There was pandemonium as drivers tried to force their way, or buy their way, into the front of the unruly queue.

Nigeria presents the best and worst that Africa has to offer. The continent's most populous nation, it is a former military dictatorship that has become a democracy, albeit a flawed one that sometimes barely seems to function. As one of the world's great oil exporters, it is a rich place that is often shockingly poor. It is nationalistic and yet deeply divided by ethnic rivalries. Mr. Bush could see little of this from Abuja, the shiny capital where politicians retreat to "run" the country.

In the decidedly grittier world most Nigerians inhabit, the president would eat delicacies from the street, things like goat head and pounded yam, and he would quench his thirst with water that did not come from a bottle, or even a tap. If there was time, he might fetch that water himself, balancing a plastic jug on his head, to get an idea of how so many African women start their days.

He would also spend time out of the big cities, since most Africans live in rural areas. He would be stopped at a checkpoint deep in the bush by children with guns.

But not everything would be so grim. Some slum dwellers in this sprawling city said they would give him palm wine and keep him out late at a music joint. And he would have seen, after waking up from a night's sleep on a straw mat laid out in the corner of some small hut, his arms and legs covered with mosquito bites, that Africans are a hardy lot.

"Somebody like him doesn't understand sufficiently what we go through every day," said a man who identified himself as Sheik Muhammad, and who said he would gladly serve as Mr. Bush's tour guide, especially since he has no job.

"I'd take him around to the neighborhoods around Lagos," he said. "I'd tell him that these are real Nigerians. They wake up at cock crow and work until sunset and they still barely make enough to live."

After a year of turmoil that saw two of its biggest stars defect to Princeton University, Harvard's celebrated Afro-American studies department will be refocused and expanded to include an African language program and a new major in African studies, the chairman of the department, Henry Louis Gates Jr., said yesterday.

Professor Gates, who at one point was so unhappy about the acrimony between his department and the Harvard president, Lawrence H. Summers, that he too weighed offers to leave, said he had appointed five new faculty members, including two African scholars, one a critic of African literature and one a linguist.

His recruits also include a linguistic anthropologist who is one of the country's leading experts on hip-hop. Hip-hop had figured in the turmoil in Professor Gates's department, with Cornel West, one of the stars to leave Harvard, complaining that Mr. Summers had, among other things, been critical of his recording of a hip-hop CD entitled "Sketches of My Culture."

& Harvard is by no means the first university to merge African and African-American studies in one department, and to offer a major in African studies. But for the university to take such a step is a recognition that the African-American experience in the United States must be understood in relationship to Africa and the diaspora, several scholars said yesterday.

"This is where we're going these days in African-American studies," said John Thornton, an African historian who will join the African-American studies department at Boston University this fall. "It's been a trend intellectually. In the past 15 years, more and more people who are doing African-American history are increasingly interested in the African equation. On the other side, there are more Africanists who are recognizing that there is an American side to what they do."

Two airports have been alerted after a giant robotic balloon escaped from a science centre in South Yorkshire.

Staff at the Magna Science Adventure Centre, in Rotherham, were forced to inform aviation authorities after the "flyborg" floated off into the sky as it was being moved.

The 13-feet long airship can expand to four times its usual size as it flies, and could fly for a week before it deflates.

Both Manchester and Sheffield airports were informed of its escape.

Freak gust

The flyborg has a computerised brain which allows it to avoid obstacles.

A spokesman for Magna said: "Two technical staff were moving a flyborg - an artificially intelligent flying robot airship filled with conventional party-balloon gas - into the main Magna building.

"The airships, constructed of lightweight polymer film, were tethered all the time to the people moving them but they had to be untethered to take the flyborg through the visitor attraction's entrance doors.

"The two technicians held on to the airship's gondola but were surprised by a very strong freak gust of wind which ripped the airship out of their hands and sucked it up into the air, leaving them holding the gondola."

The airship, which is valued at £15,000, was designed by Professor Noel Sharkey, a BBC Robot Wars judge, and his team at the Creative Robotics Unit at Magna for indoor flying robot exhibitions.

Staff have offered a reward for its recovery.

Walk the grounds of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello around dawn (before the tourists come) and you enter a 19th-century landscape where you half expect to meet The Founder himself, out on one of those brisk constitutionals for which he was known. These paths and gardens were alive with Jefferson descendants last weekend, for a new version of a family reunion. There were white Jeffersons, descended from Thomas and his wife, Martha. Alongside them ? and in some cases looking just like them ? were white, brown and black Jeffersons, descended from the children that the nation's third president is now presumed to have fathered with his slave mistress, Sally Hemings.

Old-guard Jefferson descendants are fighting this new reality. But historians at Monticello itself, near Charlottesville, Va., have increasingly rendered them irrelevant by showing that the Jefferson family ? and the early world it built ? was a mixed-race enterprise, not just in the sexual sense, but at all levels of daily life. It was therefore fitting that the guest list at the most recent reunion did not end with the Jefferson bloodline but sprawled all over the Monticello family tree. Present were descendants of Burwell Colbert, the slave who fluffed Jefferson's deathbed pillows, and Wormley Hughes, the head gardener, to whom Jefferson entrusted his exotic plants. The most talked about ancestor this time around was Sally's half-brother, the master carpenter John Hemings, who had helped to build Monticello and whose last service for Jefferson was to build his coffin.

This new chapter in the plantation's life was masterminded by the historians Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright, who have been working for a long time to flesh out the lives of the slave workers who built and ran the plantation while Jefferson carried out his research in horticulture, architecture and design. The two historians have so far interviewed more than 150 descendants for a documentary project about the lives of Monticello's slaves. When finished and compiled, these histories will provide the sharpest picture yet of how black residents of Monticello lived before and after emancipation.

There are millions of men and women in America who not only work hard every day but also put in overtime. Sometimes the overtime helps to pay the bills. Sometimes it helps them stay a little ahead of the game or to save for things they otherwise couldn't afford, like a college education or a bigger house for a growing family. There was once a time in America when these men and women believed they could depend on Democrats in Washington to defend their interests and to battle to protect their rights.

That time is apparently gone. On Thursday, the House of Representatives?with seven Democrats absent, including presidential candidate Richard Gephardt?voted 213 to 210 to approve new regulations that would cut off a universe of Americans?anywhere from 1 million to 8 million?from guaranteed overtime pay. Under the new rules, backed by the Bush administration and campaigned for heavily by business lobbyists, those employees would still have to put in extra hours. They just wouldn't get any extra pay. Instead, some would qualify for comp time?try paying the rent with that?and others would simply be reclassified as executives, even if they wield little managerial authority.

Where were the Democrats? Nowhere to be found. Gephardt was in Iowa getting an endorsement from the International Order of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, promising veterans of the picket line they'd be part of a new American prosperity. Among the leading Democratic contenders, neither Gephardt nor senators John Edwards, John Kerry, or Joe Lieberman returned repeated Voice calls for comment. The office of Representative Dennis Kucinich, a staunch labor supporter who voted against the measure, at least returned a call, as did former Vermont governor Howard Dean's office. Dean spokesperson Tricia Enright says of Gephardt's absence, "It's disgraceful. . . . Don't votes like this keep people off the picket lines?"

Some years ago, when my grandmother died at 94, she was writing a novel based on her life. She left only a few pages and an outline, but her life was indeed novel material. The daughter of Chloe Curry, a cook and tenant farmer who had been enslaved in Alabama, and Will Campbell, a white Mississippi Delta cotton farmer, she was born at the end of Reconstruction and was raised by this pair, who stayed together until his death early in the 20th century. Since I started searching for more clues to the lives of my grandmother and her mother for a book two years ago, I have, for the first time, come face to face with my white ancestors.