For many people, the name Timbuktu evokes ideas of a mythical city, inaccessible but wealthy in gold.

Timbuktu is an actual city in Mali in West Africa. Its heyday was from the 1200s to the 1500s when it was the capital of the Empire of Mali.

Timbuktu was also home to the University of Sankore, which was at that time one of the major universities in the world and one of the major centers of Islamic learning. At its peak, it had 25,000 students. An interesting fact is that it was founded by a woman.

…Agricultural protectionism--the combination of quotas, tariffs, and subsidies for farm products--may be the purest example of destructive special-interest politics ever created. Rich countries--with a few exceptions, such as Australia--burden their own populations three times over. The policies cost taxpayers directly--the atrocious 2002 U.S. farm bill is slated to cost $180 billion over ten years. (Worse, annual unbudgeted "emergency" farm spending during the late 1990s accounted for a great deal of the spending boom that squandered much of the predicted budget surplus long before the first Bush tax cut took effect.) In return for their largesse, taxpayers get the privilege of paying higher prices as consumers (and, of course, inflated prices for basic foodstuffs hit the poorest proportionately hardest). And, by locking up an excess of labor and capital in an agribusiness sector that couldn't turn an honest profit on its own, agricultural protectionism inhibits productivity growth, preventing shifts in employment and investment to more productive parts of the economy.

Still, the costs agricultural policies impose on their own societies are manageable in the huge economies of the developed world. The costs they impose on the rest of the world are often devastating. By shutting off access to developed countries' markets for the goods that developing countries are most likely to produce competitively, agricultural protectionism forecloses the most likely route to development and poverty alleviation. Moreover, the artificially high prices in the rich countries encourage overproduction there; the surplus gets exported at cut-rate prices, which not only makes it hard for developing countries to compete in export markets, it typically makes poor farmers uncompetitive in their home markets as well. And as farms go out of business, unemployed and underemployed farmers migrate to sprawling cities; but often there aren't many jobs available in the cities, either. (The next rung up the development ladder after agriculture is typically textiles, which is also the subject of massive protectionism.) In the end, the damage done to poor countries by the agricultural policies of the United States, the European Union, and Japan probably far outweighs the aid they gives those countries. Liberalizers have recently begun deploying this calucllation: In a world where more than a billion people, mostly the rural poor in the developing world, live on less than one dollar per day, every cow in the European Union receives an average daily subsidy of more than twice that.

Cohen then attempts to tie it all together by providing a laundry list of the most offensive positions taken by Bush nominees:

Yes, he has, in his article, The Redistricting Cases: Original Mistakes And Current Consequences, 24 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 103 (2000). And he produced a host of reasons for this conclusion: First, there is no evidence that the Equal Protection Clause was intended to apply to voting rights at all.

Pryor did suggest in congressional testimony in 1997 that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act should be amended or repealed. This is the section that requires DOJ "preclearance" whenever certain states do anything that might affect voting rights. I know little to nothing about the Voting Rights Act, so I'll refrain from speculating about whether Pryor's statement here was defensible. Still, I'd bet there's more to the story than Cohen lets on. (FYI: The Committee for Justice defends Pryor's testimony on pages 7-9 of this report.)

Wrong. Thomas's concurrence in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris argued that the Establishment Clause -- not the "Bill of Rights" as a whole -- "may well" have less application to state government activities that do not in themselves infringe on anyone's liberty (after all, the Fourteenth Amendment speaks of protecting "liberty"). Thomas's argument is a sophisticated one, and indeed quite a few legal scholars* have noted the conceptual difficulties in applying the Establishment Clause to the states, given that one of the original purposes of the Clause was precisely to protect state governments from federal interference. In any event, Cohen is flat-out misrepresenting Thomas's opinion.

Annan Says U.N. Will Stay in Iraq
By SAMEER N. YACOUB
Associated Press Writer

2:42 AM PDT, August 20, 2003

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- FBI agents led the search for clues in the rubble of a bombed U.N. compound in Baghdad on Wednesday, while U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the deadly attack would not drive the world body out of Iraq.

United Nations workers were told to stay at home Wednesday after a cement truck packed with explosives blew up outside the offices of the top U.N. envoy in Iraq, killing him and 19 other people. At least 100 people were injured in the unprecedented attack against the world body.

Annan said he was to meet with the Security Council later in the day to discuss security arrangements for U.N. workers in Iraq.

"We will persevere. We will continue. It is essential work," Annan said at a news conference in Stockholm, where he stopped briefly before heading to U.N. headquarters in New York. "We will not be intimidated."

Annan said the U.N. plans to reevaluate its security measures.

How America Created a Terrorist Haven
By JESSICA STERN

Yesterday's bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was the latest evidence that America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one.

Of course, we should be glad that the Iraq war was swifter than even its proponents had expected, and that a vicious tyrant was removed from power. But the aftermath has been another story. America has created — not through malevolence but through negligence — precisely the situation the Bush administration has described as a breeding ground for terrorists: a state unable to control its borders or provide for its citizens' rudimentary needs.

As the administration made clear in its national security strategy released last September, weak states are as threatening to American security as strong ones. Yet its inability to get basic services and legitimate governments up and running in post-war Afghanistan and Iraq — and its pursuant reluctance to see a connection between those failures and escalating anti-American violence — leave one wondering if it read its own report.

Bush Revises Views On 'Combat' in Iraq

"Actually, major military operations," Bush replied. "Because we still have combat operations going on." Bush added: "It's a different kind of combat mission, but, nevertheless, it's combat, just ask the kids that are over there killing and being shot at."

In his May 1 speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln, Bush declared: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country." The headline on the White House site above Bush's May 1 speech is "President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended."

Since then, a search of Bush speeches on the White House Web site indicates, the president had not spoken of the guerrilla fighting in Iraq as combat until this interview; he had earlier spoken of the "cessation of combat" in Iraq

Paul Newman Is Still HUD
By PAUL NEWMAN

The Fox News Network is suing Al Franken, the political satirist, for using the phrase "fair and balanced" in the title of his new book. In claiming trademark violation, Fox sets a noble example for standing firm against whatever.

Unreliable sources report that the Fox suit has inspired Paul Newman, the actor, to file a similar suit in federal court against the Department of Housing and Urban Development, commonly called HUD. Mr. Newman claims piracy of personality and copycat infringement.

In the 1963 film "HUD," for which Mr. Newman was nominated for an Academy Award, the ad campaign was based on the slogan, "Paul Newman is HUD." Mr. Newman claims that the Department of Housing and Urban Development, called HUD, is a fair and balanced institution and that some of its decency and respectability has unfairly rubbed off on his movie character, diluting the rotten, self-important, free-trade, corrupt conservative image that Mr. Newman worked so hard to project in the film. His suit claims that this "innocence by association" has hurt his feelings plus residuals.

Prescription Drugs Now, Day of Reckoning Later
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Aug. 18 — President Bush and Congress have agreed to spend $400 billion on prescription drugs for the elderly over 10 years. But they rarely address a basic question: Where does the money come from?

It will be borrowed from the public, officials say. In practice, economists say, workers of the future — children and grandchildren of today's Medicare beneficiaries — will have to pay much of the cost through higher taxes.

The federal government has no budget surplus to pay for the new benefits, which are the biggest expansion of Medicare since its creation in 1965. A law that required Congress to offset the cost of new benefits — either by raising taxes or by cutting other programs — was allowed to expire in September.

Set of Rules Too Complex to Be Followed Properly
By JAMES GLANZ and ANDREW C. REVKIN

he man leading the investigation into last week's blackout has come to one firm conclusion: either the rules for power transactions on the electrical grid were broken, or they were inadequate, even though they are hundreds of pages of detailed specifications covering seemingly every contingency.

Michehl R. Gent, president and chief executive of the North American Electric Reliability Council, the industry organization that created many of those rules after the 1965 blackout, is not willing to say which possibility he considers most likely at this stage, but his early conclusion has focused attention on the rules governing the power grid, a complex and, in the estimation of some experts, physically inadequate system for moving energy around the country.

Many of those rules - how much power can move in a line, when systems need to be shut down in an emergency - were drawn up long before deregulation opened the sluice gates and enabled the present transfer of billions of watts of energy around the country daily in wholesale transactions across hundreds or thousands of miles. As detailed as those rules are, according to many people in the industry, they are no match for the overwhelming scale and complexity of the grid that lost power over vast stretches of the Northeast and Canada last week.

Ben Carreras, a physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory who models the grid on computers, said that using the rules to control the behavior of the grid was sometimes like using a naturalists' handbook to tame a tiger.

And Terry Boston, executive vice president of transmission and power supply for the Tennessee Valley Authority, said, ``We have worked for many years developing the rules of the road.'' ``The problem is,'' he said, ``we're asking the system to go into a mode of operation that is far different than what it was designed to do. It was designed for short distances. Now, in the new open market, we're seeing transactions covering hundreds of miles.''

Adding another complicating factor is the reality that the rules are voluntary, enforced by little more than peer pressure and the potential sting of bad press after particularly bad power failures.

`I don't know of any grid that's got legally binding enforcement,'' said Charles Jenkins, vice president for transmission grid management at Oncor, a part of TXU in Dallas, a private company that moves electricity around the grid.

The Sad Tale of a Security Whistleblower
Federal prosecutors in California went too far when they put a man in prison for disclosing a website security hole to the people at risk from it.

By Mark Rasch Aug 18 2003 05:00AM PT
Previous articles in this space have discussed whether security professionals can go to jail for doing things like demonstrating the insecurity of a wireless network, or conducting a throughput test on a system without permission. Now, a new and unwarranted extension of the U.S. computer crime law shows that you can go to jail for simply telling potential victims that their data is vulnerable.

By explaining how the vulnerability worked, and why customer data was at risk, prosecutors asserted, the security specialist "impaired the integrity" of the affected network. It is now up to a federal appellate court to determine whether this interpretation of the law is to stand. If it does, it could mean a dramatic decline in postings to Bugtraq, CERT, or other public fora.

Bret McDanel was dissatisfied with his former employer, Tornado Development, Inc. Tornado provided internet access and web-based e-mail to its clients. However, McDanel apparently discovered a flaw in the web-mail that would permit malicious users to piggyback a previous secure session, grab the unique session ID and thereby read a user's e-mail-- despite the fact that the site promised that e-mail was secure. Dissatisfied with the pace at which Tornado addressed the issue (and for other reasons, undoubtedly), McDanel severed his employment with them, and went to work for another company.

About six months later, according to defensive filings, McDanel discovered that Tornado had never fixed the vulnerability he discovered. Using the moniker "Secret Squirrel" he sent a single e-mail to about 5,600 of Tornado's customers over the course of three days, staggering the release each day to prevent flooding Tornado's e-mail servers.

The e-mail told Tornado's customers about the vulnerability, and directed them to his own website for information about it.

So what did Tornado? First, they scrambled to delete their own customer's e-mails (without their permission) to prevent them from learning about the vulnerability. Then they took other steps to conceal the hole. Ultimately, they fixed the vulnerability, and upgraded their general security.

For his efforts, McDanel was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to sixteen months in the federal pokey, which he has now served. He has appealed his conviction to the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Let Judges Be Judges

August 18, 2003

Federal sentencing laws, especially for drug possession, are often irrational, unfair and rigid, and judges know it. However, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft thinks the problem is that too many federal judges are falling for the sob stories criminals tell them and cutting them a break on prison time.

In a July 28 memo, Ashcroft directed all U.S. attorneys to notify him whenever a federal judge imposed a criminal sentence that was less than U.S. guidelines called for. The attorney general says he wants the case numbers and judges' names so his prosecutors can appeal these sentences. But Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, Justice Anthony Kennedy and dozens of outraged federal judges regard this order as an attack on judicial independence and a veiled threat to would-be nominees.

…In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court expanded the limited ability Congress left judges to set shorter terms. About one-third of the felons sentenced since then received less than the minimum term, but in half of those cases prosecutors asked for the reduction to get defendants' cooperation.

The attorney general doesn't like those numbers and obviously wants judges to toe his automaton line, without regard to the Constitution's balance of powers. Congress should instead, as Kennedy has proposed, do away with these unworkable sentencing laws and let justice work in tandem with common sense.

And then there were 10: Marriage derby heats up
Suitors show up in Southbridge

By Peter DeMarco, Globe Correspondent, 8/18/2003

SOUTHBRIDGE -- The suitors arrived on Donna and Peter Wood's freshly mowed front lawn one by one yesterday morning, passing a horde of curious neighbors and a row of television cameras as they stepped into dating history.

Some wore hip sunglasses; some carried roses; one guy even brought his mother. Among the candidates: a Coast Guard officer, a cable installer, and a few truck drivers. But no doctors or lawyers.

The turnout wasn't quite what the Woods or their 22-year-old daughter, Kimberly Devlin, had expected.

In the past two weeks, newspapers, television stations, and radio stations have chronicled Donna Wood's plan to find a husband for her daughter by accepting applications from men ages 21 to 30 and then holding open auditions at her home. Wood has expressed dissatisfaction with her daughter's taste in men.

Given such publicity, and signs reading "Who Wants to Marry Our Daughter" posted on the front lawn, more than 100 potential suitors have inquired about Devlin, who has a 4-year-old daughter.

But in the end, only 10 brave souls were willing to put their hearts -- and egos -- on the line.

The shifting medical view on marijuana

By Lester Grinspoon, 8/17/2003

IN A RECENT poll conducted by Medscape, a website directed at health care providers, 76 percent of physicians and 89 percent of nurses said they thought marijuana should be available as a medicine. That's a big change from the attitude in the medical community a decade ago, when few health providers believed (or would acknowledge) that cannabis had any medical utility. That was not surprising; physicians receive most of their new drug education from journal articles or from drug company advertisements and promotions, and neither of these sources provides information about medical marijuana.

The dramatic change of view is the result of clinical experience. Doctors and nurses have seen that for many patients cannabis is more useful, less toxic, and less expensive than the conventional medicines prescribed for diverse syndromes and symptoms, including multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease, migraine headaches, severe nausea and vomiting, convulsive disorders, the AIDS wasting syndrome, chronic pain, and many others.

A mountain of anecdotal evidence speaks to marijuana's medical versatility and striking lack of toxicity. Even the federally sponsored Institute of Medicine has grudgingly acknowledged that marijuana has medical uses.

…The Food and Drug Administration, under pressure from a growing number of physicians and patients, approved Marinol for the treatment of the nausea and vomiting of cancer chemotherapy. Marinol is synthetic tetrahydrocannabinol, the primary active cannabinoid in marijuana, packed in a capsule with sesame oil so that it cannot be smoked.

But relatively few patients have found Marinol useful. It is less effective than marijuana for several reasons. Because it must be taken orally, the effect appears only after an hour or more. That eliminates one of the main advantages of smoked or vaporized inhaled cannabis, which works so quickly that the patient can adjust the dose with remarkable precision. Furthermore, Marinol is more expensive than marijuana, even with the prohibition tariff that raises the price of illicit cannabis.

…the primary, and for many the only, advantage of these drugs will be legality, their manufacturers will have an interest in vigorously enforced prohibition that raises the price of the competitive product, street marijuana.

The realities of human need are incompatible with the demand for a legally enforceable distinction between medicine and all other uses of cannabis. Marijuana not only has many potential medical uses, but can also safely enhance many pleasures and ease many discomforts of everyday life. In many cases what lay people do in prescribing marijuana for themselves is not very different from what physicians do when they provide prescriptions for psychoactive or other drugs.

The only workable way of realizing the full potential of this remarkable substance, including its full medical potential, is to free it from a dual set of regulations -- the laws that control prescription drugs, and the often cruel and self-defeating criminal laws that control psychoactive substances used to for nonmedical purposes. These mutually reinforcing laws strangle marijuana's uniquely multifaceted potential. The only way to liberate the potential is to give marijuana the same legal status as alcohol, a far more dangerous substance.

Marijuana should be removed from the medical and criminal control systems. It should be legalized for adults for all uses.