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walktalker · 20-09-01, 04:05 PM

Bush Submits His Laws for War
President Bush sent his anti-terrorism bill to Congress late Wednesday, launching an emotional debate that will force U.S. politicians to choose between continued freedom for Americans or greater security. Created in response to last week's bloody attacks, the draft "Mobilization Against Terrorism Act" (MATA) rewrites laws dealing with wiretapping, eavesdropping and immigration. The draft, intended to increase prosecutors' courtroom authority, also unleashes the government's Echelon and Carnivore spy systems. "We will call upon the Congress of the United States to enact these important anti-terrorism measures," Attorney General John Ashcroft said this week. "We need these tools to fight the terrorism threat which exists in the United States, and we must meet that growing threat."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,47006,00.html

Terrorists Leave Paperless Trail
Federal agents retracing the steps of the 19 hijackers suspected in last week's attacks are finding a digital trail that leads from one Internet connection to another. According to various media reports, at least some of them went online to plan the attacks, purchase airplane tickets, and coordinate their moves. Computer forensic experts warn, however, that the path only appears hot in hindsight. It's a leap, they say, to conclude that the attacks might have been prevented had laws been in place to make Internet surveillance easier.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46991,00.html

E911 Wouldn't Help at WTC
Shortly after last week's terrorist attacks in New York, a man trapped where a courtyard previously existed between the twin World Trade Center towers was rescued after he called for help on his mobile phone. To locate more victims in the WTC, Lucent Technologies and Verizon Wireless used directional antennas to pinpoint the location of cell phones in the crumbled buildings. This activity coincides with a federal mandate that carriers begin implementing technology that allows emergency dispatchers to locate cell phone callers by Oct. 1. However, nine major cell phone carriers, including Verizon, have filed petitions with the Federal Communications Commission to waive that deadline on the premise that the technology doesn't exist.
http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,46850,00.html

State of Bio Defense: Not Good
Terrorists likely have considered biological weapons and may be working on ways to deploy them, biological warfare experts say. Certainly after the Sept. 11 attacks, anything seems possible. But the experts also say it will take a level of scientific know-how to execute a biological attack that terrorists most likely don't have. "The expertise of the terrorists is more along the lines of a traditional attack using high explosives, but that doesn't mean they're not trying," said Jim Lewis, the director of the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,46924,00.html

Submarines: Not Just for the Navy
There's a growing number of would-be Captain Nemos visiting the octopus' garden in their own yellow submarines. Building your own personal sub is a new hobby that is taking off like a torpedo. A rarity a few years ago, there are now scores of people designing, building and diving their own submarines. It's definitely growing in popularity," said Ray Keefer, who runs the PSubs (Personal Submersibles), website. "When we started (five years ago) there were four members. Now we have around 160." These days, small submarines are relatively easy and cheap to build; although at around $15,000 a pop they're not everyone's idea of a stocking stuffer.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46612,00.html

Dow Jones Appeals Net Ruling
Dow Jones has appealed a court ruling giving an Australian mining magnate the right to sue for defamation over an article published in the United States and posted on the Internet. The landmark ruling could have wide-ranging implications for publishers and Internet sites that post articles in the 190 nations that allow defamation cases, media analysts said. Dow Jones & Co. of New York -- publisher of The Wall Street Journal, Barron's and other financial publications -- filed an appeal Tuesday. Last month, the Supreme Court in the southwestern Australian state of Victoria ruled that businessman Joe Gutnick could sue Dow Jones under Australia's tough defamation laws.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,46986,00.html

NIPC warns of possible DDoS attacks
The National Infrastructure Protection Center, the FBI's cybersecurity agency, issued an advisory Tuesday warning against the possibility of increased distributed denial-of-service attacks coming as a result of the last week's terrorist attacks against targets in New York and near Washington, D.C. Denial-of-service attacks are attacks in which target computers are flooded with so many requests for information that they are overloaded and are unable to respond to legitimate requests for service. A distributed denial-of-service attack is one in which multiple computers worldwide are taken over and used to floor target systems from multiple locations. Such an attack knocked major Web sites such as Yahoo.com and Amazon.com offline for as long as a week in February 2000.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/interne...idg/index.html

Spectrum off-limits after attack
Wireless-industry analysts say last week's terrorist attacks will make it hard for wireless companies to gain the right to use a larger portion of potential airwaves, and that could spark a wave of consolidation. Wireless companies such as Verizon Wireless , Sprint PCS, Cingular Wireless, AT&T Wireless and Nextel Communications have long sought to gain licenses from the Federal Communications Commission for more wireless spectrum that would allow them to support so-called 3G, or third-generation, wireless services. But the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center has made that scenario very unlikely, since the additional spectrum would most likely come from the U.S. military.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-7228872.html

Attacks delay .info launch
Internet addresses under the new .info domain will appear online later than planned as a result of last week’s terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The 52,245 registered domain names ending in .info were scheduled to begin showing up as live sites Wednesday but will now appear Saturday, according to Afilias, the registry operating that top-level domain.Afilias, a consortium of 18 domain-name registrars, said some of its registrars were located in the World Trade Center and in New York’s financial district. Last week’s events also caused disruptions in the financial system, making it difficult for the company to transfer funds, according to LaPlante.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/631256.asp?0si=-&cp1=1

Magic Bullets Fly Again
The unbridled optimism that surrounded monoclonal antibodies in the 1980s was infectious. You had to be the world's toughest cynic not to be dazzled. Got cancer? No problem. Like heat-seeking missiles, monoclonal antibodies tipped with poisons or radioactive isotopes would home in on malignant cells and deliver their deadly payloads, wiping out cancer while leaving normal cells intact. How about an infectious disease? All would be well. Monoclonals would surround marauding viruses and bacteria like goombahs from Tony Soprano's crew, muscling them into secluded byways where killer cells of the immune system would make them an offer they couldn't refuse. If only things had been so simple.
http://www.sciam.com/2001/1001issue/1001ezzell.html

Court: Let Napster Judge Work - And Stop Bugging Us

Appeals court judges have rebuffed Napster's bid to freeze copyright infringement litigation in a lower court while it disputes a pre-trial injunction that was supposed to have clamped down on music swapping. A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to continue its temporary stay of a District Court order issued July 11 that demanded "100 percent" compliance with an earlier copyright infringement prohibition. In addition, the panel refused to take a wide-ranging look at those prohibitions themselves, which date back more than a year, but which were most recently defined in a preliminary injunction issued March 5.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170337.html

Civil Liberties Groups Rally Against Anti-Terrorism Law
A broad and politically diverse coalition of public interest groups today urged Congress not to blindly approve a sweeping new anti-terrorism law proposed by the Justice Department in the wake of last Tuesday's terrorist attacks. Members of the coalition are asking lawmakers to pledge that "at a minimum, they will not vote for something that they have not actually read," Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist said today. Americans for Tax Reform - a generally conservative-leaning lobbying group - has joined the American Civil Liberties Union, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and roughly 150 other organizations of every political stripe to form In Defense of Freedom.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170335.html

WinZip Security May Spare Popular Utility From New Worm
The Nimda worm's habit of voraciously infecting executables files on the Windows servers it attacks, yet sparing a popular program known as WinZip, may have a simple explanation, according to anti-virus researchers. Mikko Hypponen, part of a team at Finland-based F-Secure Corp., which dissected the fast-spreading worm this week, told Newsbytes that Nimda's author probably knew better than to allow his creation to tamper with the WinZip program. Hypponen said WinZip - a file-compression and archiving tool - is known to check its own code on start-up to guard against unauthorized modification. Had Nimda's author allowed the worm to infect the WINZIP32.EXE executable file, the program's refusal to run might have been a tell-tale sign of infection, he speculated.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170333.html

'Nimda' - Norwegian For 'Nasty'
Network Associates called it "Minda." Central Command originally called it "ConceptV5." But blame the ungainly name that stuck – "Nimda" - on one of the first virus researchers to capture a copy of the malicious code. Righard Zwienenberg, a senior research engineer with Norway's Norman Data Defense, said the firm received several infected e-mails, including nine in a one-minute period, early Tuesday. Zwienenberg, co-founder of an invitation-only group named the AntiVirus Emergency Discussion Network (AVED), said he immediately prepared to ship off a sample of the new worm via e-mail to AVED's approximately 50 members for their own dissection.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170324.html

Key politicians in harmony over Net music bill

Key Capitol Hill politicos on Wednesday sent a letter urging colleagues to reject legislation that would force recording labels to offer the same price and terms when cutting licensing deals with Internet ventures. The measure in question was introduced this summer by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), who's concerned that the major labels will control the flow of songs on the Internet by giving special permission to those online services they back. But some of Boucher's colleagues on the House Internet Subcommittee say it's far too early in the game to regulate the Internet. Those signing the letter opposing Boucher's bill included Reps. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), John Conyers (D-Mich.), Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.), Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Robert Wexler (D-Fla.).
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/2001...nternet_1.html

Music City: We Can't Stop Child Porn
Responding to complaints that the service has become a haven for child pornographers, operators of Music City, a leading alternative to Napster, said they are unable to stop the trading of illegal photos and videos. "Personally we are very against this type of content in any forum, but we can't control what our users do. We are not censors of the group," said Steve Griffin, chairman of Music City, which has seen its growth rocket since Napster's legal troubles last spring and now claims seven million users. Music City initially gained fame as a source for unfiltered access to MP3 music files. But users of the service's message boards say Music City's versatile file swapping software, Morpheus, has lately become a favorite tool for traders of pornography, including illegal images involving children.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170261.html

How the U.S. will fight
The United States inched closer to retaliating for last week's brutal terrorist attacks Thursday, moving U.S. warships and dozens of fighter planes to the Middle East and "possibly points east," according to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Neither President Bush nor Rumsfeld offered details on the movements, which are part of the campaign the Pentagon has dubbed "Operation Infinite Justice." The dramatic designation falls rhetorically in line with President Bush's call for a "crusade" against terrorism and the states that support it, but how exactly will we implement it? How will the Bush administration fight what it has repeatedly called a "different kind of war?"
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...ons/index.html
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...ons/index.html
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...lan/index.html
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...den/index.html

Lessons on how to fight terror
Britain has been fighting wars against terrorism for most of the years since the end of World War II. The longest war has been in Ireland; but British troops have also fought Jewish and Arab terrorists in Palestine, from 1945-47; Greek terrorists in Greece and Cyprus, Arabs in Aden, Yemen, Oman and Dhofar; Chinese communists in the Malaysian jungles in the 1950s, and so, almost endlessly, on. We've lost some, we've won some. In Ireland -- our most publicized grapple with terror -- I think we've fought a draw, despite being incomparably richer, more numerous and better armed than our opponents. Here are some of the lessons we have learned.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...ror/index.html

A song for Africa -- and the terror victims
AIDS in Africa is not a cause known to be of much concern to the Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync, the artist formerly known as Puff Daddy, Ja Rule or Li'l Kim. And yet, just a few long weeks ago, when the burning question of the music business was how few clothes Britney Spears would wear at the MTV Video Music Awards, those artists and a dozen others quietly drifted away from the pre- and post-show festivities to a nearby recording studio. There, they recorded a new version of Marvin Gaye's 1971 classic "What's Going On." The idea was to release the song around World AIDS Day (Dec. 1) and have everyone in America singing it in the weeks before Christmas. Instead, the single is being rushed out now, with the proceeds going equally to buy medicine for Africans and to help the victims of terrorism in America.
http://www.salon.com/ent/music/featu...ono/index.html

How not to understand the enemy
Since television in the United States often doubles as public education, many Americans have been glued to their TV sets in search of answers to the myriad of questions posed by last week's terrorist attacks. On Wednesday night, the Discovery Channel, trumpeting a prime-time special with full-page newspaper ads nationwide, pledged to furnish some much-needed explanations. "Behind the Terror: Understanding the Enemy," a two-hour commercial-free joint production with the BBC hosted by Forrest Sawyer, promised to "provide an in-depth profile of terrorism and the people behind it." But the show did not deliver.
http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/review/2...ery/index.html

More news later on

20-09-01, 04:05 PM	#2
walktalker The local newspaper man Join Date: Aug 2000 Location: Montreal Posts: 2,036	Bush Submits His Laws for War President Bush sent his anti-terrorism bill to Congress late Wednesday, launching an emotional debate that will force U.S. politicians to choose between continued freedom for Americans or greater security. Created in response to last week's bloody attacks, the draft "Mobilization Against Terrorism Act" (MATA) rewrites laws dealing with wiretapping, eavesdropping and immigration. The draft, intended to increase prosecutors' courtroom authority, also unleashes the government's Echelon and Carnivore spy systems. "We will call upon the Congress of the United States to enact these important anti-terrorism measures," Attorney General John Ashcroft said this week. "We need these tools to fight the terrorism threat which exists in the United States, and we must meet that growing threat." http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,47006,00.html Terrorists Leave Paperless Trail Federal agents retracing the steps of the 19 hijackers suspected in last week's attacks are finding a digital trail that leads from one Internet connection to another. According to various media reports, at least some of them went online to plan the attacks, purchase airplane tickets, and coordinate their moves. Computer forensic experts warn, however, that the path only appears hot in hindsight. It's a leap, they say, to conclude that the attacks might have been prevented had laws been in place to make Internet surveillance easier. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46991,00.html E911 Wouldn't Help at WTC Shortly after last week's terrorist attacks in New York, a man trapped where a courtyard previously existed between the twin World Trade Center towers was rescued after he called for help on his mobile phone. To locate more victims in the WTC, Lucent Technologies and Verizon Wireless used directional antennas to pinpoint the location of cell phones in the crumbled buildings. This activity coincides with a federal mandate that carriers begin implementing technology that allows emergency dispatchers to locate cell phone callers by Oct. 1. However, nine major cell phone carriers, including Verizon, have filed petitions with the Federal Communications Commission to waive that deadline on the premise that the technology doesn't exist. http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,46850,00.html State of Bio Defense: Not Good Terrorists likely have considered biological weapons and may be working on ways to deploy them, biological warfare experts say. Certainly after the Sept. 11 attacks, anything seems possible. But the experts also say it will take a level of scientific know-how to execute a biological attack that terrorists most likely don't have. "The expertise of the terrorists is more along the lines of a traditional attack using high explosives, but that doesn't mean they're not trying," said Jim Lewis, the director of the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,46924,00.html Submarines: Not Just for the Navy There's a growing number of would-be Captain Nemos visiting the octopus' garden in their own yellow submarines. Building your own personal sub is a new hobby that is taking off like a torpedo. A rarity a few years ago, there are now scores of people designing, building and diving their own submarines. It's definitely growing in popularity," said Ray Keefer, who runs the PSubs (Personal Submersibles), website. "When we started (five years ago) there were four members. Now we have around 160." These days, small submarines are relatively easy and cheap to build; although at around $15,000 a pop they're not everyone's idea of a stocking stuffer. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46612,00.html Dow Jones Appeals Net Ruling Dow Jones has appealed a court ruling giving an Australian mining magnate the right to sue for defamation over an article published in the United States and posted on the Internet. The landmark ruling could have wide-ranging implications for publishers and Internet sites that post articles in the 190 nations that allow defamation cases, media analysts said. Dow Jones & Co. of New York -- publisher of The Wall Street Journal, Barron's and other financial publications -- filed an appeal Tuesday. Last month, the Supreme Court in the southwestern Australian state of Victoria ruled that businessman Joe Gutnick could sue Dow Jones under Australia's tough defamation laws. http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,46986,00.html NIPC warns of possible DDoS attacks The National Infrastructure Protection Center, the FBI's cybersecurity agency, issued an advisory Tuesday warning against the possibility of increased distributed denial-of-service attacks coming as a result of the last week's terrorist attacks against targets in New York and near Washington, D.C. Denial-of-service attacks are attacks in which target computers are flooded with so many requests for information that they are overloaded and are unable to respond to legitimate requests for service. A distributed denial-of-service attack is one in which multiple computers worldwide are taken over and used to floor target systems from multiple locations. Such an attack knocked major Web sites such as Yahoo.com and Amazon.com offline for as long as a week in February 2000. http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/interne...idg/index.html Spectrum off-limits after attack Wireless-industry analysts say last week's terrorist attacks will make it hard for wireless companies to gain the right to use a larger portion of potential airwaves, and that could spark a wave of consolidation. Wireless companies such as Verizon Wireless , Sprint PCS, Cingular Wireless, AT&T Wireless and Nextel Communications have long sought to gain licenses from the Federal Communications Commission for more wireless spectrum that would allow them to support so-called 3G, or third-generation, wireless services. But the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center has made that scenario very unlikely, since the additional spectrum would most likely come from the U.S. military. http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-7228872.html Attacks delay .info launch Internet addresses under the new .info domain will appear online later than planned as a result of last week’s terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The 52,245 registered domain names ending in .info were scheduled to begin showing up as live sites Wednesday but will now appear Saturday, according to Afilias, the registry operating that top-level domain.Afilias, a consortium of 18 domain-name registrars, said some of its registrars were located in the World Trade Center and in New York’s financial district. Last week’s events also caused disruptions in the financial system, making it difficult for the company to transfer funds, according to LaPlante. http://www.msnbc.com/news/631256.asp?0si=-&cp1=1 Magic Bullets Fly Again The unbridled optimism that surrounded monoclonal antibodies in the 1980s was infectious. You had to be the world's toughest cynic not to be dazzled. Got cancer? No problem. Like heat-seeking missiles, monoclonal antibodies tipped with poisons or radioactive isotopes would home in on malignant cells and deliver their deadly payloads, wiping out cancer while leaving normal cells intact. How about an infectious disease? All would be well. Monoclonals would surround marauding viruses and bacteria like goombahs from Tony Soprano's crew, muscling them into secluded byways where killer cells of the immune system would make them an offer they couldn't refuse. If only things had been so simple. http://www.sciam.com/2001/1001issue/1001ezzell.html Court: Let Napster Judge Work - And Stop Bugging Us Appeals court judges have rebuffed Napster's bid to freeze copyright infringement litigation in a lower court while it disputes a pre-trial injunction that was supposed to have clamped down on music swapping. A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to continue its temporary stay of a District Court order issued July 11 that demanded "100 percent" compliance with an earlier copyright infringement prohibition. In addition, the panel refused to take a wide-ranging look at those prohibitions themselves, which date back more than a year, but which were most recently defined in a preliminary injunction issued March 5. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170337.html Civil Liberties Groups Rally Against Anti-Terrorism Law A broad and politically diverse coalition of public interest groups today urged Congress not to blindly approve a sweeping new anti-terrorism law proposed by the Justice Department in the wake of last Tuesday's terrorist attacks. Members of the coalition are asking lawmakers to pledge that "at a minimum, they will not vote for something that they have not actually read," Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist said today. Americans for Tax Reform - a generally conservative-leaning lobbying group - has joined the American Civil Liberties Union, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and roughly 150 other organizations of every political stripe to form In Defense of Freedom. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170335.html WinZip Security May Spare Popular Utility From New Worm The Nimda worm's habit of voraciously infecting executables files on the Windows servers it attacks, yet sparing a popular program known as WinZip, may have a simple explanation, according to anti-virus researchers. Mikko Hypponen, part of a team at Finland-based F-Secure Corp., which dissected the fast-spreading worm this week, told Newsbytes that Nimda's author probably knew better than to allow his creation to tamper with the WinZip program. Hypponen said WinZip - a file-compression and archiving tool - is known to check its own code on start-up to guard against unauthorized modification. Had Nimda's author allowed the worm to infect the WINZIP32.EXE executable file, the program's refusal to run might have been a tell-tale sign of infection, he speculated. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170333.html 'Nimda' - Norwegian For 'Nasty' Network Associates called it "Minda." Central Command originally called it "ConceptV5." But blame the ungainly name that stuck – "Nimda" - on one of the first virus researchers to capture a copy of the malicious code. Righard Zwienenberg, a senior research engineer with Norway's Norman Data Defense, said the firm received several infected e-mails, including nine in a one-minute period, early Tuesday. Zwienenberg, co-founder of an invitation-only group named the AntiVirus Emergency Discussion Network (AVED), said he immediately prepared to ship off a sample of the new worm via e-mail to AVED's approximately 50 members for their own dissection. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170324.html Key politicians in harmony over Net music bill Key Capitol Hill politicos on Wednesday sent a letter urging colleagues to reject legislation that would force recording labels to offer the same price and terms when cutting licensing deals with Internet ventures. The measure in question was introduced this summer by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), who's concerned that the major labels will control the flow of songs on the Internet by giving special permission to those online services they back. But some of Boucher's colleagues on the House Internet Subcommittee say it's far too early in the game to regulate the Internet. Those signing the letter opposing Boucher's bill included Reps. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), John Conyers (D-Mich.), Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.), Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Robert Wexler (D-Fla.). http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/2001...nternet_1.html Music City: We Can't Stop Child Porn Responding to complaints that the service has become a haven for child pornographers, operators of Music City, a leading alternative to Napster, said they are unable to stop the trading of illegal photos and videos. "Personally we are very against this type of content in any forum, but we can't control what our users do. We are not censors of the group," said Steve Griffin, chairman of Music City, which has seen its growth rocket since Napster's legal troubles last spring and now claims seven million users. Music City initially gained fame as a source for unfiltered access to MP3 music files. But users of the service's message boards say Music City's versatile file swapping software, Morpheus, has lately become a favorite tool for traders of pornography, including illegal images involving children. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170261.html How the U.S. will fight The United States inched closer to retaliating for last week's brutal terrorist attacks Thursday, moving U.S. warships and dozens of fighter planes to the Middle East and "possibly points east," according to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Neither President Bush nor Rumsfeld offered details on the movements, which are part of the campaign the Pentagon has dubbed "Operation Infinite Justice." The dramatic designation falls rhetorically in line with President Bush's call for a "crusade" against terrorism and the states that support it, but how exactly will we implement it? How will the Bush administration fight what it has repeatedly called a "different kind of war?" http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...ons/index.html http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...ons/index.html http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...lan/index.html http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...den/index.html Lessons on how to fight terror Britain has been fighting wars against terrorism for most of the years since the end of World War II. The longest war has been in Ireland; but British troops have also fought Jewish and Arab terrorists in Palestine, from 1945-47; Greek terrorists in Greece and Cyprus, Arabs in Aden, Yemen, Oman and Dhofar; Chinese communists in the Malaysian jungles in the 1950s, and so, almost endlessly, on. We've lost some, we've won some. In Ireland -- our most publicized grapple with terror -- I think we've fought a draw, despite being incomparably richer, more numerous and better armed than our opponents. Here are some of the lessons we have learned. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...ror/index.html A song for Africa -- and the terror victims AIDS in Africa is not a cause known to be of much concern to the Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync, the artist formerly known as Puff Daddy, Ja Rule or Li'l Kim. And yet, just a few long weeks ago, when the burning question of the music business was how few clothes Britney Spears would wear at the MTV Video Music Awards, those artists and a dozen others quietly drifted away from the pre- and post-show festivities to a nearby recording studio. There, they recorded a new version of Marvin Gaye's 1971 classic "What's Going On." The idea was to release the song around World AIDS Day (Dec. 1) and have everyone in America singing it in the weeks before Christmas. Instead, the single is being rushed out now, with the proceeds going equally to buy medicine for Africans and to help the victims of terrorism in America. http://www.salon.com/ent/music/featu...ono/index.html How not to understand the enemy Since television in the United States often doubles as public education, many Americans have been glued to their TV sets in search of answers to the myriad of questions posed by last week's terrorist attacks. On Wednesday night, the Discovery Channel, trumpeting a prime-time special with full-page newspaper ads nationwide, pledged to furnish some much-needed explanations. "Behind the Terror: Understanding the Enemy," a two-hour commercial-free joint production with the BBC hosted by Forrest Sawyer, promised to "provide an in-depth profile of terrorism and the people behind it." But the show did not deliver. http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/review/2...ery/index.html More news later on __________________ This post was sponsored by Netcoco, who wants cookies, cookies, cookies and, you guessed it, more cookies