Revealed: the bloody pages of Al-Qaeda’s killing manual — “A unique manual for Islamic terrorists, detailing every aspect of how to fight a guerrilla war, from biochemical attacks to finding the fatal pressure point during hand-to-hand combat, has been obtained by western intelligence agencies.

…

Filling 11 volumes and circulated both in book form and on CD-Rom to terrorist instructors, it offers guidance on how to inject frozen food with biochemical agents to create mass panic, rig up a door lock to explode when the handle is turned, and bring down a plane with a missile.” Sunday Times of London

Labour uses twin towers ad to boost tourism: ‘Two Labour ministers in the Scottish executive have been called “ludicrously insensitive” by relatives of British victims of the World Trade Center attack after launching a tourism promotion campaign with pictures of the atrocity beside the word “opportunities” .’ Sunday Times of London

The Victim may hold vital anthrax clue: ‘The death from inhalation anthrax of a Vietnamese hospital worker in New York last week has given American investigators what they believe may be the first important clue to catching the bioterrorists responsible, writes Sarah Baxter.

Because Kathy Nguyen, 61, the fourth American to die in a month of the disease, is believed to have received no letter containing anthrax, nor had any contact with other targets, the FBI is trying to establish whether she may have come into direct contact with the killers.’ Sunday Times of London

“The Central

Intelligence Agency’s clandestine New

York station was destroyed in the Sept. 11 attack

on the World Trade Center, seriously disrupting

United States intelligence operations while

bringing the war on terrorism dangerously close

to home for America’s spy agency, government

officials say.

…Immediately after the attack, the C.I.A. dispatched a special team to scour the rubble in search of secret

documents and intelligence reports that had been stored in the New York station, either on paper or in

computers, officials said. It could not be learned whether the agency was successful in retrieving its

classified records from the wreckage.

…The C.I.A.’s plans for finding a new permanent station in New York could not be

determined.” NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

And an editorial: ‘As much as the nation may yearn

for a crack intelligence service that can save the day, there is no such outfit

in Washington at present.

But there could be someday, if the White House and Congress are

prepared to address some longstanding structural and operational

problems that have hobbled the C.I.A. and its fellow intelligence services.’

An Intelligence Giant in the Making

Overshadowed by the public focus on new Internet surveillance and “roving wiretaps” were numerous obscure features in the bill that will enable the Bush administration to make fundamental changes at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency and several Treasury Department law enforcement agencies.

Known as the U.S.A. Patriot Act, the law empowers the government to shift the primary mission of the FBI from solving crimes to gathering domestic intelligence. In addition, the Treasury Department has been charged with building a financial intelligence-gathering system whose data can be accessed by the CIA.

Most significantly, the CIA will have the authority for the first time to influence FBI surveillance operations inside the United States and to obtain evidence gathered by federal grand juries and criminal wiretaps. Washington Post

The central role of the parietal lobes in consciousness

There are now various approaches to understand where and how in the brain consciousness arises from neural activity, none of which is universally accepted. Difficulties among these approaches are reviewed, and a missing ingredient is proposed here to help adjudicate between them, that of “perspectivalness.” In addition to a suitable temporal duration and information content of the relevant bound brain activity, this extra component is posited as being a further important ingredient for the creation of consciousness from neural activity. It guides the development of what is termed the “Central Representation,” which is supposed to be present in all mammals and extended in humans to support self-consciousness as well as phenomenal consciousness. Experimental evidence and a theoretical framework for the existence of the central representation are presented, which relates the extra component to specific buffer working memory sites in the inferior parietal lobes, acting as attentional coordinators on the spatial maps making up the central representation. Consciousness and Cognition

A Deliberate Strategy of Disruption, “… a campaign of detentions on a scale not seen since World War II. As investigators race to comprehend the ongoing terrorist threat, the government has adopted a deliberate strategy of disruption — locking up large numbers of Middle Eastern men, using whatever legal tools they can.

The operation is being conducted under great secrecy, with defense attorneys at times forbidden to remove documents from court and a federal gag order preventing officials from discussing the detainees. Law enforcement officials have refused to identify lawyers representing people who have been detained or to describe the most basic features of the operation.”

A Washington Post analysis of the 235 cases they have been able to identify shows it “appears to be less an investigative search for accomplices to the Sept. 11 attacks than a large-scale preventive operation aimed at disrupting future terrorism.

That is evident, in part, from the fact that none of the detainees has been charged in the plot or with other acts of terrorism. In addition, the pace of detentions has accelerated visibly as government officials have received information about new threats and issued public warnings — spiking sharply, for example, after rumors of planned attacks Sept. 22.”

Roni Horn: A Builder of Paradoxes That Turn Viewers Inward

Coming Soon: Harry Potter and Hollywood’s Cash Cow: ‘On the one hand, the company wants to draw as much profit as

possible from J. K. Rowling’s mega-best-selling stories and lay

down a franchise for future movies and products that will feed

corporate coffers for a decade. But on the other, it worries about

tainting the golden glow that surrounds the floppy-haired little

wizard with too much hype and commercialism, alienating his

fanatical fans.’ I’ve previously written about the controversy about Warner Bros.’ giving Coke sponsorship rights, mentioned here. NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Who reports to the Office of Homeland Security? One truly mind-boggling organizational chart related to this article. NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

G.O.P. Not Relying on Aid From Bush in ’02 Elections. ‘Despite President Bush’s

colossal job approval ratings, many Republicans who are

running in the midterm elections next year say they do not expect

him, even if he remains enormously popular, to help their own

campaigns.

If anything, some Republican lawmakers and strategists fear that

the war and Mr. Bush’s desire to appear bipartisan could prevent

him from doing much to benefit them next year. And they are

worried that the sagging economy — underscored by the surge

in unemployment announced this week — could eclipse the war

as a political issue and that voters could blame the Republicans.’ NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Oh, what a ‘wobbly’ war — “On Sunday 28 October, the UK Observer’s front-page

headline announced ‘Blair rallies Britain as war nerves fray’.

On Monday 29 October, The Times (London) led with ‘Don’t

wobble, warns Blair’. On Tuesday 30 October, the Sun

splashed with ‘Cobblers to the wobblers: Blair’s rallying cry

to halt war doubts’. ” spiked

United States: all-powerful but powerless: ‘…Bush and his retainers want to fight nations; they don’t understand

21st century threats. The US has now demanded that all nations decide if

they are “with us or against us”. And Bush is getting the funding and

authority from Congress to spend ever more on military and spy

superstructure; US civil liberties will be curtailed; Bush will change our

lives to pursue an enemy he can’t find. Bin Laden should be pursued, as

should his collaborators and protectors. But the real target of our energy

should be to change the underlying conditions; to get smart, be modern.

The cold war is over.

The costs of not realising that will rise until the US comes to terms with

the new reality.’ Le Monde Diplomatique Essentially, the argument is that the US is stuck in an outmoded empire-maintenance mode. In contrast, Oxford historian Neil Ferguson argues in the Guardian that “the US must make the transition from informal to formal empire… Indeed the best way to understand this is not as Islam or fascism, but as Islamo-Bolshevism. What it represents is a challenge to a particular kind of power, namely the informal imperialism that the US has preferred to rely on since 1945… There is no excuse for the relative weakness of the US as a quasi-imperial power. The transition to formal empire from informal empire is an affordable one. But it does not come very naturally to the US – partly because of its history and partly because of Vietnam – to act as a self-confident imperial power. The US has the resources: but does it have the guts to act as a global hegemon and make the world a more stable place?”

“The Central

Intelligence Agency’s clandestine New

York station was destroyed in the Sept. 11 attack

on the World Trade Center, seriously disrupting

United States intelligence operations while

bringing the war on terrorism dangerously close

to home for America’s spy agency, government

officials say.

…Immediately after the attack, the C.I.A. dispatched a special team to scour the rubble in search of secret

documents and intelligence reports that had been stored in the New York station, either on paper or in

computers, officials said. It could not be learned whether the agency was successful in retrieving its

classified records from the wreckage.

…The C.I.A.’s plans for finding a new permanent station in New York could not be

determined.” NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

And an editorial: ‘As much as the nation may yearn

for a crack intelligence service that can save the day, there is no such outfit

in Washington at present.

But there could be someday, if the White House and Congress are

prepared to address some longstanding structural and operational

problems that have hobbled the C.I.A. and its fellow intelligence services.’

Bombing of farming village undermines U.S. credibility. This is not accidental collateral damage from bombs gone astray from nearby targets of strategic significance! The US is bombing remote villages far from anything of strategic significance with low-flying AC-130 Spectre gunships, and firing on villagers as they flee from the bombs. ‘Later, unidentified Pentagon officials told CNN that Chowkar-Karez was “a fully legitimate target” because it was a nest of Taliban and al-Qaeda sympathizers. “The people there are dead because we wanted them dead,” an official said.’ Toronto Globe and Mail And the civilian fatalities are being documented by respected NGOs like Human Rights Watch, not just reported by the Taliban.

Reaping the whirlwind: ‘Around the country, the far right reacts to September?s terror with anti-Semitic hatred, threats and conspiracy theories

.’ Southern Poverty Law Center And James Ridgeway in the Village Voice gives us some choice excerpts from the far right’s online reactions; for example, regret that they did not carry out the attack on “Jew York” themselves. ‘ “Please be advised that the time for Aryans to attack is now, not later.’ “

Here’s more, from the Ridgeway article, on the possible intersection in the paths of the WTC bombers and the Oklahoma City bombers about which I wrote yesterday:

Last week, U.S. News & World Report revealed that officials at the Defense Department were speculating that the late Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran, acted as an Iraqi agent when he bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. That might seem a far-fetched idea, but federal agents initially put out a global dragnet, thinking the terrorists might have been Middle Eastern. Later, in preparation for McVeigh’s trial, defense attorney Stephen Jones traveled around the world, stopping off in London, Tel Aviv, Belfast, and Manila.

In the Philippines, Jones found people who told him Terry Nichols had met there with Middle Eastern terrorists, including Ramzi Yousef (the kingpin of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) and, possibly, Osama bin Laden himself. Al Qaeda was using the Philippines partly as an auxiliary base and partly as a pool of new recruits. McVeigh ridiculed the idea of Nichols’s involvement in the Philippines, but Jones reports that his client later admitted it was possible.

What makes these theories even more bizarre is that the leaders seem to have crossed paths and exchanged notes. At one moment, they all came together in one wing of a federal prison in Colorado. There, McVeigh, Yousef, and the Unabomber met and became buds.

Differences emerge between US and Britain over war. The British are becoming more and more cool to the bombing campaign given the tide of negative world opinion, the civilian casualties and the inflated American claims of success. “A command control unit claimed to have been destroyed by the Americans has meant usually a phone inside a hut that does not work.” Asia Times (Hong Kong)

Declan McCullagh:
Terror Law Foes Mull Strategies Because parts of the spy law are so invasive that they arguably violate Americans’ privacy rights, opponents of the so-called USA Patriot Act have begun to weigh how to mount a legal challenge. Wired

Military Bars Green Party Leader from Flying: ‘As one of the U.S. Green Party’s top officials, Nancy Oden is used to controversy. But Oden never expected to be hassled by National Guard troops at her hometown airport of Bangor, Maine on Thursday and barred from flying out of it. She thinks it’s because of a Green Party statement she co-authored that ran in a the local newspaper. The statement calls for universal health care, limitations on free trade, and a stop to “U.S. military incursions” including the bombing of Afghanistan.’ wartimeliberty.com

Steven Weinberg:
The Future of Science, and the Universe. The grand unified theory is coming, and then we’ll be able to predict how the universe will end. New York Review of Books

An Enforceable Ban on Bioterror: “The attacks of Sept. 11 and the spread of anthrax have forced the Bush administration to reconsider its ill-advised antipathy to strengthening the 1972 treaty that bans the development, production and possession of biological weapons. This week President Bush proposed ways to assure international compliance with the accord. Unfortunately, the suggestions still leave the United States opposed to a critical enforcement mechanism.” NY Times editorial

Da Vinci bridge finally built after 500 years. New Scientist To paraphrase something one commentator somewhere (perhaps MetaFilter?) said, it makes modern bridge architecture look old.

Europe may ban internet cookies: ‘European Parliament members think the software tags may invade privacy, but others warn web surfing would be much slower.’ New Scientist IMHO, if you’re concerned about the ways the ‘net invades your privacy, cookies are largely a red herring issue.

Go West — ‘Amid appreciative coos and respectful nods, (Cornel) West, who teaches African-American studies and philosophy of religion at Harvard, is holding forth on hip-hop culture; when he isn’t speaking, he’s playing tracks of an album he recently put out with his brother Clifton West, songwriter Michael Dailey (a childhood friend), and producer Derek “DOA” Allen, who has worked with R&B singers Tyrese and Bobby Brown, among others. The album, called Sketches of My Culture, has 10 songs that mix hip-hop beats with touches of jazz, soul, and blues, and tell stories about the cultural legacy of black music.’ Boston Phoenix

Experts on Islam pointing fingers at one another. Did political biases and wishful thinking among scholars cause them to miss the most significant new developments in Middle Eastern politics and society over several decades, and in particular fail to recognize the predictable threat to the West from extremist terrorists?

And in some pseudo-punditry, Nobel literature laureate V.S. Naipaul’s contentious comments on Islam:

Ramadan Won’t Slow U.S. Offensive, Bush Declares. And Turkey, the only Islamic NATO member, will send forces to join the assault on Afghanistan and supports fighting through Ramadan. However, Attacks During Ramadan May Be Costly: “But as civilian casualties in Afghanistan grow, the U.S. is on the verge of losing whatever fragile goodwill exists across the Muslim world. The final transformation–from victim to aggressor–could come in mid-November if American forces continue the attacks into the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.” LA Times

Firefighters, NYPD Clash; 12 Arrested: “crime scene’, ‘disaster area’, ‘burial ground’, or ‘a steaming slag heap’? The facade of solidarity among the heroes collapses in dispute over ‘a new plan announced by city officials that would reduce the number of police, fire and emergency crew “spotters”–those who pinpoint possible human remains in the wreckage–at the World Trade Center site. Whenever they identify such remains, which continue to be taken out of the ruins, construction crews halt their work and special rescue teams remove the remains. Debris that does not contain remains is carted away.’ LA Times

Va. Supreme Court Overturns Law Against Cross-Burnings. They’re legal forms of first-amendment speech again, according to this court opinion which, parenthetically, also gives the nod to flag-burning. The dissenting opinion (by the court’s sole African American justice), of course, hinges on the concept that words — if threatening as opposed to merely offensive — should be treated not as speech but behavior. Where we as a society stand on this idea has broad import, starting with the cases, some still in litigation, of ‘free speech’ inciting zealots to murder health care personnel who perform abortions. Are we on a slippery slope to arbitrary infringement of civil liberties if we allow any words to be interpreted as deeds, or can a standard be defined?

‘Three Strikes’ Sentence Overturned by a San Francisco federal appeals court, the first time such a penalty has been successfully challenged on constitutional (the ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ clause) grounds in a case of a fifty-year mandatory minimum sentence for a heroin addict who had financed his habit with shoplifting and nonviolent burglaries. Washington Post

Why colds are sweeping your office

: “Offices whose workers are ravaged by a series of autumn coughs and sneezes may be hotbeds of chronic stress, warn scientists.

Any increase in the number of blocked noses and colds could well be due to the increased pressures of modern life, they say.

One expert even believes that the events of 11 September may lead to more colds and flu this year as the threat of terrorist attack adds to the general burden of winter worries.”

I’m actually more concerned about the converse message, that we need healthy immune systems to cope with the current crisis. While the field of neuropsychoimmunology attempts to articulate the little-understood links between the immune system and cognitive-emotional functioning, this new meme is popping up in all sorts of less sophisticated ways, e.g. television advertisements for vitamin supplements. (“Now, more than ever…”) One more group of profiteers blatantly exploiting fears of bioterrorism, little more.

OSHA halts mask use in Postal Service: “On the advice of health officials at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, the Postal Service bought 4.8 million of the spore-proof masks for its workers who handle mail and began offering workers the masks last week.

But according to OSHA officials and regulations, the workers must undergo hours of training and pass a “fit test” before they can be allowed to use the protective masks, which are like those worn by construction workers who install drywall and can be purchased at hardware stores.” Washington Times

The rumor busters — a portrait of Snopes.com‘s resident debunkers Barbara and David Mikkelson. Salon

Defense Sec. Rumsfeld wants the American people to be patient. He chooses to underscore it, however, through a strained and specious comparison with a very different war in a very different era:

“Consider some historical perspective:

• After the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, it took four months before the United States responded to that attack with the Doolittle raid of April 1942.
• It took eight months after Pearl Harbor before the U.S. began a land campaign against the Japanese — with the invasion of Guadalcanal in August of 1942.
• The U.S. bombed Japan for three-and-a-half years — until August 1945 — before we accomplished our objectives in the Pacific.
• On the European front, the allies bombed Germany continually for nearly five years — from September of 1940 until May of 1945.
• It took 11 months to start the land campaign against the Germans — with the invasion of North Africa in November of 1942.
• It took the United States two years and six months after Hitler declared war on us before we landed in France on June 6, 1944.”

DoD News

William Saletan thinks the press is to blame for putting the impatient spin on things. Journalists’ reports of skepticism and frustration are a “self-escalating cycle” of “vicarious doubt.” For example:

• The fallacy of subjectivity — seeing the Taliban mind only from the outside but the American mind from the inside, the press can highlight the doubts and reassessments only of the latter. Our enemy always seems more resolute.
  

• The war’s progress “falling short of expectations” is often seen as an indicator it is not viable to continue, but Saletan argues “the public’s lowered expectations make the war on terror more sustainable, not less.”
  

• The side with the coalition of necessity has the more ‘fragile coalition’ than the side without one.
  

• A stalemate is inevitably interpreted as a victory for the defense (them) rather than the offense (us).
  

• Because journalists demand news, “If the United States fails to provide news in the form of measurable success, journalists will make that failure itself the news.”

Slate

Analysis: Why use cluster bombs? by BBC defense correspondent Jonathan Marcus. In a word, for their imprecision, the terror and collateral damage they sow.

Case Settled: Justice to Break Up Apple for Making Microsoft a Monopoly. “Do you punish the monster, or Dr. Frankenstein? We chose the doctor,” said Connecticut Atty. Gen. Richard Blumenthal. SatireWire

As you know, I’ve been on the lookout for indications of the response of the far right to the Sept. 11th attacks and their aftermath. Here’s the come-on to a piece Joe Conason writes in Salon premium, to which I don’t subscribe, The real “fifth column”:

‘The true domestic threat is posed …by an unknown number of organizations and individuals on the farthest fringes of the right, with ideologies that echo Nazism and rap sheets that include every crime from bank robberies to bombings. Having repeatedly declared their determination to overthrow the United States Government and exterminate the “racially impure,” these outfits hailed the September 11 attacks as the opening salvo in a conflagration they hope will engulf us.’

David Farber, from whose mailing list I was pointed to this, comments on speculation of other links between the American paramilitary movement and Islamic extremists, for example that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols learned bomb-making from Ramsey Yousef. Supposedly, McVeigh’s attorney explored a line of defense for his client arising from reports by one of the leaders of the Philippines’ Abu Sayyef Islamic guerrilla movement (subsequently killed, apparently by his own people) that he was at a meeting with Nichols that also involved Yousef, discussing bomb-making. Here’s a Google search on ‘ “Timothy McVeigh” and Yousef ‘. [When I used the Americanized misspelling of his name, “Ramsey Yousef”, this search only came up with four hits. Thanks to Dan for pointing out the error of my ways.] This discussion thread on the “conservative news forum” freerepublic.com has some interesting speculation for right-wing conspiracy buffs.

US elite troops helicopter crashes: “A team of US special forces had to be rescued

after their helicopter crashed in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon said it was one of two

helicopters on a special operation inside

Afghanistan, and was forced down by bad

weather.” BBC [and winter hasn’t even started yet…]

Bush Plans Speeches With Coherent, Unified Message. Believe it or not, this headline was in the Times, not the Onion.

Salman Rushdie:
Yes, This Is About Islam, ‘ Highly motivated organizations of Muslim men (oh, for the voices of Muslim

women to be heard!) have been engaged over the last 30 years or so in

growing radical political movements out of this mulch of “belief.” These

Islamists — we must get used to this word, “Islamists,” meaning those who

are engaged upon such political projects, and learn to distinguish it from

the more general and politically neutral “Muslim” — include the Muslim

Brotherhood in Egypt, the blood-soaked combatants of the Islamic

Salvation Front and Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, the Shiite

revolutionaries of Iran, and the Taliban. Poverty is their great helper, and

the fruit of their efforts is paranoia. This paranoid Islam, which blames

outsiders, “infidels,” for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed

remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is

presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.

This is not wholly to go along with Samuel Huntington’s thesis about the

clash of civilizations, for the simple reason that the Islamists’ project is

turned not only against the West and “the Jews,” but also against their

fellow Islamists. ‘ NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Stories of Ghosts Who Infest the Living: “…(I)t does not take death to make ghosts of some of us. This year’s Cannes International Film Festival showed several tales of earthly spirits bearing earthly sorrows — lost souls leading the half-lives of those who never learned how to inhabit their own houses or jobs or marriages or even skin.

One such film was Joel and Ethan Coen’s Man Who Wasn’t There, which opens Wednesday. It’s the story of Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), a small town barber in California in 1949 who is unable to grab a piece of the American dream.” NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Mystery space blast ‘solved’. The famous June 1908 monster blast — estimated at 10-15 megatons — in Tunguska, Siberia seems to have been an asteroid. Solving such a mystery is a letdown in a way; there were many more exotic and bizarre explanations floating around out there — like a collision with a wandering chunk of antimatter or the detonation of a disabled extraterrestrial spacecraft. The event had a starring role in an X-Files episode one or two seasons ago, if I recall… BBC

Trying BlogBack‘s commenting system. Let me know what you think, if you please…

Fox News goes overboard. Stewart Baker says Fox News misrepresented his statements (below).

The FBI is likely to press providers of those services to centralize communications in nodes where interception will be more convenient, and it is likely to call on packet data services to build systems that provide more information about the communications of their subscribers.

The vehicle for this initiative is CALEA, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, a 1994 enactment that actually requires telecom carriers to redesign their networks to provide better wiretap capabilities.

The act is supposed to exempt information services, but the vagueness of that provision has encouraged the FBI to expand its mandate into packet-data communications. The Bureau is now preparing a general CALEA proposal for all packet-data systems. While I have not seen it, the Bureau’s past interventions into packet-data and other communications architecture have had two characteristics — they have sought more centralization in order to simplify interception and they have asked providers to generate new data messages about their subscribers’ activities — messages that are of value only to law enforcement.

There are real legal and policy questions that should be raised about this effort. In my view, it goes beyond what Congress intended in 1994. And the implications for Internet users and technologies deserve to be debated. But making these points, as I did with Fox News, is not the same as saying that the FBI has a firm plan to centralize the Internet and build back doors into all ISP networks. [thanks to Lynette Millett]

FOIA Request by the Center for National Security Studies for expedited release of extensive information on the ‘individuals “arrested or detained” in the words of Attorney General Ashcroft, in the wake of the September 11 attack…’

Much, if not all, of this information is contained in public records to which there is a constitutional and common law right of access. In addition, please release documents containing this information pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act.

We do not believe that any of the requested information is exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. We do not believe that the requested information – who has been arrested, the names of their lawyers or what charges have been filed — properly could be classified for national security reasons and withheld on that ground. Nevertheless, to the extent that any of this information is marked classified, we request that you delete or redact such information and immediately provide us the remaining information. If you believe the identities of any of the detainees should be withheld on privacy grounds, please immediately provide information concerning whether the individual has requested that his or her name be withheld, and the legal basis for withholding the names of persons detained or arrested. In this connection, we note that there is an overriding public interest in knowing the activities of the government in detaining people in connection with the September 11 attack, as reflected in the statements by the highest government officials and that the identities of some of them have already been made known. [via The Nation, thanks to Jeff]

A Veto Over Presidential Papers — “President Bush signed an executive order last night allowing either the White House or former presidents to veto the release of their presidential papers, drawing criticism from former president Bill Clinton and several historians.” Washington Post

“Pincus presents his research — much of which deals with scientific information about the frontal lobes of the brain — in a nimble, absorbing and highly entertaining way. (His stories will have you checking the lock on your front door several times before you turn out the lights.) Although Pincus does not treat his subjects sympathetically, he also knows that to cast them off as evil, morally debased monsters limits our understanding of the ingredients that somehow get thrown together to create a killer.

“

Interview with neurologist Jonathan Pincus, author of Base Instincts: What Makes Killers Kill.

“Q: According to your book, three things intersect to create a killer: mental illness, neurological damage and child abuse. Are all three always there?

Pincus: Two-thirds of murderers have all three factors, and the others have two of the three. It’s pretty clear that mental illness is not enough to cause violence because most people who are mentally ill are not violent. It’s also evident that neurological damage is not enough to cause violence because the vast majority of people who are neurologically impaired are not violent. And it’s clear that the experience of horrendous child abuse is not enough to cause violence because most people who are abused that way are not violent. Yet, most violent people have these three factors, or two of the three. That’s an indisputable fact.

The theory that explains it is that abuse sets up an impulse toward violence that a good brain can control. If you get the abuse and the neurological damage and mental illness, then violent impulses are not easy to check. That’s why they are expressed under stress or at times of jealousy or anger.” Salon

Britons claim to have found ‘Yeti’. “A group of British explorers claim to have found irrefutable proof of a “Yeti-like” creature on an Indonesian island.

The team has discovered a footprint and hair samples of a primate which has long lived in the mythology of tribes people in Western Sumatra.” Ananova

Sickness in a cold climate: “There is a wealth of research showing that the arrival of cold weather changes the body’s chemistry and physiology sufficiently to bring about a rise in joint pain, heart attacks, stroke, depression and respiratory illnesses, as well as colds and influenza. Winter brings with it a 20 per cent increase in mortality.

So clear is the link that it has now received official acknowledgement in the UK. The Met Office has established a unit to forecast the nation’s health.” Times UK

Carnivore was just child’s play: FBI seeks to wiretap the net. “Stewart Baker, an attorney at the Washington D.C.-based Steptoe & Johnson and a former general consul to National Security Agency, said the FBI has plans to change the architecture of the Internet and route traffic through central servers that it would be able to monitor e-mail more easily.” Fox News

Am I in Pi? Search the digits of pi for a given string. For example, my birthday “41852” appears starting at digit 63283. “041852” occurs starting at digit 1142308. It didn’t find “4181952”; they only have the first 1.2 million digits of pi. If a string exists, it’s a great way to send it as a coded message by stipulating the starting digit and string length. For example, the five digits beginning at location 8269 would tell the waiting terrorists what day to board the planes and activate their suicide hijacking mission (“91101”). Obviously, even easier for shorter strings. With a codebook, three-digit strings could encode a thousand messages; I’m guessing that the first 1.2 million digits of pi include all of the thousand three-digit strings; any number theorists out there reading this who could verify it, so I don’t have to try all thousand searches, or all ten thousand four-digit searches?

Via boing boing, which I just noticed has an enticing new feature. They give a guest blogger some territory in their right-hand sidebar to do a mini-blog for a week at a time. boing (can I presume such familiarity?), which I’ve been reading ever since it was a print magazine, is one of my favorite weblogs but I can only surf to it around 1:10 attempts these days. Anyone else having difficulties? Is it their server or my ISP? [The other place I can’t get to anymore is Yahoo!’s news coverage; the idiotic form email from Yahoo customer support swears there’s nothing wrong at their end. I also can’t reach The Register most times I try.]

“New Continent” Found in Human Brain. This is from the English-language Chinese People’s Daily. I’ve never heard anything about this in following the neuroscience literature, it sounds abit like jingoistic propaganda, and the English is so lame it’s difficult to understand exactly what they claim this is, but I don’t rule it out.

‘A little larger than people’s nail, lying long in slumber and not known to the world in the depth of human brain it is the “new continent” found by Chinese scientist after more than ten years’ studies. Recognized by international authorities the new area in human brain is discovered to have close connection with the function of memory and study.’

A Puzzling Anthrax Death: “The answers

will not be known until medical detectives complete their examinations, but

there are reasons to be optimistic that these cases do not signify any

major change in the small-scale nature of the anthrax attacks that have

terrified the public.” New York Times editorial

Confessions of a Call Girl’s Friend

She wanted children and to be aroused by witty conversation and sweetly hushed affections. She loved reading poetry and watching sappy films; she was deeply emotional. But she couldn’t fit into the world she dreamed of — she was too jaded. She had seen too much of the detached, carnivorous side of men. She knew men who paid for their satisfaction as if it were a piece of steak. She knew men didn’t value what women valued. Men wanted to fuck aggressively and they got off when there was no love at all. She coped with these personal revelations by saying, “You might as well get paid.” After all, she would point out, other women prostituted themselves for love, a stable marriage, some kind of commitment or promise, or for dinner. But what they got was sex, and Toni at least got paid.

I don’t think she knew how jaded she had become, how a decade of prostitution had seeped into her attitude. She was drawn to rich men. Sometimes she tried to date, but invariably would end up treating the guy like a trick. She’d have sex with him immediately, because that’s what he wanted, and then expect him to pay — for dinner, a dress and, once, her dental bill. Once he found out she was a hooker, he’d want her to stop doing tricks, but then she’d have no money and it was up to him to provide. It never lasted very long. Her affection was too expensive. AlterNet