Ariel Sharon yesterday virtually ruled out the creation of a Palestinian state under his hawkish new government just a day after President Bush pledged to broker a peace deal once he has dealt with Iraq.

Hours before his cabinet was sworn in, the prime minister revealed to the knesset that he has backed away from his commitment to the Palestinian state envisioned by Washington’s “road map” for a settlement, as part of the deal to put together his government. Guardian/UK

“These 130-decibel sirens, which, beginning Friday, will scream all day and night in the nation’s 50 largest metro areas, will serve as a helpful reminder to citizens to stay on the lookout for suspicious activity and be ready for emergency action,” [Secretary of Homeland Security Tom] Ridge said. “Please note, though, that this is merely a precautionary measure, so go about your lives as normal.” The Onion

Flatly contradicting his engineers, NASA head Sean O’Keefe said yesterday that he does not accept their premise that nothing could have been done to repair the heat tiles and save the crew of the space shuttle Columbia before it dived into its fiery re-entry from orbit.

Mr. O’Keefe’s comments came as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration released a video showing the last images of the crew, shot as their ship slashed through the upper atmosphere’s super-heated gas, which pulsed like red flashes outside Columbia’s windows.

The footage of the routine flight operations takes on an aura of poignancy because the crew, unlike those who view the tape now, was unaware that within minutes their orbiter would disintegrate more than 60 kilometres above the ground. Toronto Globe and Mail

Related: NASA’s Worst Fears Realized:

Newly disclosed e-mail inside NASA showed senior engineers worried a day before the Columbia disaster that the shuttle’s left wing might burn off and cause the deaths of the crew, a scenario remarkably similar to the one investigators believe actually occurred.

The dozens of pages of e-mail describe a broader, internal debate than previously acknowledged about the seriousness of potential damage to Columbia from a liftoff collision with foam debris from its central fuel tank. Engineers never sent their warnings to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s brass. Wired News

Fifty years to the day from the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of its co-discoverers has caused a storm by suggesting that stupidity is a genetic disease that should be cured.

…Watson says that low intelligence is an inherited disorder and that molecular biologists have a duty to devise gene therapies or screening tests to tackle stupidity.

“If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease,” says Watson, now president of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, New York. “The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what’s the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, ‘Well, poverty, things like that.’ It probably isn’t. So I’d like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent.”

Watson, no stranger to controversy, also suggests that genes influencing beauty could also be engineered. “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.” New Scientist

Some of the most secret and scariest work under way in the Pentagon these days is the planning for a possible military strike against nuclear sites in North Korea….Ironically, the gravity of the situation isn’t yet fully understood in either South Korea or Japan, partly because they do not think this administration would be crazy enough to consider a military strike against North Korea. They’re wrong. — Nicholas Kristof, NY Times

The “raptors clustered around …Cheney and …Rumsfeld and in the National Security Council” have apparently recently found Bush’s ear, just as their relentless and criminal hawking for war on Iraq eventually wore down saner positions within the administration. Bush, it seems, remains a malleable puppet in the hands of his father’s cronies. Now the administration has dropped the bilateral reference and is willing to talk to North Korea only in a multilateral framework that doesn’t exist. The old approach had a snowball’s chance in purgatory; now it’s less than that. One observer noted, “We haven’t exhausted diplomacy. We haven’t begun diplomacy…” Kristof thinks there’s nothing wrong with planning, but in an administration that’s diplomatically handicapped, going to war if diplomacy fails means going to war.

So, Kristof concludes, we’re likely headed for a surgical strike against North Korean nuclear capabilities — even without the consent of the South Koreans — banking on Kim Jong Il’s fear of US retaliation if he responds. If we’re on the wrong side of that gamble, we may be in for another Korean war. The North has 13,000 artillery pieces and could fire some 400,000 shells in the first hour of an attack, many with sarin and anthrax, on the 21 million people in the “kill box” — as some in the U.S. military describe the Seoul metropolitan area. The Pentagon has calculated that another Korean war could kill a million people. What’s the answer? Three things this dysadministration is incapable of — thinking before it acts, skillful negotiation, and thinking before it acts..

Is it cos I is British? Ali G has arrived on American TV screens and influential reviewers are not amused. Hardly surprising, says Mark Lawson – comedy rarely crosses the Atlantic ‘humour gulf’ successfully. Guardian/UK Uhhh, I’m sorry, it’s not because it’s British humor. For some inexplicable reason, I caught the HBO debut of this tripe, and I’m someone who thrives on British humor. But I’ll never watch it again. The essayist misses the point (is it cos he am British?) even though he grasps the central conceit of the show, in which an offensive, puerile and — let’s not shy away from it — stupid interviewer insinuates himself into various situations.

Entirely character-driven, the basic joke in the show – the unwillingness of officialdom to question the racial and intellectual credentials of their questioner – becomes even more pointed in a nation where the right to racial self-definition is widely accepted and terrible consequences can follow from questioning someone’s professional competence.

Even if Edwin Meese or Newt Gingrich or any of the others had felt that there was something a little odd about their interlocutor, they would have been well aware of the potential newspaper headlines or even lawsuits which might result from throwing him out. For this reason, the American editions of Da Ali G Show may be its creator’s most powerful commentary on a culture which is terrified of giving offence to anyone at all.

So American viewers are either going to be the ones who get the joke and find it too painful to be entertaining or funny, or they’re going to be the ones who are too myopic to get it at all. Sort of like the division right down the middle of the American public over George Bush’s credentials. Nobody on either side of the 49%/51% cultural divide finds him funny either.

The world’s first attempted Aids vaccine proved a failure yesterday when, after four years’ work, the Californian biotech company VaxGen announced that trial results showed that it did not protect those at risk of HIV infection.

VaxGen did its best to put an optimistic spin on the collapse of its hopes of selling the vaccine to the US and Europe by offering the surprising finding that its AidsVax had appeared to protect African Americans and, to a lesser extent, people from some other ethnic groups.

But the 78% efficacy in black volunteers, although statistically significant, proved to be based on just 13 cases of HIV infection.

The statistical problem in proving significant effectiveness against a low-incidence condition are far greater, and require much larger numbers of subjects, than against higher-frequency conditions. It is very likely that the finding that the vaccine worked in minority populations was a statistical fluke, although the company appears to be whoring with it.

Seth Berkley, president of the International Aids Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), said: “It is difficult to draw conclusions about what this means.”

John Moore, a professor of microbiology at Cornell University in New York, said: “The common sense is that this is a very small group of patients and I think they are data dredging.”

VaxGen said it intended to seek a licence to market the vaccine to those groups – African Americans and other (North American) ethnic minorities, excluding Hispanics – in whom efficacy had been shown.

“This is the first time we have specific numbers to suggest that a vaccine has prevented HIV infection in humans,” said Phillip Berman, its senior vice president for research and development and inventor of the vaccine. Guardian/UK

Tom Lehrer is still feisty and funny, but the king of sophisticated satire tells Tony Davis there’s no place for his style of humour now: the world just wouldn’t get it.

‘I’m not tempted to write a song about George W.Bush. I couldn’t figure out what sort of song I would write. That’s the problem: I don’t want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.” Sydney Morning Herald

Security Council diplomats say countries that are undecided whether to wage war on Iraq — six crucial elected council members — are preparing for a withering show of pressure from the world’s sole superpower.

“There’s an old saying that in good times, your friends find out who you are; in bad times, you find out who your friends are,” U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza said last week. Mexico is one of the key undecided votes.

Countries have learned to fear Washington’s wrath over key U.N. votes. USA Today

Related: Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war:

Secret document details American plan to bug phones and emails of key Security Council members. Guardian/UK

Ariel Sharon yesterday virtually ruled out the creation of a Palestinian state under his hawkish new government just a day after President Bush pledged to broker a peace deal once he has dealt with Iraq.

Hours before his cabinet was sworn in, the prime minister revealed to the knesset that he has backed away from his commitment to the Palestinian state envisioned by Washington’s “road map” for a settlement, as part of the deal to put together his government. Guardian/UK