A record of events of the George W. Bush administration
Not all is bad, not all is good.
This record is public domain, distribute if you will...


Jan 2001: Establishes a Ministry of Religion("Office of Faith Based
Activities") for the explicit purpose of giving tax money to religions
for recruiting ("Cannot prevent them from carrying out their core mission").
Contrary to Republican dogma, religious institutions had never been
prevented from accepting government money for public services; Catholic
Charities a prominent example. The only current restrictions are that the
tax money cannot be embezzled, and it cannot be used for promoting a
specific religion. It is these two restrictions that Bush and his
supporters in Congress have spoken their intent to do away with.

Jan 2001: Declares January 21 a national Day of Prayer, and calls upon
all citizens to pray to the Judeo-monotheistic God on this day.

Jan 2001: Delays the release of documents from the Reagan administration
until June 21. The law states that these documents must be released
January 21, but Reagan had issued a declaration that any sitting
administration may delay the release of the documents or invoke
executive privilege to prevent them from being released.

Jan 2001: Appoints Michael Powell as head of the Federal Communications
Commission. Powell, a deregulationist and son of General Colin Powell, has
been an FCC Commissioner since 1997. The National Association of Broadcasters
calls this "an outstanding choice".

Jan 22, 2001: Signs an executive order forbidding federal funding of
foreign aid groups that discuss abortion in the context of family planning.

Jan 2001: Tells the Food and Drug Administration to "re-evaluate" RU-486,
the recently approved abortion pill that has been used for over a decade
in Europe with no ill effects on the health of its takers and whose
introduction into the US has been held up for reasons of politics,
not health.

Jan 2001: Proposes the immediate construction of an anti-ICBM missile
system, violating international treaty and using current technology that 
has failed in every test that was not later found to have been rigged for
it to succeed and has even failed in some of those. Constructing such a system
while pursuing an aggressive foreign policy encourages "rogue nations"
to launch a first strike, and having such a system would encourage
rogue Presidents to launch a first strike against nations that don't.


Feb 3, 2001, Unrelated: Federal lawyers move to block rules that
would make it easier for mine workers to receive black lung benefits.
Bush had made a campaign promise to support such benefits.

Feb 6, 2001: Congressman Charlie Norwood abandons his support of
the bipartisan "Patients' Bill of Rights" legislation which he had
sponsored in a previous session, having been told that the President
wanted his own version passed instead.

Feb 6, 2001: Closes the Office of National AIDS Policy and the office
of race relations("Office of One America"), both of which had been
started by the previous president, Clinton. Their duties are given
to the Office of Domestic Policy and the Office of Public Liaison.

Feb 2001: Tells Congress not to create a panel to investigate
irregularities in the presidential election.

Feb 2001: Appoints John Ashcroft, a conservative who opposed school
racial integration as recently as 1985 and had violated his state
Constitution to embezzle state general funds to law enforcement,
as Attorney General of the United States.

Feb 2001, Unrelated: A submarine giving a joyride to several of Bush's
campaign contributors collides with a Japanese fishing boat, killing
several people. Nobody apologizes for nearly a month. The admiral
who illegally ordered the mission is not punished.


Bush's 2001-2002 budget introduced to Congress,

 Eliminates program to equip poor and rural fire departments with modern
  fire fighting equipment
 Cuts program for preparing for natural disasters that would reduce
  damages caused by earthquake, flood, etc;
 Removes existing funds from Social Security and Medicaid accounts.
 Includes oversized tax cut, lopsided towards the wealthy. Bush and his
  supporters claim that every household would get a $1600 tax cut, but
  this is the mean average; As the cut is tilted towards wealthy
  households, the median average household(half earn more, half earn less)
  will save $450. The tax cut is part of an economic policy assuming that
  the economy from 2000 to 2010 will grow at the same rate as it did from
  1997 to 1999, when in fact the economy in 2001 is shrinking, there
  has been no recorded period of sustained growth longer than 7 years in
  the American economy, and the 1997-1999 timeframe is well known as an
  aberrational period of heavy investment.
 Eliminates the estate tax. Bush supporters claim that this tax affects
  all Americans and harms the economy by putting small family farms and
  businesses into bankruptcy. In reality, the tax only affects estates
  over $675,000 and legislation has already passed that will increase
  the amount not taxed to $1 million, and after taxes inherited businesses
  still have more value than was taken out and can be sold, leaving the
  inheritor with a profit and somebody else with a small family farm
  or business. Family farms themselves have a $4.1 million exemption
  from the estate tax.
 Reduces staff in the Securities and Exchange Commission's fraud
  investigations and enforcement department.
 Cuts $200 million from a welfare program to support child care costs.
 Cuts aid to Russia for securing Russia's nuclear materials from theft.
 Cuts $180 million from energy conservation programs.

Feb 2001, Unrelated: Workplace safety regulations, advanced by prominent
Republican Elizabeth Dole and which had passed with both parties' support
after fifteen years of debate, repealed by Congress with Bush offering
rhetorical support. Estimates of the regulations' possible cost to the
economy ran from over $100 billion annually, the estimate the Republican
Party used, to a /savings/ of over $4 billion annually due to fewer
injuries and lawsuits, the figure calculated by the government accounting
office.


Mar 2001: Interferes with the free market by forbidding airline workers
who have not had a contract with their employer in years from refusing
to work. 

Mar 2001, Unrelated: A U.S. Geological Survey cartographer is fired after
releasing inaccurate maps of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an act
outside his job duties. Removing the refuge's park status and
industrializing the area was a core issue of Bush's campaign.

Mar 2001: Reneges on campaign promise to cut back on polluting carbon
dioxide emissions. This promise gained the support of many inattentive
voters who haven't looked into his record in Texas; polls showed a
significant portion of respondents considered Bush more likely to act
to help the environment than candidate Gore, who had authored a book about
environmentalism, has a decades-long record of supporting the environment
in rhetoric and legislation, and is roundly considered a treehugging nutjob.

Mar 20, 2001: Rescinds regulation on arsenic content in drinking water,
returning to a limit that was established before high amounts were known
to cause cancer.

Mar 2001: Announces plans to end a program which had increased the number
of police officers countrywide by 85,000 by paying 75% of the first
three years' wages of rookie officers.

Mar 2001, Unrelated: Supporters of the Bush tax plan hold an astroturf party,
in which rich lobbyists organized by House Speaker Dennis Hastert don
"REAL WORKER" clothes and successfully pass themselves off as day
laborers. A memo describing the set up is leaked shortly afterwards.

Mar 2001, Unrelated: The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights finds that Democrats
in Florida were specifically targeted to have their votes thrown out or to
be prevented from voting at all in the 2000 Presidential election. Bush had
won the crucial state by fewer than 1,000 votes out of over six million cast.

Mar 2001, Unrelated: Congress passes a bankruptcy bill that makes it harder
for people to eliminate their debt by declaring bankruptcy, and places
credit card debt at the same priority as unpaid child support. The bill also
wipes out debt caused by certain failed investments in foreign lands.
Congress had passed this bill earlier, but it had been vetoed by Clinton.

Mar 2001: Tells South Korea to stop seeking friendly relations with
North Korea. North Korea subsequently cancels peace talks with the
United States.

Mar 2001: Ends US involvement in the Kyoto Treaty. No alternative is proposed.

Mar 2001: Ends the decades-old policy of having the American Bar Association
review judicial appointments, claiming that the organization shows a
liberal bias.

Mar 2001, Unrelated: Mike Dombeck, chief of the U.S. Forest Service resigns
in protest over Bush's pro-industry leanings and rhetoric.

Mar 2001: Rescinds a rule that had prevented the government from doing
business with organizations that had defrauded it in the past or had violated
federal labor or environmental laws.

Mar 22, 2001: Appoints Claude Allen as Deputy Secretary of Health and
Human Services. As Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Resources, Allen
had opposed a health insurance program that would have covered abortion
in the case of rape or incest because it did not restrict this coverage
solely to cases where the life of the mother was endangered.

Mar 28, 2001: Closes the Office on Womens' Issues, assigning its duties
to the Office of Public Liaison.

Mar 30, 2001: The Department of Health and Human Services declares
that Medicaid will not pay for the abortion drug RU-486 except in
cases of rape, incest, or threat to the life of the mother.


April 2001, Unrelated: An American reconnaissance plane and a Chinese
interceptor collide over international waters in the South China Sea,
killing the interceptor's pilot. China captures the American plane and
holds its crew hostage for 11 days.

April 2001, Unrelated: A major portion of Bush's tax plan, the elimination
of the estate tax, passes the House of Representatives by a 271-154 vote.
A Democratic countermeasure to eliminate all estate tax on transferred
assets under 2.5 million dollars was defeated 227-201 as Republicans said
it doesn't do enough to protect small family farms and small family
businesses; Under existing law, $675,000 of an estate is exempt from tax,
scheduled to raise to $1m in 2002, and family farms are given a $4.1m
exemption.  Democratic representative Ronnie Shows of Mississippi, who
voted with the Republicans, claims that eliminating the estate tax will
encourage hard work.

April 2001: Pressures Canada to drill in the Northwest Territories,
saying "There's gas in this hemisphere ... I'd like it to be American gas."

April 2001, Unrelated: The Senate votes 53-47 to trim Bush's tax cut
by $448 billion.

April 2001, Unrelated: The Texas legislature, under a $1 billion
annual deficit from former Governor George W. Bush's tax cut plan,
passes an emergency appropriations bill and asks the federal government
for assistance.

April 2001: 100 economists, including eight Nobel Prize for Economics
laureates, sign a petition opposing Bush's tax cut.

April 4, 2001: Under pressure from liberal consumer groups, backs
off from a plan to eliminate salmonella testing of meat destined for
public school lunches. The testing, which was recently started under the 
Clinton administration, has lead to the rejection of 4% of meat as being
spoiled.

April 2001: Proposes dropping birth control from Federal employees'
health insurance plans.

April 2001: Appoints Mary Sheila Gall, a deregulationist, as Chairman
of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Her appointment is rejected
by the Senate in August.

April 2001: Creates an Energy Task Force, headed by Vice President
Dick Cheney and staffed by other former energy business executives. The
task force's meetings are held in secret, no written documents are to
be produced, members are not to speak about the task force to the media,
and in any meetings with outsiders members are not to speak about the
task force on the record.

April 24, 2001: Nominates to the positions of Secretaries of the Army,
Navy, and Air Force: Thomas White, retired Brigadier General and Vice
Chairman of Enron energy corporation; Gordon England, Vice President
of a military supply corporation; and James Roche, Vice President of
Northrop aircraft construction company and former director of Senate
Armed Services Committee. These positions had previously been,
respectively, unfilled and occupied by Gregory Dahlberg, former
Staff Director of House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, unfilled
and occupied by Robert Pixie, former Assistant Secretary of Defense and
President of Essex corporation; and held by Whitten Peters, former
Undersecretary of the Air Force and parter in the law firm of Williams
and Connolly.

April 24, 2001, Unrelated: The Supreme Court decides 5-4 that police
officers have the authority to arrest and jail anybody for any offense,
no matter how minor. Justices for the decision were Souter, Rehnquist,
Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas.

April 2001: Rescinds a Forest Service rule that had prohibited
construction of logging roads at government expense in nationally
protected forestlands.


May 3, 2001, Unrelated: The United States is voted off the United Nations'
Human Rights Commission. In retaliation, the United States Congress
votes to not pay its full dues owed to the United Nations.
The United States is voted back on the commission the next year.

May 4, 2001, Unrelated: A European Union court finds the United Kingdom
guilty of human rights violations in the deaths of several Irish 
Republican Army militiamen who had fired upon British troops and
been killed by return fire.

May 8, 2001: John Bolton, reportedly an opponent of arms control and the UN,
is confirmed as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International
Security.

May 9, 2001: Nominates Terrence W. Boyle, Chief Judge of the U.S. District
of North Carolina, to the Fourth Circuit. Boyle has ruled that the 11th
Amendment, which disallows lawsuits from one state against officials of
another state, also disallows lawsuits against state officials by citizens
of the same state.

May 2001: Nominates Jeffrey Sutton, an outspoken opponent of the
Americans with Disabilities Act, for a judgeship in the 6th Circuit
Court of Appeals. Sutton is confirmed on a largely party-line 52-41 vote,
with Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein and Ben Nelson joining
every Republican Senator except Pat Roberts (who abstained) in supporting
Sutton.

May 2001: Appoints Elliot Abrams, former Assistant Secretary of State
who directed terrorist activities in Central America and later plead
guilty to contempt of Congress before being pardoned by former President
Bush, to direct the National Security Council's Office for Democracy,
Human Rights, and International Relations.

May 2001: Appoints Linda Fisher, a lobbyist for Monsanto biological
research firm, as Deputy Administrator for the Environmental Protection
Agency.

May 17, 2001, Unrelated: The State of California, after a year of paying
far more for energy than other states and facing the bankruptcy of both
its major power distributing companies, announces that whistleblowers inside
the energy production companies have produced evidence of collusion to
fraudulently constrict the supply of energy to California, that there has
been a recorded pattern of power plants shutting down operations
immediately after California announces a Level 1 emergency shortage
and then coincidentally and simultaneously resuming operations when power
blackouts have begun and the price of energy reaches a peak while
the power plants owned by the faltering distribution industries
have not shown this pattern, and that the State will be filing charges
against the power producers within 60 days. During the crisis, the 
Republican-controlled Federal Energy Regulatory Committee, whose job
is to institute price controls if energy prices get too high, has urged
that California remove its own price controls on energy sold
to consumers and to instead let consumers pay the full market price which
has ranged from four to twenty times normal energy prices.

May 17, 2001: The Department of Health and Human Services announces
that instead of traditionally sending the American Medical Association
and associated groups as representatives at the World Health Assembly
in Geneva, the United States would be represented by anti-abortion groups
such as the International Right to Life Federation and Family
Research Council.

May 17, 2001: Fox News reporter Sean Hannity claims to be reading
a report from the United States Geological Survey about the
Alaska National Wildlife Refuge until guest Robert Kennedy Junior
grabs the paper and finds it to be "an advertisement by the
Energy Steward Alliance".
 
May 18, 2001: Paul O'Neill, Bush's secretary of the Treasury, announces
his intention to eliminate all taxes for corporations and to eliminate
Social Security pensions for the elderly.

May 24, 2001, Unrelated: Senator James Jeffords leaves the Republican
Party to become an independent, removing the Republican Party's control
of the Senate.

May 24, 2001, Unrelated: Theodore Olson, a prominent figure in the
Arkansas Project which was part of what former First Lady Hillary
Clinton termed the "vast right-wing conspiracy" to defame and
oust the Clintons and their political allies, is appointed Solicitor
General by the Senate.

May 26, 2001: The Guardian reports that the Enron energy company is
screening applicants for Bush's energy commission. Furthermore,
shortly after federal energy regulatory chairman Curtis Hebert was
appointed, he received a phone call from Enron advising him to change
his views to better suit the company. After refusing, Vice President
Cheney announces that Hebert wasn't the right person for the
job and will be replaced.

May 29, 2001: Orders the Justice Department to "review" lawsuits against
businesses violating pollution laws.

May 31, 2001: Edward Jurith, acting Director of the Office of National
Drug Control Policy, ends a program to pay television networks to insert
anti-drug propaganda into popular television shows which had started
under the Clinton administration.


June 1, 2001, Unrelated: Prince Dipendra of Nepal murders most of Nepal's
royal family in a drunken rage before killing himself. Prince Gyanendra
is declared King.

June 2001: Announces his intent to increase trade protections for domestic
steel producers. The steel industry had threatened to eliminate health
insurance for retired workers if Bush did not support this.

June 2001: Announces an end to the use of the Vieques Island bombing range
in Puerto Rico within two years. A significant increase in the local cancer
rate has been blamed by some on heavy metals leaching into the water supply
and on the Navy's use of radioactive depleted uranium weaponry. Within
hours of the announcement, Secretary of the Navy Gordon England urges
Congress to cancel a planned citizens' referendum on the matter. Should
the population of Vieques vote against the bombing range in the referendum,
the Navy would have to leave by 2003 as per the agreement between Clinton
and Puerto Rico's former president.

June 2001, Unrelated: In a special election in Virginia, Republican candidate
Randy Forbes defeats Democratic candidate Louise Lucas for a seat on the
House of Representatives.

June 2001, Unrelated: The US convicts five Cubans of spying.

June 9, 2001: Delays the release of documents from the Reagan administration
until August 31. The documents detail advice given to former President
Ronald Reagan by his aides, many of whom are current Bush aides.

June 21, 2001, Unrelated: The House of Representatives votes 242-173 to
prohibit industrialization of national monument areas.

June 2001: During the civil war in Macedonia, U.S. troops escort rebel
soldiers from an area where government troops had gained control to a
rebel-controlled area. Anti-U.S. rallies break out in several cities,
and the Macedonian parliament is occupied by rioters angry that the rebels,
who were believed to be close to surrender, were allowed to keep their
arms.

June 25, 2001, Unrelated: The Supreme Court rules 5-4 that Congress has 
the authority to regulate spending by political parties.

June 25, 2001, Unrelated: Led by Republicans Trent Lott and Tim Hutchinson,
16 Senators urge the Department of Labor to abort its enforcement of labor
laws on 51 poultry processing plants that had been underpaying workers.

June 25, 2001: Orders a special panel to review the labor dispute between
American Airlines and its flight attendants. Bush's spokesman says the
purpose of the panel is to delay any possible strike until after the July 4
holiday weekend.

June 26, 2001, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld announces his intentions to 
cut the B1 bomber fleet by a third.

June 26, 2001, Unrelated: The World Court rules that the United States had
violated the legal rights of two German citizens executed for murder, by
not informing the German consulate of their arrest, trial, or conviction.
One of the Germans had been executed in spite of a World Court order to
delay the execution to allow Germany to present a case.

June 26, 2001, Unrelated: The House of Representatives votes 285-143 to
stop the processing of applications for Mexican truckers to operate within
the United States. The Democrat-backed measure is a violation of the U.S's
obligations under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

June 2001, Unrelated: Democratic former Representative Charles Porter
petitions to have impeached the five Supreme Court justices who voted
to end the counting of votes in the disputed Presidential election. Over
600 law professors sign on to the petition.

June 2001, Unrelated: The Supreme Court decides in a 5-4 decision that
commercial advertising is speech protected under the First Amendment,
specifically revoking states' and localities' power to restrict tobacco
advertising from childrens' school areas.

June 28, 2001: Invites two dozen Muslim leaders to dinner as a goodwill
gesture. The guests include suspected Islamic Jihad member Sami al Arian.
The Muslim delegation leaves in anger after Secret Service guards
refuse entry to Sami al Arian's son Abdullah al Arian, an intern
for Congressman David Bonoir.


July 2, 2001: After Vice President Dick Cheney's hospitalization
to install a defibrillator for his heart, Associated Press reporter
Scott Lindlaw reports on Cheney's good health and his activities after
being released from the hospital, such as participating in radio interviews
and discussing policy in staff meetings. Six hours after Lindlaw's report
hits the newswire, Dick Cheney is released from the hospital.

July 12, 2001: Lynn Scarlett, a Libertarian and proponent of greater
corporate influence in government, is confirmed as Assistant Secretary of
Policy, Management, and Budget for the Department of the Interior.

July 2001, Unrelated: Pope John Paul II condemns the US's 40-year old
economic embargo on Cuba.

July 2001, Unrelated: China bills the US $1,000,000 for the cost
of storing the reconnaissance plane it captured in April.

July 2001: Promises to allow religious organizations receiving federal
funds to discriminate against homosexuals in offering services.

July 14, 2001: A test of the anti-ballistic missile system that is the center
of the national missile defense policy succeeds. Two weeks later, the
Times of London reports that the missile carried a Global Positioning
System device described in news reports as a "beacon". Pentagon spokesmen
claim that the device did not affect the interceptor's guidance system. In
the only other successful test of the system during the Clinton
administration, the target warhead carried a GPS system which relayed
its position to the interceptor.

July 18, 2001, Unrelated: James Howard Hatfield, author of the book Fortunate
Son which accused Bush of having a cocaine habit, dies of a drug overdose.
The book had been recalled and burned by its publisher after it was found
out that Hatfield had once been convicted of attempted murder of a former 
employer and embezzlement. Conspiracy theories begin circulating, as
Hatfield had claimed his life was in danger since writing the book.

July 2001: Due to an amendment to Bush's tax legislation by former Democratic
vice presidential candidate and still senator Joe Lieberman, American
taxpayers begin receiving "tax rebate" cheques on the order of about
$300 from the government, monies that will be accounted for by a reduction
in the taxpayers' standard deduction in the next year's taxes. On the envelope
that the cheques are mailed in is printed the Republican Party's campaign
slogan to promote Bush's tax cut plan. As Republican media claims that
the "rebate" is "Bush's gift to the country", most Americans associate the
cheques with the President.

July 2001: Tells the World Bank to forgive debts to poor nations.

July 2001, Unrelated: Russian software developer Dmitri Sklyarov is
arrested in the United States after giving a presentation at a data security
conference on designing software to read certain forms of encrypted data.
The lead attorney in the case, Robert Mueller, is being considered as a 
candidate for the top post in the FBI and in the upcoming weeks is
confirmed as Director of the FBI.

July 2001, Unrelated: China convicts three Americans of spying and
expels them from the country.

July 2001, Unrelated: Popular conservative radio and television talk show
host Rush Limbaugh says that Democratic Senator Tom Daschle is the Devil.
Days earlier, Dave Boyer of the Washington Times had claimed there was a
coordinated right-wing conspiracy to demonize Daschle in the media.

July 2001: Requests that Congress grant him trade promotion authority,
powers which Congress had granted to every president from Nixon to
Bush Sr, and had denied to Clinton.

July 20, 2001, Unrelated: Author Vanessa Leggett is jailed on contempt of
court for refusing to turn over research she had collected for her book
about a murder case to a grand jury. Leggett had claimed protection under
the Constitutions guarantee of freedom for the press. She is released in
January after the grand jury disconvenes.

July 26, 2001: Jokes that "a dictatorship would be easier" than 
negotiating with Congress. Seven months earlier, Bush had joked
about the vote-counting troubles in the presidential election, saying
"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just as
long as I'm the dictator."

July 26, 2001: CBS News reports that Attorney General John Ashcroft is
leasing airliners for personal business, leaving the government with
the cost, because of an unspecified "threat assessment".

July 2001, Unrelated: The House of Representatives votes to lower the allowable
level of arsenic in public drinking water. Weeks later, the Senate also
votes 97-1 to lower this limit.

July 2001, Unrelated: The population of Vieques Island in Puerto Rico votes
68% for the U.S. Navy to immediately withdraw from the island, 30% to
allow for the Navy to remain indefinitely, and 2% for the Navy to remain
until 2003.

August 2001, Unrelated: The House votes 265-162 to ban all forms of human
cloning. A less restrictive bill that would have allowed cloning for
scientific research failed, 178-249.

August 2001: A "Patients' Bill of Rights" bill passes that allows hospital
patients to sue health maintenance organizations that deny them necessary
care but would limit the punishments that judges and juries could declare,
after Representative Charlie Norwood withdraws his support from another
bill that did not have such a limit. Norwood explains his actions by saying
that Bush had promised to veto the bill unless it had such a limit, and it
was better for a watered-down bill to be passed than none at all.

August 2001, Unrelated: According to John Bresnahan and Mark Preston of
Roll Call magazine, Cable News Network CEO Walter Isaacson meets with
Republican political leaders to discuss how CNN could change its news
format to be more attractive to Republican viewers. CNN television
advertisements declare "We're changing everything to bring you better
news."

August 2001, Unrelated: The U.S. Embassy in Australia is occupied by
a non-violent group of Colombian protesters. Reuters reports that the
protesters are speaking out against increasing U.S. anti-drug efforts
in their home country, but the British Broadcasting Corporation reports
that they are protesting the murder of trade unionists and union
sympathizers by U.S. corporations such as Coca-Cola, which was recently
implicated in the deaths and disappearances of fifty unionists.

August 2001, Unrelated: In Afghanistan, a vice squad raids and detains
24 members of the Shelter Now aid organization, which is described in
news reports as being either U.S. or German based. Two Americans are
among the detained. The detainees are charged with offense to God and
promoting deviant acts by promoting Christianity. These crimes are
punishable by death.

August, 2001, Unrelated: Berkeley, California city councilman Kriss
Worthington convinces mayor Shirley Dean to cancel a traditional meeting
with Japanese boy and girl Scouts from the 'sister city' of Sakai, because
the Boy Scouts of America have a policy against hiring homosexual
Scoutmasters. The Scouts of Japan have no such policy.

August 8, 2001, Unrelated: The Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters
is evacuated due to a fire.

August 8, 2001, Unrelated: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a
left-leaning media critic organization that publishes Extra magazine,
releases a report on Fox News channel, describing it as "The Most
Biased Name in News". The report describes Fox's hiring practices of
asking the applicant his Party affiliation and ending the meeting if
the applicant is a Democrat or refuses to state, of Fox's most prominent
news personalities giving speeches at Republican conventions, of an
8-1 ratio of Republican guests to Democrats, of shows devoted solely
to far-right views, of an employee with prior experience as a CBS producer
resigning after being told by the senior vice president to lie about 
statistics showing poor economic progress by blacks, and of a pattern
of being hostile to Democrats and liberals while praising Republicans
and conservatives. Fox advertises its news service as "straight news",
"Fair and balanced, as always", "We report, you decide", while implying
and outright stating that all other news sources, especially the
slightly right-leaning CNN, are liberal owned and biased.

August 9, 2001: Declares his support for medical research involving "stem
cells", the basic human cell type that all cells grow from, but says that
research should be limited to stem cells that have already been extracted
from human blastocysts. Both sides of the issue are angered by the compromise.
In allowing federal funding for this research, Bush breaks a campaign promise
not to. 61 senators vote to support the research.

August 9, 2001, Unrelated: The Pentagon pays China $34,000 for the cost
of storing the EP-3 reconnaissance plane that China captured in April over
international waters and for the cost of feeding the captured crew before
they were released.

August 9, 2001: The Commerce Department imposes a 19.3% tariff on Canadian
softwood lumber imports.

August 11, 2001: Declines Congressman Henry Waxman's request for a review
of Bush political consultant Karl Rove's finances. The request came after
Rove consulted with the heads of six companies he owned more than $100,000
worth of stock in.

August 13, 2001: Signs a $5.5 billion emergency farm subsidy. Such subsidies
had been passed by Congress and signed by Clinton in the previous three years.
Democrats had wanted a larger $7.5 billion subsidy.

August 14, 2001: Appoints former Texas Public Utility Commission Chairman
Patrick Wood as the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

August 2001: The White House issues a report claiming that executive agencies
discriminate against religious groups when funding charities.

August 14, 2001, Unrelated: Enron energy corporation CEO Jeffrey Skilling
resigns after six months at a job newspapers said he was "groomed for",
getting no compensation for leaving early by his own will.

August 15, 2001, Unrelated: The pro-gun organization Jews for the Preservation
of Firearms Ownership releases a long, paranoid essay written by L. Neil
Smith and Aarol Zelman stating among other things that there is no such
thing as a liberal, but that liberal is simply a word that socialists use
to hide the fact that they are Stalinists; That all socialists(meaning
all liberals, meaning everyone more left wing than them) desire to
murder, rape, and rob "on a scale Attila the Hun never dreamed of",
not as a rhetorical device but as a statement of fact upon which
further arguments are made; Condemns acts to write or change legislation
to support the rights of gun owners as being done by people who would
"rather complain than act" and that such people are "on your knees"
rather "than on your feet"; That the last three decades of law have
held for an absolutist view of the Second Amendment, a claim the courts
and legislature who have been passing and upholding more and more
restrictive gun control laws over this period might beg to differ with;
Refers to the U.S. Civil War as "the War between the States", the
euphemism used by modern slavery supporters to refer to this war;
That the intent of gun control supporters is to disarm crime victims;
That the intent of the Brady gun-control bill of the early 1990s was
to disarm women so more of them could be raped; That gun control laws
are passed to disenfranchise specific minorities; That the news media
is "slavishly devoted to socialism", when with the exceptions of the
editorial page of the New York Times and some small independent
publications the American media is if anything slanted somewhat
conservative; That the United Nations wants to eliminate the rights
of American citizens enumerated in the Constitution; That all gun control
advocates have mental defects, using the example of a single gun control
advocate with clinical depression as proof, and then making further
arguments on this point; That gun-control advocates "can't be argued with
or made to see the truth" but "They can only be defeated"; and that
politics isn't "polite democratic debate".

August 15, 2001: Critics and protesters trying to attend a Bush rally in
Rocky Mountain National Park are forced into a confinement zone that the
Secret Service calls a "First Amendment area", more than a mile away from
the event.

August 16, 2001, Unrelated: Representative Floyd Spence, a Republican
from South Carolina and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee,
dies of an aneurysm at the age of 73.

August 16, 2001: Changes health regulations enacted during the previous
administration, among other things eliminating the guarantee of Medicaid
recipients with continuing health problems to have the same type of
specialized care that they had previously; Eliminating a requirement that
insurers annually deliver information on their plans to insurees; And
changes the maximum allowed time that health maintenance organizations are
allowed to wait before responding to the grievance of a patient with a life
threatening condition from 72 hours to 3 business days, meaning that
weekends and holidays are not counted in the period.

August 17, 2001, Unrelated: American mercenaries combating drug traffic in
Colombia hold a press conference to improve public relations after the popular
magazine Semana calls them "Godless Rambos".

August 17, 2001: Promises to help Argentina's floundering economy.

August 17, 2001: The U.S. Justice Department files a motion to intervene
in favour of a religious organization which is suing the city of Lake
Elsinore, California, to be allowed to build a house of worship on land that
is zoned for commercial use.

August 17, 2001, Unrelated: Eight Marines - a Major General, five Colonels,
a Lieutenant Colonel, and a Captain - are charged with misconduct by
falsifying maintenance and safety records for the experimental MV-22
Osprey aircraft.

August 17, 2001: Director of the White House Office of Faith Based and
Community Initiatives John DiIulio, a Democrat, resigns from his position
after six months. When he was appointed, DiIulio had said that he only
planned to serve for six months.

August 18, 2001: As China holds its largest ever naval training exercise
on the far side of Taiwan, the U.S. Navy holds a large training exercise
of its own, involving two carrier fleets, off China's southern coast. 

August 18, 2001, Unrelated: Afghanistan's de facto government, the Taliban
fundamentalist militia, refuses to extend the visas of Western diplomats
and tells them to leave the country.

August 20, 2001, Unrelated: The European Union demands $4 billion from
the United States for its illegal subsidization of exporters.

August 20, 2001, Unrelated: The Federal Reserve Bank lowers interest
rates by a quarter of a percent, to 3.5%.

August 22, 2001, Unrelated: Senator Jesse Helms, R-NC, announces that he
will not be seeking re-election in 2002.

August 22, 2001: The General Accounting Office revises its budget estimates.
In the new estimate, the previously $125 billion surplus is reduced to
under $1 billion, due to $74 billion fewer in revenues due to the tax cut,
$40 billion not realized due to an economic downturn, and $11 billion in
spending increases. Democrats blame Bush's tax cut for the loss of the
surplus even though the bulk of the tax cut will not go into effect for
years to come, while Bush claims that $140 billion earmarked for spending
on Social Security and paying down the debt will not be spent, therefore
calling it a surplus, and uses this fallacial $140 billion figure and public
confusion over the implementation of the tax cut to claim that a second tax
cut of similar size is necessary and will fit within the surplus.

August 23, 2001: Declares that the United States will unilaterally withdraw
from the Anti-Ballistic missile treaty between the U.S. and Russia.

August 24, 2001: Appoints Air Force General Richard Meyers as chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

August 24, 2001: U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham tells the United Nations
Security Council that the Unites States will veto any attempt to involve
the United Nations in the latest Arab war against Israel.

August 24, 2001, Unrelated: 15 Republican Congressmen visit Israel to voice
their support of the nation against the Arab revolt.

August 25, 2001: The U.S. condemns the European Union's decision to
require labeling of genetically modified foods, claiming that the 
labeling requirement is being applied in a discriminatory manner.

August 25, 2001: Announces intention to cut the number of federal
government employees. While the Clinton administration cut 325,000 jobs,
a report issued by the General Accounting Office says that most of the cuts
were poorly planned, and the number of redundant administration positions
has increased. Also announces that services offered by the federal
government should have private competition.

August 25, 2001, Unrelated: After a six day trial, antigovernment activist
Jim Bell is convicted of stalking two IRS employees and sentenced to ten
years imprisonment and a fine of $10,000. Bell is the author of the 
'Assassination Politics' manifesto, which suggests that those who don't
like a political figure should send anonymous donations to an account to
be anonymously withdrawn from by the eventual assassin of the figure.
While Bell had never been served with a restraining order nor had he been
warned not to compile information on the agents, the prosecution claimed
that Bell was a threat on their lives. The prosecution's affidavit stated
that Bell had proposed implementing Assassination Politics on the agents,
although news reports did not mention this and most reports suggested it
was both untrue and not mentioned in the trial. However, according to news
reports the government's case against Bell largely ignored these issues,
instead focusing on how dangerous the Assassination Politics document is and
how dangerous Bell is for having written it and not recanting and destroying
the essay; on how the agents felt Bell was a threat to their lives because
he had owned four guns prior to 1997, along with a bayonet for one of them;
how Bell's ability to use Internet search engines was a special skill that
made him dangerous to the public; And how Bell's degree in chemistry meant
that he intended to replicate the sarin gas attack on Tokyo. Bell had
gathered information on the agents through publicly available CD-ROM data
archives, search engines, and conversations with other Internet users.
During the trial, the judge Jack Tanner threatened journalists with contempt
of court for quoting public documents that had been released by the court.
Other persons have been harassed or arrested by the police in several
countries including the U.S. and Australia for distributing copies of
or discussing the Assassination Politics document.

August 27, 2001, Unrelated: Iraq shoots down an unmanned U.S. reconnaissance
plane flying over Iraq. After the 1991 war, the U.S. and U.K. claimed control
of the airspace over northern and southern Iraq to encourage rebellion in
the areas, and continue to patrol the no fly zones after the expected
rebellions failed. Iraq has never recognized U.S. and U.K. control of the
airspace, and has continually fired upon American and British airplanes
flying through it, while the U.S. and U.K. have bombed Iraq's air
defense installations which Iraq calls "civilian installations" and claims
any killed soldiers to be civilians.

August 27, 2001: The United States fails to appear at the United Nations
Conference Against Racism in protest of the conference's central point
to declare the existence of Israel racist and illegitimate. The U.S. had
previously refused to attend the last two U.N. Conferences Against Racism
in 1983 and 1978 for the same reason. Canada's foreign minister soon
reports that he will not be attending the conference for the same reason.

August 28, 2001, Unrelated: Police in Florence, Italy defuse a small
bomb that was placed outside the United States consulate.

August 28, 2001, Unrelated: Colonel Kizza Besigye of Uganda, who in
March lost the presidential election to Yoweri Museveni 69% to 28%,
arrives in the United States claiming that his life is threatened
by Museveni's administration.

August 28, 2001, Unrelated: Representative Luis Gonzales of Illinois is
sentenced to three hours of prison for trespassing on Navy land on Vieques
island in Puerto Rico.

August 29, 2001, Unrelated: The Commerce Department reports that economic
growth for the preceding quarter is one fifth of a percent, down from
1.3% in the first quarter of the year. A reduction in business inventories
and a reduction in exports are blamed for the decline.

August 29, 2001: The U.S. State Department condemns Israel's occupation
of Beit Jala, a Palestinian Authority controlled suburb of Jerusalem where
the government had permitted militia to fire guns and mortars at a nearby
Israeli suburb of Jerusalem. Israel removes its troops within two days,
after agreeing to a cease fire with the local authorities.

August 29, 2001: The U.S. State Department sends a team to the U.N. Conference
Against Racism to attempt to convince the conference to remove anti-Israel
language from conference papers.

August 29, 2001: Expresses concern that an upcoming U.N. conference on
children will consider abortion counseling and services.

August 29, 2001, Unrelated: The U.S. Copyright Office issues a report on the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law passed unanimously in 1998 that
grants new monopolies to copyright holders beyond what they have been
given in the past, and has caused limited protests not just in the
United States but overseas as the U.S. attempts to enforce this law
beyond its own borders. Among the rights granted to copyright holders
are the right to control the reading of a copyrighted work, and the full
force of law to any restrictions the copyright owner may require with the
sale of their work, overriding any conflict between these restrictions
and prior law, common law, or judicial precedent including in practice
judicial opinions derived from the Constitution. Among the statements in
the report are that traditional copyright law should not apply to digital
copies of works but a second, stricter set of standards should apply; That
the restriction of copyright to the right of first sale, allowing the buyer
of a work to transfer his ownership of the work on his own terms, should not
apply to digital works; And that although copyright owners have abused their
newfound rights to the detriment of consumers and in the future are likely
to cause greater harm to consumers, no action should be taken because the
harm caused so far is not as great as it will probably be in the future,
so immediate action is not needed.

August 30, 2001, Unrelated: The Russian Foreign Ministry warns its
information technology workers not to travel to the United States.

August 31, 2001, Unrelated: The bodies of 15 people are discovered buried
in a former U.S. army base in Honduras that was built in 1984 and used to
train Nicaraguan rebels until being given to the Honduran military and
abandoned in 1994.

August 31, 2001, Unrelated: U.S. astronaut Frank Culbertson, in an interview
with the BBC, states that from space he has witnessed the Earth's environment
get significantly worse in ten years.

August 31, 2001, Unrelated: The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases a report
stating that 113,000 jobs were lost in the month of August.

August 31, 2001, Unrelated: The NGO Forum, a conference of non-government
organizations operating in parallel with the United Nations Conference
on Racism, issues a statement which declares the International Monetary Fund
and World Bank to be racist and Israel to be a "foreign power" and to be 
conducting "barbaric" "terrorist acts". While many forms of racism and
oppression are mentioned, Israel is the only state singled out as carrying
out these acts and is mentioned repeatedly. Zionism, the nationalist belief
that Jews should be able to form their own state and self-government which
led to the creation of Israel, is as well the only specified form of
religious intolerance. The declaration is denounced by the U.S., Israel,
Amnesty International, and the head of the U.N. Conference against Racism.

August 31, 2001: Delays the release of records of President Reagan's
administration indefinitely. The Presidential Records Act states that
these records were to have been released in January.


September 1, 2001: The U.S. issues forbids sale of high technology to
a Chinese corporation, China Metallurgical Equipment Corporation, and the
National Development Complex of Pakistan after officials claim CME sold
missile technology to Pakistan in violation of a yr. 2000 treaty which
forbids China to export any missile technology. China claims that it did
not sell any missile technology to Pakistan, and argues that in spite of
the treaty it should be able to sell missile technology to Pakistan 
because the U.S. sells missile technology to the Republic of China on
Taiwan.

September 1,  2001, Unrelated: During the 32nd anniversary of the coup
he successfully lead, Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi condemns the United
States' government as being "antiquated" and belonging "in a museum",
and claims that the U.S. developed the AIDS virus.

September 2, 2001, Unrelated: Libya states that it will seize the property
of U.S. companies who left when the U.S. declared an embargo on Libya in
1986, unless the U.S. lifts the embargo and let the companies return to
claim their property. 

September 3, 2001: Announces intention to share missile defense technology
with China, and his support for China increasing its stockpile of nuclear
missiles.

September 3, 2001: Michael Kozak, U.S. Ambassador to Belarus, admits that
the U.S. is attempting to overthrow the government in that country in what
he describes as a "Contras policy". In the 1980s, Kozak had been ambassador
to Nicaragua where the Contras massacred scores of civilians. During
elections a week later, incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko defeats
challenger Vladimir Goncharik 78% to 12%, despite polls which had
shown less than half the population supporting Lukashenko. International
voting monitors saw no evidence of corruption, but claimed the totals
were suspect. Goncharik claims that he had his own people conduct a second
tally which showed Lukashenko winning 46% to 40%.

September 3, 2001, Unrelated: Marijuana advocate Grover Crosslin is killed
by an FBI sniper on his property after he saw the sniper aiming at him and
raised his own weapon in response. Crosslin had held marijuana-promotion
parties on his land, and legal proceedings were under way to seize the
land after police purchased marijuana from a partygoer. Antigovernment
activists immediately denounce the killing as reminiscent of the Waco siege
that ended in the deaths of over 80 members of a Christian sect. Crosslin's
roommate is shot dead under similar circumstances the next day.

September 5, 2001, Unrelated: Senator Phil Gramm, R-TX, announces that he
will not be seeking re-election in 2002.

September 5, 2001: President Vicente Fox of Mexico asks Bush to ease the
process of immigration from Mexico to the U.S.

September 5, 2001, Unrelated: NASA conducts a successful test of a
scramjet engine.

September, 2001: A judge declares that a plan of Bush's to give seniors
drug discount cards exceeds the authority granted to the President
by the Constitution.

September 6, 2001: The Department of Justice reports that it will not attempt
to break up Microsoft, in order to speed up the case, and will instead seek
a conduct agreement. Microsoft had broken two conduct agreements with the
government after previous trials, and its executives had lied under oath
and presented falsified evidence during the latest trial. Public opinion
is heavily against the trial, with over 60% of the public considering the
trial to be an abuse of the government's power to control trade. During the
election campaign, Microsoft had hired one of Bush's top advisers to present
a favourable view of themselves to the soon-to-be President.

September 6, 2001: Former Senator John Danforth is appointed envoy to
Sudan.

September 6, 2001: Bob Herbert of the New York Times reports that
"American representatives objected to language describing slavery
as a crime against humanity" at the World Conference against Racism.

September 6, 2001, Unrelated: The U.S. Embassy in Japan warns that
American soldiers in that country are likely to be targets of terrorist
attacks.

September, 2001, Unrelated: Christians in U.S. ally Saudi Arabia ask
the United States to intervene against the arrests of over a dozen Christian
leaders in the country, where Islam is the only legal religion to
practice.

September 6, 2001, Unrelated: Thirteen Miami policemen are charged with
covering up evidence and planting false evidence after the shooting
of three men. Two suspects who have already retired from the
force plead guilty.

September 6, 2001: The New York Times reports that it has discovered
confidential government documents showing Bush's intent to reduce
nursing home inspections and penalties for poor care. 

September 7, 2001, Unrelated: The CIA reports that Iran is attempting to
acquire nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons along with missiles
to deliver them. Iran denies the claims.

September 7, 2001, Unrelated: The United Nations declares that Serbia's
crackdown on the renegade province of Kosovo did not constitute genocide,
although war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed. Former
U.S. President Clinton had used the threat of Serbian genocide against
Kosovans of Albanian descent as an excuse to conduct a months-long bombing
campaign which destroyed much of Serbia's economic infrastructure and
happened to break the streak of no two countries with McDonald's fast food 
restaurants attacking each other.

September 7, 2001, Unrelated: President of Mexico, Vicente Fox, calls
for the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance to be replaced
by a wider-breadth treaty which would have American nations cooperate 
against poverty and crime.

September 7, 2001: Medellin drug cartel leader Fabio Ochoa is extradited
to the U.S. from Colombia. Ochoa had surrendered himself to Colombia
for the promise of not being extradited to the United States.

September 7, 2001: The General Accounting Office announces that it is
considering court action against Bush for refusing to answer to the
GAO's request to know who attended the Energy Task Force meetings
with Vice President Cheney. White House officials state that claims
of a secret energy council are nothing more than partisan nonsense. 

September 8, 2001: South Korea asks North Korea to resume negotiations
with the United States that had begun under the Clinton administration
but had been suspended by Bush.

September 8, 2001, Unrelated: The Arab League, a coalition of 22 Arab nations,
asks the United States to intervene in the Palestinian Authority's war against
Israel in order to prevent Israel from assassinating Palestinian Arab military
leaders who had been engaged in planning and carrying out attacks on Israeli
civilians, calling Israel's assassinations policy "extreme oppression and
violence against the Palestinian people". About 60 Palestinian Arab leaders
and many innocent bystanders have been killed by such Israeli attacks.

September 8, 2001, Unrelated: During ceremonies to commemorate the
ending of World War 2, Japanese Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka offers
an apology to American prisoners of war who had been mistreated. Chinese
protesters demand an apology for Japanese violations of human rights during
the China campaign and monetary compensation for victims. Under the
terms of the San Francisco peace treaty that formally ended the second
World War, Japan is not required to pay any compensation to any of its
victims. It is not mentioned in news reports whether China is a party
to this treaty.

September 9, 2001: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld announces plans to cut
the military's bureaucracy and reduce the number of bases.

September 9, 2001, Unrelated: The University of Pennsylvania issues a report
claiming that 400,000 children in the U.S. have been sexually abused.

September 10, 2001: Canadian Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew meets with
U.S. Commerce Secretary Don Evands to appeal for the lifting of the U.S.'s
19.3% tariff on Canadian lumber.

September 11, 2001, Unrelated: Both main towers of the World Trade Center
in New York are destroyed and the Pentagon is damaged from ramming by multiple
hijacked civilian jetliners, killing thousands. It is not immediately
apparent who had planned the attack, but terrorist organizations worldwide
rush to deny responsibility and several of the world's most preeminent
terrorists, including Gadhafi and Yasser Arafat, condemn it. Groups claiming
responsibility are the Japanese Red Army and the Democratic Front for the
Liberation of Palestine. The DFLP quickly retracts their statement, and
neither organization is considered a major suspect.

September 11, 2001: Bush pledges to eliminate all terrorism worldwide.
He reiterates this pledge several times in the coming days.

September 11, 2001, Unrelated: Iraq shoots down another unmanned recon
drone.

September 12, 2001, Unrelated: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a
military alliance consisting of the U.S., Canada, and most of Europe,
declares that all member nations will offer full support, including
military, to the U.S.'s response to the previous day's terrorist attacks.
Similar statements of support are given by the Rio Group, a coalition
of 19 Central and Southern American nations, and Russia. Russia later
clarifies their position by saying that they would not offer any
assistance in a possible invasion of Afghanistan. Due to the confused`
and hasty atmosphere in the media, the initial reports of Russia offering
military support may have been in error.

September 12, 2001: Vice President Dick Cheney telephones Senate
Majority Leader Tom Daschle to urge the Senate not to investigate
the United States' intelligence agencies' failure to predict
the previous day's terrorist attack.

September 12, 2001, Unrelated: The U.S. media declares that Osama bin 
Laden is the mastermind behind the recent terrorist attacks. No evidence
is given to support this claim other than that he is being considered
a primary suspect by investigators, who also appear to have no evidence
linking the attack to bin Laden other than the circumstance of bin Laden
leading one of very few terrorist organizations with the funds and manpower
to carry out such an attack. Afghanistan, where bin Laden is a respected
philanthropist and civil engineer who according to a Pakistani journalist
was recently appointed commander in chief of all ground forces, states its
refusal to belive that bin Laden has a terrorist network or could be behind
such attacks, and claims that the nature of the attack proves bin Laden's
innocence because he does not have any pilots under his official command.

September 12, 2001, Unrelated: Russia claims that its planes did not
harass an American P-3 over the Pacific Ocean, after U.S. papers report
that a Russian interceptor flew within 50 feet of the P-3 and whose pilot
radioed that he was targeting the American aircraft.

September 12, 2001, Unrelated: Congressman Don Young says that
environmentalists are probably behind the September 11 attacks
and refers to protests in Seattle and Genoa, Italy as evidence
that "eco-terrorists...have some expertise in that field".

September 2001, Unrelated: The Senate passes a law allowing federal agencies
to search private computer networks without permission or a warrant.

September 2001: China is permitted entry into the World Trade Organization.

September 2001, Unrelated: The Taliban threatens to go to war with any
country that assists the U.S. in invading Afghanistan.

September 13, 2001: Pakistan, chief supporter of the Taliban and behind
numerous terror attacks against India but also U.S. cold war ally, agrees to
let the United States use its land and airspace for staging any possible
attacks against Afghanistan where bin Laden is headquartered. Riots break
out in the coming days and four people are killed, including a businessman
who opened his store after religious leaders called for a nationwide strike.

September 13, 2001: The World Wrestling Federation reports that Bush
personally contacted them to urge them to continue their shows. This
organization is highly disreputable, and the validity of the claim
should be considered as suspect by the reader.

September 13, 2001: The Federal Communications Commission votes unanimously
to review laws prohibiting media monopolies.

September 2001, Unrelated: Highly influential Christian preacher Jerry
Falwell and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson claim that the
recent terrorist attack was caused by the American Civil Liberties
Union and by those who would separate government from enforcement of 
religion, allow gays and lesbians to exist, and stand against government
regulations preventing abortion. Other conservative leaders claim that
citizens leaning left-of-center politically are a "fifth column" in the
fight against terrorists, a reference to rebel sympathizers in Madrid who
cooperated with and assisted four columns of invading rebel troops(Andrew
Sullivan, Times of London); That all Muslim and Arab-looking people should
be considered terrorists and all noncitizens should be expelled(Ann Coulter);
That anybody who opposes "erasing" entire countries and killing all the
civilians within is wrong-thinking and undermining the U.S.'s efforts, and
such "liberal" thought is akin to a policy of appeasement(Rich Lowry); That
the US should evict the United Nations from New York for being slow to issue
an official statement and vote condemning the attacks(Andrea Peyser, New York
Post); That Bill Clinton's having had an affair with a person not his wife
is the cause of the attack(New York Post editorial board); and that anybody
who isn't in full support of war is anti-American and that it is
anti-American for a preacher to warn Americans not to commit acts
of vengeance against random Arab-looking people(Mark Steyn). Coulter is
later fired for further columns literally calling for genocide against
Muslims, and other conservative leaders including Rush Limbaugh condemn
some of these statements, although Limbaugh himself begins calling Democrats
by Arab nicknames to imply that the Democratic Party is in league with and
supporting the terrorists.

September 14, 2001, Unrelated: A group of Chinese journalists is expelled
from the United States for having cheered and applauded news of the
recent terrorist attack.

September 14, 2001, Unrelated: The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper,
reports that high ranking members of Israel's intelligence agency Mossad
warned the CIA in August of a joint Iraqi/bin Laden terrorist force in the
U.S. numbering 200 men that was planning a large attack of some kind in
September. It is also reported that the CIA has a policy of ignoring
information it gets from Mossad, despite Mossad being having some of
the best intelligence information on Middle East activities. The CIA
denies the report. Jason Keyser of the Associated Press reports contacting an
unnamed high ranking Mossad official who has confirms the original report.
Israel's head of military intelligence, Amos Malka, later says that there
is no direct link to Iraq.

September, 2001, Unrelated: CIA Director George Tenet releases a memo,
titled "We're At War", ordering an immediate end to bureaucratic
competition and separation of work that has hampered the CIA's
ability to do its job.

September 15, 2001: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announces plans
to attack 60 nations that may be harboring terrorists.

September 15, 2001: Vice President Cheney mentions the Egypt-based
group Islamic Jihad as a possible military target.

September 15, 2001, Unrelated: Osama bin Laden issues a statement denying
all involvement in the terrorist attack September 11.

September 15, 2001: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld warns legislators not
to turn the US into a police state.

September 16, 2001, Unrelated: Liberia orders the arrest of anyone
found trading pictures of bin Laden, the leading suspect in the recent
attack on the United States.

September 16, 2001, Unrelated: India urges the United States to take
measures to protect Indian citizens living in the US from revenge
attacks by Americans, after a Sikh is shot dead in Arizona.

September 16, 2001, Unrelated: Tehran Mayor Morteza Alviri sends
a message of condolence to New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani after the
recent attack which destroyed the World Trade Center. This is notable
as it is the first official contact between Iran and the United
States since Iran revolted against the U.S. backed dictator in
1979.

September 16, 2001, Unrelated: The Federal Reserve cuts interest rates
by half a percentage point.

September 2001: Former Pakistani Foreign Secretary Niaz Naik claims he
was told by American officials in July that the United States would be
invading Afghanistan in October.

September 17, 2001, Unrelated: Congressman John Cooksey says that
"if I see someone comes in that's got a diaper on his head and a
fan belt wrapped around the diaper on his head, that guy needs
to be pulled over."

September 18, 2001, Unrelated: A New York surgeon guides a robot in France
to carry out a successful gall bladder operation in the first surgery
of its kind on humans.

September 20, 2001: States that the US will go to war with any nation
supporting terrorism or harboring terrorists and that nations who do not
support the U.S. are "with the terrorists"; and announces the creation
of a Cabinet position for Homeland Defense, to be filled by Pennsylvania
Governor Tom Ridge. Bush also mentions that he spoke with Iranian
President Khatami, which would be only the second official contact between
Iran and the United States since the Iranian revolution.

September 20, 2001: The Department of Defense suspends all discharges
of servicemen.

September 22, 2001, Unrelated: The Taliban announces that it has lost track
of the location of Osama bin Laden, despite earlier claiming to have had him
under house arrest.

September 22, 2001: Waives sanctions against India and Pakistan that were
placed when the two countries detonated nuclear weapons in 1998. Other
sanctions on Pakistan related to the 1999 coup are left in place.

September 23, 2001: After Attorney General Ashcroft speaks at a
Congressional hearing, Republican Congressmen order all television
cameramen to leave the room so that there can be no coverage of
the rebuttal by human rights groups. The order is in violation
of Congressional ethics rules.

September 2001: The Taliban shoots down an unmanned reconnaissance drone
over Afghanistan. The US claims that it has lost such a drone over
Afghanistan, but not the one the Taliban shot down.

September 2001: White House officials condemn National Broadcast
Company Nightly News for interviewing former President Bill Clinton.
As a result, NBC Nightly News quickly schedules an interview with
former President George H.W. Bush, the President's father.

September 2001: Planned military operations against Afghanistan are
renamed Operation Ensuring Freedom, after the previous name, Operation
Infinite Justice, was found offensive to Muslims who believed that
only God could carry out infinite justice. Also, Bush apologizes for
calling the planned war a "crusade", which cemented previously wavering
opposition to the United States in the Middle East by recalling memories
of the racist wars by the same name.

September 2001: White House officials announce that, contrary to prior
statements, the President's airplane was not a target of the terrorists.
Earlier they had announced that a threatening phone call had been
received which made use of secret code words to refer to the plane, as
an excuse for rapidly transporting the President to random locations
throughout the country before returning him to the White House after
the attacks.

September 2001: Attorney General John Ashcroft proposes the Anti Terrorism
Act which would greatly enhance the powers of law enforcement - including
for electronic media, beyond what the Constitution allows for conventional
media - and reduce law enforcement's accountability to the public. Opposition
rises from both liberals and conservatives, and Republican representative
Bob Barr notes that many of the powers in the bill had been requested
before and denied by Congress, and accuses the Ashcroft of taking advantage
of the terrorist attack to acquire these powers during a time of great
nationalism.

September 2001: Public polls show Bush's approval rating at 90%, the
highest ever recorded for a sitting President. Before the attacks, Bush's
approval rating was 51%, including a 39% disapproval rating which has since
dropped to 6%. Bush Sr. during the Gulf War and Truman after the surrender
of Germany had both polled at 87% approval.

September 25, 2001: After political comedian Bill Maher challenges
Bush's repeated statements that the terrorist attack was "a cowardly act"
by stating that Clinton's war tactic of "lobbing cruise missiles from
2000 miles away" was cowardly while "Staying in the airplane when it hits
the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly", White House
press secretary Ari Fleischer condemns Maher, saying that Americans "need
to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for
remarks like that; there never is". Maher's television show is subsequently
dropped by several stations, and many advertisers pull their funding.
The official White House transcript of Fleischer's remarks omits the
words "watch what they say", which is explained as a transcription error.
It is not corrected.

September 25, 2001, Unrelated: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
says that "we must be aware of the superiority of our civilization"
and that "the West will continue to conquer peoples".

September 25, 2001, Unrelated: The City of New York bans amateur
photographers from taking pictures of the ruins of the World Trade Center.

September 27, 2001: Department of Defense officials admit that
special operations forces are in Afghanistan, operating in small groups
of three to five soldiers.

September 27, 2001, Unrelated: The State of Georgia indicts computer
network administrator David McOwen on one count of computer theft and
seven counts of computer trespass, punishable by up to 120 years of jail
and $815,000 in fines, for having installed a harmless distributed computing
research program on computers he administered at a Georgia college.
Georgia's office of Attorney General is directly prosecuting the case,
rather than it being handled by a common prosecutor, and McOwen's defense
team records efforts by the Attorney General's office to break into
the defense team's private computer systems without a warrant. McOwen
pleads guilty in January after being driven into debt and is penalized
a $2,100 fine and 80 hours of community service.

September 28, 2001: Al-Jazeera, reportedly one of the more respected
television news organizations in the Middle East, reports that three
U.S. soldiers on patrol in Afghanistan and their two guides have been
captured by the Taliban and that multiple sources within the Taliban
and bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization have confirmed this. A Department
of Defense spokesman refuses to comment, saying "We are not going to get
into the habit of commenting on every story that comes out of the region."
The Taliban denies the story, claiming that "it is difficult to believe"
that foreign troops could enter Afghanistan while the Taliban is in
control, despite a firefight six days earlier between the Taliban and
British SAS near Kabul.

September 28, 2001, Unrelated: BBC journalist Yvonne Ridley is arrested
by the Taliban for entering the country without a passport. She is released
10 days later on Taliban dictator Muhammad Omar's personal order. 

September 29, 2001, Unrelated: Sources within the CIA admit that the
organization has been trying to assassinate Osama bin Laden since 1998
despite a Presidential ban on assassinations, implemented by Gerald Ford,
being in place during this time. Several months later, it is revealed that
Clinton had secretly authorized the assassination plan and had allowed
for as much as the shooting down of a civilian airliner if bin Laden
happened to be on board.

September 30, 2001: British Prime Minister Tony Blair says the United
States has shown him "incontrovertible" evidence linking the September 11 
terrorist attack to bin Laden.

September 30, 2001, Unrelated: The Congressional Black Caucus holds a
dinner to honor Bill Clinton, and many of the attendees refer to him as
"the first Black President". During the event, an AIDS activist accuses
Clinton of murder for not finding a cure for AIDS during his term as
President, and Secret Service agents attempt to confiscate reporters'
recording equipment during the disruption.


October 1, 2001, Unrelated: Debbie Schlussel of World Net Daily reports
that the hijackers of one of the planes on September 11 were wearing
red headbands, marking them as members of Islamic Jihad.

October 1, 2001, Unrelated: Former President Clinton is disbarred from
practicing law before the Supreme Court.

October 2, 2001, Unrelated: New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is awarded Italy's
highest civilian honor, ordination in the Knights of the Great Cross, for
spreading hope and idealism following the terrorist attack. In light of
the circumstances, nobody cares that the U.S. Constitution forbids anyone
in government from accepting a title of nobility without Congress's consent,
which it is not reported that Congress ever gave.

October 2, 2001, Unrelated: In Porto Allegre, Brazil, 1500 music fans riot
when world-famous guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen plays the Star Spangled
Banner.

October 3, 2001: Announces plans for a $60-75 billion economic stimulus
package, most of which is to consist of further tax cuts for larger business
and upper-class incomes. This is in addition to $40 billion in new military
spending and $15 billion in aid to air travel companies that Congress has
recently passed.

October, 2001: States that the creation of an independent state for
Palestinian Arabs who had been refused inclusion in nearby states,
as long as the resulting state recognizes Israel's right to exist,
has always been part of the United States' Middle East policy. It had
not been until the Clinton administration. Israel takes offense and
demands that Palestinian Arab terrorist groups Islamic Resistance(HAMAS),
Islamic Jihad, and Hizballah be added to Bush's list of terrorist
organizations whose assets should be frozen immediately. The U.S.'s Muslim
and Arab ally states in the Middle East and Asia have threatened to evict
the U.S. military presence there and support bin Laden if Bush were to
begin targeting anti-Israel terrorist groups in what Bush has described
as a war on all terrorism worldwide.

October 3, 2001: Pakistan states that the evidence is sufficient that
bin Laden was behind the terrorist attack in the US the month before.

October 3, 2001, Unrelated: Hizballah and Islamic Jihad declare that
the United States is a sponsor of terrorism for its support of Israel.

October 3, 2001: Asks Qatar to begin censoring the independent Al-Jazeera
television station. The station relies significantly on money from
the Emir of Qatar.

October 4, 2001, Unrelated: Congressman J. C. Watts writes a complaint
letter to Reuters regarding the news organization's decision to not use
the word "terrorist" because it could offend readers who support terrorists'
causes.

October 4, 2001: Israel and the US continue to trade diplomatic barbs, with
Israeli Prime Minister Sharon claiming that the US is abandoning Israel as
Europe abandoned Czechoslovakia to Germany in 1938, and the U.S. saying that
Sharon's remarks are "unacceptable".

October 4, 2001, Unrelated: Japan's Cabinet proposes changing the law
in order to allow its self defense forces to go overseas to support the U.S.

October 4, 2001, Unrelated: Scientists report that over 100 new glaciers
have formed in the Rocky Mountains over the summer, which goes against
a worldwide trend of glaciers disappearing.

October 4, 2001, Unrelated: The State of Georgia's Supreme Court declares
that use of the electric chair violates the state Constitution's
protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

October 4, 2001: 1,000 troops are deployed to Uzbekistan. President 
Islam Karimov forbids the U.S. from launching ground or air attacks from
Uzbek territory.

October, 2001, Unrelated: A drunkard shoots a hole in the Alaska pipeline,
causing a 280,000 gallon oil spill.

October 5, 2001, Unrelated: Former Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield
dies of heart failure at the age of 98.

October 5, 2001: The U.S. states that the Sandinista Party in Nicaragua
has links to terrorist organizations, a claim that Sandinista presidential
candidate Daniel Ortega denies. Ortega had led the Sandinistas in overthrowing
a military dictatorship and setting up a somewhat more liberal dictatorship
in its place until free elections were allowed in 1990 and the Sandinistas
were voted out. In the 1980s, the United States had trained, armed, and
financed the terrorist Contra organization's war against the Sandinistas
and civilians who supported them, even after the US Congress forbid President
Reagan to continue any further support. Ortega loses the election after the
US funds and supports the opposing candidate and threatens trade sanctions
should Ortega be elected.

October 5, 2001: Afghanistan offers to release the Shelter Now workers
accused of being Christian missionaries if the US will forego airstrikes.
A news report states that these workers were caught with "thousands" of
Bibles, while the workers have claimed their Christian paraphernalia was
for personal use.

October 5, 2001: The Tampa Tribune reports that a secret flight
evacuated Saudi royal family members from the United States, with Bush's
personal approval, days after the terrorist attack, while the Federal
Aviation Administration denies that such a flight took place. 

October 6, 2001: US officials claim that Iranian government officials
privately support the US against Afghanistan while publicly
condemning the United States to placate the Iranian people and rightists
in government. Since revolting against a U.S. led dictatorship in 1979,
Iran has claimed that the United States is Satan incarnate on Earth.

October 6, 2001, Unrelated: Debka File, a news source of low repute but
which has scooped stories in the past, reports that China has deployed
between 5,000 and 15,000 troops to Afghanistan to fight the United States.

October, 2001, Unrelated: 10,000 rally in Pakistan demanding war against
the United States.

October 2001, Unrelated: Gore supporters claim that nationalistic fervor is
causing newspapers to hide a story about Gore having won the Presidential
election in Florida by 20,000 votes, although there is nothing to back up
the claim. During the election, major newspapers did cover up stories about
Bush having deserted the National Guard and having lied throughout the
campaign period over whether or not he had been caught driving drunk, for
fear of up being accused of influencing the outcome of the election. Gene
Lyons of the Arkansas Gazette later reports that newspapers are indeed
covering up the result of a count of 180,000 uncounted Florida ballots
that was to be released September 17, because releasing the results might
"stoke partisan tensions" and the election "now seems utterly irrelevant"
according to New York Times reporter Richard Berke. The Sydney Morning
Herald confirms the story.

October 5, 2001, Unrelated: The US launches a spy satellite with a 4-inch
resolution.

October 5, 2001, Unrelated: A Florida employee of the American Media tabloid
agency dies of anthrax. Days later, a coworker of his is diagnosed with
anthrax.

October 5, 2001: Restricts release of classified information to Congress
to 8 people, what newspapers describe as unprecedented, after it is leaked
that intelligence officials expect a 100% chance of a terrorist attack
occurring in retaliation for the bombing of Afghanistan.

October 6, 2001, Unrelated: Two Americans and two Britons are killed
by a bomb in Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia.

October 7, 2001: Begins daily airstrikes on Afghanistan, with U.K.
assistance. Claims the "collective will of the world" is supporting
war against Afghanistan by the US and declares that no country will
be considered neutral. Canada, Australia, Germany, and France pledge
military support. The Taliban calls the airstrikes a terrorist act and
claims that all strikes targeted civilian facilities. 37,000 food rations
are also dropped in remote regions of Afghanistan. 4,000 people riot in
Quetta, Pakistan. Pakistani dictator Musharraf fires several high ranking
members of his military and intelligence services who lean towards
supporting the Taliban. Taliban officials claim 20 civilians are killed
by the attack on Kabul, while early independent checks of regional hospitals
show no casualties. Four United Nations personnel are killed when their
offices in Kabul are bombed.

October 7, 2001, Unrelated: A United Nations helicopter is shot down
over Abkhazia, a province of the former Soviet republic of Georgia which
successfully rebelled in 1993. Five UN personnel, their translator,
and three crewmen are killed. 

October 7, 2001, Unrelated: Syria is elected to the 15-member United
Nations Security Council with unanimous support from Asian and
Middle East countries, despite its support for terrorist groups. Also
elected are Guinea, Cameroon, and Bulgaria.

October 8, 2001, Unrelated: The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission orders
four energy companies to refund California for illegal collusion and
price gouging. During the autumn energy crisis, energy prices in California
were four to twenty times the price in any other state, a circumstance that
the energy companies claimed was caused by simple supply and demand.

October 8, 2001: The humanitarian group Medecins Sans Frontieres condemns
the United States' dropping of food rations on Afghanistan as a "military
propaganda" tactic to satiate world opinion that might otherwise be
opposed to the bombing.

October 8, 2001: The Northern Alliance, the force opposing the Taliban
in Afghanistan, reports that 40 Taliban officers have defected to them.

October 8, 2001: The Arab League threatens "severe complications" should
the United States extend its "war on terrorism" to other Muslim or
any Arab countries.

October 9, 2001: Pakistan offers the United States the use of two airports
to base military operations from.

October 9, 2001: After a French journalist disguised as a woman is captured
by the Taliban, Taliban Intelligence Chief Mullah Taj Meer states that
any foreign journalist "will be treated like an American soldier". The
journalist, Michel Peyard, is released on November 3.

October 9, 2001, Unrelated: 17 Americans vacationing near Belize are killed
when their boat sinks in a hurricane.

October 9, 2001, Unrelated: A US Army helicopter crashes in Poland, killing
the pilot.

October 9, 2001: Pakistan reports a gun battle between its troops and
30 Taliban soldiers attempting to cross the border. Reports that five
Taliban helicopters flew across the border and were captured by
Pakistan are denied by the foreign ministry, but other government officials
claim the events took place.

October 9, 2001: Andrei Grozin, head of the Central Asia Institute for
Commonwealth of Independent States Studies, states that "the Taliban has
made it clear that they intend to invade Uzbekistan", whose army "is not
capable of resisting any major Taliban attack". He states that such an
attack will cause Russia to openly intervene, and claims that Russia is
already covertly fighting the Taliban.

October 9, 2001: The Christian Science Monitor reports that
"leading Russian military expert" Pavel Felgenhauer claims that "unmarked
Russian fighter bombers have been seen hitting Taliban positions in recent
days", and that "Russian troops are already in Afghanistan".

October 9, 2001: Former President Clinton gives a speech in support of
Bush's bombing campaign.

October 9, 2001, Unrelated: The Drug Enforcement Agency bans all food
products derived from hemp, the plant family of which marijuana is
a member, because the products can contain trace amounts of THC.

October 10, 2001: 500 rioters attempt to storm Indonesia's Parliament during
a protest rally calling for war against the United States.

October 10, 2001, Unrelated: A third person in Florida tests positive for
anthrax. All cases have so far worked in the same building.

October 10, 2001, Unrelated: Iraq claims to have shot down an unmanned US
reconnaissance drone inside the southern no-fly zone.

October 10, 2001, Unrelated: Israeli and Jordanian intelligence officials
announce that they have not been able to find a link between the September
attacks and Iraq.

October 10, 2001: Major US television news media agree not to broadcast Osama
bin Laden's speeches after White House spokesmen inform them that there could
be code words within the speeches that are orders to his operatives within
the United States.

October 10, 2001: United Nations officials in Afghanistan are tortured by
the Taliban and have their vehicles seized.

October 10, 2001: US military advisors are sent to the Philippines to
assist in anti-terrorist operations. The Philippine Constitution forbids
foreign troops from direct participation in local military operations.

October 10, 2001: Sheik Yusuf al Qaradawi of Qatar and the Fiqh Council
of North America issue a fatwa allowing Muslims to take part in the
United States' war against terrorism.

October, 2001: The Senate passes an anti-terrorism measure that greatly
expands police powers on a vote of 98-1. Only Russel Feingold votes
against the bill.

October 11, 2001: The bombing of Afghanistan is halted for a day to honor
the Muslim sabbath.

October 11, 2001: Iraq announces that the United States envoy to the United
Nations, John Negroponte, threatened to invade Iraq should it cause any
instability in the Persian Gulf region.

October 11, 2001, Unrelated: New York rejects a $10 million donation from
Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal after he suggests the United States should
"adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause" to prevent further
attacks and condemns Israel for "slaughtering our Palestinian brethren".

October 11, 2001, Unrelated: Czech officials state that Mohammed Atta,
presumed to have coordinated  the terrorist attack the month earlier,
met at least three or four times with Iraqi diplomat Ahmad Khalil
Ibrahim Samir Al-Ani, who had been under surveillance while suspected
of planning an attack on Radio Free Europe's offices in Prague and who
has since been expelled.

October 11, 2001: Thousands of South Africans march on the United States
consulate to protest the airstrikes on Afghanistan.

October 11, 2001: Secretary of State Colin Powell gives a speech to reaffirm
the United States' support of Israel.

October 11, 2001: The National Post reports that over 6,000 Pakistanis swore
an oath to die fighting the United States.

October 11, 2001, Unrelated: Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov states
that no Russian troops or instructors are in Afghanistan.

October 11, 2001, Unrelated: A National Broadcast Company employee
in New York tests positive for anthrax after the network reports
receiving a suspicious letter the week before. The anthrax is a
different type from the Florida cases. The letter was addressed
to newsanchor Tom Brokaw.

October 11, 2001: The FBI releases a warning that terrorist attacks are
expected within the next few days. On the FBI's public Web site, the
document containing the warning is named "skyfall" by the archiving agent,
possibly a reference to the childrens' story of Chicken Little who panics
after mundane events.

October 11, 2001, Unrelated: Freelance cartoonist Todd Persche
is dropped by Madison Newspapers for drawing a cartoon in which
characters state "When the media keeps pounding on the war drum,
it's hard to hear other points of view on how we should respond
to the disgusting World Trade Towers attack."

October 2001: The House passes an anti-terrorism measure that greatly
expands police powers. The bill:
	* Requires all real estate attorneys to perform a background check
	on anyone buying a house, and to report the results of this
	check to the federal government
	* Allows police to seize public library usage records
	without a warrant or any cause to suspect a crime, while
	forbidding library personnel from informing library users
	of such activity
	[...more to come...]

October 2001, Unrelated: Former presidential candidate Ralph Nader
condemns the US bombing of Afghanistan, claiming that it will strengthen
the terrorists.

October 12, 2001: Uzbekistan allows the United States to launch attacks from
its territory if the security of the country could be guaranteed. 10,000
Taliban troops are reported to have massed at the Uzbek border, while 1,000
American troops are in the country. Three years earlier, an invasion force
of 140 Taliban troops infiltrated to within 50 miles of the Uzbek capital.

October 12, 2001: Representative Lloyd Dogget condemns the dogmatic belief
that tax cuts are the cure to all ills as an $86 billion tax cut package
passes through committee. His over-the-top rhetoric, in asking if there was
a tax cut for Osama bin Laden to turn himself in, is criticized by rightists
on the committee even though the tax cut package was indeed presented as
a solution to the war.

October 12, 2001: Attorney General Ashcroft designates 46 organizations
as terrorist groups and forbids their members entry into the
United States. The organizations are: Al Itihaad Al Islamiya(AIAI), Al
Rasheed Trust, Al Wafa Humanitarian Organization, Asbat Al-Ansar,
Mamoun Darkazanli Import-Export Company, Salafist Group for Call
and Combat(GSPC), Islamic Army of Aden, Libyan Islamic Fighting
Group, Makhtab Al-Khidamat (Al-Kifah), Al-Hamati Sweets Bakeries,
Al-Nur Honey Press Shops(Honey Center), Al-Shifa Honey Press for
Industry and Commerce, Jaish-I-Mohammed, Jam'iyat Al Ta'awun Al
Islamiyya(Society of Islamic Cooperation), Rabita Trust, Alex
Boncayao Brigade, Army for the Liberation of Rwanda, Continuity
Irish Republican Army, First of October Antifascist Resistance
Group(GRAPO), Lashkar-e-Tayyiba(Army of the Righteous), Loyalist
Volunteer Force, New People's Army, Orange Volunteers, People Against
Gangsterism and Drugs(PAGAD), Red Hand Defenders, Revolutionary United
Front, Moro Islamic Liberation Front, Free Aceh Movement, Al-Ma'u'Nah,
Hayshullah, Brenton Resistance Army, Black Star, Anarchist Faction,
Red Brigades Combatant Communist Party, Revolutionary Proletarian
Nucleus, Turkish Hizballah, Jerusalem Warriors, Palestinian Hizballah,
Umar Al-Mukhtar Forces, Martyrs of Al-Aqsa, Salah Al-Din Batallions,
Movement for the Struggle of the Jordanian Islamic Resistance, Holy
Warriors of Ahmad Daqamseh, Islamic Renewal and Reform Organization,
Muhammad's Army, and Islamic Deterrence Force.

October 12, 2001: Attorney General Ashcroft distributes a memo to federal
agencies urging them to reject Freedom of Information Act requests and
promising support from the Justice Department in keeping documents
from the public.

October 13, 2001, Unrelated: A letter sent to a Microsoft office in Nevada
tests positive for anthrax. Other suspicious letters that have been
found in various locations around the country test negative. The Microsoft
letter tests negative in two later tests, and is accepted to have been
a false positive.

October 13, 2001: 20,000 march in London and 15,000 in Berlin to protest
the bombing of Afghanistan.

October 13, 2001, Unrelated: Five additional employees of American Media
test positive for anthrax.

October 13, 2001: Several thousand Pakistani demonstrators attempt to
enter Shabaz airbase outside Jacobobad, where US troops are said to be
stationed.

October 13, 2001: Indonesian Vice President Hamzah Haz urges the United
States to stop bombing Afghanistan.

October 13, 2001, Unrelated: The Washington Post reports that the United
States and Uzbekistan have had a secret military alliance against the Taliban
and bin Laden since the 1998 embassy bombings.

October 13, 2001: Hundreds of Christians are massacred in Kano, Nigeria,
after demonstrations against the US bombing.

October 13, 2001, Unrelated: Osama bin Laden states that terrorist attacks
will not cease until the world meets his demands, which are the removal of
all non-Arabs from the Saudi peninsula, the removal of sanctions against Iraq,
and the ending of all international relations with India and Israel so his
armies will be free to conduct a war of extermination against Hindus and Jews.

October 14, 2001: Iranian President Mohammed Khatami condemns both the
Taliban and the United States for stating that anybody who does not join
them is their enemy.

October 14, 2001, Unrelated: India shells 11 Pakistani border posts in
retaliation for sabotage of a power station.

October 14, 2001, Unrelated: A letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom
Daschle tests positive for anthrax. CNN later reports that the type of
anthrax is a high grade difficult to produce, although further reports 
clarify that it is not considered weapon grade, and that writing on
the envelope is similar to writing on the envelope from the NBC New York
attack where the type of anthrax used was of a lower grade.

October 14, 2001: The United Nations condemns the United States' policy
of dropping food packets in Afghanistan over wide areas because combining
food aid with bombing may cause aid organizations to be considered
hostile forces in the future, because some of the food could be seized by 
the Taliban instead of civilians, and because some could have landed in
minefields where civilians could be hurt trying to get to them.

October 14, 2001: Rejects the Taliban's offer of a ceasefire in exchange
for the promise to release bin Laden to a neutral country if "sufficient
evidence of his guilt" is given. The Taliban has declared evidence of
bin Laden's guilt in previous attacks, including bin Laden's own taking
credit for the attacks, as being insufficient.

October 14, 2001, Unrelated: A visitor to ABC's news studio in New York
tests positive for anthrax.

October 14, 2001, Unrelated: Queen Elizabeth of England ordains New York
Mayor Rudy Giuliani as a Knight Commander in the Order of the British
Empire. As before, it is not reported whether Congress made a decision
to allow the honor.

October 14, 2001: The Red Cross warehouse compound in Kabul, Afghanistan,
is hit by a US bomb. 

October, 2001: The Department of Defense purchases exclusive rights to all
civilian satellite images of Afghanistan with the clear intent of barring
the images from reaching the public.

October, 2001, Unrelated: The Army of God, a US-based terrorist group, mails
envelopes containing death threats and an unidentified powder to
scores of health clinics that provide abortion services.

October 15, 2001, Unrelated: The House of Representatives votes 404-0 to
declare its support for government schools imposing religious messages on
children. 

October 2001: White House officials claim that the United States
destroyed all of its anthrax supplies after the 1972 Biological
Weapons Convention.

October 16, 2001, Unrelated: The US Capitol is closed after 31 Senate
employees test positive for anthrax.

October 16, 2001, Unrelated: The City Council of Berkeley, California
passes a resolution urging the United States to end "the cycle of violence",
by using these words implying that the United States bears significant
responsibility for terrorist attacks upon it and that the attacks would
stop if the United States had not bombed Afghanistan. Businesses nationwide
begin canceling their contracts with businesses based in Berkeley. 

October 16, 2001: Lawyer Thomas Willcox claims to have this day overheard
Antitrust Department head and Assistant Attorney General Charles James
complaining that Clinton's Antitrust Department head Joel Klein and Federal
Trade Commission head Robert Pitofsky had prosecuted and won cases against
lawbreaking corporations, and that it would take "years to undo the damage".
James denies that he ever said or believes such things.

October, 2001: Australia commits 1,500 troops and four aircraft
to assist the United States.

October, 2001, Unrelated: Three Louisiana teenagers are charged with
terrorism for shooting water guns at elderly bingo hall patrons.

October 17, 2001, Unrelated: United Nations officials claim that the
Taliban has seized warehouses containing more than half of the food aid
it had sent to Afghanistan.

October 17, 2001, Unrelated: Dan Goldin, chief administrator of the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration, announces his retirement.

October 17, 2001, Unrelated: The United States and British embassies in
Bosnia are temporarily closed due to security threats.

October 17, 2001, Unrelated: New York Governor George Pataki reports that
anthrax spores have been discovered in his office.

October 17, 2001, Unrelated: A businessman in Nairobi, Kenya, receives a
letter from Atlanta that tests positive for anthrax. Other anthrax-containing
letters are sent to high ranking United Nations Environmental Program
officials. One of the letters was postmarked from Atlanta via Miami on
September 8, three days before the terrorist attack, while another
was sent from Pakistan.

October 17, 2001, Unrelated: A CBS News employee in New York tests positive
for anthrax.

October 17. 2001: Canada commits 900 troops to assist the US attack.

October 17, 2001, Unrelated: Oneida New York Daily Dispatch editors
Dale Seth and Jean Ryan are fired for Seth's writing that al Qaeda
attacked the United States because "up until 1948 there was no Israel.
The United Nations took Palestinian land and gave it to a number
of Jewish terrorists to rule".

October 18, 2001, Unrelated: The Navy bans offensive graffiti after
a photograph of a bomb with "High Jack This Fags" scrawled across it
is publicized.

October 18, 2001, Unrelated: Japan passes a law allowing its troops to
be sent overseas to assist US attacks or for humanitarian missions.

October 18, 2001, Unrelated: A New Jersey postal worker tests positive
for anthrax.

October 18, 2001: Travels to China, where the Chinese President speaks
in support of the war.

October 19, 2001, Unrelated: A New York Post employee tests positive
for anthrax.

October 19, 2001, Unrelated: A suitcase containing C4 explosives and
fuse is found in a Philadelphia bus terminal. The 150 grams of explosive
is said to be enough to demolish the building where it was found.

October 19, 2001: Between 100 and 200 US troops land in Afghanistan and
engage Taliban forces. The Taliban claims to have killed 20 to 25
US soldiers in the fighting, and to have shot down a helicopter that
went down over Pakistan, killing two soldiers. The US claims to have
met only light resistance.

October 19, 2001: The Greens/Green Party USA releases a press release
condemning the US bombing of Afghanistan as an act of terrorism and
urging that the US's leaders "be brought to justice under international
law".

October 20, 2001, Unrelated: Anthrax is found in the office building used
by House of Representatives workers. A DC postal worker also tests
positive for anthrax.

October 20, 2001, Unrelated: 20,000 rally in Sana, Yemen, to protest
against the United States. 

October 20, 2001, Unrelated: Iraq claims that the United States' own
government is behind the recent anthrax attacks, and also states that
economic sanctions are a form of terrorism.

October 21, 2001: The Taliban reports that it has executed five men
for spying for the US. Later reports state that they were Northern
Alliance commanders.

October 21, 2001: Pakistani border guards open fire upon rioting Afghan
refugees fleeing the bombing.

October 21, 2001: The House of Representatives, after conferring with
Bush, adjourns for five days.

October 21, 2001, Unrelated: A Communist militia bombs a Coca-Cola
plant in India.

October 21-22, 2001, Unrelated: Two DC postal workers die of anthrax.

October, 2001, Unrelated: Senator Hillary Clinton of New York is heckled
off the stage by New York firefighters and police officers during a major
charity event for these same public servants.

October 22, 2001: Israel rejects the United States' demands that it
withdraw from Palestinian Authority controlled cities. Israel occupied
the territories in response to the assassination of Tourism Minister
Rehavanm Zeevi, a prominent right-wing racist. Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon has compared the assassination to the attack on the US which
destroyed the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon in September.

October 22, 2001: The Taliban claims that US bombing hit a hospital,
killing 100. The United States denies this. The United Nations confirms
the claim.

October 22, 2001: US helicopters come under fire while attempting to 
retrieve the wreckage of the helicopter that the Taliban claimed to
have shot down days earlier, reportedly in Pakistan.

October 22, 2001, Unrelated: A Texas man is executed for a murder he
committed at the age of 17 while still a minor.

October 23, 2001: Under international pressure, the United States admits
that bombs can miss their targets.

October 23. 2001: Press Secretary Ari Fleischer states that anthrax was
found in a post center that processes mail for the White House.

October 23, 2001, Unrelated: Senator Charles Schumer of New York
asks the Department of Health and Human Services to allow the government
to ignore Bayer Corporation's patent for Ciprofloxacin, the drug of
choice for treating anthrax.

October 24, 2001: Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi demands that the world
agree on a just and proper definition of terrorism before acting to
combat it. He also suggests that the United States bomb London for the
United Kingdom's policy of giving political asylum to terrorist
suspects, and states that he considers the United States' war against
the Taliban to be just if the US is convinced that bin Laden was
behind the attack of September 11. Gadhafi also states that he 
considers "the threat of fleets, sanctions, embargoes" to be terrorism.

October 2001, Unrelated: It is reported that the anthrax which was delivered
to Senator Daschle's office had been treated with a chemical which
is only produced within Russia, Iraq, and the United States.

October 26, 2001: Bush signs into law an act which greatly enhances police
powers. Reports state the effects of the provisions as follows: The
requirement for police to obtain a warrant is reduced from "probable cause" 
to "significant purpose". Warrants can be issued without ever informing
the target of the warrant. Police no longer require a warrant to conduct
eavesdropping of private correspondence, and can hold persons suspected of
"terrorism" (which is broadly defined) indefinitely and without charge.
For electronic searches requiring a warrant, the police no longer need to
obtain a warrant from a judge in the same district as the place of the search
but may obtain a warrant from any judge in the United States, while a warrant
for an electronic search now allows the police to expand their search to any
electronic target regardless of whether the expanded search is relevant to
the investigation, and the police do not have to report where they served
the warrant.

October 26, 2001: 50,000 march in support of bin Laden in Karachi, Pakistan.

October 26, 2001: The US continues to bomb Afghanistan, ceasing the
practice of foregoing bombing on the Muslim sabbath.

October 2001: The same Red Cross compound that was hit earlier is again
bombed by the United States.

October 2001, Unrelated: Traces on anthrax are found in the CIA's mailroom,
and a State Department mail carrier is hospitalized with anthrax.

October 2001: The US warns that the Taliban may seize and poison food
donated by the US, UN, and international aid agencies before redistributing
it to the people in order to blame the poisoning on the United States.

October 26, 2001, Unrelated: Anthrax is found in a mail center for the 
Supreme Court.

October 26, 2001: The Taliban executes Abdul Haq and Haji Doran after
they enter Afghanistan with US State Department support in an attempt
to raise a rebellion against the Taliban. Both were heros of the war
against the Soviets but had been exiled from Afghanistan for unreported
reasons.

October 26, 2001, Unrelated: A US Congressman of Lebanese descent is
denied passage on an Air France flight to Saudi Arabia, even after
another Congressman vouched for his identity.

October 26, 2001: Japan lifts its sanctions on India and Pakistan.

October 26, 2001, Unrelated: A passenger jet is escorted to Canada after
its hijacking beacon activates accidentally.

October 26, 2001: Lockheed Martin's X-25 wins the competition to become
the Joint Strike Fighter, of which 3,000 airplanes will be produced
to replace the F-16 and A-10.

October 27, 2001: Northern Alliance leader Abdullah Abdullah criticizes
the United States' bombings as not being as effective as they could, and
suggests that there should be greater coordination between the US and
his ground forces.

October 27, 2001: Pakistani border guards face off against a militia
of Taliban supporters numbering over five thousand to prevent them
from entering Afghanistan. The militia soon swells to 10,000, but the
Taliban refuses their assistance because there is no ground war and
they would be of little help. Weeks later, it is reported that 11,300
Pakistanis entered Afghanistan to fight against the Northern Alliance
in Mazar e-Sharif and Kunduz.

October 27, 2001: Seven are killed in India when police fire upon
Muslims distributing anti-American pamphlets.

October 27, 2001: The United Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees
states his worry that refugee camps along Afghanistan's border with
Pakistan will become recruiting camps for the Taliban. Pakistan has
closed its borders to refugees, partly at the request of the US.

October 27, 2001: Top CIA and FBI officials confide to the media that
they believe the anthrax attacks are being conducted by Americans.

October 28, 2001: Attorney General Ashcroft releases a vague warning
that a serious terrorist attack is imminent and expected within days,
likely within 72 hours.

October 2001: Rebels supporting bin Laden mine and blockade Pakistan's
main highway and seize control of a town in northern Pakistan. It
takes Pakistan's army six days to regain control.

October 2001, Unrelated: A woman with no connection to any sources
of anthrax dies of the disease.

October 2001, Unrelated: Anthrax is found in a mailbag of a US embassy
in Lithuania, and at the US embassy in Peru.

October 2001, Unrelated: Polls of unreported bias and accuracy claim
that 48% of Pakistanis and more than half of all Egyptians blame the
September 11 terrorist attacks on the Jews.

October 2001, Unrelated: Representative Ernest Istook proposes an
amendment to the Constitution which would allow government run
schools to force students to pray. Two years earlier, a similar
effort gained a 224 to 203 vote majority, but fell short of the
two-thirds vote required to amend the Constitution.

October 2001: The House debates Bush's "stimulus" package, which would
not only revoke the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax that was
implemented in the 1980s in response to profitable corporations
finding enough accounting loopholes to pay no taxes, but would
refund all amounts paid by this tax throughout its existence.

October 2001: Civil rights groups begin questioning the government
over the disappearing of over 1000 people who have had no access
to lawyers and, of those who have been released, have not been
told what they were charged with or why they were held. Many of
those being held are US citizens.

October 2001: Syria announces that it will support the fight against
terrorism, but demands that no action be taken against the
"resistance" against Jewish civilians in Israel.

October 2001, Unrelated: A high ranking Muslim cleric in New York
accuses the Jews of carrying out the terrorist attack on September 11
and claims that Jewish doctors in the US routinely poison Muslim
patients. He also states that Jews are responsible for the existence
of drug use and homosexuality in society.

October 2001: CNN's chairman orders that his news organizations
"balance" their reporting, which has lately focused on civilian
casualties due to the US bombing.

October 2001: The US announces that they expect the Taliban to demolish
an important mosque in Mazar e-Sharif and blame it on the US.

October 2001: Pakistan's top nuclear scientist expresses his belief that
the Taliban are the most righteous government and belief system in the
world, evidenced by a prophecy in the Koran which states that all of the
world's wrong would ally together against the truly righteous.

October 2001, Unrelated: The Daily Jang, Pakistan's largest newspapers,
receives a letter which tests positive for anthrax.

October 2001, Unrelated: The State of Texas Governor's Task Force on
Homeland Security prints an advertisement showing a military officer
in crisp uniform against the backdrop of an American flag. Readers notice
that the officer is a Luftwaffe general. 

October 29, 2002, Unrelated: New York Magazine prints an issue whose
cover includes a child's drawing of the World Trade Center being destroyed
by a airplane bearing the Jewish 6-pointed star on its wings. The cover
photographer is Nigel Parry, a highly respected critic of Israel.

October 31, 2001: The US government settles with Microsoft by creating a
consent decree less stringent than the two previous consent decrees
that Microsoft had broken to bring the current case against them. The
agreement does not forbid Microsoft from continuing to violate laws
which Microsoft has felt free to violate because the prior consent
decrees have not specifically mentioned all acts which would break
these laws. This effectively concedes a case which the US had already
won and which was in the stage of deciding penalties.

October 31, 2001: The Taliban offers a cease fire in exchange for proof
of bin Laden's guilt.

October 31, 2001: Lowers the acceptable level of arsenic in drinking
water to the level Clinton mandated.

October 31, 2001: Raises the tariff on Canadian softwood lumber imports
from 19.3% to 31.9%


November 1, 2001: Turkey offers the US the use of a 90 man special forces unit
for the US in Afghanistan.

November 1, 2001, Unrelated: Iraq denies the Czech Republic's reports
that Iraqi diplomats met with one of the September 11 terrorists.

November 1, 2001: Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri states that
she expects Muslim nations to quit supporting the US war on Afghanistan unless
the US wins swiftly.

November 1, 2001: Announces that the bombing will not cease during Ramadan.
Several Muslim countries had requested such a pause, even though there is
a history of Muslim countries attacking during Ramadan. The Northern Alliance
supports the US, saying that the Taliban attacks during Ramadan.

November 1, 2001: bin Laden urges Pakistan's population to take up arms and
revolt against the "Christian" US and allied Musharraf government.

November 1, 2001: California Governor Gray Davis reports that a terrorist
attack on California's bridges is expected within the next ten days,
and that three separate federal intelligence agencies have independantly
provided him with this information. The FBI states both that he is lying
and that it was a breach of security to have released the information.
Later it is revealed that the tip was not from a reliable source.

November 1, 2001: Announces that food packets will now be coloured blue
rather than the same yellow colour of cluster bombs that the US has also
been dropping on Afghanistan. Cluster bomblets have a 5% failure rate,
and those that do not explode when dropped can explode when touched.

November 1, 2001, Unrelated: Pakistan masses troops on India's border.

November 1, 2001: United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan states
his desire for the bombing of Afghanistan to quickly end so that
humanitarian relief efforts can resume in full force.

November, 2001: Accepts a visit from Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo
at the White House.

November, 2001: Continential Airlines opens a route from Miami to
Havana, Cuba. Cuba is under an embargo from the United States, and it
is considered illegal by the US for anyone to spend any money there.

November, 2001: Recalls US Ambassador Donna Hrinak from Venezuela after
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez condemned the bombing of Afghanistan.

November 2001, Unrelated: An Australian girl reports having been raped
by US Navy sailors the prior September.

November 2001, Unrelated: An unconfirmed report states that the House
Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health sent a letter to the Sierra
Club asking the esteemed environmental group to publicly declare the
Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front terrorists. Many 
acts of arson, theft, and violence against property have been conducted
by the latter two organizations, which are more accurately belief systems
which anybody can claim to represent after committing such acts.

November 2001, Unrelated: New York firefighters riot during a protest
against cutbacks in the number of hours worked removing remains from
the World Trade Center where hundreds of firefighters lost their
lives.

November 2001, Unrelated: Houston radio station KRIV raises money from
its listeners to buy a bomb to be dropped on Afghanistan.

November 2, 2001: A US helicopter goes down in Afghanistan. The Department
of Defense reports that its crew survived and was evacuated on another
helicopter.

November 2, 2001: Issues an executive order allowing Presidents to
withhold records from previous administrations indefinitely, whereas
there had previously been a twelve year limit mandated by Congress.

November 2, 2001: After what had been heralded in the news as the
heaviest attack on Taliban positions yet, Northern Alliance commanders
report that fewer than "3 in 30" bombs hit their targets, and that as
a whole the bombing has been ineffective.

November 2, 2001: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld begins a tour of several
Asian countries to raise support for the war.

November 2, 2001: The Taliban claims to have shot down a "B-52 fighter jet",
possibly a translation error. The B-52 is a bomber that operates at a higher
altitude than most weapons can reach, but Pakistani papers report that the
Taliban has shown wreckage.

November 2, 2001: Green Party USA coordinating committee member Nancy Oden
is detained by military police at Bangor International Airport after she
is told a check of her name determined that she is a suspected terrorist.
She refuses to cooperate with officers after they begin criticizing her for
an editorial she recently wrote, and she is subsequently barred from all
flights. Her hotel reservations are coincidentally cancelled by an unknown
party.

November 2, 2001, Unrelated: A federal court overturns a 50 year sentence
for petty theft, declaring that the mandatory sentence under California's
"3 Strikes" law constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

November 2, 2001, Unrelated: The Virginia Supreme Court decides 2-1 that
burning a cross is a protected form of free speech, throwing out a case
against a man who burned a cross in a black man's backyard. The burning
of a cross is nationally recognized as a death threat against nonwhites
and nonProtestants.

November 3, 2001, Unrelated: bin Laden releases a statement that any Muslim
who participates in the United Nations is an "infidel" who has "renounced
the message of the prophet Muhammad". bin Laden also specifically condemns
Australia as an enemy of Islam for sending troops to protect East Timor
from massacres that occurred after the island declared independence from
Indonesia.

November 3, 2001: The State Department announces that traces of an
undetermined bacteria were found in a mail bag at the US embassy in
Greece. It got in the news, so someone thought it was worth mentioning.

November 3, 2001, Unrelated: Pakistan shells India to support rebels
caught in a gun battle with Indian troops.

November 3, 2001: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon cancels a planned
visit with Bush and states that all planned visits to the US have been
put on hold indefinitely.

November 4, 2001: The Taliban state that an American captured 10 days
ago has died of natural causes. The United States has rejected all claims
that any of its people have been captured by the Taliban.

November 4, 2001: The Arab League, meeting in Damascus, states that Osama
bin Laden does not represent Muslims, and Egyptian Foreign Minister
Ahmed Maher states that he believes bin Laden is at war with the world.
Also, Secretary General Amir Moussa reiterates that all Arab countries
would drop their support of the US if any Arab nation was attacked for
supporting terrorism, and Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al Sharaa claims
that the United States cannot make any claim to fight terrorism as long
as the US supports Israel.

November 4, 2001, Rejects Pakistan's repeated request to stop bombing
Afghanistan during Ramadan.

November 4, 2001: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld announces that the Taliban
has been rendered incapable of governing Afghanistan.

November 4, 2001, Unrelated: The Daily Telegraph reports that China
is producing documentaries celebrating the terrorist attack on the US.

November 5, 2001: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld claims that bombing accuracy
of Taliban positions has "vastly improved" since special forces have been
deployed to the ground to direct the bombers.

November 5, 2001: In what is reported as a response to US pressure,
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon agrees to visit with Bush later
this month and Israel withdraws from several Palestinian Authority
governed cities despite ongoing attacks on Israeli civilians by the PA
and PA-backed militias.

November 6, 2001: The Taliban claims to have shot down a US helicopter,
a claim confirmed by a senior Pakistani police officer. The US and Pakistani
governments officially deny the claim.

November 6, 2001: Warns Europe that no nation will be considered neutral
by the United States.

November 6, 2001, Unrelated: Anthrax is found in US embassies in Russia
and Pakistan.

November 6, 2001: Attorney General John Ashcroft orders the Drug Enforcement
Agency to begin prosecuting doctors who prescribe federally restricted
drugs to terminally ill patients wishing to die on their own terms, effectively
overturning the state of Oregon's assisted suicide law.

November 6, 2001, Unrelated: The Federal Reserve lowers interest rates
by half a percentage point.

November 6, 2001: Guardian reporter Gregory Palast claims Bush ordered
US intelligence agencies to cancel all investigations of Osama bin Laden's
family and the Saudi royal family immediately upon entering office in January,
and that this policy has been reversed since September 11. He also mentions
a supposed secret FBI report regarding this named 199I WF213589 [W199I].
The Saudi royal family includes over 5,000 members and some of these
have supported bin Laden, while bin Laden's family has disowned him.

November 2001, Unrelated: The FBI demands that California Governor Gray
Davis order the removal of police and National Guard protection from
California's bridges.

November 2001: A government report suggests giving the CIA director
control over three military intelligence agencies and power to control
satellites.

November 2001: Pakistan arrests Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the leader of the
nation's largest Islamic political party, and charges him with sedition
after he urges the military to overthrow Musharraf.

November 2001: Germany pledges 3,900 troops to aid the US.

November 2001, Unrelated: It is reported that China is heavily investing
in Iran's and Iraq's nuclear weapons programs.

November 2001: Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge refuses Congress's
requests to appear before the Appropriations Subcommittee on Treasury
and General Government.

November 2001: Congressional Republicans accuse the Democrats of trying
to worsen the recession in order to win seats in Congress and accuse
the Democrats of being "partisan" and conducting "class warfare" by
debating the wisdom of retroactively repealing taxes on profitable
corporations.

November 2001: The Republican Party urges all members to cancel any
subscriptions to the Los Angeles Times after the paper runs a Paul
Conrad cartoon depicting an elephant, the Republican Party symbol,
wearing a Taliban costume and holding a smoking rifle with the
caption "The House tax bill".

November 2001: White House spokesman Scott Stanzel claims, wrongly, that
"almost every leading economist" supported Bush's tax cut. In reality,
100 of the country's leading economists, including eight Nobel prize
winners, had signed a petition opposing it.

November 7, 2001, Unrelated: A defecting Iraqi Lieutenant General claims
that Iraq trains terrorists to attack US civilians.

November 7, 2001, Unrelated: Turkish police arrest two people who attempted
to sell weapons-grade uranium.

November 7, 2001: The House votes 405-2 to reestablish Radio Free Afghanistan.

November 7, 2001, Unrelated: Major League Baseball owners vote to disband
two teams. No team has been kicked out of the major leagues since 1899.

November 7. 2001, Unrelated: A federal appeals court overturns the $5 billon
fine on Exxon from the Valdez crash and oil spill as excessive.

November 7, 2001, Unrelated: A US judge declares that US-based Yahoo
corporation is not bound by French laws and does not have to pay a fine
imposed on it by a French judge for not reviewing Internet auctions to
ensure no items are sold that are illegal in France, specifically Nazi
war trinkets and memorabilia.

November 7, 2001: The US designates as terrorists the Aaran Money Wire Service,
Abbas Abdi Ali, Abdi Abdulaziz Ali, Abdirisak Aden, Abdullahi Hussein Kahie,
Ahmed Nur Ali Jim'ale, Al Bakara Exchange Limited Liability Corporation,
Al Taqwa Trade, Property,and Industry Company Limited, Al-Barakaat,
Al-Barakaat Bank, Al-Barakaat Bank of Somalia, Al-Barakaat Group of
Companies Somalia Limited, Al-Barakat Finance Group, Al-Barakat Financial
Holding Company, Al-Barakat Global Telecommunications (Barakaat
Globetelcompany), Al-Barakaat Wiring Service, Al-Barakat International
(Baraco) , Al-Barakat Investments, Albert Friedrich Armand Huber (Ahmed
Huber), Ali Ghaleb Himmat, Asat Trust Reg., Bank Al Taqwa Limited,
Baraka Trading Company, Barakaat Boston, Barakaat Construction Company,
Barakaat Enterprise, Barakaat Group of Companies, Barakaat International,
Barakaat International Companies, Barakaat International Foundation,
Barakaat International Incorporated, Barakaat North America Incorporated,
Barakaat Red Sea Telecommunications, Barakaat Telecommunications
Company Somalia, Barakaat Telecommunications Company Limited, Barakat
Bank and Remittances, Barakat Computer Consulting, Barakat Consulting
Group, Barakat Global Telephone Company, Barakat Post Express, Barakat
Global Telephone Company, Barakat Post Express, Barakat Refreshment
Company, Barakat Wire Transfer Company, Barako Trading Company Limited
Liability Corporation, Dahir Ubeidullahi Aweys, Garad Jama(Garad K. Nor),
Global Service International, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, Heyatul Ulya,
Hussein Mahamud Abdullkadir, Liban Hussein, Mohamed Mansour, Nada
Management Organization SA (Al Taqwa Management Organization), Parka
Trading Company, Red Sea Barakat Company Limited, Somali International
Releif Organization, Somali Internet Company, Somali Network AB (SOM NET),
Youssef Mustafa Nada, Youssef M. Nada and Company Gesellschaft MBH,
Yusaf Ahmed Ali, and Zeinab Mansour-Fattouh.

November 7, 2001: The Army of God mails over 200 letters claiming to
contain anthrax.

November 7, 2001, Unrelated: Former President Clinton gives a speech in
which he discusses the long history of terror and massacres in human
society, including the US's genocide of native Americans and practice
of slavery for which Clinton highlights the US's success in overcoming
such practices. Washington Times columnist Joseph Curl claims that Clinton
declared the US deserved the terrorist attack for having practiced such
things in the past, an allegation repeated by conservative media including
Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

November 8, 2001: Al-Barakaat, Somalia's largest corporation, denies the
US's allegations that it funds terrorists.

November 8, 2001: Pakistani dictator Musharraf continues to plead that
the US stop bombing Afghanistan during Ramadan.

November 8, 2001: Pakistan closes the Taliban's embassy in Karachi.

November 8, 2001: Refuses to meet with Palestinian Authority President
Yasser Arafat until Arafat stops attacks on Israeli civilians.

November 8, 2001: Postmaster General states that the US Postal Service
requires an extra $5 billion.

November 8, 2001, Unrelated: Airplane manufacturer Northrop-Grumman buys
Newport News Shipbuilding. Newport News is the US's only builder of
aircraft carriers.

November 8, 2001: Reports intent to cut the US nuclear arsenal by
up to two thirds. In January, clarifies this by saying that the weapons
will not be destroyed, merely disassembled and stored.

November 8, 2001: Japan pledges 3 warships to support the US.

November 8, 2001: Pakistani paper the Frontier Post reports that 45 US
Special Forces soldiers have died in numerous ground raids on Afghanistan.
Most reports to date have been that there has only been one ground raid,
and the US has denied taking any casualties in it. The same report states that
the Taliban shot down a large low flying plane that they claimed to be a B-52.

November 8, 2001, Unrelated: The Federal Elections Commission officially
recognizes the Green Party.

November 8, 2001: States that American children have donated over 1 million
dollars. In an earlier speech, he had asked children to each send a dollar
to the White House.

November 8, 2001: States that he is leading efforts to place airport
security under federal control. In Congress, Democrats have been advancing
this agenda, while Republicans have solidified against it.

November 8, 2001: King Abdullah of Jordan states his support of the US
bombing Afghanistan through Ramadan.

November 8, 2001: Pakistani police shoot and kill four rioters during
an anti-US riot.

November 8, 2001: Indian Primer Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee calls the
US campaign on Afghanistan "poorly prepared", and requests a greater role
for India.

November 8, 2001: Saudi officials express anger that Bush has not followed
up on a prior promise to create a peace plan between Israel and the
Palestinian Authority.

November 8, 2001: Germany's Green Party demands restrictions on the use
of German troops in the US's war with Afghanistan, and Green Party leader
Joschka Fischer threatens to quit the Party unless it supports the war.

November 8. 2001: An Indian reporter asks Bush how the US could have the
moral authority to go to war against terrorists when it urges India to
accept terrorism and not fight back. Bush responds that "terrorism is
evil, and all of us must work together to fight evil".

November 8, 2001: Attorney General Ashcroft allows federal police to eavesdrop
on communications between suspects and their lawyers.

November 8, 2001, Unrelated: The State of Alabama Board of Education
votes unanimously to place warning labels on high school biology textbooks
warning that the subject matter is controversial and should be questioned.

November 9, 2001: The Northern Alliance seizes the important city
of Mazar e-Sharif, executes prisoners of war and seizes a UN food convoy.

November 9, 2001, Unrelated: Anthrax is reported to have been found in a
British Petroleum facility in Vietnam.

November 9, 2001, Unrelated: Anthrax is found in four New Jersey post offices.

November 9, 2001: Iranian President Mohammed Khatami speaks at
Seton Hall university in New Jersey, the first time he has visited
US soil other than visits to the United Nations.

November 9, 2001: Cuba refuses the US's offer of aid after a hurricane
damages the island nation, but instead requests that it be allowed to
legally buy and import US food and medicine.

November 9, 2001: Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy writes a
letter to Attorney General Ashcroft demanding answers for Ashcroft's
expansion of powers and refusal to appear before Congress.

November 10, 2001, Unrelated: bin Laden reportedly claims to have nuclear
and chemical weapons. Another translation of the interview has bin Laden
stating that the US is already using nuclear and chemical weapons against
Afghanistan, but not claiming that he has them himself. bin Laden also
states that Afghanistan is the only Islamic country.

November 10, 2001: China is officially inducted into the World Trade
Organization.

November 10, 2001: Speaking before the United Nations, warns that countries
which ignore or support terrorism will eventually become overthrown by
terrorists, and announces his intent to create a state named Palestine.

November 10, 2001: Switzerland allows US humanitarian flights over
its airspace.

November 10, 2001: Pakistan deports British journalist Christina Lamb after
she uncovers efforts by the Pakistani military intelligence service to
arm and resupply the Taliban.

November 10, 2001: In Rome, 20,000 march in opposition to the US war in
Afghanistan, while a counterprotest supporting the war gathers 100,000 in
the official numbers given by the Italian police. Other numbers suggest there
were as many as 240,000 anti-war protesters and as few as 40,000 pro-war
protesters, depending on who you ask.

November 10, 2001, Unrelated: Serbian secret police block a main highway
for an hour to protest the extradition without their knowledge of
suspected war criminals that they had arrested.

November 10, 2001: With the United States among the absent, 165 countries
agree to begin implementing the Kyoto Protocol anti-pollution treaty.

November 10, 2001: Secretary of State Colin Powell says the Northern Alliance
must not be allowed to capture Afghanistan's capitol Kabul.

November 10, 2001, Unrelated: The Pakistan News Service reports that
bin Laden owns at least one nuclear bomb, a 2 kiloton "briefcase"
device built by Russia in 1988, and has probably imported it into
the United States.

November 10, 2001: Professor Noam Chomsky says that the US war in Afghanistan
is a worse act of terrorism than the attack on the US on September 11, and
that the US has no authority to demand the extradition of bin Laden because
it refused to extradite a criminal wanted by Haiti. He clarifies his
definition of terrorism by saying that all states are terrorist by their
ability to commit acts of aggression.

November 11, 2001, Unrelated: The Daily Telegraph reports receiving an
internally distributed al Qaeda videotape in which bin Laden admits
carrying out the terrorist attack in September. Previously, bin Laden
has only said that attacks would continue until his demands are met, but
has not outright claimed responsibility. In the video, he is also reported
to state that victims of the attack were not innocent because they were
involved in the American economy, that "yes, indeed, we kill innocents",
and that "killing Jews is the highest priority".

November 11, 2001, Unrelated: Anthrax is found in the offices of Senators
Dianne Feinstein(CA), Larry Craig(ID), and Bob Graham(FL). All three
offices are located in the same building as Daschle's office where a
letter containing anthrax was received, and it is believed the anthrax
came from the same letter.

November 11, 2001: The Northern Alliance captures the city of Taloqan.
US bombing of the Taliban's front lines is reportedly a major contributing
factor in the recent successes of the Alliance, whose forces were in
retreat before the US and its allies got involved. The Alliance also
reports that it is in position to seize Kabul at any time.

November 11, 2001: The Taliban reports seeing Russian and Indian
officers on the ground in Afghanistan.

November 11, 2001: Karl Rove, one of Bush's top advisors, meets with
movie industry executives to discuss entering nationalist imagery into
popular entertainment and creating public service advertisements using
movie and television stars.

November 11, 2001: The Republic of China on Taiwan is inducted into
the World Trade Organization.

November 11, 2001, Unrelated: Two of Pakistan's top nuclear scientists
report having met bin Laden twice this year while working for a relief
organization in Afghanistan.

November 11, 2001: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld announces that the US has
bombed suspected biological and chemical weapons production facilities
in Afghanistan.

November 11, 2001: Representative Ron Paul claims that the recent
police powers act was not made available for Congressmen to read before
it was approved without any debate.

November 11, 2001: Announces that Pakistan will receive $1 billion
in aid as a reward for assisting the US.

November 11, 2001: After two months of delay, newspapers release the
results of a unofficial recount of Florida's presidential election
ballots showing Gore winning by every standard in which each vote is
counted, although by not more than 60 to 115 votes out of the six
million cast. The media concentrates on Bush winning if ballots from
certain counties are ignored, and even Democratic papers announce that
the "official" result is a Bush victory. During the recount and delay,
every leak to the media from the recount operation has been that Gore votes
were being found at an exponentially higher rate than Bush votes and that
the eventual result was certain to be an indisputable landslide Gore victory.

November 11, 2001: The remains of Egyptian dead of a plane crash outside
of New York two years earlier are delivered to Egypt.

November 11, 2001, Unrelated: Terrorist mastermind Yasser Arafat is
greeted with great applause by the United Nations General Assembly,
greater than was given to Bush when he spoke the previous day.

November 12, 2001: After refusing to freeze the assets of the terrorist
Hizballah organization, Lebanon announces that it is in full cooperation
with the US's fight against terrorism. 

November 12, 2001, Unrelated: In New York, an Airbus A300 crashes on
takeoff after both engines, the tail fin, and a wing fall off the plane,
killing all 266 passengers and crew. The crash is blamed on turbulence
from the wake of another jet.

November 12, 2001: The Northern Alliance advances throughout Afghanistan,
conquering Harat and the capitol Kabul. The Alliance asks the United
Nations to send peacekeepers to assist in forming a government.

November 12, 2001: King Abdullah of Jordan announces that he has been
discussing with other Arab leaders the forming of a collective treaty
recognizing Israel's existence in exchange for Israel giving land to
Arab refugees and their descendants for an independent, third state in
Palestine. The refugees, who have since the wars called themselves
Palestinians as if they are the only ones, were denied integration into
the societies of any regional state except for Jordan while Israel currently
grants them self-rule and autonomy over the lands it conquered from Jordan
and Egypt in 1967. The United States has been key in preventing various
regional conflicts from turning into larger wars, and Bush has recently
stated his desire for a solution similar to what Abdullah recommends.

November 12, 2001: An 82mm mortar is fired at a United Nations patrol
in Kuwait, and two people in military garb are seen firing from across
the Iraqi border into Kuwait. The mortar's trajectory suggests it was fired
from Iraq. When Iraq is asked to investigate, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister
Tariq Azis says that "the Kuwaitis always fabricate lies against Iraq
as part of the American campaign".

November 12, 2001: Places military aircraft in Tajikistan airfields.

November 12, 2001: The aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis leaves port
to relieve the USS Carl Vinson.

November 13, 2001: The US intentionally bombs the Kabul offices of
independent television network Al-Jazeera, eliminating the station's
ability to broadcast from Afghanistan.

November 13, 2001, Unrelated: A German court convicts four people,
including three Libyan Embassy employees, of the bombing of a disco
in 1986 that killed two US soldiers.

November 13, 2001, Unrelated: For the first time ever, a black man, Wilton
Gregory, is elected the top Roman Catholic bishop of the United States.

November 13, 2001: Orders the creation of a military tribunal to try
foreign-born suspects in secret and outside the rule of either civilian
or military law. No such tribunal has been convened since WW2, during
which the Supreme Court had declared that someone who enters the US
"for the purposes of waging war by destruction of life or property" is
subject to such trials.

November 13, 2001: Reaches an agreement with Russia to cut the size of
the countries' nuclear arsenals. Outside of the agreement, pledges to
reduce the US arsenal by 5,000 warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200.
Later reports state that the agreement fell through.

November 13, 2001: The Saudi royal family buys four pages of advertisements
in the Washington Times to build public support for the King.

November 13, 2001: The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a group
created by Senator Joe Lieberman and Lynne Cheney, Vice President
Dick Cheney's wife, releases a report titled "Defending Civilization"
which names and accuses 40 college professors and Wesleyan University's
president of not being patriotic enough for having said such things as
"We should build bridges and relationships, not simply bombs and walls",
"I deplore those who are using rhetoric and deploying troops without even
thinking before they speak", "An eye for an eye leaves the world blind",
"Not all Americans want revenge", "Ignorance breeds hate", and "If
Osama bin Laden is confirmed to be behind the attacks, the United States
should bring him before an international tribunal on charges of crimes
against humanity". A day earlier, the same organization issued a press
release in support of another college professor who had referred to the
Unites States as "the United Snakes" and whose opinion of the September 11
terrorists was that "anyone who can blow up the Pentagon has my vote".

November, 2001: Reports appear that hundreds of schoolchildren were
massacred by the Northern Alliance in Mazar e-Sharif. Other reports
are that five hundred Taliban soldiers and allied militia were trapped
in a school complex and fought to the last man, most dying as the building
was collapsed by Alliance tanks. There is no apparent link between the two
sets of reports, and each report differed from others that were similar.

November, 2001: It is reported that Taliban troops are infiltrating
refugee camps in Pakistan. Pakistan begins fortifying their border
within days.

November, 2001: The Northern Alliance retreats in disarray from
Kunduz after being fired upon by Taliban troops whose commander had
promised their surrender. Later, hundreds of Taliban soldiers are executed
by Arab and Pakistani fighters, alternatively reported as either volunteer
militiamen or an elite al Qaeda brigade, who believed the Taliban were ready
to surrender. Refugees claim that these foreign-born soldiers are
rounding up and executing all men of Tajik and Uzbek descent.

November 2001: The Northern Alliance announces that it will take no
prisoners who are of foreign blood.

November 2001: US libraries are ordered to destroy public records which
could contain information that could be used by terrorists against
crucial public facilities. 

November 2001, Unrelated: China expels 35 foreigners who had demonstrated
in support of the Falun Gong movement which China considers an illegal
expression of religion and a terrorist cult.

November 2001, Unrelated: California's department of health declares that
materials with radioactivity under 25 millirads / year, equivalent to 175
medical X-rays, may be freely dumped in public landfills without special
permits or needing to label the waste radioactive.

November 14, 2001: Orders the filling to capacity of the US's Strategic
Oil Reserve, which has never before met its capacity of 700 million barrels.

November 14, 2001: The Western aid workers charged with proselytizing
are released by conquering Alliance troops to the Red Cross,
who call in United States helicopters to retrieve them.

November 14, 2001, Unrelated: Slate Magazine columnist Timothy Noah
reports that "Adnan Khashoggi is connected to every shocking event
that has occurred since 1960, usually by no more than one or two degrees.
A partial list would include Iran-Contra, Wedtech, BCCI, the Marcos
Philippine kleptocracy, the Synfuels fiasco, and the discovery of
buried mustard gas in the pricy Spring Valley neighborhood of
Washington, D.C. To these we must now add the tragic events of Sept. 11."

November 14, 2001, Unrelated: Senator Paul Wellstone introduces a
bill to prevent Major League Baseball from disbanding two teams.

November 14, 2001, Unrelated: Congressman James Traficant calls for
the overthrow of Iran's government.

November 15, 2001: A militia of 1000 Hazara ethnics marches on Kabul.

November 15, 2001: Papers on the production of nuclear and chemical
weapons, as well as inventory records of al Qaeda's military equipment,
are discovered in a Taliban Defense Ministry facility in Afghanistan.
From officials' statements on the contents of the documents, it is
determined that one of them was based on a famous hoax from the
Journal of Irreproducible Results, titled "How to Build an Atom Bomb".

November 15, 2001, Unrelated: Conservative groups accuse Senator Patrick
Leahy and the Democratic Party of racism for not confirming a Hispanic
judge. Leahy's spokesman claims that the Judiciary Committee has been
too busy to get around to it.

November 15, 2001: Mohammad al-Alami, Al-Jazeera's District of Columbia
correspondent, is arrested at Waco airport after the station's credit card
which he used is linked to transactions to Afghanistan. He is questioned
and released.

November 15, 2001: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld releases pictures of
American troops fighting alongside Northern Alliance soldiers.

November 15, 2001: German Chancellor Schroeder barely wins a vote of
no-confidence in the lower house of Parliament, 336-326. Many lawmakers
had opposed his support of the US war in Afghanistan and his commitment
to send 3,900 German troops.

November 16, 2001, Unrelated: A letter sent to Senator Patrick Leahy
tests positive for anthrax. The letter was mailed within the same day
and location as the letter sent to Senator Daschle.

November 16, 2001: Economic reports indicate a slight deflation in the US
due mainly to sharply reduced energy costs.

November 16, 2001: The Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and
Unconventional Warfare releases a memo condemning Palestinian Authority
President Yasser Arafat's past and present use of terrorism for political
gain and discouraging the Bush administration's attempts to support
Arafat without stopping his use of terrorism.

November 16, 2001: A woman is visited by Secret Service agents who accuse
her of having "anti-American material", supposedly a poster of Bush hanging
himself. After she shows them a poster of Bush hanging lynch victims
representing the people executed by Texas during his term as governor, the
agents decide that the poster is not sufficiently anti-American to be 
a problem.

November 17, 2001: Congress passes a bill to deputize airport security
guards as federal workers for the next three years.

November 17, 2001: The United Nations World Food Programme announces
that it is getting enough food into Afghanistan to save the estimated
six million people who were at risk of starvation due to the drought
and civil war. The US bombing had made it difficult to deliver aid.

November 18, 2001, Unrelated: An Iraqi oil tanker attempting to run the
US blockade sinks after being boarded by US troops. Two American sailors
and four Iraqis are killed. The sinking is reported as an accident.

November 18, 2001: Congressmen Brian Kerns, Darrel Issa, Nick Rahall, and
John Cooksey meet with Syrian President Bashar Assad to discuss improving
relations between Syria and the US, and removing Hizballah from the US's
list of terrorist organizations.

November 18, 2001: Pakistan, Turkey, Jordan, and Bangladesh agree to
provide troops to secure Afghanistan's future government.

November 18, 2001: Tens of thousands march in London against the war. Police
say there were 15,000 but organizers claim 100,000 marched.

November 18, 2001, Unrelated: Phillips Petroleum and Conoco announce plans
to merge and become the US's third largest oil company.

November 18, 2001, Unrelated: Senators Tom Daschle and Richard Gephart 
visit Mexican relatives of victims lost in the attack on the World Trade
Center.

November 18, 2001: Katharine Seelye of the New York Times reports that
Bush has been rescinding Clinton's environmental regulation policies
over the past two months. The report includes as examples allowing road
building in national forests, making public lands more accessible to
mining companies, weakening energy use standards for appliances, and
weakening wetland protections. The road building regulation had been
rescinded in April, putting the report's accuracy in doubt.

November 19, 2001: Journalists Harry Burton and Azizullah Haidari
of Reuters, Julio Fuentes of El Mundo, and Maria Grazia Cutuli of
Corriere della Sera are captured and executed in Afghanistan by an unknown
armed party which later robs their bodies. Other journalists who were
captured are released when their guide claims that they are Muslims.

November 19, 2001, Unrelated: A letter sent to the Calvo Mackenna Childrens'
Hospital in Chile tests positive for anthrax. The letter was mailed from
Switzerland, although the return address is in Florida.

November 19, 2001: Signs a bill to federalize all airport security personnel.

November 19, 2001: Secretary of State Colin Powell gives a speech announcing
a vision for "two states, Israel and Palestine, side by side", ignoring the
existing Palestinian Arab state in Palestine which is called Jordan. Powell
also accuses the Palestinian Authority of not acting on the declarations they
give the West that they are taking steps to end terrorist attacks, and urges
Israel to remove security checkpoints and to stop retaliating against terrorist
attacks.

November 19, 2001, Unrelated: Congressman Saxby Chambliss proposes
that Georgia "arrest every Muslim that crosses the state line".

November 19, 2001, Unrelated: The United Kingdom Criminal Injuries
Compensation Authority announces that it will pay for mental health
costs for relatives of victims of the terrorist attacks in New York
and Washington who watched the events on television.

November 20, 2001: Hosts a Ramadan dinner for the ambassadors of over
fifty Muslim countries.

November 20, 2001: The Northern Alliance accepts the UN's invitation to
hold peace talks in Germany.

November 20, 2001: Raises the bounty on bin Laden's death or capture from
$5 million to $25 million.

November 20, 2001: The US accuses North Korea and Iraq of developing
biological weapons, and requests that the UN inspect these countries.

November 20, 2001: The State of Oregon sues Attorney General John Ashcroft
to uphold the state's assisted suicide law.

November 20, 2001: Thomas Ricks of The Age, an Australian paper, reports
that the CIA has been conducting its own attacks on Afghanistan with its
own ground forces and aircraft operating outside of the US armed forces'
chain of command.

November 21, 2001, Unrelated: A 93 year old recluse in Connecticut dies
of anthrax.

November 21, 2001: Airport security workers threaten to strike over the
recently enacted airport bill which requires airport security workers
to be US citizens. In some airports, as many as 80% of security workers
are immigrants who would lose their jobs.

November 21, 2001: The Navy announces that it will begin searching
merchant ships in the Persian gulf.

November 21, 2001: City of Portland, Oregon police refuse to cooperate with
Attorney General Ashcroft's request to question 5,000 men throughout the
United States. Oregon law forbids questioning anyone who is not accused
of a crime.

November 21, 2001: Pakistan sentences Maulana Sufi Mohammed, leader of
the Tehrik Nifaz Shariat-e-Mohammedi, to three years in jail for
possessing illegal weapons and incitement to violence upon his return
from Afghanistan where he led a militia.

November 21, 2001: The US and 29 other nations sign the Cyber Crime Treaty.

November 22, 2001: Pakistan closes the Taliban's embassy in Islamabad.

November 22, 2001: The United Nations requests the United States stop 
dropping food aid on Afghanistan after two boys mistake cluster bomblets
for aid packages in separate incidents, the bomblets killing one and taking
the hand of the other.

November 22, 2001: Taliban commanders surrender Kunduz, but fighting
continues and the Northern Alliance is unable to enter the city.

November 22, 2001: The Taliban offers a bounty of $50 million for the
capture of George W. Bush.

November 22, 2001: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announces that al Qaeda
troops should be killed or imprisoned, rather than allowed to withdraw.

November 22, 2001, Unrelated: China announces its intent to land a man
on the moon within ten years.

November 23, 2001: The Northern Alliance reports that Pakistani military
planes are airlifting Taliban-allied soldiers out of Kunduz.

November 23, 2001, Unrelated: The Wisconsin Supreme Court upholds a ruling
that forbids a man from having any more children after he refused to pay
$25,000 in overdue child support for his nine children.

November 23, 2001: Over 1000 Taliban soldiers surrender in Kunduz.

November 23, 2001: A World Food Program convoy is attacked by bandits in
Afghanistan, and convoy personnel are robbed of money and personal items.

November 24, 2001, Unrelated: Islamic Resistance's leader declares war
on the United States after its top general is killed by Israel, calling
the killing of a soldier during wartime a "terrorist act".

November 24, 2001: In a Democratic Party radio address, representatives
declare that women must play a role in the new government of Afghanistan.

November 24, 2001: It is reported that eight bombs strike Pakistani soil
during a US raid on Taliban positions on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

November 24, 2001: Spain refuses to extradite al Qaeda suspects to the
United States unless they will be tried in civilian courts and will not
be subject to the death penalty. 

November 25, 2001, Unrelated: A storm of six tornados kills 12 in Alabama,
Mississippi, and Arkansas.

November 25, 2001, Unrelated: According to Associated Press reporter
Ted Bridis, data security company Network Associates has assured the FBI
that its software will avoid detecting government backdoors and wiretaps.
Network Associates vehemently denies that it has had any contact with the
government. Bridis claims to have gotten his information from one of the
company's senior executives. Competing company Symantec soon announces that
it will do the same to its software.

November 25, 2001: 300 al Qaeda soldiers who promised their surrender from
Kunduz to the Northern Alliance smuggle grenades into their prison in
Mazar e-Sharif, where they overpower their guards and battle with
Northern Alliance troops. The US deploys 40 troops and drops 30 bombs on
the prison complex to assist the 500 Northern Alliance troops battling
the POW revolt. Hundreds of al Qaeda soldiers die in a battle that lasts
three days. A CIA agent and 40 Northern Alliance troops, including three
generals, are killed in the fighting and five US soldiers are injured by
a stray bomb. Amnesty International calls for an international investigation
into the "disproportionate use of force", as Iraq calls the result a
"massacre" and Pakistani religious leaders call for a day of mourning
over the "barbaric act". International journalists at the scene have reported
that the al-Qaeda soldiers fought to the last man, while some biased
organizations have reported that not a single captured soldier had
fought back and they were all massacred by US troops while sitting
peacefully in their cells, a widespread claim easily refuted by television
footage of the battle although six bodies were found to have had their
hands bound.

November 25, 2001: The Northern Alliance captures Kunduz and executes
scores of captured foreign fighters.

November 25, 2001, Unrelated: Advanced Cell Technology claims to have
successfully cloned a human embryo.

November 25, 2001: The National Bureau of Economic Research announces that
the US is officially in a recession. The standards used by the NBER for
defining a 'recession' are not reported, other than that they are different
from the standard of six months of declining growth used by most economists.

November 26, 2001: Hundreds of US Marines are airlifted to a position near
the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. Marine helicopters strike an incoming
Taliban armoured convoy. The new base is dubbed Camp Rhino.

November 26, 2001: Declares that producing weapons of mass destruction is
a terrorist act, and warns Iraq of consequences if it does not allow UN
inspectors to search for evidence of producing such weapons.

November 26, 2001: The United Nations condemns the US's actions against
terrorist supporting businesses because people rely on these businesses
and would have financial problems if the businesses were shut down. The
UN also claims that there is no evidence to connect al-Barakaat to al Qaeda;
The US has claimed bin Laden is a founding member of the company, and that
there are numerous links between the two.

November 26, 2001: When asked if the United States would invade Spain in
the future of the war on terrorism, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer
states that the United States is not currently invading Spain.

November 27, 2001: Shots are fired across the North and South Korean border.
South Korea accuses the North of firing first, but says the shots appear
to have been accidental.

November 27, 2001: Representatives from various factions within the Northern
Alliance hold peace talks in Germany. It is decided that an international
peacekeeping force will not be accepted.

November 27, 2001: Journalist Ken Hechtman of the Montral Mirror is
captured and imprisoned by an unknown party in Afghanistan. He is released
after four days of negotiations.

November 27, 2001: Turkey asks the United States to pay it $5 million a
month for the operating costs of the 90 man special forces unit it has
planned to send to Afghanistan, and says that the costs will go up as the
unit uses additional equipment.

November 27, 2001, Unrelated: The Hubble Space Telescope detects sodium
in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a distant star.

November 27, 2001: Attorney General Ashcroft reports that around 600
people are still being held of the 1100 arrested, and many of them are
suspected of being terrorists.

November 28, 2001: Ulf Stromberg, a cameraman for TV4, is killed by robbers
in Afghanistan.

November 28, 2001: Jordan, Egypt, and Syria warn the US not to attack Iraq.

November 28, 2001, Unrelated: The credit rating of Enron energy corporation
is lowered to "junk bond" status as its stock is dumped in the most massive
sell off in history. The company had reported $12 billion in debt versus $62
billion in assets, but secret debts have since been disclosed by accountants
and a buyout by another company was cancelled. Enron files for bankruptcy
three days later.

November 28, 2001: Appoints Harold "Hal" Stratton, former Attorney General of
New Mexico, co-chair of the Lawyers for Bush campaign, and president of
the anti-regulation Rio Grande foundation; as head of the Consumer Product
Safety Commission. Stratton had earlier signed onto a letter from fifty
right-wing organizations that urged Bush to drop the antitrust suit against
Microsoft, blaming the current economic recession on a judge's decision to
break up Microsoft as punishment for its crimes and praising Bush's upper
class tilted tax cut as "growth-oriented".

November 29, 2001: Egypt complains to the US that it has not been notified
about the arrest of Egyptian citizens and has not been told their names.

November 29, 2001: Surviving al Qaeda shoot two medics at Mazar e-Sharif,
and a third medic is reported missing. The United Nations calls for an
inquiry into the deaths of the revolting prisoners.

November 29, 2001: Rejects Cuba's offer to compensate Americans who lost
property in Castro's rise to power in exchange for the lifting of the
US embargo. Earlier Cuban offers had come with a demand that the US pay
it $181 billion, but it is not reported whether this demand was a part
of the current offer.

November 29, 2001: Meets with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Anzar and
praises Spain's support of the US.

November 29, 2001: North Korea announces that it will take "countermeasures"
against the United States.

November 29, 2001: Attorney General John Ashcroft publicly accuses
prison escapee Clayton Wagner of carrying out terrorist threats against
abortion clinics in the name of the "Army of God". The same day, he also
offers amnesty to illegal immigrants who offer information against al Qaeda.

November 29, 2001: Defends his plan to try terrorist suspects in secret
tribunals by saying "we are at war". The United States Congress has not
declared war.

November 29, 2001, Unrelated: News photographer Jason Henske is arrested
for treason after taking pictures of a nuclear power plant. The county
attorney decides not to prosecute.

November 29, 2001, Unrelated: US government sources are said to report
that the type of anthrax used in the attacks on Senators Daschle and
Leahy is a specific strain which is only available to five government
and private labs, and two of those have only had it since spring. It
is also reported that the Senate office building is completely
contaminated by anthrax on all floors.

November 29, 2001: A Washington Post poll shows 59% of the American public
supports trying terrorism suspects in secret tribunals rather than lawful
courts with that number rising to 64% when told Bush supports this,
73% support eavesdropping on suspects' discussions with their lawyers,
78% support invading Iraq, and 60% support risking large military
casualties to capture bin Laden. Bush's approval rating is reported
at 89% with 69% strongly approving.

November 29, 2001: Secretary of Interior Gale Norton is charged with
contempt of court.

November 29, 2001: The Department of Homeland Security announces that a
terrorist attack is planned within the next few days.

November 30, 2001: Asks Russia not to allow the closing of bankrupt TV-6,
Russia's largest independent television station.

November 30, 2001: China and Russia pledge to fight terrorism no matter
where it happens or who supports it.

November 30, 2001, Unrelated: Republican National Committee Chairman
James Gilmore announces his resignation effective January. Gilmore's term
as Governor of Virginia expires around the same time.

November 30, 2001: A senior Pashtun delegate walks out of peace talks
being held in Germany, claiming inadequate representation of Pashtuns.


December 1, 2001: 80 surviving al Qaeda soldiers from the revolt at Mazar
e-Sharif surrender to the Northern Alliance. Three claim to be US citizens,
and one is quickly identified as John Walker of Fairfax, California.

December 1, 2001, Unrelated: Two members of Shining Path are arrested
in Peru for conspiring to bomb the US embassy.

December 1, 2001: The Pakistani Observer reports that the bodies of
124 US soldiers killed in the war are being transferred to Germany where
they will be classified as missing in action. Dawn, another Pakistani
paper, reports that over 500 US soldiers have died in the war. Another
report mirrored in several Arab news sources is that 50 US soldiers died
attacking the city of Harat. The US has only reported the death of one
CIA agent in battle, and a half-dozen soldiers dead in accidents.

December 2, 2001: 80 Taliban soldiers held prisoner in Mazar e-Sharif
die as an explosion destroys the cargo container serving as their prison,
according to the Daily Telegraph. It is not clear whether they are the
same as the 80 who surrendered earlier. The same article describes the
response to the armed revolt as a "slaughter of prisoners of war" and a
"massacre".

December 2, 2001: Northern Alliance commanders report that the US has
errantly bombed several villages in eastern Afghanistan over the previous
night, killing at least 70 civilians. The US denies the report.

December 2, 2001: Announces plans to add 400 National Guard troops to
the Canadian border. 

December 3, 2001: After a series of Arab attacks kill 25 Israeli
civilians in two days, Bush states that Israel has a right to defend
itself, a reversal of his prior policy that Israel must not retaliate
to attacks upon its people, and the US votes against a series of UN
resolutions blaming Israel for the terrorist attacks and declaring that
Israel has no right to claim jurisdiction over Jerusalem.

December 3, 2001: Freezes the assets of the Holy Land Foundation, the
largest Muslim charity in the US, due to ties between it and the terrorist
Islamic Resistance organization. The act is condemned by the American
Muslim Alliance, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Islamic Society of
North America, Islamic Circle of North America, Muslim American Society,
Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the Muslim Student Association of USA
and Canada.

December 3, 2001: In a cover story on the Bush presidency, Newsweek
magazine heralds Bush's ignorance of history as making a president who
"is busy making history.. Bush would rather look forward than backward..
the result is a president who operates without evident remorse or second
guessing". 

December 4, 2001: Dispels criticism about his plan for secret military
tribunals by saying that the US is at war, and that since no tribunals have
been held yet so it should not be a problem.

December 4, 2001: Northern Alliance representatives appoint Pashtun chieftain
Hamid Karzai as their leader.

December 4, 2001: Three US troops are killed by an errant US bomb, which
also injured 19 Americans and five Northern Alliance soldiers including
Pashtun chieftain Hamid Karzai.

December 4, 2001: Tajikistan allows the US and France the use of an
airport for military purposes.

December 5, 2001, Unrelated: The US and Russia announce that they have
complied with the START treaty to dismantle nuclear warheads and delivery
systems.

December 5, 2001, Unrelated: The city council of Paris, France, confers
honorary citizenship upon convicted cop killer and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The symbolic honor was last bestowed upon Pablo Picasso in 1971.

December 5, 2001, Unrelated: The House of Representatives votes 396-11 to
cut off aid to Zimbabwe unless the country respects the land ownership of
white farmers. White descendants of British colonists own most farmland in
the African country, and black militias have often lynched white farmowners
to steal their land. Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has slated 95% of
white-owned farmland for seizure, and stuffed the Supreme Court with four
additional judges after they declared his policies illegal, in order to
obtain a different decision which the extra new judges gave him.

December 5, 2001, Unrelated: Turkey asks the US to lift import restrictions
on Turkish goods and forgive its $5 billion debt.

December 5, 2001: Pakistan arrests 23 suspected al Qaeda members who had
snuck across the border from Afghanistan.

December 5, 2001: France criticizes the US for rejecting the Kyoto Protocol,
which was adopted by 165 countries.

December 5, 2001: 73 members of the Genovese Mafia crime syndicate are
arrested by the FBI.

December 5, 2001: General Electric is ordered to pay for the dredging
of the Hudson River which it polluted.

December 5, 2001: The Senate approves a bill to allow Mexican trucks
free travel on US highways.

December 5, 2001, Unrelated: Pat Robertson steps down as head of the 
Christian Coalition.

December 5, 2001: The US and Israel refuse to attend the Conference of
High Contracting Parties of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The conference
document, signed by 122 countries, calls the lands Israel seized from
Egypt and Jordan in 1967 "Occupied Palestinian Lands", refers to armed
terrorist militaries and paramilitaries as "civilians" and demands they
be treated as such, and condemns Israel's policies of closing its border
and enacting economic sanctions on the Palestinian Authority when
PA-supported terrorists attack Israel. Three days later, the UN High
Commissioner for Civil Rights publicly accuses Israel of terrorism for
bombing a Palestinian Authority mortar factory.

December 5, 2001: Appoints former Montana Governor Marc Racicot as head
of the Republican Party. Racicot will be allowed to continue in his current
job as a lobbyist for Enron, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, American Forest
and Paper Association, the Recording Industry Association of America, and
other businesses and trade organizations.

December 6, 2001: The Taliban claims to have killed 93 US troops and
captured 6.

December 2001: By a margin of one vote, the House votes to give Bush
"fast track" trade authority. This allows the President to make trade
agreements which cannot be amended by Congress before they are voted on.

December 2001: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld says that the United States will
not accept any agreement which allows Taliban leader Muhammad Omar to live
in freedom. The Northern Alliance's representatives meeting in Germany
decide to allow Omar clemency when he surrenders.

December 2001: The US Commission on Civil Rights head Mary Frances Berry
refuses to seat or recognize Bush's nominee to the committee Peter Kirsanow
after the commission votes 5-3 to reject his appointment.

December 2001: Russia announces an alliance with NATO.

December 2001: The National Resource Defence Council and the Southern Utah
Wilderness Council, independent environmental groups, sue the Department
of the Interior, alleging that since Bush's inauguration the department
has leased land to oil and gas developers without conducting environmental
studies as required by law.

December 2001: Ashcroft denies the FBI's request to examine firearms
purchase records for the detainees accused of supporting terrorism.

December 2001: The World Socialist Web Site claims that Secret Service
agents visited the Artcar Museum in Houston shortly after it opened an
exhibit on November 7 titled "Secret Wars" which displayed artwork
representing "artists' response to secret wars" by the US. According
to the article, the agents inquired as to who funded the exhibit.

December 2001: The Taliban agrees to surrender Kandahar to the Northern
Alliance.

December 2001: Speaking before the US Senate, Attorney General
John Ashcroft says that people who criticize the actions and methods
of his police "scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty",
"aid terrorists", "erode our national unity", "give ammunition to America's
enemies and pause to America's friends", and "encourage people of good will
to remain silent in the face of evil".

December 2001, Unrelated: US District Judge Royce Lamberth orders the
Department of the Interior to shut off all public access to all of its
electronic information systems related to the Indian Trust Fund until these
systems can be properly secured. Security analysts hired by the judge were
able to effortlessly create, modify, and delete Indian Trust Fund records.

December 2001, Unrelated: A judge in New Jersey orders over 100 teachers
jailed for refusing to work without a contract.

December 2001, Unrelated: Police in Sweden admit to doctoring video evidence.
This is apparently unprecedented, although people have known it would
eventually happen. During the Clinton administration, US television networks
were caught doctoring news broadcasts by doing such things as adding their
logo to blank walls in the scenery and eliminating advertisements for their
competitors.

December 2001, Unrelated: Lebanese newspaper As Safir reports that Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak warned the US near the end of August that a
terrorist attack was expected soon, but he had no knowledge of the
scale of the attack.

December 2001: An Uzbek journalist reports that 10 to 15 American casualties
of war have been arriving at a single Uzbek airbase every day since
late November. The Pentagon reports that total US casualties have been
8 dead and 41 wounded.

December 2001, Unrelated: Lieutenant Colonel Martha McSally files a
lawsuit against the US government for forcing her to abide by local
discriminatory clothing customs in Saudi Arabia where she is based.

December 2001: British reporter Robert Fisk is nearly lynched by Afghan
refugees in Pakistan, his life saved by an intervening Muslim cleric. The
Afghans had apparently placed blame on him for the US bombing.

December 2001: A captured al Qaeda soldier is reported to be an Australian
citizen.

December 8, 2001: Pakistani paper Dawn reports that a meeting of Nobel
Prize for Peace laureates discussed the US war in Afghanistan, during which
retired South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu said that the US is targeting
civilians just like the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center,

December 9, 2001: The US asks Pakistan for permission to interrogate some
of its top nuclear scientists.

December 9, 2001: The US claims to have a videotape showing bin Laden
gloating over the success of his terrorists beyond his expectations on
September 11.

December 9, 2001: Yvonne Ridley, a British journalist who was imprisoned
and released by the Taliban in October, reports receiving information from
Al-Jazeera that Western intelligence agencies tried to have her killed by
the Taliban to bolster support for the war against terrorism. The documents
had purportedly been delivered to the Taliban and contained erroneous
information showing Ms. Ridley to be an Israeli Mossad agent, and included
a private photograph of her whose only copy had been kept in her apartment.

December 9, 2001: Attorney General John Ashcroft promises that terrorists
tried by "military tribunals" that are not subject to military law will
receive "full and fair" trials.

December 9, 2001: North Korea accuses the US of planning to attack it next
after Afghanistan, and pledges to inflict "unimaginably telling blows" when
the invasion comes.

December 10, 2001: University of New Hampshire economics professor Marc
Herold reports that 3,767 Afghan civilians have been killed by the US
between October 7 and December 6. This exceeds the Taliban's estimate.

December 11, 2001, Unrelated: Irv Rubin, the head of the Jewish Defense
League, and another high ranking JDL member are arrested for plotting to
bomb a Los Angeles mosque and the offices of Congressman Darrel Issa.

December 11, 2001: Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman held on immigration
charges since August, is charged with counts of conspiracy to commit
terrorist acts, destroy aircraft, murder US employees, destroy US property,
commit air piracy, and use weapons of mass destruction. France requests that
the US not impose the death penalty. Moussaoui is reported to have
been the "twentieth hijacker" who was to have participated in the
September 11 attacks before being arrested.

December 11, 2001, Unrelated: Police from many nations stage a coordinated
raid on members of the Drink or Die copyright infringement ring.

December 12, 2001, Unrelated: Charges against Russian computer programmer
Dmitri Sklyarov are postponed for a year in exchange for his willingness
to testify in a case against his employer Elcomsoft. While in Russia,
Sklyarov had written a program to read data in Adobe eBook file format,
a legal act in Russia but made criminal in the US by a law passed in 1998. 

December 12, 2001: The Christian Science Monitor reports that an al Qaeda
leader claims bin Laden is in Pakistan.

December 12, 2001, Unrelated: House Majority Leader Dick Armey announces
plans to retire at the end of his term.

December 12, 2001, Unrelated: A California appeals court decides 2-1 that
sending unsolicited e-mail constitutes trespassing.

December 13. 2001: The US releases a videotape, reportedly captured by
Northern Alliance troops in Jalalabad, that shows bin Laden casually
discussing how the attack on the World Trade Center exceeded his planned
expectations. Bush had originally refused to release the tape, and there
was a delay of several days between the announcement of its existence and
its release, leading many to theorize that it may have been faked. Some
reports are that the US released a version with no audio and English
subtitles. Egypt and Saudi Arabia announce that the tape is genuine.

December 13, 2001, Unrelated: A mail bag at the US's embassy in Austria
tests positive for anthrax.

December 13, 2001: The House passes a bill to upgrade voting machines
throughout the country.

December 13, 2001, Unrelated: Five armed men assault India's parliament,
killing six policemen and a groundskeeper. India blames the attack on
terrorist groups supported by Pakistan.

December 13, 2001: Gives notice to Russia of the US's intent to withdraw
from the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty. The treaty provides for unilateral
withdrawal in this matter.

December 13, 2001: Invokes executive privilege to deny Congress access to
documents for a wide array of matters, including investigations into campaign
fund raising abuse and abuses of power at the Boston office of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation. This prompts Republican Congressman Dan Burton to
condemn Bush as a "dictatorial president" who is "acting like he's King".

December 13, 2001, Unrelated: The FDA requests that the Red Cross be held
in contempt of court for violating medical safety regulations. 

December 13, 2001, Unrelated: The Surgeon General of the United States
declares obesity an epidemic.

December 13, 2001, Unrelated: The New York Supreme Court decides that
Internet publishers are counted as press under the First Amendment.

December 13, 2001: Nominates Bennet Raley, an opponent of the Clean Water
Act and Endangered Species Act, as Assistant Secretary of Water and Science.
His appointment is confirmed by the Senate in March.

December 14, 2001: US troops arrive in the Philippines to train Philippine
soldiers to fight against terrorists.

December 14, 2001: A freighter carrying 24,000 tons of corn to Cuba leaves
port, for the first food shipment from the US to Cuba since the 1962 embargo.

December 14, 2001: The US announces that it will offer rewards for 
information leading to the arrests of Palestinian Arabs suspected of
killing American citizens.

December 14, 2001: Citizens Against Government Waste condemns Senator Tom
Daschle for increasing farm subsidies and railroad workers' pensions.

December 14, 2001: New Zealand eliminates its air force save a single
air transport division.

December 14, 2001: Justin Huggler of The Independent, a British newspaper,
accuses the US of carrying out a massacre of Taliban troops at Kandahar's
airport. The reported method of massacre is the aerial bombing of combatants
who had not surrendered.

December 14, 2001: Pakistan allows the US the long term use of an airbase
at Jacobobad.

December, 2001, Unrelated: James Merritt, head of the Southern Baptist
Convention, calls on Christians to pray for Muslims to convert to Christianity
on the last day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

December 15, 2001: The US vetoes a UN Security Council resolution condemning
Israel.

December 15, 2001: The US claims to have heard short-range radio transmissions
from bin Laden in the area of the Tora Bora fortress in Afghanistan. After
a weeklong assault by US and regional tribal warriors (widely reported as
not being affiliated with the Northern Alliance), the tribals announce
having captured Tora Bora.

December 15, 2001: The US and India hold naval exercises off India's west
coast.

December 15, 2001, Unrelated: Biologists confirm that the anthrax from
the recent attacks on media and political figures is a type manufactured
by the US Army in the 1960s and held at five laboratories in the US.

December 15, 2001, Unrelated: Saudi foreign minister Prince Nayef states that
there is no evidence any of the hijackers on September 11 were Saudi,
despite there being recorded video and audio evidence.

December 16, 2001, Unrelated: UK Chancellor Gordon Brown asks the US
to initiate a second Marshall Plan, this one directed at impoverished
countries.

December 16, 2001, Unrelated: The CIA announces that it has and (according
to a possibly overzealous CNN editor) makes use of a stock of the same
anthrax used in the attacks on government officials and the media. Previous
reports have been that there were only five stocks in existence, none of
which was that CIA's. It is reported that the FBI is investigating a
private contractor who worked with the CIA's anthrax stock.

December 16, 2001: While giving a commencement speech at California State
University in Sacramento, Janis Heaphy, publisher of the Sacramento Bee 
newspaper, is interrupted and drowned out by hecklers when she asks
"To what degree are we willing to compromise our civil liberties in
the name of security?"

December 17, 2001, Unrelated: A fire damages Saint John's cathedral in
New York.

December 17, 2001, Unrelated: Haiti's presidential palace is captured by
rebelling soldiers in a coup attempt. Loyalists retake the building after
a day.

December 18, 2001, Unrelated: Lebanon demands the US act to restrain
Israel after Israel stages practice bombing runs on several Lebanese cities.

December 18, 2001: Yemen shells a village that reportedly contains an
al Qaeda base. Arab newspapers report that US fighter-bombers took part
in the attack.

December 18, 2001, Unrelated: Bandits kill five people in Cuba, including
two Americans.

December 19, 2001: Pakistani troops capture several hundred al Qaeda
soldiers retreating across the border. Five Pakistani soldiers are killed
when one group of surrendered al Qaeda troops overpower their guards and
escape.

December 19, 2001: 100 masked troops claiming to be American soldiers
invade the Comoros Island of Moheli, seize control of the local government
and security forces, and distribute pamphlets charging the local head of
government with supporting al Qaeda. After the US denies that these are
their troops, the Comoros army retakes control, killing five invaders.
It is theorized that the gunmen are French mercenaries who have tried to
stage several coups in Comoros.

December 19, 2001: Iran accuses US naval forces of firing upon an Iranian
tanker, wounding two crewmen.

December 19, 2001, Unrelated: Executives of Tyson Foods, the country's
largest poultry processor, are charged with smuggling illegal immigrants
into the country to work for low wages at Tyson's plants.

December 20, 2001: National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice accuses the
Iranian government of training and funding terrorist warfare against
the United States.

December 20, 2001, Unrelated: Argentina's president resigns after days
of economic riots. The new president resigns after a week.

December 20, 2001: Freezes the assets of Umnah Tameer E-nau, a charity
founded by Pakistan's former Atomic Energy Commissioner and accused of
assisting al Qaeda's nuclear weapons research, and Lashkar e-Taiba, a
group accused by India of the attack on its parliament and many earlier
terrorist attacks.

December 20, 2001: Orders civilian aircraft mechanics to continue working
without a contract.

December 20, 2001, Unrelated: Consumer advocates and government critics
condemn an amendment inserted into a defense spending bill by Senate
Appropriations Committee members Ted Stevens and Patty Murray that would
lease 100 Boeing 767 aircraft at $20 million per aircraft per year for
10 years when the purchase price of these aircraft is $110 million, and
would require the government to pay for the cost of refurbishing the
craft for civilian use. The Air Force did not ask for this deal, but
announces its support.

December 21, 2001, Unrelated: Fox News pulls a four-part series on
Israeli espionage operations against the US and removes the documents
from its Web site.

December 21, 2001: US forces bomb a convoy believed to be carrying Taliban
leaders. Other claims suggest that the convoy was carrying local politicians
to Kabul to participate in the new government. A survivor supports this,
and claims that an opposing tribe called in US air support and said they
were al Qaeda troops after a road closure forced them through this tribe's
territory. The US repeats its conviction that it hit a convoy of Taliban
leaders, claiming that reconnaissance had observed the convoy since
its point of origin leaving an al Qaeda base and that the convoy fired
surface to air missiles at US planes.

December 21, 2001: Cuban leader Castro claims that his refusal to accept
US aid and to instead demand the ability to buy the goods was
"not a political move".

December 21, 2001, Unrelated: One of the rebels arrested in connection
with the attack on India's parliament says that the attack was coordinated by
Pakistan's intelligence services.

December 21, 2001, Unrelated: Russia begins construction of its first new
warship in ten years.

December 21, 2001: The FBI issues a warning to consumers of Microsoft XP 
operating system to turn off its Universal Plug and Play features after a
remote system exploit was discovered in this five weeks earlier.

December 21, 2001, Unrelated: Congressmen Frank Wolf and Lucille Roybal-Allard
write a letter to General Electric threatening to write a law to ban
hard liquor advertising on television unless GE's subsidiary NBC voluntarily
withdraws such ads from its television broadcasts. 

December 21, 2001: The US imposes $75 million worth of trade sanctions upon
Ukraine over widespread copyright violations taking place in the country.

December 21, 2001: British peacekeepers arrive in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Afghan Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim issues an order that the peacekeepers
are not allowed to use force or to disarm any "belligerents".

December 22, 2001, Unrelated: An unidentified vessel sinks after firing
upon Japanese coast guard interceptors and receiving return fire from
the Japanese ships. Japan announces that the ship was scuttled by its
crew, was in radio contact with North Korea during the battle, was of
a similar design to a ship that fled Japanese waters and docked in
North Korea in 1999, and that Korean writing was found on the personal
effects of drowned crew. China expresses its "concern toward Japanese
use of military force in the East China Sea", and North Korea denies
that the ship was one of theirs and denounces what it calls a "crime
that is nothing but brutal piracy and unpardonable terrorism that can
only be conducted by the samurais of Japan in defiance of international
law". In June 2002, Japanese divers discover that the ship was carrying
a load of heavy infantry armament.

December 22, 2001: Pakistan leader Musharraf condemns India's decision to
recall its ambassador and cut trade routes as "arrogant and knee-jerk", and
refuses to take the same actions against India.

December 22, 2001, Unrelated: A British man with explosive in his shoe
attempts to bomb an American Airlines passenger jet, but is restrained
by crew and passengers. He is identified as Richard Reid, although the
earliest reports suggested that this was certainly a pseudonym and that
his passport with this name was therefore fraudulent.

December 22, 2001, Unrelated: The Air Force grounds all C-141 cargo planes
after the wing of one "collapses" as it is being refueled on the runway.

December 22, 2001, Unrelated: Zmag, a socialist magazine, reports that
Argentine voters have in disgust been crossing out the names of all
politicians on the ballot and writing in Osama bin Laden, and that these
votes constituted a majority in two precincts.

December 23, 2001, Unrelated: Pakistani fire kills two Indian soldiers
across the border. India shells Pakistani positions in retaliation, and
artillery battles continue throughout the month.

December 23, 2001, Unrelated: Pakistan accuses India of kidnapping and
torturing a member of its ambassador's entourage.

December 23, 2001, Unrelated: Time Magazine declares that New York Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani had a greater effect on the world than any other person
this year.

December 23, 2001: Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's former ambassador
to Pakistan, applies for asylum in Pakistan.

December 23, 2001: The Republican Party orders a full page newspaper
advertisement of Saddam Hussein's face with text that Senator Thomas Daschle
is refusing to allow any oil drilling on US soil in order to make the US
dependent upon purchasing Iraqi oil. In reality, the oil purchases have been
made for years under the United Nations' Food for Oil program wherein Iraq
is allowed to sell a small amount of oil in exchange for food and medicine
to relieve the UN blockade; and Daschle has only opposed oil drilling in
national parkland, specifically the Arctic Wildlife Refuge where drilling
for oil is a center of the Republicans' agenda.

December 23, 2001, Unrelated: Nigeria's Justice Minister is murdered in
his home by masked gunmen. Three days later, the Nigerian senate is recalled
from vacation for a special session. Two weeks later, the top aide to 
Nigeria's chief supreme court justice is murdered.

December 24, 2001: British police seize and search the cargo ship Nissa
for 20 tons of plastic explosives to be used by al Qaeda in attacks on
the United Kingdom, but find nothing. The ship, owned by the Great Eastern
Shipping Company of India, carried 26,000 tons of sugar.

December 24, 2001, Unrelated: Hundreds of arson fires are set on the outskirts
of Sydney, Australia throughout the fortnight beginning today. The fires
strain the firefighting resources of Australia and New Zealand, and many
run uncontrolled through parkland while firefighters try to save houses.
Police arrest over twenty suspected arsonists, many of whom are children.

December 25, 2001: The Pakistan Observer claims that Osama bin Laden is
dead of natural causes, specifically some form of lung disease.

December 25, 2001: Indian police report capturing a five-man al Qaeda cell.

December 25, 2001, Unrelated: India evacuates civilians from its border
with Pakistan.

December 25, 2001, Unrelated: An anonymous Kuwaiti donor gives a five and
a half yard long cake to US troops at Camp Doha.

December 25, 2001, Unrelated: Russia convicts a journalist of high treason
for videotaping Russian naval vessels dumping nuclear waste in the Pacific
Ocean.

December 25, 2001: A Secret Service agent of Arab descent and member of
Bush's security detail is denied passage on an American Airlines flight. 

December 26, 2001: The US asks Yemen to allow US troops to search for
al Qaeda members there.

December 26, 2001, Unrelated: Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev
denounces former Russian president Boris Yeltsin as "a liar" and claims
that "Russian czars didn't have the kind of privileges he had".

December 26, 2001, Unrelated: Abdul Haqq Baker, chairman of Brixton mosque
in London, tells British authorities that there are at least 1000 Islamic
extremists in the UK, including 100 willing to become suicide bombers,
and that their numbers have grown "quite frighteningly" in the past several
years. He mentions that Richard Reid, who attempted to bomb an airplane
four days earlier, had attended mosque around the same time as Zacarias
Moussaoui and that they may have met. Baker also states his belief that
Reid was sent to test airport security for future operations.

December 26, 2001: The European Space Agency rejects NASA's recommendations
to reduce use of the International Space Station.

December 26, 2001, Unrelated: China urges India and Pakistan to reduce
tensions along the border.

December 26, 2001, Unrelated: Iraq claims to have hit an Allied aircraft
which then retreated into Saudi airspace. Both US and UK spokesmen deny
that any of their planes were shot down.

December 26, 2001: Al-Jazeera interrupts its programming to broadcast
a videotaped speech by Osama bin Laden in which he marks three months
since the attack on September 11, accuses the West of hating Islam, and
states that attacks on American civilians are justified because of the
US government's support of Israel.

December 26, 2001, Unrelated: Hundreds of refugees at a Red Cross camp in
Sanguette, France, escape and attempt to cross the Chunnel to England on
foot before being beaten back by riot police.

December 26, 2001: The US announces that several captured al Qaeda members
report having seen Richard Reid at al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.

December 26, 2001, Unrelated: It is reported that days before declaring
bankruptcy, Enron corporation donated $100,000 to the Democratic Party and
hired one of the higher-priced lawyers in Washington, DC. The Democratic
Party refuses to accept the donation or return it to Enron, announcing that
it will donate the $100,000 to a charity for fired Enron employees.

December 27, 2001, Unrelated: India evicts half of Pakistan's embassy staff
and forbids overflights of Pakistani civilian airplanes.

December 27, 2001: The Associated Press reports that the US is refusing to
classify captured al Qaeda and Taliban fighters as prisoners of war, instead
calling them "detainees".

December 27, 2001: The UN World Food Program reports that bandits and warring
militias are preventing food aid from reaching Kandahar in Afghanistan. The
Alliance commander of the region claims there are no such threats.

December 27, 2001: As reported in Conservative News, "conservative groups"
congratulate themselves on defeating "the homosexual lobby" by convincing
Bush to nominate someone other than Mary Fisher to chair the President's
Advisory Council on AIDS. Fisher had gained infamy when, speaking at the
Republican National Convention in 1992, she publicly announced she had
contracted HIV from her husband.

December 27, 2001: JoongAng Ilbo, a South Korean paper, reports that
elementary school children are singing "the Bin Laden Worship Song", a
parody of a popular childrens' television show theme. Lines of the song
declare bin Laden as "the person I admire most" and Bush as "the person
I detest most", and announce  "I want to be a terrorist when I grow up"
and "I'm going to blow up the 63 building", a reference to Seoul's tallest
skyscraper.

December 28, 2001: Britain's prison service dismisses two Muslim clerics
for praising the September 11 terrorist attack.

December 28, 2001: Announces that the US will assist Russia in safekeeping
its weapons of mass destruction. This is a direct reversal of previous
Bush policy in which funding for these programs was cut.

December 28, 2001: Gives China permanent normal trade status. Since 1980,
China's trade status has been voted on annually by Congress which has always
granted China normal trade status.

December 29, 2001: The FAA weakens its requirements for airport security
guards by accepting a year of experience in lieu of a high school diploma.

December 29, 2001, Unrelated: Anthrax is detected at a postal facility
in New York.

December 29, 2001: Columnist William Safire half-jokingly predicts that
the Justice Department will open up a Pro-Trust division in 2002.

December 30, 2001: Pakistan arrests Lashkar e-Taiba leader Hafiz Saeed
for incitement to violence.

December 30, 2001: The 101st Airborne Division of the US Army begins
relieving the Marine Corps at Camp Rhino, and command is transferred
on January 18th.

December 30, 2001, Unrelated: James Risen of the New York Times reports
that al Qaeda had attempted to ally with Iran to coordinate attacks on
US civilians.

December 30, 2001: Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah condemns terrorists and
declares it the duty of Muslims to oppose them.

December 30, 2001: Pakistan freezes the assets of two nuclear scientists.

December 31, 2001: The US bombs the village of Niazi Qayali in eastern
Afghanistan, killing over 100. The US states that extensive reconnaissance
confirmed this was an al Qaeda position, while villagers state that there
were no Taliban or al Qaeda in the village. In the coming days it becomes
clear that civilians were residing in the area that was hit, while a BBC
weapons expert claims that two of the buildings that were hit were
ammunition dumps. In March, Time Magazine reports that the US had bombed
a wedding party, killing 110 out of 112 guests.

December 31, 2001, Unrelated: Colombian authorities find $41 million in
counterfeit US currency.

December 31, 2001, Unrelated: The Navy admits that its testing of a powerful
sonar in 1997 was the cause of a large number of whale deaths.

December 31, 2001: A federal court blocks the FCC's approval of
Southern Bell Corp's move into Oklahoma until the government has
looked into serious antitrust concerns.

December 31, 2001: Radio host Jim Hightower accuses John Ashcroft of
trying to reinstate the Cointelpro program that infiltrated and attempted
to destroy opposition political groups in the 1960s.

December, 2001: Orders a pay raise for federal employees.


Year 2001, Unrelated: The United States Capitol Historical Society prints
a calendar that erroneously includes 31 days in the month of November.

Year 2001, Unrelated: The Victoria, Australia, Equal Opportunities
Commission releases a report claiming that Islam supports freedom
of religion and grants all people equality under the law. The EOC
announces that it is "racism" to point out that most Islamic countries
ban the open practice of religions other than Islam and restrict
the rights of women and non-Muslims. It is later found that the
EOC's "neutral fact sheet" was produced by the government of Saudi
Arabia.


January 1, 2002, Unrelated: Twelve European nations convert to the
Euro currency unit.

January 2, 2002: The US demands that Afghanistan's new government capture and
extradite Taliban leader Muhammed Omar.

January 2, 2002: Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill announces that the federal
government will surpass the $5.95 trillion debt ceiling by February, and
urges Congress to lift the ceiling to $6.7 trillion. The ceiling is the
amount of debt that Congress allows the Treasury Department to issue. While
proposing his tax cut, Bush had promised that this ceiling would not
be reached until 2008.

January 2, 2002, Unrelated: A federal judge throws out Puerto Rico's lawsuit
against the United States regarding noise caused by the US navy's use of
Vieques Island as a gunnery range.

January 2, 2002, Unrelated: A National Guardsman on duty at San Francisco
Airport accidentally shoots himself in the butt when unholstering his weapon.

January 2, 2002, Unrelated: A Massachusetts court declares that children
conceived by artificial insemination after the death of the parents have
the same rights of inheritances as other children.

January 2, 2002: During an interview with Guerilla News, Canadian
journalist Gregory Palast clarifies his earlier accusations of Bush
forbidding investigation into the bin Laden family, now claiming that
Bush ordered all US intelligence services to cease all investigation of
Saudi funding of Osama bin Laden himself and his al Qaeda group.

January 3, 2002: Afghanistan's new government frees 260 Taliban POWs.

January 3, 2002, Unrelated: Lebanon orders a halt to the distribution of
the popular newspaper Asharq al-Awsat after it reports that Lebanon's
president escaped an assassination attempt in Monte Carlo in December.

January 3, 2002, Unrelated: Douglas Gansler, State's Attorney for Montgomery
County in Maryland, announces that Hassan Tantai, actor in the critically
acclaimed film Kandahar, is the fugitive assassin Daoud Salahuddin, also
known as David Belfield. In 1980, Salahuddin had shot Iranian diplomat
Ali Akbar Tabatabai in a suburb of the District of Columbia on the behalf
of the new Iranian government.

January 3, 2002, Unrelated: Japan's National Police Agency announces that
it will create an organization similar to the US's Federal Bureau of
Investigation in order to track organized crime and Internet crime.

January 3, 2002: Pakistan arrests 50 members of two terrorist groups that
India accuses of carrying out the attack on the Indian Parliament.

January 3, 2002, Unrelated: A section of the US Capitol building is closed
after a threatening letter is received by the office of Thomas Daschle.
Tests show the letter to contain talcum powder, not anthrax.

January 3, 2002: Nina Olson, the US Treasury Department's National Taxpayer
Advocate, urges Congress to repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax, claiming
that it complicates the tax affairs of many middle class taxpayers. The AMT
is charged to wealthy businesses and individuals who find enough loopholes
in the tax code to avoid paying taxes.

January 3, 2002, Unrelated: It is reported that a new Michigan law urges
the state government to prominently display the national motto
"In God We Trust" on all government buildings, claiming that the 
US Constitution demands this.

January 3, 2002: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld admits that US propaganda
often contains factual errors, as much so as pictures of someone else
claimed to be of bin Laden.

January 3, 2002, Unrelated: US intelligence assists Israel to capture a
shipment of arms destined for the Palestinian Authority. Although Israel
claims the ship is registered to the PA and crewed by PA officers, the PA
claims no knowledge or responsibility for the ship and accuses Israel of
timing the ship's capture to coincide with the arrival of US ambassador
Anthony Zinni. In the coming days, the British newspaper Lloyd's List
reports that the ship is registered to an Iraqi citizen, Iraq denounces
the seizure as an act of piracy, and the US envoy leaves in futility.

January 4, 2002: The Pentagon reports the first combat death of a US soldier
in Afghanistan. Several other soldiers are reported injured from the battle
near Khost. A CIA agent had been killed in earlier combat near Mazar e Sharif.
Mideast news sources such as Dawn, Paknews, and Arab News have been reporting
thousands of US soldiers dead throughout the operation, sometimes reporting
more US troops dead in a single battle than the US has reported were in
Afghanistan at all.

January 4, 2002: Pakistan gives Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former
Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, into US custody.

January 4, 2002: Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati accuses
the US of carrying out "the worst kind of terrorism" in Afghanistan.

January 4, 2002, Unrelated: The Traditional Values Coalition, a far-right
fundamentalist group, accuses the government's National Public Radio of
slandering Christianity.

January 4, 2002: Senator Thomas Daschle accuses the Republican Party
of being the primary cause of the current recession.

January 4, 2002: Releases a subset of Ronald Reagan's presidential papers
after reviewing them for appropriateness. By law, all of Reagan's papers
were to have been released upon Bush's inauguration.

January 4, 2002: Columnist Paul Krugman of the New York Times reports that
"the Republicans have moved so far to the right that ... focus groups
literally refused to believe accurate descriptions of the stimulus bill
that House Republican leaders passed on a party-line vote back in October."

January 5, 2002: South Korea announces its intent to purchase 111
300km-range missiles from the US. South Korea currently has no missiles
of that range.

January 5, 2002: Cuban leader Castro announces that he does not oppose
Bush's decision to imprison al Qaeda members at Guantanamo Bay Naval
Station in Cuba.

January 5, 2002: Cuts funding to the largest Iraqi opposition group due to
their poor bookkeeping.

January 5, 2002: Promises never to raise taxes, "not over my dead body",
or to scale back upcoming tax cuts, which he equivocates with a tax raise.

January 5, 2002, Unrelated: A 15-year-old steals a Cessna light aircraft
and crashes it into a Bank of America skyscraper, killing himself and
causing minor damage to the building. A note found in his pocket reveals
that he supported the terrorist attacks on September 11, although his
acquaintances report that he was a strong supporter of the United States
after the attack. His mother later sues the makers of his acne medication,
even though he had not been taking it.

January 5, 2002: An anti-Bush protest in Portland, Oregon, is dispersed by
an announcement that Bush's planned visit was cancelled, which it was not.
A reporter overhears someone on the police radios mention that "the
misinformation is working".

January 6, 2002: India claims to have shot down a Pakistani reconnaissance
drone over Indian airspace.

January 6, 2002, Unrelated: A Chinese citizen and New York resident, who had
returned to China to verify reports of torture in Chinese prisons and was
subsequently arrested upon arrival in May 2000, gives an interview in which
she renounces the practice of Falun Gong as a brainwashing cult and
announces how she "treasures every day" that she is in prison.

January 6, 2002, Unrelated: The US Embassy in New Zealand receives a
letter containing cyanide and a threat to disrupt a golf tournament.

January 6, 2002: Pakistan claims to have arrested four members of
India's secret service agency RAW who were planning a suicide bomb
attack against US forces based at Jacobobad airport. Western news
agencies do not carry the story.

January 6, 2002, Unrelated: The Dallas Morning News reports that half of
the cocaine seized by Dallas police in drug raids is actually sheet rock.
The Mexican consolate asks that Mexican nationals deported after such raids
be allowed to return.

January 7, 2002, Unrelated: Singapore announces that 15 suspected al Qaeda
terrorists arrested in December had been planning attacks against the US
embassy and American businesses in Singapore.

January 7, 2002: After visiting with British prime minister Tony Blair,
Pakistani dictator Musharraf pledges to act against terrorist groups based
in his country.

January 7, 2002: Promotes running a deficit during recessionary periods
and times of national emergency, and suggests that raising taxes (or returning
them to somewhere between future and past levels) would be a disaster.

January 7, 2002: Announces that he will closely watch the trial of a
man accused by China of importing Bibles, an illegal act.

January 7, 2002: Announces that "Anyone who espouses a philosophy
that's terrorist and bent, I assure you, we will bring that
person to justice".

January 7, 2002, Unrelated: The Gemini North Telescope takes an image
of a planet orbiting the star 15 Sge. The planet is estimated to be between
55 and 78 times the size of Jupiter.

January 7, 2002: A federal judge strikes down a Bush order to forbid the
hiring of contractors who fail to discourage employees from joining unions.

January 2002: 1500 US soldiers are transferred to Guantanamo Bay Naval
Station in Cuba.

January 8, 2002, Unrelated: Nagalingam Parameswaran, Malaysian diplomat and
member of the United Nations' government of East Timor, resigns from his
post accusing his UN colleagues of racism.

January 8, 2002, Unrelated: Iran tries sixteen critics for treason. One
defense lawyer is barred from attending the trial, and another resigns after
being refused knowledge of the charges against his clients.

January 8, 2002: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld denies the existence of a
confidential report that recommends resuming nuclear weapons tests.

January 8, 2002: Signs a law to increase federal control over childrens'
public school education.

January 8, 2002, Unrelated: The Supreme Court unanimously declares that
carpal tunnel syndrome is not a disability covered by the Americans
with Disabilities Act, in the case of a woman whose injury caused by her
normal job duties prevented her from continuing this job, because these
injuries did not prevent her from carrying out most normal life activities.

January 8, 2002: General Richard Meyers demands that Afghanistan turn over
to the United States three Taliban ministers who surrendered to the
new Afghan government.

January 8, 2002, Unrelated: The National Academy of Sciences suggests that
Congress enact laws to punish software makers for security problems.

January 8, 2002, Unrelated: The IRS announces that it is trying to account
for 2300 missing computers, mostly laptops and PDAs.

January 9, 2002: A US KC-130 refueling plane crashes in Pakistan, killing
its crew of seven.

January 9, 2002: Al Gore quips that he was "the first one laid off back
in January" and "I was your next President of the United States".

January 9, 2002: Orders a review of US pension laws, after thousands of
Enron employees lost their pensions in the company's bankruptcy.

January 9, 2002, Unrelated: A S3-B Viking jet crash lands on the USS
Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier. There are no injuries.

January 9, 2002, Unrelated: Indonesian representative Tamalia Alisjahbana
presents a petition of 10,000 signatures supporting the United States
and opposing religious extremism, in opposition to widespread calls for
war against the United States.

January 9, 2002: Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announces a partnership
between the Energy Department and the automobile industry to produce
hydrogen fueled cars.

January 9, 2002, Unrelated: Alabama governor Don Siegelman calls for a
statewide constitutional convention to weaken the "powerful forces" of
the state Legislature.

January 9, 2002, Unrelated: Michigan passes a bill to create a "cybercourt"
where lawyers and judges meet through teleconferencing.

January 10, 2002, Unrelated: France's parliament overturns a legal ruling
that allowed children with birth defects to sue doctors for not aborting them.

January 10, 2002: Demands that Iran turn over to the US any Taliban
fleeing across the border, and threatens retaliation, "diplomatic initially",
if Iran tries to destabilize the new Afghan government. Iran responds that it
will not allow bin Laden supporters into the country under any circumstances.

January 10, 2002: Russia demands that the US destroy warheads that Bush
had earlier promised to dismantle, rather than store them for later use as
Bush has recently announced.

January 10, 2002, Unrelated: A French scientist who had lobbied for reduced
salt in snack food announces that he has been spied on by the French secret
police.

January 10, 2002: The CIA reports that China will have nearly 100 nuclear
missiles aimed at the United States by 2015.

January 10, 2002, Unrelated: Representatives Peter Deutsch, Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen, and Gary Ackerman cancel a planned meeting with Palestinian
Authority President Yasser Arafat after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon.

January 10, 2002, Unrelated: An F-16 crashes in training in New Jersey.

January 10, 2002, Unrelated: The Supreme Court declares in a 5-4 ruling
that juries in capital cases must be informed of the option of sentencing
the defendant to life without parole. Voting against are Rehnquist, Thomas,
Kennedy, and Scalia.

January 10, 2002, Unrelated: Norway indicts computer programmer Jon
Johansen for developing a computer program to read DVD discs in a method
that is explicitly permitted by the Norwegian Constitution. In 1998 he had
been arrested for developing the same program, leading to the Norwegian
equivalent of a Congressional investigation which found heavy pressure
from the US entertainment industry on the Norwegian police to arrest him.
After Johansen is later acquitted by a judge for the reason that he
developed the program to make use of his own property, Norway appeals
the acquittal.

January 10, 2002, Unrelated: A Hamilton, Ohio county judge rules that the
carrying of a concealed firearm is a Constitutional right.

January 10, 2002: Attorney General John Ashcroft removes himself from
the criminal investigation into the Enron collapse due to conflicts
of interest.

January 10, 2002: Camp Rhino is attacked by a small band of 8 to 14 gunmen.
There are no reports of casualties. Marines involved in the firefight report 
that the gunmen fired upon a plane transporting al Qaeda members to prison in
Cuba, while officers report that the plane left fifteen minutes before the
battle began.

January 10, 2002, Unrelated: Arthur Anderson Limited Liability Partnership
announces that it has destroyed documents from its audit of Enron corporation.

January 11, 2002, Unrelated: India's defense minister announces that his
country is prepared for war with Pakistan.

January 11, 2002, Unrelated: Ford Motor Company closes five automobile
plants, costing 20,000 jobs. The company's fortunes have changed from a
$6.6 billion profit in 2000 to a $692 million loss in the third quarter
of 2001.

January 11, 2002: Secretary of State Colin Powell lends his support to
Israel's destruction of the runways of Gaza International Airport and
dozens of Arab houses in Rafah as "a defensive action".

January 11, 2002: Lebanon rejects the US's accusation that Hizballah is
a terrorist group, and demands that the US provide evidence of its claims.

January 11, 2002: Iran condemns Bush as "rude and impudent", and warns that
his threats would "not have the intended results".

January 11, 2002: While the Senate is out of session, appoints former
Ambassador to Venezuela Otto Reich as Assistant Secretary of State for
Western Hemispheric Affairs and Eugene Scalia, son of Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia, as Solicitor of the Department of Labor. During the Reagan
administration, Reich had illegally used federal funds to wage a propaganda
campaign within the US media in support of the terrorist Contras of Nicaragua. 
Scalia has called called ergonomics health laws "quackery" and "junk science".

January 11, 2002: Signs a bill to double pollution cleanup funds and
give legal immunity to developers of polluted land.

January 12, 2002: Pakistani dictator Musharraf gives a speech renouncing
terrorism, declaring two Pakistani terrorist groups and two right wing
religion-based parties illegal, banning political messages from religious
functions, and announcing the requirement for houses of worship to register
with the government.

January 12, 2002, Unrelated: Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe declares
that the United Kingdom is at war with Zimbabwe.

January 12, 2002, Unrelated: Chinese Premier Zhu Rongii visits India
on a diplomatic mission. 

January 12, 2002: The US announces that one of the al Qaeda soldiers being
held at Guantanamo Bay is a British citizen.

January 13, 2002: The Australian Broadcasting Corporation presents a video
of al Qaeda troops practicing an attack on a golf tournament.

January 13, 2002, Unrelated: 60 Iranian members of Parliament protest against
the arrest and conviction of a fellow MP for insulting the judiciary. In
response, Iran's religious leader, also the head of government and judiciary,
pardons the MP.

January 13, 2002, Unrelated: Bangladeshi rebels infiltrate India and fire
into a marketplace, killing 16 civilians.

January 13, 2002: Faints for a short period of time after choking on a
pretzel.

January 13, 2002: 660 US troops arrive in the Philippines to be sent into
combat areas and return fire if fired upon, but not to initiate action. The
Philippine constitution forbids foreign troops from operating in offensive
roles on Philippine land.

January 13, 2002, Unrelated: The World Trade Organization rules US export
subsidies illegal, penalizing the US $4 billion in trade sanctions.

January 14, 2002, Unrelated: The Czech Republic demands that the US move
Radio Free Europe out of the downtown area of Prague because the number
of terrorists trying to blow it up are a danger to the public.

January 14, 2002, Unrelated: The US Embassy in Yemen temporarily closes
due to terrorist threats.

January 14, 2002: Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit visits the United
States for a five day goodwill tour.

January 14, 2002: Tonga closes its international ship registry in response
to a Palestinian Authority arms smuggling ship flying the Tongan flag. The
US assisted in detecting the ship.

January 14, 2002: Congressman Dan Burton demands an explanation from
Navy Secretary Gordon England over the decision to deny the Kennedy battle
group the ability to train on Vieques Island in Puerto Rico.

January 14, 2002: Surgeon General David Satcher announces his resignation
in order to pursue a career at Morehouse School of Medicine.

January 15, 2002: Signs an order allowing development of wetlands and
seasonal streams.

January 15, 2002: Marines discover several arms dumps just outside Camp Rhino
in the area from where fire was received earlier. Several tunnels are also
found and destroyed, some containing further caches of weaponry.

January 15, 2002, Unrelated: On the island of Jolo in the Philippines, 17
people are dead in a gun battle between the Philippine military and police
defending a crowd that tried to lynch a soldier. The crowd was participating
in a demonstration of support for Nur Misuari, a former governor who had been
arrested for taking up arms against the government. The next day, policemen
ambush an army jeep, killing four soldiers, and the government orders the
army to retreat.

January 15, 2002, Unrelated: After the arrest of hundreds of terrorist
supporters by Pakistan since Musharraf's speech, India announces that
it is still waiting for Pakistan to take "first steps" of action against
terrorists.

January 15, 2002: Relatives of people killed in the September 11 terrorist
attack visit Afghanistan to meet with relatives of people killed in
the US bombing campaign.

January 15, 2002, Unrelated: An American aid worker in Afghanistan is
kidnapped for ransom by bandits while delivering medicine. He is released
after three days.

January 15, 2002, Unrelated: Several international news organizations
including Associated Press, Agence France-Press, Reuters, Cable News Network,
British Broadcasting Corporation, American Broadcasting Corporation, and
Columbia Broadcast System petition against Israel's refusal to renew
the press licenses of Arab journalists.

January 15, 2002: The US declines to charge John Walker with treason, instead
charging him with conspiracy to kill Americans overseas, supporting foreign
terrorist organizations, and engaging in prohibited transactions with
the enemy.

January 15, 2002, Unrelated: Representative Nancy Pelowsi is appointed
House Minority Whip, becoming the highest ranking Congresswoman in history.

January 15, 2002, Unrelated: The Supreme Court decides 6-3 that the federal
government can sue a business for violating the rights of an employee who
has signed a contract with the business to settle disputes between the
employee and business in a private court. Dissenting judges are Thomas.
Rehnquist, and Scalia.

January 15 2002: The US discovers al Qaeda documents mentioning an agent
whose travels match those of Richard Reid who tried to bomb an airplane
in December. The documents were found on a computer purchased by a Wall
Street Journal reporter in Kabul, and it took US computers five days to
break the Windows 2000 40-bit encryption.

January 16, 2002: The United Nations Security Council issues a resolution
requiring all countries to stop all sales of arms to and travel by
Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and groups associated with them,
and to freeze their financial assets.

January 16, 2002: The State Duma of Russia votes 326-3 to condemn Bush's
decision to end the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and requesting President
Putin confer with the Duma to discuss the future of Russia's security.

January 16, 2002: Human Rights Watch condemns Russia, Uzbekistan, and Egypt
for declaring peaceful opposition political parties "terrorists" and moving
to disable them.

January 16, 2002: Unidentified gunmen attack Lahore airport in Pakistan,
wounding three Pakistani guards before fleeing.

January 16, 2002: United Nations human rights chief Mary Robinson demands
that the United States treat captured al Qaeda troops as prisoners of war
under the Geneva convention.

January 16, 2002: Issues an executive order barring Justice Department
workers from joining or forming unions.

January 17, 2002: Guides television cameras through the White House for
a special show on the real life duties of the President. At the end of the
day, the cameras are barred from a dining hall where he discusses policies
with Republican lawmakers.

January 17, 2002, Unrelated: A volcano in the Democratic Republic of Congo
erupts, sending hundreds of thousands of refugees into Rwanda and destroying
the city of Goma.

January 17, 2002, Unrelated: Ford posts a $5.45 billion loss for the year
2001. The report says Ford earned a $3 billion profit in 2000, differing
from earlier reports that Ford earned over $6 billion in profits that year.

January 17, 2002, Unrelated: Scientists discover that the West Antarctic
Ice Sheet, including the Ross Ice Shelf, is thickening. In March, the
3250Km^2  Larsen B Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula breaks off, and
a larger 5500Km^2 iceberg breaks off the Thwaites glacier into the Amudsen
Sea.

January 17, 2002: The US urges Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat
to "take action against those responsible" after a soldier in Arafat's
private terrorist army attacks a Jewish rite of passage celebration, killing
six partygoers.

January 17, 2002: North Korea requests that the United Nations investigate
accounts of US soldiers killing civilians in the Korean war of 1950-1953.

January 17, 2002: Waives sanctions on China related to the 1989 killing
of dozens of peaceful protesters in Tianmen Square so that the US may
legally donate firefighting equipment to the city of Shanghai.

January 17, 2002: British Liberal Democrat Party leader Charles Kennedy
describes the al Qaeda prisoners at Camp X-Ray as being kept hooded,
in shackles, and under sedation.

January 18, 2002: Bosnia delivers six suspected terrorists to the US after
the Bosnian Supreme Court orders their release.

January 18, 2002: The International Red Cross inspects the prison camp
at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station which has been dubbed Camp X-Ray.

January 18, 2002: Britain charges two Algerians of attempting to bomb
the US Embassy in Paris, France.

January 19, 2002, Unrelated: Bugging devices are found on the Chinese
president's plane after it returns from repairs in the US. Chinese soldiers
had kept the plane under guard throughout its construction and refitting.

January 2002: The African nations of Sierra Leone and Sudan both
end their civil wars. US negotiators were reported to be involved in
Sudan's peace deal.

January 20, 2002: The US issues a $5 million bounty for information leading
to the arrest of Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzik and Ratko Mladic.

January 20, 2002: A helicopter carrying seven Marines crashes in Afghanistan,
killing two.

January 20, 2002: The Archbishop of Wales declares that the US's war on
Afghanistan has lost credibility and is morally equivalent to the terrorist
attacks against the US on September 11.

January 20, 2002, Unrelated: The New York Fire Department abandons plans
for a firefighters' memorial after accusations of racism. The department's
planned memorial showed an African, a Hispanic, and a white firefighter
raising a flag while the event that the memorial was based on involved
three white firefighters.

January 20, 2002: Declares this day "National Sanctity of Human Life Day" to
urge legislators to make abortion illegal.

January 2002: At the urging of Representative Chris Smith, bans all funding
to the United Nations Population Fund which delivers tampons to Afghan women. 

January 2002: Attorney General Ashcroft orders the covering of the
semi-nude Spirit of Justice statue in the Justice Department.

January 2002: US troops kill 15 and arrest 27 people that the US claims
are al Qaeda members. Their village claims that they were not, that they had
gone to visit an area where Taliban had been and withdrawn from, and that the
US fired without offering the men the opportunity to surrender. After three
days, the story completely disappears from the international press.

January 21, 2002: Former Senator and presidential candidate Al Gore gives 
a speech in India that journalists are barred from attending. A report
suggests that he introduced himself as the man rightfully chosen to be the 
President of the United States.

January 21, 2002, Unrelated: Terrorists open fire on the US diplomatic center
in India, killing five Indian guards. India says the Pakistani government
ordered the attack, while Pakistan denies this. Days later, three Bangladeshi
and three Indians are arrested.

January 21, 2002, Unrelated: An audit finds that the US's main biological
warfare center has lost 27 samples of diseases, including anthrax and ebola.

January 21, 2002: The Wall Street Journal condemns as "liberal" the
Human Rights Watch report on the United States for the year 2002, taking
offense that the humanitarian organization considers liberties lost to
Ashcroft's police powers bill worth mentioning, and claiming that Human
Rights Watch wrote in support of the Taliban when in fact the organization
celebrated the Taliban's removal from power as a great advancement.

January 22, 2002: Lawyer Stephen Yagman files a lawsuit against the United
States over the treatment and status of the al Qaeda prisoners in Cuba.

January 22, 2002, Unrelated: K-Mart, the third largest discount store chain
in the US, declares bankruptcy.

January 22, 2002: AOL-Time-Warner sues Microsoft in civil court after it
becomes increasingly apparent that the Bush administration does not want
to punish Microsoft for its crimes.

January 22, 2002: The US asks Yasser Arafat to find a way to end terrorist
attacks after a member of Arafat's private army opens fire on a crowded
street, killing two civilians and injuring over forty. Arafat is currently
under Israeli house arrest. In related news, Islamic Resistance announces that
it will make war against Jews everywhere by any means.

January 22, 2002: Gives a speech for a rally to illegalize abortion.

January 23, 2002, Unrelated: The Senate office building reopens.

January 23, 2002: The US imposes trade sanctions on Ukraine over rampant
copyright violation there.

January 23, 2002: Sweden and Denmark report that some of the captives
at Guantanamo Bay are citizens of their countries. Germany demands that
the US treat captured al Qaeda personnel as Prisoners of War. Sweden and
Great Britain announce in advance their opposition to any decision to put
their citizens to death.

January 23, 2002, Unrelated: The FBI, Secret Service, and Los Angeles
Police raid and shut down publication of the anarchist Web site
Raise The Fist.

January 23, 2002: Wall Street Journal bureau chief Daniel Pearl is kidnapped by
a Pakistan-based terrorist group which accuses him of being a CIA agent and
demands the release of al Qaeda members who are Pakistani citizens.

January 23, 2002, Unrelated: The US revises its dress code for women in
the military serving in Saudi Arabia, no longer requiring the wearing of
local clothing.

January 23, 2002: The US and France sign an agreement to "liberalize"
airline regulations. This allows the airlines to sell seats on each others'
flights.

January 24, 2002: A US State Department helicopter is shot down in
Colombia by the Communist rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia. The helicopter is destroyed by the Colombian government
as rebels overrun the position.

January 24, 2002, Unrelated: Iraq fires upon US and UK airplanes patrolling
the "no-fly" zone. The US and UK return fire.

January 25, 2002: Federal Reserve Bank chairman Alan Greenspan announces
that the economy is recovering.

January 25, 2002: The US announces that relations are improving between
it and Libya.

January 25, 2002, Unrelated: Christian preacher Jerry Falwell predicts that
a terrorist attack will occur in San Francisco because of the city's
acceptance of homosexuality.

January 25, 2002, Unrelated: Saudi Arabia announces that it will not allow
female US soldiers to leave their bases in Saudi Arabia without wearing
traditional local clothing.

January 25, 2002, Unrelated: Former Enron vice chairman Clifford Baxter
is found dead of suicide.

January 26, 2002: Secretary of State Colin Powell requests that a judicial
system decide whether each al Qaeda prisoner individually should be given
the rights of prisoners of war under the Geneva convention.

January 26, 2002: Saudi Arabia threatens the withdrawal of support for the
US if any actions are taken against Yasser Arafat, calling the man responsible
for far more needless deaths than bin Laden a "man of peace".

January 27, 2002, Unrelated: Five high ranking Russian officials are among 14
killed in a helicopter crash in Chechnya.

January 27, 2002, Unrelated: Russia closes its last military base on Cuba.

January 27, 2002: Rumsfeld declares that the al Qaeda prisoners will not
be granted Prisoner of War status.

January 28, 2002: Saudi Arabia asks that the US release the over 100 
al Qaeda members who are Saudi citizens.

January 28, 2002, Unrelated: An armory in Lagos, Nigeria, explodes due to
a fire started at a nearby gas station. Hundreds drown fleeing into canals to
escape the blaze.

January 29, 2002, Unrelated: Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi
fires popular Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka and her deputy Yoshiji Nogami
over a government-stalling dispute in which either Tanaka or Nogami must
have been lying.

January 29, 2002, Unrelated: Bush's niece Noelle Bush is arrested for
purchasing a controlled drug with a fraudulent prescription.

January 29, 2002: Canada announces that its Joint Task Force 2 has been
involved in capturing enemy troops in Afghanistan and has handed captees
over to the United States.

January 29, 2002: Gives the State of the Union Address in which he promotes
increasing spending on defense, unemployment insurance, education, retirement,
and health care while urging Congress to restrain spending; Promotes energy
conservation and efficiency research; Takes credit for Senator Lieberman's
idea to deliver part of the tax cut immediately and directly to American
households, and implies this amount is his planned cuts in their entirety;
Promises more overseas actions to fight terror; Names Hizballah, Islamic
Resistance, and Islamic Jihad as terrorist groups, an act that Saudi Arabia
and Syria have earlier threatened retribution for; and names North Korea as
a primary terrorist state for its development of missile technology.

January 30, 2002: Newspapers report that many of the programs Bush promoted
in his State of the Union speech are the same programs being eliminated
by his budget.

January 30, 2002: The General Accounting Office announces it will file suit
against Vice President Dick Cheney to obtain documents related to the secret
energy committee meetings, the first time in the history of the office that
it has been necessary to sue an executive official.

January 30, 2002, Unrelated: Pakistan arrests the Muslim priest that the
kidnapped journalist Daniel Pearl was en route to visit when he disappeared.
Days later, the US announces that the priest is not a suspect.

January 30, 2002, Unrelated: An American civilian is killed by communist
rebels in the Philippines near Mount Pinatubo, and a US military transport
plane is hit by small arms fire while flying over the island of Lagos.

January 30, 2002: Mike Allen of the Washington Post reports that Bush is
asking Congress to limit their investigation into the September 11 attacks
to committees whose reports are made secret and kept from the public.

January 31, 2002: The US admits that it killed 21 friendly anti-Taliban
militia in an attack earlier in the month.

January 31, 2002: Declares that a fetus is an "unborn child" to be treated
by law as a live human being in government policy.

January 31, 2002: NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson announces that
NATO will not support US attacks against any other countries without
evidence that these countries were involved in attacks upon the US.

January 31, 2002: North Korea calls Bush's statements "little short of
a declaration of war", condemns Bush's "political immaturity and moral
leprosy", and warns that the US is not the only of the two with the
will and ability to attack first.

January 31, 2002, Unrelated: Five Roma who were made orphans by the Holocaust
sue International Business Machines corporation in Switzerland alleging that
IBM sold machinery to Germany knowing it would be used to commit mass murders.

January 31, 2002, Unrelated: An old US satellite falls to earth over Egypt.

January 2002, Unrelated: It is reported that the anthrax used in the attack
on Senator Daschle is not the Ames strain as previously reported, but a
different strain that is only manufactured in Texas.

January 2002: A city in Afghanistan rebels against the new government after
a warlord from a neighbouring province is appointed to govern the city. The
city had already elected its own governor after the Taliban fell and before
the new government formed. Over 60 are killed in the fighting and the
national troops are repelled. It is reported that many of the national
troops refused to fight, and that US bombers were in the area but chose
not to intervene.

January 2002, Unrelated: The British Commonwealth votes against evicting
Zimbabwe. Generally, white nations had voted to evict Zimbabwe while African
and Asian nations voted to keep Zimbabwe in the commonwealth.


February 1, 2002, Unrelated: CNN airs a videotape of an Al-Jazeera interview
with Osama bin Laden in which bin Laden advocates killing American civilians.
In retaliation, Al-Jazeera cuts all relations with CNN, stating that CNN used
poor judgement and disrespected its "special relationship" with Al-Jazeera by
"airing material that Al-Jazeera itself chose not to broadcast". Al-Jazeera
further states that it will not give any further explanation for its actions
or for its original decision not to air the tape itself. According to a BBC
report, CNN and Al-Jazeera had an agreement whereby CNN was allowed to air
any of Al-Jazeera's material.

February 1, 2002: King Abdullah II of Jordan gives his support to Bush's
statements regarding Iran and Iraq.

February 1, 2002, Unrelated: A terminal at San Francisco airport is closed
after a man's shoes test positive for ammonium nitrate, a chemical used
in fertilizer and some explosives, and the suspect walks away while his guard
searches for a supervisor.

February 1, 2002, Unrelated: Governor James McGreevey of New Jersey breaks
his leg in a fall.

February 2, 2002, Unrelated: Al-Jazeera announces that the interview it had
condemned CNN for broadcasting was conducted under duress, and that
Al-Jazeera's correspondent had been kidnapped and given questions to read
at gunpoint.

February 3, 2002: Columnist Molly Ivins accuses Bush of overturning banking
regulations that Clinton had put into place to track down terrorist money
laundering operations.

February 3, 2002: NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson calls upon Europe
and Canada to greatly increase their military capabilities to match the US.

February 3, 2002: Donald Rumsfeld accuses Iran of allowing al Qaeda troops
to escape.

February 3, 2002: The US runs television advertisements during the Super Bowl
that accuse drug users of complicity in terrorist attacks.

February 4, 2002: Iran warns the US that it can defend itself against attack.

February 4, 2002: A federal judge decides that Victoria Wilson, who was
appointed to the US Commission on Civil Rights after the death of a commission
member, may serve a full six year term. The Commission had voted to refuse
to seat Peter Kirsanow, Bush's appointed replacement for Wilson. The
Justice Department immediately appeals, and in May the District of Columbia
Court of Appeals unanimously votes in support of Bush's nominee Kirsanow.

February 4, 2002, Unrelated: Enron chairman Kenneth Lay refuses Congress's
request to testify, and later steps down from his position.

February 4, 2002: Announces that the invasion of Afghanistan was "only
the first step".

February 4, 2002: Delivers a budget wrapped in an American flag to Congress.

February 4, 2002, Unrelated: The American Academy of Pediatricians reports
that homosexual couples can provide equal quality care to children as
traditional families.

February 4, 2002, Unrelated: The National Academy of Sciences reports that
there was no justifiable basis for diverting water from Klamath farms to
rivers during the drought last year.

February, 2002, Unrelated: Pakistani police arrest three men and charge them
with the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl. Police
find e-mails from the kidnappers on the computer of one of the suspects.

February 5, 2002: Mitch Daniels, head of the Office of Management and Budget,
lies to Congress by claiming the recession as the biggest factor in the
speculated decline of a long term surplus. In reality, tax cuts are the
biggest factor.

February 5, 2002: Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, chairman of the Federation of
American Scientists' Working Group on Chemical and Biological Weapons, reports
her belief that the FBI has identified the person who sent anthrax to media
and Democratic politicians, and suggests that no arrest has been made because
the person is privy to highly classified knowledge that could cause political
harm to the US if made public.

February 6, 2002, Unrelated: Allied Irish Banks reports that an employee of
its US subsidiary has defrauded it of $750 million.

February 6, 2002: Six South Korean members of parliament write to the US to
speak against Bush's rhetoric.

February 6, 2002: The US releases the 27 friendly anti-Taliban militia
captured during a raid in January, and the CIA pays reparations to the
families of the 16 killed.

February 6, 2002: Telecommunications company Verizon sues the Federal
Communications Commission over the FCC's keeping a $1.74 auction payment
Verizon made during a bankruptcy auction on items that the FCC later returned
to the bankrupt company NextWave Telecom.

February 6, 2002: Valley watch environmentalist group leader John Blair
is arrested for carrying a sign calling Dick Cheney "19th Century Energy Man"
during a rally for Congressmen John Hostettler.

February 7, 2002: Announces that the Geneva Convention applies to Taliban
regulars, but none of the prisoners so far have been Taliban regulars.

February 7, 2002, Unrelated: Uruguayan banker Pablo Moreira charges the
cockpit of an airliner and assaults the pilots. He is described as mentally
disturbed.

February 7, 2002: A Central Intelligence Agency warplane bombs a group of
automobiles in Afghanistan, reportedly killing a senior al Qaeda leader. The
CIA suggests that it has killed Osama bin Laden or another high ranking
al Qaeda leader.

February 7, 2002: The Christian Science Monitor reports that Hizballah is
preparing to invade Israel. The report's headline blames the United States
for this, but there is nothing in the story to corroborate the blame.

February 7, 2002, Unrelated: Conservative groups express anger that
former President Bill Clinton is giving a speech in Taiwan. Clinton
is accused both of impropriety in accepting a $300,000 speaking fee
and of undermining the war effort by speaking at all and not being Bush.
For comparison, former President Ronald Reagan once accepted a $3 million
speaking fee shortly after retiring from public office, and this was
criticized as improper by Democrats.

February 7, 2002: Urges the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold Ohio's
ban on abortions.

February 7, 2002, Unrelated: The State of New York files suit against Network
Associates, makers of McAfee brand antivirus and security software, over
restrictions in the software license that act as a prior restraint on
free speech.

February 7, 2002, Unrelated: Three Marines die in a training accident when
their truck rolls over.

February 7, 2002: Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill condemns the Senate's
decision to make Bush's tax cut last ten years, calling the decision
"lilliputian", condemning it as made by "ordinary people", and comparing
it to signs saying "Coloured cannot enter here". 

February 7, 2002, Unrelated: Friends of the owner of the anarchist 
Web site Raise The Fist, which was raided by the FBI in January, accuse
the FBI of breaking into the owner's America Online account and
harassing and threatening them while the owner has been in police custody.

February 8, 2002, Unrelated: Zimbabwe cancels the visa of US Senator Russel
Feingold.

February 8, 2002: The International Committee of the Red Cross announces
that anybody captured under any circumstances during a war is eligible for
Prisoner of War status under the Geneva Convention, a claim easily refuted
by reading the Geneva Convention, something the Red Cross apparently didn't do.

February 8, 2002, Unrelated: Police in the Philippines arrest a man carrying
over 100 passports, $50000 in cash, a map of Afghanistan, and a telephone with
the name "Osama bin Laden" as the default contact, on a flight to Kuwait.

February 8, 2002, Unrelated: Albanians in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo
riot, assaulting United Nations personnel and random civilians.

February 8, 2002: Condemns the Concord Monitor newspaper for running a cartoon
comparing the effects of Bush's budget on Social Security to the effects
of the hijacked airliners to the World Trade Center. The newspaper quickly
publishes an apology for not refusing to run it.

February 9, 2002: The Netherlands promises to invest E800m in the US's
Joint Strike Fighter program.

February 9, 2002: European Union Commissioner of International Relations
Chris Patten condemns Bush's "absolutist and simplistic" foreign policy.

February 9, 2002, Unrelated: Princess Margaret of England dies of a stroke.

February 9, 2002: Iran threatens to destroy oil fields throughout the Persian
Gulf if it is attacked by the United States.

February 9, 2002: Some of the 27 former captives from the botched US raid
report that they were beaten by American soldiers while in US custody,
including a 60 year old police chief who had his ribs broken. Reports indicate
that some of those killed in the raid had been handcuffed and executed after
their capture. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld orders an investigation.

February 10, 2002: German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder reports that Bush
has informed him the US has no intention of attacking Iraq.

February 10, 2002: Colin Powell suggests that the US and Russia sign an
agreement to reduce their nuclear arsenals.

February 10, 2002: Reports appear in reputable media that three villagers
collecting scrap metal at a bombed out al Qaeda base had been killed by a US
missile on February 7. US soldiers are deployed to block journalists' access
to the villagers' hometown.

February 10, 2002, Unrelated: A drivers license examiner suspected of
providing faked identification to immigrants is killed in a fiery automobile
accident. Investigators find traces of gasoline and other accelerants on
her clothing.

February 11, 2002: Iran holds massive anti-US rallies and Iran's president
Khatami condemns Bush's "immature" leadership and blames the US for inducing
the September 11 attacks upon itself through "faulty" foreign policy.

February 11, 2002, Unrelated: Jordan convicts US citizen Raed Hijazi
of smuggling weaponry and conspiracy to commit terrorist acts while clearing
him of charges that he was connected to al Qaeda. Hijazi accuses Jordan of
falsely convicting him to win US aid dollars.

February 11, 2002, Unrelated: A wildfire enters Marine base Camp Pendleton.

February 11, 2002: The FBI warns that a group led by Fawaz Wahya al Rabeei
of Yemen may carry out a terrorist attack in the US after Tuesday.

February 11, 2002: The US urges Israel to halt its "counterproductive"
policy of attacking Palestinian Authority government buildings in response
to PA sanctioned attacks on Israeli civilians and military.

February 11, 2002: The US announces its absolute certainty that the CIA
missile fired days ago hit al Qaeda targets.

February 11, 2002: The White House leaks a memo detailing Bush's effort
to stop a campaign finance reform bill being considered by Congress.

February 11, 2002: Media magnate Ted Turner calls Bush another Julius Caesar
and accuses Bush of trying to start a war with his "axis of evil" rhetoric.

February 11, 2002: Iraq allows Iran the use of its airspace.

February 12, 2002: Former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke
speculates that Bush will invade Iraq.

February 12, 2002: Pakistan arrests the leading suspect in the kidnapping
of Wall Street Journal bureau chief Daniel Pearl. The suspect reports that
Pearl is still alive.

February 12, 2002: An anonymous posting at the Indy Media Web site claims
that Ben and Jerry's ice cream was condemned by a speaker before the House
Committee on Forests and Forest Health as "terrorist supporting" for its
donations to left-wing organizations.

February 12, 2002, Unrelated: The State of Utah passes a bill that defines
any interference with a business's employees or customers as terrorism, which
could easily be used to declare unionists or eaves campaigners as terrorists.

February 12, 2002: Orders the overthrow of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein
by any means.

February 12, 2002: Rush Limbaugh and Oliver North accuse Senate Majority
Leader Tom Daschle of entering into an alliance with North Korea, Iran,
and Iraq to sabotage the US's war effort from within, in response to Daschle
saying that each of these countries is a different situation and that
different tactics would have to be used to defeat each of them.

February 2002: Britain releases one of the US's top suspects in the attack
of September 11 after the US fails to provide any evidence of the man's
guilt or relation to the attacks.

February 2002, Unrelated: Canadian Olympic skaters are awarded 2nd place
after a flawless performance while 1st place goes to Russian skaters who
performed a more difficult act but stumbled several times. After a few days
of controversy, France admits to backroom politics favouring Russia and
the Olympic committee declares a tie.

February 13, 2002: Camp Rhino is fired upon by gunmen who escape. US patrolmen
searching for the attackers accidentally arrest friendly mercenaries.

February 13, 2002: Welcomes Pakistani leader Musharraf's visit to the US
and praises his assistance in the fight against al Qaeda.

February 13, 2002, Unrelated: University of Minnesota student Colin McMillen
reports that the US Government has ordered the seizure of imported computer
serial cables, devices that do nothing more than carry electrons from one end
to the other, because one end of the device is physically shaped so that it
can attach to a Sega Dreamcast. According to the report, the US has declared
this cable a copyright violation under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Later reports clarify that Customs has ordered all shipments from the cable's
manufacturer, Lik-Sang, seized because the company had produced a computer
chip to allow Sony Playstations to play imported video games and DVDs, which
is a DMCA violation, even though Lik-Sang stopped producing these chips as
soon as it was notified of their illegality.

February 14, 2002: Proposes an environmental plan that does not punish
excessive pollution but rewards anti-pollution efforts with tax cuts.

February 14, 2002: The confessed kidnapper of Wall Street Journal Bureau
Chief Daniel Pearl reports that Pearl is dead.

February 14, 2002: Afghanistan's Minister of Civil Aviation is killed on
a trip to Kabul airport. First reports are that he was lynched by a mob of
religious pilgrims who accused him of canceling flights to Mecca for the
annual Hajj ceremony. Later, Afghanistan's leader Hamid Karzai accuses six
generals of assassinating the minister and orders their arrest.

February 14, 2002: Iran arrests 150 refugees from Afghanistan and begins
investigating them for links to al Qaeda.

February 14, 2002, Unrelated: Bahrain's Emir declares himself King and
proposes a constitutional monarchy.

February 14, 2002, Unrelated: A retired Air Force sergeant is arrested for
offering to sell trade secrets to Iraq.

February 14, 2002: Conservative groups condemn Secretary of State Colin
Powell for encouraging sexually active people to use condoms.

February 14, 2002, Unrelated: The US Navy issues a report considering the
effects of polar ice cap loss continuing at the current rate. The report
suggests allying with Canada and Russia to regulate the new sea trade lanes,
and suggests the possibility that the entire polar ice cap could disappear
in summertime by 2050.

February 14, 2002: The Times of India reports that the US is dropping
envelopes containing two $100 bills and a picture of Bush on Afghanistan.

February 15, 2002, Unrelated: The US and Britain test a nuclear bomb in Nevada.

February 16, 2002: Vice President Cheney threatens to invade Iraq and claims
the US's allies will give full support to an invasion.

February 16, 2002: British troops in Afghanistan are fired upon by unknown
gunmen. No one is injured, and reports are that the British were not able
to find a target or return fire.

February 16, 2002: British troops in Afghanistan fire upon a car violating
night curfew hours, possibly after mistaking the car's engine noises for
gunfire. Four occupants of the car are injured and one is killed. The troops
involved are relocated, while locals call for their execution. This may or
may not be related to the other story involving British troops in Afghanistan
this day.

February 16, 2002: The US threatens Canada with trade sanctions over reported
monopolization of wheat trade.

February 16, 2002: Claims to support South Korea's attempts to engage in
friendly relations with North Korea. Previously, Bush had demanded South
Korea restrict peace talks with North Korea.

February 16, 2002: APB News lawyer Michael Ravnitzky reports that the
Department of Justice has begun a policy of discouraging Freedom of
Information Act requests from pesky journalists by refusing to acknowledge
their status as members of the news media and charging them several hundred
or thousand dollars to process the request.

February 16, 2002: The US bombs militias in Afghanistan, near the city of
Khost, that were revolting against Karzai's rule.

February 17, 2002, Unrelated: Jim Crogan of the Indianapolis Star reports
that the suspect "John Doe number 2" in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murragh
FBI building in Oklahoma City in 1995 had been identified by investigative
news agencies as Iraqi expatriate Hussain Al-Hussaini, an employee of
Samara Properties; that this company, founded by a Palestinian Arab with
suspected PLO ties, was a place of employment for Iraqi "refugees" who
were actually agents of Saddam Hussein; and that this company owned the
brown truck that was reported to have been seen leaving the scene of the
crime driven by two Arab looking men in the earliest reports after the bombing.

February 18, 2002: On a trip to Japan, announces that he has discussed
devaluation with Japan's president. After some currency traders rush to drop
their yen holdings, he corrects himself to day he meant deflation. The yen
loses a half yen in value against the dollar.

February 18, 2002: American Broadcasting Corporation reports that
former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Julie Sirrs had her security
clearance revoked and was forced out of the DIA for reporting in 2001
that the Taliban had connections with al Qaeda and that al Qaeda was active
and had plans to assassinate Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Massod. 
Sirrs reports that "people at DIA told me that the State Department
also had a large role in wanting very harsh measures to be taken against me
to get me kicked out of DIA"

February 18, 2002, Unrelated: Britain accidentally invades Spain. The
training exercise was supposed to have been held a few hundred yards away
on Gibraltar. Spain takes no offense, as the British troops realized their
error and left within minutes.

February 18, 2002: Pakistani police find short-range missiles aimed at
Karachi airport, where US air force operations are said to be based

February 18, 2002: United Nations regional coordinator Leslie Oqvist accuses
the United States of intentionally targeting civilian cars during a highway
bombing campaign to cut the Taliban's supply line.

February 18, 2002: Jordanian student Osama Awadallah reports being beaten
by US guards at two prisons while under arrest on suspicion of having
relations with terrorists. He is currently charged with perjury for reportedly
lying about whether he knew a suspected hijacker.

February 18, 2002: The Guardian reports that terrorist supporter and
accused cocaine trafficker John Poindexter has been appointed by Bush
as the head of a new organization called the Information Awareness Office
whose duties will be to spy on US civilian information networks.

February 18, 2002, Unrelated: The European Union imposes sanctions on
Zimbabwe after its election supervisors are kicked out of the country.

February 2002, Unrelated: According to the Daily Telegraph, Assistant
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz approves the refitting of AC-130 "Spectre"
aircraft with a laser gun. The first "AC-X" is expected to fly in two years.

February 2002: Orders the removal from circulation of over 6000 scientific
papers, many dealing with the creation of weapons of mass destruction, and
urges scientific journals to censor their articles.

February 2002, Unrelated: Newspapers report that South Carolina has been
keeping a databank of citizens' DNA, taken at birth, since 1995 and
has given this information to law enforcement agencies and sold it to
private companies.

February 19, 2002: Lawyers for British citizens being held at Camp X-Ray
on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, file suit against the United States demanding that
these prisoners be given the same treatment given to US citizen and al Qaeda
soldier John Walker.

February 19, 2002, Unrelated: Islamic Resistance's leader Ahmed Yassin
declares it a duty of all Muslims to succeed or die fighting in a war to
"establish the rule of God on Earth" and "liberate yourselves from America's
domination and its Jewish allies", declaring the US attack on Afghanistan a
"terrorist offensive against the Muslim people". An Islamic Resistance
spokesman states that Islamic Resistance has no intention of fighting outside
of Israel.

February 19, 2002: The New York Times reports on the Department of Defense's
Office of Strategic Influence whose purpose is to disseminate falsehoods
through international media organizations.

February 19, 2002: Pakistan disbands two branches of its intelligence
organizations that had ties to international terrorism.

February 19, 2002, Unrelated: The D.C. Court of Appeals revokes the Federal
Communications Commission's right to set limits on media local market share
ownership.

February 19, 2002, Unrelated: Free software advocates discover that a European
Commission draft on the feasibility of software patents was authored by
the Business Software Alliance, a lobbying group with a very heavy bias
towards protecting existing large companies from competition.

February 20, 2002: Iraq accuses the US of hiring mercenaries and training
terrorists to attack it.

February 20, 2002, Unrelated: Hundreds die in a fire on board a passenger
train in Egypt.

February 20, 2002, Unrelated: Madagascar presidential candidate Marc
Ravalomanana declares himself President despite not earning 50% of the
vote as is required by law.

February 20, 2002, Unrelated: Italian police arrest four men who have
explosives, a cyanide compound, and maps of water systems near the US
Embassy.

February 20, 2002, Unrelated: Britain arrests Muslim cleric Abdullah
el Faisal for distributing videotapes which promoted the killing of Jews.

February 20, 2002, Unrelated: The World Intellectual Property Organization
Copyright Treaty is ratified. This treaty states that monopoly control over
a creator's work is a right, where it has traditionally been a privilege
granted by government(P); Makes no reference to the public domain other than of
works which have already been released to the public domain by national
copyright laws; Restricts ideas and mathematical expressions from copyright
protection, where they have had copyright protection in the US under the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act(2); Compilations, databases, and lists of
information are now protected by copyright, whereas Feist vs. Rural rejected
this idea in the US, although the information being compiled is not
copyrighted(5); recognizes the copyright holder's rights as being over the
sale and transfer of ownership, where traditional US law has given the holder
rights over any copies made(6), and of authorizing rental(7), and of
broadcasting(8); allows countries to limit the copyright holder's powers
to the first sale(6); revokes the Berne Convention's allowance for countries
to restrict the length of copyright over photographs(9); requires the
illegalizing of "circumvention of effective technological measures that
are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights", which
in the US has meant any investigation into understanding how to read or play a
scrambled work without paying extra money to the author beyond what is paid
for the work(11); requires the illegalization of the removal of author
information and licensing terms from a work, what is called "Rights
Management Information", whereas "Rights Management Information" is commonly
understood to mean anything which restricts an owner's ability to use
the work for its intended purpose(12). The Berne Convention makes no exceptions
for satire or parody when giving copyright holders sole right over creation of
adaptations and alterations of their work, allowing only for use in courtrooms,
speeches, and lectures(B2, B13), although it does allow countries to allow for
exceptions where the copying "does not conflict with normal exploitation of the
work and does not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the
author"(B9), exemptions for fair use if the author is referenced(B10), and
exemptions for the media(B11); Acknowledges that countries can set limits on
the duration of copyright terms(B5.4a) and sets a copyright as lasting fifty
years after the death of a creator(B7.1) excepting movies where countries are
allowed to set the limit as fifty years from release(B7.2) and anonymous works
whose copyright is to expire fifty years after public release unless the author
reveals himself(B7.3).

February 21, 2002: The kidnappers of WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl deliver a
videotape of his execution to Pakistani authorities. According to Reuters,
Pearl was executed immediately after admitting to being a Jew.

February 21, 2002: Saudi Arabia's highest ranking Muslim cleric is reported
to have condemned the US in a keynote speech at the Hajj, but reports are
fragmented and do not make clear exactly what he said.

February 21, 2002: A helicopter carrying 10 US soldiers crashes in water
off the Philippines, killing all aboard.

February 21, 2002: Iranian dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declares that
the US has ceased fighting terrorism and is now waging war to control the
world's valuable natural resources.

February 21, 2002: Gives a speech promoting the advancement of liberal
democratic reforms in China. The speech is broadcast across China. China
censors the official transcript, removing Bush's references to God, freedom,
and democracy.

February 21, 2002: The US ends its involvement in peace talks for the Sudan
civil war until the Sudanese government explains an air force attack on
a United Nations food distribution center.

February 22, 2002: Pakistani dictator Musharraf promises to have the
killers of Wall Street Journal bureau chief Daniel Pearl "liquidated".

February 22, 2002, Unrelated: South African election monitors overseeing
Zimbabwe's election are nearly lynched by Mugabe supporters in an attack
reminiscent of the near-lynching of Floridan election monitors by Bush
supporters in the US 2000 presidential election.

February 22, 2002: The US bars Zimbabwean President Mugabe and his cabinet
from entering the country. Zimbabwe declares this an assault on its
national security.

February 22, 2002: The General Accounting Office of Congress sues
Vice President Cheney.

February 2002, Unrelated: Zimbabwe' opposition presidential candidate and
two of his party's top members are arrested and charged with high treason,
punishable by execution.

February 2002, Unrelated: Italian police discover tunnels which have been
burrowed underneath the US Embassy sometime in the past four weeks.

February 2002, Unrelated: Saudi Arabia offers to recognize Israel's right
to exist in exchange for Israel's withdrawal from land captured from Jordan,
Syria, and Egypt in the 1967 war.

February 2002: One of the suspects in the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl reports
that Pakistani police have placed him under duress and attempted to force
him to sign a confession. Pakistan announces it will wait two weeks before
pressing charges against the 3 prisoners. The US attempts to extradite
the prisoners from Pakistan.

February 2002: Bush's speechwriter David Frum leaves his job. Some reports
suggest he was fired after his wife told her family that he came up with
the phrase "Axis of Evil", but Frum states that he quit on his own will.

February 2002: General Joe Foss (retired) has his Congressional Medal of
Honor confiscated at an airport by security workers who state that it
is dangerous and will be destroyed. He has to endure three strip searches
before being allowed to retrieve it.

February 2002: United States District Judge William Downes orders jurors
to be patriotic and pledge allegiance to the United States of America,
then asks the prosecution, "Is the United States of America ready to proceed?"

February 25, 2002: Waives sanctions against Afghanistan related to
illegal drug production in order to allow aid into the country.

February 25, 2002, Unrelated: Reuters reports that Fidel Castro accuses
the United States of launching attacks on Cuba with biological weapons
to cause plagues among Cuban people and livestock.

February 26, 2002, Unrelated: Ten are killed in a terrorist attack on
a mosque in Pakistan.

February 26, 2002, Unrelated: The BBC obtains an internal report from the
aid group Save the Children which discloses the group's practice of forcing
children to pay sexual favors for food aid. The BBC implies that some nearby
United Nations troops were also involved.

February 26, 2002: Announces his support of Saudi Arabia's peace plan
for Israel.

February 26, 2002: A Gallup poll of over 9,000 people in 9 predominantly
Muslim countries shows, among other things, that 61% of respondents do not
believe that any Arabs were behind the September 11 attack, 9% believe the
US's attack on the Taliban was justified, 15% believe the September 11 attack
on the United States was justified, and only 5% of Pakistanis had a
favourable view of the US.

February 27, 2002: The former Soviet republic of Georgia reveals plans to
have US troops enter the country to train Georgian soldiers. Russia announces
its unease.

February 27, 2002: Close to 20 workers at Logan International Airport outside
Boston are arrested by federal agents.

February 27, 2002, Unrelated: A Muslim lynch mob attacks a trainful
of Hindu extremists in western India, killing 58. Religious rioting
breaks out across the province, killing about a thousand people over
the next few weeks.

February 27, 2002: The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists changes the Doomsday
Clock from 11:51 to 11:53, noting: the September 11 attacks and the world's
neglect in failing to respond to them, the US's treaty-destroying nuclear
aggression, the failure of nuclear-capable countries to adequately protect
their stocks of fissile (fissionable?) materials and the recent increase
in known smuggling attempts, the India-Pakistan crisis, and the increasingly
popular terrorist movement. The Bulletin also takes into account signs of
cooperation between the nations party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
and US assistance in keeping Russia's nuclear materials safe from theft.

February 27, 2002: The Department of Defense requests DNA samples from Osama
bin Laden's relatives.

February 28, 2002: Dozens of Cubans break into the Mexican embassy in
Havana and demand refuge. Cuba blames US radio broadcasts that apparently
promised Mexico would allow anyone who showed up to immigrate to Mexico.
Cuban troops remove the trespassers at Mexico's request.

February 28, 2002: British troops in Kabul are fired upon. No reports
of injuries.

February 28, 2002, Unrelated: Police in Montana disrupt a rebel group that
had put together plans to assassinate a large number of local public officials.

February 28, 2002, Unrelated: A bomb explodes in the car of Jordan's chief
anti-terrorism investigator's wife. Two passersby are killed. 

February 28, 2002: The US urges Israel to be careful not to harm civilians
when attacking terrorist positions. 

February 28, 2002, Unrelated: Released audiotapes show that President Nixon
had planned to nuke North Vietnam but his advisors were strong in dismissing
the idea.

February 28, 2002: Senator Daschle announces that the War on Terrorism is
a failure because Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Muhammad Omar have
not yet been captured.

February 28, 2002: Camp X-Ray inmates begin a hunger strike after guards
confiscate a makeshift turban from one of the men. Guards give in and announce
that inmates will now be allowed to have turbans. A third of the striking
inmates continue to refuse food.

February 28, 2002: White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer blames
former President Bill Clinton for causing the Palestinian Authority's
war against Israel by arranging peace talks between the two sides.
Fleischer later claims he never said this. 


March 1, 2002: It is reported that Bush has ordered certain federal
managers to work outside of the District of Columbia as insurance in case
the capitol is destroyed by nuclear weapons. Newspapers declare this the
creation of a "secret shadow US government", but it is not clear whether these
bureaucrats' work will be held secret from the populace or whether they will
supercede Congress's authority as is generally understood to the case in a
"shadow government".

March 1, 2002: Environmental Protection Agency Office of Regulatory
Enforcement Director Eric Schaeffer resigns in protest over Bush's obstruction
of the agency's ability to do its job.

March 1, 2002: Yemen and the US agree to send US soldiers to Yemen to
coordinate attacks on al Qaeda targets there.

March 1, 2002, Unrelated: Packages of acid disguised as samples of skin lotion
are mailed to several prominent British politicians.

March 1, 2002: Italy arrests six suspected al Qaeda members, and Turkey
arrests three men suspected of joining al Qaeda to fight in Afghanistan.

March 1, 2002: Afghan officials report that the Taliban is regrouping and
recruiting a new army in the mountains of Paktia province and in Pakistan.

March 2, 2002: Two Afghan troops are killed and four injured by a land mine
near Camp Rhino. Reports indicate that the mine was recently planted.

March 2, 2002, Unrelated: Pope John Paul II gives a televised speech to
Russian catholics. The Russian Orthodox Church announces that Poland is
invading Russia. 

March 2, 2002, Unrelated: Switzerland votes to join the United Nations,
ending a half millennium of neutrality.

March 3, 2002, Unrelated: Over 100,000 people march in Rome to express
their disapproval with the Fascist prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

March 3, 2002: The US uses a new "thermobaric" bomb in an attack on al Qaeda
positions in eastern Afghanistan. A US soldier is killed during the assault.
The al Qaeda position is described as being far better fortified than Tora
Bora, which was at the time of the battle there described as being the best
fortification in the world save for the US and Russia's armageddon bunkers.

March 3, 2002: Russian President Putin announces his support of US military
presence in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. US troops arrive
on April 30.

March 4, 2002: A US Chinook helicopter is shot down by al Qaeda troops in
Afghanistan, killing six. Two other US troops are killed and over forty
wounded in attacks on al Qaeda positions in mountains south of Gardez.
According to some reports, one of the US soldiers lost was captured alive by
al Qaeda and executed on videotape. The battle lasts over a week, and at
least five US helicopters are downed or disabled.

March 4, 2002, Unrelated: Indian troops battle a group of irregulars invading
from Pakistan, killing eight.

March 4, 2002, Unrelated: The House Committee on Forests and Forest Health
requests that the lawyering and industrial sabotage group People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals disclose its relations with the arson and
industrial sabotage groups Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation
Front. PETA has admitted giving money to the ELF, and ELF and ALF are together
listed by the FBI as the two most dangerous domestic terrorist groups
even though they never have killed anyone or displayed any intention of
doing so.

March 4, 2002, Unrelated: Reporters Sans Frontiers condemns Cuban police for
beating two Reuters journalists and confiscating their camera equipment.

March 4, 2002, Unrelated: Journalist Greg Palast reports that the
International Monetary Fund has announced that it would support a
transition government in Venezuela if elected President Hugo Chavez
is removed, after Chavez declined IMF loans and attached economic policy
requirements and instead raised taxes on the oil industry. Palast predicts
that Chavez will be "out of office in three months or shot dead".

March 5, 2002: Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill claims that there never
was a recession in 2001.

March 5, 2002: Institutes a 3-year 30% tariff on steel. The European
Union vows to retaliate.

March 5, 2002, Unrelated: Certain government ministers in Madagascar refuse
to recognize the rule of unelected President Marc Ravalomanana, and declare
the city of Tamatave as the new capitol. In other international news, the
Army in Zimbabwe reports that its soldiers have been ordered to vote for
Robert Mugabe in the presidential election, and an earthquake and flood kill
over 100 in the village of Zow, Afghanistan.

March 5, 2002, Unrelated: A US soldier dies of gunfire in Kosovo. The Army
reports that there were no hostilities, leaving the possibilities that the
soldier died of an accident or friendly fire.

March 5, 2002: China expresses "strong opposition and dissatisfaction" to the
United States' condemning its oppression of Muslims and Christians.

March 5, 2002, Unrelated: According to reports from several different and
independent news sources, Robert Ray, successor to Independent Counsel Kenneth
Starr, releases an official report concluding that Clinton's having had a
blowjob from an intern was sufficient evidence to indict and convict him at
that time for the perjury that he would later give about the situation.

March 5, 2002: Urges the Senate to confirm the judgeship of Charles
Pickering. Bush continues to lobby for Pickering until the Senate Judiciary
Committee rejects his nomination on March 14.

March 6, 2002: The LA Times reports that Bush has changed welfare policy
so that government supplied jobs for welfare workers no longer qualify
as jobs under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Bush immediately changes the
policy back and announces he never intended to change the policy.

March 6, 2002: The day before the UN is to meet with Iraq, the US shows 
to the UN satellite photographs purporting to show aid trucks being
equipped as missile carriers in violation UN policy.

March 6, 2002: Justice Department lawyer Philip Beck announces that he
abandoned any attempt to punish Microsoft for its crimes because he felt
that he would have a difficult time proving criminal activity. In this case,
Microsoft has already been found guilty of these crimes, and has been found
guilty again by an appeals court, and Beck's job was to create a suitable
punishment for Microsoft.

March 7, 2002: Promises to spend $21 billion on aid to New York. Reports
do not specify a timeframe.

March 8, 2002: A report is leaked from the Pentagon which specifies Bush's
order to create plans for using nuclear weapons in a first strike against
Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, Libya, China, and Russia; and in which Bush
urges the construction of smaller nukes whose use will be less politically
divisive than that of strategic nukes; and in which Bush fully rejects the
notion of nuclear weapons as a deterrent and promotes their use on the
battlefield in the near future. Bush apologists in the media claim that the
US has never promised not to launch a nuclear first strike, when in fact Jimmy
Carter promised exactly this and Bill Clinton extended this by promising that
the US would not launch until a confirmed nuclear hit on US soil. Rumsfeld
states openly that having nuclear weapons only for deterrence is no longer
a viable option.

March 8, 2002, Unrelated: An international police force begins withdrawing
from the Solomon Islands due to threats of violence against it.

March 8, 2002, Unrelated: Due to family issues, Senator Fred Thompson
announces that he will not run for reelection.

March 8, 2002: Russia bans all imports of chicken from the United States,
claiming lack of US action against exporters who deliver unlicensed,
uninspected, and often tainted meat. Poultry accounts for 20% of US trade
to Russia.

March 9, 2002: Signs a stimulus bill that contains fewer and smaller tax
cuts and entitlements than he had proposed.

March 10, 2002: The Houston Chronicle reports that Bush will not request an
extension of the Superfund tax to pay for environmental cleanup. The tax had
expired in 1995 and been extended every year since by Congress.

March 10, 2002, Unrelated: Under pressure from Syria, Saudi Arabia rescinds
its offer of peace with Israel.

March 10, 2002, Unrelated: Huffman Aviation flight school is notified that
two of its students, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi, have had their
applications for student visas approved by the Immigration and Naturalization
Service. These two men were among the airplane hijackers on September 11.
Their visas had been approved before then, but due to a huge backlog,
the approval had not been mailed out until recently.

March 11, 2002: Revokes protection for lands which are critical habitats
for endangered species because the protections hinder development of these
lands.

March 11, 2002: US troops begin withdrawing from mountains south of Gardez,
claiming to have eliminated the al Qaeda forces in the area. Afghan soldiers
rushing to fill their newly vacant positions claim that the Americans did not
have the training or equipment to advance against al Qaeda in the weather and
terrain.

March 12, 2002, Unrelated: A Navy helicopter crashes into the Mediterranean
during a training exercise, killing 3.

March 12, 2002: The US and Saudi Arabia freeze the assets of the Somali and
Bosnian branches of the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation due to these offices'
links with Osama bin Laden and with terrorist groups al Ittihad and
al Galaat al Islamiyya.

March 13, 2002: The UN Security Council votes that Israel should give up
land to Arabs for a state in the West Bank and Gaza strip, in a measure
led by the US and approved by every member except Syria, which abstains
because the measure is not sufficiently anti-Israel. UN Secretary General
Kofi Annan declares that Israel is not allowed to attack Arab military
targets if the Arabs place their military facilities anywhere near
civilians. Bush later condemns Israel for entering Arab cities to arrest
terrorists because this may cause the terrorists to be less interested
in peace.

March 13, 2002: Announces that the US is "going to deal" with Saddam Hussein,
a figure of speech that in colloquial US English usually refers to combating
an enemy rather than parleying with one.

March 13, 2002: North Korea threatens the US with nuclear destruction.

March 2002, Unrelated: Reports begin surfacing in the media that Lieutenant
Commander Michael Scott Speicher, the first US soldier lost in the war on Iraq,
is still alive and has been kept imprisoned by Iraq for all these years.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reports that he hasn't heard anything about
this. In January 2001, while Clinton was still President, the Navy had changed
Speicher's status from Killed to Missing due to reports from Iraqi defectors
that an American man matching Speicher's description was seen imprisoned
in 1992. 

March 2002, Unrelated: Representative Bob Barr files a lawsuit against
former President Clinton, Clinton's advisor James Carville, and
pornographer turned partisan political journalist Larry Flint, demanding
$30 million for emotional distress.

March 2002, Unrelated: Archbishop Isaias Duarte Cancino of Colombia
is assassinated.

March 2002: Republican members of Congress including House Speaker Dennis
Hastert begin claiming that the budget has been balanced, despite the House
Budget Committee's budget having a $46 billion deficit, the passage of a
recent $43 billion entitlement bill not accounted for by the Committee,
and the General Accounting Office, also not accounting for the entitlement
bill, reporting that there will be deficits $20 billion greater than what
the Committee had reported.

March 2002: A federal judge, in a lawsuit brought by an independent group
rather than Congress's belated lawsuit, orders the full release of all
documents pertaining to Cheney's secret energy committee. Bush fails to
comply with the order, instead releasing a portion of the documents.
The released documents are heavily censored, but show that Cheney and
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham met only with executives and lobbyists
for traditional energy businesses and failed to meet with representatives
of environmental organizations, consumer groups, or alternative energy
businesses.

March 13, 2002: Says of Osama bin Laden that "I don't know where
he is...I truly am not that concerned about him", according to
the White House's official transcript. Other sources quote
Bush as adding: "I have no idea and I really don't care...it's not
that important...it's not our priority". The earliest known occurance
of the more latter statement is March 18 by Bartcop.

March 13, 2002, Unrelated: The Eastern Division of the Eastern District
of Missouri U.S. District Court rules that unsolicited facsimile
advertisements are covered by the First Amendment's guarantee of
freedom of speech, dismissing the State of Missouri's claims against
such a fax sender in a summary judgement with prejudice. In its decision,
the court says that advertisements stating "Get Paid to Diet" are not
advertising goods or services, declares the the anti-junk-fax law in
question is further unconstitutional because it only bans advertisements
rather than all unsolicited faxes, and declares that the anti-junk-fax law
is further unconstitutional because it is overbroad.

March 14, 2002: The Times of India reports that the US has reduced the
bounty on the head of Osama bin Laden from $25 million to $5 million to
be paid to a discretionary fund for infrastructure and livestock.

March 14, 2002: Canadian troops report killing several al Qaeda soldiers in
the Shah e-Kot mountain valley south of Gardez. The US has been claiming for
days that there are no al Qaeda left in the area. An Afghan general states that
the al Qaeda defenses are far inferior to what the US has claimed, saying that
there are only about six relatively small caves. As their operation finishes,
the Canadians report capturing great amounts of heavy weaponry from several
bunkers and over thirty caves on a single mountain. Afghan commanders claim
that the US allowed a large number of al Qaeda troops to escape.

March 14, 2002, Unrelated: Serbia and Montenegro reach an agreement to share
foreign policy and military defense while other affairs will be handled 
independently, including currency and immigrations service. The resulting
entity loses the name Yugoslavia, instead calling itself simply Serbia and
Montenegro.

March 14, 2002, Unrelated: Colombian mine workers file a lawsuit in Alabama
accusing the US-based mining corporation Drummond of hiring mercenaries to
assassinate three labor organizers.

March 14, 2002: The Senate Judiciary Committee, on a party-line vote, rejects
Bush's nomination of Charles Pickering for a judgeship. Bush declares this
"unfortunate for democracy". Senator Trent Lott accuses Democrats of
"paying back" Republicans for the Republican Congress's practice of blocking
as many of Clinton's judicial nominations as they could in order to leave
vacancies to be filled by choices of a future Republican president, and
promises to do everything in his power to block for no reason the appointment
of an aide of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Daschle to the Federal
Communications Commission.

March 14, 2002: The US files suit against Arthur Anderson, accusing top
officials of personally directing the destruction of Enron's audit
records. The federal government soon bars Arthur Anderson from doing
any business with it.

March 14, 2002: Microsoft announces that it has been working heavily with
the Department of Justice to secure funding for police operations and has
donated a great deal of expertise for investigating computer related crimes.

March 14, 2002: The Environmental Protection Agency revokes public
access to the Envirofacts database of pollution information.

March 14, 2002: Libertarian leader and former presidential candidate Harry
Browne announces that Osama bin Laden has won the war in Afghanistan and
accuses the US of leaving the country "almost completely in ruins".

March 15, 2002: Senator Charles Grassley reports that US military personnel
are using Department of Defense credit cards for purchasing personal items.
In addition, cardholders are billed personally and have to petition the
Department for a reimbursement for expenses, and that cardholders are accruing
over $1 million a month in unpayable debts.

March 15, 2002, Unrelated: Two grenades are thrown at the US Embassy in Yemen,
causing no damage. A man believe to have thrown them is shot and injured by
police before his capture. The BBC reports that the force of the explosions
"rocks the area near the US embassy", but this is probably hyperbole.

March 15, 2002: Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Momcilo Perisic and US State
Department official John David Neighbor are arrested by Serbian military
police while meeting in a restaurant. The US State Department official
is released after 15 hours, and was reportedly beaten while in custody. Prime
Minister Zoran Djindic condemns the raid. Perisic is released after two days
and is accused of providing state documents to the US.

March 15, 2002: A test of the National Missile Defense System succeeds. 

March 16, 2002: Orders 10 million schoolbooks sent to Afghanistan. The books
are printed in the Afghan languages of Pashto and Dari. Bush announces that
the books will teach "tolerance and human rights", but no reports mention
any concern over possibly objectionable or propagandistic content.

March 16, 2002: Saudi Arabia announces that it will not allow its land to
be used as a base for attacking Iraq.

March 16, 2002, Unrelated: 10,000 Rwandan troops invade the Democratic Republic
of Congo.

March 16, 2002, Unrelated: The Archbishop of Cali, Colombia, is murdered by
unknown gunmen. He had been known for speaking out against Communist rebels.

March 17, 2002: A grenade attack kills five churchgoers in Pakistan, including
a US Embassy employee and her daughter.

March 17, 2002: Senator Joe Biden proposes a diplomatic meeting with Iran.
The following day, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei rejects any
proposition of talks with the US while the US is threatening to destroy
Iran because this would show weakness and willingness to surrender.

March 17, 2002, Unrelated: According to the New York Post (a tabloid), a 
former member of the terrorist organization Irish Republican Army is honored
as Grand Marshal of the Rockland County Saint Patrick's Day Parade, the
second-largest parade on this day in New York State, and police and fire
departments subsequently boycott the parade.

March 17, 2002, Unrelated: Naples News, a Floridian newspaper run by
the Scripps consortium, reports on a mysterious "black water" area of
the Gulf of Mexico northwest of the Florida Keys where there are few fish,
the water has a visible blackness that reaches further down than is disrupted
by a ship's wake, and where contact with the water has caused bacterial
skin infection in fishermen. This is a different area from the Gulf "dead
zone" south of the Mississippi delta. CNN reports that the phenomenon
is a massive algae bloom.

March 18, 2002, Unrelated: Cuba offers the US a drug interdiction treaty.

March 18, 2002: The US threatens to withdraw financial aid from Serbia
and Montenegro over alleged failure to comply with the Hague prosecution
of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosovich.

March 18, 2002: The US indicts several Communist rebels in Colombia for
conspiring to import cocaine into the US.

March 18, 2002: US troops airlift injured Philippine troops to medical
facilities.

March 18, 2002, Unrelated: The City of Albuquerque sues the Environmental
Protection Agency in an attempt to rescind the EPA's limit on the allowable
amount of arsenic in drinking water.

March 19, 2002: CIA head George Tenet announces to the Senate that Iraq
has contacted al Qaeda to coordinate attacks on US civilians.

March 19, 2002: Pakistani dictator Musharraf orders the 5 highest ranking
policemen in Islamabad removed from their posts, blaming them for
security problems.

March 19, 2002: US troops trying to rescue a Philippine patrol that had
been ambushed by terrorist guerrillas turn back because it is too dangerous
to advance. The Philippine troops are able to evacuate their wounded.

March 19, 2002, Unrelated: Unknown gunmen murder Muslim priest Ata-ur Rehman
in Lahore, Pakistan.

March 19, 2002: Sudanese authorities capture a man initially thought by
the US to be high ranking al Qaeda official Abu Anas Liby, but later
understood to be a lower ranking man with a similar name. Arrangements
are made for his transfer to Egypt where he is wanted for attempting to
assassinate President Hosni Mubarak.

March 19, 2002, Unrelated: Zimbabwe is suspended from the British Commonwealth
for one year, Switzerland imposes trade sanctions, and Denmark closes
its embassy after Mugabe wins the Presidential election held in the
prior week amid reports of violence against poll monitors, the closing of
polls while people in urban areas were still in line to vote, and polling
stations refusing people whose names were on lists of prohibited voters.
Mugabe has his opposing candidate arrested for treason.

March 19, 2002, Unrelated: South Carolina files suit against the black civil
rights group National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People
and the white supremacist group European-American Unity Rights Organization
over protests and counterprotests being held at the state borders which
are costing the state money to police.

March 19, 2002: According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle,
a Democratic Senator threatens to revoke funding for the Federal
Communications Commission after Bush revokes the Commission's ability
to investigate monopolization. No other news organizations carry the story.

March 19, 2002, Unrelated: The Defense Intelligence Agency's senior analyst
for Cuban issues pleads guilty to being a Cuban spy.

March 20, 2002, Unrelated: United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin
Scalia says that the US was wrong to have passed the Civil Rights Act
of 1964.

March 20, 2002: The Senate approves a campaign finance reform bill, and
Bush promises to sign it, and eventually does, despite having earlier
promised to veto it and lobbied Congressmen to vote against it. No news
organizations report the specifics of what the bill would do.

March 21, 2002, Unrelated: Conservative groups opposed to a Congressional
bill that would require hospitals to offer contraceptives to rape victims
claim that the bill would require hospitals to administer the drugs. Some
news organizations repeat the claim as valid fact.

March 21, 2002, Unrelated: 21 people are arrested for defrauding charities
for victims of the September 11 terrorist attack.

March 22, 2002: The US orders all non-essential embassy staff out of
Pakistan. Also, the US embassy in Bosnia-Herzegovina is closed due to
threats of an al Qaeda attack.

March 22, 2002: Promotes spending an additional $5 billion annually on
foreign aid.

March 22, 2002, Unrelated: It is reported that one of the September 11
hijackers had been treated for medical symptoms consistent with
skin anthrax. Later reports show that the doctor made this diagnosis
after the anthrax attacks of mid September, and relied upon his memory
for recalling the symptoms.

March 22, 2002, Unrelated: A Finn is caught with 200 grams of TNT and
fuse as Helsinki Airport, enough to make an airplane "become crumbs"
according to local authorities.

March 23, 2002, Unrelated: Over a million people march in Rome, Italy,
to protest both the Fascist government's anti-worker tilt and the murder
by a Communist terrorist group of the government advisor who authored the
new employment policies.

March 23, 2002, Unrelated: Israel and the US accuse Iran of delivering
arms to Yasser Arafat's terrorist groups.

March 24, 2002: US troops discover an unfinished al Qaeda medical laboratory
which may have been intended for use in researching and developing biological
or chemical weapons.

March 24, 2002, Unrelated: 30 homes are destroyed in New Mexico fires that
are suspected arson, and the state appeals to Bush to declare the area a
disaster area.

March 24, 2002: Iraq's Foreign Ministry offers to allow the US to investigate
reports of Gulf War pilot Michael Scott Speicher's survival on the conditions
that the investigation be monitored by the Red Cross and an independent US
news team and include former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter. 

March 25, 2002: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld denies that Iraq
has offered to allow the US to investigate the fate of pilot Michael Speicher,
calling news reports of the offer "propaganda".

March 25, 2002, Unrelated: Canada enacts a 71% tariff on US tomatoes due
to dumping at 22% below the US market value.

March 25, 2002, Unrelated: Representative Burch of the Kentucky State
Legislature proposes, probably tongue-in-cheek, the purchase by the
state of an attack submarine for the purpose of patrolling the Ohio River
and sinking casino boats.

March 26, 2002, Unrelated: An earthquake kills over 2000 in northeast
Afghanistan.

March 26, 2002, Unrelated: China refuses the USS Curtis Wilber permission
to port at Hong Kong in retaliation for the US hosting the Republic
of China's prime minister in Florida.

March 26, 2002: The US offers asylum to 1000 Vietnamese Montagnard refugees.
Vietnam says that there are no refugees.

March 27, 2002, Unrelated: The United Nations reports finding traces
of depleted uranium contamination in the Yugoslav soil and air, and
recommends decontamination even though the amount of uranium is below the
known danger level.

March 27, 2002: The US adds the al Aqsa Brigade, Salafist Group for Call
and Combat, and Asbat al Ansar to its list of terrorist organizations.

March 2002: Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball of Newsweek report that
Bush's campaign received funding from al Qaeda. The report is dated April 1,
but is part of a "Periscope" collection of legitimate-looking news articles.
According to the report, Republican activist Grover Norquist had set
up a group called the Islamic Institute for the purpose of raising funds
from Islamic extremist and terrorist groups.

March 2002, Unrelated: National Republican Party Committee member
Chuck Yob says that women should run for Secretary of State rather
than Governor because "they like that kind of work". He refuses
to step down after protests from many Party members.

March 2002, Unrelated: Three US soldiers are killed in a training
accident in California.

March 2002, Unrelated: The Supreme Court decides 5-4 that illegal
aliens have no legal rights as workers since they should not be working
anyways, and cannot seek reparations from employers for committing acts
against national labor laws.

March 2002: Proposes changing welfare laws to give more to married couples
in order to coerce single mothers into marriage.

March 2002: During a lawsuit brought by Ralph Frew, representing the
Center for Biological Diversity, over a provision of the military's
2003 budget that would exempt the military from complying with the
Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, the Department of Defense states
in its arguments that it is good for the military to kill birds because
"bird watchers get more enjoyment spotting a rare bird than they do
spotting a common one" and because the military's bombing and shelling
of birds' habitats would keep away humans who might disturb the birds. 

March 28, 2002, Unrelated: A US Air Force sergeant is convicted of
raping a woman on Okinawa island, and sentenced to 32 months of jail.

March 28, 2002: A US soldier is killed by a land mine near Kandahar.

March 28, 2002, Unrelated: Former Prime Minister of New Zealand
David Lange reports that former US Vice President Dan Quayle threatened
to have Lange killed unless Lange rescinded a policy banning nuclear
powered ships from porting in New Zealand.

March 28, 2002: The Interior Department releases a report stating that
drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would threaten
the local environment. The report is immediately rejected by top
Interior Department officials.

March 29, 2002: CNN reports that US troops have begun operating with
the Pakistani military to apprehend suspected al Qaeda members within
Pakistan. High-ranking al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah is captured in
the raid in eastern Pakistan, near the Indian border.

March 29, 2002: Iraq announces its recognition of Kuwait's independence
and borders.

March 29, 2002: Some newspapers report that unnamed Arab nations have
pledged military support of Iraq should the US invade. Most news sources
have nothing about this, but some state that a resolution had been passed
by the Arab League which condemned a hypothetical US invasion.

March 29, 2002: The Wall Street Journal reports that Bush and Cheney used
funds allocated by Congress for promoting solar and wind power to instead
pay for the cost of printing the energy plan which wholly supports
conventional energy methods such as coal, oil, and nuclear.

March 29, 2002, Unrelated: According to Nando Media, thousands of people
throughout the Islamic and Arab countries begin holding daily street protests
to demand their countries go to war with Israel.

March 30, 2002: The US votes to support a UN resolution demanding Israel
withdraw from Palestinian Authority controlled cities that had been
occupied following an Arab attack on a holiday dinner. The resolution
also demands that the Arabs stop attacking civilians, which the
Palestinian Authority representative to the UN promises his people
will abide to.

March 30, 2002, Unrelated: Elizabeth, mother of the Queen of England, dies
at the age of 101.

March 30, 2002, Unrelated: Jordan threatens to "take measures" if Israel
does not stop fighting back against the Palestinian Authority's war
of terrorism against Israeli civilians.

March 30, 2002, Unrelated: Sultan Abul Aynayn, head of Palestinian
Authority operations in Lebanon, threatens attacks on the United States
if "one hair on the head of" Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat
is harmed.

March 31, 2002: Russia lifts its ban on imports of poultry from the US.

March 31, 2002: Cambodia announces that it will provide safe passage to
the US for 905 Montagnard Vietnamese refugees.


April 1, 2002: Newspapers report that $123 billion of the federal
government's $230 billion in spending on goods and services was spent
without an adequate bidding procedure as would be required by law.

April 1, 2002, Unrelated: The delegates of 50 Islamic countries at
the Organization of Islamic Countries declare that Palestinian Authority
and Islamic Resistance soldiers and terrorists are "civilians" and so
Israel is therefore a terrorist state because its army targets "civilians",
and demand the United Nations impose sanctions on Israel and dedicate
military support to the Palestinian Authority. During the meeting,
Malaysia suggests that the group create a new definition of terrorism
which would also include the Arabs' direct attacks on Jewish noncombatants,
but the suggestion is rejected by all attending countries except Jordan.

April 1, 2002, Unrelated: On financial markets, the Canadian dollar loses
0.82 (0.62 US) cents to the US dollar. The loss is blamed on an April Fools'
Day joke that Canada's finance minister was going to retire to raise ducks.

April 1, 2002, Unrelated: Two radio DJs' announcement that there is
dihydrogen monoxide in the local water supply causes 150 residents of
Olathe, Kansas, to call the city's water department. The superintendent
of water protection calls the prank "a terrorist act as far as I'm concerned".

April 2, 2002, Unrelated: Bank robbers in Germany lead police of three
countries on a car chase lasting nearly two days and 1000 kilometers
through Germany and Poland before they are stopped in Ukraine.

April 2, 2002: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accuses Iran of providing
refuge and safe passage for al Qaeda terrorists.

April 3, 2002, Unrelated: Egypt recalls its ambassador to Israel and
announces a policy of restricting all contact with Israel except those
which "serve the Palestinian cause", and urges the United States to
stop Israel's recent occupation of Palestinian Authority controlled areas.

April 3, 2002: North Korea offers to restart peace talks with the United
States in exchange for the ending of "groundless slanders".

April 3, 2002, Unrelated: The Christian Science Monitor reports that Iraq
had planned an operation to bomb a US warship, and that the Iraqis would
have used Iranian flags to hide their involvement.

April 3, 2002: A Canadian is convicted in US court of trading with enemy
nations for his having traded with Cuba while he lived in Canada before
he moved to the United States. Canadian law allows trade with Cuba. He
had continued to, now illegally, trade with Cuba upon moving to the United
States, but many of the charges for which he was convicted are for his
acts while in Canada.

April 2002: Appoints the Republican Party's chief lawyer Michael Toner
to the Federal Election Commission. 

April 2002, Unrelated: Lebanon arrests six people for firing rockets
at Israel, after Israel bombs parts of Lebanon where rocket fire had
come from. Battles between Israel and Hizballah militiamen continue
regardless, and UN troops on patrol find two Katyusha rockets.

April 2002: One of the al Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay claims to
be a U.S. citizen by birth. Birth records are found which support his
claim, and he is transferred to the U.S. mainland.

April 2002: Afghan authorities arrest hundreds of people who they claim
were plotting to overthrow Hamid Karzai's government and bomb U.S. and
British troop positions. Most are released within days, and the Afghan
government soon claims that the accused were not planning to rebel.

April 2002, Unrelated: Angola's 27 year long civil war is ended. 

April 2002: The US military announces that al Qaeda has offered bounties
of $50,000 for any Westerner killed or $100,000 for any captured alive
and has threatened to kill anybody who supports the new Afghan government,
but no evidence is presented to back up the claim.

April 2002: Clinton's political consultant James Carville says that
Bush should be impeached for allowing Enron to appoint the head of the
federal organization investigating it, not specifying which organization
he is referring to.
 
April 4, 2002: Gives a speech asking Israel to halt its search for
terrorists and to withdraw its forces, accusing Yasser Arafat of
"betraying" his people by supporting the murder of Israeli civilians,
and announcing that Secretary of State Colin Powell will be dispatched
to Israel to help in the peace effort. Israel refuses to withdraw,
claiming to follow the "Bush doctrine". In the coming days, Israel
repeatedly fires upon journalists and Red Cross workers (not Red
Crescent who have been using their ambulances as troop and weapon
transports, but the neutral organization) who enter free-fire zones.

April 5, 2002: Iran and Iraq call for an international oil embargo
against the United States.

April 5, 2002: Accuses former President Bill Clinton of causing the war
between the Israelis and Palestinian Authority by putting their leaders
together for peace talks, noting that the fighting started when the
Palestinian Authority leader walked out of the peace talks. He later
claims not to have said this, but it was said during a recorded interview
and he specifically and directly blamed Clinton. 

April 5, 2002, Unrelated: Fox News talk show host Bill O'Reilly says
that black people should not be concerned about equal rights because
they are better off in the United States than they would be in Africa,
and that it is "parity" for blacks to earn 80% of what whites earn
because "most black people live in the South where salaries are lower".

April 5, 2002, Unrelated: Madagascar's unelected dictator Marc Ravalomanana 
literally declares war against his political opponents and announces that
anyone who does not volunteer for the army will be considered a rebel.
Reports hint that his opponents have been carrying out industrial
sabotage including the bombing of bridges, but this is not made clear.

April 6, 2002: Announces that "the world would be better off without"
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

April 6, 2002, Unrelated: North and South Korea normalize relations
and propose that the US seek better relations with the North.

April 6, 2002: China demands an explanation for Bush's calling the
Republic of China on Taiwan a country.

April 7, 2002, Unrelated: One million people march in the Moroccan capital
of Rabat to show support for the Palestinian Authority, and similar marches
of 9,000 to 50,000 people are held in many European capitals.

April 7, 2002: A rocket is fired at the United Nations regional headquarters
in Afghanistan.

April 7, 2002: National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice demands that
Israel withdraw from the West Bank immediately.

April 7, 2002, Unrelated: Sudan issues a call for volunteers to
attack Israel and "free the Aqsa mosque from Jewish filth". The mosque
is under Muslim governance and Israel has refused to interfere in its
affairs beyond policing riots that occur there.

April 7, 2002: United Nations official Peter Hanson reports receiving
news that Israeli tanks and helicopters are methodically firing into
civilian areas and razing entire villages. The Palestinian Authority
reports that Israeli troops have massacred a group of 30 civilians
in Jenin, the claim soon rising to 500. Israel reports that it has
killed 200 people in ten days of fighting, and later drops this claim
to around 70. Later reports by multiple media and human rights groups
show a total of around 80 dead in all Israeli operations around this
time period, including about 20 Israeli soldiers.

April 7, 2002: Tony Blair announces that Britain is ready to go to
war with Iraq.

April 8, 2002: Announces the establishment of Citizen Corps, a
nationwide volunteer effort which hopes to employ over 1 million
citizens as informants to report suspicious activity. The Citizen
Corps will be run under the authority of the Federal Emergency 
Management Agency, which has the authority to enforce martial law
in the event of a national emergency.

April 8, 2002, Unrelated: Enron shareholders expand their fraudulent
business practices suit against the company to also include Barklays,
Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suesse
First Boston, Lehman Brothers, Bank of America, and Canadian Imperial Bank.
Already included in the suit, besides Enron and many of its executive staff,
are the accounting firm Arthur Anderson and the law firms of
Vinson and Elkins, and Kirkland and Ellis.

April 8, 2002: Human Rights Watch reports that acts of genocide are
being committed against people of the Pashtun race in Afghanistan
by militias comprising members of other races.

April 8, 2002: Four people are killed in an assassination attempt
on Afghan Defense Minister Mohammed Farim, who is uninjured.

April 8, 2002, Unrelated: United Nations troops are attacked by
a rioting mob in Kosovo. 16 troops are wounded. According to the BBC,
the rioting began when the UN arrested a political leader who was
urging people to riot and attack the UN troops.

April 8, 2002, Unrelated: Iraq suspends oil exports for 30 days
in a show of support for the Palestinian Authority.

April 8, 2002, Unrelated: The Vatican condemns Israel for waiting
outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where 200 Arab
gunmen have taken refuge, for the gunmen therein to surrender, calling
it "an act of indescribable barbarity, a violation of every law of
humanity and civilization". Britain denounces the Israeli presence
near the church as "totally unacceptable". A few days later, a priest
is shot and wounded, and both Israel and the Arabs blame each
other for the shooting and claim not to have fired.

April 2002: While visiting Arab leaders before going to Israel, Colin Powell
is told bluntly by the King of Morocco that he should have gone to
Jerusalem first.

April 2002, Unrelated: Egypt's highest ranking Muslim clerics declare
that killing civilian noncombatants is acceptable "in defense of one's
homeland from an occupying force".

April 2002: Edmust Matricardi, executive director of Virginia's
Republican Party, is arrested for wiretapping on a conference call
of 30 Democratic legislators. He was turned in by the state
Attorney General, another Republican.

April 2002, Unrelated: Lawyer Lynne Stewart is arrested for passing
instructions from the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,
who is a client of hers, to his followers. She denies any wrongdoing.

April 2002, Unrelated: A nationwide strike is held in Venezuela after
several managers of the state-run oil company are fired by President
Hugo Chavez. 13 demonstrators, mostly supporters of the President, are
killed as violence breaks out.

April 2002, Unrelated: An opinion columnist (Safire?) reports
that Iraq is training 50 al Qaeda troops to assassinate Kurdish
leaders, and that information like this is well known to diplomats
in the area but that US intelligence officials and therefore policymakers
are completely ignorant of it.

April 2002, Unrelated: After raiding the Palestinian Authority's central
offices, Israel discovers documents linking the PA directly to the
numerous recent attacks on Israeli civilians. The documents include requests
for funding from terrorist groups that explicitly mention the cost of
weapons, ammunition, and bomb construction and which are personally signed
for by high-ranking PA officials, including the Minister of Finance and
Yasser Arafat himself. Also discovered are numerous heavy weapons
and records of heavy weapons purchases dating back to years before the
peace talks between Israel and the PA broke down, when the purchase of
these weapons was banned by the Treaty of Oslo which had been in effect.
The Palestinian Authority claims that the documents are forgeries.

April 2002, Unrelated: The University of California recalls students
from overseas study programs in Israel and expels 16 students who
choose to continue studying in Israeli partner universities.

April 10, 2002, Unrelated: Queen Rania of Jordan leads a protest march
in support of the Palestinian Authority.

April 10, 2002, Unrelated: Germany suspends arms sales to Israel
and reports that other European nations have done the same.

April 10, 2002: An Afghan militiaman is killed in a grenade attack. Also,
the US reports that al Qaeda troops are gathering at Miram Shah in Pakistan.
and Afghan opium farmers blockade a major highway to Pakistan to protest
the government's policy against their trade.

April 10, 2002, Unrelated: The leader of the Tamil Tigers terrorist
group in Sri Lanka announces a desire for peace talks.

April 10, 2002, Unrelated: The European Union urges an arms embargo
against Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and demands the release
of Yasser Arafat.

April 2002: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is arrested by the army.
His appointed successor, oilman Pedro Carmona, immediately voids
the Constitution, repeals business regulation laws, and disbands the
Supreme Court and legislature. Cuba, Mexico, and Costa Rica denounce
the turn of events while the United States issues a statement of
disapproval of Chavez, Colombia and the International Monetary Fund
pledge their support to Carmona, and the New York Times editorializes that
"Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator".
Carmona resigns after a day amid widespread protests and the loss of
support of coup leader General Efrain Vasquez. Chavez's Vice President
Diosdado Cabella is appointed the new interim leader. Later, a far-right
news source (Newsmax?) claims that Carmona was a member of the Fascist
cult Opus Dei and had appointed a government composed entirely of cult
members.

April 2002, Unrelated: During a Holocaust remembrance event, students
from the University of California in Berkeley occupy a building to show
solidarity with the Palestinian Authority.

April 2002, Unrelated: Saudi Arabia holds a pledge drive for donations
to the families of "Palestinian martyrs and victims of Israeli terrorism".
Saudi's royal family donates millions of dollars to the effort. In Mideast
slang, "martyr" means anyone who dies fighting Israeli troops or while
killing Israeli civilians. Saudi Arabia claims that the money will not
go to the families of suicide bombers.

April 2002: White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer announces that
Arab suicide bombers are now to be referred to as "homicide bombers".
Fox News and Time Magazine begin using the newly invented term.

April 2002, Unrelated: Investigators discover messages between several
of Wall Street's most respected stock analysts in which they describe as
"crap" and "worthless" the same stocks that they give their highest
ratings to in their public reports. In May, Merrill Lynch settles with
prosecutors for $100 million.

April 2002, Unrelated: According to MSNBC, four unarmed U.N. observers
are kidnapped and beaten by Hizballah troops, and the United Nations
issues a condemnation.

April 11, 2002, Unrelated: Democratic congressman James Traficant is
convicted of bribery. He later claims that the Justice Department
engaged in a conspiracy to press false charges on him.

April 11, 2002, Unrelated: A fuel truck crashes near an ancient
synagogue on the island of Djerba in Tunisia, killing 19 people
including 14 Germans. Israel immediately announces that this was
an al Qaeda attack, while Tunisia and Germany insist that it
was an accident. Germany later announces that if this was an attack,
it would be considered as an attack against Germany.

April 12, 2002: Powell announces that he will delay meeting with
Yasser Arafat for an unspecified amount of time.

April 12, 2002, Unrelated: A Chinese senior engineer reports that there
are cracks in the Three Gorges Dam.

April 12, 2002, Unrelated: Congressman Cass Ballenger describes the
presence of Irish Republican Army terrorists in Colombia to train
Communist rebels as a threat to the stability of the United States.

April 12, 2002: The Washington Post reports that the US government paid
Abu Sayyaf terrorists $300,000 for the return of hostages in March, but
the hostages were not delivered.

April 13, 2002: 15,000 people, including at least one Member of Parliament,
march in London in a demonstration against Israel. BBC and CBC report that
the demonstrators carried banners supporting the elimination of Jews from the
Middle East.

April 13, 2002: According to Conservative News, former Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamen Netanyahu tells the US not to delay an expected attack on Iraq by
waiting for peace in Israel. Netanyahu has been in the United States lobbying
for support of Israel.

April 13, 2002: Conservative News reports that Congresswoman Cynthia
McKinney has accused Bush of having some form of knowledge of the
September 11 attacks in advance, and calls for a complete investigation
into the matter.

April 13, 2002: Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat gives a speech
in which he says that the Palestine Liberation Organization has always
been against terrorism and against the killing of civilians, but that
attacks on Israeli civilians are necessary because the Israeli army
would attack the Arab population in the absence of such attacks. Arafat
also claims that Israel has massacred the populations of Jenin and Nablus.
The United States determines that this speech is a sufficient denunciation
of terrorism and allows Secretary of State Colin Powell to meet with Arafat.

April 14, 2002: Hugo Chavez is reinstated as President of Venezuela,
ending the country's short lived coup. The US announces that the coup,
which was aborted by massive popular rallies in support of Chavez, was
a warning to Chavez and that Chavez must now "follow the will of
the people" or he will be deposed again.

April 14, 2002: A US patrol in Afghanistan is ambushed by militiamen,
but takes no casualties and kills several attackers. US forces refer
to the attackers as "terrorists". There are news reports that close
to thirty militiamen have attacked British positions in Kabul.

April 15, 2002: Four US troops are killed in a weapons disposal accident
in Afghanistan.

April 15, 2002, Unrelated: Al-Jazeera broadcasts an al Qaeda propaganda
videotape which contains a recorded message from one of the September 11
hijackers interspersed with images of the burning World Trade Center and
of Osama bin Laden. The tape also mentions the recent Arab League summit,
and urges al Qaeda followers to exterminate all Americans.

April 15, 2002: The European Union decides not to impose trade sanctions
on Israel. Representatives say that Colin Powell's diplomatic visit is
the only reason for the decision not to impose sanctions.

April 15, 2002, Unrelated: The North Atlantic Treaty Organizations and Russia
form an alliance against terrorism.

April 15, 2002: U.S. officials acknowledge that they had met with
the leaders of Venezuela's coup to promote the idea of overthrowing
the elected President Chavez.

April 16, 2002, Unrelated: The Netherlands' public government falls after
a report blames it for failing to prevent the massacre at Srebrenica.
The country remains stable as elections are to be held in a month. The
next day, the Netherlands' highest ranking general resigns.

April 16, 2002: Senator Ted Stevens declares that the Alaska National
Wildlife Refuge is not a "wilderness" because it is too cold and that
there is no law against mining in national parkland, and detracts
drilling opponents as "liars" and announces "If it was back in the old
days, I would challenge them to a duel."

April 17, 2002: The Washington Post reports that US generals have
determined that Osama bin Laden was present at the battle of Tora Bora
and that US unwillingness to commit troops allowed bin Laden to escape.
The Post reports that many of the US-backed militiamen turned sides
to help al Qaeda troops escape into Pakistan.

April 17, 2002: Colin Powell leaves Israel, announcing that any promises
of a ceasefire would be worthless because the promise could never be
carried out in the current situation. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak
falls ill, forcing his staff to cancel a planned meeting with Powell.

April 17, 2002: A US soldier is shot and wounded by a gunman in Kandahar.

April 17, 2002: The US military announces a reorganization which includes
encompassing North America into a strategic zone such as Europe and 
the Pacific are. The BBC reports that the reorganization will make
the US military directly involve itself in policing US citizens.

April 17, 2002: Once again announces that any country which does not
wholly commit itself to supporting the United States will be considered
a rogue and terrorist nation.

April 17, 2002, Unrelated: al Qaeda's spokesman publicly admits that
his group was responsible for the September 11 attack, claiming that
God ordered his group to kill "infidels". 

April 17, 2002: Judge Robert E. Jones declares that John Ashcroft, as
an appointed executive official, lacks the authority to overturn state law,
in the matter of Oregon's assisted-suicide law.

April 17, 2002: The Los Angeles Times reports that the US stopped
unofficially supporting Venezuelan dictator Pedro Carmona when Carmona
voided the country's Constitution.

April 17, 2002: The US accidentally bombs Canadian troops during training
in Afghanistan, killing four. Later reports reveal that the US pilots
had been overworked against military procedure, and had been placed
on amphetamines.

April 18, 2002, Unrelated: Malaysia calls on all Muslim countries to
form a military alliance against Israel.

April 2002, Unrelated: Microwave Communications Incorporated runs television
advertisements proposing that a flat-rate fee for use of telecommunications
services is a human right guaranteed by the US Constitution's protection
of freedom of speech.

April 2002: The US and UK bomb Iraq, allegedly after Iraq fires
upon their planes.

April 2002: Representative Tom DeLay, speaking before a church crowd,
urges the removal of science from state universities' curriculum
and the teaching of religious dogma instead.

April 2002, Unrelated: Time Magazine reports that middle-ranking members
of Yasser Arafat's terrorist organization Fatah have ordered members
to attack the United States.

April 2002: The Republican National Committee declares that fighting
the Democrats is as important a war as fighting Osama bin Laden and
accuses Senator Patrick Leahy and the Democratic Party of showing
contempt for those who lost their lives in the World Trade Center
by blocking a bill to award the Medal of Valor to firefighters and
policemen who responded to the attack, a bill which Senator Patrick
Leahy presented to the Congressional floor and which the Democrats
voted unanimously to pass.

April 2002: The Bureau of Export Administration is renamed to the
Bureau of Industry and Security. 

April 19, 2002: British troops return from a reconnaissance mission near
Shah e-kot, reporting that many al Qaeda facilities survived the battle
and that al Qaeda forces were returning to the area.

April 19, 2002, Unrelated: India reports that a member of its foreign
ministry was kidnapped and beaten by Pakistani intelligence officers.
Pakistan reports that one of its foreign ministry personnel was
kidnapped and beaten by Indian intelligence officers days earlier,
and claims to have nothing to do with the kidnapping of the Indian officer.
India reports that it has arrested a Pakistani foreign ministry official
for spying, and that the suspect has not been mistreated.

April 19, 2002: Philippines president Gloria Arroyo allows for 300 additional
US troops on Philippines soil. The troops arrive within a day.

April 19, 2002: Bush's plan to drill for oil in nationally protected
land in Alaska dies in the Senate in a 46-54 vote.

April 19, 2002: Conservative News reports that Congress's General Accounting
Office has tallied the damage to the White House caused by departing
Clinton employees at $14,000. Upon Bush's entering the White House in 2001,
press secretary Ari Fleischer reported massive damage on this scale,
but Bush had claimed that there was little beyond pranks such as "W" keys
removed from computer keyboards. Later reports state that much of the
damage was attributed to normal wear and tear, that the missing
"W" keys from some keyboards had cost $5,000 to replace, and that
more damage had been done to the White House in 1993 and 1981 by the
departing Bush and Carter administrations.

April 19, 2002: The FBI reports that terrorists may be planning attacks on
banks in New England. It is reported that the information comes voluntarily
from a captured al Qaeda leader and could be false.

April 19, 2002, Unrelated: Argentina suspends all banking as the
economy falters.

April 19, 2002: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology reports that
Bush is trying to bar foreign students from taking certain classes
based on the students' nationality.

April 19, 2002, Unrelated: According to Reuters, the Alabama Supreme Court
orders a halt to all jury trials for the rest of the fiscal year due to a
state budget shortfall.

April 20, 2002: French troops in Kabul are fired upon by unknown gunmen.
One French soldier is injured.

April 20, 2002, Unrelated: A helicopter crash kills General Luis Acevedo
of Venezuela and six other officers. Acevedo had days earlier been named
head of the air force.

April 20, 2002, Unrelated: 75,000 march in the District of Columbia
to show support for the Palestinian Authority.

April 21, 2002: Opinion columnist Molly Ivins accuses terrorist supporter
Otto Reich of being in telephone contact with Venezuelan dictator Pedro
Carmona during Carmona's coup and short lived rule.

April 21, 2002: Peru cancels a joint military training exercise with
the US.

April 21, 2002, Unrelated: 14 people are killed in a bombing attack
on civilians at a market in the Philippines. Abu Sayyaf claims
responsibility, but police blame a native insurgency group. 

April 22, 2002: The head of the UN's chemical weapons inspection agency
is removed by a US-promoted vote for promoting a policy that nations
accused of manufacturing chemical weapons could simply regulate themselves.

April 22, 2002: Environmental Protection Agency ombudsman Robert Martin
resigns, accusing EPA head Christine Whitman of deliberately covering up
and refusing to investigate evidence of air pollution caused by the
collapse of the World Trade Center so that her husband's insurance firm
would not have to pay claims, and reporting that the EPA has seized his
work files and locked him out of his office. Martin will not be replaced
as the EPA has eliminated the ombudsman position.

April 23, 2002: Over 100 airport workers at 3 airports in Washington
are arrested. John Ashcroft announces that they were arrested for having
trespassed into high-secure areas that they did not have official access to.

April 23, 2002: Karen Hughes, counselor to President Bush, quits her job,
claiming family difficulties and homesickness for Texas. Bush pledges to
keep her involved in policymaking.

April 23, 2002: US airplanes and troops land in Kyrgyzstan at Manas
formerly-civilian airport.

April 23, 2002, Unrelated: Navy fuel transport ship USNS Walter S. Diehl
is approached in the Persian Gulf by a dozen small boats which retreat
when fired upon. It is assumed that the boaters were pirates who did not
realize that the ship was a US Navy vessel.

April 2002, Unrelated: The Central Intelligence Agency reports that
Chinese agents on US soil have been ordered by their government to bomb
key US information systems. News reports concentrate on the aspect that
the Chinese are also expected to use weaknesses in information systems
software to bring them down without physically attacking them.

April 2002, Unrelated: Hundreds of thousands march in France against
the candidacy of a right-wing candidate for Prime Minister. The daily
marches reach a high point of 1 million people on May 1.

April 2002: The Washington Post announces that US troops are in Pakistan's
ungoverned tribal territories to perform reconnaissance, and have been
pleading the Pakistani government for permission to attack al Qaeda troops
centered there.

April 2002: The FBI announces a new terrorist threat from interrogating
the same person who threatened attacks on the banks, and suggests that
the prisoner is lying.

April 2002, Unrelated: Fox News headlines a story called "Nuclear Neglect"
in which a Fox journalist flies a private airplane over a nuclear plant
and reports his outrage that no warning was received from the plant and
that no fighter craft were dispatched to investigate the plane. Other
news agencies discover that Fox had notified authorities of their plans
prior to taking off and had received clearance to fly over the plant.

April 25, 2002: According to Nando Media, Kurdish officials report that
hundreds of al Qaeda troops have taken control of a series of villages
in Iraq near the northern extent of the border with Iran.

April 25, 2002: Proposes that Congress pass a law to allow mining companies
to dump runoff and waste into river valleys near mined land. The
Environmental Protection Agency endorses the measure, saying that it
will put into writing the EPA's existing policy of ignoring mining
companies that violate the Clean Water Act.

April 26. 2002, Unrelated: 12 people are killed by the bombing of a
mosque by Islamic militants in Pakistan. The bomb was planted in the 
womens' area of the segregated prayer hall.

April 26, 2002, Unrelated: According to the BBC, Saudi Arabia threatens
danger to US interests worldwide unless the US forces Israel to surrender
to the Palestinian Authority.

April 26, 2002: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announces that the US
and its allies have been capturing small bands of Taliban and al Qaeda
fighters on an almost daily basis.

April 2002, Unrelated: Congress votes to split the Immigration and
Naturalization Service into two agencies, one to support lawful
immigration and one to enforce the borders. Newspapers report that
the INS is being abolished.

April 2002, Unrelated: Congress passes a $20 billion annual farm
entitlement bill. The bill bans the media from reporting on who 
receives the subsidies.

April 2002: Newspapers report that the US is delaying an invasion of
Iraq until 2003.

April 2002: Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat allows US and
British troops into PA administered territories to act as prison guards
for terrorists. In exchange, Israel allows Arafat's release from house
arrest. Arafat immediately condemns Israel as "terrorists, Nazis, and
racists" and urges the world to destroy the Israeli government.

April 2002: The city of Gardez in Afghanistan is shelled by rebels opposed
to the appointment of a rival warlord  as their governor.

April 2002, Unrelated: Mid-level Federal Aviation Administration officials
report that the Saudi government has demanded that no women act as flight
controllers during a Saudi prince's flight through the US. The FAA
complies, but later reports that no such request was made.

April 2002: The National Rifle Association says that gun control advocates
are terrorists.

April 2002, Unrelated: Alexander Lebed, one of Russia's top politicians,
is killed in a helicopter crash.

April 2002: Libya offers $3.5 billion to families of those killed in Libya's
bombing of a civilian jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, on the condition
that the US and UN remove trade sanctions against Libya. Later reports
have this number reduced to $2.7 billion.

April 2002, Unrelated: California's information systems department
makes a deal with Oracle computer software supplier to buy far more
software than the state needs in exchange for a $25,000 donation to
Governor Gray Davis's reelection campaign. Davis fires those responsible
and orders the state traffic police to raid the information systems
department, where they find employees shredding documents related
to the deal.

April 2002: The Republican Party issues donation solicitation letters
whose envelopes claim them to be official government census forms.

April 28, 2002: Columnist Fernando Pedreira of the Brazilian newspaper 
Estado Sau Paulo and a friend of President Fernando Cardoso reports that
Bush had asked Cardoso about Brazil, "Do you have blacks, too?" The
story appears in Der Spiegel in June, and the White House officially
denounces the report as "total crap".

April 28, 2002: Demands that Yasser Arafat act against terrorism before
he will give Arafat any respect.

April 30, 2002: Announces an intention to resume peace talks with North
Korea that had been earlier cancelled by Bush.

April 30, 2002, Unrelated: The FBI arrests Enaam M. Arnaout, head of the
Chicago-based International Benevolence Foundation, for perjury related
to his denials that his charity is associated with al Qaeda. The charity
had earlier sued the Federal government after its assets were seized for
investigation.

April 30, 2002: Judge Shira Scheindlin decides that John Ashcroft's practice
of having witnesses arrested and jailed until trial is unconstitutional.

April 30, 2002: Attorney General John Ashcroft declares that the US will
fight the Colombia-based Communist rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia "just as we fight terrorism in the mountains of south Asia",
as a US grand jury accuses the group of the murder of several US aid workers.

April 30, 2002, Unrelated: Physicist Richard Smyth is sentenced to 
40 months of prison for selling nuclear weapons components to Israel.

April 30, 2002: US troops in Afghanistan kill four al Qaeda troops and
seize a cache of light arms and mortars.

April 30, 2002, Unrelated: Britt Snider, head of the Congressional committee
investigating US intelligence agencies' capabilities after the September 11
attack, resigns unexpectedly after fewer than two months on the job. Some
officials report that he resigned over personal matters, while there are
other reports that he failed to communicate his investigation group's status
to the rest of the committee.

April 30, 2002: National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice explains the
US's support of the Carmona coup in Venezuela by stating that "complexities
bring you into different situations where different tactics are important"

April 30, 2002: Extreme vote fraud is reported as Pakistani dictator
Pervez Musharraf is elected President for another five years by a margin
of 42 million votes out of 43 million cast.

May 1, 2002, Unrelated: Basque terrorists explode two car bombs outside
a football (soccer) championship game in Spain, damaging the Europa Tower
but causing no reported deaths.

May 1, 2002, Unrelated: Czech and US officials announce that September 11
hijacker Mohammed Atta had never met with an Iraqi agent as had earlier
been reported.

May 1, 2002: Attorney General John Ashcroft and Congressmen Orrin Hatch
and Mark Foley pledge to illegalize the creation of works of art which
are supposed to depict minors engaged in sexual activity.

May 1, 2002: Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill announces that he is
adamantly opposed to the concept of a government using its power
to bolster a faltering economy. The dollar promptly loses a small portion
of its value on world markets.

May 1, 2002: Congressman Dick Armey advocates the forced removal of Arabs
from the West Bank of the Jordan river in Israel.

May 2, 2002: During the official Congressionally mandated
National Day of Prayer (established in 1952), the Senate Chaplain
asks God to "bless our President, Congress, and all our leaders
with supernatural power".

May 2, 2002, Unrelated: Federal judge Charles F. Eick orders Sonicblue
corporation, makers of the ReplayTV video recorder, to record everything
that ReplayTV's users use the device for and to give the information
to the television networks suing it for copyright infringement.

May 2, 2002, Unrelated: News Interactive reports that Australia's
prostitutes have been forced to close shop due to exhaustion after
the visit of the US aircraft carrier John C Stennis. 

May 3, 2002, Unrelated: The Army begins investigating "inappropriate
behaviour" related to lobbying for the Crusader artillery system
whose production is likely to be cancelled.

May 3, 2002: Orders banks to seize the assets of Basque terrorists. 

May 3, 2002: US troops report confiscating all the weapons in an
unnamed village in Afghanistan where al Qaeda supporters existed.

May 3, 2002, Unrelated: 18 Americans are expelled from Mexico after
waving swords and pledging to fight for farmers whose land is being
taken by the government to build an airport.

May 4, 2002: The Texas state Attorney General declares that Bush's 
gubernatorial records are State property and fall under the Public
Information Act.

May 2002: Someone leaves pipe bombs in mailboxes from Iowa to Colorado,
leaving notes urging people to kill themselves and accusing the
government of knowing that nobody really dies and of hiding this information
from the public. A young man is caught in Nevada and quickly confesses,
claiming that his intent was to leave bombs in points that formed a
happy face across a map of the United States.

May 2002: Conservative News reports that the Communist government of India
is complaining about US Embassy official James Callaghan's visit to
an Islamic school.

May 5, 2002: Philippines police arrest nine people suspected of being
al Qaeda members.

May 5, 2002: Secretary of State Colin Powell announces that the US
is withdrawing from all involvement in the International Criminal Court
due to fears that the court would selectively prosecute based on political
favouritism for and against certain countries rather than suspected guilt.

May 5, 2002: The Arab League of 22 nations announces its refusal to
participate in US-sponsored peace talks unless Israel leaves "the
occupied territories", which in Arab parlance usually means any
space on Earth occupied by Jews' presence but in this instance
is reported to refer only to the Israeli army's siege of several dozen
armed terrorists who are hiding in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. 

May 6, 2002: Due to US diplomatic pressure, Israel agrees to allow 
the freedom of several terrorists who have fortified themselves
in Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity in exchange for the exile of a
few of them to Italy. The US shortly thereafter announces that peace
in the Middle East cannot be made as long as Yasser Arafat is a
bargaining partner. The US shortly thereafter announces that Israel
must deal with Yasser Arafat as a bargaining partner for peace. Israel
also releases documents showing the Saudi government's funding 
of bounties to the families of dead terrorists. The Palestinian Authority
throws parades in the honour of the released terrorists and offers them
jobs in any government ministry.

May 6, 2002, Unrelated: Investigators find a internal Enron memo
proving that the company illegally conspired to raise energy prices
in California.

May 7, 2002: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon lauds the US for
helping stop a United Nations investigation into Israeli massacres
in Jenin. World opinion has roundly criticized Israel's refusal to
allow the mission, which was controversial in Israel and the United
States because there were no massacres in Jenin.

May 7, 2002: Canadian soldiers back from reconnaissance in eastern
Afghanistan report finding the graves of several of bin Laden's
personal bodyguards.

May 7, 2002: The UN Security Council, with US support, slightly
weakens the sanctions on Iraq.

May 7, 2002: Italy refuses to grant refuge to the Arab terrorists
currently in the Church of the Nativity, and says that it was never
consulted before the US and Israel decided to send the terrorists there.
Israel announces that it now cannot find any country willing to accept
the terrorists, even though many world leaders have been calling for the
terrorists' release. Days later, Cyprus agrees to accept the terrorists
temporarily. On May 11, Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and
Belgium offer refuge to the terrorists.

May 7, 2002: The Christian Science Monitor reports that Bush will
soon announce that public schools should segregate boys from girls.
Similar articles soon appear in other media, but all say that
Bush is expected to make the announcement soon and are not
reporting on anything that has actually happened.

May 7, 2002: Undersecretary of State John Bolton accuses Cuba of
developing biological weapons and giving biological weapons research
materials to Syria, Libya, and Iraq.

May 7, 2002, Unrelated: Tabloid journalist Matt Drudge reports that
Viacom is paying radio stations up to $300,000 each to carry right-wing
talk show host Bill O'Reilly's show.

May 2002: Unknown parties bomb a bus carrying French naval engineers
in Pakistan, killing 14. Some reports suggest the attack may have
been targeted instead at New Zealand's cricket team which was staying in
a nearby hotel.

May 2002: After Islamic Resistance bombs a pool hall in Israel, killing
over 15 patrons, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat orders his
forces to arrest terrorists, leading Israel to call off a planned attack on
terrorist positions in Gaza.

May 2002, Unrelated: About 30 people are killed in the bombing of a
Victory Day parade in Dagestan. Some reports state that Dagestan is
an independent republic, while others refer to it as part of Russia.

May 2002: Western Shoshone protest Bush's plan to store nuclear
waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, claiming the mountain as a holy
site and pointing out that the Treaty of Ruby Valley does not grant
the United States authority over the land beyond mining, farming,
transportation, and telegraphs. The Western Shoshone are the only
native American group who have kept their land granted by treaty
with the United States and have resisted pressures to sell it, but
in 1977 the United States paid itself $26 million for the land by
falsely claiming to represent the Western Shoshone, and the
Supreme Court upheld this maneuver in 1985.

May 2002, Unrelated: Palestinian Authority supporters attack a
Jew-organized peace rally at San Francisco State University in
California, shouting "Hitler didn't finish the job!" and demanding
the expulsion of Jews from the United States while physically assaulting
the peace activists.

May 8, 2002 Unrelated: Chinese troops invade the Japanese embassy 
in Shenyang to seize North Korean refugees. China claims that Japan
asked for the operation and thanked China afterwards, while Japan
denies this. Television footage shows Japanese diplomats attempting to
stop the Chinese troops.

May 9, 2002: A US assassination attempt against former Afghan Prime Minister
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar fails. Hekmatyar is a former US ally against the
Soviet Union, but is accused of planning attacks on US troops and the
new Afghan government.

May 9, 2002: Iran and the United States deny reports of communication
between officials of the two governments.

May 9, 2002: Unknown parties launch a missile attack on Jalalabad airport
in Afghanistan. No injuries are reported.

May 9, 2002, Unrelated: The Federal Reserve Bank reports finding traces
of anthrax in a mail facility.

May 9, 2002: The US accuses Colombia of embezzling money intended for
anti-drug operations, and cuts funding.

May 9, 2002: The Drug Enforcement Agency accuses Hizballah of being
behind a nationwide methamphetamine ring, and announces that this is
the first time that drug sales have been traced back to terrorist groups.

May 9, 2002, Unrelated: Conservative News accuses Cable News Network
of being "a component of Fidel Castro's propaganda machine".

May 10, 2002, Unrelated: The UK extradites al Qaeda member Amar Makhlulif
to the United States.

May 10, 2002: The State Department adds Syria, Libya, and Cuba to the
"Axis of Terror", also known as the "Axis of Evil".

May 11, 2002, Unrelated: Bahrain bans Al-Jazeera television due to
"Jewish bias" that "deliberately seeks to harm Bahrain"

May 2002: Calls for reducing welfare rolls by requiring 70% of welfare
recipients to have jobs and for welfare recipients to work at least
30 hours per week, announcing that these requirements "will provide hope
and promise, dignity and opportunity for millions of Americans". The
news media almost unanimously prints as fact nothing more than Bush's
spin that this gives states the opportunity to provide more welfare
services for the impoverished.

May 2002, Unrelated: A Yemeni terrorist group allied with al Qaeda attempts
to assassinate General Ali Mansour Rashad, the second in command of Yemen's
intelligence service.

May 2002: A rocket is fired at a US barracks in Afghanistan, missing and
causing no injuries.

May 2002: US troops kill 5 people and arrest 32 suspected of being Taliban
or al Qaeda troops in a battle north of Kandahar. The US reports that the
battle began when its troops were ambushed.

May 2002: A European Union diplomat says that conditions at Afghanistan's
prisons for captured Taliban troops are similar to those of the Nazi death
camps, specifically naming the Auschwitz camp where prisoners were
murdered by the thousands daily and those allowed to live were subjected
to horrible medical experiments.

May 2002, Unrelated: Israel arrests and expels US citizen and reporter
Dallal Muhammad, who is also the leader of an Arab charity. US citizen
and journalist Riad Abdelkarim is arrested by Israel and held on charges
of terrorism. Abdelkarim is a co-founder of the same charity, Kinder-USA,
and before its founding both had been fundraisers for the Holy Land
Foundation, the front for Islamic Resistance which had claimed to be a 
charity.

May 2002, Unrelated: Syria threatens to cut diplomatic relations after
the US Congress passes a bill banning visas for people from terrorist
supporting nations.

May 11, 2002: Announces a treaty with Russia to reduce the two nations'
nuclear arsenals. White House officials complain that Bush didn't want
the treaty but Congress had asked for it. The treaty does not reduce the
actual number of warheads but only the number which are mounted on missiles,
leading some Congressmen to complain that warheads in storage are a greater
threat to the United States because they are more likely to be stolen than
is likely for a missile to be launched.

May 11, 2002: While visiting Cuba, former President Jimmy Carter announces
that Cuba is not connected to terrorism and is not developing biological
weapons, and claims a briefing with the United States' intelligence agencies
as the source of this information.

May 11, 2002: While signing the $20bn/yr farm subsidy bill, claims that
these subsidies will not encourage production or lower prices.

May 2002: Admiral Thomas Moorer calls former President Jimmy Carter
a "damn menace" to the United States for repeating United States
intelligence agencies' information that there is no evidence of Cuban
involvement in creating biological weapons, and former Defense Department
official Frank Gaffney calls Carter a "useful idiot" of Castro's.
Moorer accuses Carter of giving the Panama Canal to China, since Panama
has allowed China to patrol both entrances into the canal since Carter
abandoned the US's claim to the land.

May 2002, Unrelated: Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
form an alliance.

May 2002: Reporters discover messages from government officials which
state that Cheney's energy task force took special effort to ignore
situations unfavourable to the report's conclusion, especially the
power situation in California.

May 2002, Unrelated: Militiamen attack an Indian Army base in
the Indian-controlled half of Kashmir, concentrating fire on
family quarters and killing 30. The United States declares the
attack to be "barbaric terrorism". According to Conservative News,
Pakistan blames India for the attack. India blames Pakistan for the
attack and expels Pakistan's ambassador.

May 2002: The US State Department begins an internal investigation into
its handling of the coup in Venezuela and the possibilities of US
involvement.

May 2002: Gregory Palast reports that Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez
was warned by Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries leader
Ali Rodriguez that the United States was going to launch a coup against
Chavez upon Iraq's announcement of an oil embargo against the United
States, in order to maintain a free flow of oil supplies to the US. The
report states that Chavez had quartered several hundred loyal troops
in hidden areas underneath the Presidential palace. Chavez claims to
have videotapes of two US military officers meeting with the coup
planners.

May 2002: Democrats condemn Bush for selling photographs of himself
working after the September 11 attacks.

May 2002: Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah reports having spent hours
showing Palestinian Authority propaganda to the "uninformed" Bush.

May 2002: Britain reports that its troops in Afghanistan are falling
ill to a fever of some sort.

May 9, 2002: Condemns Ron Kirk, a Democrat running for Congress, as
an "obstructionist" even though Kirk supports Bush's policies and
has not served in Congress to have had the opportunity to obstruct
anything.

May 2002: Bush's media advisor Mark McKinnon publicly apologizes for
having donated money to three pro-Bush Democrats' campaigns. Congressional
spokesmen harshly condemn McKinnon for not being "a loyal Bush team
player", "support[ing] a Tom Daschle Democrat", and "support[ing]
somebody who will subvert Bush's agenda". McKinnon reports that Bush's
top advisor Karl Rove has ordered him not to leave the White House
staff to work for one of the Democratic candidates, whom had all offered
McKinnon a job.

May 2002: Multiple media sources announce that Bush had been informed
in August 2001 that Osama bin Laden was planning to hijack airplanes
in the United States.

May 2002: Calls Cuban leader Fidel Castro "one of the world's
last great tyrants".

May 2002: Colonel Robert Maginnis, consultant to the US on drug policy
and vice president of anti-abortion group Family Research Council,
threatens "adverse consequences" if Canada would "antagonize government
leaders and grass roots leaders" by legalizing marijuana.

May 14, 2002, Unrelated: Former US President Jimmy Carter, while visiting
Cuba, asks the United States to lift the embargo against Cuba and calls
on Cuba to lift restrictions on the freedom of speech in the country.

May 14, 2002: US troops arrest Abdul Salam Rocketi, the former Taliban
governor of Jalalabad.

May 14, 2002: When asked if there is any evidence that Cuba is manufacturing
biological weaponry, Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer admits that there isn't
by saying that the administration has only "concerns" that Cuba may be
producing weapons of mass destruction.

May 14, 2002, Unrelated: China announces a $12 billion effort to replant
trees on 82 million acres. Much of China's land has turned to desert after
being logged.

May 14, 2002, Unrelated: Three North Koreans are given asylum in South
Korea through the US's embassy in China.

May 15, 2002: Talk show host Lowell Ponte declares that former President
Jimmy Carter is "part of the reason why Osama bin Laden operatives
slammed airliners into the World Trade Center", has "the blood
of perhaps a million people dripping from his hands", "has done
more to undermine and destroy world peace than any other human
being alive", and that Carter "should be held responsible" if US
cities are hit by a "Muslim terrorist atomic weapon".

May 16, 2002, Unrelated: The FBI begins an investigation into bankrupt
discount store K-Mart's loan of $30 million to an executive officer
and restatement of its net loss for 2001 changing by a factor of 10.

May 16, 2002: Former President Ronald Reagan, who defied Congressional
law by selling arms to enemy nations to secretly fund the terrorist murder
of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Central and South America,
is awarded the Medal of Honor. Bush, presenting the medal, calls Reagan
"a man of great character" and says that Reagan's name stood for patriotism.

May 16, 2002: Australian troops are ambushed by militiamen in Afghanistan.
Reports indicate that the attackers escaped with few casualties. The size
of the suspected al Qaeda force is reported only as "considerable", and
over 1,000 US and British troops moved in to support the Australians.
Reports are that the Australians suffered no casualties.

May 17, 2002, Unrelated: A US Border Patrol agent in Arizona is fired
upon by three soldiers, wearing Mexican Army uniforms and driving a
Humvee, after responding to a report from Native American tribal police
of harassment from a Humvee. Mexico denies having any troops in the
region, near Papago Farms and the Mexican-Arizonan border. The Immigration
and Naturalization Service does not report the incident until May 21.

May 17, 2002: The secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,
led by Judge Royce Lamberth, condemns John Ashcroft, Louis Freeh, and
the Justice Department for lying under oath and withholding information
from the court, as the court denies the Justice Department advanced
surveillance powers. The decision is released to the public on August 22.

May 2002: Vice President Dick Cheney condemns as "thoroughly irresponsible
and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war" all Congressional
criticism of the Bush administration.

May 2002: CBS news reporter Dan Rather accuses the national media,
including himself, of failing to accurately report Bush's actions
for fear of offending right-wing politicians. Rather also condemns
the Army for restricting the media's ability to gather information.

May 2002, Unrelated: The European Union signs a security alliance
with Central and South American countries. Which ones is not
reported, but some reports imply that all countries south of
Mexico entered into this alliance.

May 2002: Bush's press secretary Ari Fleischer accuses the Democratic
Party of having knowledge of the September 11 terrorist attacks and
failing to do anything about it, because Senate Intelligence Committee
member Dianne Feinstein had issued a warning about terrorism in July 2001.

May 2002: British troops in Afghanistan fall ill to a mysterious
disease which is later identified as winter vomiting, or Norwalk-like
virus.

May 2002: The Times of London reports that the US has bombed another
wedding party in Afghanistan when the guests fired machine guns in
celebration. The US reports that its troops in the area were targeted
by mortar fire from the bombees. The tribe of the people bombed lodges
a complaint that its people were only fighting another tribe. Australia
reports that its troops were fired on "from midday till dusk" from heavily
fortified positions.

May 2002: Houston, Texas police refuse US Attorney General John Ashcroft's
order to track illegal immigrants, because illegal immigrants are integral
to the local economy. Houston police have a policy against arresting or
investigating anyone for being in the country illegally.

May 2002: Microsoft computer software corporation tells a federal court
that its products are so faulty that release of their specifications
would cause a serious threat to national security due to their widespread
use in military communications infrastructure.

May 18, 2002, Unrelated: Badie Qorhani of the London-based Arabic
newspaper Asharq al-Awsat reports that al Qaeda has claimed
responsibility for a gasoline truck explosion near a 2000-year-old
Tunisian synagogue, which killed 14 German tourists and 5 others,
and that al Qaeda is planning new attacks on the US.

May 19, 2002: The FBI releases a warning that al Qaeda may be planning
to bomb apartment buildings in the US.

May 19, 2002: A US soldier is killed when his unit is ambushed in Afghanistan.

May 20, 2002: Offers Cuba humanitarian aid and resumption of mail service,
but says that other US sanctions will continue until Cuba has instituted
democratic reforms. Newspapers had expected Bush to strengthen the sanctions.
Cuba accuses Bush of seeking support from the Mafia which the Communists
had kicked off the island.

May 20, 2002: Israel accuses the US and UK of allowing a terrorist under
joint US-UK guard to order a recent attack on Israeli civilians.

May 20, 2002: The Washington Post reports that Bush is using government
money to pay for his transportation to and associated costs of attending
Republican Party fundraisers. The report states that Clinton did this
as well.

May 2002: Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright condemns Bush
for a foreign policy that sends opposing messages, and that his foreign
policy does "talk about the importance of the rule of law but seem
allergic to treaties designed to strengthen the rule of law in areas
such as money-laundering, biological weapons, crimes against humanity
and the environment".

May 2002: Environmentalist group Greenpeace rams a French yacht with one
of its boats, damaging the America's Cup racer.

May 2002, Unrelated: Insight Magazine reports that Saudi Arabia's charity
payments to citizens of the Palestinian Authority are specifically 
targeted to terrorists and their families, amounting to a $5300 payment
per terrorist.

May 2002: Charles James, Assistant Attorney General for the Department
of Justice, visits Belgium to lobby the European Union to reject
antitrust law, announcing that "the theory of monopoly leveraging has
been largely if not entirely rejected by our courts" and that the
concept of antitrust law has "very little standing in the US".

May 2002: The National Republican Congressional Committee appoints
Tom Palmeri, member of the city council of Covina, California and
a registered Democrat since the 1980s, as Republican of the Year
and bills him for $150.

May 2002: First Lady Laura Bush condemns any criticism of Bush or
suggestions of Bush's incompetence as being an offense to the memories
of those killed in the terrorist attack on September 11.

May 2002: Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill tours Africa with pop singer
and philanthropist Bono.

May 2002, Unrelated: Islamic Resistance praises Saudi Arabia
and Egypt for their continued support of terrorism.

May 21, 2002: Undersecretary of State John Magaw announces that he will
not authorize the arming of airplane pilots.

May 21, 2002: The British Broadcasting Corporation prints a prominent
article, written by Jeremy McDermott, denouncing Colombia's Communist
guerrilla movement Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia as terrorists
without any cause or justification for their attacks. This is out of
character for the BBC which usually attempts to avoid offending either
side in a conflict.

May 21, 2002: Canada announces the full withdrawal of its troops from
Afghanistan by July.

May 21, 2002: The FBI issues an alert that a terrorist attack on the
Brooklyn Bridge or Statue of Liberty is expected during the Memorial
Day weekend.

May 21, 2002: Iran responds to the US's accusing it of support for
terrorism by in return declaring the US a terrorist supporting nation
for the US's support of "the Jewish regime", accusing the US of not
documenting its allegations, and declaring that anyone considering
peace talks with the United States is guilty of treason. The US State
Department report also accuses Cuba, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan,
and Syria of supporting terrorism.

May 21, 2002: The Department of Justice announces it will file suit
against several counties in Florida, Missouri, and Tennessee for
barring minorities from voting. A week later, the Department announces
that there is no evidence of such voting fraud in Florida.

May 22, 2002, Unrelated: The USS Dolphin, a Navy research submarine,
catches fire. No injuries are reported, but the ship is evacuated.

May 22, 2002: India's Prime Minister visits troops in Kashmir province
and pledges to begin a great military offensive.

May 22, 2002: The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee subpoenas
Bush after Bush refuses to disclose the extent of his relationship
with Enron. Bush's spokespeople condemn the Senate for "refusing to
work cooperatively with the White House".

May 22, 2002: Ontario, Canada, announces that an al Qaeda cell under
surveillance has slipped away, and praises its intelligence services
for the victory.

May 22, 2002: Over 10,000 people protest Bush's visit to Germany. An equal
number of police seal off the entire area of Berlin where Bush visits.

May 22, 2002, Unrelated: Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota vetoes
a bill requiring public school students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance
to the United States, saying that patriotism comes from the heart and
should not be forced upon children by the government.

May 23, 2002: The Washington Post reports that Microsoft has been
heavily lobbying the Defense Department to ban the use of standards-based
and freely distributed software.

May 2002: Left-wing news sources report that John O'Neill, a high ranking
FBI official who led the investigation of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda,
was forced to resign in the middle of 2001 because Bush and his
appointees did not think investigating al Qaeda was important and because
Bush was negotiating with the Taliban to build an oil pipeline through
Afghanistan, reported negotiations which reportedly failed in late August.
O'Neill died in the World Trade Center's collapse after running into the
second tower to rescue and evacuate people from the attack, and some
reports call him the martyr and hero of September 11 to oppose the
villain Bush. O'Neill's superior, who had hampered his efforts to investigate
al Qaeda because of personal differences, resigned before two months after
the attacks.

May 2002: Reports leak that the Department of Defense has been heavily
lobbying Bush to avoid a war with Iraq. Other than some reports that
say the Army is incapable of gathering enough troops and handling the
logistics necessary for such an operation, reports don't disclose
the Army's reasons for this lobbying.

May 2002: White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer admits that the
recent reports of imminent terrorist attack had been manufactured by
White House officials in order to get Democrats' criticism of Bush out
of the newspapers.

May 2002: Cuba pledges its support to the United States' fight against
terrorism. The US has accused Cuba of being one of the world's greatest
sponsors of terrorism.

May 2002: The House votes to allow the United States Postal Service
to open and read mail without any warrant or suspicion of criminal
activity.

May 2002: The House of Representatives grants Bush "fast-track" authority
to negotiate treaties which Congress can only approve or deny, but not amend. 

May 2002, Unrelated: The Michigan Republican Party runs several of
its members as Democrats in regional and state elections in order
to disrupt Democrats' campaigns in the state. The tactic is organized
through the Senate Majority Communications Office, which is barred
by law from being used for politics.

May 2002: The Minneapolis FBI regional bureau reports that it had
requested to investigate captured al Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui
in late August and early September 2001, but that these requests had
been denied by Bush' recent appointee to head the FBI, Robert Mueller.
If these requests had been approved and the FBI had gained information
about Moussaoui's affiliates in the United States, this would have
disrupted and possibly prevented the September 11 attacks. Following
reports state that the regional FBI officers tried to work with the
Central Intelligence Agency's antiterrorism bureau after the FBI halted
their investigation into Moussaoui, and that the regional officers were
reprimanded by their superiors in the national bureau for this.

May 2002, Unrelated: Scientists discover ocean-sized masses of
subsurface hydrogen on Mars. 

May 2002: FBI Director Robert Mueller admits that the Minneapolis memo
is accurate, meaning that he had been lying since September 11 when he has
claimed that the FBI had no information that would have indicated
terrorist activity in the US at that time. 

May 2002: Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf claims that Pakistan
has never supported terrorism against India and pledges Pakistan's
eternal support to terrorist attacks against India. India takes the hint
and moves more troops to the border. The US begins making preparations
to evacuate US citizens from Pakistan.

May 2002: It is announced that the US will withdraw from the Philippines
by the end of summer.

May 2002: Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller
announce the reinstatement of the COINTELPRO program, under which Federal
agents infiltrate political organizations disfavoured by those in power
to subvert or destroy them from inside. The promise is that these tactics
will only be used against terrorists.

May 2002, Unrelated: Congressmen John Boehner and Steve Chabot write to
the Ohio Board of Education to press for the discouragement of teaching
science and for schools to teach religious dogma instead.

May 2002: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appoints to the board of
visitors for the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation
(formerly the terrorist training camp School of the Americas), Senators
Jeff Sessions, and Carl Levin; Congressmen Saxby Chambliss and
Loretta Sanchez; Generals John N Abrams and Gary Speer; Assistant
Secretary of State and notorious terrorist propagandist Otto Reich;
former Ambassador to Peru, Dennis Jett; former deputy Ambassador to
the United Nations, Jose Sorzano; lawyer Stephen Schneebaum of
Patton, Boggs, and Blow, who helped deliver money to Guatemala
when the country was under a US embargo; anti-contraception
activist and Catholic priest Denis St. Marie; Jennie Lincoln,
Special Assistant for International Projects and Associate Director
of Latin American Studies at Georgia Tech Research Institute, and also
a consultant to the Defense Department on project United Counterdrug
and as an expert speaker at Army presentations on Latin America; and
George Washington University professor Deborah Avant, a specialist
in the relationship between society and the use of military force. The
board's duties are to report to Rumsfeld on the facility's operations.

May 2002: Declares some Florida land and seacoast off limits to 
oil drilling, citing the need to protect the environment from
industrial development. The national media, even right wing sources,
report that the order was given to support Jeb Bush's chances in
the upcoming Florida gubernatorial election. California requests
Bush do the same for its coastal lands.

May 2002: Mocks journalist David Gregory for having spoken to French
President Jacques Chirac in French, derisively calling Gregory
an "intercontinential".

May 2002: Tabloid journalist Matt Drudge reports having personally
spoken with an anonymous White House official who said that the government
should have prevented Paramount movie production company from releasing
a movie about a nuclear attack on the United States because the fictional
film depicts a President as injured and because its existence may cause
people to be less concerned by official warnings of terrorist attacks. The
report says that the issue of the film was brought to Bush, who decided
to let it be released even though he shared the concerns of the source.

May 2002, Unrelated: Voters of Grant County, Oregon, pass measures
to seize forestry rights to federally-owned land in the county and
to ban the United Nations from the county because it wants to
establish "one world religion-Pantheism world taxation"

May 2002, Unrelated: Pakistan announces that it will launch a nuclear
first strike in the event of a war with India.

May 2002: Sends Defense Secretary Rumsfeld on an emergency diplomatic
mission to India and Pakistan.

May 2002: The US State Department urges all Americans to leave India,
as Pakistan bombards Indian border areas.

May 2002: The Media Research Center accuses the New York Times of
harassing and intimidating Bush during the Presidential campaign
by assigning homosexual reporters to cover his campaign.

May 2002: The US announces that al Qaeda has smuggled Stinger
anti-aircraft missiles into the US, shortly after the discovery
of a launcher in Saudi Arabia.

May 2002: The US releases over 50 prisoners of a controversial
raid in Afghanistan.

May 2002: US troops accidentally kill 3 allied Afghan militiamen. 

May 2002, Unrelated: The US steals over 150 cattle from Native American
tribes after the tribes fail to pay Mafia-style protection fees to the
Bureau of Land Management to be allowed to graze the cattle on
their own land.

May 2002: Investigators discover a slideshow presentation created
by Perot Systems Corporation which promotes illegal methods that
energy companies could use to cheat the California market. Perot Systems
had helped develop California's deregulation scheme.

May 30, 2002: Judicial Watch holds a press conference for FBI Special
Agent Robert Wright, who has been trying since mid 2001 to speak to
members of Congress about the FBI's practice of stalling and blocking
investigations of Islamic terrorist groups but has been demoted for
these efforts. Wright has been investigating terrorism since 1993,
is said to have personally organized and led the Chicago field office's
antiterrorism investigations code named Bulgar Betrayal, and led the
investigation of al Qaeda financier Yasin Qadi. When Wright attempted
to speak to Justice Department officials about negligence on the part
of FBI officials, he was dismissed by Justice Department Criminal
Division head Michael Chertoff as a conspiracy theorist. After the
September 11 attack, the office of Attorney General John Ashcroft
made unspecified threats to Wright to prevent him from speaking to
Congress, and the FBI issued an order that Wright was not allowed
to leave Chicago at any time without the FBI's permission. The day
before this press conference, FBI Assistant Director John E. Collingwood
threatened Wright, Judicial Watch, and their attorneys Schippers and Bailey
with criminal prosecution if Wright were to say anything at all
about his experiences in the FBI. Judicial Watch spokesman Larry Klayman,
a former Department of Justice employee, claims that this threat must
have been approved by FBI Director Robert Mueller, who has at this
time been giving press conferences urging disgruntled agents to speak
publicly about their experiences. Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton
reads a document, previously approved for release by the FBI, about
a Muslim FBI agent in Texas who would refuse to record conversations
with Muslim suspects and would wander the country interfering with
other field offices' terrorism investigations by personally contacting
the suspects in these investigations. This agent's actions were
implicitly approved by FBI headquarters as repeated requests from many
field offices to discipline this agent were ignored. Wright says that
many other agents have been placed under threat of criminal prosecution
if they contact Congress, specifically naming agents John Vincent and
Barry Carmadi. Klayman implies that al Qaeda's funding and the
funding of Palestinian Arab terrorist groups such as HAMAS are 
so interrelated as to be indistinguishable, as he does not distinguish
between the two. Klayman accuses FBI Director Robert Mueller,
Attorney General John Ashcroft, former FBI Director Louis Freeh,
President Bush, former President Clinton, former President Bush,
and Congress of treason for scuttling efforts to investigate sources
of terrorist funding, especially where the source is found to be
Saudi Arabia. Klayman also accuses "some very powerful US banks"
of knowingly allowing the passage of funds for terrorist attacks
against the United States.

May 31, 2002: Zimbabwe, under the threat of widespread starvation,
refuses the US's donation of genetically-modified food. 

May 31, 2002: US forces bomb Iraqi air defenses after coming
under fire. It is reported that four other bombings have occurred
in the past two weeks, but have not been widely reported.


June 1, 2002: Announces that the US should invade other countries if
it suspects that the other countries would become enemies of the US
in the future, rather than waiting for another country to commit
acts of war against the US.

June 2, 2002: According to Joshua Green of Washington Monthly magazine,
tells Army Secretary Thomas White "As long as they're hitting you on
Enron, they're not hitting me. That's your job. You're the lightning rod
for this administration."

June 2002: The Republican Party, under the direction of Grover Norquist,
compiles a dossier of Democratic Party members and campaign contributers
for the purpose of allowing Republicans in government to refuse jobs and
political favours to these people on the basis of their political affiliation.

June 2002: Senator Tom Daschle reports hearing from lobbyists that
Republicans are encouraging businesses to fire employees who are
Democratic Party members.

June 2002, Unrelated: Newsweek reports that the CIA had been tracking two
of the September 11 terrorists for years prior to the attack, and had
not shared its information with other bureaus such as the INS and FBI.

June 2002: Pakistan announces that it would never use nuclear weapons.

June 2002, Unrelated: The Masai tribe of Kenya donates 14 sacred cattle
to the US in a gesture of sympathy for the suffering of September 11. 

June 2, 2002: The Environmental Protection Agency releases a report
citing human activity as the primary cause of global warming and
rejecting any corrective measures, saying that people had better get
used to the changing environment. Bush and his appointees have, during
his term in office, denied that global warming exists and ridiculed
the suggestion that humans could have any impact on the Earth's environment.

June 2, 2002: Iraq's foreign minister claims that Iraq has made
unconditional offers to give a suspect in the 1994 bombing of the
World Trade Center to the custody of US authorities, but these
offers have been denied twice, in 1994 and 2001. The US claims that
Iraq had demanded the US agree to a timeline of the suspect's past
which did not agree with known facts.

June 3, 2002: The US Government pressures international financing
company Moody's to stop recognizing Iran.

June 4, 2002: Condemns the EPA's report on global warming as
having been written by "the bureaucracy", a Republican slang term
for the Democratic Party.

June 4, 2002, Unrelated: France arrests a suspected al Qaeda
member for conspiring to bomb the Strasbourg Cathedral in Germany.

June 2002: The Czech Republic's Ambassador to the United Nations, Hynek
Kmonicek, confirms that al Qaeda terrorist Mohammed Atta met with
Iraqi ambassador Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani the year earlier.

June 2002: An anonymous hold is placed on the FBI Reform Act 
in the Senate. Blame is placed on the Republicans, although it is
not clear how it would be known that an anonymous Senator is Republican
or how a single Senator could block a bill that has passed committee.

June 2002: Agence France Press reports that CIA Director George Tenet
tells the Palestinian Authority that the US will stop restraining
Israel if the PA does not stop supporting attacks against Israeli
civilians.

June 5, 2002: The Wall Street Journal condemns Environmental Protection
Agency head Christine Todd Whitman for allowing reports to be released
containing facts which disagree with Bush's preconceived opinions;
accuses Whitman of believing that Al Gore is President, as if this
would change the facts on the ground regarding the environment; and
suggests that the recent report about global warming contained
"sloppy language" when the report made clear its conclusions.
Conservative News reports as fact that global warming is a liberal myth
and that scientists have rejected "the liberal line of thought". 

June 2002: Attorney General Ashcroft announces that the US will
begin fingerprinting visitors to the country.

June 2002: Representatives of Canada and Mexico meet to discuss
how they can attempt to open up free trade to the protectionist
United States.

June 2002: US troops seize a small weapons cache in a village
in Afghanistan and arrest five people.

June 2002: A number of right-wing groups petition Bush to
rescind the EPA's recent report on global warming.

June 2002: Republican Senator Trent Lott announces his pleasure that
Cable News Network has "been willing to improve its ideological balance".

June 6, 2002: Acting Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Pamela Olson
announces the Treasury Department's opposition to a Congressional bill
that would ban companies from fraudulently registering overseas in order
to avoid paying taxes in the United States, saying that closing this
loophole would "have harmful effects on the U.S. economy".

June 6, 2002: Proposes combining the Animal and Plant Health Inspection
Service, Coast Guard, Customs Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency,
Immigration and Naturalization Service, and Secret Service under a single
command that will also have controlling ties into the Central Intelligence
Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Energy's
nuclear design and production. The new department would be the
second largest bureau in the Federal government with only the Army
surpassing it in size, and would have a $40 billion annual budget.

June 7, 2002: Soldiers attack an Abu Sayyaf base in the Philippines,
killing four terrorists and rescuing a hostage. The earliest reports
said the soldiers were US troops, but the US denies this and says
the soldiers were Filipino. At least two other hostages are reported 
killed during the fight.

June 2002, Unrelated: The American Taxpayers Alliance calls for a 
boycott of the move "Sum of All Fears" because the movie does not
have Arabs as the villains like the book did, saying "Tell Hollywood
that taking Arab terrorists out of a movie plot as the most likely
to set off a nuclear weapon in the United States is not acceptable."

June 2002, Unrelated: Pakistan shoots down an Indian reconnaissance
drone over Pakistani airspace.

June 2002: The United States Commerce Department officially designates
Russia as a market economy country.

June 2002: South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung is told by an
advisor to avoid attending the World Cup football (soccer) match
due to security fears, including fears of a riot in the event of
a US victory because of widespread hatred of the United States.

June 2002: Creates a new military doctrine which encourages
the surprise use of nuclear weapons against countries for which 
there is no evidence of any attempt to oppose the United States
or build weapons of mass destruction.

June 2002, Unrelated: US troops abandon a base in Uzbekistan
due to traces of chemical weaponry, likely left over from
Soviet operations. Some US media sources report that Uzbekistan
is a region of Afghanistan.

June 2002, Unrelated: Colorado fights the biggest wildfire
in the state's recorded history. The 130,000 acre fire is said to
have threatened Denver before the wind turned it away. A Forest
Service official is arrested for starting the fire. Two
weeks later, a 400,000 acre fire burns in Arizona, and a
separate 60,000 acre fire burns in Colorado. A firefighter
is arrested for starting the Arizona fire.

June 2002: India reopens its airspace to Pakistani commercial
flights.

June 9, 2002, Unrelated: Rioters attack Russia's Parliament
building, causing light damage and killing one person, in
response to the Russian football (soccer) team's loss to Japan
in the World Cup sporting tournament.

June 10, 2002: Attorney General John Ashcroft announces that
al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla was arrested in Chicago on May 8
while seeking materials to build a radiation bomb. The suspected
saboteur is an American citizen who, on Bush's orders, is being
held by the military under the status of enemy combatant rather
than by police forces as a criminal. Later, Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz reports that there was no plot to build such a bomb
"beyond some fairly loose talk".

June 2002: The Middle East Media Research Institute reports that
Islamic Jihad has announced its success in holding off an expected
US attack on Iraq by promoting terrorist attacks against Israel.

June 10, 2002, Unrelated: Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post
reports that the New York Times destroyed an article on Osama
bin Laden by writer Peter Bergen on September 8.

June 10, 2002: The State Department tells the Justice Department that
it will not refuse or delay visas to applicants who are suspected 
of being terrorists, claiming that the Justice Department's designation
of someone as a terrorist is "no grounds" for refusing them a visa.

June 11, 2002: Morocco arrests five al Qaeda members.

June 2002: Pakistan and the US stage joint raids in tribal
territories in northwest Pakistan, capturing several al Qaeda
members of United States citizenship.

June 13, 2002, Unrelated: Chinese troops invade the South Korean
consulate and beat up the diplomats there while kidnapping a
North Korean refugee.

June 2002, Unrelated: Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras
accuses the news media in the United States of acting like "Stalin
and Hitler" for investigating the Catholic church's acceptance of
the molestation of children by its priests. Maradiaga calls the media's
reporting on Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, who has said the children
are to blame for letting themselves be molested by priests, a "witch
hunt" reminiscent of "the dark days of Stalinist trials of churchmen
of Eastern Europe".

June 2002: US Army reconnaissance videos of Serbia and Montenegro are
broadcast unscrambled over European satellite television as the US
runs out of military satellite bandwidth.

June 2002, Unrelated: An Onion satire about Congress demanding
a new Capitol building with luxury boxes and a retractable dome
to stay competitive, in jest at sports teams demanding newer
stadiums from their host cities, is reprinted as a news article
by the Beijing Evening News, Beijing's most popular newspaper.

June 14, 2002: The US consulate in Pakistan is bombed, killing 11 people.
Pakistan blames India for the attack.

June 14, 2002: The Arab League tells the United States that the US
will not get any support from the rest of the world in fighting
terrorism because the rest of the world is more concerned with 
removing Israel from the Middle East.

June 14, 2002: The US orders an Iraqi diplomat to the United Nations
expelled from the country for spying.

June 14, 2002: Before Bush makes a commencement speech at Ohio
State University, university officials announce that anybody who
heckles or protests Bush's appearance will be stripped of their
diplomas and arrested, and order students to stand and cheer for Bush.
As the speech begins, several students who turn to face away from Bush
are arrested for "disturbing the peace" and forcibly removed from the
area. Some students report that busloads of people have been brought
in to cheer for Bush. The Associated Press revises its coverage of
the event to remove all references to any protesters.

June 14, 2002, Unrelated: United States trained terrorist John Fredy Jimenez
is arrested by Colombian police for the assassination of Archbishop Duarte.

June 2002: The White House Office of Political Affairs is caught
using taxpayer money to fund Republican Party campaign operations.
Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer says that the Office of Political Affairs
by its nature should be used for this purpose.

June 2002: Bush's advisor Karl Rove gives a speech in which he says
that the estate tax will need to be repealed because "this is a war".

June 2002, Unrelated: The Village Voice reports that radiation-bomb
suspect Jose Padilla, also known as Abdullah al Muhajir, looks
just like drawings of an at-large suspect in the bombing of the
FBI building in Oklahoma City in 1995. The story reports that
lawyers for plotter Timothy McVeigh unsuccessfully tried to link
the case to al Qaeda and its operatives in the Philippines.

June 2002, Unrelated: South Carolina Governor Jim Hodges issues
an executive order barring transport of plutonium in the state.
The order is later overturned by a federal court.

June 2002, Unrelated: Accounting firm Arthur Anderson is found
guilty of obstruction of justice.

June 2002, Unrelated: A high ranking former Taliban official
claims he contacted the US State Department in 1999 to propose
long term plans to eliminate the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's
hold over Afghanistan, but his proposal was rejected by mid-level
officials.

June 16, 2002: The Washington Post reports that Bush has authorized
the CIA to overthrow the government of Iraq.

June 16, 2002: The New York Times reports on a leaked high-level Army
report stating that after the disruption of al Qaeda's central leadership
by the war in Afghanistan, the regional cells have stabilized to each
become a terrorist entity as dangerous as al Qaeda had been.

June 2002: According to the BBC, after US National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice accuses the Palestinian Authority of supporting
terrorism, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat announces
that "We are doing what we see as good for our people and we do not
accept any orders from anyone".

June 2002: Saudi Arabia arrests 13 suspected al Qaeda members.

June 2002, Unrelated: Two schoolgirls are killed by a US military 
vehicle in South Korea, leading to protests against the US presence.
Protesters claim that the driver of the US vehicle chose to hit
the pedestrians rather than swerve and hit another US vehicle.

June 2002, Unrelated: A British banker is killed by a bomb planted
in his car in Saudi Arabia.

June 2002: Some of the Netherlands' leading Muslim priests are
recorded calling for Muslims to break Dutch and international
laws and to make the lives of Jews and Americans "a living hell".

June 2002, Unrelated: Nationwide hardware store Home Depot forbids
all sales to representatives of the federal government, citing
excessive paperwork.

June 2002: It is reported that the US has made a secret treaty
with some of its allies that no party will hand over another's
soldiers to the International Criminal Court.

June 2002: The College Republican National Committee issues donation
solicitations with the wording "if we delay then the Rule of Law may
be dead and America may turn into a Communist police state".

June 2002: The Environmental Protection Agency releases a report
stating that the act of polluting a waterway so badly that fish
are forced to move somewhere else is actually a benefit to the fish
because the fish can no longer be caught by fishermen.

June 2002: Condemns Congress for releasing information that a
National Security Agency listening post had eavesdropped on
conversations on September 10 which had announced that an attack
would begin the next day, claiming that the lives of US intelligence
agents are at risk because of this disclosure. The conversation was
not translated until September 12.

June 2002: It is reported that federal employees in the Department
of Homeland Security will be barred from unionizing, will have
their benefits cut from their current wages, and will not be 
protected by the federal whistleblower act.

June 2002: The Philippines government announces that its troops
have wounded and possibly killed the leader of Abu Sayyaf. 

June 2002: The Justice Department argues in court that the President
can declare any person an enemy combatant at the President's will, and
that any person so declared has no rights to a lawyer or to any
of the rights granted to suspects under the Constitution, and that
lawful civilian courts have no jurisdiction in any case where the military
has seized a suspect and made a determination of the suspect's guilt.

June 2002, Unrelated: The publisher of the privately owned Ottawa
Citizen newspaper is fired for writing an editorial critical
of Prime Minister Jean Chretien.

June 2002: The Environmental Protection Agency responds to a letter,
requesting coastal protection from oil drilling, from Republican
candidate for Governor of California, Bill Simon, by praising Simon's
efforts to protect California's coasts. Simon immediately accuses
California Governor Gray Davis of doing nothing to protect the coastline.
California complains that the EPA hasn't responded to Davis's earlier
letter requesting the same thing, notes that Simon has promoted oil
drilling on the coastline in the past, and notes that the only wells
that Davis has allowed to be drilled are in situations where the state
has no legal right to prevent drilling.

June 2002, Unrelated: Isiah Wright, Republican candidate for the
House of Representatives, quits her candidacy and reports that
Republican Party officials sent her death threats and threatened
to plant cocaine in her car if she continues to run against the
popular Democratic candidate because having a Republican opposition
would bring more Democrats to the polls to vote on other issues.
Reports are that Wright is not the sanest person in the world,
but the validity of her claims is not questioned.

June 2002: Cuba passes a social referendum that the structure
of government is immutable. Reportedly, over 99% of the Cuban
population has personally signed on to the referendum.

June 20, 2002: Pakistan arrests 7 suspected al Qaeda members.

June 20 2002, Unrelated: A federal court declares South Carolina's
Governor's order barring plutonium transport to the state invalid.

June 21, 2002: The FBI issues a warning that fuel trucks could
be used by terrorists to attack Jewish temples and neighbourhoods.
It is later reported that the source of the warning failed a
lie detector test, although he insists that he overheard a
cell phone conversation between two people speaking in his native
language Arabic and planning such an attack on the 4th of July
in a city of gambling and sin which he thinks is nearby Las Vegas.

June 21, 2002, Unrelated: Russia dispatches a cruiser to Norway's
Svalbard Islands in a dispute over fishing rights.

June 2002: A federal judge declares the State Department's method
of declaring certain organizations terrorist to be unconstitutional
because the organizations are not permitted a defense.

June 2002: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld announces that Iran and Iraq
are allowing al Qaeda passage through their lands.

June 2002, Unrelated: The Supreme Court bans the execution of
the mentally retarded in a 6-3 decision. Dissenting justice Scalia
condemns the decision of the majority as having no basis in law
or popular will. A few days later, the Supreme Court decides
7-2 that only juries, not judges, may grant the death penalty.

June 2002, Unrelated: The Supreme Court decides that public schools
have the authority to force students to take drug tests.

June 2002, Unrelated: al Qaeda announces that Osama bin Laden
will soon be giving a televised speech, and officially claims
responsibility for the bombing of the synagogue on Djerba
island in Tunisia because Jews were "cavorting" there while Arabs
are dying in the war between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

June 22, 2002: Enron admits to illegally hiding $1.5 billion in profits
from its shareholders because it did not want to give its shareholders
or the public the impression that it was making money from its market
manipulation in California.

June 2002: A private airplane flies within four miles of the White
House, inside the no-fly zone. White House officials report that
that there is no possibility the White House could have been in
danger had the plane been a terrorist kamikaze bomb, and that the
White House was evacuated as per procedure but that Bush had continued
working in the Oval Office through the threat.

June 2002: Australian Defense Minister Robert Hill announces his
support for Bush's policy of attacking nations based on suspicion
rather than any evidence of intent to cause harm to the United States.

June 2002: Demands that Yasser Arafat hold elections so that his
people can vote him out of office. Bush's speech is condemned by
many European allies. Arafat shortly announces that elections will
soon be held.

June 2002, Unrelated: Israeli troops fire upon a group of civilians
in Jenin, killing two. It is reported that no disciplinary action
has been taken.

June 2002, Unrelated: All space shuttle flights are postponed after
cracks are found in the fuel pipes of two craft. 

June 23, 2002: Canada arrests an Algerian man on suspicion of
involvement with terrorists.

June 23, 2002, Unrelated: The Charlotte Observer discovers that
North Carolina is spending money won from lawsuits against
tobacco companies to fund the production and advertisements
of tobacco products.

June 2002, Unrelated: Wal-Mart is sued by several employees who
claim that they were forced to work without pay. Wal-Mart claims
that it has never forced employees to work without pay, despite
the testimony of eight managers to the contrary and its previous
settlement with 63,000 employees over the same issue. 

June 2002: Ambassador to Bolivia Manuel Rocha threatens to end 
all foreign aid to Bolivia if the populace elects Socialist Movement
candidate Evo Morales, accusing Morales of being "connected with
drug trafficking and terrorism". Morales's poll numbers nearly double
and he thanks Rocha for being his "best campaign chief".

June 24, 2002, Unrelated: 5-term veteran Congressman Earl Hilliard
of Alabama is defeated in the Democratic primary by lawyer Artur Davis.
Many news reports credit or blame the Jews for Davis's victory, as
Hilliard was an opponent of Israel. Hilliard blames his loss on
recent gerrymandering.

June 25, 2002: Attends the Group of Eight summit in a remote
Canadian mountain resort. 

June 25, 2002, Unrelated: Worldcom telecommunications company is
found to have hidden $3.8 billion in losses.

June 25, 2002: 10 Pakistani soldiers are killed by al Qaeda soldiers.

June 26, 2002, Unrelated: Judge Alfred T. Goodwin of the 9th 
Circuit Federal Court declares that Congress's addition of the
words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 was an
unconstitutional Congressional endorsement of religion. Judge 
Ferdinand F. Fernandez issues a dissent saying that the addition
of these words to the pledge isn't enough to be an endorsement
of religion.  Newspapers countrywide falsely report that Goodwin
declared it illegal for anybody to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
The Senate, in an emergency session led by Tom Daschle, votes 99-0
to condemn the decision and assign the Senate's own lawyers to appeal
it, the missing vote accounted for by the absence of Senator Helms.
The Republican Party distributes strategy memos telling Party
activists to blame "liberal Tom Daschle" for the court's decision.

June 26, 2002: Announces that the 9th Circuit Federal Court's
ruling, that the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance
are an endorsement of religion, is "wrong" and "ridiculous", and
orders the Justice Department to fight the ruling.
 
June 26, 2002, Unrelated: Buenos Aries police murder two protesters
in unprovoked killings which were photographed by news agencies.
President Eduardo Duhalde condemns the police as the provincial
police chief and his deputy resign and over 100 police are suspended
from duty.

June 26, 2002, Unrelated: Federal Bureau of Investigation police raid
the homes of seven Buckeye Cable Systems customers in Toledo, Ohio, who
had configured their computers to un-cripple the cable modem service they
were paying for, an act which is not prohibited by the Buckeye terms
of service. The men are later indicted for "theft of service" by a grand
jury as local prosecutor John Weglian announces that "cyber crime is
potentially very damaging to society. We are taking a firm position
on that type of criminal activity. We hope these cases will have a
deterrent value given the cost factors for the defendants in successful
prosecutions."

June 2002, Unrelated: China arrests three Christian missionaries
for smuggling North Korean refugees out of the country.

June 27, 2002: Based on the New York Times' June 16 report on 
al Qaeda's transition from centralized to distributed leadership,
Norman Solomon of Fairness and Accuracy in Media Reporting announces
that this proves that the United States should never had tried to
fight the terrorists.

June 28, 2002, Unrelated: Xerox admits to exaggerating its revenue
by $6 billion over the past four years.

June 28, 2002: FBI Director Robert Mueller gives a speech before
the American Muslim Council, a group whose pro-terrorist political
stances and whose support of terrorist fundraising fronts has led
critics to accuse the group of supporting terrorism.

June 28, 2002: Home Depot announces its willingness to become
a federal contractor.

June 29, 2002: North Korean warships escort fishing boats into
South Korean waters and fight off the South Korean presence there,
destroying one Southern patrol boat and killing several sailors. 
The United States condemns the unprovoked attack. Japan increases
surveillance flights off Korean waters.

June 29, 2002, Unrelated: Somalia requests a United Nations peacekeeping
force be brought to its land.

June 29, 2002: Riaz Khan of the Associated Press reports that Pakistan
has deployed 3,000 troops into the Pashtun tribal areas to search for
al Qaeda forces.

June 29, 2002: An Afghan munitions dump explodes, killing 25. 

June 30, 2002: The United States vetoes an extension of the peacekeeping
mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina because US officials don't want any
of their soldiers to be tried for war crimes if their soldiers happen
to commit war crimes. The US allows for an emergency 3 day extension.
At least one mainstream US news source reports this event by
saying that the US has agreed to allow the peacekeeping mission to
proceed for another three days.

June 30, 2002, Unrelated: A Chinese consul to Kyrgyzstan is assassinated.

June 30, 2002: Robert Burns of the Associated Press reports that
the US Military is transferring some of its Middle East presence
from Saudi Arabia to Qatar.

June 30, 2002, Unrelated: Pakistan accuses India of shelling a
Pakistani village. No deaths are reported.

June 30, 2002: The Washington Post reports that lower and middle
ranking members of Hizballah have forged a de facto alliance with
al Qaeda.

June 2002: The Environmental Protection Agency cuts funding for
environmental cleanup.

June 2002: After studying Bush's verbal gaffes for the past two years,
media critic Mark Crispin Miller releases a book claiming that "Bush
is a sociopathic personality...incapable of empathy" with "an inordinate
sense of his own entitlement", stating that Bush "has no trouble speaking
off the cuff...when he's talking about violence, when he's talking about
revenge...it's only when he leaps into the wild blue yonder of compassion,
or idealism, or altruism that he makes these hilarious mistakes".

June 2002: The Senate authorizes an invasion of the Netherlands
in the event that any United States soldier is charged with war crimes
before the International Criminal Court in the Hague. The Netherlands
has been one of Europe's strongest supporters of the Iraq invasion.

June 2002, Unrelated: The city of Wilmington, Delaware, begins
compiling a dossier of "potential criminals", consisting of 
photographs and personal information about people who have never
committed crimes and which will be used to investigate them if
a crime has been committed. Mayor James Baker condemns critics
of the plan as being "intellectually bankrupt".


July 1, 2002: North Korea accuses the United States of being behind
the recent military battle between North and South Korean forces.

July 1, 2002: Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf announces that
Osama bin Laden cannot be alive and in Pakistan because he would
attract a large entourage of locals and no such movement has
been detected.

July 1, 2002: US District Judge Jed Rakoff revokes the Federal
Death Penalty Act of 1994 because of a high rate of innocents being
executed, which he claims is evidence of an unconstitutional
lack of due process that would lead to "foreseeable state sponsored
murder of innocent human beings". The Department of Justice declares
that the Judicial branch of government does not have the authority
to overrule the will of the Legislative branch, in response to
Judge Rakoff's recent ruling.

July 1, 2002: The US announces that a significant strike force,
including B-52 heavy bomber and AC-130 artillery platform aircraft,
has bombed anti-aircraft missile targets in central Afghanistan.
Every other report notes 40 civilians dead from explosions during
a wedding ceremony. Later reports indicate that the AC-130 had fired
upon multiple targets over an area of several miles, and may have hit
the wedding by accident, as prior hypotheses of a bomb falling off
track are rejected when every bomb has been accounted for. Multiple
reports indicate that US ground and helicopter forces came under
confirmed attack from high-calibre weaponry, but the US's initial
report of coming under fire from anti-aircraft missiles is not repeated.
The US later reports that there was no miss, but the target had been
the source of anti-aircraft fire since October and as recently as
two days prior. News agencies report seeing no evidence of anti aircraft
weaponry on the site.

July 1, 2002, Unrelated: Indiana State Comptroller Dan Hynes reports
that the state has nine cents left in its general fund.

July 1, 2002: National Review journalist Joel Mowbray reports that the
State Department has a "Visa Express" program to quickly grant visas
to Saudi Arabians without the same restrictions and checks given
to applicants from other countries. The State Department announces that
it has no Visa Express program and that Mowbray is a compulsive liar,
and fires diplomat Mary Ryan who it accuses of being behind the program.

July 1, 2002: The Washington Post reports that Attorney General John
Ashcroft has ordered prosecutors to seek the death penalty in twelve
cases where the prosecutors had chosen not to, including one case in
which a plea bargain had already been made.

July 2002: The al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, an aggressive wing of
Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat's private army Fatah,
orders its members to attack United States and Jewish targets worldwide.
Arafat condemns the order. Reported about the same time is that
the Brigade announces that anybody who tries to run against Yasser Arafat
in upcoming elections will be considered a collaborator and will be executed
for treason.

July 2002: Essayist Nicholas Kristoff reports that the FBI knows who
committed the anthrax attacks of the prior autumn. Time Magazine
reports that the FBI has raided the house of Steven Hatfill, a man
who fits the descriptions given by Kristoff and the Federation of
American Scientists. No anthrax is found in Hatfill's house.

July 2002: After Bush gives a speech denouncing business misconduct,
newspapers revive the story of Bush's insider trading while chief
of Harken energy corporation. Bush claims that company lawyers had
mishandled documents whose submission to the Securities and Exchange
Commission would have made Bush's trades legal. Prior to the recent
reports, Bush had claimed the SEC had lost the documents.

July 2002, Unrelated: The Pakistani Sports Board officially condemns
tennis player Aisamul Haq Qureshi for playing tennis with a Jew.

July 2002, Unrelated: Greek police discover anti-tank weaponry while
raiding a base of the 17 November assassin group. Some reports describe
the base as the group's headquarters. The group is unique in that it
has lasted 27 years without a single member being caught, leading some
to speculate that it receives assistance from the Greek government.
Among the weapons captured is the single handgun that the group
has used to conduct most of its attacks.

July 2002: Jordan arrests 10 suspected al Qaeda members.

July 2002: After Bush repeatedly shirks responsibility for the
deficit by claiming that during the 2000 Presidential campaign he had
said the US would only run a deficit in times of war, recession,
or national emergency, journalists discover no record of Bush ever
having made this "trifecta" claim but find that it was made by Al Gore.

July 2002, Unrelated: At the request of Republican congressional
candidate Jay Dicky, the Stephens Media Group orders the Pine Bluff
Commercial newspaper to tilt its reporting to favor Dicky and ignore
Dicky's opponent Mike Ross. After Commercial editor Tom McDonald
resigns in protest of the order, Stephens MG president Sherman
Frederick accuses McDonald of having "very strong feelings against
Jay Dicky".

July 2, 2002: Pakistan announces that al Qaeda hired local terrorists
to bomb the US Consulate and the French navalworkers' bus, declaring
irrefutable proof that al Qaeda was behind the attack. Further reports
state that many regional terrorist groups are merging into a new
group called Lashkar e-Omar, named in honour of the man who has been
charged with kidnapping and killing Wall Street Journal bureau chief
Daniel Pearl.

July 3, 2002, Unrelated: 84 Marine and Navy soldiers and nearly
100 civilians are arrested at and around Camp LeJeune for drug
trafficking.

July 3, 2002: Lynne Cheney, wife of the Vice President, announces
that the United States should retain a separation of church and state.

July 3, 2002: al Qaeda forces attack a Pakistani army checkpoint.
Three Pakistani troops and four al Qaeda troops are killed in the battle.

July 3, 2002, Unrelated: Conservative News reports that the United
States is $35 trillion in debt because it will cost $29.8 trillion
to pay the future retirement and medical entitlements of the existing
population, and announces that the only solutions to relieving this
debt are to either cancel the Social Security and Medicare programs
or to massively devalue the currency.

July 4, 2002, Unrelated: A gunman kills two people at Los Angeles
Airport's El Al terminal before being shot by security guards. Israel
announces that the shooting should be considered a terrorist attack
until any evidence otherwise is discovered. Although all mainstream
news sources consider this a random shooting, Debka File reports that
the shooter was a member of Egyptian Jihad, a wing of al Qaeda.

July 4, 2002, Unrelated: Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota
refuses to declare a statewide Day of Prayer, instead declaring
"Indivisible Day", using in the declaration language from an
atheist lobbyist group.

July 4, 2002: Issues an executive order granting citizenship
to foreign-born US soldiers.

July 5, 2002: The United States forgives Tanzania's $21 million debt.

July 5, 2002: Newspapers report that the US Army has drawn up plans
for an invasion of Iraq, as if this were newsworthy given the
diplomatic situation. Bush has claimed that there are no plans
to attack Iraq.

July 5, 2002, Unrelated: A terrorist bombing kills 35 people in
Algeria.

July 5, 2002: The Christian Science Monitor reports that Uzbekistan
has begun to allow its people more freedoms at the request of the
United States.

July 6, 2002: Afghan Vice President Haji Abdul Qadir is assassinated.
Afghanistan declares this a terrorist attack.

July 6, 2002, Unrelated: United Nations talks with Iraq fail as
Iraq refuses to allow weapons inspectors into the country until
sanctions against Iraq are dropped.

July 6, 2002: After a hurricane passes through Guam, Bush declares
the US territory a disaster area to allow federal funding for repair.

July 7, 2002: Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf issues an order
that no person may be elected Prime Minister more than twice,
effectively banning former Prime Ministers Nawaz Sharif and 
Benazir Bhutto from returning to the job.

July 7, 2002: Senator Daschle accuses Securities and Exchange
Commission chairman Harvey Pitt of knowingly allowing corporations
to commit fraud. Senator John McCain calls for Pitt's resignation.

July 8, 2002: Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for
the Advancement of Coloured People, accuses Bush of attacking the
civil rights of all Americans and belittles Bush's black supporters
as "ventriloquist dummies".

July 8, 2002: In defending his illegal insider trading, says that
"in the corporate world, sometimes things aren't exactly black
and white when it comes to accounting procedures".

July 8, 2002: Accuses the Democratic Party of promoting news coverage
of his illegal insider trading to "divert attention" from the
supposed fact that all recent corporate scandals are solely the
Democratic Party's fault.

July 8, 2002: Denies that his administration may have promoted
business wrongdoing in any way, blaming the recent reported corporate
scandals on "the last administration". When directly asked if he blames
former President Clinton for permitting such scandals, says "No".

July 8, 2002: Claims that his administration cannot possibly be
scaling back civil rights because there are two black people in
his Cabinet.

July 8, 2002: Announces that while any talk of attacking Iraq
is "hypothetical", the United States will "use all the tools at
our disposal" to have a "regime change" in Iraq.

July 8, 2002: Announces that corporate executives who act against the
interests of shareholders will be prosecuted and jailed.

July 8, 2002, Unrelated: Merck Pharmaceuticals admits overstating
its revenues by $12.4 billion over the past three years.

July 9, 2002: US Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson
abandons a speech in Barcelona, Spain, due to an unreceptive crowd.
The earliest reports indicated that a small mob attempted to lynch
Thompson and was stopped by police, while later reports state only
that there were loud protesters in the crowd whose speech drowned
out Thompson's.

July 9, 2002: Senator Bob Graham calls for the bombing of Hizballah
positions in Syria.

July 10, 2002: Judicial Watch files a lawsuit against Vice President
Dick Cheney for fraud while CEO of Halliburton energy company. Also
named in the suit is Halliburton's accounting firm Arthur Anderson.

July 10, 2002, Unrelated: Ayatollah Jalaluddin Taheri of Isfahan, Iran,
resigns in protest of the government's extremism and failure to
meet the promises of the revolution. Iran orders the story censored
from newspapers.

July 10, 2002: The Rand Corporation presents a report to the Defence
Policy Board, a group consulted by the Department of Defense for
strategy advice, which labels Saudi Arabia as the United States'
chief enemy in the war on terrorism. When news of this report is
leaked in August, both the US and Saudi Arabia announce that their
alliance is in excellent condition.

July 2002: The US investigates the possibility that employees of the
US Embassy in Qatar may have forged visas for profit, and that some
of these visas may have been used by terrorists to enter the US.

July 2002: Britain announces that Afghanistan's border with Pakistan
will continue to be secure. Buried in reports about this item is the
news that Britain has ceased its patrols of this border and no other
nation is apparently conducting any except Pakistan on its side.

July 2002: Mexican farmers kidnap and threaten to murder local
government officials in an attempt to halt the government's seizure
of their land under eminent domain to build an airport. The hostages
are soon released in exchange for the release of several farmers
arrested for fighting police.

July 2002: Louis Farrakhan, leader of the black supremacist group
Nation of Islam, visits Iraq in a gesture of goodwill towards Iraqi
leader Saddam Hussein. Iraq announces that Farrakhan has pledged the
Nation of Islam's support to Iraq in its conflict with the United States,
but Farrakhan denies this.

July 11, 2002, Unrelated: New York State University researchers announce
that they have created a polio virus "from scratch" and have used their
creation to infect lab mice. One of the scientists reports his belief
that viruses are not really alive, but are merely chemical reactions
such as fire is.

July 11, 2002: Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi announces that al Qaeda
is "crazy" and declares that Libya will arrest al Qaeda members
found in the country.
 
July 11, 2002: The Federal Energy Regulatory Committee raises the
price cap on electricity in California from $55 to $92 per megawatt
hour while California experiences high electricity demand during a
heat wave. The change is opposed by the power industry, the state,
and consumer groups, as the price of electricity has remained steady
around $25 per megawatt hour even with high demand leading to shortages.

July 11, 2002, Unrelated: John Dendahl, chairman of the New Mexico
Republican Party, reports that he was told to pay the Green Party
over $100,000 to run candidates in districts that were expected 
to be close races between Democratic and Republican candidates.

July 12, 2002: Italian police arrest eight suspected al Qaeda members.

July 12, 2002: The National Review reports that al Qaeda has
established itself in Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority,
and is allying with Hizballah and Islamic Resistance.

July 12, 2002: Six Afghan provincial governors forbid the United States
from launching attacks in their territory without receiving the
governors' permission.

July 12, 2002: US positions receive small arms fire near Tarin Kot
in Uruzgan province of Afghanistan. No casualties are reported.

July 12, 2002: Announces his support for Iran's democracy activist
movement. Iran issues a condemnation.

July 12, 2002, Unrelated: Britain offers to share sovereignty over
Gibraltar with Spain. Gibraltar's governor Peter Caruana announces
his strong opposition to the idea.

July 12, 2002: National Review journalist Joel Mowbray is arrested by
the State Department and interrogated for the sources of his information.

July 12, 2002: The Office of Management and Budget prints a press
release claiming that Bush's tax cuts are less than 15% of the
decline in the expected sum surplus through 2011. After news
organizations report that the OMB's own data shows that the tax
cuts will cause 38% of the decline, the OMB modifies their archived
press release to remove this claim.

July 13, 2002, Unrelated: The Department of Defense announces that
China is modernizing its military to threaten US forces defending 
the Republic of China on Taiwan.

July 13, 2002: The United Nations exempts US troops from being tried
before the International Criminal Court for one year in exchange for
the US allowing the Bosnia peacekeeping mission to continue.

July 13, 2002, Unrelated: Terrorists attack a poor neighbourhood
in Jammu, India, killing over 25 civilians before escaping.

July 13, 2002: August Hanning, chief of Germany's intelligence service,
reports his belief that Osama bin Laden is alive and hiding on Pakistan's
border with Afghanistan and that 5,000 al Qaeda members are still in
Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

July 13, 2002, Unrelated: Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan
announces his support for Zimbabwe's policy of seizing white-owned
land by organizing mobs to lynch white people and then declaring
eminent domain over the deceased's land.

July 13, 2002: The US bombs Iraqi air defenses. Seven civilians are
reported injured.

July 14, 2002, Unrelated: A neo-Nazi fails in an assassination attempt
on French president Jacques Chirac.

July 14, 2002: The US removes two Swedish employees of al-Barakaat
from its list of known terrorists.

July 14, 2002: Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz announces
that the US will not support the establishment of a Kurdish state
in northern Iraq.

July 2002, Unrelated: Morocco invades Perejil Island, claimed by Spain,
in the Straits of Gibraltar and claims that its conquering of the
uninhabited island will help the war on terrorism. The Arab League
announces its support of the invasion. The European Union condemns
the invasion and declares that Western European land has been invaded
for the first time since the second World War.

July 2002, Unrelated: Scientists announce that the discovery of
elements 116 and 118 has been invalidated because one of the
researchers falsified data.

July 2002: Several Afghan leaders demand that the US investigate
its intelligence failure that led to the bombing of a caravan of
anti-Taliban governors and mayors several months earlier, claiming
that a governor competing those killed in the bombing and opposed
to the US's opposition to his desire to take control of their land
had given the US bad information claiming the caravan carried Taliban
leaders. It is not reported that the US gave any response, but the US
has in the past claimed that its information was from multiple impeccable
sources including surveillance overflights which identified caravan members
as Taliban and received hostile fire from the caravan.

July 2002: Many mainstream media sources report that Bush had received
memos on Harken's financial situation despite his claiming lack of
knowledge, and that two months before selling his stock Bush had signed
a promise not to sell his stock until 180 days after a future public
offering which never occurred.

July 2002: Former columnist Ann Coulter, who has literally called for
the genocide of all Muslims, releases a book claiming an extreme
left wing bias in the national media. In a promotional interview with
a conservative talk show host, Coulter continually interrupts the
host and changes the subject of the talk, at many times not letting
the host complete a sentence, and at the end accuses the host of being
a liberal and of trying to interrupt her to prevent any conservative
viewpoint from being seen in the media. The book is the top selling
book in the country for many months.

July 2002: Secretary of State Colin Powell urges Congress not to
ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
against Women, claiming that the treaty is vague and complex and
needs to be reviewed by the Justice Department. Only Afghanistan, Iran,
Qatar, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and the United
States of America have not ratified the treaty; all other countries have.

July 15, 2002: Paraguay declares martial law amid widespread rioting
and protests.

July 16, 2002: Harold Evans of Salon Magazine reports that Cable
News Network's leader had announced that CNN "would not dream of
touching" the Harken story during the 2000 election campaign.

July 16, 2002: The Irish Republican Army issues an apology for the
deaths of noncombatants.

July 16, 2002: Pornographer Jon Messner hijacks the al Neda Web site,
which broadcasts reports and propaganda from al Qaeda, and tracks
movement on the site for five days before the site users notice
that it is a fake. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is unable
to dispatch a computer technology expert in this time.

July 16, 2002, Unrelated: Fox News threatens to sue the "Bill O'Reilly Sucks"
Web site because it uses Bill O'Reilly's name.

July 2002, Unrelated: Senators James Inhofe, Zell Miller, and Don Nickles
announce that they will not allow an atheist to be appointed to the
Supreme Court.

July 2002: The Securities and Exchange Commission orders corporate
executives to personally sign for the validity of their companies'
financial statements. Several corporations (unnamed in the reports)
request to be allowed to modify their issued statements before
their executives sign them. The SEC denies the request.

July 2002: The Food and Drug Administration begins allowing medical
equipment manufacturers to certify the safety of their own devices
in exchange for cash payments to the FDA.

July 17, 2002: The U.S. Postal Service announces that its employees
will not take part in Bush's Citizen Corps domestic spying program,
in which millions of citizens are expected to report suspicious
behaviour to authorities.

July 17, 2002, Unrelated: Spain reoccupies Perejil Island, capturing
six Moroccan soldiers and returning them to their homeland. Morocco
condemns Spain's "invasion in contradiction with international law"
of what has been Spain's own land for over three hundred years,
and demands that the United Nations order Spain to withdraw.

July 17, 2002: Greek police arrest a professor accused of being
one of the leaders of the November 17 group.

July 17, 2002: The Federal Energy Regulatory Committee raises
the minimum price of electricity in California to $250 per megawatt
hour and orders the state to create an electricity commission which
is independent of the executive branch, as electricity prices jump
to $40 following the recent price cap increase.

July 17, 2002: The Federal Communications Commission declares that
telephone companies are allowed to release information on their
customers' private data and calling practices.

July 17, 2002: The Justice Department releases information that over
six hundred people have been secretly jailed and tried for crimes.

July 17, 2002: Detroit police arrest Omar Shishani, a suspected al Qaeda
member, carrying $12 million worth of fraudulent cheques.

July 17, 2002: The State of Alabama mobilizes the 131st Armour division
for a two year deployment within the United States.

July 18, 2002: Veterans Affairs head Anthony J. Principi orders
the bureau to cease advertising its services and to refuse service
to veterans who have not already enrolled due to a budget shortfall.

July 18, 2002: The US Postal Service announces that its decision to
refuse participation in the nationwide domestic spying program
had been made in error due to insufficient information, and that it
will meet with the Department of Justice to discuss the program.

July 18, 2002: Judge Leonie Brinkema refuses to allow admitted
terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui to plead guilty.

July 18, 2002, Unrelated: A gasoline truck crashes into a bus
in Uganda, killing over 70 people. The bus is later found to
have been carrying United Nations personnel, but as only two
were on board it is not believed to be a terrorist attack.

July 19, 2002: The US condemns Israel for today arresting the
families of terrorist leaders in preparation for deportation, a
move that has also earned widespread criticism from much of Israel's
media and politicians.

July 19, 2002: The US bombs what it calls an Iraqi communications center
in what Iraq calls a residential district, killing five.

July 20, 2002: Cuts $34 million from a United Nations womens' health fund
due to pressure from conservative groups falsely claiming that the
fund pays for infanticide in China.
 
July 20, 2002: The State Department announces an end to the Visa Express
program, under which three of the September 11 terrorists were granted
entry into the United States.

July 20, 2002: Spain withdraws from Perejil island after the US convinces
Spain and Morocco to allow the island to be disputed with no signs of
national sovereignty upon it. Hours before Spain leaves, a Moroccan
civilian is arrested while carrying two Moroccan flags to the island.

July 21, 2002, Unrelated: Environmental activist group Greenpeace sends
eleven boats to the Tasman Sea off Australia to protest Britain's shipping
of plutonium that they claim is nuclear bomb making material. The British
Broadcasting Corporation reports that Greenpeace has blockaded the
shipping lines even as it reports that Greenpeace does not expect
the British ships to halt, and BBC's later reports parade the British
ships' success in "sneaking" past the "blockade".

July 21, 2002: Global Exchange, a human rights organization, reports
that US bombing has killed over 800 civilians in Afghanistan and that
incidents of strikes on civilians are mainly due to intelligence failures.
Afghanistan's president Hamid Karzai announces his support for the
United States and claims that fewer than 500 civilians have been killed.

July 21, 2002, Unrelated: Worldcom telecommunications company files
for bankruptcy in what is described as the largest bankruptcy in
US history.

July 21, 2002: Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge proposes voiding
the Posse Comitatus Act that forbids use of military forces for domestic
law enforcement.

July 22, 2002: Sergeant Reese of White House Security threatens to
arrest a process server for attempting to deliver notice of legal
complaint to Vice President Cheney. Cheney's staff claims that the
attempt to serve Cheney was a public relations stunt, despite the
fact that numerous lawsuits were served upon the Clinton administration.

July 22, 2002: Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds files suit against
the FBI for firing her when she attempted to notify FBI leaders
that nothing was done about another FBI employee leaking information
to terrorism suspects.

July 24, 2002, Unrelated: James Traficant is expelled from Congress
for bribery.

July 25, 2002, Unrelated: Nineteen Congressmen request that Attorney
General John Ashcroft deploy more Justice Department resources towards
prosecuting and arresting Internet-based copyright violators.

July 2002: Peter Kirsanow, Bush's appointee to the U.S. Commission
on Civil Rights, argues that there should be "more detentions, more
stops and more profiling" of Arabs. Senator Debbi Stabenow demands
Kirsanow's removal from the commission.

July 2002: Anonymous Bush administration officials report that the
United States is abandoning its relationships with reformists in
the Iranian government due to their ineffectuality, and is instead
now working to create a popular revolution to overthrow Iran's government.

July 2002: Condemns Israel for killing Islamic Resistance's military
commander in an airstrike that also killed 14 civilians.

July 2002: The US votes against a UN convention against torture.

July 2002: Pledges to veto any bill on establishing a Homeland Security
branch of government if the bill does not grant him the power to
deny employees the right to unionize.

July 2002: Press Secretary Ari Fleischer announces that Social Security
must be ended immediately because people who are currently paying
Social Security taxes will never receive any benefits because some
administration will end Social Security before current payers are
eligible.

July 2002, Unrelated: After a jet crashes at an air show in Ukraine,
killing over 80 spectators, Ukranian President Leonid Kuchma fires
and has arrested head of the air force General Viktor Strelnikov 
and air force division commander General Sergei Oniszhenko, and fires
Chief of Staff Petro Strulya. Defense Minister Volodymir Shkidchenko
offers his resignation.

July 2002: A United Nations investigative team reports that the United
States cleared away all evidence of damage after the July 1 airstrike
which hit a wedding ceremony in Afghanistan.

July 2002: North Korea announces its desire for improved relations
with the United States.

July 2002: Asharq al-Awsat reports that Saad bin Laden, a son of Osama,
has assumed command of al Qaeda.

July 2002: The media receives leaked FBI communications between
Boston and FBI headquarters in DC which show that high ranking
FBI officials had permitted the use of the FBI to protect Mafia
informants from prosecution for crimes that they continued to commit.
Bush had ordered the documents sealed in order to halt a Congressional
investigation into the matter.

July 2002: The Dow Jones Industrial Average drops to 7800 points in
a series of sharp falls before rising with equally sharp gains that
include two of the three highest point gains ever. Many people blame
Bush's speeches against corporate corruption for the fall, as market
losses coincided with his numerous speeches on the issue around this time.

July 2002, Unrelated: Scotland Yard reports that al Qaeda had
a training camp called "Ground Zero USA" near Marion, Alabama,
in which personnel were trained to attack police cars, school
buses, and mockups of residences, and that the camp was run
by a front company called Sakina Security.

July 2002, Unrelated: A Florida rail company hires uniformed highway
patrol officers to halt vehicles on an interstate highway in order to
perform a survey on the vehicles' occupants. The marketing tactic
was approved by the Florida Department of Transportation.

July 26, 2002: Announces that the Department of Homeland Security must
be created because the federal government has no department "with the
overriding duty of protecting the American people" and that the Homeland
Security Department's will "must be the ruling priority of all of our
government", while accusing Congress of attempting to weaken the President's
constitutional authority by denying the President the new authority to
deny government employees their rights as workers, and claiming that
the power to deny government employees their rights as workers
will "in no way" be used to deny government employees their rights
as workers.

July 2002, Unrelated: China bans a traveling exhibit on the famed
German/American scientist Albert Einstein because the exhibit says
that Einstein was Jewish.

July 2002: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld announces that Iraq's biological
warfare programs are advancing and that Iraq has established mobile
laboratories and laboratories buried deep underground which are difficult
for the US to find and destroy.

July 2002: The Senate ratifies the Convention on the Elimination of
All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

July 2002: Cable News Network talk show host Paul Begala
claims that "the Dow would go to 20,000" if Bush resigns.

July 2002: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld orders General Tommy Franks
to increase operations in Afghanistan.

July 27, 2002: Newsmax reports that Central Intelligence Agency
Vice Committee Chairman of Foreign Denial and Deception, James B. Bruce,
has threatened "sending SWAT teams into journalists' homes" to stop
information leaks. The article is quickly removes from Newsmax's Web
site without explanation. The committee is named for  

July 28, 2002: Brazil's currency loses 5% of its value after
US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill accuses Brazil of allowing
money to "go out of the country to Swiss bank accounts".

July 29, 2002: Afghan police seize a car loaded with explosives
which may have been intended to be used to assassinate Hamid Karzai.

July 29, 2002, Unrelated: Former President Bill Clinton pledges to
"personally get in a ditch, grab a rifle, and fight and die" to
defend Israel against Iraqi aggression.

July 2002: Announces that welfare recipients should be made to work
40 hours per week to continue receiving welfare.

July 2002: The Department of Health and Human Services announces
spending $27.7 million to "help communities develop and implement
abstinence-only education". $475,280 of this goes to the
brainwashing cult Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon through its
subsidiary Free Teens USA.

July 29, 2002, Unrelated: Uruguay closes its banking system to avert
a run on the banks during economic troubles. Rioting breaks out.

July 30, 2002, Unrelated: Judge Tena Campbell orders Utah to allow
native tribes to store nuclear waste on their own land. The small
Goshute tribe had offered its land to energy companies for this
purpose, and these companies joined in the suit against the state.
Governor Mike Leavitt pledges to appeal the decision.

July 30, 2002, Unrelated: Greece bans the import or use of
all games that are not strictly mechanical. A court later revokes
the law as being unconstitutional.

July 31, 2002: Declares that corporate whistleblowers shall not be
protected by law unless they only provide information to a Congressional
investigation, an order at odds with recently passed law which
provides protection for whistleblowers who contact Congressmen
under any circumstance.

July 31, 2002, Unrelated: Mafia leader Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov is
arrested by Italian police for rigging the Olympic figure skating
tournament.


August 1, 2002: Condemns terrorists for killing "in the name of some
kind of false religion". Bush's spokesmen hastily announce that
he did not mean Islam, but the distortion of such which terrorists
follow.

August 1, 2002: Congress grants Bush "fast-track" trade authority
to create international treaties which may not be amended by Congress
but only accepted or rejected.

August 1, 2002: The Toronto Star reports that US Air Force is giving
its pilots amphetamines before missions for alertness and sedatives
afterwards to rest, and that this has become standard procedure.

August 2, 2002: The FBI asks the Intelligence Committees of the
House and Senate to submit to polygraph "lie-detector" testing.

August 2, 2002: Judge Gladys Kessler orders the United States to
release the names of terrorist suspects within 15 days, except
for material witnesses and suspects who do not wish their names
revealed.

August 2, 2002: The FBI searches Steven Hatfill's house for the
second time. 

August 2, 2002: Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris resigns
today, effective July 15th 2002, in order to qualify to run for Congress,
as state law demands that the holder of this office resign 10 days
prior to qualifying for another office. Following Harris's resignation,
Governor Jeb Bush appoints former Secretary of State Katherine Harris
as acting Secretary of State.

August 2, 2002: The Los Angeles Weekly reports that FBI Agent Robert
Wright has accused FBI headquarters of shutting down his unit's
investigation into Palestinian Arab terrorist training camps
in Chicago and Kansas City in 1998. Since 2001, Wright has been under
strict orders not to discuss his FBI duties and experience with anyone,
not even Congress. The LA Weekly report mentions one of the
suspected terrorist leaders as Mohammed Abdul Hamid Khalil Salah
and two couriers Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook and Yassin Kadi.

August 2, 2002: The U.S. Embassy announces that the U.S. Customs Service
will deploy a P-3 reconnaissance plane to patrol the inauguration
of Colombian president-elect Alvaro Uribe.

August 2, 2002: Bloomberg reports that Enron, Halliburton, Reliant Energy,
Anadarko Petroleum, Occidental Pedrolium, Tom Brown, Sallie Mae, Phar-Mor,
MBNA, and W. W. Tischner corporations donated or rented use of their
airplanes to Bush and his staff during the election recount. The story
notes that Enron, Halliburton, and Reliant are under criminal investigation
for other acts.

August 2002: Urges Congress to grant him the power to transfer
money without Congressional approval.

August 2002: A federal court determines that, as Guantanamo Bay
Naval Station is not Federal land but is leased from Cuba, prisoners
held there are not entitled to their rights under United States law.

August 2002, Unrelated: Louisiana declares a state of emergency due
to a widespread outbreak of the West Nile virus.

August 2002: North and South Korea resume peace talks.

August 2002, Unrelated: California gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon's
business is found guilty of laundering its profits to avoid paying
taxes.

August 2002: Talk show host Rush Limbaugh announces that "the
New York Times has launched an effort to thwart America's war effort"
by publishing information that the US has plans to attack Iraq,
and declares the sources of the information traitors.

August 3, 2002: The conservative Cato Institute issues a report
claiming Bush is less conservative than Bill Clinton was.

August 3, 2002, Unrelated: Republic of China President Chen Shui-bian
declares that the Republic of China on Taiwan is an independent country
rather than a province of the Peoples' Republic of China, and calls
for a popular referendum declaring as such.

August 3, 2002: Iran and Saudi Arabia announce their opposition to
a US attack on Iraq.

August 3, 2002: Pakistani forces attack Indian forces which were
trying to build an outpost within India's land near the cease fire line
in Kashmir.

August 3, 2002: The United States urges a reduction in the Multinational
Force peacekeeping presence in the Sinai Peninsula.

August 3, 2002: Columnist Andrew Sullivan declares that all opposition to
a war with Iraq is really a "campaign to protect Saddam's weaponry".

August 4, 2002, Unrelated: The former Soviet republic of Georgia captures
seven Chechen soldiers as Russia accuses Georgia of allowing mercenaries
and terrorists safe harbour on its land.

August 4, 2002: Offers Uruguay a $1.5 billion loan.

August 4, 2002: Secretary of State Colin Powell visits the Philippines
to praise their support in fighting terrorism.

August 4, 2002: United Nations chief arms inspector Hans Blix announces
that he will not visit Iraq for diplomatic talks until Iraq allows
arms inspections to resume.

August 2002: Time Magazine reports that departing Clinton officials
gave detailed reports on the al Qaeda threat to the incoming Bush
administration. White House officials vehemently deny the report
and say that Clinton had no plan whatsoever for fighting al Qaeda.
The BBC reports that Clinton's plan was approved on September 4.

August 2002: Halliburton announces that Cheney was uninvolved in all
of the company's dealings with the government during his tenure as
an executive, and that the company has made no effort to use Cheney's
influence since he left. 

August 2002: The New York Daily News reports that Harken Energy
had established tax-shelter subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands
in 1989, while Bush was on the company's board of directors. Bush's
spokesmen claim that there was nothing wrong with doing this because
the company didn't make any money to pay taxes on and therefore
didn't hide any from the IRS.

August 2002: Two rockets are fired at a US base in Afghanistan.

August 5, 2002: Terrorists attack a Christian school in Pakistan,
killing six people before escaping.

August 5, 2002: The US Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, is closed due
to threats.

August 5, 2002: Iraq offers to allow US Congressmen to conduct
inspections of any of Iraq's arms facilities while accompanied by
any number of weapons experts. The US refuses the offer.

August 5, 2002, Unrelated: The Vatican excommunicates seven
female priests who had been ordained by a rogue archbishop.

August 5, 2002: Germany raids the Al Aqsa charity which it accuses
of being a front for Islamic Resistance.

August 5, 2002: Cable News Network debate host Ann Coulter
declares that the Democrats "want to keep Saddam Hussein in power"
and "object to every reasonable national security measure taken by
Attorney General John Ashcroft".

August 5, 2002: Consortium News reports that recently released tax
documents show that Bush's presidential campaign paid several
people to start a riot in Florida to stop the counting of ballots there.
The persons named by Consortium News are Bush aide Matt Schlapp,
Tom DeLay aide Thomas Pyle, DeLay fundraiser Michael Murphy,
House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee legal counsel
Garry Malphrus, Jim DeMint aide Charles royal, and former Congressional
aide Kevin Smith. Schlapp and Kaplan are now Presidential aides,
while Malphrus is deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council.
The Bush campaign also paid for a victory dinner after the riot
and the rioters received personal calls of thanks from Bush and Cheney.

August 6, 2002: Appoints Tom Door, who has been accused of defrauding
the government, as Undersecretary of Agriculture while Congress
is in recess, five days after Congress voted not to approve Dorr's
appointment to this position. Also appointed during recess are
Cheryl Halpern to the Board of Directors for the Center for Public
Broadcasting, Suzanne Marshall as Chairman of the Merit Systems
Protection Board, anti-work-safety lawyer William Scott Railton
to the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, 
Al Casey to the US Postal Service Board of Directors, and Tony
Hammond to the Postal Rate Commission.

August 5, 2002: The Star Tribune reports that the government has
presented no evidence that al Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui
was involved in planning the September 11 attacks, in prosecuting
a case against him for exactly this.

August 6, 2002: David Pace of the Associated Press reports that
the Army has hired Halliburton subsidiary corporation Brown and Root
as its sole logistics supplier in a 10-year contract that "encourages
Brown and Root to spend" whatever it wants, and that this was done
over the objections of Congress, which is investigating Brown and Root
for defrauding the government.

August 6, 2002: Cable News Network debate host Robert Novak refers
to Senator Jeffords as being from "the Peoples' Republic of Vermont",
implicitly calling Jeffords a Communist for daring to desert the
Republican Party, calls New York Times columnist Paul Krugman a
liar for reporting that the Office of Management and Budget had
printed false figures about the effects of the tax cut, claims
to have personally contacted the OMB and been told that the OMB
stands behind its false figure, and tells co-host Paul Begala
"I know you hate to do reporting, but try it once in a while"
after Begala cites the Bush budget as proving the OMB's figures
wrong, before changing the subject.

August 6, 2002: Salon Magazine reports that telephone calls 
to the Citizen Corps "TIPS" reporting hotline are being routed
to the television show "America's Most Wanted".

August 6, 2002: The Department of State intervenes against a lawsuit
accusing Exxon-Mobil energy corporation of allowing the rape and
murder of Exxon employees at facilities in Indonesia, claiming that
allowing the lawsuit to proceed would harm "significant interests 
of the United states, including interests related directly to the
war against international terrorism".

August 2002, Unrelated: Terrorists attack a religious ceremony
in the Indian portion of Kashmir, killing nine. India blames
Pakistan for the attack, while Pakistan denies this and condemns
the attack.

August 2002: Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is knighted
by the Queen of England.

August 2002, Unrelated: Peru announces a slowdown of cocaine eradication
programs due to complaints from cocaine producers.

August 2002, Unrelated: The International Monetary Fund grants
a $30 billion loan to Brazil.

August 2002: Sulayman Balal Zainulabidin of Sakina Security Services
is found not guilty of supporting terrorism by a British court.

August 2002: It is reported that the Citizen Corps Operation TIPS
Web site has been changed to remove references to the specific
professions which would be enlisted in carrying out domestic spying
and to the pilot program which would involve 1 million workers in
10 cities. Also removed is an enticement to "Volunteer now!". 

August 2002: The United States establishes an "Office of Transition
Initiatives" in Venezuela with duties to "promote democracy and
stability in Venezuela", rhetoric which the United States has used
in support of a failed Fascist coup attempt in Venezuela.

August 7, 2002: The Justice Department ignores a federal judge's
order to present evidence of a detainee's involvement in terrorism,
claiming that only the executive branch could give such orders.

August 7, 2002: Unknown parties attack an Afghan military base,
killing four. Eleven of the attackers are killed. The attackers
are said to have been al Qaeda soldiers who escaped from prison.

August 7, 2002: Jordan bans al-Jazeera television for claiming
that the late King Hussein was being paid $1 million a year by
the CIA to keep peace with Israel.

August 7, 2002: Talk show host Rush Limbaugh proposes that the United
States invade Iraq and bomb "the sand deserts of Saudi Arabia" on
the anniversary of the September 11 attack.

August 8, 2002: The Office of Management and Budget issues a notice
that it had modified its earlier press release due to "errors that
have since been removed".

August 8, 2002: A grenade is thrown into a Christian hospital
in Pakistan, killing three nurses.

August 8, 2002, Unrelated: Worldcom announces that it has
hidden an additional $3.3 billion in losses.

August 8, 2002: Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein derides the United
States as "the forces of evil".

August 8, 2002, Unrelated: A group of 300 native Americans requests
that the US grant them asylum due to mistreatment by Mexico.

August 8, 2002, Unrelated: Democratic candidate for Congress,
Gerrie Schinske, accuses Republican opponent Congressman Dana Rohrabacher
of meeting with the Taliban's foreign minister in April of 2001 to present
a "personal peace plan', during a trip paid for by the Islamic Institute.
Journalist Joshua Michael discovers that the meeting, called the
Free Markets and Democracy Conference, was also attendend by 
other Congressmen. Further reports indicate that the "personal peace plan"
was for peace in Afghanistan, where Rohrabacher fought as a rebel
against the Soviets, rather than any agreement between the Taliban
and the United States.

August 9, 2002: The Department of Health and Human Services issues
an order allowing medical companies to distribute patient records
without the patient's permission.

August 9, 2002: The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that 2,000 truckers
have been recruited by the federal government's Citizen Corps program.

August 9, 2002: An Afghan roads construction building blows up,
killing 14. It is not clear if the explosion was intentional
or accidental.

August 9, 2002: The Christian Science Monitor reports that al Qaeda
has established two bases in northern Pakistan and is attempting
to procure surface to air missiles from China which are capable
of hitting high altitude B-52 bombers.

August 9, 2002: Two terrorists in Yemen are killed when a bomb they
are making explodes prematurely. Police investigating the accident
find an arms cache including rocket propelled grenade launchers,
and arrest three persons who shared the residence.

August 9, 2002: Norway rejects the US's request not to turn over
US troops suspected of committing war crimes to the International
Criminal Court.

August 10, 2002: Announces that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein will
be considered an enemy until it is proven that Hussein is not an enemy.

August 10, 2002. Unrelated: Jordan recalls its ambassador from Qatar
over the recent Al-Jazeera reports. The news agency receives Qatari
funding.

August 10, 2002: German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder announces that
Germany will not participate in an attack on Iraq.

August 10, 2002: Iran transfers 16 captured al Qaeda members to Saudi
Arabia. Saudi Arabia announces that Iran is an ally in the war
against terrorism and has "cooperated extensively with the United States".
US Senator Fred Thompson accuses Iran of assisting al Qaeda and says that
the transfer only "serves the purpose of the Saudis and the Iranians".
Early reports said 17 had been transferred.

August 2002: Newsweek magazine reports that Osama bin Laden survived
the attack on Shah e-Kot in late December and returned there to rally
Taliban troops in February, at a time that the US was reporting that
no Taliban forces were left in the area. The source of the story
is a man who claims to have been bin Laden's guide on his escape
in addition to reports from Taliban soldiers.

August 2002: The United Nations reports that Iran is forcing Afghan
refugees to return to Afghanistan by threatening that their assistance
from the UN would be cut off.

August 11, 2002, Unrelated: The United Nations reports that air
pollution in southeast Asia is so great that it has effected
the subcontinental weather cycle, lowering rainfall in the
Afghanistan-Pakistan area by over 20%.

August 11, 2002, Unrelated: United Nations police arrest Kosovo Liberation
Army regional commander Rustem Mustafa for the torture and murder
of prisoners.

August 11, 2002: Biological warfare researcher Steven Hatfill announces
his innocence of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

August 11, 2002: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez accuses "people
with a lot of money" of attempting to influence the Supreme Court
in the trial of military officers General Efrain Vasquez, General
Pedro Periera, Rear Admiral Hector Ramirez Perez, and Vice Admiral
Daniel Comisso Urdaneta for their part in the April coup. In two
days, the Supreme Court votes 11-8 in favour of the officers' innocence.

August 11, 2002, Unrelated: Indonesia abolishes the 38 appointed
parliamentary seats reserved for representatives of the military.

August 11, 2002, Unrelated: A sailor from the Kitty Hawk is arrested
by police of Yokosuka, Japan, for the attempted robbery of a civilian.

August 11, 2002, Unrelated: Communist rebels kill eleven policemen
in eastern India.

August 11, 2002: Afghan forces seize two weapons caches in Jalalabad
and Acheen.

August 11, 2003, Unrelated: Egyptian newspaper editor Reda Hilal disappears.

August 12, 2002: Iraq announces that it will not allow United Nations
weapons inspectors to return, claiming that the inspections were
completed four years ago. Iraq had expelled the UN inspectors four
years ago after discovering that the United States was using the
UN inspection team as a cover for covert spying operations.

August 12, 2002, Unrelated: Colombia declares a state of "internal
commotion", similar to declaring a state of emergency.

August 12, 2002, Unrelated: US Airways, the sixth largest airline
in the US, files for bankruptcy.

August 2002, Unrelated: 50,000 flee Prague and 30,000 flee Dresden
as central Europe is hit by the worst flooding in years.

August 2002: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld proposes transferring
command of covert operations from the Central Intelligence Agency
to the Army's Special Operations Command, and using Special Operations
forces to enter other countries and attack terrorist targets without
the other countries' knowledge.

August 13, 2002: Iranian President Mohammed Khatami accuses the
United States of creating a "warlike atmosphere" in the world.

August 13, 2002, Unrelated: Anthrax is detected in a postal drop box
in Princeton, New Jersey, a block away from Princeton University.
Princeton University's post office had been closed for a short time
in October 2001 after anthrax was discovered in a nearby town's
post office that serves the university.

August 14, 2002, Unrelated: Texas executes a Mexican citizen who had
been denied his right to notify and seek representation from Mexico.
In protest, Mexican President Vicente Fox cancels a planned trip to
meet with President Bush.

August 14, 2002: The US bombs Iraqi air defense sites.

August 14, 2002: Judicial Watch files a lawsuit against Deputy Attorney
General Larry Thompson for accounting fraud and insider trading while
on the board of directors of Providian Financial Corporation. Thompson
is the head of a newly established task force for prosecuting accounting
fraud.

August 14, 2002: FBI investigators distribute photographs of Steven
Hatfill to residents and workers in the area where anthrax was recently
discovered in a post box.

August 14, 2002: Retired Marine General Paul van Riper reports that
the recent Millennium Challenge 2002 war game, meant to test new
US tactics, was rigged for the side representing the US to win. For
instance, game organizers under Joint Forces Command forbid van Riper's
team the use of certain weapons at times when their use would be
detrimental to the US team, brought sunken ships back into the
simulation after van Riper's team had destroyed them, ordered
van Riper to reveal his units' locations to the other team because
of the US's electronic eavesdropping capabilities even though van Riper
was using human messengers on motorbikes for communications, and
ordered van Riper's forces to withdraw from landing points so that
US forces could land there without incurring casualties. Air
Force General Jim Smith is named as one of the obstructionists for
having ordered his subordinates who were van Riper's in-game subordinates
to follow Smith's orders instead of van Riper's.

August 14, 2002: The International Association of Firefighters votes
to boycott a September 11 memorial ceremony where Bush will be speaking
due to Bush's cutting of $250 million worth of firefighting equipment
and training, and of $90 million to insure the September 11 firefighters'
health.

August 2002, Unrelated: 600 relatives of September 11 victims file a
$1 trillion lawsuit against the state of Sudan, seven banks, eight
Muslim charities, former Saudi intelligence chief Turki al Faisal al Saud,
Saudi Prince and Defense Minister Sultan bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, and
Saudi royal family member Mohammed al Faisal al Saud, accusing the
defendants' support of terrorism for contributing to the September 11
attacks. In specific, the lawsuit alleges that the three Saudis gave
al Qaeda a $300 million payoff in exchange for a promise not to attack
civilians in Saudi Arabia.

August 2002: Forbids any increase of foreign aid to Egypt as retribution
for Egypt's imprisoning democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim.

August 2002: Attorney General John Ashcroft proposes the establishment
of concentration camps for United States citizens who are deemed
to be "enemy combatants".

August 2002: The Department of Justice refuses to answer questions
of the House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee, announcing that
it will only answer to the Intelligence Committee which plays no part
in overseeing the Justice Department.

August 2002, Unrelated: Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris,
running for a Congressional seat, accuses Republican opponent John Hill
of "wasting taxpayer dollars" in filing a lawsuit to have Harris removed
from the ballot for failure to file a letter of intent to run for Congress
as required by state law.

August 2002, Unrelated: Florida's head of child welfare services
resigns after a newspaper finds nine children, whom the service
has not been able to account for, in a single day. Governor Jeb Bush
appoints as her replacement Jerry Reiger, onetime co-chairman of a group
which does not consider it abuse to beat a child bloody and bruised,
and wants to outlaw masturbation, premarital sex, and marriages of
non-Christians to Christians. Jeb Bush announces that "it doesn't really
matter if Jerry has a deep and unabiding faith and it certainly doesn't
disqualify him for public service", while accusing persons opposed
to Reiger's position of having a "bigotry" against "people of faith".

August 2002: FBI investigators seize tons of illegally imported
heavy infantry weaponry, including over 2,000 rockets, from a
private weapons training ground in New Mexico called High Energy
Access Tools. The camp is owned by International Hydro Cut Technologies
and run by a Canadian illegal immigrant. The rockets were sold
by Halliburton.

August 2002: It is reported that Bush has granted 160 of his most
generous campaign donors the privilege of sleeping in the Lincoln
bedroom of the White House. During the Presidential campaign, Bush
had condemned Clinton for conducting the same practice, and had
pledged to "restore honor and dignity to the White House".

August 2002: The BBC reports that Representative Dick Armey,
Senator Carl Levin, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft,
former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Laurence Eagleburger,
and General Norman Schwarzkopf announce their opposition to an attack
on Iraq. In reality, Kissinger announced his support for an attack
and Schwarzkopf simply admitted that the US could incur losses in
a war.

August 2002, Unrelated: A woman in Montana is arrested for mailing
cyanide to Senator Ted Kennedy and Prince William of England.

August 2002, Unrelated: Congressman John Hostettler accuses several
breast cancer survivors seeking cancer research funding of having
had abortions, as he believes abortions cause breast cancer.

August 15, 2002, Unrelated: Hundreds of Albanians riot in Kosovo
following the arrest of four Albanians by the United Nations.

August 15, 2002: Cable News Network reports that Iraq has
moved "dozens" of surface to air missiles to defend what Iraq
claims to be a meat packing plant.

August 15, 2002, Unrelated: Midwest department store chain Ames goes
out of business, closing 327 stores and making 22,000 employees
jobless.

August 16, 2002: The Federal Security Service of Russia charges
US Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Michael Schuler with
breaking into a computer system in Russia during an investigation.

August 16, 2002: The Saudi newspaper al Riyadh proposes on its
front page that Saudi Arabia should end its alliance with the US.

August 16, 2002: Urges Major League baseball players not to hold a strike.
The players' union, upset at league plans to punish teams that pay
their players high salaries, announces that a strike will be held August 30. 

August 16, 2002: Federal District Judge Robert Doumar reports
that never before in the history of the United States has "an
American citizen been held incommunicado and subjected to an
indefinite detention in the continental United States without
charges, without any finding by a military tribunal, and without
access to a lawyer".

August 16, 2002: Two British soldiers die of "non-hostile" gunfire
in Afghanistan. It is not reported whether this was a suicide or accident.

August 17, 2002: Announces that taxes must be reduced to balance the budget.

August 17, 2002, Unrelated: Iraq announces a $40 billion trade deal with
Russia. It is reported that the trading will not violate UN sanctions.

August 17, 2002: FBI investigator Don Foster reports that two suspects
in the anthrax attacks have been identified, but that the CIA and Army
are withholding information from the investigation because the two
have relations with the CIA. He also claims that the suspects are
high ranking, and that he believes the criminal had attempted to
frame two other biological warfare researchers who had recently been
fired by mailing from nearby these former employees' homes in New Jersey.

August 17, 2002, Unrelated: Antonio Verdugo, regional head of
Miami-Dade County Christian Coalition, is arrested for falsifying
signatures on a petition to allow discrimination against homosexuals.

August 18, 2002, Unrelated: Pope John Paul 2 condemns the practice
of genetic engineering and medicine's attempts to lengthen peoples'
lives as an attempt to seize the power of life and death from God,
and condems liberalism as a false ideology compared to the freedom
given by following Catholicism.

August 18, 2002: Bahrain announces its opposition to a US attack on Iraq.

August 18, 2002: The Daily Telegraph reports that the US is threatening
other countries to consider them as enemies if they do not support the US's
planned invasion of Iraq.

August 18, 2002, Unrelated: The New York Times announces that it will
begin reporting homosexual marriages.

August 18, 2002: Patrick E. Tyler of the New York Times reports that
the US had sixty intelligence agents performing reconnaissance
for Iraq in Iraq's war with Iran during the Reagan administration,
and that the US continued supporting Iraq after Iraq's use of chemical
weapons against Iranian troops. Bush has claimed the possibility that
Iraq may have chemical weapons as a moral imperitive granting the US
a causus belli to attack Iraq and overthrow its government. Later
reports state that the United States had delivered chemical
and biological weapons to Iraq and had helped build Iraq's production
facilities for same during this period.

August 18, 2002: Cable News Network reports receiving al Qaeda
videotapes detailing chemical weapons experiments on dogs.

August 18, 2002: Condemns the Senate for increasing spending because
the money is needed for another tax cut.

August 19, 2002: The US announces that it will pressure Afghanistan
to investigate the reported deaths of hundreds of surrendered Taliban
soldiers.

August 19, 2002: Newsweek reports that nearly 1,000 captured Taliban
troops suffocated to death during a transport to prison, that their
mass grave has been found, and that the US has lied and impeded
investigations into the matter.

August 19, 2002: The Washington Post reports that US oil companies
have been directly paying the Iraqi government unregulated amounts
of 20 to 50 cents per barrel of oil.

August 20, 2002: The British Broadcasting Corporation reports that the
United States has refused to attack a terrorist group known to have
developed deadly chemical weaponry because of worldwide opposition
to the US's plans for war with Iraq. The group, Ansar al Islam,
operates in an area of Iraq which is controlled by Kurdish rebels.

August 20, 2002: Forces claiming to be Iraqi rebels capture the
Iraqi embassy in Germany, taking two hostages. German forces soon
capture the rebels. No wounds are reported. Iraq blames the United
States and Israel for the attack.

August 20, 2002: Colombian police report that Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia commander Jorge Briceno has ordered his soldiers
to attack "gringos" because "they have all declared war on us". 

August 20, 2002: Canadian Defense Minister John McCallum announces
that Canada will probably not support the United States in an invasion
of Iraq unless there is proof that Iraq is belligerent.

August 20, 2002, Unrelated: Italian police arrest five men for plotting
to attack a basilica in Bologna because it contained a painting of
the prophet Muhammed being eaten by demons in Hell.

August 20, 2002: Eight civilians are kidnapped by Abu Sayyaf terrorists
in the Philippines island of Jolo. Two Muslim captives are released,
while the two remaining male civilians are murdered the next day for
not being Muslim.

August 20, 2002: The US State Department accuses Indonesian prosecutors
of mishandling evidence after Indonesia fails to convict six of seven
accused massacre participants,

August 2002, Unrelated: Congressmen Bob Barr and Cynthia McKinney
of Georgia lose their Party's nominations for the Congressional candidacy.

August 2002: Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf singlehandedly amends
to Constitution to grant himself more power.

August 2002: A newly hired security guard at the Kandahar air base
kills two Afghan guards for being "sons of Americans" before being shot.

August 2002: The State Department reports that Rwandan-supported
rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo carried out massacres.

August 2002: Rescinds several restrictions on logging in nationally
protected forests, claiming that increased logging is needed to prevent
forest fires, while accusing environmental activists who sue
to have logging laws enforced through the judicial system when the
government will not enforce them of crossing "a fine balance between
people expressing themselves and preventing US citizens from enacting
common sense".

August 2002, Unrelated: Fox News chairman Peter Chernin calls for
the censorship of pornographic material on the Internet.

August 2002: The US condemns the possibility of Libya being appointed
chair of the UN Human Rights Commission. Libya announces that the US
is trying "to distract attention from the United States' poor human
rights record".

August 2002, Unrelated: Enron executive Michael Kopper pleads
guilty to money laundering and wire fraud, and offers evidence against
Chief Financial Officer Andy Fastow. 

August 2002, Unrelated: Zambia, facing mass starvation, rejects a
gift of genetically modified food, calling the modified food "poison".

August 2002, Unrelated: The New York Daily News reports that Supreme
Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist was ticketed July 16 for driving
over the speed limit.

August 2002, Unrelated: A 435,000 acre fire burns in Oregon, the
largest fire in the state's recorded history.

August 2002, Unrelated: 250,000 flee flooding in China.

August 2002, Unrelated: Chechen rebels shoot down a Russian troop
transport helicopter, killing 118 of the circa 130 people on board.
The helicopter is only rated to carry 80 people.

August 2002, Unrelated: Lawrence Monahan of Conservative News, Ellen Sorokin
and Tom Lott of the Washington Times, the Times of London, the
Investor's Business Daily, the Augusta Chronicle, the Cleveland Plain Dealer,
the Richmond Times Dispatch, the Denver Post, the Columbus Dispatch,
Cable News Network debate host Tucker Carlson and news host Kate Snow,
Fox News Network host Sean Hannity, tabloid journalist Matt Drudge,
news columnists John Leo, George Will, Bill Cotterell, Mona Charen,
Abraham Cooper, and Harold Brackman, cartoonist Bruce Tinsley, and lobbying
group Concerned Women of America condemn the National Education Association
for last September 15 reprinting a National Association of School
Psychologists report which stated: "Groups of people should not be
judged by the actions of a few. It is wrong to condemn an entire group
of people by association of religion, race, homeland, or even proximity.
No one likes to be blamed or threatened for the actions of others...Avoid
making negative statements about any racial, ethnic, or religious group at
these very tense and troubling times...Focusing on the nationality of the
terrorists can create prejudice, anger, and mistrust for their group
members...Do not suggest any group is responsible [for the September 11
attack four days prior]".

August 22, 2002, Unrelated: A US training helicopter and its two pilots
are lost during a storm in South Korea.

August 22, 2002: South Africa announces that it is not involved in a
plot to overthrow Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, after US State
Depratment head of African affairs Walter Kansteiner says that the US
is working with Botswana, Mozambia, and South Africa to "isolate" Mugabe.

August 22, 2002, Unrelated: New York Times business editor Allen Myerson
dies after a fall from the top of the Times building in what is apparently
a suicide.

August 22, 2002: The US imposes sanctions on North Korea for having
sold Scud missile parts to Yemen two years earlier.

August 23, 2002: Pakistan reports killing dozens of Indian soldiers
after a failed Indian attack on a Pakistani border post. India denies
any losses and denies that it had crossed the border, and suggests that
the attackers were Pakistani rebels.

August 23, 2002, Unrelated: The US deports University of South Florida
professor Mazen al Najjar for overstaying his tourist visa. Najjar
has been accused of raising funds for Islamic Jihad.

August 23, 2002: US and Russian soldiers capture 100 pounds of
weapons grade uranium from Serbia, with Serbia and Montenegro's approval.
The Federation of American Scientists later reports that the raid was
financed by television mogul Ted Turner.

August 23, 2002: After eleven months of imprisonment without charge
or habeas corpus, Nabil al Marabh reports having been tortured by
United States officials while in New York's Metropolitan Detention
Center.

August 23, 2002: General Anthony Zinni says that "It might be interesting
to wonder why all the generals see it the same way, and all those that
never fired a shot in anger and are really hellbent to go to war see
it a different way."

August 2002: Fox News Vice President Kevin Magee accuses
Cable News Network of paying al Qaeda for the chemical weapons
videotapes CNN recently received and reported on. After CNN reports
that it had paid anonymous parties $30,000 for the tapes, Fox News
runs a full page newspaper ad claiming CNN was "caught", and ending
with the phrase "Truth is important in journalism".

August 2002: A federal judge orders an end to federal and state
funding of sexual abstinance promotion programs which promote the
Christian religion. Reported examples of a sexual education programs
which were funded by the government are the Louisiana Abstinence Education
Program, which teaches that sexually transmitted disease is caused by
the "removal of God from the classroom", and the Rapides Station Community
Ministries, whose sexual education courses "focus on the Virgin Birth".

August 2002: The Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency reports that investors
have withdrawn over $200 billion worth of investments from the United
States, according to Arab News.

August 2002: Retired terrorist Abu Nidal is reportedly found dead of
gunshots in Baghdad, although no body is produced. Jane's reports
that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein likely had Nidal killed because
Nidal could be a threat to his rule.

August 2002: The US and Britain bomb a few Iraqi listening and
air defense posts.

August 24, 2002: The Federal Bureau of Investigation requests the
personal schedules and telephone records of all members of the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence, in its investigation into the
leak of information that a passive NSA listening post had intercepted
messages warning of the September 11 attacks but had not decrypted
the messages until September 12.

August 24, 2002: Iraq announces that any attack on Iraq by the Jewish
Bush administration would be an attack on the entire Arab nationality.

August 24, 2002: The US condemns Russia for having "indiscriminately
bombed villages" in Georgia, according to "credible reports". Russia
denies flying any sorties in the area and claims the bombing was
done by the Georgian military. Georgia denies that it would bomb its
own territory.

August 24, 2002: Syria announces that the US is threatening the
"whole Arab world" by threatening to attack Iraq.

August 24, 2002, Unrelated: A Jewish man is arrested in Saint Petersburg,
Florida, for plotting to bomb mosques.

August 25, 2002: Refuses to attend the World Summit on Sustainable
Development in Johannesburg, which is being attended by over 100
heads of state.

August 25, 2002: James Baker, former President Bush's Secretary of State,
announces that the US should seek the assistance of allies to attack Iraq.

August 25, 2002: Stephen Hatfill, accused by some in the media of
conducting the prior autumn's anthrax attacks, condemns John Ashcroft
for supposedly persecuting him without evidence and releases timesheets
showing himself to have worked during the time some of the anthrax
letters were mailed out.

August 25, 2002: China issues restrictions on the export of missile
technology.

August 26, 2002, Unrelated: British Foreign Minister Jack Straw calls
for the creation of a Constitution of the European Union.

August 26, 2002, Unrelated: Spain bans the Batasuna Party for supporting
terrorism.

August 26, 2002: Vice President Dick Cheney announces that a containment
policy would not work against Iraq.

August 26, 2002: It is reported that the East Turkistan Islamic Movement,
which operates in Xinjiang, has been added to the State Department's list
of terrorist organizations. Some reports state that the Movement is
peaceful and has not committed a terrorist act in over a decade, while
others state that Movement members were recently arrested in several
foreign countries while plotting to bomb embassies.

August 26, 2002: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak announces that
a US invasion of Iraq will cause violent popular uprisings throughout
the greater Arab nation.

August 26, 2002, Unrelated: The Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development reports that ten percent of the world's forests
have been destroyed in the prior ten years.

August 2002: The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the training
regimen for the Department of Transportation's Mobile Screening Force,
members of which are considered "elite" airport security, lasts 15 minutes.

August 2002: It is reported that many countries which had promised
to fund the rebuilding of Afghanistan's infrastucture have not 
made good on their pledges.

August 2002: Bush's lawyers testify that documents related to pardons
which former President Clinton gave are subject to executive privilege
and may not be released to the public, even if the documents were
never seen or touched by Clinton or his staff. The case was brought 
against Clinton and the federal government by Judicial Watch.

August 2002: White House officials claim that all of the protestors
who appear wherever Bush gives a public appearance are a single group
of the same people that follows Bush around the country.

August 2002: The Congressional Budget Office projects that the US
will gain $336 billion in surpluses through 2011, with almost all of
the surplus due to the planned elimination of Bush's tax cut in 2010
and all of the surplus due to taxes for Social Security that will
eventually need to be paid out. It is not reported whether this is
simply the sum of surpluses or if it is a net of surpluses and deficits.
The year prior, the Office had predicted a $5.6 trillion surplus.
Bush blames Congressional spending as the sole cause of the reduction in
planned surplus, while the report blames reduced tax revenues due to
the economic downturn and tax cuts. Senate Budget Committee Chairman
Kent Conrad describes Bush's economic plan as "punching more holes in
the hull as the ship goes down".

August 2002: Four men are arrested in Detroit and one in Oregon
on charges of being al Qaeda soldiers. A fifth from Detroit escapes
the police and is at large.

August 2002, Unrelated: Japan admits to having used weapons of
mass destruction during World War 2.

August 2002: After a civilian carries a handgun through on
airplane flight and the security guard who searched the civilian's
handbag is fired, the Transportation Department reports that
the guard did their job with perfection.

August 2002: The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decides that
the Justice Department must end its practice of holding immigration
hearings in secret and closed to the public.

August 2002, Unrelated: The Justice Policy Institute, an advocacy
group, reports that there are 30% more black men in prison than
there are in college in the United States. It is later reported that
this is because prison sentences are often longer than college terms,
and there are 260% more black men between the ages of 18 and 24
in college than there are in prison.

August 2002, Unrelated: The State Department finds that McDonalds
fast-food corporation had forced foreign-born employees to rent
company housing and pay so many fees to McDonalds that employees
effectively earned no pay for their work.

August 2002, Unrelated: As the wreckage is found of a Japanese
submarine sunk by a US destroyer 45 minutes after the Japanese
launched their planes to attack Pearl Harbour, numerous reports
insinuate that this is proof the United States was the aggressor
in World War 2 for having fired the first shot.

August 27, 2002: Praises the United States' "eternal friendship"
with Saudi Arabia.

August 27, 2002, Unrelated: Georgia accuses Russia of "breaking all
limits" of "barbarism" with an attack on a village in Pankisi Gorge.
Russia still denies having carried out any operation on the day the
attack took place.

August 27, 2002, Unrelated: Georgia demands Russia's withdrawal
from Abkhazia, which Georgia claims as its own.

August 27, 2002: John K. Cooley of the Christian Science Monitor
reports that al Qaeda commanders are leading revolts against
the Palestinian Authority in Lebanon's Palestinian Arab camps.

August 27, 2002: The Washington Post reports that two high ranking
al Qaeda leaders, Saif al Adel and Mahfouz Ould Walid (aka Abu Hafs)
are hiding out in the Iranian cities of Mashad and Zabol, and
reports Arab intelligence sources claiming that Iran is protecting
and sponsoring al Qaeda. The US had reported Walid dead on Jan 8.

August 28, 2002: Israel promises to grant the United States any
assistance needed to invade Iraq.

August 28, 2002: The United Nations reports that it cannot begin
an investigation into the deaths of hundreds of captured Taliban
soldiers in northern Afghanistan because witnesses' lives would
be threatened by the local government.

August 28, 2002: Iranian President Mohammed Khatami proposes a
bill to increase his powers over that which has been allowed by
the judiciary. Khatami claims that the bill is taken, word for
word, from the Iranian Constitution, and that since the judiciary
is only permitted to veto bills which are against Islam or against
the Constitution, this bill must be permitted since it is not against
Islam. The bill swiftly passes Parliament.

August 28, 2002: Iranian President Mohammed Khatami proposes
an improvement in relations between Iran and the United States.

August 28, 2002: Envoy and retired General Anthony Zinni announces
that the US should concentrate on promoting reform in Iran rather
than going to war with Iraq.

August 28, 2002: The United Nations reports that authorities have
been ineffective in finding and freezing al Qaeda's bank accounts,
and that al Qaeda has between $30 million and $300 million in liquid
assets. The United States rejects the report's accuracy as "incomplete".

August 28, 2002, Unrelated: Germany expels an Israeli shipment of
tank treads bound for Iran from its ports. Israel claims that
the privately owned shipment was supposed to have been for Thailand,
while Iran denies that it would have any relations with Israel.

August 28, 2002: Stratfor reports that the US has suffered combat
deaths in Afghanistan and has failed to report them to the public,
and that "more than 110" soldiers are missing in action and presumed
dead. Stratfor claims its sources as Afghan government officials,
an unnamed "US military source", and "sources in Russian and Indian
intelligence" which estimate that over 300 US soldiers have been
killed so far. The US claims 19 combat deaths and no missing.

August 28, 2002, Unrelated: The Zayed Center for Coordination and
Follow-up, a wing of the Arab League, announces that the Holocaust
was carried out by Jews killing their own people.

August 29, 2002: France condemns that US's plan to attack Iraq.

August 29, 2002: Pakistan announces its opposition to a US attack
on Iraq.

August 29, 2002: Columnist Maureen Dowd proposes that the US invade
Saudi Arabia instead of Iraq.

August 29, 2002: Salon Magazine reports that Secretary of the Army
Thomas White had been involved in fraudulently hiding business losses
while Vice Chairman of Enron energy corporation.

August 29, 2002: The Washington Post reports that the Republican Party's
campaign strategy for the Congressional elections is to promote a
new tax cut which the country cannot afford, and condemn the Democrats
for voting against it.

August 29, 2002, Unrelated: Hizballah rockets Israeli positions in
the Golan Heights, killing one Israeli soldier. Israel returns fire
on positions in Lebanon, while blaming Syria for the attack.

August 30, 2002: Appoints Allan Fitzsimmons to head the Department
of the Interior's fire reduction program. The Seattle Times reports
that Fitzsimmons, head of the lobbying firm Balanced Resource Solutions,
has published papers for the Poltical Economy Research Center and the
Center for Economic Personalism in which Fitzsimmons claims that
ecosystems "exist only in the human imagination" and therefore should not
be protected, condemns religious leaders for "urging the public to make
changes in their lives to accomodate nonexistant ecosystem needs", and
claims that species going extinct "would not constitute a crisis" because
enough foreign species are being introduced to the United States that
"this part of the world has seen an increase in biological diversity". 

August 30, 2002: The World Trade Organization grants the European
Union the right to impose $4 billion worth of trade sanctions
on the United States.

August 30, 2002: After the major league baseball players' union 
allows owners to penalize teams which pay players high salaries and
to give the penalties to teams which are not turning a profit,
Bush's spokesman says that a work stoppage in the major leagues would
have prevented Americans from "participating in the national pastime".

August 30, 2002: Hizballah high priest Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah
announces that new US laws force all Arabs and Muslims to withdraw
their assets from US banks or risk having their assets frozen by the US.

August 30, 2002, Unrelated: Tennessee State Representative Ronnie Davis
is arrested for forging diplomatic passports.

August 30, 2002: During an interview on the Australian show Media Report,
veteran journalist Walter Cronkite condemns Bush for censoring
information about the course of the war in Afghanistan, and author/reporter
Hunter S. Thompson says "the generals are a little afraid of Iraq, a little
worried about it, but it's the civilians in the White House, the gang of
thieving lobbyists for the military-industrial complex, who are running
the White House, and if to be against them is to be unpatriotic, then
hell, call me a traitor".

August 2002: China announces its opposition to a US attack on Iraq.

August 2002: Afghanistan admits that 200 Taliban captees died during
transport to prison in northern Afghanistan.

August 2002: Former South African leader Nelson Mandela announces that a US
attack on Iraq could lead to the downfall of the United Nations.

August 2002: Sweden arrests a man carrying a gun on an airplane flight
and accuses him of trying to hijack the flight. The US reports that
the suspect has taken flying lessons. The suspect is released September 30
for lack of a case against him.

August 2002, Unrelated: North and South Korea agree to resume rail
service between the countries.

August 2002: British journalist Yvonne Ridley, who had been captured
by the Taliban for ten days, announces her conversion to Islam,
explaining that she lost faith in Christianity when Israel shelled
the Church of the Nativity and no Christian leaders were condemning
the shelling. Israel never shelled the Church.

August 2002, Unrelated: Kentucky bans the practice of Satanism in
its prisons, citing the religion's promotion of violence and revenge
as a threat to the safety of the prisons.

August 2002: Police in Arlington, Texas deputize businesses to
capture customers' fingerprints from cheques for a police database.

August 2002, Unrelated: The Arab Voice newspaper, published in Paterson,
New Jersey, begins printing parts of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
in every issue. The Protocols is a book produced by the Russian secret
service in the late 1800s which claimed to expose the Jewish conspiracy
to rule the world.

August 2002: National Security Council deputy national security advisor
Wayne A. Downing resigns.

August 31, 2002: Time Magazine reports that Secretary of State
Colin Powell plans to resign at the end of Bush's term.

August 31, 2002, Unrelated: According to the Tehran Times, Iraqi
Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan accuses Iran of being allies
of Israel while on a diplomatic visit to Jordan.


September 1, 2002: Germany announces that it has evidence connecting
terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui to the September 11 attacks, but is
withholding this evidence from United States prosecutors until the
US promises not to execute Moussaoui.

September 1, 2002: Secretary of State Colin Powell says that
the United States needs to present evidence that Iraq is developing
weapons of mass destruction, and announces his support for sending
weapons inspectors to Iraq.

September 1, 2002, Unrelated: Kashmiri National Conference Party leader
Haji Ghulam Hassan Bhat is kidnapped and killed, and Industrial Minister
Sheikh Mustafa Kamal survives an assassination attempt.

September 1, 2002: The Des Moines Sunday Register prints an article with 
the following text. The author is unknown at this time. On September 5,
the Associated Press distributes a modified version. Words added by
the AP are in in [brackets] while words in the original but dropped by the AP
version are in {braces}.

	Some of the fundamental changes to Americans' legal rights
	by the Bush administration and the USA Patriot Act following
	the terror attacks {are}:

	* FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION: Government may monitor religious and
	political institutions without suspecting criminal activity to
	assist terror investigation.

	* FREEDOM OF INFORMATION: Government has closed once-public
	immigration hearings, has secretly detained hundreds of people
	without charges, and has encouraged bureaucrats to resist public
	records requests.

	* FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Government may prosecute librarians or
	keepers of any other records if they tell anyone that the
	government subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation.
	{The FBI won't say how many public libraries it has checked in
	order to determine who is getting particular books or looking
	up particular information on computers. A University of Illinois
	survey of nearly 2,000 libraries in December and January determined
	that the agency searched one of every nine of the nation's largest
	libraries.}

	* RIGHT TO LEGAL REPRESENTATION: Government may monitor federal
	prison jailhouse conversations between attorneys and clients,
	and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes.

	* FREEDOM FROM UNREASONABLE SEARCHES: Government may search
	and seize Americans' papers and effects without probable
	cause to assist terror investigation.

	{ * Trial: Government may jail Americans without a trial.  }
	[* RIGHT TO A SPEEDY AND PUBLIC TRIAL: Government may jail
	Americans indefinitely without a trial.]

	* RIGHT TO LIBERTY: Americans may be jailed without being
	charged or being able to confront witnesses against them.

	{ Other Changes:

	Government may listen to suspects on any
	telephones they might use, not just on a specific phone.
	The FBI and intelligence agents may share information, an
	unprecedented shift away from a 24-year-old policy that
	placed a high wall between domestic law enforcement officials
	and the CIA. The Treasury Department may target banks and
	foreign countries deemed havens for money laundering. The
	Immigration and Naturalization Service may hold noncitizens
	up to seven days without charges and detain them indefinitely
	if they are considered a threat to national security.

	Now: At least 147 people remain in custody in the United States.
	Seventy-four of those were in custody for immigration violations,
	73 on secret federal criminal charges, and an undisclosed number
	as "material witnesses", according to Justice Department court
	filings. The detainees were among an estimated 1,200 rounded up 
	under the government's post-Sept. 11 secret arrests, detentions
	and interrogations.

	Internationally, nearly 600 people from Afghanistan, Pakistan,
	and 30 other nations were captured by U.S. soldiers and taken
	to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay where they remain, and
	an undisclosed number are being held at a U.S. air base in
	Bagram, Afghanistan. The military wants to add more than 200
	cells at Guantanamo because space is running out.

	Court rulings: A U.S. District Judge has ordered the government
	to identify domestic detainees and their lawyers before the end
	of the month. The Justice Department has appealed.

	A Cincinnati-based federal appeals court has ordered the government
	to open deportation hearings, ruling unconstitutional the policy
	of barring public and media from deportation hearings deemed a
	"special interest" to the anti-terrorism campaign.

	Another U.S. district judge ruled the Cuba detainees don't have
	a right to U.S. court hearings.  

	What's ahead: The Senate will vote on President Bush's plan
	for a Department of Homeland Security, including his proposals
	to create a national identity card and a civilian corps to report
	suspicious activities in neighborhoods around the country.

	The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will decide whether an
	American citizen held incommunicado by the military has a right
	to a lawyer.

	A special national security appeals court will consider how much
	and what kinds of information intelligence agencies can give
	federal prosecutors and investigators.
	}

September 2, 2002: Urges congress to pass his energy bill, describing
it as a "jobs bill" in his Labor Day speech.

September 2, 2002: The Office of Personnel and Management accuses
the American Federation of Government Employees of lying in pointing
out that Bush's plans for the Homeland Security Department would allow
the Department to hire, fire, or reduce the wages of anybody at any time
for any reason, without the protections of civil service and labor laws.
In Bush's defense, the Office says that the Department must have
the "flexibility" and "freedom" to "get the right people in the right
job at the right time" and to "hold them [employees] accountable",
"without all kinds of bureaucratic rules and obstacles", and demands
that the Federation "stick to the facts" and avoid "distortion of
the administration's position" and "inflammatory rhetoric".

September 2, 2002: Former South African president Nelson Mandela
condemns the United States for "introducing chaos in international
affairs" and setting a precedent for other countries to ignore
the United Nations Security Council.

September 2, 2002: Libya announces that an overthrow of Iraq's government
would turn Iraq into "another Afghanistan" and would increase worldwide
support for al Qaeda.

September 2, 2002: Lebanon denies that al Qaeda is operating within
its territory, after the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reports
that over 150 al Qaeda soldiers are in the Ayn al Hilweh refugee
camp near Sidon.

September 2, 2002: Pakistani inspectors returning from Guantanamo
Bay Naval Station report that none of the Pakistani citizens held
there are members of al Qaeda. Pakistan requests their citizens'
immediate release.

September 2, 2002, Unrelated: Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe states
that no white farmers have had all of their land taken away by reforms,
but that all farmers have been left with a plot of farmable land.

September 2, 2002, Unrelated: Iranian President Mohammad Khatami
proposes a bill to weaken the judiciary's power to determine who
may or may not run for elected office.

September 2, 2002, Unrelated: Sudanese rebels conquer the city of Torit.
As a result, Sudan ends its peace talks with the rebels.

September 2, 2002, Unrelated: After Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien
promises to send the Kyoto Treaty to Parliament for ratification,
Albertan Environmental Minister Lorne Taylor pledges to oppose the
decision as natural resources are the jurisdiction of the provinces
under Canadian law. Meanwhile, it is reported that Russia and China
have not yet signed the treaty either.

September 2, 2002, Unrelated: George Gurley of the New York Observer
reports that bestselling author Ann Coulter has said her "only
regret with Timothy McVeigh", who bombed the FBI building in Oklahoma
City in 1995, "is he did not go to the New York Times building".

September 2, 2002: Netherlands police arrest eight suspected
al Qaeda members.

September 2, 2002, Unrelated: Georgia announces that the Pankisi Gorge
is under its full control.

September 3, 2002, Unrelated: Republika Srpska, the Serb-race government
in Bosnia, announces that claims of a massacre at Srebrenica are "imagined
or fabricated".

September 3, 2002, Unrelated: The Palestinian Authority's chief negotiator
says that Israel's expulsion of convicted accomplices in terrorist acts
"is definitely a war crime" and marks "a sad, black day for human rights".
A third suspect was aquitted in the case before Israel's highest court.

September 3, 2002: The Washington Post reports that Bush has spent
250 days, or 42 percent of his term, on vacation.

September 3, 2002: CBS reports that it was able to smuggle weapons
through airports in 70% of tests done on the Labor Day holiday.

September 4, 2002: Announces his opposition to sanctions on Syria,
as Congress considers a bill to punish Syria for its support of 
terrorist groups Islamic Resistance and Islamic Jihad. A spokesman
says that the bill harms Bush's "maneuverability".

September 4, 2002: Speaking before the World Summit on Sustainable
Development, Secretary of State Colin Powell is heckled for condemning
Zimbabwe's seizure of white-owned farmland.

September 5, 2002: The US and UK bomb an Iraqi air defense site.
The Daily Telegraph reports that over 100 aircraft took part in the
attack, although only twelve dropped ordnance on the target in
western Iraq, and mentions that Iraq has fired upon coalition aircraft
130 times in the past year. The Telegraph suggests that the attacks
open up a route for helicopters into Iraq from Jordan, and damage
Iraq's capabilities to attack Israel with medium-range Scud missiles.
The US reports that the attack wasn't nearly as large as the Telegraph
article made out, and fewer than two dozen aircraft were involved.
It is reported that the coalition has bombed Iraq 34 previous times
this year.

September 5, 2002: Over two dozen are killed by a pair of bombs
targeting a marketplace in Kabul, Afghanistan.

September 5, 2002: Gunmen fire at Afghan President Hamid Karzai,
missing him but wounding Kandahar governor Gul Agha Sherzai.

September 5, 2002, Unrelated: Fernando Mancilla, chief of Colombia's
secret police, is assassinated in Medellin.

September 5, 2002: The Senate Judiciary Committee rejects, on a party
line 10-9 vote, Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen's nomination
to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Some reports place Owen as an
extremist opponent of worker and reproductive rights, but it is stated
that she has gained the highest rating from the American Bar Association.

September 5, 2002: Israel claims that Libya is developing nuclear weapons.
Libya claims not to have the money to carry out development.

September 5, 2002: Congresswoman Maxine Waters reports that Florida
has not yet returned the right to vote to an estimated 70,000 black
citizens who were falsely accused of being felons by Florida Secretary
of State Katherine Harris.

September 5, 2002: NBC reports that Syria is providing the United States
"a wealth" of information on al Qaeda, and is in return being allowed
to smuggle Iraqi oil.

September 2002: Orders Defense Secratary Donald Rumsfeld to cancel
a 2300 word opinion piece for the Washington Post which would have
presented a case for attacking Iraq.

September 2002: Germany arrests two people for plotting to bomb
a US army base in Germany. One of the suspects works in the base PX.

September 2002: Congress convenes in New York for the first time
since 1970, in honor of New York's losses on September 11.
Senator Robert Byrd declines to attend, saying that "Congress ought
to be here, working. There's not anything I can do by going up there".

September 2002, Unrelated: Captured terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui
claims to have had an account named "xdesertman" on the Hotmail
electronic mail service, and reports claim that the FBI let the
account lapse and have its contents deleted. Microsoft, which runs
Hotmail, claims that there never was a Hotmail account with that name.

September 2002: ABC reports that the FBI has given Zacarias Moussaoui
classified information among documents requested to build a defense.

September 2002: Unknown parties in Afghanistan print fliers in Arabic,
a language foreign to Afghanistan, which call for fighting the United
States.

September 2002: The Arab League announces its opposition to an
attack on Iraq.

September 2002, Unrelated: Lebanon bans Murr Television, owned by
politician Gabriel Murr, for broadcasting "political propaganda".
Murr claims that the closure was because of his personal opposition
to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon.

September 2002, Unrelated: Mayor Vincent Cianci of Providence,
Rhode Island, is convicted of racketeering and stripped of his title.

September 2002: Speigel reports that United States Ambassador Richard
Burt has announced his support for a "change of goverment" in Germany.

September 2002: ABC News smuggles 15 pounds of depleted uranium
into the United States to show how weak the US's security is,
claiming that the depleted uranium would give off a similar signature
to weapons-grade material in a lead lined case. The uranium was
transported along a route described in al Qaeda documents.

September 2002: As Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura prepares to lead
a diplomatic and trade mission to Cuba, Assistant Secretary of State
for Western Hemispheric Affairs Otto Reich accuses the trip of going
to Cuba "to participate in sexual tourism".

September 2002: The Republican Party airs a radio ad in predominantly
black districts which calls the Social Security program "reverse
reparations", in reference to black leaders' demands for payments
to the descendants of slaves.

September 6, 2002: Conservative News editor Sterling Rome accuses Iraq
of being responsible for the September 11 attacks.

September 7, 2002: Pakistan arrests fourteen people for planning
a protest against the government.

September 7, 2002, Unrelated: The BBC reports that an aide to
the Taliban's foreign minister had contacted the United States 
embassy in Pakistan as well as the United Nations with information
that Osama bin Laden was planning an attack on the United States
last July. The report claims the aide's source as Uzbek religious
leader Tohir Yuldash.

September 7, 2002: United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
Mary Robinson accuses the United States, China, and Russia of
attacking human rights and legitimate political opposition under the
guise of fighting terrorism.

September 7, 2002, Unrelated: Kyrgyzstani Secretary of Security
Misir Ashirkulov is wounded by an assassin. 

September 7, 2002: Announces that Iraq has been caught attempting to
purchase aluminium tubes used in refining weapons-grade nuclear material,
and that there has been unexplained construction near several Iraqi
nuclear power plants. To this date, Bush has offered no indication
other than a personal hunch that Iraq is planning to build weapons
of mass destruction. 

September 8, 2002: Former United Nations arms inspector Scott Ritter
announces that "Iraq today is not a threat to its neighbours and is not
acting in a manner which threatens anyone outside its own borders".

September 8, 2002: Senator Tom Daschle demands to know who Bush would
replace Saddam Hussein with after an invasion of Iraq, and insinuates
that Bush hasn't thought about this.

September 8, 2002: A music store in Khost, Afghanistan, is bombed.
No deaths are reported.

September 8, 2002: Sectarian violence between Christians and Muslims
breaks out in the Moluccas islands of Indonesia.

September 8, 2002: Pakistani police kill four people near Multan
in Punjab province, after a band of rebels attacks a police convoy
and frees two terrorists who were responsible for bombing a Christian
church. The two terrorists were among the dead.

September 9, 2002: The US closes its Indonesian embassy in Jakarta
and its embassy in Malaysia, and cancels a planned September 11 memorial
event due to fears of a terrorist attack.
 
September 9, 2002: As India and Pakistan exchange artillery fire
across the border, Pakistan asks the United States not to attack Iraq
because it could provoke India to invade Pakistan.

September 9, 2002: Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat
demands an end to terrorist attacks against Israel because the
attacks harm the Palestinian Authority's public image.

September 9, 2002: The International Institute for Strategic Studies
issues a report on Iraq and its capabilities for building a weapon of
mass destruction. The report states that Iraq does not have the
capabilities to produce a nuclear weapon on its own, but could 
produce one within months if it imports processed nuclear material, and
that Iraq could produce biological or chemical weaponry on short notice.

September 10, 2002: Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein calls for all Arabs
to commit terrorist attacks on American civilians in the event of an
invasion of Iraq. 

September 10, 2002: Germany raids Tatex Trading on suspicion of smuggling
terrorists into the country. 

September 10, 2002: The Republic of China accuses the People's Republic
of China of practicing terrorism through its threats to invade Taiwan.

September 10, 2002, Unrelated: Orlando police report that Noelle Bush,
daughter of Florida's governor Jeb Bush, was caught with cocaine
in a rehabilitation center, but since the center's officials refused to
give a statement, the officers could not arrest Noelle. Later reports
from residents of the center state that Noelle has been caught with
cocaine five times before but has not been punished because the center's
officials do not believe they have a right to punish the Governor's
daughter, and that it was residents who called the police in.

September 10, 2002: Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf gives a
speech at Harvard University.

September 10, 2002: Colombia grants its police forces the powers
to make arrests and searches without a warrant and to lay out curfews.

September 10, 2002, Unrelated: Israel threatens to invade Lebanon
for diverting water from the Hasbani River which flows into the Jordan
and the Sea of Galilee. Lebanon states that the amount of water diverted
is far less than Israel alloted to Lebanon under a peace agreement that
was never formalized, and in any case is within Lebanon's rights.
The United Nations states that Lebanon is not diverting any water from
the river because the water is being diverted to people suffering a
water shortage.

September 10, 2002: The US closes its embassies in Cambodia, Vietnam,
Pakistan, Tajikstan, Bahrain, Malawi, and the United Arab Emirates.

September 10, 2002: Pakistan announces that it has arrested 402
al Qaeda members in the past few months.

September 11, 2002: Iraq's state-run newspaper celebrates the anniversary
of "God's punishment" of the United States, as its state-run television
announces that the United States carried out the September 11 attacks
upon itself.

September 11, 2002: Russia threatens to attack the Pankisi Gorge
region of Georgia, claiming that Georgian forces have not stopped
Chechen rebels in the region.

September 11, 2002, Unrelated: Mushtaq Ahmad Lone is assassinated by
gunmen in Kashmir, as part of a wave of widespread attacks and terrorism
that kills eighteen people in the day.  Lone's funeral procession is
attacked the next day.

September 11, 2002: The US reports capturing a key financier of al Qaeda
and the Taliban. The raid in Bermel also saw the destruction of a
weapons cache and the capture of a second unnamed "high-value target".

September 11, 2002: Terrorists in London hold a pro-terrorism conference
at the Finsbury Park Mosque. Journalists are barred from entry.
The size of the conference's attendance is not reported. The conference's
organizer is reported to be Omar Bakri Mohammed of al Muhajiroun.

September 11, 2002: Former South African President Nelson Mandela
declares the United States to be a threat to world peace.

September 12, 2002: Iran pledges not to intervene against Iraq
when the United States attacks.

September 12, 2002: Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan announces
that Bush needs to reduce spending and scale back tax cuts for the
economy to recover.

September 12, 2002: Abdul Hadi Awang, leader of Malaysia's second
largest political party, says that "the United States and its allies
are carrying out new crusade wars against Muslims" and that "the
attacks against Afghanistan were cruel and without any strong reason".

September 12, 2002: Italy arrests fifteen Pakistanis accused of
being members of al Qaeda.

September 12, 2002: The Juneau Empire reports that the FBI has
placed Forest Service worker and retired Coast Guard commander
Larry Mussara on a list of people who are a threat to airline security.

September 12, 2002: The US condemns Russia for threatening to attack
Chechen targets within Georgia's borders.

September 12, 2002: Six hundred people from Army Central Command
are transferred from Florida to Qatar, purportedly for a weeklong
training exercise in November.

September 13, 2002: Floridan police arrest three men on suspicion
of being terrorists, and close the Alligator Alley highway where they
were arrested. The men, medical students travelling to Miami, are
later cleared. They are expelled from the hospital where they planned
to train.

September 12, 2002, Unrelated: California Superior Court Judge
James C. Chalfant dismisses a jury's unanimous guilty verdict
against William E. Simon and Sons investment firm, which is run
by California gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon, and orders
the plaintiff to pay Simon $125,000 in court costs. Pro-Democrat
media sources report that Chalfant was appointed by former Governor
Pete Wilson in exchange for an $8,000 donation to Wilson's campaign.

September 13, 2002: Major General Geoff Lambert orders US soldiers
in Afghanistan to shave their beards and wear full uniforms, after
seing photographs of soldiers wearing beards and local regalia to
appear friendly to the local population.

September 13, 2002: The Air Force charges two pilots with manslaughter
for bombing a Canadian training exercise in Afghanistan on April 17.

September 13, 2002: Pakistan arrests Ramzi Binalshibh, supposedly
one of the organizers of the September 11 attacks of the prior year.
The BBC describes Binalshibh as "the 20th hijacker", a term previously
used by multiple media to refer to Zacarias Moussaoui.

September 13, 2002: Iraq announces that it will not allow the unconditional
return of weapons inspectors, reversing numerous earlier offers.

September 13, 2002: The United States imposes sanctions on Russian
arms-related businesses Tula Design Bureau of Instrument Building, State
Scientific Production Enterprise Bazalt, and Rostov Airframe Plant 168,
for trading with unnamed "sponsors of terrorism". Rostov declares the
sactions a "hostile move directed against Russia", and Russia declares
that its trade and "military technology cooperation" with terrorism-supporting
countries is "absolutely legitimate".  

September 13, 2002: The US arrests five people in Lackawanna, New York,
and charges them with providing material support to al Qaeda. The US
describes the group as an al Qaeda cell which had trained in bin Laden's
camps in Afghanistan. Neighbours describe the suspects as peaceful men
leading families. Reports are that one of the arrested has admitted
the group's guilt.

September 13, 2002: The Republican Party accuses the Democratic Party
of planning a "December Surprise" of raising spending and taxes to
malicious levels after the November elections. 

September 13, 2002: Vice President Dick Cheney accuses Congress of
being unwilling to consider an invasion of Iraq. High profile Congressmen
have demanded for months that Bush present them with a reason for
invading Iraq.

September 13, 2002, Unrelated: Pravda reports that two hundred former
Soviet nuclear weapons are missing from Ukraine. According to the article,
which quoted Ukrainian Communist Party leader Pyotr Simonenko, Ukraine
had 2400 nuclear weapons and only recorded the export of 2200 of them.

September 13, 2002, Unrelated: Grand Rapids District Court Judge 
David Buter sentences a potential juror to 24 hours of community
service and a drug test because the jury candidate stated that she
did not trust police officers to tell the truth.

September 2002: Newsweek reports that the FBI had an informant who
was a roomate of two of the September 11 hijackers.

September 2002: After new voting machines break down in Florida's primary
election, Congressman Mark Foley accuses the Democratic Party of
deliberately committing election fraud to prevent former Attorney General
Janet Reno from winning the Party's nomination for governor.

September 2002: A "newly assigned federal security agent" visits the
Juneau Empire to tell the newspaper that it is commiting treason
by writing about the fact that retired Coast Guard commander Larry Mussara
found himself on an FBI list of potential terrorists. The Empire, in
an editorial, tells the unnamed agent to "look in a mirror" to find
a traitor.

September 14, 2002: Khildir Hamza, former head of Iraq's nuclear weapons
program, claims Iraq had enough uranium to construct three nuclear
weapons at the time he left the country.

September 14, 2002: Netherlands police arrest Mullah Krekar, leader
of Ansar al Islam. Jordan, Norway, and the United States request Krekar's
extradition.

September 14, 2002: The United States refuses to allow Canada access
to a Canadian citizen under US arrest.

September 15, 2002, Unrelated: Gunmen attack Kashmir's Minister of Tourism,
Sakina Yatoo, killing two of her bodyguards. In another incident, India
kills nine soldiers of an unknown force. India accuses Pakistan of being
behind the recent upsurge of violence, while Pakistan denies this.

September 15, 2002: An explosives-laden fuel tanker is captured by
Afghan police while en route to Kabul. Major Gordon Mackenzie reports
that the truck was driven by Pakistani citizens. Kabul head of police
Basir Salangi disputes the drivers' nationality.

September 15, 2002: Saudi Arabia offers the United States the use of
its air bases for an invasion of Iraq, conditional upon a United Nations
resolution supporting an invasion.

September 2002: Senator John McCain describes Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld's top secret briefings as "a joke" and "almost insulting"
due to the lack of information presented, and says that "everyone
who goes to them is frustrated". Congressman Robert Menendez says
that other Congressmen have taken to skipping the briefings because
they present "nothing...new, compelling, or that I have not heard before".
Another Congressman claims to be able to get better information from CNN.
Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer claims that the administration is keeping
Congress "as fully inform[ed] as possible".

September 2002: The Environmental Protection Agency releases its annual
report on air pollution trends, from which a section on global warming
has been removed at the demands of "people at pretty high levels" in
the EPA.

September 16, 2002: French police arrest two people accused of being
leaders of the Basque terrorist movement Euskadi Ta Azkatasuna.

September 16, 2002: Iraq offers the United Nations the unconditional
return of weapons inspectors.

September 16, 2002: The FBI arrests a man in Bahrain and claims that
he is part of the same al Qaeda cell recently arrested in New York.
Reports indicate that there were two additional people in the cell.

September 16, 2002: Talk show host Rush Limbaugh announces that
the Democratic Party is the Party of al Qaeda because the five
men recently arrested at Lackawanna were registered Democrats.
In response, The Smoking Gun reports that murderer and child molester
David Allen Westerfield is a registered Republican.

September 16, 2002, Unrelated: The New Yorker reports that al Qaeda
had merged with Jamaat al Islamiyya and Egyptian Islamic Jihad
last summer.

September 17, 2002, Unrelated: North Korea admits to kidnapping Japanese
civilians and forcing them to teach North Korean spies how to integrate
into Japanese society. Japan and North Korea sign a declaration in
which Japan apologizes for its demolishing of Korea during colonial times
and offers North Korea low-interest loans, and both agree to respect each
others' sovereignty.

September 17, 2002: Iraq announces that its offer of allowing
unconditional weapons inspections only applies to military bases,
and demands a ten day waiting period before dicussion of the return
of inspectors.

September 17, 2002: The Washington Post reports that Bush has been
firing the bureaucracy's volunteer scientific advisory staffs and
replacing them with people who will decide for what the administration
wants them to, and that "at least one nationally renowned academic"
was told that he was not suitable for a position in the Department
of Health and Human Services becasue his opinions on the morality
of cloning and embryo cell research differed from Bush's.

September 17, 2002: Actor Christopher Reeve, who suffered a broken back
in a fall from a horse, accuses Bush and the Catholic Church of hindering
medical research that could help his condition.

September 17, 2002: Judge Royce Lamberth finds Interior Secretary
Gale Norton in contempt of court for the Interior Department's
mismanagement the Indian Trust Fund. 

September 17, 2002: Conservative News reports that the Central
Intelligence Agency has begun training Palestinian Authority security
forces.

September 17, 2002: Singapore arrests 21 people accused of being
allied with al Qaeda.

September 17, 2002, Unrelated: Lawrence H. Summers, president of
Harvard University, announces that the recent worldwide academic
movement to condemn Israel alone and ostracise people from Israel
without condemning or ostracising people from any other country
is motivated by hatred of Jews.

September 17, 2002, Unrelated: Protests erupt in Ukraine on the
second anniversary of the kidnapping and decapitation of investigative
journalist Georgiy Gongadze. Protesters accuse President Leonid Kuchma
of ordering the killing and demand his resignation. Kuchma has been
recorded issuing an order to "throw Gongadze to the Chechens".
The protests, which last for more than a week, are ignored by state media.

September 19, 2002: Issues a one year extension of the state of
national emergency "with respect to persons who commit, threaten
to commit, or support terrorism".

September 2002: The Department of Education orders the destrution of
documents written prior to Bush's term.

September 2002: Congressional investigations dig up dozens of warnings
about the September 11, 2001 attack and plans for similar attacks. Bush
has claimed that the US's intelligence agencies had received no warnings
and had no reason to expect an attack such as what happened on September 11.

September 2002: Newspapers report that the US is massing a large
strike force in east Africa, and claim Yemen is a target. The US
says that it is not planning on attacking Yemen.

September 2002, Unrelated: Terrorists fire into a high school in India,
killing two.

September 2002: Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemispheric
Affairs Dan Smith says that Cuban agents have been giving the United States
false information about al Qaeda in order to hamper the US's abilities
to fight the terrorist organization. Cuba denies the allegation.

September 2002: B-2 bombers are deployed to an island in the Indian ocean.

September 2002: Presents Congress with a resolution granting him the
authority to invade Iraq.

September 2002: al Jazeera reports that its cameramen Sami al Haj
has been arrested by United States forces in Afghanistan and is now being
held at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station.

September 2002: German Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin says
that Bush plans to invade Iraq "to divert attention from his domestic
problems. It's a classic tactic. It's one that Hitler used". Bush's
spokesman Ari Fleischer calls the statement "outrageous and inexplicable".
The Christian Social Union demands Daeubler-Gmelin be immediately fired
and barred from working in government. After the election, Chancellor
Schroeder fires Daeubler-Gmelin.

September 2002: The city of Santa Cruz, California, distributes marijuana
from city hall in protest of the federal government's raid of a local
marijuana farm.

September 2002, Unrelated: Satellite photographs show that the
Sahara desert's southern boundary is returning to grassland
following an increase in regional rainfalls.

September 2002, Unrelated: Burundi's army admits to killing 173 civilians
on September 9, claiming the civilians were accomplices of a rebel group
and blaming the rebels as "fully responsible" for the deaths.

September 2002: Germany bans sixteen organizations related to
a Turkish Islamic fundamentalist movement.

September 2002, Unrelated: Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey begin
working on an oil pipeline to Turkey from the Caspian Sea.

September 2002, Unrelated: Japan announces that North Korea has
agreed to admit arms inspectors.

September 2002: The US siezes three truckloads of weapons from
a site in Afghanistan.

September 2002: Two Afghan soldiers are wounded by gunmen wearing
womens' burqas in Kandahar. An accomplice is arrested.

September 2002: Pledges to veto legislation that would provide
full military retirement and disability benefits to wounded veterans.
Current law reduces retirement benefits by the amount of disability
benefits.

September 2002: The General Services Administration removes its
public computer systems' administrators' contact information from
public view.

September 2002: The village of Sarobi, Afghanistan, requests
that the US Special Forces govern the village.

September 2002, Unrelated: A rebellion breaks out in Cote D'Ivoire
as nearly a thousand soldiers mutiny. Government forces attack
immigrants from Burkina Faso after a government official accuses
Burkina Faso of backing the rebellion. Initial reports say that
the rebels are fighting because their benefits were cut, while
later reports repeat Cote D'Ivoire's statement that they were expelled
from the army because they were considered a threat to rebel.

September 2002: Announces that he no longer opposes a Congressional
investigation into the September 11 attacks.

September 2002, Unrelated: North Korea announces that it will allow
capitalism within a walled-in area on the border with China.

September 2002, Unrelated: Worldcom announces that it has hidden
$9 billion in losses from stockholders, rather than the $7 billion
earlier claimed.

September 20, 2002: Announces a new foreign relations doctrine
based upon attacking any country which even attempts to become
an economic or military match to the US, according to the same
report in the San Francisco Chronicle and the BBC.

September 20, 2002: Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, Iran's chief justice,
says that "Qatar is committing treason against all Muslims" by allowing
the United States to have a military base there.

September 20, 2002, Unrelated: Turkey bars Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
reportedly Turkey's most popular politician, from running for office
due to his being found guilty of inciting religious hatred.

September 20, 2002: Japan urges Bush to "open a road to dialogue"
with North Korea.

September 20, 2002, Unrelated: South Korea demands that the North
release several hundred of its own citizens who have been held captive.

September 20, 2002: A US base in Lwara, Paktia Province, Afghanistan,
comes under continuous fire for two hours. No casualties are reported.

September 21, 2002: Iraq announces that it will not cooperate with
any new United Nations Security Council resolutions.

September 21, 2002: Yemen captures five suspected al Qaeda members
after a gunfight.

September 21, 2002, Unrelated: Kashmir Tourism Minister Sakina Itoo
survives her car hitting a land mine. The Hizbul Mujahideen claims
responsibility for the attack.

September 21, 2002: Bestselling author Ann Coulter says that 
the Democratic Party is "desperately dying to provide aid and
support to al Qaeda".

September 23, 2002, Unrelated: France sends troops to Cote D'Ivoire
to defend European and American civilians there.

September 23, 2002, Unrelated: A grenade explodes inside a car 
in the early morning near a warehouse for the US Embassy in Jakarta,
Indonesia. One occupant of the car is killed, one is arrested by police,
and two escape. The man held is reportedly from the Moluccas islands,
where religious warfare has broken out.

September 23, 2002: Pakistan arrests two people, Saeed and Mohammed Din,
in Peshawar who are accused of being terrorists by the US Federal Bureau
of Investigation, on suspicious of "anti-state activities".

September 23, 2002: Columbia requests additional aid from the United
States.

September 23, 2002: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld speaks of Germany's
recent elections, in which Gerhard Schroeder was reelected, that
"the way it was conducted was noticably unhelpful" and "as the White House
indicated, has had the effect of poisoning the relationship" with the US.
The BBC reports that Bush has not given Schroeder a customary congratulatory
telephone call, and that Rumsfeld has "pointedly refused" to meet with the
German Secretary of Defense.

September 23, 2002, Unrelated: Croatia announces its refusal to enforce
a United Nations arrest warrant against General Janko Bobetko.

September 23, 2002, Unrelated: A battle breaks out in Sringar, India,
during regional elections. One report states that several grenades
were thrown at a polling station.

September 23, 2002, Unrelated: Three terrorists attack a Hindu shrine
in India and kill over 30 worshipers. Several Muslims are stabbed
by Hindu terrorists in retaliation.

September 23, 2002, Unrelated: The BBC reports that Britain has sold
beryllium to Iran. The material is used in the construction of
nuclear weapons.

September 23, 2002: El Paso Corporation is found guilty of withholding
more than a fifth of its natural gas supplies from California's power
plants in order to raise prices during the power crisis of two years
earlier.

September 23, 2002: The Federation of American Scientists claims
that Bush is ignoring the threat of nuclear weapon proliferation
outside of Iraq.

September 24, 2002: Britain publishes a 53-page document on Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction development programs. The report states
that Iraq has produced and deployed rocket technology banned by
United Nations sanctions and the cease fire agreement, that Iraq has
been producing biological and chemical weapons within the past few years,
and that Iraq has attempted but failed to acquire the equipment necessary
to build a nuclear bomb. Iraq denounces the report as Jewish lies
and offers full access to UN arms inspectors.

September 24, 2002, Unrelated: US District Judge William Sessions
rules the federal death penalty does not adequately allow for a fair
trial and as such is unconsitutional.

September 24, 2002: 200 US troops are deployed to Cote D'Ivoire to defend
US citizens at the International Christian Academy in Bouake. French
soldiers arrive first and retrieve them and other Western civilians.

September 24, 2002: The city of Santa Cruz, California, passes a resolution
denouncing Bush's plans to invade Iraq, citing "inevitable environmental
destruction and likely harm to innocent civilians" and the opposition
of religious leaders to the war. News reports state that the resolution
condemned Bush for running a "propaganda campaign", but this is not a part
of the resolution.

September 24, 2002: Department of Defense Director of Operational Test
and Evaluation Thomas Christie reports that the Navy is deploying combat
systems without adequate testing, in a memo leaked to the public.
Examples given are the Joint Standoff Weapon being deployed aboard
the USS Stennis before being tested, a classified system for the F/A-18
fighter which failed its tests but is in the process of being deployed
anyway, an infrared bomb guidance system which failed 5 of 7 tests but
is still being pushed forward, a proposal to deploy a reconaissance
array without testing it, and the deployment of submarine sonar systems
without the systems having passed tests.

September 25, 2002: Says repeatedly that the Democrats are "not interested
in the security of the American people". After Senator Daschle condemns
the statement, Bush and Senator Trent Lott condemn the Democrats
for turning the Iraq debate into a partisan political issue.
Conservative News describes Daschle as "having hissed in a stage whisper",
states that "Daschle had his facts wrong", and describes Democrats
as "running scared" without "their pet domestic policy issues" in
news article text, not an editorial. In reporting on the event,
the Washington Times, Wall Steet Journal NBC, CNN, CBS, and Newsweek
report that Daschle was upset about another, less extreme statement
that Bush had made in one of four speeches this day. The Washington Times
refuses to issue a correction when notified of the error by the Spinsanity
media critic group.

September 25, 2002: Gunmen murder seven people at the offices of the
Institute for Peace and Justice, a Christian charity, in Karchi, Pakistan.
The Archbishop of Karachi states his doubt that the killing was due
to religious strife, instead saying that it may be connected to the
poisoning of the charity's chairman four months earlier.

September 25, 2002: Canada announces its support for a US invasion
of Iraq.

September 25, 2002: Germany announces that there is no information
in the recently released British document on Iraq which suggests that
Iraq is currently intending to deploy weapons of mass destruction.
France announces that it only accept the word of United Nations weapons
inspectors on whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or not. China
threatens "severe consequences" if the US invades Iraq without the
support of the United Nations.

September 25, 2002: Georgia transfers thirteen captured Chechen soldiers
to Russia.

September 25, 2002: The US indicts United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia
leader Carlos Castrano on drug trafficing charges. Castrano demands
that the US also indict the leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia.

September 25, 2002, Unrelated: Twelve people are killed as a bus
catches fire in Kodandapurim, India. The fire was caused by a passenger
intentionally spilling gasoline and lighting it.

September 25, 2002, Unrelated: The Institute for Human Rights Study
and Advocacy, a group based in Papua, Indonesia, determines that
the Indonesian Army killed two Americans in an attack on workers
at a Freeoirt gold and copper mine.

September 25, 2002: House Majority Whip Tom DeLay says that the
Democratics "are people that don't want to protect the American
people. They will do anything, spend all the time and resources
they can, to avoid confronting evil."

September 26, 2002: Three hundred Chechen soldiers invade Russia
from the Pankisi Gorge region of Georgia, where Georgia had claimed
there were no Chechen soldiers. Russia defeats the force, killing
around 15 soldiers and losing a helicopter. British news cameraman
Roderick Scott is killed in the battle.

September 26, 2002, Unrelated: French police discover a small amount
of plastic explosives on a Royal Air Maroc plain from Morocco.

September 26, 2002: The US bombs the radar and a support building
at the Basra civilian airport in Iraq, claiming that the Iraqi army
was using the facilities to target US aircraft. Iraq condemns
the bombing as a "terrorist attack".

September 26, 2002: Announces that Iraq has trained al Qaeda forces
in the development and use of chemical weapons, and refuses to provide
any specifics or evidence for the claim when asked by news reporters.

September 26, 2002, Unrelated: Southern Bell Communications cuts
eleven thousands jobs.

September 26, 2002: The European Union decides not to impose sanctions
upon the United States for the US's treaty-violating 30% tariff on
steel imports.

September 26, 2002: China announces that the US Navy ship Bowditch
has invaded China's exclusive economic zone, an act entirely within
a foreign military force's rights which China claims as an illegal
invasion of its sovereign territory. Reports indicate that a Chinese
"civilian" fishing boat harassed the Bowditch on September 19 and
eventually rammed a signal receiving array being towed behind the ship.

September 26, 2002: South Africa and India deny involvement in
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, as the recent British
report claimed Iraq procured materials from these countries.

September 26, 2002: Columnist Maureen Dowd writes "do we really want
to punish the Germans for being pacifists? Once these guys get rolling
in the other direction, they really don't know how to put the breaks on."

September 26, 2002: Iran denies reports that there is an al Qaeda
terrorist training camp near its border with Afghanistan, calling
the claims US propaganda.

September 26, 2002, Unrelated: United Nations Secretary General
Kofi Annan condemns Israel for killing two known Islamic Resistance
terrorists, saying that it is a violation of international law for
Israel to kill enemy combatants during a war or for Israel to attack
enemy positions when there is any chance of civilians being injured
in such an attack, and that Israel is responsible for protecting
civilians when Israel's enemies place their military facilities
within civilian facilities. No civilians were killed in the recent
Israeli attack.

September 26, 2002: Newsweek reports that Attorney General John
Ashcroft has been a vocal supporter of the Mujahedin e Khalq Organization,
said to be a terrorist group by the State Department and for whom
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's support is listed by Bush as a reason to
invade Iraq.

September 26, 2002: Talk show host Bill O'Reilly calls guest Bob Fertik
a liar, a geek, stupid, dopey, and the worst spinner he has ever seen
for Fertik's stating the truth that there was vote fraud in the
year 2000 presidential elections, for stating the truth that opinion
polls show a two to one margin of public disapproval of invading Iraq
if the US were to receive heavy casualties as a result, and for Fertik's
stating the truth that Al Gore supports an invasion of Iraq. Gore recently
gave a speech in which he supported the planned invasion of Iraq but
accused Bush of squandering the world's goodwill that the United States
had gained from being attacked on September 11.

September 2002: After Bush claims that the International Atomic Energy
Agency had reported in 1998 that Iraq has the materials to build
a nuclear bomb within six months, the Agency claims that it never made
such a report. Bush's spokesman Scott McClellan claims that Bush is
referring to a 1991 Agency report. The Agency claims it never made
such a report. Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer then claims that Bush is
referring to an International Institute for Strategic Studies report
that was issued two days after Bush's statement and denies that Iraq
has the materials to build a nuclear bomb. After the Washington Post
points this out, Ari Fleischer announces that "the underlying fact
remains the same" and "it is the Post's reporting that is dubious,
if not wrong".

September 2002: The Department of Justice intervenes in the case of
Chavez versus Martinez in an attempt to cancel the human right
recognized in the Miranda versus Arizona ruling that people may refuse
to answer questions asked by the police. Farm worker Oliverio Martinez
was shot five times by Oxnard, California police after resisting arrest
for wandering into the scene of a police investigation. He was then
subjected to nearly an hour of questioning by police while in the
ambulance and hospital until he fell unconcious from his wounds
and medication. The police, who refused doctors' orders to leave,
had demanded Martinez admit to attacking and trying to kill the
policemen who shot him. Solicitor General Ted Olson states that
the right to refuse to speak only applies to information that
may be used in a criminal trial, and states that the police did not 
"employ...harmful psychological techniques" in questioning Martinez
in his condition.

September 2002: The Palestinian Authority begins arresting members
of its security forces who had been involved in anti-terrorism operations,
"in order to purify the Palestinian society" according to General
Musa Arafat.

September 2002: The Earth Liberation Front announces that it will
begin killing people who it deems to be enemies of the environment.

September 2002: Right-wing politician Pat Buchanan calls for the
lifting of trade sanctions against Cuba because the sanctions'
target was the now-defunct "Soviet empire".

September 2002, Unrelated: A German truck driver is sentenced to
a month in jail for joking that he was carrying explosives for al Qaeda.

September 2002: The Vice President's office notifies Congress that
it is transfering $100,000 from the office's personnel budget to the
travel budget, having already spent the allocated $386,000 and an
extra $50,000 for unanticipated travel expenses. Reports state that
Gore, the previous vice president, was alloted a third of this amount,
and suggest that Cheney is using taxpayer money to fund his travel
to Republican Party fundraising events.

September 2002, Unrelated: Peruvian Congressman Eittel Ramos challenges
Vice President David Waisman to a duel after Waisman calls Ramos a coward.

September 2002: Soldiers at Bagram base in Afghanistan report
being ordered as to what responses they will give to questions asked
by the media.

September 2002: States repeatedly that the United States "will speak
with one voice", a veiled demand for Democrats to stop disagreeing
with him.

September 2002: The Department of Health and Human Services announces
that fetuses are to henceforth be classified as children and granted
the rights thereof.

September 2002, Unrelated: New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey demands
that poet laureate Amiri Bakara resign his title after Bakara reads
a poem which implies that Israel is behind the September 11 attack.

September 2002: Special Forces troops report that regular Army units
are abusing the Afghan populace and that the US has lost almost all
respect which it had gained from the people in those areas, to the
point where Special Forces units are now regularly assualted by the
populace where before they were welcomed or at least accepted. The
Army calls the Special Forces "prima donnas" and accuses them of
damaging the war effort by not accepting the regular units' tactics.
Colonel James Huggins reports that all of his officers deny
any such abuses took place.

September 2002, Unrelated: Somebody cuts the suspension lines on 
13 parachutes at Camp Lejuene, a Marine training facility in North Carolina.

September 2002: Says that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein must be removed
from power because "he tried to kill my dad" in a failed assassination
attempt in 1993.

September 2002: Says that "Saddam is the true threat to America" when
asked by reporters about the state of the fight against al Qaeda.

September 2002, Unrelated: It is reported that former New York mayor
Rudolph Giuliani had asked Bush for the honor of personally executing
Osama bin Laden in the event of bin Laden's capture.

September 2002: Staff Sergeant Ryan Foraker disappears from
Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in the middle of the night.

September 2002: Microsoft electronics and software corporation has
Lik-Sang electronics corporation put out of business because Lik-Sang
produces a chip that allows third party software by independent developers
to be run on Microsoft's X-Box video game console.

September 2002: Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who fled Syria at age 17
to avoid the draft, is deported from the United States to Syria
where he imprisoned and tortured for a year.

September 2002: Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, aides to former
National Security Advisor Sameul R. Berger, publish a book in which
they quote military officers accusing Bush of putting anti-terrorism
plans "farther on the back burner" and of rejecting counter-intelligence
plans against the Taliban. The book also accuses Saudi Prince Bandar bin
Sultan of lobbying Federal Bureau of Investigation chief Louis Freeh to
stop investigating the Khobar Towers bombing of 1996 by claiming that
President Clinton did not want to investigate the matter.

September 2002: General Wesley Clark reports that Bush has been
intentionally ignoring the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance. Clark
is the former Supreme Commander of NATO.

September 27, 2002: Former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosovich claims
that the massacre at Srebrenica was conducted by the Muslims upon
their own people, under the leadership of France.

September 27, 2002: Malaysia arrests Wan Min Wan Mat, accused of being
a member of an organization related to al Qaeda.

September 27, 2002: France announces its opposition to the United Nations
authorizing the invasion of Iraq without a separate prior resolution
for the return of weapons inspectors. China announces the same.

September 27, 2002, Unrelated: An overloaded ferry sinks off the coast
of Gambia, killing over 1,100. The ferry was only rated to carry
around 500 people.

September 27, 2002, Unrelated: Anti-trade activists riot in the
District of Columbia after promising to attack police and shut
down all commercial activity in the city. Sixty-five are arrested.
In addition, six hundred people are arrested for peacefully protesting
against the upcoming war with Iraq, for passing through the area of
the peaceful protest, and for attending the State of the Science Congress
nursing convention across the street from the protest. In addition, several
reporters are arrested for covering the events, and US Army forces
are witnessed patrolling the area and taking note of individuals
in violation of United States Code Title 18 Section 1385.

September 27, 2002: Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith
urges Pakistan to remove troops from the Indian border to search
for al Qaeda forces near the Afghan border.

September 27, 2002, Unrelated: Timor Leste, formerly known as East Timor,
joins the United Nations.

September 27, 2002: The US withholds $50 million of foreign aid to
Ukraine and announces that it will conduct a "policy review" of its
relations with Ukraine after accusing Ukraine of selling four passive
radar-like detection system capable of detecting stealth aircraft to Iraq.
The US claims to have tape recordings of Ukrainian President Leonid
Kuchma approving the sale. Ukraine announces that the accusation is
baseless and was intended to help opposition political candidates.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Anatoly Zienko abrubtly cuts off a diplomatic
visit to the Dominican Republic and flies to New York to meet with
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.

September 27, 2002: Senator Ted Kennedy announces that there is "no
persuasive evidence that Saddam is on the threshold of aquiring"
nuclear weapons, and that there is nothing "to connect al Qaeda
and Iraq".

September 27, 2002: Afghan President Hamid Karzai requests foreign
aid to help the government fight opium and heroin production.

September 27, 2002: Russia says that the recent British report on Iraq's
weapons capabilities does not include enough information to determine
whether Iraq is building any weapons of mass destruction, and announces
that existing United Nations resolutions are enough to prevent Iraq from
building any.

September 27, 2002: The San Francisco Chronicle reports that
opponents of Bush's policies are being barred from flying by 
the federal government's placing their names on a list of 
suspected terrorists. The Chronicle also reports that it cannot
determine which federal agency manages the list, as the FBI
says it is under Transportation Department authority and the
Transportation Department claims to have no access to it.

September 28, 2002: There is an explosion in an apartment building
in Kabul, Afghanistan.

September 28, 2002, Unrelated: Turkey captures 700 grams of metals
claimed to be weapons grade uranium being smuggled near the Syrian border. 
The material is in a container which is marked as originating in
West Germany, and is later discovered to be harmless. Initial reports
placed the amount at 15 kilograms, which is since understood to be a
miscalculation in which the weight of the lead container was included.

September 28, 2002: US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says
that part of Japan's economic reform plan, to let the central bank
buy the stock of independent banks, is not likely to work.

September 28, 2002: 150,000 march in London against invading Iraq.

September 28, 2002, Unrelated: The Pacific Maritime Association
shuts down all naval shipping at ports on the west coast of the
United States for the day, after longshore workers stage a slowdown
in which they claim to only be suddenly following worker safety
regulations. The dispute is over the International Longshore and
Warehouse Union's demand that new job classifications created by
changing technology be union positions. The event is not mentioned
by most mainstream news organizations.

September 28, 2002, Unrelated: Bombs explode at a movie theatre and
a circus in Satkhira, Bangladesh. No deaths are reported.

September 28, 2002, Unrelated: Representative Patsy Takemoto Mink
of Hawaii dies of pneumonia at the age of 74. 

September 29, 2002: Left-wing radio show Democracy Now reports that
22 of 26 Congressional offices it contacted have reported receiving
an "overwhelming opposition" to war with Iraq from their constituents
while only one has reported a majority of pro-war letters.

September 29, 2002: The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank
ask Europe and the United States to reduce trade subsidies and tariffs
that disrupt the free market and prevent third world countries
from competing.

September 29, 2002, Unrelated: Gunmen shoot their way into the British
Embassy's grounds in Yemen, killing several guards. The attackers were
relatives of Speaker Abdullah al Ahmar, and reportedly demanded
passage through restricted grounds as a shortcut to get to a wedding
across town.

September 29, 2002, Unrelated: A car bomb kills a German civilian
in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government says that the German
was a smuggler and was killed by rival smugglers.

September 29, 2002, Unrelated: Saudi Arabia recalls its ambassador
from Qatar.

September 29, 2002: The US bombs an Iraqi radar near Basra and
an anti-aircraft missile site in Qalat Sikur.

September 29, 2002: Basque terrorists Euskadi Ta Azkatasuna announce that
they will begin attacking Spanish political parties because of the banning
of ETA's Batsuna Party from Parliament.

September 29, 2002, Unrelated: Hundreds of South Korean intelligence
agents march to demand promised payment for missions they had undertaken.
Over 200 are arrested after violence breaks out.

September 29, 2002, Unrelated: The Pacific Maritime Association
closes all ports on the west coast of the United States until
further notice.

September 29, 2002: Pakistani police kill two gunmen believed responsible
for the prior year's attack on a church in Bahawalpur. A third escapes.

September 29, 2002: Indian police kill five gunmen believed responsible
for the bombing of a Hindu extremist organization's offices.

September 30, 2002: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld announces that Iraq
has fired upon US and British aircraft 67 times since September 16.

September 30, 2002, Unrelated: Terrorists attack a bus in Hiranginar,
India, killing four.

September 30, 2002, Unrelated: Crime gangs force a shutdown of
almost all businesses in Rio de Janerio, Brazil, in what is apparently
a challenge to the government and its popular elections.

September 30, 2002: The European Union allows its members to
choose to ignore violations of international law by US troops.

September 30, 2002, Unrelated: Indonesian soldiers kill four policemen
on Sumatra island in retaliation for the arrest of a soldier for
selling illegal drugs. Twenty of the soldiers are later dishonourably
discharged from service.

September 30, 2002: The US reports capturing nine truckloads of
weapons and ammunition from two sites in Afghanistan.

September 30, 2002, Unrelated: France grants logistic support to
the Cote D'Ivoire army against the rebels, sending vehicles and
communications equipment.

September 30, 2002: Talk show host Bill O'Reilly calls Representatives
Davin Bonoir and Jim McDermott traitors for visiting Iraq.

September 30, 2002: Former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger denies
that the United States gave weapons of mass destruction to Iraq.


October 1, 2002, Unrelated: Senator Robert Torricelli resigns after
being found guilty of soliciting bribes by the Senate Ethics Committee.
The Democratic Party sues to allow for a new candidate to be placed
on the ballots even though New Jersey law forbids it at this time.

October 1, 2002: The Immigration and Naturalization Service begins
photographing and fingerprinting all visitors to the United States
from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and Syria. Malaysia announces that
the new security measures are "anti-Muslim hysteria".

October 1, 2002: Columnist George Will calls Representatives Davin
Bonoir and Jim McDermott "collaborators" and compares them to Nazi
Germany's propogandists and Stalin's "useful idiots" because the
two Representatives called for inspections of Iraq's weapons production
facilities. Will also refers to United Nations Secretary General Kofi
Annan as Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's "servant". Talk show host
Rush Limbaugh calls McDermott and Bonoir "anti-war kooks and traitorous
types" and calls McDermott a "useful idiot" for saying that Bush is
lying to promote the war. White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer says
that McDermott "has the right to say anything he wants, no matter how
foolish" in response to a question from a World Net Daily reporter
which began with numerous references to Senator Torricelli before
suddenly asking if Bush thought McDermott was like a Nazi propogandist.
Senator Trent Lott says that "questioning the veracity of our own
American president is the height of irresponsibility" and that McDermott
"needs to come home and keep his mouth shut". Washington State Republican
Party Chairman Chris Vance calls McDermott "Baghdad Jim". Senator Don
Nickles says that McDermott and Bonoir "sound somewhat like
spokespersons for the Iraqi government". Senator John McCain says that
the Represenatives "are helping the Iraqi government sell to the Iraqi
people their hatred of the United States".

October 1, 2002: After Iraq and the United Nations agree to a plan for
conducting weapons inspections, the United States says that it will
"move into thwart mode" against the plan if the UN doesn't pass a 
resolution granting the US the authority to invade and conquer Iraq.

October 1, 2002: Representative Dick Gephardt accuses Republicans
of a "bankrupt economic agenda" and of blaming Democrats for Republicans'
own failures "while the economy is crashing around us".

October 1, 2002: White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer calls
upon the Iraqi people to assassinate Saddam Hussein.

October 2, 2002: An American soldier and three civilians are killed when
a restaurant is bombed in the Philippines. The Philippine government
blames Abu Sayyaf for the attack.

October 2, 2002: Representative Dan Burton says that Saudi Arabia
has assisted in the kidnapping of children from the United States.

October 2, 2002: France and Germany announce their opposition to
any United Nations resolution which would require an invasion of Iraq.

October 2, 2002, Unrelated: The New Jersey Supreme Court unanimously
declares that the Democratic Party may replace Robert Torricelli's
name on the upccoming election ballots, saying that it is nessecary 
for a free election to have candidates from both major parties.

October 3, 2002: Representative Mike Thompson poses beside a 500-pound
pile of dead fish he brought to Washington, DC, to call for the release
of water from federal dams into the Klamath River. 25,000 Chinook salmon
have died of disease and other causes in the nearly-dry Klamath,
and the spawning run of endangered Coho is to begin soon. The Department
of Fish and Game says that there is not enough evidence to make
a decision to release water into the river. Flows into the river were
reduced last year following a drought and subsequent farmers' rebellion
when flows to farmland was reduced to protect the fish. At the time,
the federal government said that reduced flows into the river posed
no threat to the salmons' health.

October 3, 2002, Unrelated: The Vatican announces that it will bestow
sainthood upon the founder of the Fascist cult Opus Dei.

October 3, 2002, Unrelated: India reports killing eight gunmen crossing
the border from Pakistan.

October 3, 2002: Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan suggests that
Bush challenge Saddam Hussein to a duel so that civilians are not harmed
in the battle.

October 3, 2002: The US bombs Iraqi air defense positions and drops
leaflets over Iraq which threaten to kill any Iraqis who fire upon
US aircraft.

October 3, 2002: Former presidential candidate George McGovern says
that Iraq has never attacked United States property or persons.

October 3, 2002, Unrelated: Cote D'Ivoire's rebels agree to a ceasefire.

October 3, 2002: Sends an envoy to North Korea.

October 3, 2002, Unrelated: Turkey commutes the death sentence of
terrorist mastermind Abdullah Ocalan to life in prison.

October 3, 2002: The European Union threatens retaliation for the
United States' imposition of a tariff on uranium imports.

October 3, 2002, Unrelated: The United Nations accuses Australia
of torturing and executing prisoners of war in Timor Leste.

October 3, 2002, Unrelated: A man fires two shots at the United Nations
headquarters in New York because the UN hasn't yet overthrown the North
Korean government.

October 3, 2002: Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed says that
Muslim countries should conspire to control the world's oil supply
as a weapon against "oppression" by non-Muslims.

October 3, 2002: The Democratic Party says that Bush's anti-worker
plans are attacking "the same kinds of people who were first on the
scene after the September 11 attacks".

October 3, 2002, Unrelated: The World Health Organization classifies
violence as a global health problem.

October 3, 2002: The United States and Britain order the United Nations
not to inspect Iraq until a resolution has been passed granting the
United States and Britain the authority to invade Iraq.

October 3, 2002, Unrelated: Five people are murdered by rifle fire in 
five different places in Montgomery County, Maryland. Sporadic shootings
continue for twenty days in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of
Columbia, killing ten in total, until October 23 when John Allen Muhammad
and his stepson John Malvo are arrested.

October 3, 2002, Unrelated: A teacher in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is fired
for having written in private notes that "bin Laden did us a favor"
in having "vulcanized us, awakened us, and strengthened our resolve".
The teacher is reinstated after complaining.

October 3, 2002, Unrelated: Enron executive Andrew Fastow is arrested
on charges of fraud.

October 3, 2002, Unrelated: Christian preacher Jerry Falwell says
that the prophet Mohammed was a terrorist and the Mohammed set
"the opposite example" of Jesus and Moses.

October 3, 2002: The US leaks a draft proposal to the United Nations
which would call for the US to occupy "exclusion zones" inside Iraq
and would allow any nation to send inspectors to Iraq with the same
authority of United Nations personnel.

October 3, 2002: Says that relations with Germany are fundamentally
strong.

October 3, 2002, Unrelated: China arrests Yang Bin, wealthy tycoon and
appointed head of North Korea's Sinuiju capitalist zone, is arrested
on suspicion of tax evasion.

October 3, 2002: Senator Robert Byrd calls Bush's attack plan "hasty"
and "blind and improvident", saying that "we are rushing into war
without fully discussing why, without thoughtfully considering the
consequences, or without making any attempt to explore what steps we
might take to avert conflict", that the "bellicose mood which permeates
this White House...is clearly motivated by campaign politics", and
that "there is nothing in the deluge of Administration rhetoric over
Iraq...that would preclude the Senate from...taking the time for
a thorough and informed discussion", and that "the President is using
the Oval Office as a bully pulpit to sound the call to arms".

October 3, 2002, Unrelated: Enron, Lernaut and Hauspie, Adelphia, 
Bank of Commerce and Credit International, Cendant, CMS Energy,
Duke Energy, Dynegy, Gazprom, Global Crossing, HIH Insurance, Informix,
Kmart, Maxwell Communications, McKessonHBOC, Merrill Lynch, Merck,
Peregrine Systems, Qwest Communications, Reliant Resources, Rent-Way,
Rite Aid, Sunbeam, Tyco, Waste Management, WorldCom, Xerox,
and Arthur Andersen are awarded the mock Ig Nobel Prize for Economics
"for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for
use in the business world".

October 2002, Unrelated: Governor Jeb Bush of Florida is recorded
saying that he will raise taxes and cut support of nursing homes to
retaliate against the public if the populace votes for a Constitutional
limit on school class sizes, and that he is trying to find a way for the 
state to lower teachers' salaries against the will of regional school boards.

October 2002: Senator Chuck Hagel says that "It is interesting to me that
many of those who want to rush this country into war and think it would
be so quick and easy don't know anything about war. They come at it from
an intellectual perspective versus having sat in jungles or foxholes and
watched their friends get their heads blown off."

October 2002: Der Zeit reports that Israeli agents had been tracking
some of the September 11 terrorists in Florida, and had been deported
from the United States when they went to tell US officials that an attack
was imminent. Israel denies the story.

October 4, 2002: Attorney General John Ashcroft reports that four
al Qaeda terrorists have been arrested in Portland, Oregon, and
two are at large. Ashcroft reports that the six went to Asia
after September 11 to fight against the United States. One of the
suspects had trained in the US Army Reserves.

October 4, 2002: It is reported that Bush has attended enough fundraisers
this year to have raised $140 million for Republican congressional
candidates by this time, a feat never done before. Travel to many of
the fundraisers has been paid for by the government since Bush can
claim to be conducting official business by scheduling a small event
at the day and place of the fundraiser.

October 4, 2002: Israeli Defense Minister Benjamen ben Eliezer predicts
that the United States will invade Iraq "toward the end of November".

October 4, 2002, Unrelated: Russia reports having killed Chechen rebel
leader Murad Yusupkhadzhiyev, who had commanded rebels in Grozny.

October 4, 2002, Unrelated: A bomb explodes at a school in Kashmir, India,
killing two soldiers who were securing the site prior to its conversion
into a voting station.

October 4, 2002: US forces destroy 420 500-pound bombs buried
in a riverbed near Kandahar, Afghanistan.

October 4, 2002, Unrelated: Sudan's government and rebel force declare
a cease fire.

October 4, 2002, Unrelated: King Gyanendra of Nepal dismantles the
citizen government.

October 4, 2002, Unrelated: The African and African Descendents' World
Conference Against Racism, being held in Barbados with the sponsorship
of the government, expels all non-black attendees. The conference
later demands that local white business pay for the cost of holding
the conference.

October 4, 2002: The United Nations chief weapons inspector Hans Blix
agrees to US and British demands to wait for a while before beginning
any inspections of Iraq.

October 4, 2002: Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham says
that there is no need to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq.

October 4, 2002, Unrelated: Talk show host Michael Savage says that
"we need another brave Senator like [Joe] McCarthy, whom history has
proven to be a loyal patriot".

October 4, 2002, Unrelated: Northern Ireland police raid the Parliament
building, called Stormont, in Belfast, Ireland, seeking information
connecting politicians to terrorists.

October 5, 2002, Unrelated: In India, the state of Karnataka refuses
the Supreme Court's order to release Cauvery River water to the
state of Tamil Nadu.

October 5, 2002: Italian police arrest five Arabs accused of planning
attacks on US-related targets. The men, fishers by trade, claim to use
explosives found in their possession for fishing.

October 5, 2002, Unrelated: India arrests seven people accused of
being terrorists.

October 5, 2002, Unrelated: 250,000 march in Rome to celebrate
the canonization of the founder of the Opus Dei cult.

October 5, 2002, Unrelated: Japan raises the ship which sunk in
a firefight with Japanese vessels on December 22, and determines
from artifacts on board that it was a North Korean vessel.

October 5, 2002: A US soldier is injured as a helicopter comes under
small arms fire. One of two attackers is killed by return fire.

October 5, 2002, Unrelated: South African police raid a small arms
cache and arrest twelve people accused of plotting a rebellion.

October 5, 2002: Says that "the United States does not desire conflict",
demands that "Iraq complies with the worlds' demands", and says that
"the use of force may become unavoidable" if "the Iraqi regime persists
in its defiance", and that Saddam Hussein's "only chance is to fully comply
with the demands of the world". Iraq has already fully agreed to the demands
of the United Nations. 

October 5, 2002: Former president Bill Clinton gives a speech in Britain
in which he promotes Bush's plan to attack Iraq and the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein, but says that a full-scale military invasion should
be the last resort. Newsmax editorialist Carl Limbacher states that
Clinton has launched an "unprecedented attack" on Bush and is "playing
right into the hands of Baghdad's propaganda machine".

October 5, 2002: It is reported that Bush has appointed Dr. David Hager,
who has prescribed religious activity for his patients' physical ailments,
to head the Food and Drug Administration's panel on womens' health.

October 6, 2002, Unrelated: The French civilian oil tanker Limburg is
rammed by a kamikaze boat in the port of Ash Shihr, Yemen, according to
the ship's captain and officers on board who blame the attack on al Qaeda.
Yemen blames the explosion, fire, and large hole in the ship's hull
at waterline on an on-board accident. The US later says that the damage
appears to have been an accident.

October 6, 2002, Unrelated: The ceasefire in Cote D'Ivoire fails to take
hold as government forces, claiming not to have received word of the
ceasefire, continue to attack rebel positions, and as government officials
refuse to sign the ceasefire agreed upon by spokesmen from both sides.

October 6, 2002, Unrelated: Venezuela announces having stopped a
planned coup against the government of Hugo Chavez.

October 6, 2002: Neil Mackay of the Sunday Herald reports that Bush
had decided in April 2001 for "military intervention" against Iraq to
secure "the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East".
The article cites the Baker Institute for Public Policy's document
Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century which was
commissioned by the White House Energy Policy Development Group led
by Vice President Cheney.

October 6, 2002: Al Jazeera reports that Osama bin Laden has made
new threats against the United States in an audiotape which is supposedly
bin Laden's voice.

October 6, 2002: Iran says that Jerry Falwell's recent statement, that
the Prophet Mohammed was a terrorist, is part of "a propaganda war
by the US mass media and the Jews" and condemns "the clash of religions
and civilizations sought by the expansionist and aggressive Jews".
Malaysia says that Falwell was a single ignorant person and pleads
against accusing all Christians of being like Falwell.

October 6, 2002: Jason Burke of the Guardian reports that the US has,
within the last month, intercepted a telephone call from Mullah Muhammad
Omar to an unidentified aide in which Omar was also speaking with
Osama bin Laden, who was in the same room and whose voice has been
positively identified.

October 6, 2002, Unrelated: Princess Hazleza Ishak of Malaysia
is kidnapped and murdered.

October 7, 2002: Announces that Iraqi officers who order the use
of "cruel and desparate" tactics against US forces will be tried 
as war criminals.

October 7, 2002, Unrelated: The Supreme Court refuses to hear
the case against the Democrats' replacing withdrawn candidate
Robert Torricelli in the New Jersey Congressional race.

October 7, 2002: North Korea announces that the recent envoy from
the US "made it clear that the Bush administration is not pursuing
a policy of dialogue but a hard-line policy of hostility".

October 7, 2002: The Philippines announces that high European tariffs
on Philippine tuna imports cause poverty and terrorism.

October 7, 2002: A soldier is killed in a terrorist attack on
a voting station in India.

October 7, 2002: The United States condemns Israel for carrying
out a skirmish in the terrorist-controlled city of Khan Yunis in
which 14 Arabs were killed, claiming that Israel deliberately
attacked civilians, and demands that Israel "prevent the recurrence
of tragic incidents such as these". United Nations Secretary General
Kofi Annan condemns Israel for bringing its military forces to battle
in a civilian area. Israel admits to having killed civilians in crossfire
but claims to have videotapes showing that its forces did not intentionally
fire upon civilians. Most of the deaths were caused by a single missile
fired into a crowd as Israeli troops were withdrawing under fire, and it
is disputed whether the crowd was civilian or a militia formation.

October 7, 2002: Numerous sources report that Iran has announced that
it will fire upon any US forces attempting to use its airspace in an
attack against Iraq. The Washington Times reports that Iran has granted
the US the use of its airspace in an attack against Iraq.

October 7, 2002: Russia and Georgia agree to a truce and pledge
cooperation in fighting Chechen rebels.

October 7, 2002, Unrelated: Scientists report discovering a 1200
kilometer wide planetoid in the Kupier Belt. The object is named
Quoaoar.

October 7, 2002, Unrelated: Britain gets a court order forcing news
organizations not to report about the trial of MI5 agent David Shayler,
who is being tried for giving away state secrets by accusing MI6 of
giving 100,000 pounds to al Qaeda in 1996 to fund the assassination
of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, an accusation which the British
government denies. Home Secretary David Blunkett and Foreign Minister
Jack Straw requested the order.

October 7, 2002: In a letter to Congress, Central Intelligence Agency
director George Tenet claims that Saddam Hussein would not use weapons
of mass destruction against the United States unless the US was
attacking Iraq to overthrow him.

October 7, 2002, Unrelated: The Ayn Rand institute condemns lawyer
Lawrence Lessig as a "vandal", "Marxist", and "intellectual cannibal"
for arguing before the Supreme Court that copyrighted works should
eventually fall into the public domain.

October 8, 2002: Gunmen fire upon a US Marine Corps training exercise
on Failaka Island, Kuwait, killing one soldier. Both gunmen are killed
by return fire, and are later found to have been al Qaeda soldiers.

October 8, 2002: Saudi Arabia announces that it will begin fingerprinting
all visitors from the United States.

October 8, 2002: Representative Edward Markey reports that the Department
of Health and Human services has appointed to the Center for Disease Control's
Lead Advisory Committee: Doctor William Banner, who has testified for
lead companies that the human body will not be harmed by 10 times as
much lead as what the CDC says is the level of harm; Doctor Joyce Tsuji,
who works for a company that offers services to Asarco, which is suing
the CDC for blaming it for polluting land with lead and arsenic, 
and the King and Spelding law firm which represents lead companies;
Doctor Kimberly Thompson of the Harvard School of Public Health,
which is funded by lead companies; and Doctor Sergio Piomelli, who
has said that the CDC's blood lead standard is too low; and that
meanwhile, a member who had been on the committee for five years was
forced off while another qualified applicant was rejected. Markey
asks whether "if the Bush administration was seeking advice on whether
the sun revolved around the earth or vice versa, would it take Galileo
off the committee and replace him with the Inquisition?"

October 8, 2002: Consumer rights group Public Citizen announces to
have proof that Army Secretary Thomas White gave false testimony to
the Senate about Enron energy corporation's operations under his
leadership.

October 8, 2002: Malaysia arrests a US citizen accused of being
a member of al Qaeda.

October 8, 2002, Unrelated: The Dallas Morning News reports that
Representative Dick Armey had attempted to add an amendment to a
defense spending bill which would require the owner of the Dallas
Morning News to divest his stock in the newspaper, as punishment
for the newspaper running negative articles about his son and
Congressional candidate Scott Armey.

October 8, 2002: Calls Saddam Hussein a "nuclear holy warrior".

October 8, 2002: The Sebastopol, California city council votes 4-1
to publicly oppose Bush's plan to go to war with Iraq. Councilman
Bob Anderson votes against the resolution because he does not belive
the city council should concern itself with matters of foreign policy,
but states that "I support everything said in that resolution".

October 8, 2002: Singer Harry Belafonte calls Secretary of State Colin
Powell, who is black, a house slave serving "master" Bush.

October 8, 2002, Unrelated: The Wall Street Journal reports that
cartoon character Spongebob Squarepants may be homosexual.

October 8, 2002, Unrelated: The City of Philadelphia grants a $36
million contract for health care at its jails to a company that did
not submit a bid for the contract even though two other companies
did submit bids and the winner was fired by the city for gross
incompetence in June.

October 9, 2002: Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee calls
Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf a "self-appointed king" and
condemns Musharraf for his support of terrorism.

October 9, 2002: The Irish Republican Army terrorist organization
is discovered to have aquired transcripts of telephone conversations
between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

October 9, 2002: World Net Daily reports that many US troops assigned
to the Middle East have no working protection against chemical or
biological weapons.

October 9, 2002: Orders west coast ports reopened for 80 days by his
authority under the Taft-Hartley act.

October 9, 2002: The Guardian reports that several US government
intelligence analysts have called Bush's case against Iraq "slanted"
and "entirely false". The report cites the Central Intelligence Agency's
former head of counterintelligence Vincent Cannistraro saying that
"cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements"
and "CIA assessments are being put aside by the Defense Department in
favour of intelligence they are getting from various Iraqi exiles", and
quotes unnamed nuclear weapons exports as saying that the aluminium tubes
aquired by Iraq are a type used in producing conventional weapons, and
states that government scientists and officials who know that Bush is
lying have been ordered to stay quiet.

October 9, 2002: US troops in Kuwait report being assaulted by gunmen
who are unable to get off a shot before being arrested.

October 9, 2002, Unrelated: The National Review reports that the
visa applications for 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers failed
to meet standards and should have been rejected, and that the State
Department claims 11 of these applications were reviewed by consular
officials.

October 9, 2002: A Pew Research Center poll reports that 66% of
respondents in the US believe that Iraq was behind the September 11
attack on the World Trade Center and that 86% believe Iraq has
or is close to aquiring nuclear weapons.

October 9, 2002: The Independent reports that President Ronald
Reagan had sent special envoy Donald Rumsfeld to meet with Saddam
Hussein in 1983, after Iraq had begun using weapons of mass destruction
against Iran, to establish an embassy in Iraq and improve relations
between the two countries.

October 9, 2002: The Daily Globe reports that Bush, as executive of
Harken oil company, had managed a partnership with Harvard University
to illegally create a third entity that would have $20 million of Harken's
liabilities transferred to it, and that Harvard illegally sold its Harken
stock when the stock rose following the reduction in liabilities. The
Wall Street Journal's version of the story reports that Harvard University
saved Harken Energy from financial trouble.

October 9, 2002: Brigadier General Rick Baccus is removed from his
post as head of military police at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, is 
is discharged from the National Guard, and has his unit, Task Force 160,
disbanded and merged into Task Force 170 for allegedly failing to
communicate with his superior officer Major General Reginald Centracchio.
Baccus, who denies the charge, had held the command since March 28.
Department of Defense sources reportedly claim that Baccus was fired
for being "too nice" to prisoners, and Baccus has reportedly said that
captives at the camp should be granted full rights of Prisoners of War.
Both Task Forces 160 and 170 are stationed at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station.
Task Force 160, a special operations helicopter unit, was created in 1981.
Task Force 170, lead by Major General Michael Dunlavy and created on
January 22, is an interrogation unit which reportedly includes FBI and CIA
officers. Major General Geoffrey Miller will be taking command of the
combined task force in November.

October 10, 2002: The House of Representatives passes, on a 296-133 vote,
a bill granting Bush the authority to invade Iraq. The Senate passes
the resolution on a 77-23 vote. Of those Senators voting against the
bill, Paul Wellstone is the only one who is a candidate for re-election.

October 10, 2002, Unrelated: A police station is bombed in Grozny,
killing 17.

October 10, 2002: A bus station is bombed in the Philippines, killing 8.

October 10, 2002: Germany arrests a Moroccan citizen accused of
being a member of al Qaeda.

October 10, 2002: al Qaeda announces that Bush's invasion of Iraq
is planned "to consolidate the supremacy of Israel".

October 10, 2002: Riots break out at a voting station in Pakistan,
and one person is killed in a gun battle between rival party supporters.

October 10, 2002, Unrelated: The United Nations declares that the Bakassi
Peninsula is the property of Cameroon. Nigeria accepts the decision
but later renegs on it.

October 10, 2002, Unrelated: Republican Senatorial candidate Mike Taylor
withdraws from the race after the Democratic Party runs a television
advertisement implying that Taylor is homosexual. Taylor later re-enters
the race.

October 10, 2002, Unrelated: Oklahoma television reporter Jayna Davis
informs Congress that seven witnesses saw Iraqi Republican Guard
soldier Hussain al Hussaini driving with Timothy McVeigh in the truck
bomb which destroyed the FBI building in Oklahoma City in 1995, and
then leaving downtown in "a brown Cevrolet pickup that matched the FBI's
all-points bulletin for foreign suspects that morning". Davis also
states that bombing co-conspirator Terry Nichols "received his bomb-making
expertise from Iraqi intelligence based in the Philippines" and had
met with al Qaeda terrorist Ramzi Yusef.

October 10, 2002: The White House sends a mass unsolicited e-mail to many
nationwide Hispanic leaders which condemns Senator Byrd as "doddering" and
"senile", and condemns Hispanic Congressmen who voted against the war powers
resolution as "ninnies" who are "out of touch with their constituency".
Bush's spokesman claims that the mail does not reflect his views.

October 2002: Announces that Iraq has a fleet of unmanned aircraft
capable of reaching the United States which are equipped with biological
and chemical weapons and cannot be shot down by the US's air defenses
before reaching the US. Newspapers report that Iraq has unmanned aircraft
with a 400 mile range.

October 2002, Unrelated: Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman accepts
$100,000 from Bombay Sapphire gin company to use his office to promote
their drink.

October 11, 2002: Former President Jimmy Carter is awarded the Nobel Prize
for Peace. The Nobel Committee notes that Carter has stood by the principles
of human rights and respect for international law as contrasted with
"a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power". When
asked about this statement, Nobel Committee Chairman Gunnar Berge says
that the prize "should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that
the current administration has taken" and as "a kick in the leg to all
that follow the same line as the United States".

October 11, 2002: In Pakistani elections, the pro-terrorist and anti-US
Muttahida Majlis e-Amal Party wins 45 out of 267 seats in Parliament and
gains control of the Northwest Frontier province. Initial reports had
stated MMA's winnings as 35 out of 149 seats, but this could be due
to incomplete counting.  The European Union condemns Pakistan for
interfering with the election in favour of Musharraf's party, which
won 77 seats. 

October 11, 2002, Unrelated: Lucent Technologies announces plans to cut
10,000 jobs.

October 11, 2002, Unrelated: After traces of TNT and pieces of a smaller
boat are found in the French oil tanker Limburg, French President
Jacques Chirac demands that Yemen investigate the explosion.

October 11, 2002: North Korea announces that the United States has
declared war upon it.

October 11, 2002: The United States requests that Canada raise
its military spending in order to deploy troops to support US operations
without requiring the United States' provision of transport and logistics.

October 11, 2002: Secretary of the Navy Gordon England orders the
US military to change the status of pilot Lieutenant Commander Scott
Speicher from "missing in action" to "captured". Speicher had been
considered killed in action in the Gulf War of 1991 until his status
was changed to Missing in early 2001. The BBC reports that Speicher
has also been promoted to Captain.

October 11, 2002: Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman report that
Bush has been interfering with Congress's investigations into the
bureaucracy's preparedness for and response to the September 11 attacks.

October 11, 2002: The Republic of China (Taiwan) rejects the United States'
demands that it increase the term of copyright to 70 years.

October 11, 2002: Rense reports that Iranian Revolutionary Guards Commander
Yahyia Rahim Safavi announces that "The US goal in attacking Iraq is
not to overthrow Saddam Hussein but to safeguard the Jewish regime" and
calls for a tenth of all the world's Muslims to form an army to destroy
Israel.

October 12, 2002, Unrelated: Cote D'Ivoire President Laurent Gbagbo fires
Defense Minister Moise Lida Kouassi and assumes control over the military.
The BBC reports that rebels now control more than half of Cote D'Ivoire's
territory whereas prior reports stated that rebels controlled a dwindling
number of city outposts. The World Food Program reports that "all the
ingredients are present for a large-scale humanitarian crisis".

October 12, 2002: A car bomb explodes at a night club in Kuta Beach,
Bali Island, Indonesia, killing 187 people.  The Sun-Herald later
reports that the neighbouring Paddy's Irish Pub was attacked with
a thrown bomb immediately prior to the nightclub attack. Other bombs 
explode harmlessly at the Philippine Consulate in Manado on Sulawesi
Island, and near the US Consulate in Denpasar on Bali Island. Australia
announces its suspicion that terrorist group Jemaah Islamiya, an ally
of al Qaeda, is behind the attacks.

October 12, 2002: Iraq announces that it will force United Nations
weapons inspectors out of the country if it finds that the inspectors
are spying upon Iraq or are being given orders by the United States.

October 12, 2002: Seven people are killed in riots in India following
demonstrations against US preacher Jerry Falwell's statement that
the prophet Muhammad was a terrorist.

October 12, 2002: Iraq denies that it has ever had a nuclear weapons
program. The US announces that it had destroyed elements of an Iraqi 
nuclear weapons program in the early 1990s, and Israel had destroyed
an Iraqi nuclear reactor assumed to be part of a nuclear weapons progam
in 1981.

October 12, 2002, Unrelated: Seven people are killed in a bombing
in Vantaa, Finland. The bomber is a chemistry student who died in
the explosion. No motive is suspected. The Associated Press reports
that the bomber took to violence because he used Internet Relay Chat,
and police later arrest four people who had used the same chat channel.

October 12, 2002: Nearly 100 Abu Sayyaf guerrillas attack a Philippine
army unit, killing 11 and wounding 26. The Philippine government has
in the recent past claimed that there are fewer than a dozen Abu Sayyaf
rebels remaining.

October 13, 2002, Unrelated: Cote D'Ivoire's rebels capture the
city of Daloa. The government retakes the city two days later.

October 13, 2002: Philippine troops attacking an Abu Sayyaf camp
find troops of the Moro National Liberation Front and Moro Islamic
Liberation Front, the latter of which had recently signed a cease-fire
with the government and has now broken the agreement by coordinating with 
Abu Sayaaf. Reports state that over 700 soldiers from the three groups
were present at the camp, and 20 were killed.

October 13, 2002: Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit accuses the 
United States of dragging Turkey into a war with the Kurds by encouraging
Kurdish independence from Iraq and allowing Kurds to create a Constitution. 

October 13, 2002: North Korea announces that the United States' "hostile"
policy towards North Korea is preventing it from searching for the
remains of missing US soldiers from the Korean war.

October 13, 2002: Ayatollah Mohsen Mujtahed Shabestari, governor of
Iran's Azerbaijan province, sentences to death US preachers Jerry Falwell,
Pat Robertson, and Franklin Graham.

October 13, 2002: Senator Jean Carnahan says that Bush "can't get
Osama bin Laden" and is "going to get me" instead. Carnahan soon
apologizes for the remark after being criticized by her opponent.

October 2002: The US reports receiving fire at bases near Lawara, Khost,
and Gardez in Afghanistan.

October 14, 2002: US soldiers are fired upon in northern Kuwait.

October 14, 2002: Al Jazeera reports that Osama bin Laden has issued
a written statement supporting the recent attacks on a French oil tanker
and upon US soldiers in Kuwait.

October 14, 2002: Australia denies that its support for the US is
the cause of the Bali bombing.

October 14, 2002: Laskar Jihad denies that it is behind the Bali bombing
and announces that it has disbanded.

October 14, 2002, Unrelated: A Saudi plane is hijacked in Sudan. The
hijacker is quickly arrested by the plane's guards.

October 15, 2002: The Department of Defense deploys military surveillance
aircraft and personnel to search for the sniper in the District of Columbia
area, in clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

October 15, 2002: Undersecretary of State John Bolton announces that
some Iraqi officials other than Saddam Hussein will also have to be
removed from power. Bush has so far said that Saddam Hussein is solely
the problem.

October 15, 2002: Representative Dick Gephardt gives a speech 
detailing the Deomcratic Party's economic agenda and condemning
Bush's "extremist ideology of trickle-down economics and ineffective
gimmicks". The speech is ignored by the media.

October 15, 2002, Unrelated: Russia announces having arrested a Chechen
carrying "radioactive material".

October 15, 2002: Great Britain proposes that the European Union
appoint a President.

October 16, 2002, Unrelated: Israel again threatens to invade Lebanon
if Lebanon makes use of Hasbani River water.

October 16, 2002: The Lwara base in Afghanistan comes under rocket
fire. No injuries are reported.

October 16, 2002: The US reports that North Korea has admitted to having
a nuclear weapons program, in violation of a 1994 treaty, during talks
earlier this month. South Korea and Japan announce that they will continue
seeking friendly relations with North Korea.

October 16, 2002: India and Pakistan announce reductions in forces
along the shared border.

October 16, 2002: Chris Hawley of the Associated Press reports that 
United States forces in Afghanistan are giving captured weapons
to regional militia commanders instead of the central government.

October 16, 2002: Representative Dick Armey says that al Qaeda is able
to reorganize itself because "al Qaeda doesn't have a Senator Daschle".

October 16, 2002: Talk show host Rush Limbaugh says that Democrats
are trying to implement the Iraqi voting system, where voters are
threatened with death if they vote against Saddam Hussein and the
government announces that everyone voted for Hussein despite the facts,
in the United States. As evidence, Limbaugh says that the Democrats are
threatening to kill blacks who fail to vote Democrat.

October 16, 2002: The Arcata, California city council votes 4-1 to
pronounce its "opposition to military action against the nation of Iraq",
to urge Bush to respect the United Nations and to "encourage democracy
and respect for human rights in Iraq", and to call for "domestic policies
which promote the uses of energy which would not require the need for war".
Councilman Bob Noble votes against the bill for being too politically
biased.

October 2002: Promises to grant Israel two weeks prior notice of
an attack on Iraq.

October 2002: The United States denies visas to Iranian film director
Bahman Ghobadi to receive the Gold Plaque award at the Chicago Film
Festival, and to Russian computer programmer Dmitri Sklyarov to testify
in a US court trial against his company. Ghobadi reportedly asks that
his plaque be delivered to Bush.

October 2002: The Illinois State Rifle Association claims that
the Democratic Party hired the DC-area sniper to promote the Party's
Maryland gubernatorial candidate's gun-control stance.

October 2002: Representative Dick Armey says that the Department of
Justice is "out of control" in abusing the peoples' fundamental liberties.

October 2002: Talk show host Rush Limbaugh says that Senator Tom Daschle
will run for Vice President in 2004 under the campaign of Saddam Hussein.

October 17, 2002: Announces that he has "not ordered the use of
force" against Iraq, despite numerous recent air raids on Iraqi
facilities.

October 17, 2002: Twelve Pakistani militiamen are killed by Indian forces
in Kashmir. Three civilians and an Indian soldier are also killed in
multiple incidents.

October 17, 2002: A Kuwaiti man is arrested with Molotov cocktails
near a US military residence. Reports are differing, but the man is
said to have voluntarily surrendered to police and to have claimed
to have been ordered to attack the building by messages from the
Internet.

October 17, 2002: Bush's lawyers argue in court that all documents
related the the Energy Task Force are sensitive communications that
cannot be revealed to the public or to the courts, and that it
would be "too burdensome" to review the documents for any that may
not contain confidential information. Judge Emmet Sullivan orders
the documents be made public on Election Day.

October 17, 2002: Undersecretary of State John Bolton visits China
to request that China enact sanctions against North Korea. White House
officials report that China is surprised to hear that North Korea has
a nuclear weapons program.

October 17, 2002: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announces that
North Korea has built a "small number" of nuclear weapons.

October 17, 2002: White House Spokesman Scott McClellan reports that
Bush is seeking a diplomatic solution to North Korea's nuclear
weapons program.

October 17, 2002: The US withdraws its demand that the United Nations
pass a resolution requiring military action against Iraq if inspections
fail, and promises to consult the United Nations Security Council before
attacking Iraq.

October 17, 2002: Reuters reports that senior Bush officials believe
China and Russia are assisting North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

October 17, 2002: Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle demands North Korea
destroy any nuclear weapons it may have and submit to inspections of its
facilities. Representative Henry Hyde, chair of the House International
Relations Committee, announces that "Pyongyang's reckless brinksmanship
must be met with firm and united resolve by the allies of freedom and
democracy". Representative William Delahunt condemns Bush for not
telling Congress about North Korea's revelation, made October 4,
while or before Congress was debating a since-passed resolution granting
Bush the power to invade Iraq.

October 17, 2002: Six people are killing by bombings in the Philippine
city of Zamboanga.

October 17, 2002: A Pakistani man is sentenced to 11 years of jail
for planning bomb attacks against power plants and National Guard
centers in Florida.

October 17, 2002: Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet
announces that "al Qaeda is in the execution phase" of a coordinated
set of attacks against United States and Western targets. Tenet
also announces that the CIA had known of large-scale al Qaeda plans
during the last summer but did not have any specifics, and that
similar conditions now exist.

October 17, 2002: Philippines police arrest high-ranking Abu Sayyaf
leader Mark Gumbahale.

October 17, 2002: Asadabad police exchange gunfire with Sayed Ahmad Safi's
security entourage after demanding the removal of tinted windows from
Safi's vehicle, a common security precaution. Four civilians are killed
in the crossfire. Safi, a spokesman for a regional politician, is arrested.

October 18, 2002: Venezuela promises not to "use oil as a political weapon"
against the United States if the US invades Iraq.

October 18, 2002: The United States demands Eritrea release two
US Embassy employees who have been jailed for a year without charge.

October 18, 2002: A bus bomb kills 3 in Quezon, Philippines, on the
outskirts of the capital Manila.

October 18, 2002, Unrelated: Governor Valentin Tsvetkov of Magadan,
a province of Russia, is assassinated in Moscow.

October 18, 2002: French President Jaques Chirac says that "the use
of force can only be an exceptional and final recourse".

October 18, 2002: The Associated Press reports that "US officials"
believe Russia, China, and Pakistan have assisted North Korea's nuclear
weapons program. Russia and Pakistan deny the charge, with Pakistan
saying that North Korea's technology is so far ahead of Pakistan's
that Pakistan is incapable of offering assistance to North Korea.

October 18, 2002, Unrelated: Fourteen bombs explode across Corsica,
causing minor damage.

October 18, 2002, Unrelated: Two F-18 jets crash during training
in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, killing the
four crewmen.

October 18, 2002, Unrelated: Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore
says that government must promote the Christian religion because
the Christian God gave the country's founders the wisdom to
place a separation between religion and government in the Constitution,
stating that "the very concept of separation mandates a recognition
of sovereign God".

October 2002: Wisconson State Senate Majority Leader Chuck Cvala
is charged with extortion, and Assembly Majority Leader Stephen Foti
and Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen are charged with using their public
offices to run political campaigns.

October 2002, Unrelated: Conservative activist Brad Dacus threatens
to sue the Elk Grove, California school district for inviting a
homosexual speaker, saying that "to convince middle school boys
that it's okay to be gay" is "advocacy" and "a controversial position".

October 2002: Australian Senator Bob Brown says that Australia should
begin publicly opposing the United States to appease terrorists.

October 2002: Indonesian Muslim leader Abu Bakar Bashir says
that "Americans and Jews" are behind the Bali bombing, asks families
of the bombing victims to "convert to Islam as soon as possible",
and warns Australia "not to follow US policy because it will bring
tragedy for your country". Bashir has been arrested on suspicion
of being a leader of Jemaah Islamiya.

October 2002: The Presidents of the National Academy of Engineering,
the National Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine
condemn the Bush administration for creating a new document status
of "sensitive but unclassified" allowing the government to forbid
publication of documents or restrict distribution of already published
documents, saying that this policy will "stifle scientific creativity
and weaken national security".

October 2002, Unrelated: A reporter with dual French and Israeli
citizenship is evicted from a meeting of French-speaking countries
for being Jewish.

October 2002: British Prime Minister Tony Blair offers to sell arms
to India during talks on the Indian-Pakistan relationship.

October 2002: Sends an e-mail to federal employees, soliciting campaign
donations from them. Representative Henry Waxman calls the mailing
"obviously inappropriate, obviously illegal, and obviously a reflection
that the administration will do anything to raise campaign dollars".

October 2002: Reporters Sans Frontieres issues a report stating that
sixteen countries have more freedom of the press than the United States,
citing arrests of journalists for refusing to reveal their sources
or for trespassing in secured areas.

October 2002: Orders hundreds of federal officials he has appointed
to temporarily abandon their government jobs and assist in the Republican
congressional campaigns across the country in order to "show their
Republican credentials", according to the Washington Post.

October 2002: Sends a memo to all employees of the Environmental Protection
Agency encouraging them to assist in the Republican congressional campaigns.

October 2002: Czech President Vaclav Havel says that there is no
evidence that September 11 terrorist Mohammed Atta met with an
Iraqi diplomat in Prague.

October 2002, Unrelated: The Florida Republican Party condemns state
Senatorial candidate Dave A. Aronberg for filing a lawsuit against
the West Palm Beach school district because the district charged
parents fees for standard services. The lawsuit, which cost the school
district $300,000, was filed by Dave T. Aronberg. 

October 2002, Unrelated: The Tennessee Republican Party mails
letters to senior citizens urging them to apply for absentee ballots.
The mailing is a criminal misdemeanor. The Republican Party announces
that the mailing was not a forbidden "socilitation", and condemns
the Democratic Party's "strong-arm tactics" in pointing out the
illegal act.

October 2002: Policeman Richard Whitenight is arrested and interrogated
by police and FBI officers in Fort Worth, Texas, for trainspotting
on his day off of work. Later, Whitenight reports being told that train
crews have been ordered to report trainspotters to police. Union Pacific
Railroad spokesman John Bromley admits that this is true and says that
"we certainly aren't out to destroy an American tradition of watching
trains".

October 2002, Unrelated: National Republican Party Committee member
Chuck Yob condemns Melvin Hollowell as "a black attorney from Detroit.
As you all know, people in the U.P. [upper peninsula] don't like attorneys,
and they really don't like Detroiters."

October 19, 2002: The US declares that the Global Relief Foundation
charity is a money-raising front for al Qaeda.

October 19, 2002: French President Jacques Chirac says that "the fight
against terrorism will be merciless, but it must be carried out with
respect for human rights and UN conventions and resolutions".

October 19, 2002: General Tommy Franks announces that the US will
continue to work towards stability in Afghanistan.

October 19, 2002: A car bomb explodes at a McDonald's fast-food
restaurant in Moscow.

October 19, 2002, Unrelated: Ethiopia condemns the United Nations
Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea for complaining about an attack
on United Nations peacekeepers by Ethiopian militiamen.

October 20, 2002: Iraq pardons all prisoners in the country with
the exception of murderers who have not been forgiven by victims'
families.

October 20, 2002: The Fort Pilar church in Zamboanga, Philippines,
is bombed, killing a guardsman.

October 20, 2002: Todd Pitman of the Associated Press reports that
refugees returning to Afghanistan are being forced to leave the
country and return to refugee camps by the high rents and lacks of
jobs and food.

October 20, 2002: The United Nations reports that 4 million Afghans
will face starvation over the next year.

October 20, 2002: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, investigating
US claims, determines that Orao Aviation, a branch of Republika Srpska,
sold arms to Iraq against international treaty and is currently involved
in repairing Iraqi military aircraft.

October 20, 2002: Pakistan and the United States conduct joint
military exercises.

October 20, 2002, Unrelated: Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez reports that
assassins had planned to shoot down his airplane at Maiquetia air base
but had been spotted and the flight was diverted.

October 21, 2002: Announces that North Korea can be disarmed through
diplomacy, without the use of force.

October 21, 2002: Eritrea accuses the United States of "rejecting
diplomacy" and of trying to raise a coup against the government,
and says that its arrests of journalists and US Embassy employees
without charge or trial are "legitimate acts" and "necessary action
against hostile elements to safeguard the sovereignty and national
security of the country" with "no links whatsoever to democracy
or human rights as the State Department insinuates".

October 21, 2002: After Time Magazine reports that al Qaeda is active
in Bangladesh, US Ambassador to Bangladesh Mary Ann Peters says that
there is no basis to the story. The Time report specifically mentions
the docking of a ship full of arms and 150 soldiers at Chittagong.

October 21, 2002: The Evening Standard reports that "the FBI is
under pressure from the highest political levels in Washington
to investigate suspected links between Iraq and the Oklahoma bombing"
of 1995, stating that "senior aides to Attorney General Ashcroft"
have found Jayna Davis's reports "compelling".

October 21, 2002: Britain announces that it will soon abandon a base
in Karachi, Pakistan. The BBC reports that the base is in Afghanistan.

October 21, 2002, Unrelated: A nationwide strike is held across Venezuela
in protest of Hugo Chavez's rule. Organizers claim that 85% of the
workforce is striking.

October 21, 2002, Unrelated: Civilians in Daloa, Cote D'Ivoire, report
widespread massacres of Muslims by government forces. Government
spokesman Colonel Jules Yao Yao says that those conducting such attacks
will be "shot on sight". 

October 21, 2002, Unrelated: The British Broadcasting Corporation refuses
to call the bombing of a civilian bus in Israel an act of terrorism,
instead following an editorial policy of calling it a "militant attack"
by the "militant group" Islamic Jihad, using the same adjective commonly
used to describe angry but peaceful political protesters. The BBC reports
do quote US, Israeli, and UN officials as calling the attack "terrorism".

October 21, 2002: Pakistan launches an artillery attack against
Indian forces in the Uri Boniyar Sector of the border.

October 21, 2002: Republican Representative and Senatorial candidate John
Thune demands that his opponent Democratic Senator Tim Johnson
publicly confess to ordering two voter organizers to forge 400 voter
registration forms. The two organizers are reported to be low-level
employees of the Democratic campaign.

October 21, 2002: Senator Henry Waxman reports that the Department
of Health and Human Services and the Center for Disease Control
have deleted information about abortion and prevention
of sexually transmitted diseases from their public archives.

October 22, 2002: Announces that Iraq's acquiesence to United Nations
regulations will satisfy his demands for a "regime change". As Bush's
prior announcents have made clear that "regime change" meant the 
removal from power of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, spokesman Ari Fleischer
says that Bush's "policy is regime change, however it is defined".

October 22, 2002: Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai says that
Israel should reconsider retaliating against Islamic Jihad because
participating in the conflict "could cause difficulties for the
Americans".

October 22, 2002: The US announces that new terrorist attacks
in Indonesia are imminent.

October 22, 2002, Unrelated: French forces fight off a lynch mob
attempting to break into a French military base in Cote D'Ivoire where
the mob suspects rebel leader Alassane Ouattara is hiding. The British
Broadcasting Corporation reports that French troops assualted a peaceful
pro-government rally.

October 22, 2002: Several dozen relatives of Iraqi prisoners hold an
unauthorized protest in Baghdad demanding to know what has happened to their
imprisoned family members who were not released in the recent amnesty.

October 22, 2002, Unrelated: Fourteen Venezuelan military officers
make a televised plea for a coup against President Hugo Chavez.

October 23, 2002: Offers Russia a $10 billion contract to store
nuclear materials if Russia will cease assissting in Iran's nuclear
and missile programs.

October 23, 2002, Unrelated: Nigeria refuses to give the Bakassi
Peninsula to Cameroon as ordered by the United Nations.

October 23, 2002, Unrelated: Former US Army soldier John Allen Muhammad
and his stepson John Malvo are arrested on suspicion of being behind the
recent spate of sniper shootings in Virginia, Maryland, and DC, as well
as robberies and shootings in Montgomery, Alabama, and later Baton Rouge,
Louisiana. They are found with a rifle that matches the bullets in
ballistics tests, and a vehicle which has been modified to permit gunfire
from the rear. Later, the suspects are accused of murdering a woman and
firing at a synagogue in Tacoma, Washington.

October 23, 2002, Unrelated: Thirty-six Chechen terrorists take control
of the Palace of Culture theatre in Moscow, holding over 800 people
hostage and announcing that they have come to Moscow "to die". Russian
forces regain control of the theatre two days later.

October 23, 2002, Unrelated: Turkish prosecutor Sabih Kanadoglu
appeals to the Constitutional Court to ban the Justice and Development
Party, the country's most popular party, because it is being led by
Recep Tayyip Erdogan who has been barred from practicing polictics
for inciting religious hatred. In 1999, Erdogan had declared that
"mosques are our barracks" and "minarets are our bayonets", causing
his banishment from political campaigning.

October 23, 2002: A small bomb is found in Kabul, Afghanistan at
United Nations International Committee Association employee housing.

October 23, 2002: The US adds Jemaah Islamiya to the list of terrorist
groups.

October 23, 2002, Unrelated: Twelve Venezuelan officers join the call
for rebellion against Hugo Chavez.

October 23, 2002: Marine Corps Harrier jets are deployed to Afghanistan.
Nando Media reports that most US fighter-class aircraft have been
launched from aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean, and that the
air in Afghanistan is so thin that the performance of Harriers and 
Apache helicopters is dramatically effected.

October 23, 2002: Russian legislator Boris Nemtsov is arrested upon
arriving in Belarus and expelled after US currency and documents are
found upon his person. Nemtsov's spokesman says that the money and
documents were planted by Belarussian police. Belarus announces that
Nemtsov was expelled "because of numerous facts of interference into
the internal affairs of Belarus" and possession of "literature aimed
at destabilizing the situation in Belarus". Nemtsov announces the
event as one of "the death throes of Lukashenko's police regime". 

October 23, 2002: The US calls a meeting of the United Nations
Security Council.

October 23, 2002: The Associated Press reports that Department of
Health and Human Services Inspector General Janet Rehnquist has fired,
without reason, every Deputy Inspector General and 13 other senior staff
members, and has fraudulently charged the government for her personal travel
expenses. The Department of Health and Human Services announces that
the reports are false.

October 23, 2002: It is announced that seven Pakistanis who have been
held at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station are innocent and will be released. 

October 23, 2002: Republican Senatorial candidate John Thune demands
that opponent Democratic Senator Tim Johnson release "all correspondence
and e-mail between his campaign and the South Dakota Democrat Party,
all cell and phone records between the Johnson campaign and the South
Dakota Democrat Party, all records of meetings between the Johnson
campaign and the South Dakota Democrat Party, and all financial
transactions between the Johnson campaign and the South Dakota
Democrat Party related to the voter fraud investigation, people
currently under investigation and those indicted".

October 23, 2002: Talk show host Rush Limbaugh states that "Only the
rich pay income taxes", that poor people earning under $26,000 a year
pay far too little in income taxes, that the poor pay so little in
income taxes that it is impossible to cut their taxes so all tax cuts
must instead be targeted towards the rich, that the fact that the wealthy
pay more in taxes than the poor "nukes the liberal myth" that some
rich people find accounting tricks to cheat on their taxes, and that
every rich person has earned their money except for Democratic Senator
Ted Kennedy. Limbaugh's numbers ignore the 6.2% Social Security tax on
workers' pay.

October 24, 2002: The Federal Bureau of Investigation opens an
office in Beijing, Peoples' Republic of China.

October 24, 2002: The Evening Standard reports that "the highest
political levels in Washington" are pressuring the FBI to find
a way to blame Iraq for the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.

October 24, 2002, Unrelated: Libya announces its withdrawal from
the Arab League due to the League's "inefficiency" in opposing
the United States and Israel.

October 24, 2002: Iran says that it will not oppose a United Nations
led invasion of Iraq.

October 24, 2002: Chinese President Jiang Zemin calls for cooperation
between the United States and the Peoples' Republic of China to
prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

October 24, 2002, Unrelated: The United Nations reports that racist
violence is rising in the Democratic Republic of Congo and there
is a threat of large-scale genocide occuring.

October 24, 2002: British police arrest Abu Omar Qatada, accused
of being a communications link between al Qaeda command and terrorist
cells in Europe. Qatada had been granted asylum in 1994 after fleeing
prosecution for a string of bombings in Jordan.

October 24, 2002: Announces that the federal annual deficit for
the prior fiscal year was $159 billion.

October 25, 2002, Unrelated: Florida Democratic Party Chairman Bob Poe
reports receiving a phone call from a man, claiming to represent
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill McBride's campaign, urging
Democrats to cast their absentee ballots for McBride on November 10,
a time at which point the ballots would be invalid.

October 25, 2002: North Korea announces that it does not have a
nuclear weapons program, accuses the United States of stockpiling
nuclear weapons in South Korea, condemns the United States for
threatening to launch a preemptive nuclear attack against North Korea
in violation of the 1994 treaty, and accuses Bush of seeking to
"stifle" North Korea "by force".

October 25, 2002: The FBI announces that al Qaeda may be planning
to attack railroad lines in the US.

October 25, 2002: New York Times columnist Paul Krugman criticizes
the national media for refusing to say that Bush is a liar.

October 25, 2002, Unrelated: A rebellion breaks out in the Central
African Republic as rebels supporting discharged army leader Francois
Bozize fight President Ange Felix Patasse's personal guard and Libyan
peacekeepers. Central African Republic's main armed forces are reportedly
uninvolved in the conflict and have not deployed to join it.

October 25, 2002: Australia warns of a terrorist threat to tourists
on the Thai island of Phuket.

October 25, 2002: Indian Prime Minister Atai Behari Vajpayee announces
that India must eliminate the "demon of terrorism" that is Pakistan.

October 25, 2002, Unrelated: Senator Paul Wellstone is killed in
an airplane crash.

October 25, 2002: Former judge, director of the FBI and CIA, and
director of the Security Review Commission William Webster is appointed
to the Public Accounting Company Oversight Board, an oversight committee
for the Securities and Exchange Commission, on a party-line vote after
highly partisan arguments.  Webster had been promoted for the job by
White House chief of staff Andrew Card, while Democrats had wanted to
appoint pension fund manager John Biggs to the position. Biggs reports
that he had been promised support by SEC head Harvey Pitt, who denies
that he made such a promise.

October 25, 2002: The Department of Defense reports that it has
deployed pilotless drone attack aircraft against Iraq.

October 25, 2002, Unrelated: Russian forces storm the Palace of Culture
theatre, occupied by Chechen terrorists, after the terrorists threaten
to begin executing hostages. Fifty terrorists are reported killed in
battle after being incapacitated by knockout gas so they could not
detonate explosives. The gas is reported to have killed about ten of the
hostages and incapacitated several more, causing unconciousness and nausea.
Later reports are that the gas killed far more hostages than the terrorists
did. Doctors report that they are unable to treat gas victims because Russia
will not admit what gas was used.

October 25, 2002: The United Nations adds Jemaah Islamiya to its
list of terrorist organizations due to its relations to al Qaeda.

October 25, 2002: China announces that it has never supported North
Korea's nuclear weapons program.

October 25, 2002, Unrelated: A West African alliance led by Senegal
begins sending 2000 peacekeepers to Cote D'Ivoire, and Togo is named
as the mediator between the Cote D'Ivoire government and rebels.

October 26, 2002: Around 100,000 people demonstrate in the District
of Columbia against war with Iraq, 10,000 demonstrate in Berlin, Germany,
and over 40,000 demonstrate in San Francisco. The Associated Press reports
that the number of protesters in DC measured in the "hundreds", later
revising this to "several thousand". The protests in the US were organized
by the Communist movements Workers World Party and Revolutionary Communist
Party USA under the aliases Act Now to Stop War and End Racism,
International Action Center, Refuse and Resist, and Not In Our Name.

October 26, 2002, Unrelated: Russian President Vladimir Putin makes
a televised apology for not being able to rescue all of the hostages
from the Palace of Culture theatre. Putin does not admit that Russian
force caused most of the deaths.

October 26, 2002: Senator Sarbanes, head of the Senate Banking Committee
and author of the law establishing an Securities and Exchange Commission
oversight committee, demands the resignation of SEC chairman Harvey Pitt
following the approval of William Webster to chair the oversight committee.

October 27, 2002: Former Federal Bureau of Investigation translator
Sibel Edmonds reports that her supervisors ordered her to slow her
translation work so the department could claim a backlog and ask for
more funding, and that her work was destroyed to create a backlog
when she refused to comply. Edmonds also states that FBI translator
Jan Dickinson was working for Turkish intelligence to hide information
about Turkish spies working in the Departments of Defense and State,
and that her supervisors refused to do anything about it when she
discovered this.

October 27, 2002: North Korea announces that it requires nuclear weapons
to defend against "US imperialism" that "looks down upon those countries
weak in military power, forces them to accept its brigandish demands
and makes them a target of military intervention and aggression".

October 27, 2002: Gunmen seize and murder 22 civilians at the village
of Dadgiri in India. India blames the attack on the National Democratic
Front of Bodoland.

October 27, 2002, Unrelated: It is reported that 115 hostages were killed
by Russian forces when Russia gassed the Palace of Culture theatre that
had been siezed by terrorists, and over 640 hostages remain hospitalized.

October 27, 2002, Unrelated: Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens
to cancel a planned visit to Denmark because Denmark is allowing
a meeting of Chechen supporters and officials.

October 27, 2002: Pleads for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power
while at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. 

October 27, 2002: Demands the United Nations pass a resolution against
Iraq before the next week.

October 27, 2002: Six people are killed in battles between forces
of Absul Rashid Dostum and Atta Mohammed in Afghanistan.

October 27, 2002: Veteran journalist Walter Cronkite announces that
Bush could start World War 3 by invading Iraq against the will of
the world, and says that "We have an oligarchy here, not a democracy".

October 27, 2002: Three Afghans and a Pakistani are released from prison
at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station after the US determines that they are
not a threat to security.

October 28, 2002: The family of the late Senator Wellstone refuses to
allow Vice President Dick Cheney to attend Wellstone's funeral after
the Republican Party begins airing attack ads against Wellstone and
possible replacement Walter Mondale.

October 28, 2002: United States Agency for International Development
officer Lawrence Foley is assassinated in Amman, Jordan.

October 28, 2002: Fox News requests that the United Nations allow it
to send camera crews accompanying UN weapons inspectors in Iraq.

October 28, 2002: Republika Srpska Defense Minister Slobodan Bilic
and Chief of Staff Novica Simic resign after the government military
and trade organizations Orao Aviation and Jugoimport were found to
have sold arms to Iraq. The US led the accusations against the Serb
government.

October 28, 2002: Announces that "Saddam Hussein has made the
United Nations look foolish" and demands a vote on a resolution
against Iraq, as France annouces that it cannot support any resolution
which automatically defaults to requiring an invasion "because recourse
to force can only be the last resort".

October 29, 2002: North Korea refuses to end its nuclear weapons program,
during talks with Japan.

October 29, 2002, Unrelated: Russia claims that 45 of the hostages from
the Palace of Culture theatre were killed by gunfire. Doctors have claimed
that 116 of 117 dead had no bullet wounds and were killed by gas spread
by Russian forces.

October 29, 2002: Mark Wheelis and Professor Malcolm Dando, whom the
BBC describes as international specialists on weapons of mass destruction,
claim that the United States is developing biological weapons and delivery
systems in violation of Biological Weapons Convention treaty.

October 29, 2002: Jordan arrests numerous pro-terrorist activists
following the assassination of US diplomat Lawrence Foley. One target
of the sweep, Muhammed al Chalabi, exchanges gunfire with police before
being wounded and arrested.

October 29. 2002: Several speakers at Paul Wellstone's memorial service
call for the Republicans' defeat in the upcoming elections, and Senator
Trent Lott's appearance is met with heckling. Governor Jesse Ventura
walks out of the service in disgust. The Republican Party demands that
television stations which covered the memorial donate an equal amount
of time to Republican campaigning, and Republican media personalities
condemn the political posturing. Many of the media personalities who
condemn the heckling of a standing Senator had spoken in support
of the people who heckled Senator Clinton at a memorial for September 11
attack victims.

October 2002: Orders the military to end the use of the term
"Commander in Chief" to refer to anybody but the President. Previously,
the term was used to describe the highest commander of certain commands.

October 2002: Author Gabe Hudson says that he received a personal
letter from Bush calling Hudson's book "Dear Mr. President" an
"unpatriotic" and "ridiculous" work, and says that he has been
monitored by FBI agents at his book signings. Hudson later admits
to making up the story.

October 2002: Four girls' schools in Wardak province of Afghanistan,
southwest of Kabul, are shelled and set on fire.

October 2002: Russia announces a "war on terrorism" worldwide.

October 2002, Unrelated: Democratic Congressional Candidate Anne Sumers
accuses Republican opponent Scott Garret's positions of causing
the recent sniper attacks.

October 2002: The Republican Party sends mailings announces that "Tim
Johnson and the Democratics are Hiding the Truth about Voter Fraud",
showing pro-Republican newspaper headlines alleging "massive" voter
fraud throughout the state. One of the headlines, stating "A Violation
of Trust", is from an article about an insurance fraud case unrelated to
the election. South Dakota Attorney General Mark Barnett announces that
there are a grand total of fifteen fraudulent ballots and a single
Democratic contractor under investigation.

October 2002: Republican Party election monitors in Arkansas are evicted
by police officers for harassing black voters during early elections.

October 2002: The National Cancer Institute deletes from its public
archives a paper showing that there is no link between abortions
and cancer.

October 2002: A man is arrested in Columbia, South Carolina
and charged with trespassing for refusing to surrender a sign
after leaving a protest.

October 2002, Unrelated: The Chesterfield County, Virginian, Board of
Supervisors states that only Judeo-Christian priests may be allowed
to conduct the nonsectarian prayers that begin every board meeting.

October 2002, Unrelated: Ukrainian News founder Mykhailo Kolomiyets
disappears and is later found hanged, at which point the Ukrainian
goverment announces that Kolomiyets certainly committed suicide.

October 30, 2002: Urges Congress to approve appointed judges within
180 days.

October 30, 2002: The Boston Globe reports that Harken Energy's board
of directors had been warned by its legal staff in 1990 that selling their
stock at the time could lead to charges of insider trading. The memo
was distributed a week before Bush sold his stock, and was delivered 
to the Securities and Exchange Commission the day after the SEC suspended
its investigation of Bush. In another report, the Boston Globe reports
that Harvard University had invested an entire percent of its endowment
into Harken Energy in 1991 and lost $200 million on the investment.

October 30, 2002: Canada issues a travel warning for Arabs to avoid
traveling to the United States. In response, the United States announces
that it will no longer fingerprint and photograph visitors from Canada. 

October 30, 2002, Unrelated: Hizballah fires anti-aircraft missiles
at Israeli planes reported to be near the Lebanese border.

October 30, 2002, Unrelated: Central African Republic reports having
defeated the rebel forces after mobilizing its army against them.

October 30, 2002, Unrelated: Denmark arrests Chechen leader Akhmed
Zakayev on suspicion of being involved in planning the Palace of Culture
hostage crisis.

October 30, 2002: Far-right journalist Cliff Kincaid reports that
Bush has ordered US troops in Georgia to serve under the command
of the United Nations, breaking a campaign promise and one of the
platforms of the Republican Party. 

October 30, 2002: Election monitors from the Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe arrive in the United States to certify
the accuracy of Florida's elections of the following week.

October 30, 2002: A boat full of 300 Haitian refugees evades the Coast
Guard and lands in Key Biscayne, Florida. 

October 31, 2002: Macalester College Professor of Media Studies
Michael Griffin reports that the first Bush administration sold
weapons of mass destruction to Iraq after the 1991 Gulf war.

October 31, 2002, Unrelated: Russia asks Turkey to investigate several
Chechen charities for complicity in terrorism after intercepting telephone
calls from the Palace of Culture terrorists to the charities.

October 31, 2002: Iraq opens its border with Saudi Arabia.

October 31, 2002: The Securities and Exchange Commission demands an
investigation into the appointment of William Webster to the SEC's oversight
committee after it is learned that US Technologies has been accused
of conducting financial fraud wile Webster lead the company's audit
committee, and that SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt knew of this and failed
to tell the SEC's commissioners who were voting on Webster's appointment.
The Democrats' candidate, John Biggs, had been on the McDonnell Douglas
audit committee while the company was twice investigated for fraud.

October 31, 2002, Unrelated: The Republican Party announces that Democratic
Senator Tom Daschle wants to raise taxes by $9,961 per family.

October 31, 2002: The United Nations agrees to delay its vote on Iraq
so that the United States can have time to revise its proposal for
a resolution against Iraq.

October 31, 2002: The US sends special hangers for B-2 stealth bombers
to bases in Fairford, England and Diego Garcia.

October 31, 2002: The New Republic reports that the Republican Party
is running advertisements nationwide which are intended to persuade
black voters to not vote by claiming that the Democratic Party is racist
and hates black people.

October 31, 2002, Unrelated: Two Republican Party election monitors are
evicted from voting stations during early elections in Hidalgo County,
Texas, for harassing voters.

October 31, 2002: The Orlando Sentinel reports that a jailed Floridan had
told FBI agents in August 2001 that other Muslims in Brixton Prison
in England had boasted to him that Osama bin Laden was planning an attack
against the World Trade Center and two targets in the District of Columbia.
Bush and the FBI have repeatedly claimed that there were no warnings or
signs of an impending attack.

October 31, 2002, Unrelated: The National Post reports that Hizballah
has established a significant presence in Canada to purchase military
equipment, raise funds, and launder money, and that Canadian investigators
are aware of the terrorist presence.


November 1, 2002: Russia bans the media from reporting on anti-terrorism
operations or carrying statements of rebel groups.

November 1, 2002: The BBC reports that tens of thousands of Saudis
will launch a holy war against the United States if the US invades Iraq.

November 1, 2002: Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly accepts the bargain
between Microsoft and the Department of Justice, and dismisses the
remaining states' cases against Microsoft, effectively ending the
government's 12-year antitrust case against Microsoft. The new agreement
implicitly recognizes Microsoft's right to abuse its power in the
marketplace by enumerating only a few specific instances where this power
is denied. An oversight committee composed entirely of Microsoft board
members will determine whether Microsoft is following the terms of
the agreement, and any findings by this committee of continuing 
wrongdoings by Microsoft cannot be admitted as evidence of criminal
activity in any trial against Microsoft.

November 1, 2002: Amnesty International demands that the United States
release prisoners from the Afghanistan conflict or charge them with
some crime.

November 1, 2002: Greg Palast reports that the Florida voter scrub list,
which barred 91,000 legally registered voters, mostly black Democrats,
from voting in the 2000 election, is being used again in the upcoming
midterm election.

November 1, 2002: USA Today reports that the Taliban's Ministry of Vice
and Virtue has been reincorporated as the new Afghanistan government's
Ministry of Religious Instruction.

November 1, 2002, Unrelated: Minnesota Supreme Court Judge Alan Page
condemns columnist Robert Novak for writing that the Democratic Party
refused Page's offer to run for Senate because Page is black.

November 1, 2002, Unrelated: The Arkansas Times reports that Arkansas
Governor Mike Huckabee, with the help of Parole Board Chairman Leroy
Brownlee, had actively lobbied for the parole of convicted murderer
and rapist Wayne Dumond because one of Dumond's rape victims was a
relative of Bill Clinton. Huckabee later wins re-election with 55%
of the vote.

November 2, 2002: Iran reports that it had arrested one of Osama bin Laden's
sons among a group of about twenty people crossing the Afghanistan border
about two months ago, and had turned them back into Afghanistan.

November 2, 2002: Seven people are arrested at a Republican Party rally
at the University of South Florida for not being Bush supporters. Over
a hundred others are jailed in a "First Amendment Zone" for being vocal
opponents of Bush's policies, and others are forcibly removed from campus
grounds. 

November 2002: A pamphlet is spread through black neighbourhoods of
Baltimore, Maryland, urging readers to vote on November 6 and reminding
readers that they need to clear any arrest warrants and finish payments
on any parking tickets, motor vehicle tickets, or overdue rent before
they will be eligible to vote.

November 2002: Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent John Roberts
says, in a television interview, that the FBI is hiding evidence of
incompetence and is protecting and promoting managers whose conduct
is detrimental to the United States. FBI Assistant Director Robert Jordan
threatens to have Roberts fired or transferred for saying this even
though Roberts had been given written permission to speak publicly.
Jordan then holds a special meeting of all FBI agents in Roberts's department,
on a day when Roberts on sickness leave, to publicly berate Roberts for
having "violated the trust of the family". Roberts is later stripped of his
supervisory position. As Jordan and Director Robert Mueller refuse to speak
to Congress or the media about the issue, the FBI announces that it
"is committed to fairness in the workplace and does not tolerate
retaliation of any kind".

November 3, 2002: Saudi Arabia announces that it will not allow the
United States to use its military bases in an attack on Iraq even if
the United Nations condones the attack.

November 3, 2002: A Hunt Corporation helicopter is fired upon in Yemen,
wounding one passenger.

November 3, 2002, Unrelated: Saudi Arabia announces that non-Muslims are
not permitted to eat, drink, or smoke in public during Ramadan, and
that violators may be expelled from the country.

November 3, 2002: A group of about twenty Quakers holds a rally in
Baghdad, Iraq, to protest Bush's plans for war with Iraq.

November 3, 2002: Philippine President Gloria Arroyo announces that she
will not apologize for allowing the unconstitutional presence of foreign
troops on Philippine soil.

November 3, 2002: Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein announces that the United
States will try to conquer Egypt, Syria, and Iran after it defeats Iraq.

November 3, 2002: The Republic of China on Taiwan announces that
the Peoples' Republic of China sent a surveillance ship into its waters
near a military base.

November 3, 2002: Kuwait raids and closes the local offices of al Jazeera
television news service, claiming that the service is "not objective". 

November 3, 2002: Canadian author Rohinton Mistry cancels his book tour
in the United States after repeatedly being arrested and searched because
of his Indian heritage which makes him appear Arab.

November 3, 2002: The Federal Deposit Insurance sues accounting business
Ernst and Young for $548 million for overstating client Superior Bank's
assets by $270 million, causing the FDI to have to pay $750 million in
claims following the bank's failure.

November 3, 2002: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports that
the United States will soon require visas of persons visiting from
British Commonwealth countries. 

November 3, 2002: The Justice and Development Party wins a majority
of Parliament seats in Turkish elections after securing 34% of the
vote. The Party pronounces that it will "build a Turkey where common
sense prevails" and denies claims that it will promote religion.

November 3, 2002: Afghanistan announces the firing of over twenty
officials accused of corruption, drug trafficing, and other criminal
activity.

November 3, 2002, Unrelated: A magnitude 7.9 earthquake occurs in
Alaska, causing little damage to population centers but creating
a 145-mile long crevasse.

November 4, 2002: A Central Intelligence Agency drone bombs a car
in Yemen, killing six apparent al Qaeda members, in the first US
attack against al Qaeda outside of Afghanistan since the September 11
attack. One of the dead is Ali Qaed Senyan al Harthi, said to be
al Qaeda's top commander in Yemen and one of the twelve highest ranking
members of the organization. Another is a US citizen who the US claims
to be the missing sixth member of the Lackawanna accused al Qaeda cell.

November 4, 2002: Kuwait announces that it will allow a United Nations
authorized force to attack Iraq from its bases.

November 4, 2002: Chris Hawley of the Associated Press reports that
United States soldiers in Afghanistan are rounding up the entire
populations of villages, not feeding them, leaving them cold at nightfall,
and threatening to execute anyone who moves while other soldiers search
for weapons on the village grounds. The 82nd Airborne Division is
specifically mentioned as conducting such searches, which are reported
to generally be successful in finding weaponry.

November 4, 2002: Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura appoints campaign
chairman Dean Barkley to the Senate seat vacated by Senator Wellstone's
recent death.

November 4, 2002: The Department of Energy closes its information
service PubScience at the bequest of the Software and Information
Industry Association which wants to make people pay them money for
the same information.

November 5, 2002: The Washington Post reports that US intelligence
agencies believe Russian, France, Iraq, and North Korea to have
significant stores of smallpox, and that al Qaeda has attempted to
aquire the virus.

November 5, 2002: Human Rights Watch condemns the United States for
supporting Afghan leader Ismail Khan, governor of Herat province,
who it says has tortured and arrested political dissenters.

November 5, 2002: The United States announces that it opposes Israel's
policy of bombing enemy military leaders despite the fact that the
United States just used the same exact tactic against an al Qaeda
leader in Yemen.

November 5, 2002: Harvey Pitt, head of the Securities and Exchange
Commission, resigns his office following accusations that he knew
William Webster was lying to SEC commissioners about his past.

November 5, 2002: France arrests eight people accused of helping plan
the al Qaeda attack on North Africa's oldest synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia.

November 5, 2002: MI5 agent David Shayler is sentenced to six months
in jail for selling documents to a newspaper.

November 5, 2002: The Republican Party wins control of the Senate in
national elections. Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe resigns.
Among the defeated Democrats is Senator Max Cleland, a disabled Vietnam
veteran who Republican challenger Saxby Chambliss, a Vietnam draft dodger,
successfully accused of naivete in military matters and of contempt
for the United States armed forces.

November 6, 2002: The Zimbabwe government-owned newspaper Herald announces
that the United States is going to invade Zimbabwe "within the next six
months" to force the country to open its markets to genetically modified
food without any safety testing, "on the pretext of bringing aid to relief
to people who were allegedly being denied food on political grounds".
The BBC reports that Zimbabwe's government has been refusing to distribute
famine relief aid to people who are not members of the ruling party.

November 6, 2002: Yemen promises clemency to al Qaeda members who disband.

November 6, 2002: The Federal Reserve lowers interest rates by half
a percentage point, to 1.25%.

November 6, 2002: Four Cuban diplomats are accused of spying and expelled
from the United States.

November 6, 2002: The Washington Post reports that Department of Health
and Human Services Inspector General Janet Rehnquist has fired, without
reason, every Deputy Inspector General and 13 other senior staff members,
and that Department of Defense Inspector General Joseph E. Schmitz has
fired three senior executives without any cause.

November 6, 2002, Unrelated: Argentina accuses Ford Motor Company of
participating in the arrest and execution of workers during a right-wing
dictatorship, to the point of having secret prisons inside Ford facilities.

November 6, 2002: The US forces the United Nations to delay a vote on
a treaty forbidding the cloning of humans because the treaty does
not forbid the cloning of stem cells.

November 6, 2002, Unrelated: Egyptian state television begins airing
the 41-part historical documentary "Horse Without a Horseman" on the
Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world.

November 7, 2002, Unrelated: 187 citizens of Gibraltar vote for Spain
to share sovereignty of the rock against 17,900 "no" votes, in a
rare 98.97% democratic vote. Voter turnout was 87.9%.

November 7, 2002: The Department of Justice announces that it will
not enforce the conditions of the Department's settlement agreement
with Microsoft.

November 7, 2002, Unrelated: Billionaire George Soros is charged by
a French court with insider trading. Soros is later found guilty
and fined E2.2 million.

November 7, 2002: Indonesia reports arresting the owner of the car
bomb used in the Bali bombing, and says that the prisoner has confessed
and identified several co-conspirators.

November 7, 2002, Unrelated: Iran sentences journalist Hashem Aghajari
to death for giving a speech in which he told the audience not to
follow the orders of conservative clerics.

November 7, 2002: Iran bans all advertising for products imported
from the United States.

November 7, 2002: Attorney General John Ashcroft announces that
murder suspects John Allen Muhammed and John Malvo will be tried
in the state of Virginia, rather than under other jurisdictions
where they are accused of murder, because Virginia courts can provide
"the best law" and "the best facts", specifically the death penalty.

November 7, 2002: Says that Securities and Exchange Commission
leader Harvey Pitt, who recently resigned in disgrace for promoting
a fraudster to head the SEC's oversight committee, has "enforced the
corporate responsibility ethos" "more so than ever in history", and
calls said fraudster William Webster "a decent, honourable public servant
who has served our country well".

November 7, 2002, Unrelated: Federal prosecuters charge Kentucky Lieutenant
Governor Steve Henry with fraud for stealing money from Medicare and Medicaid
while a surgeon.

November 7, 2002, Unrelated: After a mayoral candidate is assassinated
in Concordia, Colombia, 500 people riot and destroy the rival political
party's offices.

November 8, 2002: The United Nations Security Council unanimously
passes a resolution which demands Iraq grant full and immediate access
to inspectors, and threatens "serious consequences" if Iraq fails,
and guarantees the "sovereignty and territorial integrity" of Iraq.

November 8, 2002: Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Steven Pifer
announces that the US is "in a very difficult period in our bilateral
relations" with Ukraine over Ukrainian officials' lying to US officials
investigating claims that Ukraine sold a passive aircraft detection system
to Iraq.

November 8, 2002: A gunman fires upon US soldiers near Deh Rawod,
Afghanistan, and is killed by return fire.

November 8, 2002, Unrelated: European Union official Valery Giscard
d'Estaing says that admitting Turkey to the EU would mean "the end
of Europe", and that people supporting Turkey's admission are "the
adversaries of the European Union".

November 8, 2002: Interpol commander Ronald Noble says that Osama bin
Laden is still alive, that al Qaeda is "preparing a high-profile
terrorist operation with attacks targeting not just the US but several
countries at the same time", and that "the battlefield now spreads across
every country and mobilizes several terrorist groups" in a "coordination
of terror".

November 8, 2002: Canadian Security Intelligence Service leader Ward
Elcock says that Osama bin Laden is probably alive.

November 8, 2002, Unrelated: Indian Chief Election Commissioner
J.M. Lyngdoh announces that the National Conference Party in control
of Kashmir had planned to release terrorists from prison to "infiltrate
the electorate to influece the results", and that the Kashmiri government
had issued an order to Indian troops to withdraw from voting areas and
man roadblocks, which the Election Commission had to issue an order to
countermand. National Conference Party leader Farooq Abdullah, former
chief minister of Kashmir, denies the charges and threatens to sue the
Election Commission.

November 8, 2002, Unrelated: Conservative News reports that the
Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith is falsely associating honest
conservative white supremacists with racist organiztions like the
Nazi Low Riders and Ku Klux Klan.

November 8, 2002: Attorney General John Ashcroft announces that the
United States will again fingerprint and photograph visitors from Canada,
about a week after the State Department pledged not to, and proclaims
his support for extra searching of Arabs and Arab-looking people because 
they "pose a threat to the security and safety of our communities".

November 8, 2002, Unrelated: Cote D'Ivoire's rebels accuse the government
of murdering the civilian brother of a rebel ambassador.

November 8, 2002: Securities and Exchange Commission Chief Accountant
Robert Herdman resigns.

November 8, 2002: Turkish General Hilmi Ozkok announces that "Turkey's 
armed forces have the will and determination to protect the republic
from...radical Islam and separatism" following the election of
the Justice and Development Party.

November 8, 2002: Afghan governor Haji Mohammed Zaher survives being
fired upon at the Pakistani border. One of his bodyguards is killed.

November 8, 2002: Amnesty International declares the recent bombing of
a carload of al Qaeda personnel in Yemen to be a "violation of
international human rights law".

November 8, 2002: Business Week analyst Christopher Farrell states
that supply-side financial tactics "would do little to stimulate the
economy", and that "instead, money should go toward supporting lower
and middle income households that need some extra income to make ends
meet in troubled times" by extending unemployment benefits, cutting
payroll taxes, and giving billions of dollars to state governments
to retain government employees.

November 9, 2002: Afghan forces enter a gunbattle with Kuchi tribal
forces after trying to evict the Kuchis from government land. US helicopters
strafe the Kuchis after a two-hour firefight, ending the battle. No
deaths are reported.

November 9, 2002: Secretary of State Colin Powell announces, in an
interview on the Lebanese Broadcasting Station, that the United States
is "not looking for war" with Iraq.

November 9, 2002: South Africa announces that it will not extradite
to the United States a former member of the terrorist group Symbionese
Liberation Army unless the US promises not to execute him.

November 9, 2002: 450,000 people protest in Florence, Italy, against
the United States' plans for war with Iraq.

November 9, 2002, Unrelated: The Council of Europe bans the incitement
to violence or denial of the Holocaust.

November 9, 2002: Rockets are fired upon a US military post in the
Miran Shah part of Pakistan near the Afghan border where the US has
beforehand claimed not to have any presence. Pakistan says that the
US forces are providing logistics and intelligence for Pakistani forces.

November 9, 2002, Unrelated: A US Embassy guard is shot dead in his
house in Nepal.

November 10, 2002, Unrelated: Jordanian forces enter the city of Maan
to arrest a members of a gang that have controlled the city. Five
people are killed in the fighting. The town is placed under curfew
and all weapons are confiscated.

November 10, 2002, Unrelated: The World Wildlife Federation condemns
"political wheeling and dealing" at the Convention on International Trade
in Endangered Species being held in Santiago, Chile. WWF spokesman
Sue Leverman says that Japan is "trying to block all proposals here
to deal with fish, including sea horses".

November 10, 2002, Unrelated: 181 members of Iran's Parliament sign
a petition demanding the release of journalist Hashem Aghajari who
was sentenced to death after insulting the Guardian Council.

November 10, 2002, Unrelated: Thai fishermen open fire upon Indian
fishermen in the Bay of Bengal.

November 10, 2002: The Arab League demands that Arabs be among
the United Nations inspectors investigating Iraq.

November 10, 2002, Unrelated: Tornados kill over 35 people in the
South and Midwest.

November 2002: Indian Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani says that
al Qaeda is increasing its activities in Bangladesh with the assistance
of the Pakistani intelligence agency. Bangladesh denies the allegations.

November 2002: It is reported that Iraq has issued a purchase order for
a million doses of atropine, an antidote for nerve gas, from Turkey.
Turkey's Ministry of Health denies the report.

November 2002: Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham
reports that the Federal Bureau of Investigation claims not to have
any information on terrorist activity in the United States.

November 2002: al Qaeda releases a tape with the voice of Osama bin Laden
praising the Bali bombing, the Palace of Culture hostage-taking,
the bombing of the French oil tanker Limberg, and the assassination
of USAid officer Lawrence Foley, and promising further attacks
against Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Canada, and Australia.

November 2002: Canada issues a complaint against the United States'
arrest of a Canadian citizen for having a shotgun in his car while
crossing the border to buy gasoline.

November 2002: Admits that "tax revenues are down" and says that these
revenues would be even lower if the tax cut hadn't passed.

November 2002: The Army expells six Arabic language specialists for
being homosexual.

November 2002: A small crop-duster aircraft carrying ten Cubans
evades the Coast Guard and lands on Key West, Florida. Cuba accuses
the United States of practicing terrorism against Cuba by the "crime
of air piracy" in allowing the Cuban refugees to escape.

November 2002: Pizza Hut fast food restaurants are bombed in Tripoli
and Mameltein, Lebanon, causing no injuries. Lebanon blames a group
of Palestinian Arabs for the attack.

November 2002: Left-wing advocates accuse the Republican Party of rigging
the recent elections, pointing out that the results of several hotly
contested elections were as many as 15 percentage points different from
polls taken days before the election and that voting machines are
manufactured by companies whose executives are active in the Republican
Party.

November 2002: The Times of London reports that Libya has offered 
he family of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein refuge in exchange for
$3.5 billion. Libya denies the story.

November 2002: Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward reports that
Fox News chairman Roger Ailes had sent a memo to Bush last September 20
proposing the use of certain public relations tactics. Ailes admits to
ending the memo and says that Woodward is "like [fiction writer] Tom Clancy.
they both make up a lot of stories, but Clancy does better research".
Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch says that Ailes's memo was "patriotic,
not partisan". 

November 2002: Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott fires Senate
Sergeant at Arms Alfonso Lenhardt, retired Major General and former
head of the United States Army's security, and replaces Lenhardt
with Robert H. Maxwell, the Senior Field Representative and Economic
Development Liaison for Senator Trent Lott.

November 2002: The Transportation Security Administration announces
that it has a list of about 1,000 people it considers "threats to aviation"
and who are barred from flying in the United States.

November 11, 2002: Time Magazine reports that the United States is losing
the war in Afghanistan, citing an increase in al Qaeda operations
and the bribery of an Afghan soldier whom the US has failed to pay the
salaries of, the statement of General Richard Myers that "we've lost
a little momentum there", and the weak state of the Afghan army, which
numbers "1200 raw, poorly armed recruits".

November 11, 2002: At the Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species, being held in Chile, the United States announces
support for trade in the ivory of endangered elephants.

November 11, 2002, Unrelated: Sweden expels two Russian diplomats for
spying on Ericsson technology corporation. Russia threatens to "make the
appropriate response to such an action".

November 11, 2002: The Somalian government and all rebel factions
issue a joint demand for the United States and its allies to release
the assets of the al Barakaat bank, which the US has accused of financing
al Qaeda.

November 11, 2002, Unrelated: The United Nations reports that dangerous
levels of radiation have been found at three locations in Bosnia, and
that the radioactivity is due to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's
use of depleted uranium weaponry.

November 11, 2002: The Christian Science Monitor reports that Yemen
officials are "angry" about the recent US airstrike in Yemen. Most
media reported that Yemen officials agreed to and were happy with
the attack. The report quotes Brigadier General Yahya al Mutawakel
as saying that Yemen is "reluctant to work closely with" the United
States because "they don't consider the internal circumstances in Yemen."

November 11, 2002: Pakistani politicians and newspapers request that
Bush or Virginia Governor Mark Warner pardon convicted murderer
Aimal Kasi, who is scheduled to be executed soon. Kasi is executed
on the 14th.

November 11, 2002: Four university students are killed by police in Kabul,
Afghanistan. Army officer Sher Mohammed, a witness, reports that the
students were murdered when they tried to hold a protest march over a lack
of food and electricity. Police claim that the students assaulted them.

November 12, 2002: The Iraqi Parliament votes unanimously to reject
the United Nations resolution demanding inspections of Iraq's weapons
production facilities.

November 12, 2002: North Korea accuses South Korea of mobilizing tanks
at the border and sending warships "deep into" North Korean waters.

November 12, 2002, Unrelated: A mob kidnaps Caracas, Venezuela mayor
Alfredo Pena before being fought off by National Guard forces. Pena
is an opponent of President Hugo Chavez, and Chavez's supporters are
blamed for the attack.

November 12, 2002, Unrelated: Russian President Putin tells a Le Monde
reporter, who accused Russia of directing heavy weapons fire upon known
civilians in Chechnya, that "If you want to become an Islamic radical
and have yourself circumcised, I invite you to come to Moscow. I would
recommend that he who does the surgery does it so you'll have nothing
growing back afterward." Putin then condemns the Chechens, saying
that "they talk about setting up a worldwide Islamic state and the
need to kill Americans and their allies. They talk about the need to
kill all kafirs, non-Muslims, or 'Crusaders' as they put it. If you are a
Christian, you are in danger. If you decide to abandon your faith and
become an atheist, you are also to be liquidated according to their
concept. You are in danger if you decide to become a Muslim. It is not
going to save you anyway because they believe traditional Islam is hostile
to their goals."

November 12, 2002: The United Nations condemns the United States'
economic embargo of Cuba by a 173-3 vote. Mexico and 24 other countries
state that the embargo is a violation of international law.

November 12, 2002: Public Accounting Company Oversight Board chairman
William Webster resigns.

November 12, 2002: The Los Angeles Times reports that US troops are
already in northern Iraq, scouting and forming bases and defensive
positions.

November 12, 2002: Australia warns its citizens to avoid traveling to
Mombasa, Kenya, after receiving information suggesting attacks on European
interests are being planned.

November 13, 2002: al Qaeda delivers to al Jazeera a six-page statement
of demands and intent.

November 13, 2002: The US issues a condemnation of both rebel and
government forces in Cote D'Ivoire for conscripting children, and demands
that rebel groups disband.

November 13, 2002: United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan condemns
Israel for allowing Jewish terrorist groups to attack Arab civilians,
and demands Israel surrender "nearly all" territory that is occupied
by Arabs.

November 13, 2002: Iraq announces that it has accepted the United Nations
resolution against it.

November 13, 2002: Colombian President Alvaro Uribe offers to release
captured rebels in exchange for hostages taken by rebel groups in
the future.

November 13, 2002: People's Republic of China President Jiang Zemin is
voted out of office by the Communist Congress, with Vice President
Hu Jintao elected to this position and the Politburo Standing Committee.
Retiring from the Politburo are Jiang, economics chairman Zhu Rongji,
Li Peng, and Li Ruihuan. The Congress unanimously approves Jiang's proposal
to allow capitalists to become Party members.

November 13, 2002: The Justice Department announces that it will not
prosecute the International Longshore and Warehouse Union for the
reduction in the pace of work at western ports because the Department
has seen evidence that the Pacific Maritime Association is as responsible
for the slowdown.

November 13, 2002: United Press International quotes a "senior State
Department offical" as saying that European governments "have been wrong
on just about every major international issue for the last 20 years"
and are "a bunch of hypocrites".

November 13, 2002: Senator George Allen, a pro-slavery advocate who
displays the Confederate battle flag in his living room, is unanimously
elected chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

November 14, 2002: Offers a free trade agreement to Australia.
Trade Representative Robert Zoellick that the agreement will defeat
Osama bin Laden.

November 14, 2002: Philippine police report capturing the Abu Sayyaf's
top explosives expert.

November 14, 2002, Unrelated: Argentina defaults on its World Bank loan
by paying only the $79.2 million in interest on the current payment
rather than the full payment of $805 million. In response, the World Bank
announces that it will withhold the rest of the loan from Argentina unless
the country finishes this payment within 30 days. Bush had earlier promised
to help Argentina's economy.

November 14, 2002: Nancy Pelosi is elected as House Minority Leader.

November 14, 2002, Unrelated: Tanzania police capture 110 kilograms
of material claimed to be raw uranium. 

November 14, 2002: Threatens to cancel further oil shipments to North Korea
after the end of this month's oil shipments unless North Korea ends
its nuclear weapons program.

November 14, 2002: The United States announces that it is investigating
reports that General Dostum's men have been assassinating witnesses to
the Northern Alliance forces' mistreatment of Taliban prisoners that
led to the deaths of hundres of prisoners.

November 14, 2002: The Department of Justice charges several leaders of
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia with conspiring to kidnap
American citizens and traffic in cocaine.

November 14, 2002: William Safire reports that the bill to create the
Department of Homeland Security will allow the government to record
every act of commerce that every US resident takes part in.

November 14, 2002: The Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that
al Qaeda is planning a "spectacular" attack in the near future, likely
"within the aviation, petroleum, and nuclear sectors as well as 
significant national landmarks" or against hospitals. Bush condemns
the FBI's report "because they did not handle it properly" and because
the information is "low credibility".

November 14, 2002: During an interview on CBS Radio, Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld says that any failure of the United Nations weapons
inspectors to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq will mean that
"the inspections process had been successfully defeated by the Iraqis",
and that the United States would "lead a coalition of the willing" to
invade Iraq if that happens.

November 14, 2002: Senator Tom Daschle says that "the al Qaeda network
poses just as great a threat today to the United States as they did 
over a year ago...I don't think anybody has a right to say we're winning
the war on terrorism until we see more results". In response,
Representative Mark Foley accuses Daschle of providing "aid and comfort
to our enemies" and states that "this rhetoric of fear...could
prove...disastrous for his party". The next day, talk show host
Rush Limbaugh announces that Daschle is "hoping to politically benefit
with the next terrorist attack" and "seeking political advantage in
the war on terrorism", and says that the Democratic Party has "done
nothing but try to sabotage" the war on terrorism.

November 15, 2002: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says that
war with Iraq will be short and "certainly isn't going to last longer
than" five months, and that this war will not lead to "World War 3".

November 15, 2002: US bases near Gardez and in Lwara come under rocket fire.

November 15, 2002: The Czech Republic allows the United States to
patrol its airspace during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit.

November 15, 2002: The BBC reports that the US has captured one of
the top leaders of al Qaeda, and that the name of the captee and fact
of his capture are classified. The captee is later identified as
Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, the chief of operations for the Persian Gulf
theatre.

November 15, 2002: The Associated Press reports that Bush is planning
to hire independent contractors to replace 850,000 government employees.

November 15, 2002: Debate stalls the bill to create a Department of
Homeland Security as Senator Byrd condemns an amendment that would
grant immunity from liability to vaccine manufacturers, and Senator Gramm
says that the United States has always granted immunity to makers
of vaccines that are defense-related.

November 15, 2002: The Department of Justice reports that the Federal
Bureau of Investigation shows an unwillingness to punish managers for
wrongdoing in the same manner that low-level employees are punished.

November 15, 2002: Iraq fires upon US forces patrolling its airspace.
The US announces that it will consider any further attacks upon its
aircraft to be attacks against the United Nations inspectors.

November 15, 2002: Left-wing activist Steven Hertzberg reports on several
discrepancies in this year's elections, including that votes were counted
from nonexistant precincts in Florida and New Jersey; voting machines in
Dallas, Texas, would register a vote for the Republican candidate when the
voter selected the Democratic candidate; voting machines in Scurry County,
Texas, were found to have registered votes for Republican candidates after
the voters selected the Democratic candidate and that manual recounts in the
county found the Democratic candidates winning by large margins after
the machines reported a Republican win; voting machines in Alabama deleted
the records of 7,000 votes, and election officials refused an audit;
voting machines in Davidson County, South Dakota, were found to have
registered two votes for every vote cast before this was corrected by
election officials; voting machines in Wayne County, North Carolina,
deleted 5,500 party-line votes which were recovered by manually counting
printed records and were enough to change the result of state House
Majority Leader Phil Baddour's re-election campaign; voting machines in
Gretna, Nebraska, failed to count votes for a school bond initiative;
a voter from Pennsylvania claimed that votes for the Libertarian candidate
for governer were not counted in his district; voting machines in
North Carolina deleted the records of 294 votes; voting machines at
several precincts in Flordia registered votes for the Republican candidate
when the voter selected the Democratic candidate; Democratic Senatorial
candidate Charlie Matulka was given a ballot which was already marked
for his opponent Chuck Hagel; and black voters in Pensacola, Florida, were
told by an offical to step aside so that white people could vote and
were then told "y'all ain't gonna vote today" when they asked why they
had to wait.

November 15, 2002, Unrelated: Battles in the Nepalese towns of Tarkukot
and Khalanga leave 3 civilians, 37 government troops, 23 policemen,
and 55 Communist rebels dead. The government fought off a major
rebel assault on Khalanga in which "hundreds" of rebels had attempted
to take the town.

November 15, 2002, Unrelated: The Institute of Education in Democracy
reports that 14.5% of the votes tallied in Kenya elections were cast
under the name of a dead person.

November 15, 2002: France hires 200 counter-intelligence workers and
a fifth judge devoted to counter-terrorism work in response to the
recent Osama bin Laden audiotape which made threats against France.

November 15, 2002: A bomb explodes on a bus in Hyderabad, Pakistan,
killing two passengers.

November 15, 2002: Maryland Governer-Elect Robert Ehrlich announces
that he will rescind the temporary death penalty ban upon taking office.
The ban was put into place after departing Governor Parris Glendening
noticed that every one of the people sentenced to death was convicted of
killing a white person, while 80% of the state's murder victims are black.

November 15, 2002, Unrelated: The Washington Post reports that
Merrill Lynch stock analyst John Olson was fired for refusing to
give Enron a Strong Buy rating, for which Enron had cancelled a
deal with Merrill Lynch.

November 15, 2002, Unrelated: British Foreign Minister Jack Straw
publicly accepts Britain's responsibility for modern conflicts in
India, Israel, and Iraq.

November 16, 2002: United Nations head weapons inspector Hans Blix
announces that he will fire any members of his team found to be spies.

November 16, 2002: Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says that Argentina's
economy is improving.

November 16, 2002: Dana Priest and Dan Eggen of the Washington Post report
that Bush, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Chief of Staff
Andrew Card, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Central Intelligence
Agency Director George Tenet, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director
Robert Mueller, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and six other unnamed
persons have held a meeting to plan the creation of a new intelligence
agency to spy on American citizens. The report states that Mueller is
opposed to creating the new agency because he feels it would compete
with the FBI.

November 16, 2002: Nine phosphorus rockets are fired at the US base
in Lwara, Afgahnistan. Another rocket is fired at a base in Khost.

November 16, 2002, Unrelated: Argentina announces that its payment
of only the interest on its World Bank loan, rather than any principal,
was not due to inability to pay but was instead a protest against the
World Bank's demand that Argentina make "savage" budget cuts.

November 16, 2002: England arrests three people on suspicion of planning
a terrorist attack against London's subways, according to news reports.
Deputy Prime Minster John Prescott says that there is no evidence of
a bomb or poison gas plot.

November 16, 2002: The United States condemns Egypt for running 
a miniseries (mistranslated by US media as "Horse Without a Horseman",
"Horseman Without a Horse", and "Knight Without a Horse"), about the
Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world, on state television, announcing
that "this broadcast does great harm to Egypt's reputation" and "this
program does not contribute to the climate of mutual understanding and
tolerance that the Middle East so needs".

November 16, 2002: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak demands that the
United Nations inspect and destroy Israel's weapons of mass destruction
with the same vigor as in the campaign against Iraq.

November 16, 2002, Unrelated: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization
accuses Republika Srpska of having more helicopters than allowed under
the Dayton treaty. Stabilization Force inspectors report seeing seven 
armed helicopters at an airfield near Banja Luka which were claimed by
Republika Srpska to be medical helicopters. 

November 17, 2002: North Korea announces that it has nuclear weapons.
Prior and later announcements state only that North Korea thinks it
has a right to own nuclear weapons, and South Korea announces that
this statement might be a mistake.

November 17, 2002: Kuwait announces that it has captured an al Qaeda
leader.

November 17, 2002: The US base near Gardez, Afghanistan, comes under
small arms fire.

November 17, 2002, Unrelated: Venezuelan forces enter the city of Caracas
and take control of the city from rebelling police. Mayor Alfredo Pena
announces that he is "the victim of a coup d'etat". President Hugo Chavez
appoints a new police director who immediately resigns and pledges his
allegiance to Pena.

November 17, 2002: al Jazeera contacts the Associated Press about the
statement of demands and intent that it recently received from al Qaeda.
Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge announces that the statement
"does not add any special credence" to the fight against al Qaeda.

November 17, 2002: The Sunday Telegraph reports that the SAS are
searching for Osama bin Laden in Yemen.

November 17, 2002: Arab News reports that Saudi Arabia is expelling
its Yemeni residents.

November 17, 2002, Unrelated: Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov fires
Deputy Prime Minister Redzhep Saparov and the governors of four of
the country's five provinces for falsifying cotton harvest results and
making illegal land sales.

November 17, 2002, Unrelated: Italian Senator and former Prime Minister
Giulio Andreotti is convicted of ordering the murder of journalist
Mino Pecorelli in 1979. Andreotti had been aquitted of the same charge
three years earlier. Current Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi condemns
the Italian judicial system.

November 18, 2002: Bush accuses Iraq of firing upon United States aircraft
shortly after the United Nations weapons inspection team arrives in Iraq, 
and declares that Iraq has now violated the recent United Nations
resolution. The US also reports having come under Iraqi fire the day
before. France and United Nations chief arms inspector Hans Blix
state that attacks on US aircraft over Iraq are not a violation of the
resolution. 

November 18, 2002: Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff says
that US citizens' past ideas of Constitutional rights are really nothing
more than "custom and convenience", and that the reported arrests and
trials of hundreds of US citizens without any public notification of
the suspects' arrests were "not secret trials" because the suspects
were provided access to lawyers.

November 18, 2002: Senator Robert Byrd compares Bush's power to that
of Roman Emporer Vespasian who had Senator Helvidius Priscus executed
for speaking out against Vespasian in the Roman Senate.

November 18, 2002: Australia arrests a man on suspicion of planning
to bomb the Israeli embassy.

November 18, 2002, Unrelated: Fourteen people are killed after a bus
runs over a land mine in Warangal, India, and is then hit by small arms
fire. India blames the Communist movement Naxalite People's War Group for
the attack. Four days later, the Group issues an apology for the attack,
calling it a "serious mistake in the history of the revolutionary movement".

November 18, 2002: Comcast cable television company purchases
American Telegraph and Telephone's cable system, thereby attaining
30% of the market in the United States. The Federal Communications
Commission promotes the deal and says that this control "poses no
substantial public interest harm".

November 18, 2002: Indonesian Vice President Hamzah Haz condemns the
police for raiding Islamic religious schools in searching for
co-conspirators behind the Bali bombing.

November 18, 2002, Unrelated: Israel accuses the Palestinian Authority
of openly assisting terrorist groups after claiming to find mortars
and terrorist-designed Qassam short-range missiles in a PA police
building. The PA claims that Israel raided an empty building.

November 18, 2002, Unrelated: Two small rockets are fired near Camp Zama,
the US Army's regional headquarters in Japan. No damage is reported.

November 18, 2002: The Wall Street Journal falsely claims that
Saxby Chambliss never insulted Max Cleland's patriotism and condemns
people who pay attention to the facts for spreading the "cock-and-bull
story". Chambliss had aaccused Cleland of "breaking his oath to protect
and defend the Constitution" and had claimed Cleland incapable of acting
against terrorism.

November 18, 2002: After Senator Christopher Dodd complains about
the Homeland Security bill ballooning in size from 35 pages to 484
pages "filled with special interest legislation" and Senator Tom Daschle
says Congress should "keep it homeland-security related" and "take out
all this terrible special interest legislation that has nothing to do
with homeland security", House Majority Whip Tom DeLay codemns "Daschle's
continued obstruction" in "thwarting the new Homeland Security department"
and which "ignores the American people's unmistakable demand to grant
President Bush the authority to strengthen the country".

November 18, 2002: A special court, composed of judges Ralph B. Guy,
Edward Leavy, and Laurence H. Silberman and created by Chief Justice
William Rhenquist for this purpose, unanimously overrules the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court's ruling limiting the powers of police
to perform warrantless searches. Solicitor General Theodore Olson was
the only person presenting arguments before the court. The ruling states
that the President, and hence the Executive Branch bureaucracy, has
"inherent Constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign
intelligence surveillance" within the United States and that police
practices which do not meet Constitutional standards but "come close"
are then "reasonable" enough to meet Constitutional standards.
Attorney General John Ashcroft praises the ruling as a "giant step forward"
and announces the establishment of regional domestic espionage centers
throughout the United States.

November 18, 2002: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announces
that only the name of the Office of Strategic Influnce has been
disbanded, saying that he reserved the right to "keep doing everything
that needs to be done, and I have". The Office's duties are to
insert lies into independant newsmedia.

November 19, 2002: The Christian Science Monitor reports that very little
of the $4.5 billion in reconstruction aid that Bush has promised to
Afghanistan has since been delivered.

November 19, 2002: Congress passes a page bill to create a Homeland Security
department. The 484-page bill was passed two days after it was presented
to the Senate, without any hearings or committees as most bills have.
Nine Senators voted against the bill. The Act is soon signed
by Bush and passed into law. The Act:

	* Grants Eli Lilly immunity from liability over the company's
	infant vaccination treatments, which contain mercury and
	are said to have caused retardation in thousands of children
	* Makes it a federal felony to disclose weaknesses in a
	private business's products or practices
	* Establishes as law the President's power to declare
	documents as "sensitive but unclassified", removing
	the public's right to view unclassified public documents.
	* [...more to come...]

November 19, 2002: On a 55-44 largely party-line vote, the Senate
confirms Bush's appointment of judge Dennis Shedd -- who has ruled that
women have no right to work in an environment free of sexual harassment,
that states have a right to discriminate against minorities and
the elderly, that it is acceptable for employers to discriminate against
the handicapped, and that police have a right to eavesdrop on conversations
between suspects and their lawyers -- to a federal appeals court. Shedd
had received the highest possible rating from the American Bar Association.

November 20, 2002: Demands that the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization nations improve their military capabilities to better assist
other NATO nations' military operations.

November 20, 2002: United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan
says that it is not a violation of United Nations resolutions for
Iraq to fire upon United States and British aircraft.

November 20, 2002, Unrelated: Mohamed Sobhi, lead actor and co-author
of the Egyptian state-produced television series "Horseman Without
a Horse", says that "if the series terrifies the Jews, we will produce
more series. It's an honor to be opposed to the Jews. It is my pride to
be defended by not only 67 million Egyptians but also by 240 million Arabs.
It honors me very much that I was capable of revealing the great conspiracy
aimed at swallowing our beloved nation". Sobhi condemns the Egyptian
Organization for Human Rights, which has said that the series incites
hatred, as a "Jewish organization conspiring against Egypt".

November 20, 2002, Unrelated: Muslim rioters burn down the Kaduna, Nigeria
offices of the newspaper This Day for writing that the contestants at
the Miss World beauty pageant are so beautiful that the Prophet Mohammed
would have been willing to marry one. The rioters then burn down a
shopping center and several Christian churches and attack anyone they
suspect of being non-Muslim, killing over 200 people.

November 20, 2002: Iraq closes the offices of the newspaper run
by dictator Saddam Hussein's son Uday Hussein which had reported that
Saddam had sought a safe haven for his family in Libya.

November 20, 2002: Pakistan releases Lashkar e-Taiba leader Hafiz
Mohammed Saeed from prison. Saeed announces that "the Americans are
leading an international campaign of violence against the Muslims".

November 20, 2002: Senator Tom Daschle accuses talk show host Rush
Limbaugh of incitement to violence and encouraging death threats against
Daschle and other Democrats, and compares the type of rhetoric used
by Limbaugh to the type of rhetoric used by terrorists to incite violence.
In response, Limbaugh says that Daschle has accused "the entire audience"
of being "unsophisticated barbarians" and says that Daschle is "a disgrace
to patriotism, a disgrace to this country, a disgrace to the Senate" and
is "trying to sabotage the war on terrorism for your own personal and
your Party's political gain"; Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz
ridicules Daschle for being upset about Limbaugh's rhetoric, calling
Limbaugh "mainstream" and saying that Daschle has "lost a couple of screws"
and is simply depressed about the Democratic Party's loss in the recent
elections; Fox News analyst Fred Barns says that "Rush Limbaugh is a
pretty conventional conservative" and "not an extremist" and suggests
that Limbaugh does nothing more than blandly "read editorials from the
Wall Street Journal"; and Fox News host Sean Hannity says that the
Democrats "are the ones with the shrill, mean-spirited hateful rhetoric".

November 20, 2002, Unrelated: The National Geographic Society reports
the results of a poll showing that 11% of young adults from the
United States cannot find the United States on a map of the world,
70% cannot find the state of New Jersey, 29% cannot find the Pacific
Ocean, 44% cannot find India, 58% cannoot find Japan, 65% cannot
find France, 69% cannot find England, 87% cannot find Iraq, 83% cannot
find Afghanistan, and 42% did not know that the Taleban were based
in Afghanistan.

November 20, 2002, Unrelated: After sentencing three men to over
10 years of prison for owning 700 slaves at Florida citrus farms, District
Judge K. Michael Moore says in his decision that "others at a higher level
of the fruit picking industry seem complicit...with how these activies
occur...there is a broader interest out there [that] the government should
look into as well".

November 20, 2002: Over 100 airport employees in the United States are
arrested for lying on their resumes and employment applications.

November 20, 2002: Australian Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock demands
an investigation into reports that members of terrorist groups were
granted visas to enter Australia after claiming to be refugees.

November 20, 2002: The US accuses the International Benevolence Foundation
of being a front for al Qaeda, and accuses its leader Enaam Arnaout
of personally purchasing weapons with the charity's funds and of being
a licensed al Qaeda arms dealer.

November 20, 2002: The Orlando Sentinel states that "if you're not
paranoid, you're not paying attention" with regard to the loss of
civil liberties in the United States.

November 20, 2002: The Wall Street Journal prints an editorial condemning
the federal income tax system because wealthy individuals pay a higher
dollar amount than poor individuals, and calling those people so poor
as to not owe taxes "lucky duckies" of "the non-taxpaying class".  

November 20, 2002: The Sun, a Maryland newspaper, reports that
Fox News provided elected Governor Robert Ehrlich with a helicopter
for his personal use.

November 20, 2002, Unrelated: Judges Joan Bernard Armstrong and
David S. Gorbaty of the Louisiana State 4th Circuit Court of Appeal
rule that the "Crime Against Nature" law forbidding oral and anal sex
does not discriminate against homosexuals and is not a violation of
citizens' right to privacy. Judge Charles R. Jones dissents.

November 21, 2002: North Korea condemns the US-led oil embargo as
"a wanton violation" of the 1994 treaty with the United States, which
also forbid North Korea from attempting to develop nuclear weapons.

November 21, 2002: A policeman attacks US soldiers in Kuwait, wounding
two.

November 21, 2002: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization announces
that Iraq has failed to comply with its obligations under the recent
United Nations resolution.

November 21, 2002: The United States reports that Iraq has increased
its attacks against US and British aircraft.

November 21, 2002: The Mirror reports that US security advisor Richard
Perle has said that the United States will invade Iraq if United Nations
weapons inspectors do not find any weapons in Iraq.

November 21, 2002: Indonesia arrests Imam Samdura, accused of planning
the Bali bombing.

November 21, 2002, Unrelated: Senator John McCain and the American Bar
Association condemn the exercise of third-party influence in judicial
election campaigns.

November 21, 2002: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania,
Slovakia, and Slovenia join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

November 21, 2002: Malaysia denies a US statement that terrorists may
increase activity in the country.

November 21, 2002: Afghan police arrest saboteurs attempting to bomb
the hydroelectric dam that powers Kabul.

November 21, 2002: The BBC reports that United Nations Secretary General
Kofi Annan has, during a speech at Tilburg University, issued a statement
condemning countries for abusing the word "terrorism" to, in the BBC text,
"demonize political opponents by calling them terrorists, justify military
action in [unrelated] disputes with neighbouring states... throttle freedom
of speech... de-legitimise legitimate political grievances..." and enact
laws which "[BBC text] cloak or justify violations on human rights". 

November 21, 2002, Unrelated: United Nations Relief and Works Agency
leader Ian Hook is killed by Israeli forces during a gunbattle at
Islamic Jihad leader Abdulla Wahsh's residence in Jenin. The United Nations
accuses Israel of denying Hook medical attention and of refusing to allow
an ambulance dispatched for Hook into the area, and says that Hook
"lost his life trying to save the lives of others". Israel states that
the ambulance summoned for Hook was an Israeli Defense Force ambulance
and was not prevented from entering the area. United Nations Secretary
General Kofi Annan condemns Israel for barring the ambulance from entering
the area. The Palestinian Authority says that Hook was intentionally
murdered by Israel because all Israelis are evil and want to murder
innocent people. Over the news few days: Israel says that a soldier
mistook Hook's telephone for a weapon as Hook ran from his building
towards Israeli forces, and says that its troops came under fire from
the United Nations trailer compound. The United Nations condemns the
suggestion of gunmen in the compound as "totally incredible" because
no one could enter the compound without permission. Israel releases
an audiotape recording of a telephone call made by Ian Hook an hour
before his death in which Hook states that "shabab", which could mean
a mob or a gang, had broken into the United Nations compound, and
cites videotape of ammunition casings inside the UN compound as evidence
that there were gunmen there. The United Nations insists that gunmen
could not have broken into the UN compound and that Hook was intentionally
shot in the back because Israelis have "a lack of respect and a disdain"
for the way "we [the UN] and others render humanitarian assistance". 

November 21, 2002: Canadian communications director Francoise Ducros
calls Bush "a moron" for lobbying the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
to attack Iraq. After she resigns due to the political fallout of the
statement, Prime Minister Jean Chretien initally refuses to accept her
resignation before accepting it later in the week.

November 21, 2002, Unrelated: Carson, California mayor Daryl Sweeney
and three city councilmen are charged with soliciting bribes from
undercover FBI agents.

November 21, 2002, Unrelated: Democratic Party political consultant
James Carville says that "everybody knows that the Fox News Channel
is merely a wing of the Republican Party, and its viewers use it the
same way a drunk uses a lamp post: for support, not illumination".

November 22, 2002: Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor reports
that the US had considered attacking Ansar al Islam in August, but
had rejected the idea. The report states that Ansar al Islam's defenses,
including land mines and alliances with two neighbouring Kurdish rebel
groups, are impregnable to the main Kurdish force Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan, and that the PUK is unable to leave their positions to
engage Iraqi forces because that would leave them open to attack by
Ansar al Islam.

November 22, 2002: The State Department warns all non-essential
diplomatic personnel to leave Jordan.

November 22, 2002: The Environmental Protection Agency rescinds a
requirement for coal power plants to upgrade their filters to meet
environmental standards when upgrading capacity, saying that this
will "remove perverse and unintended regulatory barriers to investments
in energy efficiency and pollution control projects while preserving
the environmental benefits". The Council of Republicans for Environmental
Advocacy praises the deregulation as a "positive step forward for
increasing energy efficiency and improving air quality".

November 22, 2002: Newsweek, quoting FBI sources, reports that two of
the September 11 hijackers were financed by Saudi Princess Haifa al Faisal,
wife of the Saudi ambassador to the US, and that the payments were
laundered by the families of Omar al Bayoumi and Majeda Ibrahim Dweikat.
An unnamed Bush spokesman says that "the facts are unclear and there's
no need to rush to judgement". Senator Bob Graham accuses Bush of
withholding this information from Congress to increase his political power.

November 22, 2002: Russia says that the United States should let the
United Nations weapons inspectors do their job, that the United States
should be concerned about terrorism coming from Saudi Arabia, and
expresses concern that elements of Pakistan's military may hand over
part of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal to terrorists.

November 22, 2002: A United Arab Emirates customs officers fires
upon a US helicopter before being shot and wounded by police.

November 22, 2002, Unrelated: Muslims riot in Abuja, Nigeria, attacking
anyone suspected of being non-Muslim. The Miss World beauty pageant is
moved to London for the safety of the contestants, who are in Abuja,
and pageant organizers condemn the This Day newspaper for causing
the riots. Miss Canada is disqualified from the contest for having
left Abuja a day before the other contestants.

November 22, 2002: The United States criticizes Hong Kong for passing
a law that may be a threat to civil liberties. The law would illegalize
promoting revolution againt the Peoples' Republic of China.

November 22, 2002: Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill requests India
reduce tariffs to promote trade, institute "protection against public
or private theivery", and establish "respect for property rights".

November 22, 2002: Turkey allows communication in Kurdish.

November 22, 2002, Unrelated: Three mortars are fired at the office
of the Attorney General of Colombia, missing and causing minor damage
to the surroundings.

November 22, 2002: North Korea denies entry to Korean Peninsula Energy
Organization inspectors in retaliation for the United States' energy
embargo.

November 22, 2002: Afghan police arrest a suspected suicide bomber
who they say was plotting to assassinate Defense Minister Mohammad
Qasim Fahim.

November 23, 2002: Calls for the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization
members to send forces to attack Iraq.

November 23, 2002: The United States bombs an Iraqi mobile radar which had
locked onto US aircraft.

November 23, 2002: David Sanger of the New York Times reports that
the United States has photographs of North Korea transfering long-range
missile parts to Pakistan. The report also quotes the Central Intelligence
Agency as stating that North Korea has a uranium enrichment program that
ill produce enough material to create a nuclear weapon in three years;
quotes an anonymous intelligence official stating that "Saddam doesn't
have" nuclear weapons, whereas Bush has strongly implied that Iraq does;
states that Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had in 1993 promised
to support North Korea's "right to acquire and develop nuclear technology
for peaceful purposes" at a time when the United States had been pressing
the United Nations for sanctions against North Korea for creating a nuclear
weapons program at Yongbyon, and that North Korea had paid Bhutto for her
support with schematics for the medium-range No Dong missile from which
Pakistan developed the Ghauri missile in 1998; that North Korea had
restarted its nuclear weapons program "in 1997 or 1998"; that Pakistan
had given gas centrifuges used in nuclear weapons production to North
Korea; that the CIA has "concluded that the North has moved from
research to production", that National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice
"asked for a review by all American intelligence agencies", and that
"the agencies came back with a unanimous opinion: the North Korean program
was well under way"; and that Bush has refused to follow United States
law that demands he either impose or publicly waive trade sanctions against
nations suspected of proliferating nuclear weapons technologies. Pakistani
General Rashid Qureshi condemns the report as a lie and says that the
Times needs "to update their intelligence gathering system".

November 23, 2002: Zafarullah Khan Jamali, an ally of dictator Pervez
Musharraf, is inaugurated as Prime Minister of Pakistan.

November 23, 2002: Saudi Arabia denies that Princess Haifa al Faisal
financed the September 11 terrorists, praising Haifa for generousity
in giving "large amounts of money to charities". This is later clarified
to state that Haifa would regularly write cheques to Saudi families living
in the United States as an act of charity, and it is stated that Haifa's
own father King Faisal was killed by terrorists in 1975. Saudi foreign
policy advisor Adel al Jubeir condemns the United States Congress for
being "more interested in scoring political brownie points than they
are in arriving at the truth".

November 23, 2002: China reports that North Korea will ban all trade
in US currency.

November 23, 2002: Australian Member of Parliament Fred Nile says that
the country should ban women from wearing traditional Muslim clothing
because explosives could be hidden underneat the clothing. Prime Minister
John Howard doesn't condemn the statement, but says that "one of the
things that hasn't changed and mustn't change is the character of Australia
as a free and open and decent and tolerant nation".

November 24, 2002: The Los Angeles Times notes the Department of Justice's
intervention in the Chavez versus Martinez case, noting that the
government is demanding the power to practice "coercive questioning".

November 24, 2002: Senator Schumer accuses Saudi Arabia of having "played
a duplicitous game" by doing "everything" the terrorists want in
exchange for not coming under attack. Senator Biden says that Saudi
Arabia has a history of "buying off extremism". Senator Lieberman
says that Saudi Arabia must "decide which side they're on". Senator
McCain says that "the Saudi royal family has been engaged in a Faustian
bargain for years to keep themselves in power".

November 24, 2002: The Observer translates and reprints a document,
claimed to have been written by Osama bin Laden, titled "letter to
the American people". The document states al Qaeda's demands, being:
the extermination of Israel and the death of anyone who has ever
supported Israel's existence, calling the Jewish claim to heritage
from the Jews of the Bible "one of the most fallacious, widely
circulated fabrications in history" and stating that the ancient Jews
were really Arab Muslims; the implementation of Sharia law throughout
all Muslim land, accusing Muslim governments which oppose al Qaeda of
being agents of the United States; the raising of the "paltry price" of
"our Ummah's wealth", and claiming the low price of oil as "the biggest
theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world"; the overthrow
of all Muslim governments which "have surrendered to the Jews" by
"acknowledging the existence of their state"; the removal of all
foreign military forces from Muslim lands because these foreign forces
"corrupt our lands" and "beseige our sanctities to protect the security
of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures";
the conversion of all non-Muslims to Islam; the elimination of interest
on debt, through which "the Jews have taken control of your economy,
though which they have taken control of your media, and now control
all aspects of your life, making you their servants and achieving their
aims at your expense, precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you
against [reference to a hoax produced by pro-Nazi publisher William
Dudley Pelley in 1934]"; an end to the use of intoxicating drugs;
an end to "acts of immorality" like "President Clinton's immoral
acts"; an end to the employment of women "to serve passengers, visitors,
and strangers" and as "advertising tools calling upon customers to
purchase them"; an end to trade in sexual materials; an end to
the intentional spreading of AIDS, "a Satanic American invention";
an end to industrial pollution; an end to "law of the rich and
wealthy people"; an end to the "policy of prohibiting and forcibly
removing weapons of mass destruction" from certain nations while the
US allows others to retain such weapons; an end to the arrests of American
citizens without trial or public disclosure; an end to any recognition
of India's claim to Kashmir; an end to any recognition of Russia's right
to fight the Chechens; an end to any recognition of the Philippines'
right to fight against al Qaeda and Abu Sayyaf; the withdrawal of all
Americans from all Muslim lands; and an end to the support of corrupt
leaders in Muslim countries.

November 24, 2002: The Washington Post reports that at least 44 people
have been jailed in maximum security prisons as "material witnesses"
without habeas corpus, that 20 have never been asked to testify, and that
29 have since been released.

November 24, 2002, Unrelated: A mob attacks police in Maan, Jordan,
after police attempt to arrest the son of rebel leader Mohamad al Chalabi.
Police claim that the boy had thrown rocks at a police vehicle, while
his mother claims that he was merely walking to the market. Two rebels
are killed in the battle and the city is again placed under curfew.

November 24, 2002, Unrelated: 15,000 members of the Basiji militia
march in Tehran, Iran, to support the death sentence ofjournalist
Hashem Aghajari. 

November 24, 2002, Unrelated: Terrorists attack a Hindu temple in India,
killing ten. Pakistan condemns the attack, claiming to be opposed to all
terrorism.  India accuses Pakistan of training the terrorists.

November 24, 2002: A few dozen people protest outside Cable News
Network's headquarters, claiming that CNN censors reports which are
not supportive of the government and businesses. A day later, CNN deletes
its own report on the protest from its public archives.

November 24, 2002: Reverend Bob Olmstead of First United Methodist Church
of Palo Alto, California, says that "Richard Nixon, while President,
proposed a guaranteed annual income - not just welfare but a guarantee
of a minimum income for every family in America...the political pendulum
has swung so far to the right that the most liberal congressman today
is now to the right of Richard Nixon. The idea of sharing America's
wealth with the hungry, the naked, the homeless, and the lonely
has dropped off the legislative agenda."

November 25, 2002: Secretary of State Colin Powell says that Pakistan
has agreed not to continue its assistance of North Korea's nuclear
weapons program.

November 25, 2002: Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer says that "the Saudis
have been a good partner in the war on terrorism".

November 25, 2002: Algeria reports having killed Emad Abdelwahid
Ahmed Alwan, al Jazeera's top commander in North Africa.

November 25, 2002: Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill condemns journalists
for pointing out that the economy is not doing well, accuses Europe
of dragging down the US economy with high tariffs on agriculture,
and says that the US's high tariffs and subsidies on agriculture
and steel are not protectionist but are a legitimate response to
a glut in the market.

November 25, 2002: Camp Gray in South Korea is attacked with
Molotov cocktails during a protest against the quick acquittal of
soldiers for driving over and killing two pedestrians. The next
day, Camp Page is attacked with Molotov cocktails. Several
businesses in South Korea begin refusing to serve people from
the United States.

November 25, 2002: It is reported that Pakistan has arrested fourteen
Arabs and Afghans suspected of providing al Qaeda propaganda tapes to
al Jazeera.

November 25, 2002: The Department of Justice asks the US Court of
Federal Claims to make secret the medical records of children with
autism from over a thousand families suing corporation Eli Lilly over
claims that the company caused their childrens' condition.

November 25, 2002: Senator John McCain issues a public apology for
calling talk show host Rush Limbaugh a circus clown, saying that
"my office has been flooded with angry phone calls from circus clowns
all over America. They resent that comparison and so I would like to
extend my apologies to Bozo, Chuckles, and Krusty."

November 25, 2002, Unrelated: British journalists Zaiba Naz Malik and
Leopoldo Bruno Sorrentino are jailed in Bangladesh for working on a report
that would mention the existence of an anti-government movement. Two
Bangladeshi journalists working for Reporters Sans Frontieres are also
arrested. Bangladesh releases the two British journalists on December 12.

November 25, 2002, Unrelated: Truckers, railroad workers, and air traffic
controllers throughout France hold a strike and blockade roads over
low pay and long working hours.

November 25, 2002, Unrelated: Nigeran President Olusegun Obasanjo condemns
"irresponsible journalism" for causing the riots during the Miss World
beauty contest.

November 25, 2002, Unrelated: The United Nations occupies Mitrovica,
Republika Srpska. 

November 25, 2002, Unrelated: Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov 
escapes an assassination attempt and accuses exiled former politicians 
foreign minister Boris Shikhmuradov, ambassador Nurmukhamet Khanamov,
finince minister Khudayberdy Orazov, and deputy agricuture minister
Imamdurdy Yklymov of planning the attack. Shikhmuradov says that "Niyazov
deserves as many deadly gunshots as lives and destinies he has ruined".

November 26, 2002: The United States calls for a World Trade Organization
order phasing out tariffs on all non-agricultural products by 2015.

November 26, 2002: White House Spokesman Ari Fleischer says that
Saudi Arabia "could do more" to fight terrorism than it currently does.
The Washington Post quotes an anonymous intelligence official as stating
that the United States would give the Saudi government 90 days to act
on intelligence before the US will "assume solving the problem is
beyond their ken" and act on the information.

November 26, 2002: Kabul is struck by rocket fire. No damage is reported.

November 26, 2002: Germany announces that it will increase the number
of its military forces in Afghanistan.

November 26, 2002: Germany announces that it has "a historic and moral duty"
to defend Israel against Iraqi attack, and will provide Patriot anti-missile
systems to Israel if the United States invades Iraq.

November 26, 2002: New Zealand dispatches the frigate Te Kaha to
join the United States fleet in searching for al Qaeda activity in
the Persian Gulf.

November 26, 2002: France arrests eight people suspected of supporting
al Qaeda bomber Richard Reid. One of those arrested is also suspected
of trying to bomb the Strasbourg cathedral.

November 26, 2002: Malaysia reports arresting three terrorists.

November 26, 2002: Arab News reports that terrorists have been
getting themselves certified with mental disorders to mislead
investigators into thinking they act alone and to ensure light
setences for their crimes.

November 26. 2002: China denies that it assisted Ukraine in selling
advanced Kolchuga aircraft detection systems to Iraq.

November 26, 2002, Unrelated: The province of Zamfara, Nigeria, sentences
This Day newswriter Isioma Daniel to death for saying that the Miss World
beauty contestants were so beautiful that the prophet Muhammad would have
been willing to marry one. Deputy Governor Mamuda Aliyu Shinkafi says
that "it is binding on all Muslims, wherever they are, to consider
the killing of the writer as a religious duty". Nigeria announces that
the death sentence is unconstitutional and will not be enforced.

November 26, 2002, Unrelated: The Sun, a British tabloid, reports
that Tesco farms in California have begun importing deadly Black Widow
spiders to protect their crops from insects because Californians have
been demanding they stop using harmful pesticides. The report quotes
company spokesman Greg Sage praising the practice, saying that the
fact that shoppers in British supermarkets have found live Black Widows
in their food is proof that Tesco is not using pesticides. Avanova,
another tabloid, confirms the story about three British shoppers finding
the spiders in their food and quotes Tesco spokesman Jon Church as saying
that the company does not intentionally use Black Widow spiders but that
the spiders are natural to the region.

November 26, 2002, Unrelated: Iran arrests six students for protesting
the death sentence of journalist Hashem Aghajari and charges them
with treason.

November 26, 2002, Unrelated: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
refuses to cooperate with judges interrogating him in the trial of
Berlusconi's political ally Senator Dell'Utri for laundering Mafia money.

November 27, 2002: Germany announces that it will grant the United States
use of its territory to attack Iraq.

November 27, 2002: Arabic News reports that Russia is planning a coup
in Iraq to prevent the United States from occupying it and harming Russian
economic interests.

November 27, 2002: Appoints former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger -- who
has a history of blocking investigations into government wrongdoing,
sabotoging other government employees' work, and lying to Congress in
official reports -- to lead the investigation into the government's
preparedness for the September 11 attacks,  praising Kissinger for
"clear thinking and careful judgement".

November 27, 2002: Judge Emmet Sullivan orders Vice President Dick Cheney
to release documents related to the secret energy task force within
two weeks.

November 27, 2002: The United States issues a warning to US citizens
in Venezuela to be aware of rioting and disorder. The Associated Press
reports that the US has recommended its citizens prepare to defend
themselves, but nothing suggesting this is quoted in the AP story.

November 27, 2002: Germany and France agree to provide the United States
with evidence against Zacarias Moussaoui after the US promises
not to use the evidence to push for anyone's execution.

November 27, 2002: Britain bans a television advertisement for the comedy
2DTV which shows a cartoon Bush trying to play a videotape in a toaster,
stating that advertisements may not insult people without their consent.

November 27, 2002: Canada declares that Islamic Jihad, Islamic Resistance,
Asbat al Ansar, the Islamic Army of Aden, Harakat ul Mujahedeen,
and Jaish-I-Mohammed are terrorist groups, and bans Canadians from
giving them material support.

November 27, 2002: Doctor Amer Aziz says that he inspected Osama bin Laden
a year ago and found no sign of the kidney disease that the United States
claims bin Laden has.

November 27, 2002, Unrelated: Archbishop John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan
of Nigeria calls on Christians to stop "turning the other cheek"
and tells his followers that "it is a Christian duty to protect yourselves"
from the Muslims.

November 27, 2002, Unrelated: Cote D'Ivoire launches a full-force attack
on rebel positions in violation of a ceasefire, using mercenaries and
new weapons that the government had imported during the ceasefire.

November 27, 2002: Al Gore accuses the media in the United States of
falling under the influence of a Republican "fifth column", stating that
"something will start at the Republican National Committee...and it will
explode the next day on the right-wing talk show network and on Fox News
and in the newspapers that play this game...and pretty soon they'll start
baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring this story...and then
pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a
so-called objective sampling, and...these RNC talking points are woven
into the fabric of the zeitgeist". Gore condemns the Fox News slogan
"We report, you decide" as "their ritual denial". The Republican Party
accuses Gore of mental illness and depression from leading "a party without
a message", and suggests that Gore "take a break from the book tour" to
relieve his stress.

November 27, 2002: San Francisco Weekly writer Matt Smith, in a column
on the appointment of Admiral John Poindexter to lead an organization
which has requested the power to record every act undertaken by every
citizen of the United States, reports attempting to interview Poindexter
by having "dialed John and [wife] Linda Poindexter's number (301) 424-6613
at their home at 10 Barrington Fare in Rockville, Md., hoping the good
admiral and excused criminal might be able to offer some insight". 

November 28, 2002: The United Nations secures 6,000 weapons and 30 tanks
from regional governors' armies in Afghanistan.

November 28, 2002: Australia closes its Philippines embassy and places
guards at the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge after receiving
warning of a possible terrorist attack. Canada and the European Union also
close their embassies in the Philippines.

November 28, 2002: North Korea condemns the United States for being
among those noticing that North Korea announced it has nuclear weapons,
saying that the US is lying when it mentions what North Korea said.

November 28, 2002: The Colombian Supreme Court declares zones of
martial law to be illegal.

November 28, 2002, Unrelated: The Palestinian Authority forbids
Christians from celebrating Christmas.

November 28, 2002, Unrelated: Conservative News reports that 
Finsbury Park Mosque prayer leader Abu Hamza al Masri had foreknowledge
of the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, citing as evidence that in 1998
Masri had preached for the seizure or destruction of non-Muslim ships
which wander into Muslim ports.

November 28, 2002, Unrelated: A car bomb hits the Paradise hotel
in Mombasa, Kenya, killing 13, and missiles are fired upon an Arkia
passenger plane leaving the Mombasa airport. The hotel is owned by
an Israeli company and Arkia is an airline based in Israel. The same day,
seven people are killed by Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat's
agents at a Likud Party convention in Beit Shean, Israel, and at a
nearby bus stop which the PLO soldiers also attack. The Palestinian
Authority condemns the attack.

November 28, 2002, Unrelated: The Nigerian Supreme Islamic Council
overturns the death penalty for This Day newswriter Isioma Daniel.

November 29, 2002: Vetoes a pay raise for federal non-military workers,
stating that "Full statutory civilian pay reaises in 2003 would interfere
with our nation's ability to pursue the war on terrorism."

November 29, 2002: "In the national security interest of the United States",
waives sanctions against the Palestine Liberation Organization which
were recommended by a US report noting that the Palestinian Authority
has failed to abide by promises to crack down on terrorism. The report
states that instances of Palestinian Authority personnel supporting and
participating in terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians have been
independent actions outside of the Palestinian Authority's control or
direction.

November 28, 2002: Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hizballah,
praises Islamic Resistance, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah for killing
innocent Israeli civilians and enourages these groups to make attacks
outside of Israel, accuses the United States of being behind Israel's
threats to invade Lebanon over water from a Lebanese river, and proclaims
that Hizballah's slogan will always be "Death to America".

November 29, 2002: Iraq's ruling party announces that the United States
is inserting spies into the United Nations inspection teams.

November 29, 2002: Switzerland says that the bin Laden tape was made
by an impersonator. United States investigators have said that the 
voice was bin Laden's.

November 29, 2002: The International Atomic Energy Agency demands
inspections of North Korea.

November 29, 2002: The United States and Israel send investigors
to Kenya to look into the recent attacks against Israeli civilians there.
They determine that the attacks were caused by al Ittihad al Islamiyya,
a Somali ally of al Qaeda. A day later, the assumption becomes that
al Qaeda carried out the attack itself. On December 2, al Qaeda claims
responsibility.

November 29, 2002: Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly announces
that Massachusetts will appeal the Microsoft settlement. Representative
Ed Markey announces that Reilly is now "the de facto antitrust division chief
of the United States" due to the federal Justice Department's pro-monopoly
stance. All other states except West Virginia announce that they will
not appeal the settlement.

November 29, 2002, Unrelated: Over 100,000 people march in Tehran, Iran,
to call for the destruction of the United States and Israel.

November 29, 2002: Belgium arrests Dyab Abu Jahjah, leader of the Arab
European League, for inciting two days of riots following the murder
of a Moroccan. Four days later, he is ordered freed by a court.

November 29, 2002: The New York Times reports that the Business Roundtable,
a pro-Republican lobbying group, is pushing for demand-side economics.

November 29, 2002: Columnist Joe Conason defends Senator Daschle's claim
that Rush Limbaugh encourages threats of violence against Democrats,
stating that a gunman had broken into Cody Shearer's house after Limbaugh
accuesed Shearer of threatening a woman who had accused Clinton of
sexually harassing her.

November 29, 2002, Unrelated: As India mounts an operation against the
Naxalite People's War Group rebels, the British Broadcasting Corporation
prints a headline stating that India "cracks down on leftists".

November 29, 2002: Former United Nations Assistant Secretary General
Hans von Sponeck says that an invasion of Iraq will lead to "a global
terror war", and condemns the United States for "desperate attempts...to
destroy the arms inspection before it's properly done, to provoke a war".

November 29, 2002: The United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia,
an anti-Communist terrorist militia, announces a unilateral cease fire.

November 30, 2002, Unrelated: French forces are fired upon in Bangolo,
Cote D'Ivoire. No casualties are reported.

November 30, 2002: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez fires fifteen
generals who have called for his resignation.

November 30, 2002: The Washington Post reports that the United States
has lost track of 250,000 defective chemical/biological protective suits
produced by Isratex a decade ago and that these duits may have been issued
to soldiers; that Senator Christopher Shays has said that "in some cases,
we've mixed bad inventory with good" based upon his personal experience
inspecting US troops in Europe; and that an anonymous source states Defense
Department tests show the protective suits to be so faulty that they
wear out after two days of use. General Barry McCaffrey announces
that there is not a single piece of faulty chemical protection equipment
in the Army or Navy. 

November 2002: The United Nations weapons inspection team enters Iraq
and begins inspections by investigating sites that have been abandoned
for years. Some reports state that these sites are being investigated
because they were used for producing weapons of mass destruction in the
1980s and 1990s.

November 2002, Unrelated: The Chicago Tribune reports that Metropolitan
Pier and Exposition Authority Director Scott Fawell accepted bribes
of prostitutes and cruises from former state Representative Roger Stanley.
Reporter John Kass sarcastically notes that "Republican bigwigs are taking
jobs away from hard-working Illinois hookers and exporting the jobs
to Costa Rican hookers, who apparently work for much less."

November 2002: The American Educational Research Association and
the American Library Association demand the restoration of documents
which were deleted from the Department of Education's public Web archive
because, in the Department's words, the information "does not reflect
the priorities, philosophies, or goals of the present administration".

November 2002: Salon Magazine reports that 820,000 people will lose
their federal unemployment benefits on December 28, followed by 95,000
every week afterward for an unspecified amount of time, after Congress
did not extend the program before ending its session. Upon resuming
in January, Congress quickly extends the benefits.

November 2002, Unrelated: Private investigators hired by Los Alamos
National Laboratory to investigate fraud and corruption are fired
for reporting fraud and corruption. Laboratory officials state that
the laboratory cannot acknowledge the corruption or else it would
risk the laboratory's contract with the Department of Energy
to perform nuclear weapons research.


December 1, 2002: Appoints Elliot Abrams, who was convicted of lying
to Congress to support terrorists in Nicaragua and who is a staunch
supporter of Israel, as Director of Middle Eastern Affairs. White House
officials state that Abrams was selected by National Security Advisor
Condoleeza Rice. 

December 1, 2002: The US drops seven bombs in western Afghanistan
and denies that the bombing is related to fighting between rival
governors Ismail Khan and Amanullah Khan. Amanullah Khan says that
the bombing was placed so as to disrupt the fighting. 

December 1, 2002: A small arms cache is found in Kabul, Afghanistan.

December 1, 2002: The US bombs Southern Oil Company properties in
Basra, Iraq. The properties are reported by the BBC to be oil drilling
facilities. The US claims it bombed a communications center there,
in the south of Iraq, after its plains in the northern no-fly zone
came under attack. 

December 1, 2002: Australian Prime Minister John Howard announces that
Australia will attack terrorist positions in other countries regardless
of sovereignty. Indonesia, the obvious target of Howard's remarks,
opines that "states cannot flout international law and norms willy-nilly".
The next day, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed accuses Australia
of wanting to return to "the good old days when people can shoot
aborigines without caring about human rights", Philippine National
Security Advisor Roilo Golez announces that he will argue against cooperating
with Australia versus terrorists, Indonesian General Endriartono Suharto
promises war if Australia attacks terrorists within Indonesia, and
Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer says that "of course" the United States
"supports pre-emptive action".

December 2002: The Republican Party removes veteran Republicans from
the Appropriations Committee, whose membership is traditionally based
upon seniority, to be replaced by other Republicans appointed by
House Speaker Dennis Hastert for their political views.

December 2002: Announces that there should be no new restrictions
on pollution for the next ten years.

December 2002: Esquire Magazine publishes an interview with former
Director of the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives John J. Dilulio in
which Dilulio says that there is a "complete lack of a policy
apparatus" with "no precedent in any modern White House for what is
going on in this one", with "everything, and I mean everying, being run
by the political arm", calls Karl Rove "the single most powerful person
in the modern, post-Hoover era to ever occupy a political advisor post
near the Oval Office", and condemns the White House policy makers
as "Mayberry Machiavellis". White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer
condemns the statements as "baseless and groundless". In response, Dilulio
issues a statement reaffirming what he had said in the inverview. Dilulio
shortly thereafter issues another statement that everything he said was
"groundless and baseless", claims he never said many of the things that
Esquire Magazine attributed to him, and retracts his statements in full.
Esquire Magazine releases a letter from Dilulio in which Dilulio makes use
of phrases which he claimed never to have used in his latter statement.

December 2002: The New York Times reports that Bush has rescinded
Clinton's order forbidding the payment of bonuses to "political appointees"
working in the Executive branch.

December 2002, Unrelated: Over eighty fires burn around Sydney, Australia.
The army is called out to fight the fires, some of which are
said to have been deliberately set.

December 2002, Unrelated: Paul Purcell of Soldiers for the Truth
reports that "a multitude" of Department of Defense vehicle clearance
passes have been stolen from vehicles across the country.

December 2, 2002: The New York Times reports that the United States
has demanded Israel not respond to the attack on Israeli citizens
in Kenya.

December 2, 2002: The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upholds
California's law requiring the California Coastal Commission approve
any oil drilling on California's coast. California had sued the
Department of Interior after the federal Department granted extensions
to expired drilling leases.

December 2, 2002: Britian releases a document detailing Iraq's torture
of its people. Amnesty International condemns Britain for using the report
as a case for war against Iraq.

December 2, 2002: The Sunday Times reports that Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon has ordered Israel's intelligence agency Mossad to
assassinate the terrorists behind the Kenya attack. Israel has not
carried out such operations since 1972 when it assassinated members
of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which later became the
Palestinian Authority, who had attacked the Olympic Games and killed
eleven Israeli athletes.

December 2, 2002, Unrelated: Russia expels two Swedish diplomats,
accusing them of spying. 

December 3, 2002: The Central Intelligence Agency announces that
Bush has the authority to order the assassination of United States citizens
at any time if the citizen is considered an "enemy combatant", and that
the determination of who is an "enemy combatant" is solely Bush's decision.

December 3, 2002: Announces that Iraq's cooperation with United Nations
resolutions is not important and that inspections cannot determine whether
Iraq has disarmed, and pledges that "the United States of America will
lead a coalition to disarm" Saddam Hussein unless Iraq disarms.

December 3, 2002: Russian President Vladimir Putin condemns the
United States' "absolutlely inadmissable" "disregard of international
agreements and accords" regarding Iraq.

December 3, 2002, Unrelated: Denmark refuses to extradite Chechen
leader Akhmed Zakayev to Russia, stating that there is no evidence
against him.

December 3, 2002: Turkey announces that it would allow the United States
to use its airspace, but not its land, to attack Iraq if the United Nations
passes a resolution allowing the US to attack Iraq.

December 3, 2002: South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung and 31 members of
Parliament call for revising the Status of Forces Agreement military
alliance with the United States.

December 3, 2002: Australia announces that Jemaah Islamiya had sent
three terrorist teams to attack the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney,
but that the plan was vetoed by Jemaah Islamiya's regional commander
in Australia.

December 3, 2002: Kuwait announces that Iraq has fired upon two of
its coast guard vessels near Warba island, causing the ships to collide
during evasive maneuvers. A day later, the United States announces that
"there was no Iraqi involvement of any kind".

December 3, 2002: The North Atlantic Treaty Alliance reports that
a man arrested October 26 for spying on United States troops in Bosnia
has been found to be an al Qaeda member.

December 3, 2002: Senator John Kerry proposes refunding the Social Security
tax on workers' pay for one year.

December 3, 2002, Unrelated: The Court of Cassation, Egypt's highest court,
orders a retrial of democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim.

December 4, 2002: United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq discover
artillery shells armed with mustard gas. The UN reports that it had
first discovered the weaponry in 1998 and that Iraq had not moved
or destroyed it since the previous inspectors were barred from the country.

December 4, 2002: Demands an increase in economic sanctions against Iraq
and more agressive inspections.

December 4, 2002: Iraq announces that the United Nations weapons inspectors
are spying for the United States and Israel to locate targets for the
coming war, and declares the UN's inspection of a palace to have been
a material breach of the UN resolution allowing inspections.

December 4, 2002: Iraq announces that it has distributed weaponry to
every household in Iraq.

December 4, 2002: Judge Michael B. Mukasey rules that the President
has the Constitutional authority to exercise war powers during peacetime,
and that United States citizens arrested as "enemy combatants" must
be granted the opportunity to speak to a lawyer.

December 4, 2002: Ansar al Islam breaks out of its stronghold near Halabja,
forcing Patriotic Union of Kurdistan forces to retreat. PUK forces were
weakened as many soldiers were on leave to celebate Eid el Fitr.

December 4, 2002: Indonesia reports arresting Mukhlas, one of the top
leaders of Jemaah al Islamiya.

December 4, 2002: Russia and India issue a joint declaration opposing
the United States' plan to attack Iraq and demanding that the United States
follow international law.

December 4, 2002: The World Tribune announces that "Saudi Arabia is
working to form a coalition to oppose any US drive to impose democracy
on the Middle East", is calling for other Arab nations to sign an alliance
to oppose any attempt by the US to create a democratic state in the 
Middle East, and has announced that "No one can change the Saudi regime
but God".

December 4, 2002: General Akin Zorlu of the multinational peacekeeping force
in Afghanistan reports that "after almost every" missile attack, "we have
been receiving proposals to buy some rockets or missiles".

December 4, 2002: Amateur photographer Mike Maginnis reports having been
arrested for taking photographs of a hotel in Denver where Vice President
Dick Cheney was staying. Maginnis reports that during his arrest,
a Secret Service agent named Willse had told him that he was being
charged with terrorism and called Maginnis a "raghead collaborator"
and a "dirty pinko faggot"; when he was offered a telephone call,
he called the Denver Post and the police immediately disconnected the phone;
and when he was released, police refused to issue a receipt for his
camera and other belongings that were confiscated. Denver police deny
that they have ever had Maginnis in custody.

December 4, 2002: The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee announces
that Henry Kissinger must abide by a law requiring him to release the
identities of people and organizations who have paid him over $5,000
for his work as a consultant. Bush had claimed that Kissinger does not
have to comply with the law. 

December 4, 2002, Unrelated: Doctors Christoph Buettner and Martin Surks
of the Albert Einstein College of Medice in New York report that one
of their patients taking radioactive iodine treatment has been
repeatedly strip-searched by police for setting off radiation alarms
on the city's subways.

December 4, 2002: After Israel deports Red Crescent worker and US citizen
Khaled Nazem Diab for being a suspected member of al Qaeda, the US
State Department announces that it "has no information which suggests
that Dr. Diab was connected to any terror group". The next day, the
State Department retracts this statement and deletes it from its archives.

December 4, 2002: The Pew Research Center releases a report showing a
worldwide loss of respect for the United States, with exceptions
of Ukraine, Russia, Nigeria, Guatemala, and Uzbekistan where public
support of the US has grown. The "very unfavourable" rating for
the United States is over 50% in Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan, 42% in
Turkey, 38% in Lebanon, 23% in Argentina, 19% in South Africa, and
near or below 5% in most other nations. The report also shows that:
15% of people in the US are so poor as to be unable to acquire food, and
19% have been too poor to buy needed clothing for their families; 17% of
people in the US believe that access to quality drinking water is a
serious problem; 26% of people in the US are unable to afford the costs
of health care; 71% of people in the US support Bush, and 25% oppose
him; the majority of Muslims in Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda, Indonesia,
Turkey, and Uzbekistan believe that suicide bombing is "never justified"
while 48% of respondents in Lebanon and about a fifth of respondents in
Cote D'Ivoire, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Jordan, and Pakistan believe the tactic
to be "often justified"; while the vast majority (60%+) of people in
developed countries report getting most of their news from television,
fewer than 40% reported getting most of their national and international
news from this source; about 20% of respondents in Egypt and Lebanon have
a "very unfavourable" opinion of Turkey, while 44% of people in Turkey
have such an opinion of Iran; Majorities in most countries believe that
the world is safer with the United States as the premier military power
than it would be if there were another equal power; Majorities in
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, France, the former German Democratic Republic,
Jordan, Pakistan, and Turkey report being opposed to the US's ideas about
democracy; There is moderate to strong opposition to the US's business
culture in all regions outside of Africa, where this culture is strongly
accepted in some countries and disputed in others; More people in the
United States dislike the US's popular culture than people from most
of the polled countries; All countries except Russia greatly respect the
United States' technological progress; More respondents in Senegal,
Bangladesh, Indonesia, South Korea, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan,
and Turkey oppose the US's war on terrorism than support it, with
only 5% of Egyptians favouring the war; 83% of people in Turkey oppose
the US's use of bases in Turkey to attack Iraq; Over 30% of people
in Turkey believe that Iraq, North Korea, and Iran are "no danger at all"
to stability in their regions, and 29% of people in Russia believe this
about North Korea; Strong majorities in Britain, France, and Germany
believe that Saddam Hussein must be removed from power in Iraq; 18%
of people from the US and fewer than 15% of people in other polled countries
believe that removing Saddam Hussein from power will reduce the threat
of terrorism; and 53% of respondents in Turkey believe the United States
is attacking Iraq as part of a greater war against Islamic countries.

December 4, 2002, Unrelated: Kansas Governor-elect Kathleen Sebelius
is sued by fourteen news organizations for illegally closing state
budget task force meetings to the public.

December 4, 2002, Unrelated: Bombs are discovered in Ikea furniture stores
in Amsterdam and Slidrecht, Netherlands. Eight other stores are closed
by police.

December 4, 2002, Unrelated: Turkmen Prosecutor General Gurbanbibi
Atadzhanova accuses Russia of protecting the plotters of the recent
assassination attempt against President Saparmurat Niyazov.

December 4, 2002, Unrelated: Australian Minister of Citizenship and
Multicultural Affairs Gary Hardgrave condemns national Muslim groups
for calling for a boycott of several corporations based in Australia
and the United States which do business in Israel, stating that
"creating division by calling on sections of our community to turn
against other sections of our community is unAustralian...I would have
thought the leadership of the Australian Arabic Community Council would
be more responsible than to be associating itself with this nonsense
which has come from nations outside Australia less cohesive than our
own...We all have a responsibility to support and respect each other...this
sort of campaign is simply about dividing our community."

December 5, 2002: Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and economic advisor
Larry Lindsey resign on their own initiative according to most reports,
while the New York Times says they were fired on Bush's order. Lindsey 
is reported to have designed Bush's tax cut plan. White House officials
announces that "we can continue to move from recession to higher growth"
under Bush's leadership alone, without the need for economics or
financial experts.

December 5, 2002: Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer announces that
"the President and the Secretary of Defense would not assert as plainly
and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction
if it was not true". Bush has already told massive lies about Iraq's
weapons capabilities.

December 5, 2002: Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein calls on his people to
support the United Nations weapons inspections.

December 5, 2002: Iraq announces that "we don't have chemical, biological,
or nuclear weaponry, but we have equipment which was defined as dual use".
Bush announces that he has "solid" proof that Iraq has weapons of
mass destruction.

December 5, 2002: The United States refuses to extradite to Japan 
a Marine Major accused of attempting to rape a Japanese woman
on Japan's Okinawa island. He is extradited two weeks later.

December 5, 2002: Patriotic Union of Kurdistan forces retake hilltops
around Halabja, forcing Ansar al Islam forces to retreat. About fourty
Kurdish fighters and about a dozen Ansar fighters were killed in the
two days of battle. Half of the Kurdish deaths were prisoners of war
who were executed by Ansar al Islam. The Union reports killing Ansar
second in command Abdulla Khalifana.

December 5, 2002, Unrelated: The Macedonian consulate in Karachi, Pakistan
is bombed, killing three. Graffiti left nearby claims al Qaeda carried
out the attack.

December 5, 2002: The Guardian reports that the Chechen terrorists
in the Palace of Culture theatre raid had made telephone calls to
their financiers in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar,
and quotes a Russian security official stating that terrorism operations
inside Russia are funded to the extent of $2-4 million a month
from financiers in the Persian Gulf region.

December 5, 2002: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announces that
al Qaeda is actively cooperating with Hizballah in Lebanon and is also
active in Gaza.  The Palestinian Authority condemns the announcement as
lies and accuses Israel of trying to draw a false connection between
al Qaeda and the Palestinian Authority. Lebanse President Emile Lahoud
announces that "al Qaeda has no presence in Lebanon" and denies that
there is any "coordination or cooperation" between al Qaeda and "the
national resistance".

December 5, 2002: The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously decides
that the Second Amendment's recognition of "the right of the people
to keep and bear arms" is not intended to apply to individuals, but only
to state-organized militias.

December 5, 2002: The United Nations issues a petition signed by 60 UN
workers from 20 countries condemning Israel for intentionally murdering
aid worker Ian Hook. Israel claims that Hook was accidentally shot during
a firefight with Palestinian Authority soldiers, and that United Nations
workers waving United Nations flags had stood in front of some of the gunmen
so that the gunmen could fire upon Israeli troops but Israel could not
return fire for fear of hitting UN personnel.

December 5, 2002, Unrelated: Israel bars the free movement of United
Nations vehicles due to the alleged use of UN vehicles by terrorist
groups to transfer arms and soldiers.

December 5, 2002: An association of relatives of September 11 victims
condemns the Republican Party and President Bush for refusing to consider
their recommendation for Republican former Senator Warren B. Rudman to
occupy one of the seats on the commission to investigate the government's
preparedness for the attack.

December 5, 2002: Columbia Broadcast System reports that the
most popular toy in Pakistan is an Osama bin Laden doll and army jeep.

December 5, 2002: During a celebration of Senator Strom Thurmond's
100th birthday, Senator Trent Lott announces that "I want to say this
about my state [Mississippi].  When Strom Thurmond ran for president
we voted for him, and we're proud of it, and if the rest of the country
had followed our lead we wouldn't have had all these problems over
all these years, either". In 1948, Thurmond ran for President on a 
platform of denying blacks their human rights, stating among other
things that "there's not enough troops in the Army to force the
Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race
into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into
our churches". Lott later apologizes and denies endorsing segregation.
Lott apologizes again after newspapers report that he made the same
remark while supporting Thurmond and Ronald Reagan in 1980.

December 5, 2002: The Islamic Iran Participation Front condemns the
Iranian government for arresting three newsmen who reported the results
of a poll showing 70% of Iranians supported improving relations with
the United States. In February, two of the newsmen are sentenced to
seven and eight years of prison.

December 5, 2002: A McDonald's restaurant is bombed in Makassar, Indonesia,
killing three. The attackers were associates of the Bali bombers.

December 5, 2002: The State Department announces that there is a
threat of terrorism against US citizens in Turkey.

December 5, 2002, Unrelated: Venezuela sends the military to break strikes
at its oil plants.

December 5, 2002, Unrelated: The Carlyle Group buys a 33.8% stake in the
British Ministry of Defense's research corporation Qinetiq.

December 5, 2002, Unrelated: Paraguayan President Luis Gonzalez Macchi
is impeached.

December 5, 2002, Unrelated: Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers terrorist group
declare peace.

December 6, 2002: Congresswoman-elect Katherine Harris, who stripped 91,000
Florida citizens of their right to vote in the 2000 and 2002 elections,
is appointed Assistant Majority Whip.

December 6, 2002: The Independant reports that recent publicized raids
of al Qaeda members in Pakistan captured the wrong people, that there are 
some Pakistani army officers who warn al Qaeda about US activity against
the group, that military units in the Northwest Frontier are so sympathetic
to al Qaeda that the US cannot directly cooperate with them but most
work with the central Pakistani government, and that al Qaeda is avoiding
detection by communicating through couriers.

December 6, 2002: The United States urges the United Nations weapons
inspection team to bribe Iraqi scientists.

December 6, 2002: Demetrius Perricos of the United Nations weapons 
inspection team condemns the United States for trying to control the
team's actions, saying that "the people who sent us here are the
international community. We're not serving the US. We're not serving
the UK". Perricos also demands that Bush release whatever hard evidence
Bush claims to have confirming Iraq's ownership of weapons of mass
destruction, saying that "what we're getting and what President Bush
may be getting is very different, to put it mildly".

December 6, 2002: Iraq announces that "we have no weapons of mass destruction
at all".

December 6, 2002: al Qaeda announces that it has formed a group to
help Islamic Resistance destroy Israel, and urges Islamic Resistance
and the Palestinian Authority to stop fighting and instead coordinate
their attacks against "the Jewish invaders".

December 6, 2002: The Washinton Post prints excepts from recently
unsealed court documents proving that both Democratic and Republican
parties engage in massive and widespread bribery.

December 6, 2002: Federal forces raid the offices of Ptech software company,
which is owned by Saudi businessman Qassin al Kadi who has ties to al Qaeda.
The company has provided organization management products to the federal
government. The Department of Justice announces that "media characterizations
of this as a terrorist investigation are premature" and that "there is
no reason to believe that the software has any secondary purpose or
malicious code".

December 6, 2002: Two United Nations workers are among 10 killed
during a battle between Israeli and Palestinian Authority forces.
The United Nations condemns Israel, stating that eight out of the
ten dead were unarmed civilians. Israel claims that at least five
of the dead were Islamic Resistance soldiers, and points to an
Islamic Resistance press release saying that six of its soldiers
were killed in the fighting. The Palestinian Authority admits that
two of the dead were its soldiers and announces that the battle was
"a new massacre...a continuation of massacres" and "Israeli terrorism
against our children, our women, and our holy shrines from Rafah to Jenin".
No mosques were damaged in the battle, even though mosque loudspeakers
called the populace to arms. Iran announces that every one of the dead
were civilians who were rounded up and massacred by Israeli forces to
prevent the Muslims from happily celebrating Eid el Fitr. Islamic Resistance
announces that "we are committed to continuing the holy war and martyrdom
operations until our land is liberated". United Nations Relief and
Works Agency Commissioner General Peter Hansen accuses Israel of
indiscriminately firing heavy weaponry into groups of unarmed civilians.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan condemns Israel for the
battle, saying that "most of those killed were civilians".

December 6, 2002: Following Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's statements
that al Qaeda has allied with Hizballah and the Palestinian movement,
Hizballah announces that "al Qaeda has no presence in Lebanon and there
is no relation between Hizballah and al Qaeda". Iran announces that
Sharon's announcement was one of many "evil schemes...designed jointly
by Israel and the United States" and "an obvious attempt to justify
impending plans to carry out atrocities in Gaza", and says that the
statement "could not prevent the freedom struggles of the Muslim militants
against Jews".

December 6, 2002: Chechen leader Akhmed Zakayev is arrested by United
Kingdom police upon his arrival in the country. Amnesty International
urges the UK not to extradite him to Russia due to "the widespread use
of torture and ill-treatment by the Russian authorities".

December 6, 2002: Russian President Vladimir Putin proposes China
and India join Russia an a "strategic triangle" alliance.

December 6, 2002: The New Republic reports that people under consideration
to replace Paul O'Neill as Treasury Secretary include "such economic
snake-oil salesmen as Steve Forbes, Dick Armey, and Phil Gramm".

December 6, 2002: Former United Nations weapons inspector Bill Tierney
says about Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein "I have no doubt that he has nukes."

December 6, 2002, Unrelated: French forces discover a mass grave in
Ferkessedougou, in the north of Cote D'Ivoire. Rebels claim that government
forces "killed everyone in the village". Cote D'Ivoire claims that "this
can only be a crime committed by the rebellion".

December 6, 2002: Judge J. Frederick Motz says that Microsoft's business
tactics are like the tactics of Olympic figure-skater Tonya Harding,
who hired a thug to break the kneecaps of rival skater Nancy Kerrigan.

December 6, 2002: The Washington Times accuses Senator Mary Landrieu of
trying to buy military votes by handing out coupons for $10 of food
to military servicemen while she is involved in special runoff election.
The coupons are produced by the Armed Services Foundation, a private
organization, and are given to Senators from both parties to give
to servicemen before Thankgiving. The Federal Election Commission
says that the giveaway is acceptable.

December 6, 2002, Unrelated: The National Aeronautics and Space
Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Royal Observatory
of Belgium report that the recent shift in the Earth's gravity field
is caused by the transfer of water from subpolar glaciers to the
equatorial oceans as global warming is causing the glaciers to melt.

December 2002: al Qaeda spokesman Abu Ghaith takes credit for
bombing the Paradise hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, announces that 
"the Jewish-Crusader coalition will not be safe anywhere from
Mujahideen attacks", and promises that "the next phase will witness
bigger and more lethal operations".

December 7, 2002: The Sydney Morning Herald reports that al Qaeda has
decentralized and is now working through many varied terrorist groups,
located around the world, which it had previously given support to.

December 7, 2002: Iraq urges the Kuwaiti people to rebel against their
government and join an alliance to repel the United States' coming invasion.
Iraq also apologizes to Kuwait for invading it in 1991 and blames the
invasion on the United States.

December 7, 2002: Iraq delivers a 11,800 page document on its weapons
of mass destruction capabilities to the United Nations, and announces
that it has no weapons of mass destruction. The report consists of
2081 pages on Iraq's nuclear capabilities, 1037 pages on Iraq's
chemical capabilities with a 841-page set of supporting documents on
Iraq's chemical capabilities, 528 pages on Iraq's biological capabilities
with a 732-page set of supporting documents, an additional section
of undetermined length on Iraq's biological research, and 1240 pages
on Iraq's ballistic missile capabilities with a 5074-page set of
supporting documents. The report fails to mention the weapons
and materials found and catalogued by United Nations inspectors
prior to the inspectors' being barred from the country in 1998.

December 7, 2002: An Iranian oil tanker and a US Navy destroyer collide,
causing minor damage to the destroyer.

December 7, 2002: The Palestinian Authority announces that Israel
has sent spies to the Gaza Strip to pretend to be an al Qaeda cell.

December 7, 2002, Unrelated: Bombs explode in several movie theatres
in Mymensingh, Bangladesh, killing over 15.

December 7, 2002, Unrelated: Threatens to initiate sanctions against
Swaziland if King Mswati buys a jet during a famine, shortly after
Mswati forced 200 families off their land to grant it to his brother. 

December 8, 2002: The Telegraph reports that Iraq has hidden its 
top scientists from the United Nations inspection team.

December 8, 2002: The Associated Press reports that explosions have
been occuring daily between 7AM and 11PM at the Naval Observatory,
which is Vice President Cheney's residence, for the past two months,
and that Observatory officials say that the top-secret construction
could last another eight months and is on a "fast track" so work 
can not be limited to the daytime.

December 8, 2002: The British and Israeli embassies and the US
Public Affairs office in Nairobi, Kenya, are closed due to threats
of terrorism.

December 9, 2002: Nominates Chessie Seaboard railroad corporation
chief executive John Snow as Secretary of the Treasury. A number
of unnamed conservatives are said to have written Bush in protest,
as Snow once led the Business Roundtable, which has called for reducing
taxes on the poor, and Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which
did not support Bush's tax cut plan.

December 9, 2002: The Washington Times reports that military commanders
in Afghanistan are refusing to go on search-and-destroy missions
against suspected al Qaeda positions because of concerns that the
missions are "too dangerous", and are assuming that intelligence
on enemy movements is too questionable to move on.

December 9, 2002: United Press International reports that the United States
is supporting the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq,
a group with strong ties to the extremist wing of the Iranian government.

December 9, 2002: Porter Township, Pennsylvania, declares that the
Supreme Court's recognition of corporations as persons, with all the
rights thereof, does not apply within the township. The declaration
was in response to a lawsuit by a number of corporations which had
sued the township to abolish a law that had set environmental standards
for sewage used as fertilizer, in which the corporations claimed that
the law was a violation of basic human rights.

December 10, 2002: Appoints former New York Stock Exchange chairman
William H. Donaldson as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

December 10, 2002: Senator Richard Shelby says that "some of the people
on the committee [investigating the government's preparedness for
the September 11 attacks] don't want to assign the blame or the
accountability".

December 10, 2002, Unrelated: Michelangelo Signorile reports that
Washington Times Assistant National Editor Robert Stacy McCain 
has said in various public forums that "the media now force interracial
marriages into the public mind...rational people react to these
images with an altogether natural revulsion...THIS IS NOT RACISM,
no matter what Madison Avenue Hollywood, and Washington tell us",
and "the civil rights movement, to a great extent, represented a direct
assault on tradition and law". One of the forums where McCain made
these statements, Free Republic, deletes them after Signorile's article
is published. Signorile also writes that McCain is a member of the
League of the South whose leader Michael Hill has written "THE SOUTH
WAS RIGHT...NO APOLOGIES FOR SLAVERY should be made. In both the Old
and New Testaments slavery is sanctioned and regulated according to
God's word. Thus, when practiced in accord with Holy Scripture, it
is NOT A SIN...what we are really upholding is GOD'S WORD".

December 2002: Federal Judge John Bates declares that Congress
has no Constitutional right to investigate possible criminal acts
of the Executive branch, throwing out the General Accounting Office's
lawsuit against Vice President Dick Cheney. Bates was appointed by Bush
and had been among Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's legal team when
Starr successfully argued that the separation of powers does not allow
the Executive branch to deny Congress information relating to possible
criminal acts of the Executive branch. Comptroller General David Walker
later says that Bates "made up" some of the facts in the ruling.

December 2002: New York Times columnist Paul Krugman accuses the Republican
Party of being racist for hiring black people to hold signs in black
neighbourhoods urging people to vote against the Democratic candidate.

December 2002: Weekly Standard columnist Fred Barnes says that talk show
host Rush Limbaugh has never "abused or demonized" Senator Tom Daschle.
Limbaugh has said outright that Daschle is Satan.

December 2002: Columnist David Frum accuses John Kerry of being
a "Wahhabi Democrat", in reference to the terrorism-promoting sect
of Islam, and accuses Kerry of wanting to "return to ancient orthodoxies
on everything from foreign policy...to energy". Frum later apologizes
for the reference. 

December 2002: Spanish warships sieze a North Korean vessel carrying
a hidden cargo of 15 Scud medium-range missiles and unnamed chemicals
destined for Yemen, and give the ship to the United States. The US
releases the ship to Yemen after Yemen declares that the cargo was
purchased for its army in 1999 and that Yemen has no intentions of
further military trade with North Korea.

December 2002: Colombian President Alvaro Uribe escapes an assissination
attempt in Bogota. Police defuse a number of car bombs. The BBC reports
that this is the twelfth assassination attempt Uribe has escaped since
his inauguration four months ago.

December 2002: United Airlines files for bankruptcy.

December 2002: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency removes
the Total Information Awareness Program's members' biographies from
its public archives.

December 2002: The United States Agency for International Development
promises to track Palestinian Authority tax revenues that Israel has
seized under the fear that the PA would use the money to purchase weapons.

December 2002, Unrelated: Former President Jimmy Carter announces that
the Israeli-Arab conflict is "the most significant threat to world peace
in the world".

December 2002: Conservative News reports that people who condemned
Senator Trent Lott for calling for a return to segregationist values
are hypocrites for not having condemned Senator Robert Byrd for last
year calling some members of his own race "white niggers". Newsmax
also reports this and says that Byrd's statement was more hostile
to blacks than Lott's was and that Bill Clinton is a racist because
his brother Roger once called black people "niggers" in 1984.

December 2002: Indonesian Muslim leader Abu Bakar Bashir threatens
that God will destroy Australia instantly if Australia fights against
terrorism, and praises the bombing of civilians as "a noble thing,
a holy struggle of high value".

December 2002: Open Secrets reports that 33 of the people Bush has
appointed as ambassadors to foreign nations had donated money
to Bush's Presidential campaign.

December 2002: Over twenty Chicago airport security workers are arrested
and 600 are suspended for falsifying their Social Security numbers on
their job applications.

December 2002: The Associated Press reports that the F-22 Raptor program
is fraught with cost overruns, and that the airplane's onboard computer
system becomes unstable and requires rebooting every few hours. 

December 2002: Former State Department worker Daniel Ellsberg, who
leaked the Pentagon Papers proving that the Tongking Gulf incident which
the United States used as excuse to enter the Vietnam War was faked,
says that "I am using every opportunity to say to people in the government
who are in the position that I was then, and who know that their president
is lying us into a wrongful and reckless war, to do what I wish I had done
in 1964-65: to go to Congress and the press with documents and tell the truth.
That would be a risk, but there are times when big risks are worth that
to save a lot of lives."

December 2002: A Bellbrook, Ohio high school student is arrested and
interrogated by Secret Service agents for wearing a T-shirt with
a picture of crosshairs on Bush's forehead.

December 2002: Japanese police raid the offices of Seishin Enterprise
for selling mill crushers to Iran which could be used to produce
solid fuel for missiles.

December 2002: At the Fifth Asian and Pacific Population Conference,
the United States refuses to allow the conference to produce a document
which promotes "reproducted health services" or recognizes "reproductive
rights" or "sexual rights"  because these phrases could be interpreted
as "abortion". The United States also demands the conference pass
a resolution against the use of condoms. The US loses both measures
by votes of 31-1 and 32-1.

December 2002: One soldier is killed and over a hundred sickened
by Streptococcus Group A bacteria at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot
in San Diego.

December 2002: Attorney General John Ashcroft orders all male immigrants
above 15 years of age from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and Syria to
reregister with Immigration and Naturalization Service authorities
by December 16; and those from Afghanistan, Armenia, Algeria, Bahrain,
Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia,
Somalia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen to to reregister
by January 10. The Department of Justice later rescinds the order
for Armenians to reregister. The Department later rescinds the rescinding.

December 2002: The Information Awareness Office removes from its public
Web site its logo, that of a giant spaceborne Masonic pyramid shining
a ray of light over the Earth.

December 11, 2002: Ambassador to the United Nations John Negroponte
declares that the United States has a right to the full Iraqi declaration
of capabilities that was delivered to the United Nations. The United Nations
complies and grants a copy to the five permanent members of the Security
Council. The United States siezes this copy meant for the Security Council
in order to make their own copy "in secure surroundings". The United States
then delivers to the rest of the Security Council a censored version
with over 8000 pages missing.

December 11, 2002, Unrelated: The Hague War Crimes Tribunal decides
that journalists are not required to divulge their sources to the court.

December 11, 2002: Senator Graham reports that there is evidence "foreign
governments [were] involved in facilitating the activities of at least
some of the terrorists in the United States. I am stunned that we have
not done a better job of pursuing that to determine if other terrorists
received similar support, and even more important, if the infrastructure
of a foreign government assisting terrorists still exists for the current
generation of terrorists who are here planning the next plots. To me that
is an extremely significant issue and most of that information is classified,
I think overly-classified. I believe the American people should know the
extent of the challenge that we face in terms of foreign government
involvement. That would motivate the government to take action."

December 11, 2002: An anti-ballistic missile test fails as the missile
does not detach from its booster rocket. The several previous tests have
been successful.

December 11, 2002: Chile and the United States enter into a treaty to
eliminate tariffs on 85% of goods traded between the countries.

December 11, 2002: United States Ambassador to Germany Daniel Coats
says that there is still a very poor relationship between the countries.

December 11, 2002: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas condemns
the Virginia Supreme Court's decision last November that burning
a cross on a black man's yard is an act of free speech.

December 11, 2002: The Federal Communications Commission proposes allowing
media companies to each own as much as 45% of the national market. The
current limit is 30%.

December 11, 2002: The Department of Justice announces its opposition
to Northrup Grumman aerospace company's planned purchase of
Thompson Ramo Wooldridge aerospace company.

December 11, 2002, Unrelated: An Army helicopter crashes during
training in Honduras, killing five soldiers.

December 11, 2002, Unrelated: France sends more troops to Cote D'Ivoire
to "answer the need for protection of French nationals and foreigners,
for stability and securing of the cease fire", and condemns "the recourse
to the use of force...as well as outside interference". France has provided
logistical support to the Cote D'Ivoire government and stood aside as
the government unilaterally broke the cease fire and attacked rebel forces.

December 11, 2002, Unrelated: Iranian judiciary spokesman Hussain Mir
Mohammad Sadeghi resigns in protest of the death sentence of reporter
Hashem Aghajari.

December 12, 2002: Issues an executive order allowing the government
to give money to religious groups for recruitment.

December 12, 2002: Announces that he will force all members of the military
to be vaccinated against smallpox.

December 12, 2002: North Korea announces that it is restarting its
nuclear weapons program.

December 12, 2002: Cable News Network reports that Iran has
a nuclear weapons program, quoting US intelligence as stating that
Iran is building heavy water and uranium enrichment plants which are
similar in design to those used in Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.

December 12, 2002: The United States apologizes to Spain for encouraging
Spain to sieze a North Korean vessel smuggling arms to Yemen. Spanish
politicians demand more information about the operation from the US.
North Korea accuses the US of engaging in piracy by having Spain sieze
the ship, which was flying without a flag.

December 12, 2002: Condemns Trent Lott for endorsing Senator Strom Thurmond's
1948 Presidential campaign, saying that "every day our nation was
segregated was a day that America was unfaithful to our founding ideals".
Lott again apologizes for his statement. Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer
says that Bush does not think Lott should step down from his position
as the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate.

December 12, 2002: Appoints former Goldman Sachs bank chairman
Stephen Friedman as economic advisor. 

December 12, 2002: Iraq cancels a $3.7 billion oil field development plan
with Russian energy company Lukoil.

December 12, 2002: Cuba reports that actors Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte
have accused Bush of pressuring motion picture companies to produce war movies
and have claimed that movies released recently are "molded by the interests
of the Pentagon and the White House".

December 12, 2002, Unrelated: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez fires
officers of the state oil company who have joined in the nationwide
strike against his rule, and declares that "we are in a war".

December 12, 2002, Unrelated: Communist rebels order all schools shut
down in Nepal in protest of the existence of private education services.
26,000 schools follow the order.

December 12, 2002: Kathy Gannon of the Associated Press reports that
al Qaeda is training suicide bombers in Pakistan and is promising
to pay $50,000 to the families of such bombers. Pakistan says that
it is impossible for terrorists to establish training camps in Pakistan.

December 12, 2002: Vice President Dick Cheney's lawyer David S. Addington
threatens to sue The White House, a parody of the President's Web site.

December 13, 2002: Announces that he will receive the same smallpox
vaccination that he is ordering all military personnel to take.

December 13, 2002: Issues an Executive Order excempting the Air Force
from releasing classified information about pollution at Groom Lake
Air Force Base, claiming that this order is "in the paramount interest
of the United States". Groom Lake AFB is the infamous secret base,
also known as "Area 51", where the Blackbird and Nighthawk were tested.
During the Clinton administration, a number of workers at the base filed
a number of lawsuits against the Air Force after they were sickened with
cancer they claimed was caused by failure to properly dispose of hazardous
waste. At least one of these lawsuits was thrown out of court after
the judge determined that the base did not exist and so the workers
had never worked there. The remaining lawsuits will be hampered by
this Order, which specifically mentions two of the suits, since the fact
of the pollution and the nature of the workers' duties are classified. 

December 13, 2002: The United States accuses Iraq of leaving out
important information from its declaration of capabilities, including
the locations of weapons of mass destruction known to exist from prior
United Nations investigations and Iraq's recent attempts to purchase
material that could be used to create weapons of mass destruction.

December 13, 2002: North Korea announces that the seizure of a
flagless smuggling ship was a "deliberate military provocation"
and that talks between the US and South Korea to discuss reactions
to North Korea's reinstatement of its nuclear program are a "declaration
of war".

December 13, 2002: Iran announces that it has no nuclear weapons program
and invites the United States to send inspectors. The United Nations
announces that it will be sending inspectors to the sites.

December 13, 2002: Secretary of State Colin Powell announces that the US
has pledged $29 million to promote democracy in the Middle East.

December 13, 2002: A federal judge declares that the energy companies
defrauded California of $1.8 billion. California complains that the judge
threw out almost all of the state's evidence and alleges that the
companies defrauded the state for $9 billion.

December 13, 2002: Henry Kissinger steps down from the commission
investigating the government's preparedness for the September 11 attacks
because being on the commission would require him to identify who has
paid for his consulting recently.

December 13, 2002, Unrelated: Argentina refuses to make any additional
payments on its World Bank loan, accusing the World Bank of requiring
Argentina to make policies which have caused the country's depression.

December 13, 2002: The United Nations Security Council declares that
the attacks on Israeli civilians in Mombasa, Kenya on November 28
were "acts of terror". Syria votes against the resolution and condemns
it for mentioning Israel.

December 13, 2002: Turkey's parliament changes the Constitution to
allow people found guilty of inciting religious hatred to become
involved in politics.

December 13, 2002, Unrelated: Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe announces
that white citizens are "enemies among us...enemies of our government,
enemies of our Party, enemies of our people".

December 13, 2002, Unrelated: Cote D'Ivoire's rebels threaten to attack
French troops in the region. France dispatches reinforcements.

December 14, 2002: After Bush pressures the European Union to
hasten Turkey's admission, the EU cancels talks on Turkey's admission
and delays a review of Turkey's application for two years.

December 14, 2002: After Pakistan fails to bring any charges against
Jaish-I-Mohammed leader Maulana Masood Azhar, the High Court of Lahore
declares that he cannot be held on house arrest without charge
and orders his release. Azhar announces that he is "a peace loving
person, and just want to preach Islam".

December 14, 2002: Jordan reports arresting two al Qaeda members
suspected of assassinating United States Agency for International
Development officer Laurence Foley.

December 14, 2002, Unrelated: North Korea condemns the United States
for allowing the movie "Die Another Day" to be released, stating that
the latest film in the James Bond series "clearly proves" that the
United States is "the root cause of all disasters and misfortune
of the Korean nation" and "an empire of evil" while the film itself
is a "dirty and cursed burlesque aimed to slander" and "insult the
Korean nation" by "inciting interKorean confrontation, groundlessly
despising and insulting the Korean nation, and malignantly desecrating
even religion".

December 14, 2002, Unrelated: Syrian President Bashar Assad says
that Islamic Resistance and Islamic Jihad "espouse the views
of...300 million Arabs and over a billion Muslims".

December 14, 2002: British police arrest six people accused
of being terrorists from the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party,
a Turkish Communist group.

December 14, 2002: United States Assistant Secretary of State
for South Asia Christina Rocca demands Nepal's Communist rebels
surrender and threatens to put the Communists on an international
list of terrorist groups.

December 14, 2002: Indian police discover a Pakistani Army Anza Mk1
anti-aircraft missile in a terrorist hideout in Kupwara. Also, Indian
police shoot and kill two people who drove through a roadblock in Delhi
and recover a large amount of weapons and ammunition in their vehicle.

December 14, 2002: The Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that
"close to 100" terrorist attacks around the world have been prevented
by international security cooperation since September 11, 2001.

December 14, 2002: Over 300,000 people rally in South Korea to
demand a new trial for two United States soldiers who were aquitted
in a single day of responsibility for running over and killing two
schoolgirls in June.

December 14, 2002, Unrelated: A bomb explodes at a restaurant
frequented by legislators in Bogota, Colombia, injuring many people.
Senator German Vargas Lleras is wounded by a bomb at his office.

December 14, 2002, Unrelated: Saskatechewan Indian Nations Senator
and former Chief as well as former Chief of the Assembly of First Nations
David Ahenakew praises Adolph Hitler for killing six million Jewish
civilians during World War 2, saying that "the Jews damn near owned
all of Germany prior to the war. That's how Hitler came in. He was
going to make damn sure that the Jews didn't take over Germany or Europe.
That's why he fried six million of these guys. Jews would have owned
the whole god-damned world, and look what they're doing. They're killing
people in Arab countries...I saw the Jews kill people in Egypt while
I was there...I saw Israel fucking dominate everything. How do you get
rid of a disease like that, that's going to take over, that's going
to dominate?" The current Chief of the Assembly of First Nations
condemns the remarks.

December 14, 2002, Unrelated: Nicaragua orders Dow Chemical, Shell Oil,
and Standard Fruit to pay $490 million to over 500 fieldworkers poisoned
by the companies' illegal use of Nemagon pesticide.

December 15, 2002: Terrorist mastermind Yasser Arafat demands that
terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden stop proclaiming support for
Arafat's terrorist movement, saying that bin Laden is "trying to
hide behind the Palestinian cause" and that he "never helped us,
he was working in another completely different area and against
our interests".

December 15, 2002: Pakistan reports arresting three people planning
to assassinate United States diplomats. One of the prisoners, Asif Zaheer,
is said to have planned the bombing of French naval engineers in May.

December 15, 2002: Former President Bill Clinton threatens to destroy
North Korea's nuclear reactors unless it ends its nuclear weapons program.

December 15, 2002: North Korea orders the United Nations International
Atomic Energy Agency to remove surveillance equipment from North Korea's
nuclear facilities.

December 16 2002: The Supreme Court requests the opinion of President Bush
in the appeal of an anti-abortion group which encouraged the murder
of doctors and was successfully sued for racketeering.

December 15 2002: MusliMedia International, aka Crescent International,
aka the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought, reports that "the real
axis of evil, comprised of the US, Israel, and India, is getting
more involved in Afghanistan. Although the Americans have in effect
occupied Afghanistan, they have failed to subdue the Afghans;
the Indians have sneaked in by such ruses as reconstruction projects
and consulates in cities such as Qandahar, Jalalabad and Herat.
Now the Israelis have also got a foothold in the country. Several
hundred Israeli commandos and Mossad agents are reportedly operating
in Afghanistan...as a result of the Israelis' involvement in Afghanistan,
Karzai will now also be expected to recognize Israel...the Israelis
are positioning themselves for a possible strike on Pakistan's nuclear
installations...The only jobs available in Kabul are as translators,
drivers and so forth, serving the occupiers...the maligned burqa is
still very much part of customary womens' dress. It is part of Afghan
culture; the Taliban merely enforced it with greater vigor, but women
wear it willingly to protect themselves from the taunts of men.
The women in Kabul who wear skirts, blouses and heavy make-up are
not typical Afghan women...since the Taliban left, rape of women has
become widespread...[the Afghan people] did not want to listen to music
or to shave their beards...Afgahnistan today is not only under American
military occupation but also Indian and Israeli occupation. So much for
the liberation of Afghanstian."

December 15, 2002: Senator Don Nickles, the Assistant Majority Leader,
urges Majority Leader Trent Lott to resign. 

December 15, 2002: Lieutenant Colonel Stevan Boylan, Eighth Army head
of public affairs, is attacked and stabbed by South Koreans in Seoul.

December 15, 2002, Unrelated: Protesters form a blockade around oil
tankers in Venezuela as police seize control of the ships.

December 15, 2002, Unrelated: Colombian police subcommander Jaime Cordero
escapes an assassination attempt at his home in Arauca.

December 15, 2002, Unrelated: French forces are ordered to "preserve
stability" against rebel forces in Cote D'Ivoire.

December 16, 2002: Hundreds of Muslim immigrants forced to report
to Immigration and Naturalization Service offices for reregistration
are arrested. The United States announces that the registration drive
has been a success, and most media sources from the US do not report
that any of the registrants were jailed.

December 16, 2002: The United States bombs Iraqi air defense positions.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports that the US has been bombing
Iraq for the past two days as well, but this was not reported in
most major news sources.

December 16, 2002: Appoints former New Jersey Governor and President
of Drew University Tom Kean to lead the commission investigating
the government's preparedness for the September 11 attacks.

December 16, 2002: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation quotes an unnamed
Turkish newspaper as saying that the United States has moved military
equipment into Kurdish-controlled regions of Iraq.

December 16, 2002: The Department of Justice and the Federal Election
Commission ask the federal court determining the Constitutionality
of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act to keep lobbyists' briefs
secret from the public.

December 16, 2002: Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Joe Allbaugh
announces that he will resign in March to work on Bush's reelection campaign.

December 16, 2002: The Environmental Protection Agency weakens regulations
of water pollution from livestock farms.

December 16, 2002: Senator Jesse Helms criticizes US government broadcasts
in Iran for playing popular music, saying that the music "likely will
insult the cultural sensitivites of Iranians, as well as their intelligence".

December 16, 2002: Conservative News reports that no true Catholic
supports a woman's right to abortion. Also, Conservative News highlights
the conservative group Public Advocate of the United States, which has
praised Senator Trent Lott's statements endorsing segregation as "positive
remarks" and condemned criticism of Lott's recent and past statements
supporting segregation as "political correctness run amok" of the type
that would bar people from admitting that religious holidays exist
in private conversation.

December 17, 2002: Orders the deployment of an anti-ballistic missile
defense system. Asks Britain to allow the United States to use the
Royal Air Force's early warning station at Fylingdales.

December 17, 2002: The United Nations reports that al Qaeda has
reestablished training camps in Afghanistan and that not enough
has been done internationally to stop al Qaeda.

December 17, 2002: Tageszeitung reports that Iraq's declaration of
capabilities shows that German corporations had been Iraq's main
supporter of infrastructure and material for producing weapons
of mass destruction, and that Germany offered military support
to Iraq through the prior year despite a United Nations embargo.
Germany announces that it has not yet received the report to verify
the claims. Continuing reports list a number of corporations and
organizations as having supplied Iraq in violation of the embargo,
including from the United States: Alcolac, American Type Culture Collection,
Axel Electronics, Bechtel, Canberra Industries, Carl Zeiss, Consarc,
Cerberus, Dupont, Eastman Kodak, Electronic Associates,
EZ Logic Data Systems, Finnigan, Hewlett Packard, International
Computer Systems, Leybold Vacuum Systems, Honeywell, Rockwell, Semetex,
Spectra, Sperry, Tektronix, Texas Instruments Coating, and Unisys;
from the United Kingdom, Ali Ashour Daghir, C. Plath, Endshire
Export Marketing, Euromac, International Computer, International
Signal Control, Inwako, Matrix Churchill, MEED International, Walter Somers,
Terex, TMG Engineering, XYY Options, the Technology Development Group
and the International Military Services branch of the Ministry of Defense;
from Belgium, Boehler Edelstahl, NU Kraft, OIP Instrubel,
Phillips Petroleum, Poudries Reunies Belge, Sebatra, and 
Space Research Corporation; from the Peoples' Republic of China,
Huawei Technologies, Wanbao Engineering, and China State Missile Company;
from France, Aerospatiale and Matra Espace, Cerbag, Protec, Sciaky,
Thales Group, Thomson, the General Society for New Techniques, and 
the Commission for Atomic Energy; from Japan, Fanuc, Hammamatsu Photonics,
NEC, Osaka, and Waida; from the Netherlands, Delft Instruments, KBS Holland,
and Melchemie; from Spain, Donabat, Treblam, and Zayer; from Sweden,
ABB and Saab-Scania; and from Russia, Amsar Trading, Aviatin Trading House,
Livinfest, Mars Rotor, Niikhism, and the Soviet State Missile Company.

December 17, 2002: The Organization of American States passes, on
a 32-0 vote with two abstaining, a resolution supporting Venezuela's
government against the strikers demanding Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's
overthrow. The day before, the United States had accused Venezuela of
deliberately shooting peaceful protestors and newsmen, and had
called for a resolution urging independent branches of Venezuela's
government to act against Chavez.

December 17, 2002: DefenseWatch (aka Soldiers For the Truth) editor
Ralph Omholt is subpoenaed by a federal grand jury for purchasing
a B-737 aircraft flight training manual. Omholt, who is also a pilot
licensed to fly the B-737, reports that the seller had been accused
of creating a national security threat.

December 17, 2002: Two US soldiers and an Afghan interpretor are wounded
in a grenade attack in Kabul, Afghanistan.

December 17, 2002: French police arrest 3 Algerians suspected of
planning a terrorist attack.

December 17, 2002: The city of Oakland, California, passes a resolution
urging California's Congressmen to repeal the USA Patriot Act.

December 17, 2002: Conservative News reports that the nationwide upset
at Senator Lott's remarks supporting segregation is just a conspiracy
by the Congressional Black Caucus, and demands that the Caucus condemn 
Senator Robert Byrd for last year calling some of his own race "white niggers".

December 17, 2002: Former President Bill Clinton condemns Republicans
as "hypocritical" for condemning Senator Trent Lott's statements
supporting segregation, saying that "what they are really upset about
is that he made public their strategy. They try to suppress black voting,
they ran on the Confederate flag in Georgia and South Carolina, and
from top to bottom the Republicans supported it...he just embarrassed them
by saying in Washington what they do on the back roads every day".

December 17, 2002, Unrelated: A jury determines that Elcomsoft
software corporation did not violate the Digital Millenium Copyright
Act by producing software which could read documents saved in
Adobe's proprietary "E-Book" format.

December 17, 2002, Unrelated: Malaysia bans Toyota car advertisements
which picture US movie actor Brad Pitt because the ads are "an insult
to Asians" by showing a Westerner.

December 18, 2002: Announces that there are no plans for war with Iraq.

December 18, 2002: Protests break out in Los Angeles as hundreds
of Muslims arrested on December 16 while complying with residency laws
are still imprisoned.

December 18, 2002: The New York Times reports that when Yemeni President
Ali Abdullah Saleh had offered to negotiate peace between Iraq
and the United States last year, using an Arab proverb that if you
put a cat into a cage it can turn into a lion, Bush had responded
that "the only way to cure the cat is to cut off its head".

December 18, 2002: Five employees of InfoCom, all brothers working
in Richardson, Texas, are arrested for trading with Libya and Syria.
Attorney General John Ashcroft accuses them of being "financiers
of terror". One of the arrested, Ghassan Elashi, was director of the
Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a front for the
Islamic Resistance terrorist organization.

December 18, 2002: Tom Paine magazine offers a $10,000 reward for
the name of the Congressman who added the provision to the Homeland
Security bill freeing Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company from liability
for its allegedly retartation-causing childrens' vaccine.

December 18, 2002: Mississippi Lieutenant Governor Amy Tuck
accuses Democrats of supporting segregation as well as Lott,
saying "As Jesus said, let him without sin cast the first stone."

December 18, 2002: The Onion, a satirical paper, reports that Bush
has reduced the Bill of Rights from ten to six. The joke report also
mentions Attorney General John Ashcroft praising the new rights Bush
has added to the Constitution, including "the right to be protected by
soldiers quartered in one's home, the guarantee that activities not
specifically delegated to the states and the people will be carried out
by the federal government, and freedom of Judeo-Christian activity
and non-combative speech". The article mentions Senator Larry Craig
as a supporter for such an evisceration of the Constituion.

December 18, 2002, Unrelated: Former Congressional Representative
and avowed racist David Duke is found guilty of embezzling campaign
contributions and evading taxes.

December 18, 2002: Conseco insurance company files for bankruptcy.

December 18, 2002, Unrelated: Zogby announces the results of a poll
showing that college seniors today have less "general culture knowledge"
than high school seniors did in 1955, having tested about 400 students
on 12 cultural and geographical questions.

December 18, 2002, Unrelated: Venezuela's Supreme Court orders President
Hugo Chavez to return Caracas police to civilian control.

December 18, 2002, Unrelated: Russian President Putin fires General
Gennady Troshev, commander of Russian operations in Chechnya, after
Troshev refuses to be redeployed to Siberia. Troshev had accused
Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov of sabotaging Russian operations
in Chechnya and had demanded President Putin fire either of the two.
Russia fires Lieutenant General Yevgeny Bolkhovitin, another leader
of the Chechnya campaign.

December 19, 2002: United Nations chief weapons inspector Hans Blix
says that Iraq failed to include important information in its declaration
of capabilities, saying that "An opportunity was missed...to give us
a lot of evidence".

December 19, 2002: Britain announces that Iraq's failure to comply
with the United Nations' demand for full disclosure of its weapons
of mass destruction capabilities is not grounds for war with Iraq.

December 19, 2002: A chemical warehouse in Karachi, Pakistan explodes,
killing 5. One of the dead was wanted for participating in the murder
of Wall Street Journal bureau chief Daniel Pearl. Another is Pakistan's
most-wanted terrorist Asif Ramzi, leader of the Lashkar e-Jhangvi.

December 19, 2002: Pakistan arrests nine suspected al Qaeda members,
including two Canadian citizen and three United States citizens. The
United States Federal Bureau of Investigation assisted in the raid.
All of the arrested were members of the same family. Gunfire was exchanged
between police and guards at the family's private home.

December 19, 2002: Dan Plesch of the Guardian reports that "several
US-led attacks...have been ineffective, suffered outright defeat,
or resulted in disaster. These failures have led the US to keep its
forces mostly inside their bases: at Khost and Kandahar they are
under attack almost daily from missiles and machine guns". The report
states that the attack on the Shah e-Kot region south of Gardez in
March was defeated by al Qaeda intelligence which had infiltrated
Afghan forces participating in the attack, and "at a dozen mountain
passes, al Qaeda attacked US and allied forces as they jumped from
their helicopters to take up what they thought would be their own
ambush positions. So intense was the enemy fire that for two days
the US could not fly in helicopters to support its own troops, who
remained pinned down in vicious fighting...After proclaiming the
operation a complete success, the US announced that no more operations
of this kind would be undertaken", that the 82nd Airborne Division's 
raids had the effect of "undoing in minutes six months of community
building. They went through villiages as if bin Laden was in every
house", and that "the 82nd...has reduced media access. One senior US
editor told me he had been prevented by his own organization from filing
reports on the futility and brutality of US operations". The report
goes on to suggest that the December 1 bombing in western Afghanistan
was done to defend US soldiers as they began establishing a regional
base. 

December 19, 2002, Unrelated: History professor Necip Hablemitoglu is
assassinated at his home in Ankara, Turkey. President Ahmet Necdet Sezer
condemns the killing as "a political crime". Hablemitoglu has recently
gained national prominence for speaking in support of secular government.

December 19, 2002: At the urging of terrorist groups, a general strike
is held in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir in protest
of the convictions of three people for helping plan the attack against
India's Parliament.

December 20, 2002: Judge Kevin McHugh orders two Pakistanis deported
from the United States even though the Immigration and Naturalization
Service has granted them permission to temporarily remain in the country
while their visa extension is being processed, saying that "After
September 11 the Attorney General [John Ashcroft] said anyone who is
in the country illegally has to go", and that "you're Muslim so you
don't have to worry about Christmas". The two are the husband and
stepfather of United States citizen Crystal Campbell, who when testified
that she and her husband indeed had plans for a Christmas celebration,
was rebuked by Judge McHugh that "That is your holiday, not his".

December 20, 2002: Senator Trent Lott resigns as Majority Leader
after pressure from Bush. The BBC reports erroneously that Lott
had resigned from the Senate.

December 20, 2002: A US soldier is killed while on patrol near Shkin
in eastern Afghanistan's Paktika province. General Richard Myers
denies that there has been any increase in al Qaeda's activities.

December 20, 2002: Federal Energy Regulatory Committee judge
Carmen Ana Cintron rules that there was no pressure by energy companies
on states to sign power contracts during the power crisis. The long-term
contracts require the states to purchase energy at higher than market rates,
and the power crisis suddenly ended as soon as the contracts were signed.
Employees at some of the energy companies have admitted that the
power crisis was manufactured by the intentional witholding of power.

December 20, 2002, Unrelated: Former Congressman Wayne Owens in found dead
on an Israeli beach. Some reports state that Owens, a strong supporter
of Israel during his career, was murdered by Israel's Mossad intelligence
agency. More reputable sources suggest he died of a heart attack.

December 21, 2002, Unrelated: China admits to holding democracy activist
Wang Bingzhang in prison on charges of engaging in violent terrorist
activities. Wang had disappeared while in Vietnam and there had been
a $10 million ransom demand for his freedom.

December 21, 2002: The United States forbids the World Trade Organization
from allowing poor countries to duplicate expensive drugs to treat
epidemics of HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis, saying that the proposed
ruling would also allow the duplication of drugs to treat lesser diseases
like asthma and diabetes. Medecins Sans Frontieres says that "this is
not just a failure of the Geneva talks, but of two years of negotiations".

December 21, 2002: The United States vetoes a United Nations Security Council
resolution accusing Israel of "the excessive and disproportionate use of force
in the Occupied Palestinian territories". The territories are Israeli land
under any fair reading of international law, and Israel's use of force
consists mainly of small numbers of foot soldiers defended by armoured
personnel carriers and battle tanks, with the occasional air-to-surface
missile used against enemy commanders, snipers, and clustered troop formations.
While Bulgaria and Cameroon abstained, the rest of the Security Council
had voted in favour of the resolution.

December 21, 2002: An ISAF helicopter crashes in Kabul, Afghanistan,
killing its crew of seven German soldiers and two children on the ground.

December 21, 2002: Communist rebels in the Philippines reject
the government's offer of a ceasefire.

December 21, 2002: Roh Moo-hyun, recently elected to be the next
President of South Korea, promises to "ease the tension on the
Korean peninsula which is clouded by North Korea's nuclear issue"
and promotes a "mature" relationship with the United States.

December 21, 2002: Two Yemeni policemen are killed in a gunfight
with al Qaeda soldiers in al Mukalla. The attackers escape even
though the police had surrounded the building they were in.

December 21, 2002: al Jazeera and Sayed newsmen report being arrested
and interrogated by the international forces in Afghanistan, who
mildly tortured the newsmen and demanded they tell the soldiers
where Osama bin Laden and Muhammad Omar are, after the newsmen
had been caught filming the results of a recent attack on the
International Security Assistance Force's main base. The newsmen report
being told that the soldiers were from the Netherlands. ISAF spokesman
Major Gordon MacKenzie defends the detention, saying that the public area
was off limits to newsmen and recalling the al Qaeda assassination
of Northern Alliance commander Ahmed Masood by a camera crew. 

December 21, 2002, Unrelated: French forces directly engage rebel
forces in Cote D'Ivoire. Each side claims the other fired first.
The French do not sustain any casualties in the battle.  Also,
The United Nations Security Council votes to condemn the rebels
for rebelling.

December 22, 2002: North Korea removes United Nations monitoring equipment
from its nuclear facilities.

December 22, 2002: French news reporter Patrick Bourrat is hit and killed
by a US tank in Kuwait.

December 22, 2002: Malaysia arrests two teachers who were holding
paramilitary training for Jemaah Islamiyah.

December 22, 2002: An Afghan military vehicle is hit by rocket fire
on the outskirts of Kandahar, killing one soldier.

December 22, 2002: Dafna Linzer of the Associated Press reports that
a Pakistani nuclear weapons scientist had offered Iraq assistance in
its nuclear weapons program during the Persian Gulf war of 1990-1991.
Pakistan condemns the report as "a blatant lie".

December 22, 2002, Unrelated: Euskadi Ta Azkatasuna terrorist leader
Ibon Fernandez Iradi escapes from prison in France. He is re-captured
a year later.

December 22, 2002, Unrelated: Turkmenistan expels Uzbekistan's ambassador,
accusing the ambassador of protecting persons behind the assassination
attempt on Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov.

December 22, 2002, Unrelated: Over 10,000 march in Hong Kong to support
proposed anti-sedition laws. A week ago, 50,000 had marched against
the legislation.

December 22, 2002, Unrelated: Bangladesh releases journalist Priscilla Raj,
who reports having been tortured by police. Raj had been arrested with
British journalists Leopoldo Bruno Sorrentino and Zaiba Naz Malik.

December 23, 2002: The Los Angeles Times reports that candidates for
an advisory panel at the National Institue on Drug Abuse were asked
whether they supported executing drug dealers, opposed womens' right
to abortion, and had voted for Bush.

December 23, 2002: The Washington Times reports that France has agreed
to send troops to join the invasion of Iraq.

December 23, 2002: Iraqi fighter jets enter the southern "no-fly zone"
and shoot down an unmanned US aircraft.

December 23, 2002: Senator Bill Frist is elected Majority Leader.
Senator Trent Lott, who recently resigned from the position after
a political outcry over his stated support of segregation, says
that "there are people in Washington who have been trying to nail me 
for a long time...When you're from Mississippi and you're a conservative
and you're a Christian, there are a lot of people that don't like that."

December 23, 2002: The British Broadcasting Corporation reports that
70% of Muslims polled in the United Kingdom believe that the
United States' battle against al Qaeda is in reality a war to destroy
Islam, 56% believe that al Qaeda was not behind the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks, 64% believe that al Qaeda was not behind the Bali
bombing, 8% would support terrorist attacks against Britain, and 37%
report being targets of discrimination since the September 11 attacks.
Muslim News editor Ahmed Versi says that Muslims have "difficulty
believing what Tony Blair says when the reality, since the Terrorism Bill,
is that the Muslim community is the target...of the 20-odd organizations
prohibited under the act, 16 to 18 are Muslim groups...it is also
interesting that there are no Jewish or Hindu groups among them."

December 23, 2002: Kelly Candaele and Peter Dreier of The Nation
report that Bush has cut heating subsidies for the poor by $300 million,
which would leave over 400,000 people without heat for the winter;
refused to implement a pay raise for federal workers which Congress had
passed because it would "interfere with our nation's ability to pursue
the war on terrorism"; and ended unemployment payments to women on
maternity leave.

December 23, 2002: The Christian Science Monitor reports that Bob Woodward
has reported that the strategy of allying with the Northern Alliance
to defeat the Taliban was Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet's
idea.

December 23, 2002: Conservative News reports that Senator Robert Byrd
is a racist for playing the role of Confederate General Paul Semmes
in the movie Gods and Generals.

December 23, 2002, Unrelated: Greenpeace reports that Dow Chemical
has sued 200 survivors of the Bhopal pollution of 1984 for $10,000
for "loss of work" by holding a two-hour rally to remember the event.
The article does not mention whether Dow is seeking this amount from
each worker or from all of them collectively, but suggests that Dow
is claiming the two-hour rally cost the company ten years' worth of
work per employee. It is not clear whether this report is one of a number
of satires about Dow and Bhopal which have fallen into the media recently,
but there seems to be nothing new of this sort from the satirist group RTMark.

December 23, 2002, Unrelated: An airplane crashes in Iran killing
43 passengers and crew, including a number of Ukrainian aircraft engineers.

December 23, 2002, Unrelated: The Boston Archdiocese argues in court
that the Constitution's recognition of the right to freely practice
religion should give the Catholic Church immunity from prosecution
or civil suit for allowing priests to molest children.

December 2002: Requests Congress pass a second raise in the
federal debt limit.

December 2002: The Federal Bureau of Investigation requests
colleges across the country provide the Bureau with the personal
information of all foreign-born students and teachers. Some college
spokesmen say that complying with the request would be a violation
of the law.

December 2002: Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist
Theodore Postel accuses the school of covering up faults in
the anti-ballistic missile system which Bush recently ordered the
deployment of.

December 2002: The National Cancer Institute, a division of the Department
of Health and Human Services, announces that abortions cause cancer.
This is a hoax invented by anti-womens-rights activists. 

December 2002: The Center for Disease Control, a division of the Department
of Health and Human Services, deletes from its public archives
the results of studies showing that educating children about preventing
sexually transmitted diseases does not cause children to engage in
sexual activity earlier than children who were not taught. The CDC also
deletes, from its fact sheet on condoms, instructions for how to
properly use condoms to lessen the risk of condom failure, and
now claims that there is no evidence that condoms prevent veneral disease.

December 2002: The Department of Labor ends the practice of counting
fired workers, with Deputy Assisatant Secretary Mason Bishop saying that
"we didn't see how this program was helping workers re-enter the
workforce...it's questionable what value this program has for workers."
Former President Bush had ended the same program after he was criticized
for the poor economy in 1992.

December 2002: Indonesia sentences two US citizens to four and five months
of prison for violating their visas to visit rebel-controlled areas.

December 24, 2002: Israel accuses Syria of hiding chemical and
biological weapons smuggled from Iraq by Iraqi agents. Syria
denies the accusations as being designed to "divert attention from
the chemical, nuclear and biological arsenal that Israel possesses."

December 24, 2002: The New York Times reports that "White House officials
are urging President Bush to propose cutting taxes on corporate dividends
for shareholders by about half".

December 24, 2002: Russian police arrest two men armed with explosives
at a shopping mall.

December 24, 2002: French police arrest four men suspected of planning
an attack on the Russian embassy. The suspects are reported to have
trained with Chechen rebels in the Pankisi Gorge and with al Qaeda.

December 24, 2002, Unrelated: A bomb explodes in Datu Piang, Mindano Island,
Philippines, killing Mayor Julieto Ando and 12 others including the city
treasurer and a council member. The government blames the Moro Islamic
Liberation Front terrorist group. The MILF denies that it was behind
the attack, stating that "the Mayor is not our enemy" and that
relatives of MILF leaders were harmed in the attack.

December 24, 2002: The government of the Northwest Frontier Province
of Pakistan orders the arrest of movie theatre owners and the destruction
of films which offend Islam.

December 24, 2002, Unrelated: Columnist Mona Charen reports that a recent
National Endowment of the Humanities poll shows that "32% of Americans
believe that the President may suspend the Bill of Rights in wartime",
35% believe that the Consitution declares the government shall operate
on the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according
to his needs", 40% do not know that the Constitution outlines the
separation of powers between the different branches of government, and
18% believe that Germany was allied with the United States during World War 2.

December 25, 2002: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar announces an alliance of
his forces with al Qaeda.

December 25, 2002: The American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee,
Alliance of Iranian Americans, Council on American-Islamic Relations,
and National Council of Pakistani Americans file a lawsuit against
Attorney General John Ashcroft over the arrests of hundreds of Muslims
for complying with an order to visit Immigration and Naturalization
Service offices.

December 25, 2002: Russia announces it will hasten construction
of a nuclear reactor in Iran.

December 25, 2002, Unrelated: A grenade is thrown at a church
in Daska, Pakistan, killing three. Grenades are thrown into a church
in Maliopota, India, injuring several worshippers.

December 25, 2002, Unrelated: Vietnam sentences eight Montagnard
to ten years of prison for "undermining national unity" by attempting
to flee the country.

December 26, 2002: The Washington Post reports that the Central Intelligence
Agency has been torturing suspected terrorists in Afghanistan.

December 26, 2002: The United States and India make an agreement
not to extradite each others' citizens to the International Criminal Court.

December 26, 2002: North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary General
Lord George Robertson says that NATO has a "moral obligation" to
join the United States in a war against Iraq.

December 26, 2002: Niger denies that it has sold uranium to Iraq.

December 26, 2002: Colunmist Robert Novak reports that "National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice has insisted that Hizballah -- not al Qaeda -- is 
the world's most dangerous terrorist organization."

December 27, 2002: The Department of Justice announces that federal
courts have no power to determine whether the Department is breaking
the law.

December 27, 2002: North Korea orders International Atomic Energy Agency
weapons inspectors to leave the country. The Agency refuses to follow
the order.

December 27, 2002: The United States accuses North Korea of deploying
mounted machine guns to the Demilitarized Zone in violation of the
1953 ceasefire between North Korea and the United Nations.

December 27, 2002: United Nations weapons inspectors report that
an Iraqi metallurgist has given them evidence that Iraq has
a nuclear weapons program.

December 27, 2002: Truck bombs destroy the Chechen government building,
killing over 80. Russia blames Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov for
the attack. Maskhadov denies responsibility and urges his followers
to avoid fighting Russian forces, saying that "the Kremlin uses any
means to link Chechens to international terrorism. Our task is not
to prove them right."

December 27, 2002: Terrorists attack a Toronto Ventures mining company
truck on Mindanao Island in the Philippines, killing 12 people.

December 27, 2002: The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rules
that prisons cannot punish Muslim prisoners for praying on Friday,
the Muslim Sabbath.

December 27, 2002: Russia expels the United States Peace Corps
after finding 30 of 64 volunteers engaged in espionage.

December 27, 2002: Poland agrees to buy 48 F-16 fighter jets
from Lockheed-Martin.

December 27, 2002, Unrelated: Conservative News condemns as "2002's
most dubious news stories of the year" the facts that more people
in the United States are obese than were in previous generations,
that chemicals can leach from some plastics, that overfishing can
cause fish populations to shrink, and that city lights can make it
difficult to see stars in the night sky.

December 27, 2002: Communist forces attack militia positions in Columbia
while the militias are observing a cease-fire, killing 60 militiamen.

December 28, 2002: US forces arrest nine people near a rocket launching
site in Afghanistan.

December 28, 2002: The Federal Bureau of Investigation says that
five al Qaeda members have entered the United States and disappeared.
One of the photographs is that of a Pakistani jeweler who has never
visited the United States and was once deported from the United Arab
Emirates for traveling on a forged passport.

December 28, 2002: French police arrest an airport baggage handler
who had several guns and bombs in his vehicle. The next day, police
arrest the man who reported the arsenal. Two weeks later, police report
that the guns and bombs had been planted by feuding family members.

December 29, 2002: The New York Times reports that Saudi Arabia
will allow the United States to use its airspace for an attack on Iraq,
and to use Saudi bases to provide logistics for US forces. Saudi Arabia
denies the report.

December 29, 2002: Secretary of State Colin Powell announces that
the United States will not attack North Korea's nuclear weapons
production facilities, and that the United States plans to secure
Iraq's oil fields and increase oil production.

December 29, 2002: A terrorist attacks a Baptist hospital in Jibla, Yemen,
killing three US citizens. The attacker says the murders will bring him
closer to God.

December 30, 2002: Congressman Charles Rangel proposes making
military service mandatory for all young people in order to
make the Republicans, many of whom have no military experience
or children in the military, less willing to go to war. Rangel
is a veteran of the Korean war. A later report states that
only one Congressman has a child in the military.

December 31, 2002: Announces that the United States must invade Iraq
because "our economy is strong, it's resilient, and we've got to
continue to make it strong and resilient."

December 31, 2002: The Department of Transportation orders the
warrantless search of 10% of airline passengers' luggage.

December 31, 2002: The National Marine Fisheries Service announces
that the fishing practice of netting entire pods of dolphins to catch
the nearby tuna schools has "no significant adverse impact" on dolphin
populations, and so tuna caught this way can be labelled as dolphin-safe.

December 31, 2002: 22,000 protest against the United States in
Seoul, South Korea.

December 31, 2002: A Pakistani soldier enters Afghanistan and fires
upon United States forces near Shkhin, wounding one. In response,
the US bombs an abandoned madrassah that the soldier ran towards.
Early reports of the incident state, apparently in error, that the US had
bombed a Pakistani border patrol. The US and Pakistan's military
claim that the madrassah is in Afghanistan, while Pakistan's civilian
government and people in the region claim it is in the Pakistani village
of Burmol. The BBC reports that the site is 300 meters on the Pakistani
side of a Pakistani border post.  The government of the Northwest Frontier
Province unanimously passes a resolution condemning the United States
for having "violated the air and borders of Pakistan". A few days later,
the US announces that Pakistan has arrested the attacker, and claims
that there were multiple attackers in the madrassah complex.

December 31, 2002: Indonesian police sieze half of a ton of ammonium nitrate
from a residence in Palu, Sulawesi Island.

December 31, 2002: The American Petroleum Institute announces that
the United States' oil reserves have dropped 3% over the prior week
and are near their lowest point in 26 years. Oil prices rise about
70 cents per gallon on the news. It is not mentioned whether these
numbers include the Strategic Oil Reserve or simply civilian supplies.

December 31, 2002: United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan announces
that Iraq is cooperating with the weapons inspectors. One of the weapons
inspectors reports anonymously that the inspectors have been thwarted by
Iraqi forces who are always prepared for the inspectors' arrival, and by
international intelligence officials who have not given the inspectors
any information on Iraq's production capabilities.

December 31, 2002: A fireworks stand is bombed in Tacurong, Mindanao
Island, Philippines, killing four. 

December 31, 2002, Unrelated: The Israeli Election Commission votes
21-20 to ban the Balad political Party which has called for the
destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jews. Three days
earlier, the Commission had approved on a 21-18 vote the candidacy
of racist Baruch Marzel who has called for similar things for the Arabs.
Israel's supreme court reverses the banning on January 9.

December 2002: Florida Governor Jeb Bush appoints Judge Kenneth B. Bell,
who has stated that the judiciary is "the weakest branch of government"
and must "pay due deference to the legislative and executive branches",
to the state Supreme Court, announcing his support for Bell's policies
of "judicial restraint" in refusing to consider the actions of the
executive or legislature illegal or unconstitutional, and announcing
that judges "must guard our individual rights, but not at the expense
of our collective right to self-government."

December 2002: Washington Monthly columnist Joshua Micah Marshall
reports that Chris Nelson of Sameuls International Associates has reported
that several of former President Clinton's officials had told the incoming
Bush administration about North Korea's uranium enrichment program
in 2001, and Bush had ignored the issue for a year and a half.

December 2002: The federal government begins allowing states to
refuse to pay for Medicaid-insured patients' emergency room visits.
Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer promises that "patients will continue
to get all the care they need". After news gets of this is printed
in January, the new rule is eliminated.

December 2002: Senator James Inhofe claims that the September 11
terrorist attacks were brought by God as retribution for restraining
Israel from retaliating against terrorist attacks, and claims that
Arabs have no right to any part of Israel because the Bible says God
granted the land to the Jews.

December 2002: Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs
Nicholas Calio resigns due to the low salary of $145,000.

December 2002: The Department of Labor orders all unions to
record and report to the government all expenses greater than $2,000.

December 2002, Unrelated: A judge in Louisiana grants a warrant for
the forced DNA testing of nearly 100 black people who live and work
in the same area where a number of murders have been committed.


January 1, 2003: North Korea announces that the United States is
"threatening us with a preventative nuclear strike" and cites this
as a reason to abandon the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. North Korea
officials withdraws from this treaty a week later. North Korea
also calls for South Korea to support its nuclear weapons program.

January 1, 2003: The State Department charges Boeing and Hughes Technologies
with providing rocket technology to the People's Republic of China.

January 1, 2003, Unrelated: Tikopia and Anuta Islands, in the Solomon chain,
are hit by a hurricane. Initial reports that every person on both islands
was killed are disproved when contact is reestablished with the islands
and no casualties are reported on either. 

January 1, 2003, Unrelated: During a protest on Parliament Hill,
Canadian firearms ownership activist Jim Turnbull is handed a piece
of a gun by unknown persons and is subsequently arrested for
wielding a firearm in public.

January 1, 2003, Unrelated: France condemns Cote D'Ivoire for attacking
a village behind rebel lines, killing 11 civilians.

January 1, 2003, Unrelated: Lebanon shuts down New Television, a private
broadcasting company, to prevent the airing of a Bila Raqeeb weekly
newsshow whose subject was the relationship between Saudi Arabia
and the United States.

January 2, 2003: Afghan police capture 330 BM-12 rockets being
smuggled into Afghanistan from Pakistan.

January 2, 2003: Dawn reports that other news organizations have reported
that two Pakistani border guards were killed by recent US bombing
but that this is denied by the Pakistani military, and that the Pakistani
military is now stating that Pakistani soil was bombed. 
 
January 2, 2003: The United States asks Israel to cease selling arms
to the People's Republic of China. Israel immediately halts all such
arms sales.

January 2, 2003: Deparment of Health and Human Services Secretary
Tommy Thompson announces the grant of $550,000 of federal money
to organizations which promote marriage.

January 2, 2003: Capitol Hill Blue reports that terrorism alerts
"are part of a carefully scripted White House campaign to keep
terrorism on the minds of American voters along with public approval
ratings of administration handling of the stalled war on terrorism",
and that the Executive Branch has such a reputation of accusing innocent
Muslims of being terrorists that United States intelligence officials
jokingly refer to terrorist data files from the White House and Department
of Homeland Security as "Japanese camp files".

January 3, 2003: The United States begins requiring US citizens
attempting to leave the country to state their identities and
destinations so they can be tracked.

January 3, 2003: Tens of thoundands rally throughout Pakistan to
protest the United States. Protestors' banners announce such things
as "Long live Saddam Hussein", "Stop the Holocaust against Muslims",
and "Yankees: Don't spread hatred in the Muslim world".
Mutahida Majlis e Amal-leader Fazi ur Rahman says that "the American
attack on Iraq will be an attack on the Islamic world. If today we
cannot stop America from attacking Iraq, then tomorrow they will
attack Iran, and then it could be Pakistan." Jamiat Ulema i Islam
leader Samiul Haq says that "The US has started a war against Muslims.
This is a war between the forces of God and the forces of evil...If
the US attacks Iraq then there will be open war here. No American will
be safe here." Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali criticizes the
protestors' support of Iraq, saying "give a glance back in history
and see whether Iraq helped Pakistan during its times of crisis." 

January 3, 2003: The United States accuses Liberia of attacking opposing
politicians and fraudulently restricting candidates from upcoming elections,
and calls for the United Nations to monitor the elections. Liberia announces
that "no foreign laws shall prevail in the electoral process, and there shall
be no foreign supervision".

January 3, 2003, Unrelated: Japan rents three of the Dioyutai islands
from their private owner. The Republic of China on Taiwan and the
People's Republic of China condemn the "unilateral action", both
claiming sovereignty over the islands north of Taiwan. 

January 3, 2003: Announces that the United States will show no mercy
or concience when fighting terrorism, claims that "the opinion
of the world" supports an invasion of Iraq, and tells soldiers that
"you will be fighting not to conquer anybody but to liberate people."

January 3, 2003, Unrelated: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a leftist
news analysis group, publishes study of the political alignment of guests
on Cable News Network's Wolf Blitzer Reports show and Fox News's
Special Report with Brit Hume. The study showed that of 91 guests on
the CNN show, 38 were nonpartisan (of whom 3 were right-wing extremists),
23 were Democratic, and 30 were Republican (of whom 26 were right-wing
extremists); and of 75 guests on the Fox show, 29 were nonpartisan
(of whom 14 were right-wing extremists), 6 were Democratic, and
40 were Republican (of whom 37 were right-wing extremists). FAIR
notes that only one liberal, Senator Jon Corzine, has appeared on
the Fox show during the study, and only two "movement progressives",
Ralph Nader and Elizabeth Birch, have appeared on the CNN show.

January 4, 2003: Pakistan forbids the United States from chasing
fleeing al Qaeda forces across the Pakistani border.

January 4, 2003: Turkey announces a diplomatic alliance with Syria
to prevent an attack against Iraq.

January 4, 2003: The Globe and Mail reports that the Federal Bureau
of Investigation has admitted that its announcement of five terrorists
entering the United States from Canada last week was fabricated, and
that an anonymous senior officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
says that there is no evidence the five terrorists exist or were ever
in Canada and that the FBI might have made the announcement because
"it was a slow week at the White House. They needed something to stir
the pot because nothing was happening in Iraq".

January 4, 2003, Unrelated: Cote D'Ivoire announces a unilateral ceasefire
and promises to send back the foreign mercenaries it had hired.

January 4, 2003, Unrelated: The Peruvian Constitutional Court declares
that some anti-terrorism legislation passed in the 1990s denies
people their basic human rights, that it is unconsitutional for
military tribunals to try civilians, and that life sentences for
convicted terrorists are excessive.

January 4, 2003, Unrelated: A cargo ship rams a Singaporean patrol boat
in the dark of night, smashing the smaller military vessel and killing
four sailors.

January 5, 2003: Turkey announces a diplomatic alliance with Egypt
to prevent an attack on Iraq.

January 5, 2003: British police arrest seven people in possession
of ricin poison on suspicion of planning terrorist acts.

January 5, 2003: The Washington Post reports that Bush has supported
Bill Back for the leadership of the California Republican Party
and that Back had distributed an essay by William S. Lind in 1999 stating
that the world would be better off if the Confederacy had won the civil war
and claiming that Reconstruction, the failed attempt to allow southern
blacks their civil rights, was the sole cause of racism in the South.
Following the Contra Costa Times's initial report of the essay, Bush's
spokesman Claire Buchan says that "we are not involved in the race for state
Party chair".

January 5, 2003: Agents of Yasser Arafat's private army attack a Chinese
restaurant in Tel Aviv, Israel, killing 22 people, including many
immigrants. In response, Israel prevents Palestinian Authority diplomats
from traveling to Britain, for which Britain condemns Israel. 

January 2003: Senator Trent Lott is appointed chairman of the Senate
Rules Committee.

January 2003: Senator Trent Lott nominates former Navy Secretary John Lehman,
who protected child molesting soldiers at Coos Bay Naval Facility from
investigation, to lead the investigation into the United States'
preparedness for the September 11 attacks.

January 2003: The National Regulatory Commission Office of Inspector General
reports that the NRC had allowed the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant 
to continue operating without an inspection after five nearby plants
of similar construction were found to have cracks in the reactors, because
shutting down the plant for an inspection would cost the owners money.

January 2003, Unrelated: Algerian Member of Parliament Abdelmalek Benbara
is assassinated.

January 2003, Unrelated: Police in Fairfax County, Virginia,
begin entering local bars and arresting patrons for drunkenness.

January 2003, Unrelated: Bank of France Governor Jean Claude Trichet,
appointed President of the European Central Bank, is charged with
accounting fraud.

January 2003, Unrelated: The Tamil Tigers terrorist group kidnaps
over a hundred children and impresses them into its army.

January 2003, Unrelated: Lexmark printer corporation sues
Static Control Components for making ink cartridges that
can be used in Lexmark's printers.

January 6, 2003: The New York Times reports that Bush is planning to
announce plans for eliminating all tax on stock dividends. Earlier
unverified reports from the same source had suggested that Bush planned
to halve stock dividends.

January 6, 2003: International Atomic Energy Agency Chairman
Mohammed el Baradei announces that there is no evidence that Iraq
has left any information out of its report to the United Nations.

January 6, 2003: Iraq accuses the United Nations of spying.

January 6, 2003: North Korea announces that economic sanctions
are an act of war.

January 6, 2003: The United States gives 3,000 M-16 rifles to Nepal.
The United States announces that this has nothing to do with the
Nepalese civil war between the monarchy and Communist rebels.

January 6, 2003, Unrelated: Bhutan begins open combat with anti-Indian
terrorist groups operating from its territory, killing four members of
the National Democratic Front of Bodoland.

January 6, 2003, Unrelated: Cote D'Ivoire's rebels attack French positions,
taking heavy casualties and injuring a few French soldiers. The rebels
report that the government never initiated the ceasefire it claimed to have.

January 2003: University of California microbiology professor Mark Wheelis
and University of Bradford peace studies professor Malcolm Dando accuse
the United States of producing biological weapons in violation of
international treaty.

January 2003: Renominates Judges Pickering and Priscilla Owen.

January 2003: Presents the Presidential Rank Award to Federal Bureau
of Investigation Deputy General Counsel Marion Bowman, who had blocked
investigations into al Qaeda before September 11, for Bowman's work
in establishing arguments and judicial precedent for the FBI to conduct
searches without warrants as required by the United States Constitution,
termed "diverse and highly complex issues for which little or no
formal legal education has been available." Bowman was recommended
for the award by FBI Director Robert Mueller. Senators Richard Shelby
and Charles Grassley condemn the award.

January 2003: The United States agrees to pay property taxes
for buildings it owns in Sweden.

January 2003: After Congress resumes, the Republican majority quickly,
on party-line votes, passes changes in Congress's ethics rules to allow
lobbyists to give food to Congressmen and charities to pay for
Congressmens' travel and lodging, eliminates the "debt ceiling" that
had required Congress pass a law specifically raising the debt ceiling
in order to spend past it, and requires Congress's budget planners
to assume that tax cuts will cause increased revenues.

January 2003: Pakistani and United States Federal Bureau of Invesigation
agents sieze two suspected al Qaeda members in a joint operation.

January 2003: The Marine Corps cancels all leaves and forbids the
retirement or dismissal of any Marine during the next twelve months
for any reason other than homosexuality.

January 2003: Terrorist propagandist Otto Reich, whose term as
Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs has expired,
is appointed Special Envoy for Western Hemispheric Initiatives, where
he will report directly to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

January 2003: Political pundit Arianna Huffington produces parodies
of the government's anti-drug commercials which, instead of stating
that drug use supports terrorists, state that driving low-gas-mileage
vehicles supports terrorists.

January 2003: California Republican Party Board of Directors member
Randy Ridgel condemns black Board member Shannon Reeves for reporting
being treated as a busboy at Republican Party events and for disagreeing
with the pro-Confederacy essay written by William S. Lind and distributed
by state Republican Party Vice Chairman Bill Back in 1999, saying about
Reeves's statements "I, for one, am getting bored with that kind 
of garbage...you don't know squat about hardship...I personally don't
give a damn about your colour, so stop parading it around", demanding
that Reeves "get over it bucko...get in [the Party] without the whining
or get out", calling Reeves a "bombastic gasbag" and his statements
"bigoted propaganda", saying about blacks after the Civil War that
"most of the poor devils had no experience fending for themselves,
so they fared worse than before the war and during the war", and
demanding the jailing of black preachers Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
Ridgel later condemns "the liberal media" for reporting his statements.

January 2003, Unrelated: The University of Chicago and Massachusetts
Institute of Technology report the results of a study in which
5,000 resumes of equal quality were sent to businesses, and resumes
with traditional European names were 50% more likely to gain a response
than resumes with African-American names.

January 2003, Unrelated: The Missile Defense Agency cancels the next
two planned tests of the national missile defense system.

January 2003, Unrelated: Algerian terrorists kill over 100 people
in a week. Most of the dead were soldiers, but many of the attacks
targeted civilians.

January 2003, Unrelated: Sulayman Balal Zainulabidin of Sakina
Security Services dies three days after surgery on an arthritic knee,
having contracted a drug-resistant bacteria during the operation.
Zainulabidin had recently been acquitted of running a terrorist training camp.

January 2003, Unrelated: Los Alamos National Laboratory Director John Browne,
Principle Deputy Director Joseph Salgado, Security Director Stan Busboom,
and Deputy Security Director Gene Tucker are fired. University of California
Vice President for Laboratory Management John McTague retires. After
the House Energy Committee orders the Laboratory to re-hire two
investigators who had been fired for discovering fraud and corruption
at the Laboratory, the Laboratory re-hires them and bars them from
setting foot on Laboratory grounds.

January 2003, Unrelated: Gretta Duisenberg, wife of European
Central Bank chairman Wim Duisenberg, claims that terrorist mastermind
Yasser Arafat "hates killing", says that Israel is "worse than the Nazis",
and claims that the lands that Jews were successfully cleansed from
in the Arabs' 1948 war to exterminate the Jews is rightfully that
of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority.

January 7, 2003: Proposes eliminating all taxes on stock dividends,
claiming that this would help the poor and that the average taxpayer
would save $1,083 per year. The Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center reports
that the average family would save $265 per year and upper class families
would save an average of $611 per year, while the extremely wealthy would
save so much that the total amount of dollars saved divided by the total
number of taxpayers would equal $1,083.

January 7, 2003: Fox News debate host Sean Hannity says that "when
you cut taxes, you double revenues". 

January 8, 2003: The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals declares that
the judiciary has no power to oversee the actions of the military,
stating that "the review of battlefield captures in overseas conflicts
is...highly deferential" and that "any effort to ascertain the facts...would
entail an unacceptable risk of obstructing war efforts authorized by
Congress and undertaken by the executive branch." This decision strips
United States citizen and Taliban soldier Yasir Hamdi of his rights
as a human being. Attorney General John Ashcroft announces that granting
Hamdi his human rights or the rights of a prisoner of war would allow Hamdi
to return to active duty as an enemy soldier, and calls the decision
"an important victory for the President's ability to protect the
American people in times of war." Hamdi has been jailed in Norfolk, Virginia
for over a year without charge or access to a lawyer.

January 8, 2003: Pakistan assigns control of its nuclear-capable Ghauri
missile systems to the army's Strategic Force Command.

January 8, 2003: Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer says that Bush's
new tax cut plan will "create additional revenues for the federal
government and pay for itself".

January 8, 2003, Unrelated: Mafia boss Antonino Giuffre accuses
Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of meeting with other Mafia bosses
to discuss the trial of Senator Marcello Dell'Utri, accused of laundering
money for the Mafia.

January 8, 2003, Unrelated: One of Cote D'Ivoire's rebel factions agrees
to a ceasefire. The government immediately attacks their positions.

January 8, 2003, Unrelated: Senegalese forces engage rebel forces
near the tourist resort of Cap Skirring.

January 8, 2003, Unrelated: United Nations envoy Stephen Lewis
accuses Western drug agencies of murder and "a crime against humanity"
for refusing to lower the price of AIDS medication to a level that
can be afforded by disease sufferers.

January 8, 2003: Two Syrian soldiers in civilian clothing enter 
the Israel-occupied Golan Heights and fire upon an Israeli patrol.
One is killed by return fire. Syria reports that Israeli forces
fired upon random Syrian civilians on the Syrian side of the line
of control, "leading to the martyrdom of one".

January 9, 2003: Claims that his new tax cut plan will cut taxes
by 96% for the average family, "from $1,178 a year to $45 a year".

January 9, 2003: The Transportation Security Agency bans airport security
workers from joining unions.

January 9, 2003: The Accounting Oversight Board, in its first meeting,
raises board member salaries to $452,000, rejects an initiative to
limit the Board's auditors to five-year terms, and moves the Board's
meetingplace to failed fraudulent-accounting firm Arthur Anderson's
former headquarters.

January 9, 2003: Turkey's armed forces accuse the government
of promoting Islam. 

January 9, 2003: United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix reports
that his team has found no evidence that Iraq is producing weapons
of mass destruction.

January 9, 2003: Salon Magazine columnist Joe Conason reports
that judicial nominee Charles Pickering has lied under oath.

January 10, 2003: Numerous immigrants complying with Attorney General
John Ashcroft's order they re-register themselves at immigration offices
are arrested. There are nearly no reports of the arrests in any media
source. The Chicago Sun Times reports that the Immigration and Naturalization
Service is "interviewing" the immigrants. The Washington Post later reports
that every single person was arrested and interrogated before being released.

January 10, 2003: Amnesty International demands that the United States
either release prisoners at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station or charge them
with a crime, and condemns the mass arrests of immigrants from
countries with large Muslim populations.

January 10, 2003: Vice President Dick Cheney announces that Bush's
new $100 billion per year tax cut plan "will generate new growth,
it will expand the tax base and thus increase tax revenue to the
federal government". Bush's first tax cut caused a drop in
government revenues.

January 10, 2003: Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says that
he would not have supported Bush's new tax cut plan.

January 10, 2003: The United States threatens trade sanctions against
Europe for requiring safety testing of genetically modified foods before
allowing their import.

January 10, 2003: Singapore issues a report on Jemaah Islamiya stating
that the group trains its terrorists at Moro Islamic Liberation Front
facilities in the Philippines, and that it had planned to expand its
operations to strikes against United States, British, Australian,
and Israeli targets.

January 10, 2003: North Korea threatens to start World War 3 if
it is attacked.

January 10, 2003: North Korean diplomats, snubbing the Bush administration,
meet with New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson who had been ambassador to
the United Nations during the Clinton administration.

January 10, 2003: Hans Blix reports that Iraq had imported missile
parts last year in violation of United Nations sanctions.

January 10, 2003: The United States declares that there is no
need for United Nations intervention in the Cote D'Ivoire civil war.

January 10, 2003: The Washington Times reports that Russia's Foreign
Intelligence Service is collaboriting with Iraq's Mukhabarat espionage
agency against the United States.

January 10, 2003: Fox News reports that Iraq has equipment that
scrambles the Global Positioning signals used by some of the United States's
weapons.

January 10, 2003: San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll
openly calls for the United States' citizenry to oppose Bush's tyranny.

January 10, 2003: Acting on a tip from the United States, Germany
arrests two people accused of being al Qaeda members.

January 10, 2003: The State Department issues a warning of a possible
terrorist attack on Zanzibar Island in Tanzania.

January 10, 2003, Unrelated: Editors of the Iranian newspaper Hayat e No
are arrested and the newspaper orded to cease operations after it prints
a 65-year-old cartoon of United States President Franklin Roosevelt
pressing his thumb on the head of United States Supreme Court Chief
Justice Charles Hughes, representing Roosevelt's attempt to add extra
justices to the Court to gain a majority favourable to him. Opponents
of the newspaper claim that the image of Hughes bears a resemblence
to Ayatollah Khomeini. Religion teachers hold a nationwide strike.

January 11, 2003: Microsoft settles with consumers for its monopolistic
overpricing, agreeing to pay $1.1 billion.

January 11, 2003, Unrelated: Illinois Governor George Ryan commutes
the sentences of all men sentenced to death in the state to life in prison.

January 11, 2003: The European Union declares that only the United Nations
can determine the legitimacy of a war against Iraq.

January 12, 2003: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia announces that
the Constitution's separation of religion and government is no longer
valid because most people people no longer believe in maintaining it.

January 12, 2003: The Washington Post reports that Bush had ordered
an invasion of Iraq on September 17, 2001.

January 12, 2003: Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi admits coordinating
with the United States against al Qaeda, announcing that fundamentalism
"is a threat to all regimes in the region...Unfortunately, America
has given the fundamentalists a strong pretext...now that there is 
a move against Iraq, it has proven bin Laden right...we don't know
who poses a greater threat, the American president or Saddam Hussein."

January 12, 2003: A bomb is planted at a Kentucky Fried Chicken
fast-food restaurant in Hyderabad, Pakistan. It is defused by police.

January 12, 2003: Pakistan reports that India has shelled three villages
without provokation.

January 12, 2003, Unrelated: Union of Italian Muslims leader Adel Smith
and Massimo Zucchi are attacked by a Fascist mob during an interview
on Telenuevo. Smith had also been attacked on television a week before by
columnist Carlo Pelandra.

January 13, 2003: Pakistan arrests an Australian accused of being
an al Qaeda member.

January 13, 2003: Former President George H. W. Bush's appearance
at the American Music Awards is strongly heckled by the country-music
fan crowd. The American Broadcasting Corporation edits the heckling
out of its broadcast of the event.

January 13, 2003, Unrelated: The United States blocks aid to Colombia's
First Aerial Command Unit after it fails to take responsibility
for a bombing in 1998 which killed 17 civilians.

January 13, 2003, Unrelated: Christian preacher Joseph Cooper
is attacked by a mob of Hindus in Kilimanur, India, after preaching
that Krishna created and spreads the AIDS virus. Cooper is soon expelled
as his tourist visa does not permit preaching.

January 14, 2003: Offers North Korea additional aid if it promises
to end its nuclear weapons program.

January 14, 2003: Calls for requiring the poor to work 40 hours
a week to recieve welfare.

January 14, 2003: Ends a requirement for Russia comply with arms treaties
in exchange for aid to secure Russia's nuclear materials and other
weapons of mass destruction.

January 14, 2003: Care International complains about the widespread
anarchy and instability in Afghanistan and urges the United States
and its allies to pacify the region. In reporting on this, the BBC reports
that many Afghan policemen have quit their jobs due to low pay.

January 14, 2003: Human Rights Watch condemns the United States
for setting an authoritarian international example with its
lack of respect for human rights, stating that the US "has so much
power today that when it flouts human rights standards, it damages
the human rights cause worldwide".

January 14, 2003: Britain arrests three suspected terrorists. A policeman
is killed during the arrest. 

January 14, 2003: Lawrence Morahan of Conservative News reports
that there is so far no evidence that Iraq is producing weapons of
mass destruction or has any links to al Qaeda.

January 14, 2003: Lebanese police sieze 13 tons of military equipment
destined for Iraq from Belarus. Belarus denies knowledge of the shipment.

January 14, 2003, Unrelated: Roger Hedgecock of FOGO Radio reports
that six Mexican Consulate officials impersonated officers of the
United States Immigration and Naturalization Service to spirit a
murder suspect away from a hospital.

January 14, 2003, Unrelated: The Supreme Court of the state of Georgia
overturns a law forbidding sex outside of marriage, declaring that
"the government may not reach into the bedroom of a private residence
and criminalise the private, non-commercial, consensual sexual acts
of two persons legally capable of consenting to those acts".

January 14, 2003, Unrelated: The Voter News Service, a consorium which
has predicted election results based on exit polls for over 50 years,
disbands following a breakdown in its computer systems during the 2002
election.

January 14, 2003: Unrelated: The International Monetary Fund begins
releasing loan money to Argentina. Payments have been stopped after
Argentina defaulted on the loan.

January 14, 2003, Unrelated: Islamic Resistance announces acquiring
anti-tank missiles.

January 15, 2003: Condemns the University of Michigan for
having an "affirmative action" program which gives extra weight
to the applications of blacks, hispanics, and native Americans
under the assumption that these populations have been denied
opportunities for equality by the racist culture of the United States,
calling the program a "quota" and "divisive, unfair, and impossible
to square with the Constitution"; and orders the Justice Department
to argue the Supreme Court to strike down affirmative action programs
as un-Constitutional. Michigan's applicant program awards 20 points
out of 160 to prospective students who are black, native American,
or Hispanic, who come from low-income households, who come from
high schools attended by a majority of minority races, or who are athletes.

January 15, 2003: North Korea rejects Bush's recent proposal as
"a deceptive drama to mislead the world's public opinion".

January 15, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announces that
"The fact that the inspectors have not yet come up with new evidence
of Iraq's WMD program could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq's
noncooperation".

January 15, 2003: At the Information Society Regional Conference in Tokyo,
delegates from the United States veto a proposal for nations to support
production of open source computer software.

January 15, 2003: The California Legislature reports that Governor Davis
is artificially inflating the state's deficit by 1/3 its actual size.

January 15, 2003, Unrelated: The Supreme Court declares, in a 7-2 ruling,
that Congress has the power to repeatedly extend copyrights indefinitely.
Judges Breyer and Stevens dissent. Congressmen Sensenbrenner, Conyers,
Coble, and Berman praise the ruling.

January 15, 2003, Unrelated: The Supreme Court declares, in a 5-4 ruling,
that the Constitution's prohibition of double jeopardy does not
apply to hung juries, in the case of a man who was found guilty 
of murder but the jury could not decide whether to sentence him to death,
so a second jury was arranged which did sentence him to death.

January 2003: The Republican Party sends form letters to newspapers
nationwide, claiming the letters to be the work of independant individuals,
stating that Bush is "demonstrating genuine leadership" and repeating
Bush's lies about his new tax cut plan.

January 16, 2003: Calls for Congress to limit hospitals' liability
for medical malpractice, saying that "our medial liability system...first
and foremost hurts the patients and the people of America".

January 16, 2003: United Nations weapons inspectors report finding
a dozen unarmed chemical warheads in Iraq.

January 16, 2003: The American Prospect reports that the Environmental
Protection Agency's annual Report on Light-Duty Automotive Technology
and Fuel Economy Trends had not been published in 2002, and that
"one source close to the publication" has said that "the White House
has held up the release". The report is normally published every September.

January 16, 2003, Unrelated: California's Second District Court of Appeals
declares that the federal government cannot negotiate a treaty that
would deny people the right to sue for grievances, allowing a lawsuit
against the Taiheiyo Cement Corporation by a Korean man forced into
slavery by Japan during World War 2. The treaty between the United States
and Japan that ended World War 2 waives Japan's liability for all such crimes.

January 17, 2003: Scott Baldauf of the Christian Science Monitor
reports that al Qaeda has an encampment of 300 soldiers in the
deserted village of Sabila, Pakistan, and that al Qaeda also has
forces in the Pakistani towns of Miran Shah, Bajaur, Tira, Angore Adda,
Dir, Chirtal, and Dera Ismail Khan, and in the Afghan town of Barikowt.
The report also mentions that "the men of Sabila village...receive a
number of visits, including politicians from the top Pakistani religious
parties that now control the state of Northwest Frontier Province...Members
of Kashmiri terrorist groups such as Jaish e Mohammad, Hizbul Mujahideen,
Al Badr Mujahideen, Harkatul Mujahideen, and the Afghan-based Islamist party,
Hizb-i Islami have also visited."

January 17, 2003: Afghanistan sends 5,000 soldiers to the southern
border town of Spin Boldak, where the Taliban is regrouping and
recruiting from returning refugees.

January 17, 2003: Indonesia condemns the United States' requirement
for the booking of immigrants from Indonesia and other countries,
calling it "arbitrary, hard to understand, and unacceptable to
the Indonesian government" while urging its citizens to avoid
travel to the United States. Pakistan condemns the rule, saying
that "Pakistan has been at the forefront of the war against
terrorism".

January 17, 2003: A grenade is thrown over the wall of the United States
embassy in Madagascar.

January 17, 2003: Mark Huband and David Stern of the Financial Times
report that Chechens allied with Ansar al Islam and al Qaeda have
been producing ricin poison in Pankisi Gorge, Georgia.

January 17, 2003: Over 100,000 people protest in each of San Francisco,
California, and the District of Columbia, and 20,000 protest in Portland,
Oregon against war with Iraq.

January 17, 2003: Attorney General John Ashcroft praises civil rights
activist Martin Luther King Jr. for having spoke of justice
"more eloquently than any Attorney General before or since". Ashcroft
also announces that there have been fewer complaints about the Justice
Department's practices during the Bush administration than during
prior years.

January 17, 2003: The Saint Petersberg Times condemns the Republican
majority in the Florida legislature as "not conservatives...fanatics"
for rejecting federal grant money for environmental cleanup and
delivering food to the poor at no cost to the state, concluding
that "their seats would be better off vacant than put to such
grotesque misuse".

January 17, 2003, Unrelated: The Mexican army raids the offices of
the federal anti-drug police in search of evidence of corruption.

January 18, 2003: Five US soldiers are wounded by remote-controlled bombs
in Kabul, Afghanistan, and a sixth is shot and wounded during a patrol
in western Afghanistan.

January 18, 2003: The Justice Department's antitrust division permits
Delta, Continential, and Northwest airlines to sell seats on each
other's flights, praising the alliance's "potential to lower fares
and improve service for passengers in many markets throughout
the country".

January 18, 2003: At a peace rally in the District of Columbia,
former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney claims that "in no other
rich democracy on Earth do so mnay people have so little as
they do in this country". Three days later, Washington Times
Editor in Chief Wesley Pruden falsely reports that McKinney said "country"
instead of "rich democracy" and mocks McKinney's supposed "dreaming
dreamy dreams of the supermarket abundance in North Korea, Upper Volta
and Lower Slobbovia".

January 18, 2003, Unrelated: 50,000 people protest in Miami, Florida,
against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

January 19, 2003: Time Magazine reports that Bush has reinstated
the practice of annually sending a wreath to the Confederate Memorial
on Memorial Day to honour those killed fighting for the Confederacy,
quoting Confederate Memorial Association leader John Edward Hurley
as saying that "No one saw a wreath from 1990 until George W. Bush
got elected". Time soon retracts the story, stating that "according
to documents provided by the White House this week, the practice
of delivering a wreath to the Confederate Memorial on Memorial Day
continued under Bill Clinton". Sons of Convederate Veterans chief of staff
Ron Casteel calls the Time article "part of the far-left Democratic
leadership's strategy...to ensure the Democratic Party base turns out
in 2004". Elisabeth Reba, a librarian with access to the Lexis-Nexis
database of past newspaper articles, finds reports from the New York Times
and Washington Times in 1990, and 2001 confirming that the first President
Bush ended the practice in 1990 due to a political split between the two
major Confederate organizations and that the current President Bush
reinstuted the practice in 2001, and also finds a Salon article
confirming that the first Bush never ended the practice and Clinton
continued itthe practice. .

January 19, 2003: Con Coughlin of The Telegraph reports that United Nations
weapons inspectors have found nuclear bomb construction plans at the home of
an Iraqi nuclear physicist. The report quotes "a Western diplomat"
as reporting that "these are not old documents. They are new and they
relate to on-going work taking place in Iraq to develop nuclear weapons."

January 19, 2003: Offers "economic cooperation" with North Korea
if North Korea ends its nuclear weapons program.

January 19, 2003: General Richard Meyers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, visits Turkey.

January 19, 2003: The United States urges the United Nations not
to confirm Libyan journalist Najat al Hajjaji as President of the
Human Rights Commission. She is approved 33-3 with 17 abstensions.

January 19, 2003, Unrelated: Gordan Logan of the English Language Center
of Jubai reports that British intelligence service MI6, with the approval
of Israeli intelligence service Mossad, is setting off bombs in Saudi Arabia
to discourage Saudi support for the Palestinian Authority by claiming
the bombs to be from PA supporters, and that the Britons arrested for
the bombings were probably MI6 agents. Logan also reports surviving
an assassination attempt, " the third attempt in two years. MI6
(personal communication) reckons it's 'nine' since 1984."

January 20, 2003: Britain pledges 26,000 soldiers to assist in the
invasion of Iraq.

January 20, 2003: Britain raids the Finsbury Park Mosque and arrests
seven people living there on suspicion of involvement in the production
of ricin poison. Sheik Abu Hamza al Masri condemns the raid as "disgusting"
and "a provocative act", saying "What can people have in a mosque?...When
did you last hear of a church being raided when someone has been arrested?
These people [Scotland Yard] do not have principles."

January 20, 2003: Joshua Micah Marshall reports that "a Clinton
administration official" has told him that the United States discovered
in 1999 and 2000 that North Korea was "purchasing centrifuge equipment
and other hardware that you would use to put such a [uranium enrichment]
program together".

January 20, 2003: Conservative News and World Net Daily report
that the Kinsey Report on human sexuality, whose publication in 1948
broke the social taboo against researching sexuality, is actually
propaganda designed to encourage sex with underage children.

January 20, 2003, Unrelated: Malaysia raids the offices of the
newspaper Malaysiakini for printing a letter which condemned the
government's favouritism towards ethnic Malays.

January 21, 2003: Creates the "White House Office of Global Communications"
and appoints Tucker Eskew as its leader.

January 21, 2003: A gunman ambushes two computer programmers working
for the Army near Camp Doha, Kuwait, killing one.

January 21, 2003: Mexico requests the International Court of Justice
order an end to executions of Mexican citizens by the United States
as US police agencies have denied the Mexicans access to their Consulate.

January 21, 2003: The Department of Justice accuses Texas Technology
University biology professor Michael Dini of religious bigotry by
refusing to give letters of recommendation praising students who
do not believe in the theory of evolution upon which the science
of biology is founded. The Department later drops its investivation
after Dini agrees to allow students to explain the theory
while not requiring that they believe it.

January 21, 2003: The Wall Street Journal condemns Bush's "soak-the-rich"
"progressive" tax cut plan, calling it akin to something from Karl Marx
because it would increase the excemption per child, leaving "families
with incomes over $100,000" to "end up paying a larger share of the total
income tax" while more impoverished "lucky duckies...won't pay taxes".

January 21, 2003: The Lincoln and Roosevelt carrier groups, along
with 37,000 soldiers, are dispatched to the Persian Gulf. In reporting
on this, the British Broadcasting Company prints a graphic of
"key areas of the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier" including the
locations of the engine room, aircraft elevators, and crew quarters,
as well as the ship's top speed.

January 21, 2003, Unrelated: Indonesia announces that it will stop
taking loans from the International Monetary Fund due to the IMF's
interference in Indonesia's economy.

January 22, 2003: Threatens "serious consequences for any Iraqi general
or soldier who were to use weapons on our troops".

January 22, 2003: Gives a speech on the nation's economy while in a
warehouse filled with boxes stamped "Made in China". For the television
cameras, a canvas painting of a wall of boxes labelled "Made in U.S.A."
is placed behind Bush and the "Made in China" markings on real boxes near
his position are covered with duct tape. The masking of the imports'
source country is a crime under U.S. Title 19 Subtitle 2 Part 1
Section 1304 subsection l, punishable by up to 1 year in prison
or a $100,000 fine. 

January 22, 2003: Capitol Hill Blue reports that a White House official
has said "the President considers this nation to be at war, and as such
considers any opposition to his policies to be no less than an act of
treason", and that "one longtime FBI agent" has described Bush's plans
as to "find a link, any link, no matter how vague or unproven, and then
use that link to justify action against Iraq".

January 22, 2003: The Washington Post reports that the United States
will not enact any kind of economic sanctions against North Korea.

January 22, 2003: National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice announces
that "Iraq's declaration [of capabilities]...resorted to unabashed
plagiarism, with lengthy passages of United Nations reports copied
word-for-word (or edited to remove any criticism of Iraq) and presented
as original text...the declaration...constitutes a material breach of
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, which set up the
current inspections program."

January 22, 2003: Sheikh Qutaiba Ammash, imam of the al Nidaa mosque
in Baghdad, Iraq, condemns the United Nations' inspection of the mosque
as "a profanity" and "a provocation", saying "we thank God that it was
not a time of prayer when they came, because their lives would have been
in danger if they had. Are they looking for weapons of mass destruction
or are they gauging the faith in our hearts?" The United Nations claims
that it never inspected the mosque, but that some members of the
inspection team were invited there and had visited the mosque as guests. 

January 22, 2003: Noah Shachtman reports that "Nearly half of the
military's 60-or-so plane Predator fleet has crashed or been taken out."

January 22, 2003: Nicholas Stein of Fortune Magazine reports that
Thomas Kean, appointed by Bush to head the investigation into the
government's preparedness for 1998, has had business relations with
al Qaeda supporter Khalid bin Mahfouz while director of oil company
Amerada Hess.

January 22, 2003, Unrelated: Rebels bomb the Sui pipeline providing
half of the gas used by Punjab and Northwest Frontier provinces of
Pakistan.

January 22, 2003, Unrelated: Hizballah shells Israeli positions.

January 2003: Appoints Jerry Thacker, a teacher and prayer leader
of Protestant-supremacist school Bob Jones University who has called AIDS
the "gay plague" and homosexuality a "sinful deathstyle" that
"Christ can rescue" people from, to the Presidential Advisory Commission
on HIV and AIDS. Bob Jones University deletes from public access its
records stating "Mr. Thacker believes that homosexuality is the judgement
of God on America" for not being a theocracy", replacing this with
moderate text favourable to Thacker's campaign. After news organizations
report on this, Thacker withdraws his nomination. Bush also appoints
former Represenative Tom Coburn, who opposed funding for AIDS research
and demanded the Centers for Disease Control fire a director who had
said condoms reduce the risk of HIV infection; anti-homosexual activist
Pat Ware, who has accused homosexual whites of purposely infecting blacks
with AIDS; and anti-contraceptive activists Joe McIllaney and Anita Smith;
and anti-homosexual activist and preacher Joseph Jennings.

January 2003: Irish singer Josie Walker reports that shortly after
Bush's inauguration in 2001, he asker her if she was from Ireland.
When she replied that she was from Belfast, Bush then asked "so are you
British or Irish?"

January 2003, Unrelated: The New Jersey Education Association releases
a document, encouraging parents to become more active in their childrens'
education, in three versions: a standard version, one translated into
Spanish, and one dumbed-down for blacks.

January 2003, Unrelated: The United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia
kidnap three National Geographic reporters in the province of Darien,
Panama. When news gets out, they are quickly released. Days later,
the National Liberation Army kidnaps two Los Angeles Times reporters
in Saravena, Colombia. They are released February 1.

January 2003: Human Rights Watch condemns the United States' barring
of homosexuals from the military as "a violation of basic human rights".
In response, The Center for Military Readiness, a military lobbying group,
says that allowing homosexuals into the military would be "a disastrous
mistake, a social experiment of a rather extreme measure...it was already
rejected by Congress. It would certainly be rejected by the American
people"

January 2003: Gregory Freeman of Rolling Stone Magazine reports
that many homosexuals want to get the AIDS virus and that these people
comprise 25% of all new infections.

January 2003: The Department of Housing and Urban Development begins
allowing itself to give funds intended for housing for the poor
to religious groups to build places of worship.

January 23, 2003: Ambassador to Pakistan Nancy Powell demands that Pakistan
stop providing a base for terrorists operating in the Indian half of Kashmir.
Pakistan claims to have "taken all measures" to stop terrorist attacks
against India, with Information Minister Rashid Ahmed saying "we are one
of the top supporters of anti-terrorism", while politician Khurshid Ahmed
calls Powell's statements "a joke" that "has hurt our nation's feelings"
and strongly suggests that Powell be expelled from the country. 

January 23, 2003: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz reports that
Iraq has threatened its scientists with death of themselves and their
families if they cooperate with United Nations weapons inspectors.

January 23, 2003: Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer says that Britain, Italy,
Spain, Australia, and several Eastern European nations have pledged forces
to invade Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says that "Germany has
been a problem and France has been a problem...but you look at vast numbers
of other countries in Europe, they're not with France and Germany on this.
They're with the United States."

January 23, 2003: Former President Bill Clinton says that "No one really
thinks these terrorists are going to win a military victory over us...the
only way that we can be vanquished is if we respond to this in a way that
compromises the future of our children and the character of our nation",
and mocks Bush's tax cut plan and his own wealth by saying "In times like
this, states usually get a little extra help from Washington, but instead
they're going to give the money to me...I can afford a nice suit and tie,
but I need an income tax cut, a dividend tax cut."

January 23, 2003: Senators Mary Landrieu and Jon Corzine propose
temporarily eliminating payroll tax on the first $10,000 of workers'
salaries, saying "the President's plan, if you have a hundred people
in a room...gives money to eight people...this plan gives money
to all 100 people". 

January 23, 2003: Senator Ron Wyden sneaks an amendment into
a Senate budget bill which denies the Army funding for conducting
warrantless searches of databases and information networks
for the Total Information Awareness program.

January 23, 2003: Washington Post reporter Helen Thomas, who has
covered Presidents' press conferences since 1961, describes Bush as
"the worst President ever...the worst President in all of American history."

January 23, 2003: Retired Senator and astronaut John Glenn calls
for the United States to reinstitute the draft.

January 23, 2003: The Kitty Hawk carrier group leaves port from Japan.
A week later, North Korea announces that the carrier is off its waters
preparing for an invasion.

January 23, 2003, Unrelated: Cote D'Ivoire accuses Liberia of assisting
rebel forces and asks France to send forces to fight against the rebels.
France and Liberia deny that Liberian soldiers are assisting the rebels.

January 24, 2003: The Deparment of Homeland Security is officially
established to maintain border security, respond to terrorist attacks,
and perform domestic intelligence gathering. The Department incorporates
the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and the Plum Island Animal
Disease Center, from the Department of Agriculture; the Computer Security
Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the
Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office, and the National Hazard Information
Strategy division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
from the Department of Commerce; the National Bioweapopns Defense Analysis
Center and the National Communications System, from the Department
of Defence; the Environmental Measurements Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory, National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis
Center, National Nuclear Security Administration, Nuclear Incident Response,
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Office of Biological and Environmental
Research, Office of Energy Assurance, and Office of Security from the
Department of Energy; the Federal Emergency Management Agency; the
Computer Incident Response Center and Office of Federal Protective Service
from the General Services Administration; the Metropolitan Medical
Response System, National Pharmaceutical Stockpile Program, National
Disaster Medical System, Office of Emergence Preparedness, and Office
of Health and Safety Information System from the Department of Health
and Human Services; the Domestic Emergency Support Team, Executive Office
for Immigration Revie, Immigration and Naturalization Service, National
Infrastructure Protection Center, National Domestic Preparedness Office,
and Office of Domestic Preparedness from the Department of Justice;
the Visa Services agency from the Department of State; the Coast Guard
and Transportation Security Administration from the Department of
Transportation; and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center,
Secret Service, and Customs agency of the Treasury Department.
The new Department of Homeland Security will contain five divisions:
under the Secretary's direct control are the Office of Homeland Security,
Homeland Security Council, Coast Guard, Secret Service, and coordination
with state, local, and private agencies; the Border and Transportation
Security agency, containing the Animal and Plant Health Inspection
Service, Customs, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and
the Border Patrol (split from the current INS), the Transportation
Security Administartion, and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center;
an Emergency Preparedness and Responce agency, containing appropriate
agencies (such as FEMA) for responding to medical, nuclear, weather,
and other emergencies; the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection
division, containing communications and information security agencies
as well as the Office of Energy Assurance; and the Science and Technology
division, containing laboratories, biowarfare research agencies,
the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Plum Island Animal
Disease Center, and the DoE's Office of Security.

January 24, 2003: Spain arrests 16 suspected al Qaeda members,
claiming to have prevented a major terrorist attack.

January 24, 2003: Italy arrests four Moroccans in possession of
explosives and maps of North Atlantic Treaty Organization bases
in Italy.

January 24, 2003: Columbia Broadcast System reports that "if the
Pentagon ticks to its current war plan, one day in March the Air Force
and Navy will launch between 300 and 400 cruise missiles at targets in Iraq"
in a "Shock and Awe" plan to simultaneously attack Iraqi leadership
and civilian infrastructure. CBS claims that "this report contains no
information that the Defense Department thinks could help the Iraqi military."

January 24, 2003: The Associated Press reports that the Immigration and
Naturalization Service has arrested 45 security guards and 24 taxi drivers
who work for Jack Murphy Field where the Super Bowl is to be held.

January 24, 2003: Florida Governor Jeb Bush travels to the District
of Columbia to meet with Vice President Dick Cheney, Federal Bureau
of Investigation Director Robert Mueller, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist,
Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, Ambassador Otto Reich, Secretary
of Housing and Urban Development Mel Martinez, Director of White House
Domestic Policy Jay Lefkowitz, and Deputy Director of White House
Inter-Governmental Affairs Debbie Spagnoli in separate meetings
throughout the day.

January 2003: Proposes setting aside $500 million into a "Human Capital
Performance Fund" to give bonuses to bureaucrats who are "productive".

January 2003: The Federal Bureau of Investigation orders regional
bureaus to perform a census of all Muslims and mosques in their districts.

January 2003: Afghan, United States, and Norweigan forces capture a base
used by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's forces near Spin Boldak, Afghanistan.

January 2003, Unrelated: A cease fire is declared in Nepal.

January 25, 2003: Marc Kaufman of the Washington Post reports
that the United States has abandoned the Lwara base on December 11,
giving the base to Afgan militia who were overrun by al Qaeda forces.

January 25, 2003: Cable News Network reports that United Nations
weapons inspectors have allowed Iraqi soldiers to arrest several
Iraqis who have tried to defect.

January 26, 2003: Secretary of State Colin Powell announces that 
the United States "has no intention of attacking North Korea".

January 26, 2003: Gunmen attack a United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees convoy and a nearby military checkpoint in Nangarhar province
of Afghanistan, killing six guards and soldiers.

January 26, 2003: The British Broadcasting Corporation reports
that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is interrogating 50,000
men of Iraqi descent, one sixth of the Iraqi population of the
United States. The report also states that "the FBI is reported to be
enlisting the help of campus police officers in colleges and universities
in an effort to monitor foreign students."

January 26, 2003: The Guardian reports that the United States has
doubled its oil imports from Iraq recently.

January 26, 2003, Unrelated: Nepalese Police Chief Krishna Mohan Shrestha
is assassinated.

January 27, 2003: Hans Blix and Mohammed el Baradei report to the
United Nations that Iraq has been hiding information about its
weapons of mass destruction programs and capabilities. Noted by news
organizations are that there is no evidence Iraq has destroyed its
anthrax stocks as Iraq claims it had in 1991; that Iraq has alternatively
claimed in different reports that either 13,000 chemical warheads were
dropped on Iran or that 19,500 were, leading to a discrepency, and that
6,500 warheads would contain 1,000 tons of chemical weaponry; that Iraq
failed to declare 650 kilograms of bacterial growth agent which it
had declared in a prior report, and that "the absence of this...would appear
to be deliberate"; that Iraq lied about the quality of VX gas that it
had achieved, and "there are questions concerning the fate of the VX
precursor chemicals"; that "several thousands of chemical rockets...are
unaccounted for"; and that Iraq has "often withheld" cooperation "or given
grudgingly".

January 27, 2003: The Philadelphia Daily News reports that
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had planning attacking Iraq
immediately after the September 11 attack, having written "best info
fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. at the same time. Not only UBL.
Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not." The story
also mentions that the Project for a New American Century had
urged President Clinton to invade Iraq in 1998, with a letter
signed by current officeholders Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney's
chief of staff Lewis Libby, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, 
Trade Representative Robert Zoelick, Assistant Secretary of Defense
Peter W. Rodman, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Defense
Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle, Defense Science Board Chairman
William Schneider, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage,
Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky,
Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security
John Bolton, National Security Council member Elliot Abrams, and
Special Envoy to Afgahnistn Zalmay Khalilzady, as well as former
CIA director James Woolsey, former Congressman Vin Weber, Weekly Standard
editor William Kristol, and lobbyist and former Senate Foreign Relations
committee member Jeffrey Bergner. The letter had been written by
foreign policy analysts Francis Fukuyama and Robert Kagan, and
Republican Party activist William J. Bennett.

January 27, 2003: White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer
accues ZMag reporter Russell Mokhiber and the Washington Post
of blaming the United States for Iraq's use of chemical weapons
against civilians, after Mokhiber cites a Post article detailing
that the United States gave Iraq the weapons for its war with Iran.

January 27, 2003: India and Pakistan shell each others' positions.
Pakistan reports that India attacked civilian areas without any provocation.
India reports that it destroyed a Pakistani military outpost after Pakistan
attacked its troops without provocation.

January 27, 2003: In reporting on the India-Pakistan border fire and
a possible Pakistani nuclear response, Nando Media states that
"Pakistan, like the United States, has never promised not to strike first."
United States Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton promised not to
launch a first strike, with Clinton promising to wait for a confirmed
nuclear hit on US soil before retaliating, and Bush has withdrawn this 
promise. 

January 27, 2003: The Federal Bureau of Investigation asks the public
for help in finding 3,000 Iraqi immigrants.  
 
January 28, 2003: The United States condemns China's execution of
a Tibetan nationalist who was convicted of terrorism in a secret trial.

January 28, 2003: Niles Latham of the New York Post reports that Iraq
has delivered death certificates for Iraqi scientists' families
prior to the scientists' interviews with the United Nations.

January 28, 2003: Gives the State of the Union address in which he:
Proposes legislation to mandate a 70% cut in power plants' air pollution;
Proposes drug treatment programs, despite that Republicans have previously
opposed drug treatment in favour of jailing drug users; Proposes additional
research for converting automobiles to hydrogen fuel, despite that Republicans
have been blocking alternate energy research for decades and mocking proposals
of moving off oil when there is still oil to drill as "junk science";
Condemns lawsuits against incompetent doctors who have harmed their patients
and the lawyers who would take such cases as "one of the prime causes
of higher costs" for medicine, saying "no one has ever been healed
by a frivolous lawsuit"; Proposes spending $15 billion to buy AIDS drugs
to give to poor countries, weeks after the US refused to void drug companies'
patent monopolies over these drugs to allow the poor countries to produce
the drugs themselves; Claims his anti-AIDS plan will "prevent 7 million
new AIDS infections" compared to treating 2 million current infections,
even though his foreign policy to this point has opposed educating people
about using condoms to prevent infections; proposes a program to
save Medicare by forcing the elderly to quit Medicare to receive certain
medications; Proposes privatizing the Social Security pension plan;
Pledges to achieve 100% employment, an economic impossibility without
major government interference in the economy; Promises that "we will not
pass along our problems to other Congresses, other Presidents, and other
generations"; Says that reductions in the child credit would be in the
form of "checks to American families" when they'd really be deductions
on a tax form; Repeats the dishonest statistic that "Americans will keep
an average of almost $1,100 more of their own money", when the average
family would keep $265; Calls for the end of dividend tax; Says that
"lower taxes" would lead to "higher revenues to our government" even though
his last tax cut significantly reduced revenues and his tax cut as
Governor of Texas also significantly reduced revenues; Praises his
programs of encouraging logging in federal parks as a "Healthy Forests
Initiative to help prevent the catostrophic fires that devastate communities,
kill wildlife, and burn away millions of acres of treasured forest"; 
Condemns environmental laws and "endless lawsuits" against law-breaking
industries; Proposes using the power of the federal government to promote
Christianity to the weak, poor, and suffering, to "transform America
one heart and soul at a time", and to "bring to all Americans who
struggle with drug addition this message of hope" that "God does miracles
in people's lives and you never think it could be you"; praises the
"power, wonder working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith
of the American people", using a phrase from the Christian hymn
"There Is Power in the Blood"; Proposes banning dilation-and-extraction
abortions; Proposes banning all kinds of cloning, including medical
research; Proposes "peace between a secure Israel and a democratic
Palestine", ignoring that they're the same place; Proposes deploying
the ballistic missile defense system this year; Claims that
"in each case" of militancy in the 20th century, the "ambitions of cruelty
and murder...were defeated by the will of free peoples, by the strength
of great alliances, and by the might of the United States of America",
ignoring dozens of such wars in which the United States either was
not involved, was actively supporting the "ambitions of cruelty and murder",
or was not victorious; Speaks out in support of Iran's people against
their government; Says Iraq is "a greater threat" than North Korea;
Lies about the aluminium tubes Iraq purchased for building conventional
weapons, claiming they are for building nuclear weapons despite that
the tubes cannot be used for this purpose; Claims Iraq is "blocking
U2 surveillance flights requested by the United Nations" and that
"Iraqi intelligence officers are posing as the scientists inspectors
are supposed to interview"; Promises that Colin Powell will present
evidence that Iraq has a weapons of mass destruction on February 5;
Claims that "the liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world,
it is God's gift to humanity", and that God is behind "all of history";
and proposes an extra $51.25 billion in annual spending while telling
Congress to restrain its spending.  At one point, after saying "We have
the terrorists on the run...the terrorists are learning the meaning
of American justice", the Joint Chiefs of Staff pointedly refuse to 
join in the customary standing ovation, even refusing to applaud.
The Hartford Courant reports that twenty Democrats left the speech
before it ended.

January 28, 2003: Pakistani journalist Ejaz Haider is arrested
at the Brookings Institute.

January 2003: Author Kurt Vonnegut says that "our country,
for whose Constitution I fought in a just war...has been taken over
by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat
imaginable, and those now in charge of the federal government are
upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus
not-so-closeted white supremacists, also known as 'Christians', and
plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities...they know
full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they
do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts...and what syndrome
better describes so many executives at Enron and Worldcom...and so many
of these heartless PPs [psychopathic personalities] now hold big jobs
in our federal government as though they were leaders instead of
sick...unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts for the
simple reason that they cannot care what happens next".

January 2003: General Norman Schwarzkopf says that "I have gotten nervous
at some of the pronouncements [Defense Secretary] Rumsfeld has made...it
appears that he disregards the Army...he gives the perception, when he's
on TV, that he is the guy driiving the train and everybody else had better
fall in line behind him or else...it's scary...there are guys at the 
Pentagon who have been involved in operational planning for their
entire lives...and for this wisdom -- acquired during many operations,
wars, schools -- for that to just be ignored and in its place have somebody
who doesn't have any of that training, is of concern."

January 2003: The Iraqi newspaper al Thawrah condemns Bush's
State of the Union address as promoting "a new imperialist drive based
on despotism and agression, of interest only to the Jews and capitalists."
The United Arab Emirates newspaper al Khalij claims that Bush's speech
and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's recent reelection are a sign
that the United States and Israel are aligning for "war against the Arabs". 

January 2003: North Korea moves fuel rods from the Yongbyon
nuclear power plant for reprocessing into weapons-grade material.

January 2003: The United States Postal Service announces plans
to cut its workforce by 58,000 employees.

January 2003: Attorney General John Ashcroft orders federal
prosecutors to seek the execution of accused murderer Jairo Zapata,
who has agreed to testify for the government in exchange for a
sentence of life in prison. United States Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf's
spokesman praises Ashcroft's decision. The Department of Justice
pledges to "guarantee the fair implementation of the death penalty".

January 2003: British Prime Minister Tony Blair says that "after
we deal with Iraq we do, through the UN, have to confront North Korea
about its weapons program".

January 2003: Soldiers for the Truth reports that "evidently there
was quite a few high ranking members of DOD [Department of Defense]
and CENTCOM [Central Command] community that were very embarrassed
about the news of their fuck ups in Afghanistan getting out to
the public. There is now a witch-hunt to try and stop guys from
giving out evidence of commander incompetence." Other reports
the same week are that "two-thirds of the U.S. Army's Hellfire
missile inventory -- an estimated 10,000 weapons -- had been found
to have a flawed rocket motor assembly that required retrofitting",
that Camp Lemonier, the United States' main base in the Horn of Africa,
is "horribly defended...the front gate has nothing higher than a 5.56mm
covering it and is only yards away from the base operations center...the
only sandbags around are to hold the flaps of tents down...the snake
obstacles at the front gate were removed, thus allowing anybody plenty
of room to drive a truckload of explosives into the camp...there are
no bunkers"; and that there is a "profound contempt for the uniform
among some of the civilian appointees doing the dreaming in the Pentagon".

January 2003: Columnist Ann Coulter says of the Democrats' failure
to applaud vigorously to Bush's proposal for building a ballistic missile
defense system, "if this is not treason, then treason has no meaning".
When asked about the statement on Cable News Network's Crossfire
debate show, Coulter reaffirms this while saying that Vice President
Dick Cheney's sale of oil production equipment to Iraq in 1998
is acceptable because "we weren't at war with Iraq" and "it was
actually quite useful to have Iraq and Iran fighting one another",
calling the sale "the classic liberal scandal, some precious technical
little point" and "a complicated little legal point", saying that Cheney
as the Chief Executive Officer, only "worked for a corporation that
sold equipment that ended up someplace at somewhere we're going to
war with now" and then claiming that Cheney wasn't trying to sell
the equipment. Coulter also claims that Saddam Hussein is the
leader of al Qaeda, claims that federal economic policy has
nothing to do with the strength of the stock market, and promises
that "the second he gets in" the District of Columbia Circuit Court of
appeals, her close friend Miguel Estrada will "overrule everything
that you [liberal host Begala] love".

January 2003: Vice President Dick Cheney, Republican National Committee
Chairman Marc Racicot, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Senate Whip
Mitch McConnell, and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao each give a speech at the
Conservative Political Action Conference, organized by right-wing
extremist groups the Free Republic, the Center for Individual Freedom,
the Eagle Forum, Citizen United, the Family Research Council,
the Christian Coalition, and the Bradley Foundation, among others.
Vendors at the conference sell racist propaganda such as Confederate flags
and bumper stickers stating "No Muslims, No Terrorism". The conference
holds a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the defeat of the
Equal Rights Amendment. Attending Congresswoman Sue Myrick says that
publicizing these far-right positions is part of a plan to "make the
President look more moderate".

January 2003: The United Nations covers up Pablo Picasso's painting
of the bombing of Guernica that hangs in the UN headquarters.

January 2003: Pro-Democrat Web sites begin reporting that Senator
Chuck Hagel, a Republican, owns a company which produces voting machines
that were used to confirm landslide Republican victories in districts
where polls predicted Democratic victories.

January 2003: Stephen C. Pelletiere, who claims to have been
"the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq
during the Iran-Iraq war", reports that Iran gassed the city of Halabja
in 1988, stating that "each side used gas against the other in the
battle around Halabja" and that residents of the city were killed by 
"a cyanide-based gas which Iran was known to use" while Iraq is 
"not known to have possesed blood agents at the time".

January 2003: Missoula, Montana City Councilman Clayton Floyd
condemns City Councilman Jim McGrath for having a picture of
a local landmark, the Northside Waterworks Peace Sign, affixed to
his computer. Floyd claims to have "heard from a number of folks
indicating dismay with what Jim has displayed on his laptop".

January 2003: A Canadian woman traveling through Chicago is arrested
and has her passport destroyed by Immigration and Naturalization Service
officers, who then deport her to India.

January 2003: The United States awards the Bronze Star to four
Canadian soldiers who were killed by a United States pilot while training.

January 30, 2003: Spain, Italy, Portugal, Britain, the Czech Republic,
Hungary, Poland, and Denmark issue a statement supporting an invasion
of Iraq.

January 30, 2003: Announces that the United States will invade Iraq 
in "weeks, not months", disregarding the possibility of allowing
United Nations inspectors more time to find weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq.

January 30, 2003: Immigration and Naturalization Service middle manager
Dawn Randall and subordinate manager Leonel Salazar are charged with
destroying the paperwork of 90,000 immigrants.

January 30, 2003: The Senate Judiciary Committee accepts Bush's nomination
of Miguel Estrada to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals
for the District of Columbia. Earlier, Bush had refused to allow the Senate
to see records of Estrada's opinions and writings, citing "executive
privilege". Estrada is a member of the board of directors of the Center
for Community Interest, an organization opposed to the Fourth and Sixth
Amendments' protections for those accused of crime, and the First Amendment's
protections of the right of the people to peaceably assemble and the right
to freedom of speech. Estrada has argued in opposition of the right
to assemble, that laws enforced solely upon black neighbourhoods
are not discriminatory, that medical patients have no right to
sue health maintenance organizations for malpractice if an HMO orders
their doctor to commit malpractice, and that the Seventh Amendment's
guarantee of the right to a jury trial in civil suit does not exist.
Estrada's confirmation is condemned by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus,
the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Congrssional
Black Caucus, and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Senator Charles Schumer condemns the confirmation as "ratifying a don't ask,
don't tell policy" as Estrada refused to answer several questions asked
by the Senate committee. Estrada was given a "well qualified" rating
by the American Bar Association. Estrada has never served as a judge.
Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer celebrates that "progress is being made".
Senator Orrin Hatch says that Democrats opposed to Estrada's nomination
are racists who want "to smear anyone who would be a positive role
model for Hispanics".

January 30, 2003: Former South African President Nelson Mandela says of
the United States that "one power with a President who has no foresight,
who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into
a holocaust", and accuses the United States and Britain of trying
to undermine the United Nations "because the Secretary General of
the United Nations is a black man".

January 30, 2003, Unrelated: California State Senator William Knight says
that "homosexuals want to be recognized as normal...and they're not."

January 30, 2003: A Black Hawk helicopter crashes in Afghanistan,
killing four United States soldiers. 

January 30, 2003: South Korea admits to giving North Korea
a $200 million bribe to attend peace talks in June 2000.

January 30, 2003: North Korea condemns Bush's State of the Union address
as a "undisguised declaration of agression to topple our system".

January 30, 2003: The Commission on Opportunity in Athletics,
a panel created by the Bush administration, issues a recommendation
for weakening the Title 9 law that requires government-run schools
to provide womens' sports in addition to mens' sports.

January 30, 2003: Pakistan insists that no terrorists are entering
the Indian half of Kashmir from the Pakistani half.

January 30, 2003: The Department of State declares Lashkar e-Jhangvi
to be a terrorist group.

January 31, 2003: During a speech with British Prime Minister
Tony Blair, when asked "Do you believe that there is a link between
Saddam Hussein, a direct link, and the men who attacked on September
the 11th [2001]?", says "I can't made that claim". Later, Blair
says that "the process ends once there is a second resolution".

January 31, 2003: Italy arrests 28 Pakistanis who it claims comprise
an al Qaeda cell.

January 31, 2003: Hans Blix accuses the United States of exaggerating
his statements.

January 31, 2003: Admiral Thomas Fargo, Commander in Chief of Pacific
Command, requests additional forces in the Pacific to deter North Korea.

January 31, 2003: Judges Stephen F. Williams and Judith W. Rogers of
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia decide
that the Export Admnistration Act's permissal for the government
to refuse to release certain documents under the Freedom of Information Act
remains in effect after the Act expires. Judge A. Raymond Randolph dissents.

January 31, 2003: Sander Hicks of the Guerrilla News Network
reports that Secret Service and Suffolk County, New York, police
broke into the house of citizen Lance Schotte and held him
under arrest without a warrant while seraching Schotte's home
for Harry Stuckey, who the police did not have a warrant for either.
Stuckey, under the pen name "voxfux", had written an article stating
that Bush's stated policy of assassinating terrorists means that Bush
should assassinate himself, writing "by the administration's policy,
both Bushes must be immediately destroyed. No trial, no explanation,
no warning -- just immediate obliteration. According to White House
officials, the Presiden'ts policy is that 'association' alone, with
any suspected al Qaeda or terrorist, is sufficient enough justification
for immediate execution by the CIA or US military. Yet there is no
other family in America today who has had closer ties with the bin Ladens
than the Bush family."

January 31, 2003: Security advisor Richard A. Clarke resigns.

January 31, 2003: Oakland, California's official marijuana grower
Ed Rosenthal is convicted of growing marijuana for sale after
Judge Charles Breyer bars the defense from discussing the context
in which the drugs were being grown. Five members of the jury condemn
their own decision to convict Rosenthal and demand a retrial.
Five months later, Breyer sentences Rosenthal to one day of prison
comprising time already served, and fines him $1,300.

January 31, 2003, Unrelated: Jafar Umar Thalib, leader of Lashkar Jihad,
is acquitted of charges of inciting violence in Indonesia. 

January 31, 2003, Unrelated: A pro-grovernment mob attacks French forces
in Cote D'Ivoire, injuring several. The mob, defended by Cote D'Ivoire troops,
is angered at the govenment's recent peace with rebels, which France
helped negotiate.

January 31, 2003, Unrelated: Israeli airplanes invade Lebanon and
harass Lebanese ground forces.


February 1, 2003, Unrelated: The space shuttle Colombia breaks apart
reentering the Earth, killing seven astronauts.

February 1, 2003: Announces his oppsition to further attempts to
find any evidence of Iraq having a weapons of mass destruction program,
saying that "any attempt to drag the process on for months will
be resisted by the United States". Bush also takes credit for
sending weapons inspectors to Iraq.

February 1, 2003: The Department of Labor and Department of Commerce
announce plans to repeal the minimum wage, 40-hour work week, and
overtime pay.

February 1, 2003: The United States withdraws foreign aid to Ukraine
after determining Ukraine broke the embargo against Iraq.

February 1, 2003: The Guardian reports that "to win the backing of
a majority of...the UN security council...the US has agreed to blacklist
three rebel Chechen groups, a long-standing request from Russia;
approved $4.1m (Ł2.48m) for the resettlement of returnees to Angola;
and approved an extra $2.1m for Liberian refugees hosted by Guinea,
another council member."

February 1, 2003: Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post reports
that 13 of the 15 members of the African American Republican
Leadership Council are white, and that the Council appointed
former Senator Ed Brooke to its advisory board without his knowledge.

February 1, 2003: Insight Magazine reports that Magnequench, makers
of the Joint Direct Attack Munition, are moving their JDAM production
facilities to the People's Republic of China.

February 1, 2003, Unrelated: Thai police arrest Cambodian politician
Sam Rainsy in retaliation for rioters' destruction of the Thia embassy.

February 2, 2003: The Herald Sun reports that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's
top bodyguard has defected to Israel and revealed the locations of
several of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction manufacturing and storage
areas. The article lists these locations.

February 2, 2003, Unrelated: A bomb explodes at a bank in Lagos, Nigeria,
killing over 40.

February 3, 2003: Pakistan condemns Italy for arresting 28 Pakistanis
in possesion of bombs and terrorist propaganda, claiming that the
arrestees are all innocent and "our citizens have been arrested in Italy
because of a conspiracy".

February 3, 2003: Pakistan State Oil's headquarters in Karachi is bombed,
killing one.

February 3, 2003: Indonesia reports arresting Mas Selemat Kastari,
head of Jemaah Islamiya's operations in Singapore.

February 3, 2003: Finsbury Park Mosque prayer leader Abu Hamza al Masri
preaches on the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia that "the Muslim
people see these pilots as criminals. By going into space they would have
sharpened the accuracy of their bombs through satellites. These missions
would increase the number of satellites for military purposes. It would
increase the slavery of governance of other countries by America.
It is a punishment from God. Muslims see it that way. It is a trinity
of evil because it contained Americans, an Israeli, and a Hindu,
a trinity of evil against Islam. The fact that the motor of the craft
fell on Palestine [,Texas], all these are messages from God. It is a
strong message, for the Israeli, to be taken up there to space and
he spoke about the Holocaust to try to make religious advancement from it
and gain some moral high ground, hence you have seen this message
over Palestine." The next day, Britain's Charity Commission orders
al Masri to stop preaching for having "used his position within the charity
to make political statements".

February 3, 2003: Al Muhajiroun leader Anjem Choudray says "We believe
if anyone innocent dies, then that is something we would not wish
on anyone. However, this craft did also have one Israeli army official
on board...Muslims would not be shedding any tears. Ultimately the
United States is a country at war with Muslims and we know it is a sign
from God."

February 3, 2003, Unrelated: An off-duty US soldier is shot and wounded
near Schweinfurt, Germany.

February 3, 2003, Unrelated: The American Friends Service Committee,
a Quaker peace organization, accuses Denver, Colorado police of
spying on them and conducting background checks without warrants.

February 3, 2003, Unrelated: Indian and Bangladeshi troops exchange
fire on the border.

February 4, 2003: The Philadelphia Enquirer reports that Iraq is
deploying forces to its northern border.

February 4, 2003: Congressman Howard Coble, Chairman of the Judiciary
Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, praises
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's imprisonment of the entire
Japanese-descendant population of the mainland United States during
the Second World War, saying "we were at war. For many of these
Japanese Americans, it wasn't safe for them to be on the street...some
probably were intent on doing harm to us, just as some of these
Arab Americans are probably intent on doing harm to us." In 1988,
Coble had opposed a bill to apologize and pay restitution to
Japanese citizens, saying "Was there a failure of political leadership?
I think not...the decisions that are being questioned today...were
intertwined with a threatened national security."

February 4, 2003: Diebold Election Systems admits to placing its
voting systems' records on anonymous FTP sites where any Internet
user can modify the vote count. The admission is under pressure from
Bush critic Bev Harris, who accuses the Republicans of rigging
voting machines in the last two nationwide elections.

February 4, 2003: Pat Ware, chair of the President's Advisory Committee
on HIV and AIDS, is promoted to a higher position within the Department
of Health and Human Services.

February 4, 2003: Texas executes a Briton of whom over 100 British
Members of Parliament and the British Foreign Secretary had demanded
a retrial due to oddities in the case.

February 5, 2003: Secretary of State Colin Powell presents the United
Nations with audiotapes of one Iraqi official asking another if
a site has been evacuated before an International Atomic Energy Agency 
committee arrives, in which one official mentions a "modified vehicle";
shows aerial photographs of bunkers with monitoring posts and nearby
decontamination vehicles; shows photographs of Iraqi truck convoys arriving
at inspection sites in the days before United Nations inspection teams
arrive there; claims that Ansar al Islam is supported by the Iraqi
government because a dozen Ansar members established a base in Baghdad,
and provides evidence that Iraq has allowed it to operate without 
interference. After the presentation, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia
pledge to assist in an invasion of Iraq.

February 5, 2003: North Korea threatens to launch a pre-emptive
strike if the United States reinforces its nearby troops.

February 5, 2003, Unrelated: The World Court orders Texas to delay 
the executions of three Mexicans who were denied access to their
consulate.

February 5, 2003: The Federal Senate of Australia votes 34-31 to
declare a vote of no confidence in Prime Minister John Howard
and to censure his deployment of forces to the Persian Gulf.

February 5, 2003: Joshua Micah Marshall reports that judicial
nominee Miguel Estrada, who has claimed under oath before Congress
never to have been in a position where he would need to consider
arguments on the legality of abortion, had been the clerk for
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy when Kennedy had been asked
to consider the legality of abortion in 1988.

February 5, 2003: Cable News Network reports that Bush's budget
will charge a tax on ranchers and slaughterhouses to have their sites
inspected, an annual $250 tax for veterans to receive medical benefits,
a $20 tax on airline tickets, a higher fee for applying for a visa,
and a fee on medical companies for reporting erroneous data to Medicare.

February 5, 2003: The Brookings Institute reports that Bush's
plan to increase funding for AIDS prevention by $450 million
"is offset by a $470 million shortfall in its Child Survival
and Health request relative to the fiscal 2003 appropriations bill."

February 5, 2003: Iraq announces that "If we had a relationship with
al Qaeda and we believed in that relationship, we wouldn't be ashamed
to admit it."

February 5, 2003: Knight Ridder reports that Iraq is deploying forces
to the Kuwaiti border. The report quotes United Nations officials
as saying that Iraq's front line forces "will surrender when they
hear the first American tank turn on its engine" and that some soldiers'
families have been arrested to ensure the soldiers will fight.

February 5, 2003: North Korea announces that the Yongbyon reactor
is now operating at full capacity.

February 5, 2003: Congressmen Paul DeFazio and Ron Paul introduce
a bill to rescind Congress's permission for Bush to invade Iraq.
The bill is soon cosponsored by Congressmen Tammy Baldwin,
Michael Capuano, Julia Carson, John Conyers, Danny Davis, Sam Farr,
Bob Filner, Barney Frank, Raul Grijalva, Jesse Jackson, Stephanie Jones,
Gerald Kleczka, Dennis Kucinich, Barbara Lee, Jim McDermott, Eleanor Norton,
James Oberstar, John Olver, Bobby Rush, Bernard Sanders, Janice Schakowsky,
Jose Serrano, Pete Stark, Maxine Waters, Diane Watson, and Lynn Woolsey.

February 5, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld condemns
international treaties against the use of chemical weapons as
a "straightjacket".

February 5, 2003: Robert Fisk claims that "al Qaeda has a radio station
operating inside Afghanistan which calls for holy war against America",
that 25% of the weapons siezed in Afghanistan have been imported
since the war, that United States forces have retreated from at least
five positions near the Pakistani border including the Lwara base
which "al Qaeda fighters then stormed...and burnt it to the ground",
and that the enemy forces claimed by United States media to be Hekmatyar's
rebel Afgans are really Arab.

February 5, 2003: Admiral Steven Kunkle, commander of the Kitty Hawk
battle group, is removed from command for having an affair with
another naval officer.

February 6, 2003: al Qaeda releases an audiotape in which Osama bin Laden
calls for the "liberation" of Jordan, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan,
Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, "which are enslaved by the United States",
to "estabish the rule of God on Earth"; and condemns Iraq's government
as "socialist", saying "socialists are infidels wherever they are,
whether they are in Baghdad or Aden" and "fighting in support of the
non-Islamic banners is forbidden" but that "there will be no harm if
the interests of Muslims converge with the interests of the socialists
in the fight against the Crusaders, despite our belief in the infidelity
of socialists. The jurisdiction of the socialists and those rulers has
fallen a long time ago." A week later, the United States and Britain claim
that the tape proves an alliance between Iraq and al Qaeda. Following this,
the Microsoft National Broadcast Company deletes from its articles 
any mention of the tape's opposition to Iraq's government.

February 6, 2003: The State Department warns United States citizens
not to travel to any other country.

February 6, 2003: The New York Times reports that the United States
is offering Turkey control over the Kurdish portion of Iraq.

February 6, 2003: Attorney General John Ashcroft orders federal prosecutors
to execute more people, saying "the death penalty is the law of the land,
provided for as the ultimate punishment for heinous crimes, and the
Attorney General is committed to the fair implementation of justice".

February 6, 2003: Turkey allows the United States to use bases on its
land for war with Iraq.

February 6, 2003: The New York Sun calls for people speaking against
plans for war with Iraq to be tried for treason.

February 6, 2003: India arrests two people suspected of planning
terrorist attacks. One says that Pakistani High Commissioner
Jalil Abbas Jilani gave them $6,000. Jilani calls the accusation
"a figment of the imagination of the Indian security agencies".

February 6, 2003: Germany arrests three people suspected of planning
terrorist attacks. Police raided the Islamic Centre of the city of Muenster
during the investigation.

February 6, 2003: Britain arrests seven people suspected of planning
terrorist attacks.

February 6, 2003: Channel Four and the Guardian report that a
recently released British government report on Iraq's current activities
was largely plagiarized from a college student's paper on Iraq's
activities in 1990 and a Jane's Intelligence Review report
on Iraq's activities in 1997. The Observer later reports that
the British government changed certain words in the original
to more specific and emotional words, such as replacing "monitoring"
with "spying" and "opposition groups" with "terrorist organizations".

February 6, 2003: Secretary of State Colin Powell refuses to answer
Senator Joe Biden's question as to why the United States has not
acted against Ansar al Islam's facilities in northern Iraq. In reporting
on this the next day, the Los Angeles Times quotes an anonymous
intelligence official explaining the lack of action by saying "this is their
compelling evidence for use of force [against Iraq]. If you take it out,
you can't use it for justification of war."

February 6, 2003: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland,
New Jersey, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island,
and Vermont file suit against the Environmental Protection Agency
to prevent the EPA from weakening Clean Air Act regulations.

February 6, 2003: Laurie Garrett of Newsday writes a personal note
about the World Economic Forum which is leaked to the public,
writing that "heads of Saudi and German FBI, plus the foreign
minister of Afghanistan...all said that at its peak al Qaeda
had 70,000 members. Only 10% of them were trained in terrorism.
The rest were military recruits. Of that 7000, they say all but
about 200 are dead or in jail...al Qaeda, they say, is like a
brand that has been heavily franchised. And nobody knows how many
unofficial franchises have been spawned since 9/11...The global
economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year when
WEF met here in New York all I heard was 'yeah, it's bad, but
recovery is right around the corner'. This year, 'recovery' was
a word never uttered...the watchwords were 'deflation', 'long term
stagnation', and 'collapse of the dollar'...Except for diehard
American Republicans, a few Brit Tories and some Middle East folks
the WEF was in a foul, angry, anti-American mood. Last year the WEF
was a lovefest for America. This year the mood was so ugly that it
reminded me of what it felt like to be an American overseas in
the Reagan years. The rich...are livid about the Iraq crisis primarily
because they believe it will sink their financial fortunes...If
the US cannot behave in partnership with its allies -- especially
the Europeans -- it risks not only political alliance but BUSINESS,
as well. Company leaders argued that they would rather not have to
deal with US government attitudes about all sorts of multilateral
treaties (climate change, intellectual property, rights of children,
etc.) -- it's easier to just do business in countries where governments
agree with yours...For a minority of the participants there was
another layer of AntiAmericanism that focused on moralisms and religion.
I often heard delegates complain that the US 'opposes the rights
of children' because we block all treaties and UN efforts that would
support sex education and condom access for children and teens...I
attended a small lunch with Ashcroft, and observed Ralph Reed and other
prominent Christian fundamentalists working the room and bowing their
heads before eating. The rest of the world's elite finds this
American Christian behavior at least as uncomfortable as it does
Moslem or Hindu fundamentalist behavior. They find it awkward every
time a US representative refers to 'faith-based' programs. It's
different from how it makes non-Christian Americans feel -- these
folks experience it as downright embarassing...When Colin Powell
gave the speech of his life...the sharpest attack on his comments
came not from Amnesty International or some Islamic representative -- it
came from the head of the largest bank in the Netherlands!...the only
economy about which there is much enthusiasm is China...I learned
from American security and military speakers that 'we need  to
attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but preemptively,
as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a campaign that
will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet'...the world
isn't run by a clever cabal. It's run by about 5,000 bickering, sometimes
charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who are accustomed to
living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal power. A few
have both. Many of them turn out to be remarkably naive -- especially
about matters of science and technology...they have a hard time
reconciling long term issues (global warming, AIDS pandemic, resource
scarcity) with their daily bottomline foci."

February 6, 2003, Unrelated: Michigan State Representative Arlon Lindner
proposes a bill to allow discrimination against homosexuals. The bill
would also claim that homosexuals were not targeted for extermination
by Nazi Germany during the 1940s.

February 6, 2003, Unrelated: Talk show host Bill O'Reilly
calls Mexicans "wetbacks" and "coyotes".

February 7, 2003, Unrelated: Texas announces that "there is no authority
for the federal government or this World Court to prohibit Texas
from exercising the laws passed by our legislature".

February 7, 2003: Congress allows Vice President Cheney to keep
the names of members of the Energy Task Force secret.

February 7, 2003: Reliant Energy, whose executives have been recorded
bragging about causing the energy shortages in California in 2000,
is fined $13.8 million by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

February 7, 2003: Announces that the crisis with North Korea can
be resolved diplomatically.

February 7, 2003: North Korea promises that "if the United States' moves
to bolster agression troops are unchecked, the whole land of Korea
will be reduced to ashes and the Koreans will not escape horrible
nuclear disaster".

February 7, 2003: Recipients of the Nobel Prize for Economics
George Akerlof, Kenneth Arrow, Lawrence Klein, Daniel McFadden,
Franco Modigliani, Douglass North, Paul Sameulson, William Sharpe,
Robert Solow, and Joseph Stiglitz, along with nearly 400 other economists,
condemn Bush's economic policy and tax cut plan.

February 7, 2003: The Center for Public Integrity reports
that the Department of Justice is producing a new law, the
"Domestic Security Enhancement Act", which would make it a federal
crime to release the names or any information about people who
have been arrested in terrorism investigations; make it a federal
crime to release studies estimating the results of chemical pollution;
create a database of the DNA of every person who is suspected of
being a terrorist; prohibit state law enforcement agencies from
choosing not to spy on the public without a warrant; deny habeus corpus
or bail hearings to anybody suspected of terrorism; allow "indefinite
detention" of people suspected of terrorism; allow the Attorney General
to order the deportation of any noncitizen; restablish a mandatory
5 year prison term for anybody who uses encryption during the commission
of a crime; and strip the citizenship of Americans who are suspected
of terrorism. The Center reports that an early copy of the law has
been seen by Vice President Dick Cheney and House Speaker Dennis Hastert,
and that the Department of Justice has told the House Judiciary Committee
that it was not working on any such law.

February 7, 2003: Five Afghan soldiers are killed by rebel forces
near Choto in Helmand province.

February 7, 2003: The British Broadcasting Corporation reports
that Cuban officials are harassing United States diplomats.

February 7, 2003: The City of Manchester, New Hampshire, accuses
the Virginia-based Republican Party organization Grand Old Party Marketplace,
led by Republican Leadership Council Executive Director Allen Raymond,
of hiring telemarketing company Milo Enterprises to flood the telephones
of a firefighters' union that had offered the public rides to voting booths,
preventing many seniors and disabled people from voting in the 2002 election.
Republican State Committee Executive Director Charles McGee denies
having hired GOP Marketplace. State Republican Party Chairman Jayne Millerick
confirms that McGee had hired GOP Marketplace. McGee resigns following
the publication of news articles on this story.

February 7, 2003: United States diplomat Mike Owens condemns Australia's
parliament for criticizing Bush.

February 7, 2003: Former Finsbury Park Mosque prayer leader
Abu Hamzi al Masri praises the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia
over Texas, saying "It is the headquarters of Mr. Bush. It is a message
for him. You are a curse for your people, for the planet, and mankind.
The message is that some big calamities are going to drop on your head"
and that it "shows the evil coalition between Israel and America is
immoral and is going to be disintegrated".

February 7, 2003: Soldiers for the Truth reports that the "water buffalo"
portable water supplies used by United States forces in the Persian Gulf
work by replacing water leaving the device with air from the surrounding
environment, and that there are no filters on the devices to protect
against chemical or biological weapons.

February 7, 2003, Unrelated: A bomb explodes at the Club Nogal night club
in Bogota, Colombia, killing 33. 

February 2003: Congresswoman Sue Myrick says that the United States
could face future terrorist attacks because "look at who runs all
the convenience stores across the country. Every little town you
go into".

February 2003: The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests
a Washington Army National Guard intelligence officer Rafael Davila
and his ex-wife on charges of passing information on the production of
weapons of mass destruction to white supremacist organizations.

February 2003: Somebody sends a package of pornographic materials
to Attorney General John Ashcroft. The Department of Justice pledges
to have the sender arrested for terrorism.

February 2003: The Workers World Party bans Rabbi Michael Lerner,
the United States' most prominent Jewish opponent of the war with Iraq,
from speaking at a peace rally planned for February 16 because Lerner
does not support the elimination of Israel.

February 2003: Viacom, among the largest owner of billboards,
refuses to run ads against war with Iraq.

February 8, 2003: Announces that "today I ask our religious broadcasters,
those who reach into every corner of America, to rally the armies
of compassion so that we can change America one heart, one soul at a time."

February 8, 2003: Kurdish Member of Parliament Shawkat Haji Mushir
and five others are assassinated by Ansar al Islam terrorists who
had claimed to be defecting. Mushir was one of the seven founders
of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

February 8, 2003, Unrelated: India expels Pakistani High Commissioner
Jalil Abbas Jilani for giving money to terrorists. In response, Pakistan
expels five Indian ambassadors and complains that "the state of relations
is extremely bad...because of the actions that India has been taking and
it appears that they are interested that this atmosphere remains
vitiated".

February 8, 2003: Congressman Tom DeLay announces that he did not
write a letter, signed with his name, which said that workers' unions
are "a clear and present danger to the security of the United States".
The letter solicited donations for the National Right to Work Legal
Defense and Education Foundation.

February 8, 2003: The United States conscripts several dozen commercial
airliners to serve as troop transports.

February 9, 2003: Belgium, France, and Germany veto North Atlantic Treaty
Organization plans to stengthen forces in Turkey. United States
Defese Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says that Belgium, France, and Germany
"will be judged by their own people and they'll be judged by
other NATO countries...We will defy Paris and Berlin".

February 9, 2003: The Sunday Herald reports that the United States
is paying Iran a significant amount of foreign aid to stay out of
the war with Iraq, and that Turkey has demanded $14 billion 
in foreign aid for its support.

February 9, 2003: The Independent reports that the Central Intelligence
Agency and Britain's MI6 intelligence agency believe that their
governments are lying about Iraq.

February 10, 2003: United States forces bomb gunmen in the Uruzgan province
of Afghanistan.

February 10, 2003: Two missiles strike near Germany's main base
in Afganistan, causing no damage.

February 10, 2003: Benevolence International admits to funding
terrorists in Chechnya and Bosnia. In return, the government drops
charges of funding al Qaeda.

February 10, 2003: The Rumsfeld clan of Bremen, Germany officially
disowns United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

February 10, 2003: The Eight Circuit Court of Appeals rules 6-5
that execution of the insane is not "cruel and unusual punishment"
forbidden by the Constitution if the prisoner is medicated so
they are no longer insane. Bush appointee William Jay Riley
is among the majority.

February 10, 2003: The United States bombs an Iraqi surface-to-air
missile post near Basra.

February 10, 2003: The New York Post announces on its front page
that United States soldiers "died for France but France has forgotten".

February 10, 2003: The Department of Homeland Security urges the people
of the United States to prepare for a terrorist attack by assembling
a "disaster supply kit" and to have a room in their homes that can be
sealed airtight.

February 10, 2003: Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart condemns
"Americans who too often find it hard to distinguish their loyalties
to their original homelands from their loyalties to America and its
national interests". When asked to clarify this statement, Hart
mentions the Irish and the Cubans.

February 10, 2003: Freelance columnist Dennis Hans writes in Scoop magazine
that "Bush and his foreign-policy team have systematically and knowingly
deceived the American people in order to gain support for an unprovoked
attack on Iraq" and condemns National Broadcast Company reporter Tom Brokaw,
Columbia Broadcast System reporter Dan Rather, American Broadcasting
Corporation reporter Peter Jennings, Cable News Network reporter Wolf Blitzer,
and Public Broadcast System reporter Jim Lehrer as "journalistic imposters
who control what you hear and see, who seem psychologically incapable
of conceiving of Bush as a liar, and who wouldn't have the guts to call him
one even if they reached that conclusion."

February 11, 2003: The Commercial Appeal reports that Bush has said
that "liberty is not America's gift to the world. Liberty is God's gift
to every human being in the world...we are called to extend the promise
of America to every country...let us pray for strength equal to the task."

February 11, 2003: Senator Jim Brunning condemns United States
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, whose job is to run the
country's economy, saying "You make statements on fiscal policy,
which you should not be doing". Later, Greenspan condemns Bush's
new tax cut plan, saying "economic growth cannot be safely counted upon
to eliminate deficits, and difficult choices will be required to restore
financial discipline...until we can make a judgement as to whether
there is underlying deterioration going on, and my own judgement is
I suspect not, then stimulus is actually premature."

February 11, 2003: Praises Miguel Estrada, who has opposed the
Seventh Amendment and who lied during his confirmation hearings
in Congress, as a "worthy candidate" and demands that Congress
immediately approve his nomination.

February 11, 2003: Britain places London under military guard.

February 11, 2003: The United States bombs an Iraqi Ababil-100 
surface-to-surface missile installation near Basra. The US claims
that the attack was done "under UN authority".

February 11, 2003: Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet
says that recent threats of terrorist attack refer plans that
are not "idle chatter" but "the most specific we have seen", saying
that "al Qaeda is living in the expectation of resuming the offensive."

February 11, 2003: The People's Republic of China begins withdrawing
all non-essential diplomatic staff from Iraq.

February 11, 2003: The British Broadcasting Company prohibits
all newscasters and editors from attending an anti-war rally
for any reason.

February 12, 2003: Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet
says that North Korea has intercontinental ballistic missiles
capable of hitting the mainland United States.

February 12, 2003: The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the United States
will withdraw nearly all of its forces from Germany.

February 12, 2003: The United States places additional anti-aircraft
missile systems around the District of Colombia.

February 12, 2003: Recipients of the Nobel Prize for Economics
Milton Friedman, James Buchanon, and Vernon Smith, along with
112 additional economists, announce support for Bush's new tax cut plan,
stating that "as a rule, government cannot create wealth or expand
the economy" but can only "hinder economic growth through excessive
taxes, high marginal tax rates, overregulation, or unnecessary spending"
and that "accordingly, elected leaders should be working to adopt
measures that curb or halt government policies that are hurting
the economy" which the letter implies are all of them.

February 12, 2003: An Italian judge orders the immediate release of
28 Pakistanis who had been arrested in late January after the
government fails to present sufficient evidence against any of them.

February 12, 2003: The Saint Petersburg Times reports that the
Federal Aviation Administration and Transportatio Security Administration
have granted themselves the power to suspend the license of any flight pilot,
engineer, or instructor without reason, saying a new regulation "sets up
a procedure to alert the FAA whenever the TSA receives information that
the holder of an 'airman certificate', basically a license to work, might
pose a security risk. The FAA then is required to suspend the certificate
without independent investigation of the allegations. The suspended
individual may appeal, but the appeal goes back to the same officials
at TSA who originally triggered the suspension. And the individual may
see only the evidence against him that TSA does not consider classified."

February 12, 2003: Iran reports that "US and Danish warplanes bombed
a civilian are in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province...killing
at least 17 and injuring dozens more of Afghan civilians", quoting
Helmand's governor's  spokesman Mohammad Vali as saying that "the US
fores had received reports about the presence of al Qaeda and Taliban
militants in the region, which is why they bombed a residential region
in Helmand" and that "the government forces have a strong position
in Helmand and do not permit the opponents of the central government,
including the Taliban and al Qaeda militants, to form any political
or military resistance." Retuers confirms that Helmand's government
has noted several civilian deaths as a result of US and Dutch bombing.
The United States denies that there were any population centers
in the area. Iran also reports that five Afghan soldiers have been
killed in recent fighting near Bagheran of Chatou province. 

February 12, 2003: The Philippines expel Iraqi Consul Husham Husain
for having received a telephone call from Abu Sayaaf after a bombing.

February 12, 2003: Senator Robert Byrd says that Bush "is possibly
crippling, for all time, International order-keeping entities like
the United Nations and NATO. This Administration has called into question
the traditional worldwide perception of the United States as
well-intentioned, peacekeeper", and condemns Bush's "calling heads
of state 'pygmies', labeling whole countries as evil, denigrating
powerful European allies as irrelevant".

February 13, 2003: Japan threatens to launch a pre-emptive strike
against North Korea.

February 13, 2003: American Broadcasting Corporation reports that
the recent warnings of an imminent terrorist attack were based
upon a lie from one captured terrorist.

February 13, 2003, Unrelated: The Senate Finance Committee finds
that Enron had bribed Internal Revenue Service agents to avoid
paying taxes, and had avoided paying $2 billion in taxes from
1995 to 2001.

February 13, 2003: A United States government plane crashes in Colombia. 
Two passengers are executed by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia,
and the other three are captured.

February 13, 2003: The American Association for the Advancement
of Science announces that the United States' medical system
is "in imminent danger of collapse".

February 13, 2003: The Philippine army reports killing 122 soldiers
of the terrorist Moro Islamic Liberation Front. The MILF reports
killing 49 government soldiers while losing 17. 

February 13, 2003: Congressman Jim Kolbe reports that Bush's budget
does not include any aid to Afghanistan.

February 13, 2003: Congressmen John Conyers, Jesse Jackson,
Sheila Jackson Lee, Dennis Kucinich Jim McDermott, and Jose Serrano
file a lawsuit against Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld
to prevent Bush from invading Iraq during peacetime. The lawsuit
is quickly thrown out of court by Judge Joseph Tauro, citing that
"case law makes clear that Congress does not have the exclusive right
to determine whether or not the United States engages in war."

February 13, 2003: White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Pennsylvania
Imperial Wizard David Hull is arrested for planning terrorist bombings.

February 13, 2003: Andrew J. O'Connor of Santa Fe, New Mexico is arrested
at the Saint John's College library for telling another library patron
that "Bush is out of control". Upon his release, O'Connor vows to
"sue the Secret Service, Santa Fe Police, St. John's, and everybody
involved in this whole thing."

February 13, 2003, Unrelated: Columbia Broadcast System reports
that firefighters' masks do not filter biological or chemical weapons.

February 14, 2003: The United States announces that it has no intention
of enacting sanctions against North Korea.

February 14, 2003: The United States expels an Iraqi journalist
for being "harmful to US national security".

February 14, 2003: After Hans Blix makes a speech to the United Nations,
Cable News Network deletes mention of Iraq's compliance
and a rebuttal to Colin Powell's presentation from its official
transcript of the speech.

February 14, 2003: The State Department issues a warning for
United States citizens in France to stay away from peace rallies.

February 14, 2003: 150,000 march in Melbourne, Australia to protest
against war with Iraq.

February 14, 2003: Pakistani and United States Federal Bureau of Investigation
police arrest a man in Quetta suspected of being an al Qaeda member.

February 14, 2003: The town of Spin Boldak, Afghanistan comes under
rocket fire.

February 14, 2003: The Center for Contstitutional Rights, the International
Human Rights Law Group, and the International Federation of Human Rights
accuse the United States of torturing suspected terrorists at
Guantanamo Bay Naval Station.

February 14, 2003, Unrelated: On a 3-1 vote, Iran's Supreme Court
nullifies the death sentence of journalist Hashem Aghajari due to
a technical issue and orders him retried.

February 14, 2003: The New York Metropolitan Transit Authority
begins randomly searching train passengers and their baggage.

February 14, 2003: The Florida 2nd District Court of Appeal
unanimously overturns journalists Jane Akre and Steve Wilson's
wrongful dismissal claim against Fox News for firing them for
refusing to lie in a news report.

February 15, 2003: 100,000 march in New York, 750,000 march in London,
1,300,000 march in Barcelona, 1,000,000 march in Rome,
660,000 march in Madrid, 200,000 march in Seville, 200,000 march in Damascus,
500,000 march in Berlin, 100,000 march in Paris, 80,000 march in Dublin,
70,000 march in Amsterdam, 60,000 march in Oslo, 50,000 march in Brussels,
35,000 march in Stockholm, 100,000 march in Montreal, 20,000 march
in Vancouver, 5 rally at the South Pole, and thousands more in cities
throughout the word march in protest of Bush's plan to invade Iraq.
The Associated Press reports that the number of protesters worldwide
is in the thousands.

February 15, 2003: The Syracuse Post Standard reports that
the Bush administration has filed a legal brief to support
the city of New York's banning of protest marches against Bush.

February 15, 2003: Belgium offers to end its opposition to
sending North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces to Turkey
if the United States ensures that the forces will only be there
to provide for Turkey's defence and not for aggression against Iraq.

February 15, 2003: Prince Sultan bin Turki of Saudi Arabia calls
for all Arab countries to send troops for Iraq's defense.

February 15, 2003: Iraq rejects its term as chair of the
Conference on Disarmament. Terms are rotated on a monthly basis
by alphabetic order.

February 15, 2003: Bahrain arrests five people suspected of
plannign terrorist acts.

February 15, 2003: The Washington Times reports that Saad bin Laden
is in Iran.

February 16, 2003: 65,000 march in San Francisco to protest
Bush's plans for war with Iraq.

February 16, 2003: Capitol Hill Blue reports that the Mossad has
told the Central Intelligence Agency that al Qaeda cannot commit
another large scale attack, but will instead leak false information
to world intelligence agencies to keep them confused.

February 16, 2003: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announces
that "we'll continue to govern in democracy and peace, exercising
due authority just like" Bush.

February 17, 2003: French President Jacques Chirac threatens
to oppose the European Union membership applications of countries
which support the United States' war with Iraq, saying that "if they
wanted to diminish their chances of joining Europe they could
not have found a better way."

February 2003: A high scholl student in Dearborn, Michigan
is suspended for wearing a shirt that proclaims Bush to
be an "international terrorist".

February 2003: The city council of Seattle, Washington passes a resolution
condemning the Patriot Act and the federal government's expansion of powers.

February 2003: The city councils of Saint Paul, Minnesota,
Los Angeles, California, and Petaluma, California, reject proposed
resolutions which would have opposed war with Iraq.

February 2003: Cubbie's Restaurant of Beaufort, North Carolina
announces that "because of Cubbie's support for our troops,
we no longer serve french fries. We now serve freedom fries."

February 2003, Unrelated: Dozens are crushed to death in a panic fleeing
from a night club in Chicago which had one small exit for 500 people.
Reverend Jesse Jackson and Democratic presidential candidate
Carol Moseley-Braun condemn the city for threatening to charge
the politically-connected club owner with fire code violations.

February 2003: United Nations weapons inspectors report that the
information they have been getting from the United States is "garbage
after garbage after garbage".

February 2003: Grand Old Party Marketplace shuts its public Web site.

February 2003: Grand Old Party Team Leader calls on all Republicans
to condemn Washington Post reporter Helen Thomas. Media Whores Online,
a left-wing media critic group, reports that Bush personally ordered
the action and calls it an "enemies list" like the one Nixon had.

February 2003: David Gergen, who was communications director for
former President Ronald Reagan and advisor to Presidents Nixon,
Ford, Reagan, and Clinton, says that Bush's "actual governance...is
much farther to the right of Reagan. There's a radical conservatism
that runs through much of the Bush policy, whether it's tax cuts
or affirmative action or the environment or education or dismantling
the Great Society...one of the interesting questions...is whether,
to some extent, he believes that...he somehow may be an instrument
of Providence, that part of what he's on is a mission that has some
sort of theological roots."

February 2003: The Mobile Register reports that Bush has said that
attacking Iraq is his "duty" and that "in Midland, Texas, when I grew up,
there were more signs saying Get us out of the UN than there were saying
God Bless America. And there were plenty of God Bless America signs.
I feel the comfort and the power of knowing that literally millions of
Americans I'm never going to meet ... say my name to the Almighty
every day and ask him to help me, he said. My friend, Jiang Zemin
in China, has about a billion and a half folks, and I don't think he can
say that. And my friend, Vladimir Putin, I like him, but he can't say that."

February 2003, Unrelated: Los Angeles Dodgers assistant coach
Sandy Koufax quits after the New York Post, owned by News Corporation
which also owns Fox News and the Dodgers, publishes an article
accuses Koufax of homosexuality.

February 2003: The Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan promise to attack any Turkish forces that cross the Iraqi
border.

February 2003: The Los Angeles Times reports that Bush's budget
would waive the military's requirement that the antiballistic missile
system be tested.

February 18, 2003: Turkey announces that it will not allow United States
forces to attack Iraq from its territory unless the United Nations
passes a resolution permitting an invasion of Iraq.

February 18, 2003: North Korea threatens to end the ceasefire of 1953
unless the United States withdraws its forces.

February 18, 2003: India and Pakistan allow the replacement of each others'
diplomatic teams. 

February 18, 2003: Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al Faisal
says that "our worry is the new emerging fundamentalism in the
United States and the West. Fundamentalism in our region is on the wane.
There, it's in ascendancy. That's the threat."

February 18, 2003: San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carrol
reports that "Last week, I wrote a controversial column suggesting
that killing civilians should be a tactic of last resort. This
unpatriotic sentiment was roundly attacked, usually in rambling letters
that somehow ended up back at Bill Clinton."

February 18, 2003: Ken Masugi of the Claremont Institute and
the Center for Local Government defends Congressman Howard Coble's
support for sending all United States citizens of Japanese descent
to concentration camps during the Second World War, saying that
the act was "sobriety, true moderation, and restraint" and
that disagreeing with the internment "is ideological fanaticism.
Congressman Coble's critics are the fanatics. They are the ones
who should be regarded with wariness in these nervous times".

February 18, 2003, Unrelated: Florida Governor Jeb Bush refers
to Spanish Prime Minister Jose Aznar as "the President of the
Republic of Spain". Spain is a monarchy, and has not been a republic
since the success of Fascist forces during the Civil War.

February 18, 2003, Unrelated: Iran files suit against the United States
for destroying several oil platforms in 1988. The platforms were
used as missile launching sites to attack United States civilian shipping.

February 18, 2003, Unrelated: Clear Channel Worldwide founder and
chief executive Lowry Mays says that "If anyone said we were in the
radio business, it wouldn't be someone from our company. We're not
in the business of providing news and information. We're not in the
business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business
of selling our customers products." Clear Channel owns over 1,200 radio
stations across the United States for a market share over 20%.

February 18, 2003, Unrelated: 120 people are killed by arson
on a subway in Daegu, South Korea.

February 19, 2003: The Kurdish government condemns the United States' plans
for military occupation of Iraq, claiming that the United States promised
to replace Saddam Hussein's rule with a democracy and saying that
"conquerors always call themselves liberators".

February 19, 2003: Canada asks the United Nations to set a final date
by which Iraq must begin complying with resolutions or face invasion.

February 19, 2003: Italy's Parliament passes a resolution supporting
war with Iraq.

February 19, 2003: Philippine trooops report killing Abu Sayyaf
high-ranking leader Mujib Susukan.

February 19, 2003: Michael Harrison of the Independent reports
that three ships "have been sailing around the world's oceans for
the past three months while maintaining radio silence in clear
violation of international maritime law" and "might be carrying
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction". In April, the Press Democrat
reports that the ships may not have ever existed.

February 19, 2003: Peter Brand and Alexander Bolton of The Hill report
that Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens may have
threatened to cut funding for the General Accounting Office if
it continued its lawsuit against Vice President Dick Cheny.

February 19, 2003: Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein says
that Bush's "theological rhetoric about good and evil" is not the
"best way of resolving the Iraqi conflict", continuing that
"our President doesn't talk about Saudi Arabia, he doesn't talk
about Nigeria, where women are stoned because of adultery. He doesn't
talk about the fact that most of these Iraqi arms we are trying to
get rid of are the very arms and weapons that we gave to them...I think
there are other ways of getting rid of Saddam Hussein without going
to war...Our [journalists'] stake in maintaining the myth and the
attendant self-image that we are doing a great job is every bit as great
a fiction as that of the American Congress serving the people.
The gravest threat to the truth today may well be within our
own profession."

February 19, 2003: The Moro Islamic Liberation Front attacks
houses in a village on Mindinao Island, killing 14.

February 19, 2003: Talk show host Rush Limbaugh claims that
the recessions in 1982 and 1986 and fears of Arab or Japanese takeover
of the United States economy never existed, and are in fact
false memories implanted in the minds of liberals.

February 19, 2003: The Washington Post reports that the Department
of Transportation has ordered police to conduct warrantless searches
of vehicles near airports.

February 19, 2003: Microsoft Network Money Markets Editor Jim Jubak
announces that the economy is "worse than you thought" and that
"we're looking at a replay of the massive restructuring of businesses
that took place in the late 1970s and 1980s."

February 19, 2003, Unrelated: Pakistani Air Chief Marshal Mushal Ali Mir
and 16 others including two other high-ranking air force officials,
are killed in a plane crash.

February 20, 2003: Announces that the Blue Chip Economic Forecast
has predicted that his tax cut plan would cause the economy to grow
by 3.3%. The Forecast had predicted 3.3% growth for the year 2003
a month before Bush had announced his new tax cut plan.
Bush continues to state that the Blue Chip Forecase supports
his new tax cut plan.

February 20, 2003: The United States pledges 3,000 soldiers to
fight terrorists in the Philippines. The Philippine Constitution
forbids foreign forces from operating on Philippine soil for any reason.

February 20, 2003: The United States arrests four people, including
University of South Florida professor Sami al Arian and USF instructor
Sameeh Hammoudeh, on charges of terrorism. Also indicted is former
USF instructor Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, living in Syria and accused
of being the worldwide leader off Islamic Jihad; Muslim College professor
Bashir Musa Mohammed Nafi, living in Oxfordshire, England; and two others.

February 20, 2003: The Federal Communications Commission allows
telephone wire owning companies to run their own Internet service provider
while barring other Internet service providers from using the facilities.

February 20, 2003: Venezuelan Ambassador to India Walter Marquez
accuses President Chavez's pilot Major Juan Diaz Castillo, who is
seeking asylum in the United States, of libel for saying that Marquez
and President Hugo Chavez delivered $1 million to the Taliban shortly
after the September 11 terrorist attack of 2001. 
 
February 20, 2003, Unrelated: A night club catches fire in
West Warwick, Rhode Island, killing 96.

February 20, 2003, Unrelated: California State Assemblyman Dave Cox
introduces a bill to count prison beds as low-income housing
so that communities with prisons do not have to build as much
housing for the poor.

February 21, 2003: Orders 150 soldiers sent to Colombia to search
for three United States citizens captures by the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia. 

February 21, 2003: Germany announces that it is preparing to
withdraw its forces from Afghanistan if rebel activity increases
following an invasion of Iraq.

February 21, 2003: The General Accounting Office reports that
the 132 of the 288 convictions which the Department of Justice
has heralded as terrorism convictions in fact had nothing to do
with terrorism, including 131 of 174 reported convictions for
international terrorism.

February 21, 2003: British Prime Minister Tony Blair says that
"if you leave Saddam Hussein with these chemical, biological, and
potentially nuclear weapons, the link between that and international
terrorism is so obvious it hardly needs to be stated".

February 21, 2003: British former Member of Parliament and Irish nationalist
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey is arrested at Chicago's O'Hare airport
and deported from the United States for being a "potential or real threat
to the United States". Airport police say that the British government
had flagged McAliskey as a terrorist, threaten to shoot her, and tell her
that "after nine-eleven, nobody has any rights".

February 21, 2003: Beligan Defense Minister Andre Flahaut condemns
the Wall Street Journal for an article stating that the Belgian
army is incapable of fighting anything other than "their own bad breath".

February 21, 2003, Unrelated: A fuel barge explodes at Staten Island,
New York. This causes a nationwide rise in gasoline prices.

February 21, 2003: A week after the Department of Homeland Security
urges all people in the United States to buy duct tape and apply it
to their doors and windows, Al Kamen of the Washington Post reports
that the founder of the United States' largest duct tape manufacturer
gave over $100,000 to the Republican Party in 2000.

February 21, 2003: The Drudge Report, a rumour mill, reports that
Columbia Broadcast System is considering cutting the microphone
of any Grammy award winners who make statements against Bush.

February 22, 2003: Accuses the Democrats of "partisan politics"
and being "unfaithful to the Senate's own obligations" by filibustering
the nomination of Miguel Estrada.

February 22, 2003: 1,000 people rally in Indianapolis to support
an invasion of Iraq.

February 22, 2003: The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia announce 
having captured three Central Intelligence Agency spies.

February 22, 2003, Unrelated: Terrorists attack a Shiite mosque
in Pakistan, killing several worshippers.

February 2003, Unrelated: Dave Marash reports that Serbia had
upgraded Iraq's jetfighters at facilities in a region of Bosnia
occupied by the United States.

February 2003: Pope John Paul II calls on all Christians to
dedicate their fast of Ash Wednesday to oppose the war with Iraq.

February 2003, Unrelated: A Samoan man is found guilty of holding
200 immigrants as slaves.

February 2003: Iraq threatens to confiscate the property of
any refugees who flee their homes during war.

February 2003: Seymour Hersh reports that the United States allowed
al Qaeda forces to escape during the battle of Shah i Kot because
several Pakistani intelligence officers were fighting alongside al Qaeda
and the United States did not want to offend Pakistan by killing them.

February 2003: Seymour Hersh says that Attorney General John Ashcroft
is "demented" and "doesn't seem to understand the law."

February 2003: John Bradley Kiesling, a counselor at the Embassy
to Greece who has been a diplomat for 20 years, resigns in protest
of Bush's plan for war against Iraq, writing that "until this
Administration it had been possible to believe that by upholding
the policies of my president I was also upholding the interests
of the American people and the world... The policies we are now asked
to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also
with American interests...We have begun to dismantle the largest
and most effective web of international relationships the world
has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and
danger...we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence,
such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war
in Vietnam..., this Administration has chosen to make terrorism
a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated
al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror
and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated
problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive,
is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the
military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens
from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage
to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to so to ourselves.
Is the Russia of the late Romanovs really our model, a selfish,
superstitious empire thrashing toward self-destruction in the name of
a doomed status quo?...We have over the past two years done too much
to assert to our world partners that narrow and mercenary U.S. interests
override the cherished values of our partners...Not one of my colleagues
is comfortable with our policy.  Everyone is moving ahead with it as
good and loyal. The State Department is loaded with people who want to
play the team game -- we have a very strong premium on loyalty."

February 24, 2003: The United States bombs three Iraqi air defense sites.

February 24, 2003: Senator Peter Fitzgerald reports that Bush
has promoted assassinating Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein "if he had
intelligence on where he was now and we had a clear shot".

February 24, 2003: Newsday reports that "The lawyer who recommended
the American Bar Association's highest rating for controversial
appellate judge candidate Miguel Estrada took part in partisan
Republican activities during his term as a nonpartisan judicial
nomination evaluator for the Bar...While serving on the ABA's
nonpartisan Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary,
veteran Washington lawyer Fred F. Fielding also worked for the
Bush-Cheney Transition Team, accepted an appointment from the
Bush administration and helped found a group to promote and
run ads supporting Bush judicial nominees, including Estrada."

February 24, 2003: The Republican Leadership Council begins
running Spanish-language television ads implying that Democratic
Senators Jeff Bingaman Barbara Boxer, Bob Graham, and Harry Reid
are racist Hispanic-haters for filibustering Miguel Estrada's nomination.

February 24, 2003: The Swiss Broadcasting Corporation reports
that United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was on the
board of directors of Asea Brown Boveri when it sold nuclear power plants
to North Korea.

February 24, 2003: North Korea's government-run news agency reports
that North Korea will launch its nuclear, chemical, and biological
arms at Japanese and United States cities "at the first sign
of invasion" and expects that 30% of its military would survive
a nuclear counterstrike by the United States.

February 24, 2003, Unrelated: Four US soldiers are killed in
an accident in Kuwait.

February 25, 2003: Suspected Taliban forces assassinate Habibullah,
chief of Delaram district in Nimroz province, Afghanistan.

February 25, 2003: Iraq reports having one R-400 bomb containing
an unknown liquid. The bomb is a type used to carry chemical or
biological weapons.

February 25, 2003: Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein claims that Iraq
does not have any missiles that violate United Nations range restrictions.

February 25, 2003: The United States condems Cote D'Ivoire for
arresting and executing people who politically oppose the government.

February 25, 2003: The United States condemns Egypt for renewing
laws allowing the government to jail people without charge and
try civilians in military tribunals.

February 25, 2003: Noah Shachtman reports having walked into a
sensitive area of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the federal government's
main nuclear weapons research facility, without any opposition
beyond "a few strands of rusted, calf-high barbed wire", and that
some of the guards at the laboratory are unarmed.

February 25, 2003: The White House press corps breaks out in laughter
after Press Secretary Ari Fleischer responds to a series of questions
about the United States' well-recorded bribes of other countries
for their support of Iraq by telling the reporters "the President
is not offering quid pro quos. This is a time for nations to do
what they estimate the right thing to promote the peace...if anybody
thinks that there are nations like Mexico whose vote could be bought
on the basis of a trade issue or something else like that, I think
you're doing grave injustice to the independence and the judgement
of the leaders of other nations...you're saying that the leaders
of other nations are buyable, and that is not an acceptable proposition."

February 25, 2003: Senator Arlen Spector says that "when we dug
into the details of the FBI failures on the Phoenix Report from
July of 2001 and the failure of the FBI to use the proper standard
in seeking a warrant for Zacarias Moussaoui's computer, it was evident
that had this trail been followed, along with other evidence, that
the tragedy of September 11th might well have been prevented."

February 25, 2003: Talk show host Michael Savage calls for
arresting everybody who opposes war with Iraq, deport all 
undocumented immigrants, ending all schooling of languages
other than English, and eliminating lawyers.

February 25, 2003, Unrelated: The Spanish Embassy and Colombian
consulate in Caracas, Venezuela, are bombed.

February 25, 2003, Unrelated: Beijing University and Tsinghua University
in Beijing are bombed. No deaths are reported.

February 25, 2003: The British Book Awards grant the Book of the Year
prize to Michael Moore's Stupid White Men, an error-filled political
rant which happens to be critical of Bush.

February 25, 2003: Talk show host Phil Donahue is fired by
the National Broadcast Company for being a "tired, left-wing
liberal out of touch with the current marketplace" and showing a
"difficult public face for NBC in a time of war" by having guests
who are "anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives",
in the words of a leaked NBC memo. Donahue's show was the highest rated
show on MSNBC, although its rivals on other stations had far more viewers.
MSNBC's ratings for Donahue's time slot drop by two thirds.

February 26, 2003: Glenn Hubbard, who is credited with writing Bush's
first tax cut plan, resigns his chairmanship of the Council of
Economic Advisers.

February 26, 2003: Announces that "The United States has no intention
of determining the precise form of Iraq's new government. That choice
belongs to the Iraqi people. Yet, we will ensure that one brutal dictator
is not replaced by another...A new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic
and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region...Success
in Iraq could also begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace...In
confronting Iraq, the United States is also showing our commitment
to effective international institutions...If the Council responds
to Iraq's defiance with more excuses and delays, if all its authority
proves to be empty, the United Nations will be severely weakened as
a source of stability and order."

February 26, 2003: The State Department internally distributes a report
titled "Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes", denying that
an invasion of Iraq would lead to a sweeping democratic revolution
across the middle east, stating that "Liberal democracy would be difficult
to achieve" and "Electoral democracy, were it to emerge, could well
be subject to exploitation by anti-American elements".

February 26, 2003: General Richard Myers says that the United States
is in "the most dangerous situation of the last 50 years".

February 26, 2003: In response to Columbia Broadcast System's
interview of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the White House demands
that CBS grant an interview of White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.
CBS offers to interview Bush, which the White House refuses, 
and then offers to interview Vice President Dick Cheney
or Secretary of State Colin Powell, which the White House also refuses.
Newspapers report that CBS has refused to grant Bush an interview
to rebut Hussein's statements.

February 26, 2003: Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Colleen Rowley
writes a letter to Director Robert Mueller questioning the FBI's statement
that there are 5,000 trained al Qaeda terrorists in the United States,
complaining that the FBI has not attempted to interrogate captured
al Qaeda terrorists Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid, questioning
orders to field offices to arrest large numbers of Arab immigrants
"for what seem to be essentially PR purposes", and noting that Mueller
has "made it clear that the FBI is perilously close to being divided up
and is depending almost solely upon the good graces of Attorney General
Ashcroft and President Bush for its continued existence".

February 26, 2003: The Department of Justice shuts down ISO News,
a news and discussion site about video games and movies.

February 26, 2003: Canadian Member of Parliament Carolyn Parrish
is recorded saying "damn Americans. Hate those bastards" after
giving a speech condemning Bush's aggression. Parrish quickly apologizes.

February 26, 2003: Jonah Goldberg of the National Review writes
that Senator Joe McCarthy -- who during the 1950s accused many
innocent people of being Communists, costing them their jobs,
before being publicly condemned by the Senate -- "was on the right
side of history and, in a broad sense, of morality as well".

February 26, 2003: In an interview with Conservative News,
author Steven Millow, who leads the "junk science" movement
against environmentalists, says that "no one should be concerned
about mercury. Typical exposures are not a problem. There is
absolutely no data that shows mercury is a public health threat."

February 27, 2003: Turkey allows the United States to use its bases
to attack Iraq in exchange for $5 billion in aid and $10 billion
in loans.

February 27, 2003: Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
says that General Erik Shinseki's estimate that "several hundred thousand"
troops would be needed to occupy Iraq is "wildly off the mark",
and tells Congress that this is not the "appropriate moment"
to reveal a more accurate estimate. Wolfowitz also says that
there is no history of racial warfare in Iraq such as the constant
battles between Kurds, Arabs, and Persians that have been going on
in Iraq for decades.

February 27, 2003: When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is asked for
information to further "useful debate" on the question of war with Iraq,
Rumsfeld refuses, saying "I've already decided that it's not useful."

February 27, 2003: Undersecretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs
Charlotte Beers tells Congress that "the gap between who we are and
how we wish to be seen and how we are in fact seen is frighteningly wide".

February 27, 2003: Talk show host Michael Savage condemns activists
who have asked his sponsors to quit advertising on his show because of
his racism, calling such people Nazi brownshirts, "stinking rats who
hide in the sewers", and "liberal fascism and sewer groups" while
comparing their actions to murder and threatening to have the
Department of Justice investigate them.

February 27, 2003: After Democratic presidential candidate Dick Gephart
calls for the World Trade Organization to mandate each country set
and enforce a minimum wage for itself, the Washington Times reported
Gephart's "bizarre proposal" in "asking the World Trade Organization
to impose a minimum wage on all our trading partners, no matter
how poor their economy is".

February 2003: Cable News Network reports that Congress has passed
a law requiring airlines to perform background and credit checks
on every person who buys a ticket to determine whether the person
should be considered a terrorist, and to store the resulting assessments
in a central database.

February 2003: Soldiers for the Truth reports that "the ACOG scope
that comes with the Mk IV has some issues...soldiers are spending
their own money...to buy the Leupold Mk IV CQT, which is a much
superior scope"; "desert boots...rip out the sides and just plain
don't hold up"; "sanators: 50% operational rate"; "NBC protective
suit...has not been completely issued. 1 set per soldier, although
2 suits per soldier are supposed to be issued...when you open the
package containing the suit (not supposed to open it until you
need it)...you have two pair of pants and no jacket w/hood. The
carry bags to carry the packaged suits have not been issued to all
soldiers. There are not enough pro masks"; "Not enough of the new
flak jackets. Not enough armor plate inserts for the jackets that
have been issued. Incompatible with old rucksack and frame.";
"new synthetic moly rucksack frame breaks easily."

February 2003: The Washington Post reports that "A Bush administration
bookkeeping decision has left a funding shortfall for the AmeriCorps
national service program that could force enrollment cuts of as much as
50 percent, instead of the 50 percent increase President Bush had promised."

February 2003: Fomer Senators James Abourezk Dale Bumpers, John Culver,
Fred Harris, Gary Hart, Bill Hathaway, Charles MacMathias, George McGovern,
Howard Metzenbaum, Paul Simon, Adlai Stevenson, and John Tunney
issue a petition condemning Bush's plans for invading Iraq as
"a war that need not be undertaken at this time", saying that "this is
a war that will dramatically increase the terrorist threat...the nation's
almost-forgotten 'war on terrorism' has been seriously neglected
because of the Administration's preoccupation with Iraq and
Saddam Hussein...a first strike is not authorized under international
law because Iraq poses no imminent or unavoidable threat"

February 2003: Director of Middle Eastern Affairs Elliot Abrams
fires National Security Council advisors Ben Miller, Flynt Leverett,
and Hillary Mann, for what the Washington Times describes as their
even-handed position on Israel. Miller had led the Council's position
on Iraq while Leverett had been Senior Director for Middle East Initiatives.

February 2003: Greek professor Eugene Angelopolous is arrested and
deported by police at John F. Kennedy Airport for opposing the
United States' plans for war with Iraq. Angelopolous was scheduled
to give a speech at New York University.

February 2003: Citrus College speech teacher Rosalyn Kahn requires
students in her Small Group Communication class to write letters
to Bush protesting against Bush's plans to invade Iraq, and to
state Senator Jack Scott to express an agenda which was not reported.

February 2003: The Office of Management and Budget stops producing
the Budget Information for States report which detailed the amount
of federal money given to the states.

February 2003, Unrelated: The city of Moab, Utah, requests
that the Air Force change the name of the Massive Ordnance Air Burst
bomb.

February 2003, Unrelated: Massachussetts Governor Mitt Romney
proposes eliminating the state's Office of Inspector General.

February 2003, Unrelated: Several of Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi's
bodyguards are barred from the Arab League summit because they are women.

February 2003, Unrelated: The State of Oregon stops buying medication
for the mentally ill.

February 28, 2003: White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer announces
that "to escape military action, Iraq must disarm and Mr. Hussein
must be deposed", saying that "both would be necessary conditions
because disarmament was the United Nations' goal and changing
Iraq's government was the President's."

February 28, 2003: The United States announces that it has cancelled
plans to send 3000 soldiers to the Philippines, following widespread
protests in the islands.

February 28, 2003: Two guards are shot dead at the United States consulate
in Karachi, Pakistan.

February 28, 2003: Kurdish leaders threaten to fight against the
United States if it allows Turkish forces to cross the border
into Iraq.

February 28, 2003: The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejects
the Department of Justice's request for it to rescind its decision
that Congress's addition of the words "under God" to the
Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 was an unconstitutional law respecting
an establishment of religion. Fox News falsely reports that
the Court has decided that "the Pledge of Allegiance is unconsitutional
because of the phrase 'under God'". Attorney General John Ashcroft
falsely claims that the decision forbids anybody from choosing
to pledge their allegience to the United States on their own.

February 28, 2003: The Associated Press reports that the
Federal Bureau of Investigation has been flying a reconnaissance plane
over Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, every day for a week.

February 28, 2003: Senator Mike Enzi requests that toy rocket engines
be removed from the list of items in whose commerce the Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives is required to monitor.

February 28, 2003, Unrelated: Jennifer Harper of the Washington Times
condemns talk show host Phil Donahue for having "featured Rosie O'Donnell
as his very last guest, dwelling upon her feelings as a 'mother'
and a pacifist", using quotes to imply that O'Donnell, who is
homosexual, is not a mother despite having children.

February 28, 2003, Unrelated: Zimbabwe arrests 23 preachers
for holding a protest against the government's torture and killing
of its political opponents.

February 28, 2003, Unrelated: Conservative News describes
New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer as "pro-abortion"
for believing that the government should not have the power
to deny women the option of abortion.

February 28, 2003: Bill Moyers says that "the flag's been
hikacked and turned into a logo...as if it were the Good Housekeeping
Seal of Approval...When I see flags sprouting on official lapels,
I think of the time in China when I saw Mao's Little Red Book
on every official's desk, omnipresent and unread."


March 1, 2003: Pakistani police capture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
one of al Qaeda's top commanders. Also arrested is Jamaat e-Islami
member Ahmed Abdul Qadus and al Qaeda financier Mustafa Ahmed al Hawsawi.
The Muttahida Majlis e-Amal condems the arrest. Six months earlier,
the Asian Times had reported Mohammed dead in a raid on his apartment
during which Ramzi Binalshibh had been captured, but Pakistan releases
photographs of Mohammed, proving his capture.

March 1, 2003: Turkey's parliament rejects approval for United States
forces to invade Iraq from its territory, on a 264-250 vote with 19
abstentions, lacking a majority. A Defense Department official
says that Turkey's refusal to allow United States forces onto its
territory will not prevent the United States from deploying its forces
to Turkey

March 1, 2003: The British Broadcasting Corporation reports that
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said that "no final decision
has been taken on whether American troops should be allowed to fight
against Muslim rebels in the southern Philippines."

March 1, 2003: Iraq reports destroying four al-Samoud 2 missiles,
which it has recently claimed do not violate United Nations regulations.
Iraq reports destroying six more missiles the next day.

March 1, 2003: The Vatican sends an envoy to the United States
to urge Bush to abandon his plans for war with Iraq.

March 1, 2003: Afghan President Hamid Karzai asks that the United States
not "forget us if Iraq happens", saying that "the war on terrorism
is going on".

March 1, 2003: British Prime Minister Tony Blair compares people 
opposed to the invasion of Iraq to those who "said there was no need
to confront Hitler".

March 1, 2003: The United States declares as terrorist groups
the Chechen groups Islamic International Brigade, Riyadus Salikhin
Reconnaissance, Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs, and Special
Purpose Islamic Regiment.

March 1, 2003: Former Congressman Robert Dornan calls Senator John Kerry
a "Judas Catholic", that is, a traitor to Christianity.

March 1, 2003: Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur says that "One could say that
Osama bin Laden and these non-nation-state fighters with religious purpose
are very similar to those kind of atypical revolutionaries that helped
to cast off the British crown...the kind of insurgency we see occurring
in many of these countries is an act of hope that life will be better
using Islam as the only reed that they have to lean on."

March 1, 2003, Unrelated: Liberia reports being attacked by mercenaries
under the control of Cote D'Ivoire's government.

March 2, 2003: The Observer reports receiving a leaked memo detailing
the National Security Agency's reading the mail and bugging the telephones
of United Nations Security Council delegates "minus US and GBR, of course",
as well as "existing non-UN Secuity Council Member UN-related
and domestic comms for anything useful related to Security Council
deliberations". The memo was sent by Regional Targets Chief of Staff
Frank Koza. When the Observer attempts to contact Koza's office
to confirm the memo, Koza's secretary hangs up on the journalists.
A copy of the memo released by the Observer has Koza's name misspelled
as "Kuza" and uses British spellings and grammar.

March 2, 2003: George Packer of the New York Times reports that
as recently as January, Bush did not know "that there are two kinds
of Arabs in Iraq, Sunnis and Shiites" and "The very notion of
an Iraqi opposition appeared to be new to him."

March 2, 2003: In response to news about Iraq destroying a few of
its al-Samoud 2 missiles, Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer says that 
"President Bush has always predicted that Iraq would destroy its
Al-Samoud 2 missiles as part of their games of deception... I think
when you summarize Iraq's statement, that in principle they will
destroy their missiles, the Iraqi actions are propaganda wrapped
in a lie, inside a falsehood...Mr. Bush remains hopeful that war
can be averted and Mr Hussein and his top leaders will go into exile
or that he will completely disarm."

March 2, 2003: After Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi condemns
Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah at the Arab League Summit for
making "an alliance with the Devil" by allowing United States
forces on Saudi land, Abdullar tells Gadhafi that "you are a liar
and your grave awaits you".

March 2, 2003: North Korean fighters intercept a United States
RC-135 reconnaissance plane over international waters, forcing it
to retreat.

March 2, 2003: 100,000 people rally in Seoul, South Korea to
express their support for the United States.

March 2, 2003: Several tens of thousands rally in Karachi, Pakistan,
to oppose the United States' plans for invading Iraq.

March 2, 2003: Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski
says that "we are literally undercutting" the United States'
relationship with its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies,
and "we have never been as isolated globally, literally never,
since 1945".

March 2, 2003: New York Times foreign policy columnist Thomas Friedman
describes Bush's plans for war with Iraq as "the greatest shake
of the dice any president has voluntarily engaged in since Harry Truman
dropped the bomb on Japan" and "the mother of all presidential gambles".

March 2, 2003: The Associated Press reports that New Jersey has claimed
to have handled 62 international terrorism cases, of which 60 were
students from Arab countries paying others to take their tests for them.

March 2, 2003: The State Department reports that Afghanistan is
once again the world's leading producer of opium.

March 2, 2003: Actor Martin Sheen reports that the National Broadcast Company
has condemned his public opposition to Bush's plans for war with Iraq.

March 2, 2003: Right-wing extremist group Free Republic holds a rally
to support the invasion of Iraq at the same time and place as the
annual Los Angeles Marathon and then claims that every one of the
50,000 marathon runners was part of Free Republic's rally.

March 2, 2003, Unrelated: Judge Stephen Mitchell allows US Airways
to cancel its employees' pensions.

March 3, 2003: The Guardian reports that "Britain and the United States
have all but fired the first shots of the second Gulf war by dramatically
extending the range of targets in the 'no-fly zones' over Iraq to soften
up the country for an allied ground invasion."

March 3, 2003: The People's Republic of China releases Zhang Qi,
a political activist who had been kidnapped along with Wang Bingzhang
in Vietnam in 2002, to the United States. Wang had been sentenced
to life imprisonment a week earlier.

March 3, 2003: Undersecretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs
Charlotte Beers resigns. Secretary of State Colin Powell praises Beers
for her success in "expanding our outreach efforts to make connections
with ordinary people, particularly in Moslem nations".

March 3, 2003: California requests that the Federal Eneregy
Regulatory commission release the state's evidence of monopolism
in the energy market to the public.

March 3, 2003: The Screen Actors' Guild and International Alliance
of Theatrical Stage Employees report that movie producers are considering
reimplementing the blacklist.

March 3, 2003: The Utne Reader reports that the Department of Justice's
proposed Domestic Security Enhancement Act is very similar to the
Law for Removing the Distress of the People and the Reich, passed
by the German Parliament in 1933. After making this comparison,
the Reader admits that "Patriot 2 doesn't go quite as far as
the German bill did 70 years ago".

March 3, 2003, Unrelated: Israel arrests Islamic Resistance founder
Sheikh Mohammed Taha and five of his sons who are high ranking members
of the terrorist organization.

March 2003: It is reported that Halliburton has been awarded a contract
to rebuild Iraq's oil fields after the war, and that the Defense Department
will not discuss the procedures used to select Halliburton. Later reports
state that the contract grants Halliburton the powers of "operation
of facilities and distribution of products" from oil wells.

March 2003: National Park Service Director Fran Mainella orders
the removal of a biographical videotape of Abraham Lincoln, produced by
students from Saguaro High School in Arizona, from the Lincoln Legacy Room
of the Lincoln Memorial for the tape's suggesting that Lincoln would have
supported civil rights for blacks, homosexuals, and women.

March 2003: Guilderland, New York police arrest two men for wearing
T-shirts stating "Let inspections work" and "Peace on Earth".

March 2003: Washington State Representatives Lois McMahon and Cary Condotta
leave their seats to protest the daily invocation's being performed
by a Muslim. McMahon describes the protest as "patriotism" and
says that Islam is "the focal point of the hate-America sentiment
in the world".

March 2003: Hotel Sofitel removes the French flags that traditionally
fly at its locations in the United States.

March 2003: Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon says that
"To recreate Israel, the church and the state must become one
as Cain and Abel. Instead they became one with Rome and captured
and killed Jesus. They united with Rome. Who are the Jewish members here,
raise your hands! Jewish people, you have to repent. Jesus was the
King of Israel. Through the principle of indemnity Hitler killed
6 million Jews. That is why. God could not prevent Satan from doing that
because Israel killed the True Parents. Even now, you have to determine 
hat you will repent and follow and become one with Christianity through
Reverend Moon."

March 2003: Ohio State Representative Bill Seitz proposes that the
state of Ohio reject the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution
unless the Assembly declares that the state has a right to promote
religion and ban abortions.

March 2003: Columbia Broadcast System reports the results of a poll
showing that 42% of people in the United States believe that
the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 was caused by
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

March 4, 2003, Unrelated: The Supreme Court unanimously declares that
a trademark must have been harmed to have suffered dilution. Previously,
any use of words vaguely similar to a trademark had been considered dilution,
and judges have found long-established trademarks to dilute newer but
more popular trademarks and therefore be void.

March 4, 2003: Attorney General John Ashcroft denies that the Department
of Justice is working on another police powers bill like the Patriot Act.
A copy of just such a bill was leaked from the Justice Department recently.

March 4, 2003: Salon Magazine reports that the National Broadcast Company,
Cable News Network, and Fox News have all cancelled scheduled interviews
with Observer home affairs editor Martin Bright regarding the report
of the United States eavesdropping on other Security Council members
at the United Nations headquarters.

March 4, 2003: Les Kinsolving, the White House correspondant for
Talk Radio Network and World Net Daily, condemns "the Sodomy Lobby
and its ally the National Organization of Women" for complaining about
talk show host Micheal Savage's statement that "the gay and lesbian
Mafia wants our children", a statement that Kinsolving says "many, many
millions of Americans...strongly agree with" and indeed "what most
Americans believe".

March 5, 2003: Saudi Arabia allows the United States to invade Iraq
from its territory in exchange for the State Department removing
Saudi Arabia from a list of countries which deny people their
religious freedoms.

March 5, 2003: General Himli Ozkok, leader of Turkey's armed forces,
announces the Army's support for the United States to invade Iraq
through Turkey.

March 5, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says that more countries
will send troops to fight Iraq in the upcoming war than did send forces
in the war of 1991, even if the United Nations votes against an invasion.

March 5, 2003: The United States expels two Iraqi diplomats stationed
at United Nations.

March 5, 2003: Cable News Network reports that two men arrested
in Afghanistan were beaten to death by United States soldiers.
Other reports from reputable sources state that all prisoners at the base
are kept chained to the ceiling and blindfolded. The Independent later
confirms that the prisoners were killed "while under interrogation".

March 5, 2003: Congressman Richard Burr says that Senator John Edwards
"owes Howard Coble an apology" for demanding that Howard Coble
apologize for saying that sending American citizens to concentration camps
during the Second World War was a good thing.

March 5, 2003: Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General
Janet Rehnquist resigns following criticism of her acceptance of fraud
and lack of respect for the law.

March 5, 2003, Unrelated: The Supreme Court declares on a 5-4 vote
that it is neither cruel nor unusual to sentence a man to fifty years
of prison for stealing a few videotapes worth 153 dollars and 54 cents.
Justices Rehnquist, Kennedy, O'Connor, Scalia, and Thomas supported
the sentence as "not grossly disproportionate", while Breyer, Souter,
Ginsberg, and Stevens dissented.

March 5, 2003: Fred Caplan of Slate Magazine opines that "the president
is botching the Iraq crisis with his clumsy, naive unilateralism...however
justified the coming war with Iraq may be, the Bush administaration is in
no shape...to settle its aftermath. It is hard to remember when, if ever,
the United States has so badly handled a foreign-policy crisis or been
so distrusted by so many friends and foes as a result."

March 5, 2003: Canada's Customs and Revenue Agency seizes copies of the movie
What I've Learned About U.S. Foreign Policy: The War Against the Third World,
a compilation of statements by Roy Borgeois, Ramsey Clark, Amy Goodman,
Bill Moyers, Gloria la Riva, Susan Sarandon John Stockwell Barbara Trent,
and S. Brian Wilson about the United States' activities in Central America.
Agency spokesman Sam Papadopoulos says that any tapes that may have been
seized would have been because they promoted hatred against the United States.

March 5, 2003: Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a candidate
for the Nobel Peace Prize, says that French President Jacques Chirac
should win the prize for his opposition to the United States' plans
to invade Iraq and for restoring friendly relations with Algeria.

March 5, 2003: Helen Thomas criticizes Bush for not holding press conferences.
The next day, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer makes a surprise
announcement that Bush will hold a press conference at 8:00 that night.
Thomas, who traditionally has asked the first and last question of every
Presidential press conference for several decades, is completely ignored.
Bush also ignores Washington Post correspondent Mike Allen.

March 5, 2003: The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation records the
names of protesters at a peace rally in Murfreesboro.

March 5, 2003: The Age reports that the Australian Federal Police
is investigation Saudi princes and European financial organizations
for the firefighting effort" in Iraq, and that "a shadowy group
of Texas oilmen...have a plann to take the company away from
the shareholders, just when business could be getting good.
The oilmen formed a business called Checkpoint. It's incorporated
in Panama, so it's impossible to find out who's behind the company.
In December, Boots and Coots announced the men had agreed to lend
up to $1 million to keep the company afloat. But the next month,
the Checkpoint partners declared Boots and Coots in default on the loan.
Last month, they presented Boots and Coots with a plan that would have
the company declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy and cancel Boots and Coots stock,
most likely putting the four oilmen in control of the company and
leaving shareholders with absolutely nothing."

March 10, 2003, Unrelated: Michigan State Represenative Arlon Lindner
says that allowing homosexuals to exist would cause a "Holocaust 
of our children" and turn America into "another African continent".

March 11, 2003: Congressman Robert Ney, as Chairman of the Committee
on House Administration, and Congressman Walter Jones order all
cafeterias in Congress's office buildings to change the name of
French fries and French toast to "Freedom Fries" and "Freedom Toast".
French Toast was invented by Joseph French of Albany, New York in 1724.

March 11, 2003: Cable News Network reports the results of a poll
showing 72% of respondents in the United States believe that Iraqi
dictator Saddam Hussein was behind the terrorist attack of September 11,
2001.

March 11, 2003: Australian Office of National Assessments analyst
Andrew Wilkie resigns in protest of Australia's support of Bush's
plans to invade Iraq.

March 11, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claims that Iraq
is planning to launch chemical weapons at its own cities in the event
of war with the United States.

March 11, 2003: Rowan Scarborough of the Washington Times reports
that the Amiriya bomb shelter which the United States bombed in
the Gulf War of 1991, killing several hundred people, was really
a military command and control center.

March 11, 2003: The Village Voice reports that K-Mart and "other national
retailers" including Wallgreens are selling Easter candy baskets "in which
the traditional chocolate bunny has been replaced by toys including
plastic soldiers armed with machine guns, rifles, grenades, and knives."

March 11, 2003: Greenpeace activists bring several 100-gallon barrels
of what they claim to be drinking water from Bhopal, India to
the front gate of Dow Chemical's headquarters in Houston. They are
arrested and charged with "manufacture of a criminal instrument".
The Texas Environmental Crimes Unit threatens to charge the activists
with endangering the environment.

March 11, 2003, Unrelated: A Black Hawk helicopter crashes in New York
while on a training mission, killing 11 soldiers.

March 2003: The Islamic Society reports that the Federal Bureau
of Investigation has asked mosques for their membership rolls.

March 2003: Pakistan Awami Tehreek Party deputy chairman Agha Murtaza Pooya
reports hearing from credible sources that Osama bin Laden has been
captured and that Pakistan and the United States are delaying news
of the capture until the beginning of war with Iraq. Pakistani
Interior Minister Faisal Saleh calls Pooya's claim "absolutely unfounded
and absolutely baseless".

March 2003: Pep Boys automobile supply stores illegally fires
several employees for being called up for military duty.

March 2003: Several Clear Channel Worldwide owned radio stations
and Cumulus Broadcasting ban the Grammy award winning country-pop act
the Dixie Chicks after the Chicks announce that "we're ashamed that
the President of the United States is from Texas". Cumulus arranges
rallies to condemn the Dixie Chicks.

March 2003: Oregon State Senator John Minnis proposes a bill which
would define terrorism as "any act that is intended, by at least one
of its participants, to disrupt...free and orderly assembly of the
inhabitants of the State of Oregon...commerce or the transportation
systems...or the educational or governmental institutions
of the State of Oregon or its inhabitants" -- which would include
labor strikes, political rallies, and bar brawls -- and would require
a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years of prison without parole
for any person participating in such an event.

March 2003: Brent Flynn's opinion column is dropped by the Lewisville Leader
after he calls invasion supporters "useful idiots" of "an Attorney General
who believes constitutionally guaranteed rights can be denied, depending
on the crime" and declares "It is not merely your right to dissent when
you disagree with your government's policies, IT IS YOUR CIVIC OBLIGATION.
Before the Bush hawks start exporting democracy to the Middle East through
the use of military force, maybe we should make sure we've got it right
in America."

March 12, 2003: North Korea threatens nuclear war unless the United States
withdraws the Carl Vinson fleet from the Sea of Japan.

March 12, 2003: The Seattle Times reports that the members of the 
commission to investigate the federal government's preparedness
for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 still have not
received clearance to review classified documents that they need
to review to carry out their duties.

March 12, 2003: State Department spokesman Richard Boucher says that
France's support of disarming Iraq through weapons inspections instead
of an invasion is "precisely the wrong signal for those who want
peaceful disarmament".

March 12, 2003: The New York Sun reports that Defense Policy Board Chairman
Richard Perle is planning to sue New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh
for libel for reporting that Perle has solicited investment from
several sources, including Saudi financier Adnan Khashoggi, for
Trireme Partners Limited Partnership, formed to "invest in companies
dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to
homeland security and defense" and which stands to benefit from war
with Iraq.

March 12, 2003: Nobel Peace Prize winner and Former Polish President
Lech Walesa calls for the United Nations to support an invasion of Iraq.

March 12, 2003, Unrelated: Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic
is assassinated. President Natasa Micic initially accuses organized crime
of being behind the killing. Serbia soon accuses former police commander
Milorad Lukovic of planning the assassination.

March 12, 2003: Robert Bryce and Julian Borger of The Guardian report
that Halliburton is continuing to pay Vice President Dick Cheney
$1 million per year for his services to the company while Vice President.
Cheney's spokesmen say that this is pay that was owed Cheney when
he quit the company.

March 12, 2003: The city council of New York, New York votes 31-17
to state its opposition to Bush's plans to invade Iraq.

March 12, 2003: San Francisco Columnist John Carroll says that "a rogue
nation is one that shows disregard for the opinions of other nations
and takes as a given its right to attack any other nation at any time...it
either refuses to sign treaties or breaks the treaties it does sign...the
United States is a rogue nation...another feature of rogue nations is
the messianic fervor of their leaders. They act as though (and often say)
that they are on a mission from God, that they have the bestest nation
in the world...Even if that were true before, it becomes instantly untrue
the moment it's said."

March 12, 2003, Unrelated: Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra
reports that "international Mafia bosses want to kill me" for
launching a crackdown on drug dealers. 1,498 drug dealers have been
killed since the crackdown started in February, although police claim
that all but 31 were killed by other gangs.

March 12, 2003, Unrelated: Indonesia sentences Brigadier General Noer Muis
to five years of prison for allowing militias to massacre over a thousand
people in Timor Leste. Muis was present at some of the massacres.

March 12, 2003, Unrelated: Bangladeshi police arrest over 200 people
accused of setting off a single bomb that killed two policemen in Khulna.

March 13, 2003: The Associated Press reports that the United States
Customs Service has intercepted communications between Associated Press
reporters Jim Gomez and John Solomon and has given the information
to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and that the Federal Express
mail service assisted Customs by reporting the commications as
lost instead of seized.

March 13, 2003: Washington Post economics reporter Jonathon Weisman
reports that Bush administration officials are refusing to talk
on the record, and that any quotes a reporter wants to use in their
story must be submitted to government censors who often demand changes
to the quote. If an administration official does not like a report,
they can then accuse the reporter of publishing a false quote.

March 13, 2003, Unrelated: The Supreme Court postpones the execution of
Delma Banks. Witnesses in the case had later reported that they were lying,
but Texas's courts refused to grant a retrial.

March 13, 2003, Unrelated: Serbia arrests 56 members of the Zemun gang
which is accused of arranging the assassination of Prime Minister Djindjic.

March 13, 2003, Unrelated: Turkey's Supreme Court bans the People's
Democracy Party for assisting the terrorist group Kurdistan Worker's Party.
46 members of the party are banned from politics for five years.

March 13, 2003: Philippine forces report killing 16 members of
the Moro Islamic Liberation Front near Pikit on Mindanao island.

March 13, 2003: Congresswoman Ginny Brown-Waite proposes excavating
the bodies of United States soldiers buried in France during the
wars for France's freedom and returning the bodies to the United States.

March 13, 2003: Talk show host Bill O'Reilly calls for a nationwide
boycott of French businesses and products.

March 13, 2003, Unrelated: German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder proposes
weakening worker job protections, limiting welfare payments to 12 months,
allowing companies' local branches to reject a labour agreement the
company made, and allowing unlicensed tradesmen to start businesses
in trades that previously required licenses.

March 13, 2003, Unrelated: A bomb explodes on a passenger train in
India, killing 11. The next day, police find and defuse bombs on
six more trains.

March 13, 2003: Workers' World Party suborganization International
Act Now to Stop War and End Racism issues a press release praising
Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe and condemning Bush for enacting
sanctions against Zimbabwe.

March 14, 2003, Unrelated: Turkish Prime Minister Abdullah Gul resigns
in order to hand power over to Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

March 15, 2003: New Jersey police leader Sid Caspersen promises to
shoot on sight anybody who leaves their home if the federal government
declares a red alert threat of terrorism, saying that "red means all
non-critical functions cease...you are literally staying home,
is what happens...if you are left standing, you are probably a terrorist."

March 15, 2003: Iran's Expediency Council doubles funding for the
Guardian Council. Iranian President Mohammed Khatami and Parliament Speaker
Mehdi Karubi walk out of the Expediency Council meeting in protest.

March 15, 2003, Unrelated: The World Health Organization issues
an emergency travel advisory regarding a disease of unknown cause,
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which has been detected in Canada,
China, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and VietNam,
and in a traveler from New York to Germany.

March 15, 2003: Journalists from the University of Pennsylvania
and Indiana University are arrested while reporting on a protest
at the World Bank building in the District of Colombia.

March 16, 2003: Vice President Dick Cheney claims that Iraq
"has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons".

March 16, 2003: Orders an end to all sanctions against Pakistan.

March 16, 2003: The United Nations withdraws most of its helicopters
from Iraq after its insurance company cancels coverage. Germany advises
its citizens to leave Iraq.

March 16, 2003: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan sign an agreement
to create an oil pipeline through the three countries from the Caspian
region to the Indian Ocean.

March 16, 2003, Unrelated: Central African Republic's military
revolts against President Ange-Felix Patasse, firing upon Patasse's
plane as it returns from a summit in Niger, forcing Patasse to
seek refuge in Cameroon. General Francois Bozize seizes power
and voids the Constituion. Central African Economic Community
forces surrender.

March 16, 2003: Spain reports that Iraq's ambassador to Spain
was a friend of al Qaeda terrorist Yusuf Galan.

March 16, 2003: Former Senator Thomas F. Eagleton, in an opinion
printed in the Saint Louis Post Dispatch, says that "Bush is the
Crusader-in-Chief. As a 'true believer', he is convinced that he
is doing God's work to purge the Middle East of dangerous
impurities...Iraq is only one step on the path to the Christian
democratization of the Middle East...everyone, including President Bush,
has forgotten about Afghanistan. We are doing great things there
with democracy. President Hamed Karzai presides as mayor of Kabul,
constantly guarded by U.S. troops. The rest of the country is
in anarchy...Colin Powell is the only semblance of restraint of
this madness, but he will be out sometime in the presumed second term."

March 16, 2003: Thom Hartmann writes "It started when the government,
in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of
an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched
feeble attacks on a few famous buildings...the odds were he would
eventually succeed...the warnings of investigators were ignored
at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted;
the man who claimed to be the nation's leader had not been elected
by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right
to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character
of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have
the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation
in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language
- reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state - and his
simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended
the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite...When
an aide brought him word that the nation's most prestigious building
was ablaze...he used the occasion - 'a sign from God,' he called it - to
declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors,
a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East
and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion...In a national
outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag was everywhere, even printed
large in newspapers suitable for window display. Within four weeks
of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular leader had pushed
through legislation - in the name of combating terrorism and fighting
the philosophy he said spawned it - that suspended Constitutional
guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now
intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be
imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers;
police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases
involved terrorism...Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act,
his federal police agencies stepped up their program of arresting
suspicious persons and holding them without access to lawyers or courts.
In the first year only a few hundred were interred, and those who objected
were largely ignored by the mainstream press, which was afraid to offend
and thus lose access to a leader with such high popularity ratings.
Citizens who protested the leader in public - and there were many - quickly
found themselves confronting the newly empowered police's batons, gas,
and jail cells, or fenced off in protest zones safely out of earshot
of the leader's public speeches...Within the first months after that
terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political advisor,
he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage...instead of
referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as
'The Homeland'...exploiting a disagreement with the French over his
increasing militarism, he argued that any international body that
didn't act first and foremost in the best interest of his own nation
was neither relevant nor useful... His propaganda minister orchestrated
a campaign to ensure the people that he was a deeply religious man
and that his motivations were rooted in Christianity. He even proclaimed
the need for a revival of the Christian faith across his nation,
what he called a 'New Christianity.' Every man in his rapidly growing
army wore a belt buckle that declared 'Gott Mit Uns' - God Is With Us -
and most of them fervently believed it was true.  Within a year of
the terrorist attack, the nation's leader determined that the various
local police and federal agencies around the nation were lacking
the clear communication and overall coordinated administration necessary
to deal with the terrorist threat facing the nation, particularly
those citizens who were of Middle Eastern ancestry and thus probably
terrorist and communist sympathizers, and various troublesome
'intellectuals' and 'liberals.' He proposed a single new national agency
to protect the security of the homeland, consolidating the actions
of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative
agencies under a single leader... His assistant who dealt with the press
noted that, since the terrorist attack, 'Radio and press are at our
disposal.' Those voices questioning the legitimacy of their nation's
leader, or raising questions about his checkered past, had by now
faded...he reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing
former executives of the nation's largest corporations into high
government position...He encouraged large corporations friendly
to him to acquire media outlets and other industrial concerns across
the nation...after an interval of peace following the terrorist attack,
voices of dissent again arose within and without the government...leaders
of nearby nations were speaking out against his bellicose rhetoric...he
began a campaign to convince the people of the nation that a small,
limited war was necessary. Another nation was harboring many of the
suspicious Middle Eastern people, and even though its connection with
the terrorist who had set afire the nation's most important building
was tenuous at best, it held resources their nation badly needed if
they were to have room to live and maintain their prosperity. He called
a press conference and publicly delivered an ultimatum to the leader
of the other nation, provoking an international uproar. He claimed
the right to strike preemptively in self-defense, and nations across
Europe - at first - denounced him for it...Thus Hitler annexed Austria
in a lightning move...In a speech responding to critics of the invasion,
Hitler said...'Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators'"

March 17, 2003: Demands that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and his family
leave Iraq within two days or face "military conflict commenced at
a time of our choosing". Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri says in response
that Bush "should go away from the presidency and let the Americans
lead an ordinary life with other nations, not a life of aggression,
a policy of aggression against other nations. This policy has brought about
disasters to the U.S. So for the U.S. to live properly with the world
and for the world nations to live in peace, this crazy man should go."

March 17, 2003: Australia announces that it will contribute forces
towards an invasion of Iraq.

March 17, 2003: The United Nations orders all its personnel to leave Iraq.

March 17, 2003: British House of Commons leader Robin Cook resigns
from Prime Minister Tony Blair's Cabinet in protest of Blair's plans
to invade Iraq. Cook is given a standing ovation by the House of
Commons, an act the British Broadcasting Corporation describes
as unprecedented.

March 17, 2003: National Security Council antiterrorism director Rand Beers
resigns.

March 17, 2003: Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi says that
the United States has the authority to invade Iraq given prior
United Nations Security Council resolutions.

March 17, 2003: The New York Times reports that Bush is 
offering $1.5 billion in Iraq reconstruction jobs to
United States companies, and is not allowing foreign companies
into the bidding process unless they are subsidiaries of
companies from the United States. Later reports state that
there was no bidding process, and the companies were selected
for being strong supporters of the Republican party.

March 17, 2003: The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the
average household debt in the United States is greater than
the average household annual disposable income for the first
time in history, and that the near-zero savings rate is the
lowest since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

March 17, 2003: Chemist Derek Lowe claims that VX gas "appears
to have been used in the infamous attack on the Kurds", which
is probably a reference to the Halabja attack in 1988.

March 17, 2003: Congressman Rahm Emanuel says that Bush plans to
"build more housing, rebuild more schools and go further in providing
health care for pregnant women in Iraq than his budget gives Americans",
according to USA Today.

March 18, 2003: In a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert,
writes that an invasion of Iraq would fall within "necessary actions
against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including
those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed,
or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."

March 18, 2003: France pledges to "help American troops" if
Iraq uses chemical weapons.

March 18, 2003: Denmark pledges two ships to the invasion of Iraq.

March 18, 2003: Beligan Prime Minister Verhofstad reverses
Defense Minister Andre Flahaut's recent order forbidding
United States military equipment from entering Belgium.

March 18, 2003: The British House of Commons votes 412-149
to support an invasion of Iraq, and 396-217 against a proposed
amendment to declare the invasion without moral justification
if the United Nations does not support it. Members of Parliament
Anne Campbell and Bob Blizzard, Home Office Minister John Denham,
and Junior Health Minister Lord Hunt resign in protest.

March 18, 2003: Conservative News Network reports that the
"coalition of the willing" to invade Iraq "represents a great
victory in diplomacy" superior to the alliance of 20 nations'
forces to liberate Kuwait in 1991 because 30 countries have now
stated that they morally agree with the United States' plans for war, 
although few are sending troops.

March 18, 2003: Vatican spokesman Jaquin Navarro-Valls warns that
"Those who decide that all peaceful means that international law
makes available are exhausted assume a grave responsibility before God,
their conscience and history."

March 18, 2003: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says that
"the Constitution just sets minimums. Most of the rights that you enjoy
go way beyond what the Constitution requires".

March 18, 2003: Senator Tom Daschle says that "a diplomatic success
 is having 200,000 international troops present instead of the 225,000
U.S. troops which are present today...a diplomatic success is getting
other countries to pay 90 percent of the costs incurred. All of that
happened in 1991. None of that is happening in the year 2003", and
declares himself "saddened that we have to give up one life because
this President couldn't create the kind of diplomatic effort that
was so critical for our country". In response, House of Representatives
Speaker Dennis Hastert says that Daschle has "come mighty close"
to actions which "give comfort to our enemies" and "undermine the President
as he leads us into war"; Congressman Tom DeLay calls Daschle "the official
Democrat hatchet man" and "just a taxpayer-funded pundit" and tells
Daschle to "fermez la bouche", French for shut his mouth; Senator Santorum
condemns Daschle for having "clearly articulated the French position";
the Republican National Committee accuses Daschle of trying to
"gain partisan advantage" and "blame America first"; White House
Press Secretary Ari Fleischer accuses Daschle of "blaming President Bush
for the fact that we may be on the verge of war"; talk show host
Rush Limbaugh accuses Daschle of using "the politics of personal destruction"
in a "viscious attack", says that Daschle should "be ashamed to act
this way", and accuses Daschle of supporting the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001 by not approving Bush's foreign diplomacy efforts;
National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg says that Daschle thinks
that "opposing Bush is more important" than his integrity; National Review
columnist Kathryn Jean Lopez says that Daschle has "just lost his mind";
Weekly Standard columnist Hugh Hewitt calls Daschle one of the "proponents
of vulnerability at home and indecision abroad"; and United States
News and World Report columnist Michael Barone says that Daschle is
"like a vulture hovering over the battlefield...seeking gains from deaths
in war". 

March 18, 2003: Gregory Palast reports that ChoicePoint -- the data mining
company which falsely accused 91,000 Floridans, mostly minorities and
members of the Democratic Party, of being felons, leading to their being
barred from voting in the 2000 and 2002 elections -- has been chosen
to create the Total Information Awareness database of every commercial
transaction undertaken by every resident of the United States, and to perform
profiling of travelers at airports and borders, and that ChoicePoint
also has a database of the DNA codes of United States citizens.

March 18, 2003, Unrelated: Germany's Supreme Court refuses to ban
the National Democratic Party, which government prosecuters had accused
of being a modern incarnation of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party,
after the Party accuses government agents of infiltrating the
Party and hiring neo-Nazi activists to create a case against it.

March 18, 2003: Phil Carter notes that "two of America's best reporters
[Rick Atkinson and Jim Dwyer] for two of America's best newspapers [the
New York Times and Washington Post] carried the exact same story -- almost
word for word -- in todays's newspaper. The policy of embedding...has a
downside, which is apparent today...particularly when a pool of reporters
is exposed to exactly the same facts with little else to write about
that day".

March 18, 2003: Aaron Klein of World Net Daily reports that the
Muslim Student Association has invited speakers from al Muhajiroun,
a pro-terrorist group, who tell students that "We are not Americans!
We are Muslims! We reject the UN, reject America, reject all law
and order. Don't lobby Congress or protest because we don't recognize
Congress! The only relationship you should have with America is to
topple it!...Musharraf gets $60 million a month to betray and arrest
us...the so-called terrorists are the only people who truly fear God.
Since everyone fears the worldly things that God controls, they therefore
fear these Islamic organizations which have been labeled terrorist
organizations. We must join with these organizations. They are the only
worthy causes, and the mighty superpower only fears them...we can
defeat America. Eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House
dictating the laws of Sharia."

March 18, 2003: Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting reports that
the major news networks are "Megaphones for Official Views"
with over 78% of guests on American Broadcasting Corporation,
Columbia Broadcast System, National Broadcast Company, 
and Public Broadcast System news shows about Iraq strongly supporting
the invasion, with these numbers taking into account the 7% of guests
representing the Iraqi government.

March 19, 2003: The Evening Standard reports that British Special Boat Service
and United States Marine forces have been caught in a firefight near
Basra, Iraq.

March 19, 2003: Veteran diplomat Mary Wright resigns, saying that
"I strongly believe that going to war now will make the world
more dangerous, not safer...In our press for military action now,
we have created deep chasms in the international community and
in important international organizations. Our policies have alienated
many of our allies and created ill will in much of the world...I have
served my country for almost 30 years in some of the most isolated
and dangerous parts of the world...I want to continue to serve America.
However, I do not believe in the policies of the administration
and cannot defend or implement them."

March 19, 2003: The Chicago Tribune reports that Clear Channel Worldwide
has arranged several recent rallies to support Bush's plans to invade Iraq.

March 19, 2003: District Judge Michael Baylson orders
Berks County, Pennsylvania to print ballots in Spanish
and to hire poll workers who speak Spanish after hearing
that poll workers in Reading had routinely barred Hispanics
from voting.

March 19, 2003: Senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow announce
their opposition to every one of Bush's judicial nominees from
their state of Michigan.

March 19, 2003: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia demands
all news cameras be removed from a Cleveland City Club meeting
at which Scalia is given an award for promoting free speech.
During his speech, Scalia refers to a case where he determined
that the First Amendment forbids the government from banning
flag-burning and mocks the clean-shaven boot-wearing Texan defendant
as "bearded, scruffy, sandal-wearing" and says that the defendant
should have been jailed for this appearance alone but that he was
"handcuffed" by the Constitution.

March 19, 2003: Oregonian columnist Peter Carlin reports that
"CNN's coverage has tilted noticeably toward the war in the last
few weeks, both in the monochromatic opinions of the majority
of its guests and in the unabashed advocacy from some of its own
anchors and correspondents."

March 19, 2003, Unrelated: The European Union discovers listening
devices at the offices of the French, German, British, Austrian, and
Spanish delegations.

March 19, 2003, Unrelated: Serbian deputy prosecutor Milan Saraljic
becomes one of the now over 1,000 people arrested for being part of
the gang accused of assassinating Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic.

March 20, 2003: Fires 32 cruise missiles into Baghdad in an attempt
to assassinate Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. An hour later, declares
war with Iraq and claims that 35 nations are offering military support
to the invasion, and in a letter to Congress claims that the war is
"necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist
organizations, including those organizations or persons who planned,
authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred
on Sept. 11, 2001". After numerous delays, Saddam Hussein appears
on television in what United States networks claim to be a prerecorded
speech. Iraq fires four missiles into Kuwait in retaliation, of which
one is destroyed by US antimissile batteries and three simply crash
into empty desert, causing no casualties.

March 20, 2003: Turkey's parliament votes 332-202 to allow
the United States to launch airstrikes against Iraq from bases
in Turkey, and to deploy forces to the Iraqi border.

March 20, 2003: Rescinds the offer of billions of dollars in aid to Turkey
in exchange for Turkey's support in the war. 

March 20, 2003: The Peoples Republic of China calls for the United States
and Iraq to "immediately stop military action".

March 20, 2003: Kenya reports capturing one of the highest ranking
members of al Qaeda in the area.

March 20, 2003: Spain deploys 700 soldiers to the Persian Gulf
with orders to sit around and not take part in the invasion of Iraq.

March 20, 2003: France report seizing vials containing traces of
ricin poison at a train station in Paris.

March 20, 2003: The Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that
there is an al Qaeda commander in the United States named Adnan G.
el Shukrijumah, also known as Jaafaral al Tayyar, who is
planning a "major attack" and could be "another Mohammed Atta".

March 20, 2003: Reuters reports that "In 1991 at least 33 countries
sent forces to the campaign against Iraq and 16 of those provided
combat ground forces, including a large number of Arab countries.
n 2003 the only fighting forces are from the United States, Britain
and Australia. Ten other countries are known to have offered small
numbers of noncombat forces, mostly either medical teams and specialists
in decontamination, making a comparable alliance of about 13 countries."

March 20, 2003: Iraq claims that it no longer has Scud missiles.

March 20, 2003: The New York Times reports that Global Crossing
telecommunications company has hired Defense Policy Board Chairman
Richard Perle to use his position to influence a foreign country
to accept a contract with Global Crossing.

March 20, 2003: Federal agents arrest United States citizen
Mike Hawash at his job in Hawthorne Farms, Oregon, and jail him
in solitary confinement as a "material witness" without habeus corpus.
Hawash had previously given over $10,000 to the Global Relief Foundation,
but it is reported that this is a coincidence. On April 29, Hawash
is charged with attempting to join the Taliban while on a trip to China,
and on August 6 he pleads guilty.

March 20, 2003, Unrelated: United States District Senior Judge
Lloyd George orders author Irwin Schiff to quit publishing a book
that encourages readers to not pay taxes and claims that this is legal.

March 20, 2003, Unrelated: US District Judge John F. Keenan
dismisses a lawsuit against former Union Carbide Chief Executive
Warren Anderson over the Bhopal pollution which killed 18,000 people,
delcaring that "Union Carbide has met its obligations to clean up
the contamination in or near the Bhopal plant" and that Anderson
cannot be sued because he no longer has any connection to the company.

March 20, 2003, Unrelated: Serbian Supreme Court chief justice
Leposava Karamarkovic resigns due to government pressure which
has so far forced 35 other judges to resign.

March 21, 2003: United States forces invade Iraq under cover of night.
Troops are banned from flying national or unit colours other than the
Iraqi flag in order to promote the appearance of an army of liberation
instead of one of conquest. At least one officer tells reporters that
US forces intend to kill any Iraqi soldiers they detect without
offering a chance for surrender. Slashdot, an amateur news service
usually focusing on technology issues, reports that "the schedule
has been accelerated due to infrastructure destruction" following reports
of oil wells being set on fire.

March 21, 2003: The Daily Telegraph reports that Bush had convinced himself
that Iraq was responsible for the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001
and that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had coerced Bush not to
invade Iraq in talks on September 12.

March 21, 2003: Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer says that "the use of force
is being persued to help make this get settled in the most peaceful
way possible".

March 21, 2003: The New Zealand Herald reports that "Karim Sinjari,
the Interior Minister of the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party,
last month asked the US and Britain for help in obtaining gas masks
and antidotes, but received no reply."

March 21, 2003: Riots break out in San Francisco over the war in Iraq.
Over 1,400 people are arrested.

March 21, 2003: Iraq expels Cable News Network from the country.

March 21, 2003: Northwest Airlines cuts 4,900 jobs.

March 21, 2003, Unrelated: The People's Republic of China reports
that the Tamil Tigers terrorist group has sunk a Chinese fishing boat,
killing 18.

March 21, 2003: United States Colonel Roger King reports that
rebels in Afghanistan have launched rockets on US bases in three
provinces of Afghanistan, including Orgun base in Paktika.

March 21, 2003: The United States cuts military aid to Nigeria,
citing a massacre that occured two years ago. Nigeria claims that
this is punishment for its opposition to the United States' plans
for invading Iraq.

March 21, 2003: American Broadcasting Corporation reports that
"Distinguished Islamic institutions and renowned, moderate Muslim clerics
have urged Muslims to join in jihad (holy war) to resist the U.S.-led
onslaught" in Iraq, and "Osama bin Laden and his militant ilk no longer
have a monopoly calling on Muslims to wage jihad to defend the faith."

March 21, 2003: Cartoonist Garry Trudeau draws a character in his Doonesbury
comic strip holding a fasces and declaring himself to be just like
Attorney General John Ashcroft.

March 21, 2003: According to a teacher from Michigan, the Department
of Education has forbidden all teachers from saying anything negative
about the government or the war with Iraq.

March 22, 2003: Turkey is reported to have invaded Iraq, although
this is later disputed. France deploys 100 chemical weapons
detection specialists to Kuwait. The United States bombards positions
of Ansar al Islam, a terrorist group with ties to Chechnya and al Qaeda
which the US has previously ignored. Australian Broadcasting Corporation
cameraman Paul Moran is killed by a car bomb which is blamed on Ansar al Islam.
Independent Television Network correspondants Terry Lloyd, Fred Nerac,
and Hussein Othman are missing after being fired upon by United States tanks
near Basra. Fox News attempts to barter down reports of 200 Iraqis wounded
in the whole of the war by interviewing a single Red Cross doctor and 
reporting the number of wounded that this doctor has personally seen
as the whole. US forces, against against direct order, replace the
Iraqi flag with the US flag in Um Qasr. Three missiles land in Iran,
one hitting an oil refinery in Abadan near the Persian Gulf. Iran
initially blames the United States, but the missiles turn out to be Iraqi.
Part of Iraq's 51st division surrenders without incident to
the United States. A US soldier attacks a command tent of the
101st Airborne in Camp Pennsylvania, Kuwait, killing 1 and wounding 13.
The Age and Cable News Network report that US forces are using napalm,
which other countries have banned by international treaty and which
the US has claims to have destroyed all its supplies of, although the
Department of Defense denies this.

March 22, 2003: Reports from Knoxville, Tennessee; Hartford, Connecticut;
and Jacksonville, Florida state that the Federal Bureau of Investigation
is making lists of all United States citizens of Iraqi descent
and interrogating some of them. The Indianapolis Star reports that only
Iraqi immigrants are being contacted and that the interviews are
completely voluntary even though FBI agents have ordered interviewees
to avoid contacting any lawyers or civil rights organizations.
 
March 22, 2003: Elizabeth Wilmhurst, deputy legal advisor to British
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, resigns in protest of the invasion of Iraq.

March 22, 2003: A pro-Iraq rally in Paris, France, turns into a lynch mob
as marchers begin attacking every Jew in sight before being restrained
by police. While Digipresse reports on the event, most French news agencies
determine that it is not worth mentioning.

March 22, 2003: An anonymous poster on the Plastic message board system
says that "Having previously repealed the Great Society and most of the
New Deal, the Republican leadership in the Senate is busy repealing
the social legislation enacted by Republicans during the Progressive Era
between 1880 and 1925", noting attacks on the Railway Labor Act of 1926,
the bankruptcy act of 1896, and the merit-basead civil service system
enacted in 1882.

March 23, 2003: United States forces report capturing Basra.
Minor resistance appears in Um Qasr in an area that the United States
had reported was totally under its control. A US air defense battery
shoots down a returning British aircraft. The US meets resistance
at Nasiriya.  Iraq releases televised interviews of captured US engineers,
which the Red Cross says violates Article 13 of the Geneva Convention's
requirement that prisoners of war be protected from public curiousity.
It is reported that Kurdish forces begin an advance towards Kirkuk,
but nothing is heard of this for days and the report may be false.
The Washington Post reports that, contrary to prior leaks of
the United States' plans, the US has not targeted civilian facilities
in its bombing. Independent Television Network reports that journalist
Terry Lloyd has been killed by United States forces and "we believe his
body to be in Basra hospital which is still under Iraqi control".
The British Broadcasting Corporation reports infighting between defecting
and loyal Iraqi units near Irbil. The Washington Post reports that "the
Iraqis holding out in Basra are members of the Iraqi army's 51st Division".

March 23, 2003: Russia accuses the United States of "a return to the
Cold War practice" of flying spy planes over Russian territory after
detecting three U2 reconnaissance planes over Russia near Georgia.

March 23, 2003: The United States accuses Russia of having satellite
technicians assisting Iraqi forces through a front company called
Aviaconversiya, which Russia denies exists.

March 23, 2003: Focus on the Family announces its concern that
the United States Agency for International Development may
"be sending in the condom pushers and the sex educators" to Iraq.

March 23, 2003: A pro-war rally of 17,000 in Minneapolis, Minnesota
heckles pro-war speaker Ruby Zigrino for quoting the Koran and suggesting
that the United States should rebuild Iraqi civilian infrastructure,
telling Zigrinto to "go home" and shouting "Screw Muslims! Screw the Koran!"

March 23, 2003: Palm Beach, Florida, bartender Evgeniy Komyakevich
(alternately spelled Conykevich) is shot to death by a bar patron
for not supporting the invasion of Iraq.

March 24, 2003: Accuses Russia of selling anti-tank missiles,
guidance jamming systems, and night vission goggles to Iraq.
US Major General Stanley McChrystal says that if Iraq has any GPS jammers,
"they are not having a negative effect on the air campaign at this point".
Pravda reports that Russia is preparing for war with the United States.
US Major General Victor Renaurt reports that Iraq has attempted to use
six GPS jammers "that they obtained from another nation", and that
all six were destroyed. Some reports state that the jammers were
destroyed by GPS-armed missiles. The Daily Record, a British tabloid,
reports that British forces have discovered Russian missiles timestamped
2002 in an abandoned Iraqi air base.

March 24, 2003: A United States helicopter offensive against Iraqi forces
is repelled with at least one shot down and only minor damage to the Iraqis
reported. Columbia Broadcast System reports that "Iraqis have
drawn a red line on the map around Baghdad, and once American troops
cross it, the Republican Guards are authorized to use chemical weapons". 
Reuters reports that conditions in Iraq are so poor that civilians
are claiming to be soldiers and trying to surrender to United States
forces so that they will be given food. Iraqi forces cut off one
of the United States' main supply lines near Safwan. Joseph Galloway
of Knight Ridder Newspapers quotes an anonymous "Pentagon official"
as saying "this is the ground war that was not going to happen
in (Rumsfeld's) plan...now we have three divisions strung out
over 300-plus miles and the follow-on division, our reserve, is
probably three weeks away from landing" and a "retired senior general"
as saying "The Secretary of Defense cut off the flow of Army units,
saying this thing would be over in two days...he shut down movement
of the 1st Cavalry Division and the 1st Armored Division. Now we don't
even have a nominal ground force", and Galloway goes on to
write that "Rumsfeld and his civilian aides at first wanted to commit
no more than 60,000 American troops to the war on the assumption
that the Iraqis would capitulate in two days" and that the US and Britain
have 2,000 Iraqi prisoners (the US had reported capturing 8,000 prisoners
on the first day). United States forces report capturing a chemical weapons
production facility near Najaf, but soon determine that it has not 
been used to produce weapons for at least five years.

March 24, 2003: United States forces fight forces of Afghan
provincial governor Bacha Khan Zardran. Both sides accuse the other
of firing first. Five of Zardran's soldiers are killed, including
Zardran's son Jillani Khan. 

March 24, 2003: Poland announces that its forces have entered Iraq.

March 24, 2003: The Institute for Policy Studies issues a report,
titled "Crude Vision: How Oil Interests Obscured US Government Focus
on Chemical Weapons Use by Saddam Hussein", detailing how "Bush-Cheney
Administration officials, and their close associates, last tried to
ensure the long-term supply of oil out of Iraq when they were working
for the Reagan Administration...despite the war and its atrocities,
from 1983 to 1985, the Reagan White House took extraordinary measures
to curry Saddam Hussein's favor. Their goal: to promote a new pipeline
from the Euphrates River, in Iraq, to the Gulf of Aqaba, in Jordan.
Their primary candidate for the billion-dollar pipeline's construction:
Bechtel Corporation...this same corporation - Bechtel - and Halliburton,
Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer, stand poised to benefit from
US Agency for International Development initiated post-war reconstruction
contracts...oil interests, to a large degree, became entwined with
''national security'' objectives under Reagan"...the key players..read
like a ''Who's Who'' of men who have helped to craft the Bush-Cheney
Administration's current initiative against Iraq: Donald Rumsfeld,
Ed Meese, George Schultz, James Schlesigner, Robert McFarlane,
Lawrence Eagleburger, Judge William Clark".

March 24, 2003: South Korean spokesman Song Kyong Hee says that
the United States has no plans to attack North Korea for its
nuclear weapons program, saying that "In every meeting that I have had
with responsible US officials, they told me 'Iraq is a different case
from North Korea and we want a peaceful resolution of the problem."

March 24, 2003: The Department of Justice begins allowing the
Federal Bureau of Investigation to add inaccurate information to a
National Crime Information Center database.

March 24, 2003: The State Department tells all United States citizens
to leave Indonesia.

March 24, 2003: The New Yorker reports that Bush had led
Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan in a Christian prayer during
a diplomatic meeting to seek Saudi support for the war in Iraq,
baffling the Prince.

March 24, 2003: The New York Stock Exchange expels reporters from
al Jazeera for "security reasons" and "because of al Jazeera's coverage
of the war on Iraq".

March 24, 2003: A grenade is thrown at the British consulate in Ecuador.

March 24, 2003: Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed declares
that "it is a black day in history when a superpower with its allies
attacks a country incapable of defending itself, much less threatening
another county...this is an act by imperialists who still want to
control the world...we have gone back to the Stone Age where might
is right...people will live in perpetual fear" and calls the
United States a "cowardly, imperialist bully".

March 24, 2003: The Financial Times reports that Halliburton is
considering ending business operations in Iran which had begun under
Chief Executive Officer Dick Cheney.

March 24, 2003: Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan writes
that "American victory in Iraq...is going to be the biggest good thing
that has happened in the world, the West and the United States
since the twin towers fell".

March 24, 2003: A British Broadcasting Corporation commentator
says that "One of the Iraq war's major casualties is the credibility
of the American media. Nobody takes it seriously."

March 24, 2003: Pitchfork Media reports that the Canadian band
Godspeed You Black Emperor was arrested after a gas station attendant
called police and accused them of being terrorists.

March 24, 2003: Cable News Network fires veteran talk show host
Connie Chung.

March 24, 2003, Unrelated: United Nations human rights advocate
Paulo Sergio Pinheiro leaves Burma after finding that Burmese police
were secretly listening to his conversations with political prisoners.

March 24, 2003, Unrelated: Serbia arrests Special Operations Unit
Deputy Commander Zvezdan Jovanovic for the assassination of Prime Minister
Zoran Djindic.

March 2003: USA Today reports that National Broadcast Company "has
spent nearly a year planning to outshine rivals in Iraq, including
developing new technology to send live, broadcast-quality video
from moving vehicles at the front."

March 2003: Charleston City Council members Wendell Gilliard
and Robert George walk out of a Council meeting in protest
of the selection of atheist Councilman Herb Silverman to give
the invocation before the meeting. Gilliard says that the invasion
of Iraq is "for our principles, based on God" and that "it's about
time we started standing up for something in this country".

March 2003: Hearst Corporation suspends San Francisco Chronicle
technology writer Henry Norr for having attended a peace rally.

March 2003: Secret Service agents interrogate public access
television producers Kaseen Smith and Ariana Kitchin, and have
Smith sign papers he is not allowed to read, after Smith sings
a song including the lyrics "I got a sword from God so that's what
makes me lethal" and "I wanna burn a Bush". The Secret Service orders
Smith to delete anti-Bush opinions from his public Web site "or there's
going to be a problem...we will take it to trial, you will be convicted
and you will serve time".

March 2003: American Politics Journal reports that Congressmen
Roscoe Bartlett, Dan Burton, Duncan Hunter, Sam Johnson, Walter Jones,
Buck McKeon, John Shimkus, Cliff Stearns, Tom Tancredo, Dave Weldon,
and Jerry Weller have petitioned Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
to begin censoring news reports. Hunter, Bartlett, Jones, and McKeon
are on the Armed Services Committee, Hunter chairing the Committee.

March 2003: Iran, Libya, Pakistan, Sudan, and the United States 
pressure the United Nations to remove text from a statement on
womens' rights which would have condemned violence against women
as part of traditional or religious practice and would have condemned
forcing women into pregnancy. The US's chief delegate Ellen Sauerbrey
says that "I don't think we're aligning ourselves with countries
who have bad records on human rights".

March 2003: Reckitt Benckiser and its public relations advisors
Bender Hammerling Group issue a press release that Benckiser product
French's mustard was invented by Robert T. French of New York
and does not come from France.

March 2003: The police chief of Alamosa, Colorado, threatens to
arrest for "contempt of flag" a bookstore owner who flew the US flag
upside-down in the traditional sign of distress.

March 2003: Texas State Legislator Debbie Riddle says ""Where did this
idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care,
free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out
of the pit of Hell, and it's cleverly disguised as having a tender heart.
It's not a tender heart. It's ripping the heart out of this country."

March 2003: Highland High School of Albuquerque, New Mexico,
fires teachers Allen Cooper and Geoffrey Barrett for allowing students
to draw artworks expressing pacifist views. Highland Principal Ace Trujillo
also condemns an artwork of a soldier shooting Saddam Hussein in the head
as "not sufficiently pro-war".

March 25, 2003: Issues an executive order suspending the release
of some classified documents to the public for another three years.

March 25, 2003: United States forces report capturing a hospital
in Nasiriya that had been used as a military outpost by Iraqi forces,
taking 170 men, 200 weapons, and a T-55 tank. The US reports that
Iraq has executed several prisoners of war. Iraq destroys two US M1 tanks
of the 7th Cavalry, the first M1s to ever be destroyed by enemy fire.
Basra Shia leader Ayatollah Sistani calls on all Shias to defend
Iraq from the US-led invasion.

March 25, 2003: United States Ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci
announces that "many in the United States are...disappointed and upset
that Canada is not fully supporting us right now" because "there is
no security threat to Canada that the United States would not be
ready, willing, and able to help with", and declares anti-Bush remarks
by Member of Parliament Herb Dhaliwal as "totally inappropriate"
and condemns Prime Minister Jean Chretien for not condemning Dhaliwal's
remark the way Chretien condemned Albertan Governor Ralph Klein's
letter declaring Alberta's support for the invasion of Iraq and praise
for Bush.

March 25, 2003: Saudi Arabia releases pro-democracy activist
Sheikh Saeed bin Zuair from prison.

March 26, 2003: Bush's personal chefs change the name of French toast
to "Freedom Toast". Bush's spokesman Ari Fleischer does not deny
that Bush gave the order to have the menu changed.

March 26, 2003: Iran captures an Iraqi speedboat loaded with explosives
at the mouth of the Shatt al Arab river. Three other boats escape.
The US 173rd Airborne Brigade deploys to a Kurdish-controlled area
of Iraq. The United States expels Christian Science Monitor reporter
Philip Smucker, one of the few journalists who did not volunteer for
the military's journalist embedding program, from Iraq for reporting
the locations of Army and Marine units as "right across from Najaf.
If Najaf is the Army column coming up towards Baghdad, then we're
the Marine column coming up further". Some other news organizations say
that this was common knowledge at the time, although Smucker admits
that this was "information I shouldn't have given out".

March 26, 2003: The World Trade Organization declares that Bush's
tariffs on steel are a violation of international treaty. Congressman
Phil English says that "the WTO is trying to change the rules arbitrarily
and without precedent to dismantle America's trade laws in order to
attack the U.S. manufacturing base. This outrageous decision...undermines
America's participation in the world trading system".

March 26, 2003: The Hindustan Times reports that the United States
is advertising for "non-Muslims only" to work at army bases in Kuwait.

March 26, 2003, Unrelated: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says
that "children might be induced to follow the path to homosexuality"
if homosexuals are allowed to be schoolteachers.

March 27, 2003: Britain accues Iraq of executing two captured soldiers.
The United States announces the deployment to Iraq of the
4th Infantry Division, numbering 100,000 troops, and insists that
the reinforcements are part of the original war plan. The 101st Airborne,
previously held as reserve in Kuwait, is deployed into Iraq.
Cable News Network extolls the bravery of the 173rd Airborne
for droping into friendly Kurd-held territory. Brigadier General
Charles Fletcher reports that the 3rd Infantry has run out of food.
Soldiers of the 101st nickname their forward operating bases "Exxon"
and "Shell", after oil companies. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
accuses Syria of shipping arms to Iraq, and promises to "hold the
Iranian government responsible" for the actions of militiamen who
had been trained by Iran. It is reported that Iraqi soldiers have
abandoned frontier positions near Kurdish controlled areas near Chamchamal.
Channel One Television journalist Dan Scemama, Yedioth Aharonoth
journalist Boaz Bismuth, and Radio Televisao Portuguesa journalists
Luis Castro and Victor Silva are captured and tortured by US forces.
The United States announces that Iraq has transferred chemical weapons
to the Medina division.

March 27, 2003: The Red Cross withdraws from Afghanistan
after one of its workers is murdered.

March 27, 2003: Polish Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski
criticizes Bush and United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
for using Poland's special forces units "for propaganda".

March 27, 2003: Columnist Andrew Sullivan accuses the British
Broadcasting Corporation of being a "military player" that is
"objectively pro-Saddam".

March 27, 2003: During a protest at Fox News's building in New York City,
Fox changes the news broadcasting ticker on the outside of the building
to insults directed against the protesters and filmmaker Michael Moore,
who does not attend the protest.

March 27, 2003: Richard Perle resigns his chairmanship of
the Defense Policy Board, while remaining a member of the Board,
due to the reports of his using his influence to help Global Crossing
telecommunications company.

March 27, 2003: Retired Colonel Sameul Gardiner quotes retired Generals
Wesley Clark and Barry McCaffrey as saying "we don't have enough force"
in Iraq, and says that "the leadership of the United States has
a problem...you don't send American men and women into battle without
all it takes to do that."

March 27, 2003: Washington Monthly columnist Joshua Micah Marshall
opines that "chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks'
nightmare scenario -- it's their plan".

March 27, 2003: Musician Michael Franti of the political band Spearhead
reports that government agents told a bandmate's mother that the
bandmate was the enemy of the bandmate's sibling who is a US soldier
currently operating in Iraq, seized the soldier's music collection,
and told the mother that she was forbidden from speaking to 
certain news organizations about this while speaking to other selected
news organizations was permissible. 

March 27, 2003, Unrelated: Japan launches its first spy satellites.
North Korea declares this to be an act of war.

March 28, 2003: The British Broadcasting Company reports that
Kurdish forces have completely conquered Ansar al Islam's territory,
and that al Qaeda has forces in Basra fighting against the US forces
there. Reuters quotes an anonymous "Bush administration official"
as saying that two Iraqi government sabotage squads have been arrested
while planning bombings of United States interests in two foreign
countries. Al Jazeera reports that US airstrikes on Ansar al Islam
positions actually hit civilians of a "neutral Islamist group".
The Guardian quotes a "senior BBC news source" as saying "we're getting
more truth out of Baghdad than the Pentagon at the moment".

March 28, 2003: The Baltimore Sun reports that China has cut off
oil supplies to North Korea.

March 28, 2003: Congressman Jack Kingston asks Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld to cancel the Marines' food contract with Sodexho,
a French company. Marines spokesman Matthew McLaughlin says that
the Marine Corps "is going to fulfill its obligations of the contract".

March 28, 2003: The United Way charity cancels actress Susan Sarandon's
appearance to promote womens' volunteering for charity activities
because Sarandon does not support the invasion of Iraq.

March 28, 2003: The Las Vegas, Nevada, Regional Transportation Commission
cancels an order of 10 buses from a French company, saying "we believe
it's not good business to be giving millions of our dollars, Clark County
taxpayers' money and the money of US citizens, to a country that doesn't
want to give us one iota of respect...the Committee feels like every
other American citizen that they don't want to be involved with France.
France is not one of our good friends and never has been."

March 29, 2003: A missile explodes near a shopping center in Kuwait.
Initial reports quote investigators as saying the missile's fragments
have the markings of a United States cruise missile, while later
reports state that it is a Chinese Silkworm missile fired by Iraq.
Refugees fleeing central Iraq give food to hungry US Marines
who are restricted to one meal a day. The US reports capturing
an Iraqi general in Nasiriya. An Iraqi soldier dressed in civilian clothes
detonates a bomb hidden in a civilian taxi cab, killing several US soldiers.
The British Broadcasting Corporation reports that Muslim prayer leaders
worldwide have told their congregations to launch a holy war against
the United States and Jews. It is reported that the US has ordered
a 6 day halt of troop advances in order to resupply forces.

March 29, 2003: Two US Special Forces soldiers are killed in an ambush
near Gereshk, Afghanistan.

March 29, 2003, Unrelated: Doctor Carlo Urbani, who first detected
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, dies of the disease.

March 30, 2003: The Washington Post reports that Bush has personally
ordered United States forces to continue advancing towards Baghdad.
General Tommy Franks describes US forces' progress as "truly remarkable".
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reports that "The area in the south
and the west and the north that Coalition forces control is substantial.
It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were
dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit
and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
Britain reports capturing an Iraqi general near Basra, but later reports
that this was "just another officer". Britain reports that explosions
hitting civilian areas of Baghdad, which have been blamed on US
cruise missiles, were caused by Iraqi anti-aircraft missiles and that
the head of Baghdad's air defense operations has been fired. Robert Fisk
reports that one of the missiles Britain is referring to has
Western writing on it, and Russel Brown identifies the writing as a code
for Raytheon and Tim Blair quotes several readers identifying
the numbers as those of a US High Speed Anti-Radiation Missile
(HARM) anti-radar missile and the code for the LAU-118 which is
only used to fire these missiles. Independent Television Network reporter
Gaby Rado dies in a fall from the roof of his hotel in Baghdad.
Iraq interviews Microsoft National Broadcast Company reporter Peter Arnett,
who says that "the first war plan has just failed because of Iraqi
resistance. Clearly the American war planners misjudged the determination
of the Iraqi forces...Our reports about civilian casualties here,
about the resistance of the Iraqi forces, are going back to
the United States. It helps those who oppose the war...to develop
their arguments." Senator Jim Bunning calls for Arnett to be
"tried for treason". Newsday reports that its reporters Matthew McAllester
and Maises Saman have been arrested by Iraqi forces in Baghdad.
Federazione Nazionale Stampa Italiana reports that seven journalists from
Corriere della Sera, Il Messagero, L'Unita, Il Sole 24 Ore, Il Giornale,
La Nazione and Il Mattino have been arrested by Iraqi forces near Basra
and transferred to Baghdad. Australian Broadcasting Corporations reports
that the United States Marine Corps has given every Marine a Christian
prayer book with prayers for Bush to ignore his critics and his own
understanding of world affairs and to act on faith instead. United States
forces, under orders to shoot anything that moves, massacre a group of
refugees fleeing Nasiriya.


March 30, 2003: A rocket hits the headquarters of the International
Security Assistance Force in Kabul, Afghanistan, causing no damage.

March 30, 2003: Venezuela reports bombing Colombian rebel positions.
The rebel group is not identified.

March 30, 2003: The city of Chicago, Illinois destroys Meigs airfield
without notifying air control authorities or the planes about to take off
from the field.  Mayor Richard Daley cites homeland security as a reason
for destroying the airfield, which he has long wanted to close because
of the noise it produces. Daley had earlier promised to keep the airfield
open until 2006.

March 31, 2003: National Broadcast Company announces that Peter Arnett
simply told facts in his interview on Iraqi government television
and fires him. The United States reports that Fox News reporter
Geraldo Rivera has been ordered to leave Iraq for drawing a map
to describe a unit's plans to conduct an attack two hours later.
Rivera says that "some rats at my former network are spreading lies
about me. They can't compete fair and square on the battlefield,
so they're trying to stab me in the back...MSNBC is so pathetic
a cable news network that they have to do whatever they can to
attract attention, but you can rest assured that anything they are
saying is a pack of lies." 150,000 rally in Peshawar, Pakistan
to call for a holy war to destroy the United States. United States
forces capture Hindiyah. The Nation columnist David Corn reports
that the United States does not appear to have plans for conquering
Baghdad.

March 31, 2003: The Sydney Morning Herald notes that al Qaeda leader
Osama bin Laden has not said anything about the invasion of Iraq yet.

March 31, 2003: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reporter Patrick Brown
says that United States Central Intelligence Agency and Special Operations
forces in Iraq are posing as journalists.

March 31, 2003: The Nazi-sympathizer magazine Barnes Review claims
to have received copies of 1500 pages of memos from the corporate offices
of "one of the three major American television networks" -- meaning
American Broadcasting Corporation, National Broadcast Company,
or Columbia Broadcast System -- ordering network affiliates
to ignore all information from French sources, show only the
positive side of the invasion of Iraq, reduce mention of North Korea,
refrain mention of Bush's religious views, directing cameramen
at pro-war protests to show signs equating anti-war protesters
with terrorists, and declaring that college students support Bush
and are not involved in protests. The Review claims that is "is not
possible, obviously" to report which station supposedly gave 
these directions.


April 1, 2003: Iraq expels News Limited journalist Ian McPhedran
and Sunday Times reporter Bonny Schoonakker for having left their
hotel to inform government officials of a US missile strike on the city.
Turkey expels British Broadcasting Corporation journalist Johnny Dymond.
United States forces begin engaging Iraq's main Republican Guard forces,
demolishing the Medina and Baghdad divisions in a day.

April 1, 2003: Sturgis, Michigan police arrest seven young men and
charge them with disorderly conduct for what Police Chief Eugene Alli
describes as the "terrorist acts" of posting signs on April Fool's Day
containing the video game slogan "All your base are belong to us".
Alli promises that the pranksters "will be prosecuted to the fullest
extent of the law".

April 1, 2003: The Los Angeles Times deletes from its Web archive
the part of an article describing a friendly fire incident, in which
a British soldier was killed by a United States A-10 pilot, which
notes that the pilot broke formation and made two attack runs
and quotes another British soldier as saying that pilot has "just gone
about on a jolly".

April 1, 2003, Unrelated: France fines British Petroleum, Shell Oil,
Exxon Mobil, and TotalFinaElf oil companies for collaborating
to raise the price of gasoline.

April 2, 2003: The Age reports that United States forces in
Nasiriya "appeared to have fired indiscriminately, with orders
to shoot at civilian vehicles". Iraq releases from prison
Newsday reporters Matthew McAllester and Moises Saman, Jyllands Posten
photographer Johan Rydeng Spanner, and Esquire photographer Molly Bingham 
and expels them from the country.  United States forces push to
within 15 miles of Baghdad on two fronts. Iraq expels Al Jazeera
reporters from Baghdad. Basra Shia leader Ayatollah Sistani calls on
all Shias to support the US-led invasion; reports state that he had been
under Iraqi arrest when he made the earlier statement calling on his
followers to resist. Microsoft National Broadcast Company begins
running advertisments stating that "we will not compromise military
security...or jeopardize a single military life", a reference to Fox News
reporter Geraldo Rivera outlining a future military operation. Fox News
begins running advertisements stating that Peter Arnett "spoke out
against America's armed forces. He said America's war against terrorism
had failed. He even vilified America's leadership...and he worked for MSNBC."

April 2, 2003: Nominates staunch Israel supporter and anti-Muslim bigot
Daniel Pipes to the Board of Directors of the United States Institute
of Peace.

April 2, 2003: USA Today reports that Commerce Secretary Don Evans 
has said that "Bush believes he was called by God to lead the nation
at this time. 

April 2, 2003: The city of Arcata, California, declares it illegal
on a 4-1 vote for any city manager to comply with the Patriot Act.

April 2, 2003, Unrelated: The World Health Organization issues
a recommendation that people avoid traveling to Hong Kong and Guangdong.

April 3, 2003: Republican National Committee Chairman Marc Racicot
condemns John Kerry for having "dared to suggest the replacement
of America's commander in chief at a time when America is at war"
in the 2004 election.

April 3, 2003: United States forces press into Baghdad's main airport
a few miles from the city. Jordan officially condemns the invasion of Iraq
and denies any involvement. British Broadcasting Corporation
cameraman Kaveh Golestan is killed by a land mine. French Prime Minister
Jean-Pierre Raffarin says that "there was an alternative to war...with
this war, we've gone beyond the law." Cafod charity activist Patrick
Nicholson reports that Umm Qasr "is not under control. It's like the
Wild West...water is not being adequately administered...the hospital
has been without water for three days...there is only one doctor at
the hospital...If the coalition has trouble looking after such a
small town, then what are they going to about the city of Basra,
or, my God, Baghdad? If the coalition is trying to win the battle of
hearts and minds in Iraq, then it is not winning". Newsday reports
that "The CIA has no credible evidence that the government of Syria
has had a role in the shipment of night-vision goggles and other
military equipment to Iraq". Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle
reports that Cable News Network's top executives had known
since March 4 that the invasion of Iraq would start on March 19.
The Daily Telegraph reports that United States forces have discovered
traces of mustard gas and cyanide in the Euphrates river. Al Jazeera
and Abu Dhabi report that the United States is firing on their
camera crews. House Majority Leader Tom Delay condemns dissenting
members of the military as "blow-dried Napoleons that come on television
and in some cases have their own agendas".

April 3, 2003, Unrelated: Pennsylvania refuses to release the list
of Internet sites which Pennsylvania Internet users are forbidden
from reaching, following accusations that several sites are being
blacklisted for their political content. State Attorney General
Mike Fisher's spokesman Sean Connolly declares that "we will not
aid and abet child pornographers....This is not a First Amendment
issue. This is [about] child pornography, a heinous and destructive
crime."

April 3, 2003, Unrelated: The United States withdraws diplomatic staff
from China due to the SARS epidemic.

April 3, 2003, Unrelated: The Recording Industry Association of America
accuses Michigan Technology College student Joseph Nievelt,
Princeton college student Dan Peng, Rennsselaer Polytechnic Institute
student Jesse Jordan, and Rennsselaer Polytechnic Institute student
Aaron Sherman of each distributing $97,800,000,000 worth of unlicensed music,
equivalent to more than eight years of music sales in the United States
per defendant. The students had run automated directory services that
listed the contents of all public file servers on their campuses'
residential computer networks, some of which contained unlicensed music.
The four all settle within a month, agreeing to pay between $12,000 and
$17,500 each.

April 3, 2003, Unrelated: A restaurant is bombed in Davao, Philippines,
killing sixteen. Vigilantes attack three mosques with small arms
in retaliation. No casualties are reported from this.

April 4, 2003: Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed promises
that "we will do something which I believe is very beautiful...commando
and martyrdom operations in a very new, creative way". The Nida
division of the Republican Guard retreats into Baghdad, with reports
of many defections. Atlantic Monthly editor and Washington Post
columnist Michael Kelly is killed in a vehicle accident. Marines First
Regimental Combat Team 1 leader Colonel Joe Dowdy is sacked and sent back
to Kuwait. Army Central Command says that Dowdy no longer has "the absolute
confidence of a higher commander...it's not unheard of, but you generally
don't go on to command again".

April 4, 2003: Nando Media reports that General Richard Meyers has
insinuated that, in Nando's words, "U.S. troops do not intend to
lay siege to Baghdad but plan only to isolate it from the rest of
the country."

April 4, 2003: Akamai Technologies cancels its contract to provide
communications services for al Jazeera's English broadcasts.

April 4, 2003: Iraq supporters riot in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

April 4, 2003: Schools and businesses throughout Kashmir close
in mourning of the death of terrorist mastermind Saif ul Islam,
who was killed in a gunbattle with Indian forces trying to arrest him.

April 4, 2003, Unrelated: The North Dakotan State Senate votes
26-21 to keep an 113-year-old, until recently ignored law forbidding
a man and a woman from living together outside of marriage. State Senator
John Andrist praises the law "as a reminder that there is right
and there is wrong".

April 5, 2003: US forces make several feints into Baghdad, reportedly
penetrating to the center of the western portion of the city. The US
reports killing over 2,000 Iraqi soldiers during these feints.
The Baltimore Sun reports that US forces have engaged a militia
of foreign gunmen with high quality equipment who fought to the death
near Al Muhaydi As Salih. British forces seize a warehouse containing
hundreds of corpses which are reported as being Basran civilians
executed for not supporting dictator Saddam Hussein; later reports
state that the corpses are of soldiers killed in the war with Iran.

April 5, 2003: Afghan politician Haji Gilani, a close friend of
Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, is assassinated in Deh Rawood.

April 5, 2003: British Home Secretary David Blunkett strips the citizenship
of Abu Hamza.

April 6, 2003: Iraqi resistance in Baghdad and elsewhere virtually disappears.
Politiken reports that the United States Central Intelligence Agency
has spirited former Iraqi General Nizar al Khazaji out of house arrest
in Denmark where he had been awaiting trial for using chemical weapons
on civilians, and that al Khazaji has been taken to Kuwait in preparation
for his installment as the new dictator of Iraq to replace Saddam Hussein.
Russia condemns the United States for bombing a residential district
of Baghdad near its embassy.

April 6, 2003: Atlanta Journal-Constitution journalist Ron Martz
reports that "the hand of God" caused two United States soldiers
to be shot instead of him during a battle in Iraq.

April 6, 2003: Alliance Atlantis televsion production company fires
long-form programming division director Ed Gernon for discussing the
documentary "Hitler: The Rise of Evil" by saying that "it basically
boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear who ultimately chose
to give up their civil rights and plunged the whole nation into war.
I can't think of a better time to examine this history than now."

April 7, 2003: The United States bombs a house in Baghdad in which
it believes Saddam Hussein and one of his sons were meeting. 
The US reports finding barrels of Sarin nerve gas, but the barrels
are later found to contain pesticide. British forces enter Basra
after weeks of artillery exchanges, meeting no resistance.

April 7, 2003: Russia accuses the United States of attempting to assassinate
Ambassador to Iraq Vladimir Titorenko. A Russian journalist reports
that the ambassador was caught in crossfire between US and Iraqi forces.

April 7, 2003: 15,000 rally in Clearwater, Florida, to show their support
for Bush. The rally was arranged by Clear Channel Worldwide.

April 7, 2003: The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service
announce that they will begin allowing corporations to reduce employees'
pensions by redefining the historical interest rate to be a few
percentage points higher than it actually was. Currently, pensions
are calculated using the Treasury bond rate, which is already higher
than actual interest. Fortune Magazine reports that this change
will cut employee pensions by half. The role of Treasury and the IRS
is in determining whether a pension plan qualifies to be taxed or not.

April 7, 2003, Unrelated: A grenade is thrown into the offices of
Chicago Alderman Danny Solis and Illinois State Representative
Edward Acevedo. 

April 8, 2003: The United States bombs the offices of al Jazeera
and Abu Dhabi television stations in Baghdad, and shells the
Reuters office in the Palestine hotel where international journalists
are staying. Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk, Telecinco cameraman
Jose Couso, and al Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayoub are killed. Greece, Spain,
Reporters sans Frontieres, and the International Federation of Journalists
condemn the US's actions. Spain reports that the United States had
declared the Palestine Hotel to be a military target and had ordered
all reporters out two days ago, while the reporters say they never
received any warnings. US General Vincent K. Brooks claims not to know
that any journalists were staying at the Palestine Hotel, a fact mentioned
in nearly every journalist's report from Baghdad, while General
Buford Blount reports that US forces received rocket and small arms fire
from the hotel. Numerous journalists at the hotel report that there had
been no fire from the building. National Public Radio reports that
Iraq had stationed artillery at al Jazeera's building.  Iraqi fire
kills El Mundo journalist Julio Anguita Parrado and Focus journalist
Christian Liepig, who are traveling in a US military convoy.
TVN24 reporter Marcin Firlej and Polskie Radio reporter Jacek Kaczmarek
escape from Iraqi custody. The United States bombs the Palestinian Authority
embassy in Baghdad.

April 8, 2003: A man in Fayetteville, Arkansas is arrested for
wearing a shirt that stated "Support the troops, not war or Bush".

April 9, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accuses Syria
of acts of war in allowing Iraqi officials to take exile there.

April 9, 2003: Nomintates Alabama Attorney General William H. Pryor
to a judgeship on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Pryor has
defended Alabama's law against sex toys, saying that "commerce
in the pursuit of orgasms by artificial means for their own sake
is detrimental to the health and morality of the State".
Senator Jeff Sessions praises the appointment, saying that Pryor
"has an incredible commitment to the rule of law, and he does
what he believes is the legally correct thing regardless of
the political pressure...President Bush could not have picked anyone
more uniquely qualified for the 11th Circuit...he follows precedent
even when it conflicts with his personal beliefs". Pryor was co-chairman
of Bush's Presidential campaign in Alabama.

April 9, 2003, Unrelated: California Republican Party Central Committee
member Katrina Leung is arrested on suspicion of being a spy for the
People's Republic of China.

April 9, 2003: The Evening Standard prints a doctored photograph
on its front page to exaggerate the size of a crowd around the
toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein. 

April 2003: National Baseball Hall of Fame President Dale Petroskey
cancels a planned celebration of the 15th anniversary of the making
of the movie Bull Durham, accusing the movie's stars Tim Robbins
and Susan Sarandon of endangering US troops by not supporting
the invasion of Iraq.

April 10, 2003: United States and Kurdish forces enter Mosul and Kurkut
with no opposition. Shiite cleric Majid al Khoei and former Iraqi
religious minister Haider al Kadar are lynched by a mob finding them
meeting to discuss the transfer of power to the previously exiled al Khoei.
Information Clearing House reports that the massive crowds celebrating 
the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein were no more than 150 people,
and that these people included members of Ahmed Chalabi's Free Iraqi Forces
militia whose 150 men were inserted into Iraq a few days prior; this is
supported by a photograph of a largely empty Fardus Square and two 
photographs of a FIF militiaman, one taken alongside Chalabi and one said
to have been taken at Fardus Square. Baghdad's museums are looted.

April 10, 2003: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz announces
that "the Syrians have been shipping killers into Iraq to try and
kill Americans. We need to think about what our policy is towards
a country that harbours terrorists or harbours war criminals. There will
have to be change in Syria".

April 10, 2003: The House and Senate both pass, without any public notice,
hearing, or debate, the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act which prohibits
"knowingly...making available for use or profiting from any place for
the purpose of...distributing or using any controlled substance, and for
other purposes". The bill was introduced by Joe Biden, Dianne Feinstein,
Chuck Grassley, and Joe Lieberman, who promoted using the bill to shut down
dance parties under the assumption that all techno-music dance parties
exist for the sole purpose of distributing illegal drugs.

April 10, 2003: Public Broadcast System columnist Robert X. Cringely
(a pseudonym) notes seeing "TV images of Compaq computers being carried off
by looters from government buildings in Baghdad.  With a supposed economic
embargo in place since 1991, where did those new machines come from?"

April 10, 2003, Unrelated: Texas Governor Rick Perry orders six
crippled constituents arrested and charged with tresspassing for
sitting in his reception room to seek an audience with him.

April 11, 2003: Cable News Network journalist Kevin Sites and
his news team are captured and threatened with execution by Iraqi forces
before being ordered released by a local governor.

April 11, 2003: Pro-war rally organizer Don Neddo, who has arranged
rallies in New England, admits to lying about his military service.

April 11, 2003, Unrelated: Eleven prisoners suspected of being behind the
bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 escape from prison in Aden, Yemen.

April 2003: At a charity concert for the poor, talk show host Bill O'Reilly
suggests that a band of young black musicians which arrived late for their
show might be "in the parking lot stealing our hubcaps."

April 2003: Ellison Horne reports that Cable News Network's
re-broadcast of Michael Moore's speech at the Oscar awards
amplified the jeers that Moore received for condemning Bush.

April 2003: Cable News Network moves its popular Crossfire television show,
featuring a debate between liberal and conservative hosts, from its
prime-time 7:00PM time slot to 4:30PM when most people are still at work
and cannot view it. CNN explains the move by saying "since Crossfire
is such an important show, we moved the time so more people could watch."
CNN's ratings for its 7:00 time slot drop by a third within a month.

April 12, 2003: Former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani proposes
restoring peaceful relations with the United States.

April 12, 2003: British Defense Minister Peter Kilfoyle condemns
the United States Department of State's appointment of Dyncorp
mercenary group to police Iraq. Dyncorp had used its policing
operations in Bosnia as a cover for trading in sex slaves
forged passports, and banned weapons.

April 13, 2003: Iraqi forces fire upon a Cable News Network convoy
in Tikrit. The convoy, led by Brent Sadler, returns fire and escapes
with no casualties. United States forces rescue seven prisoners of war
near Sammara. Kurdish forces expel Arab families from homes that Kurds
had once been expelled from by Iraqi forces.

April 13, 2003: Secretary of State Colin Powell says that "we have
designated Syria for years as a state that sponsors terrorism, and we
have discussed this with the Syrians on many occasions. We are concerned
that materials have flowed through Syria to the Iraqi regime over
the years. We are making this point clearly and in a very direct manner
to the Syrians. We hope the Syrians will respond accordingly." 

April 13, 2003: Nicaraguan President Enrique Bolanos orders an investigation
into how Choicepoint Corporation was able to gain copies of government
records of Nicaraguan citizens, noting that "in the United States these
are very serious offenses".

April 13, 2003: Former President Bush's Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger 
says that "If George Bush decided that he was going to turn the troops loose
on Syria now, and Iran after that, he would last in office for about
15 minutes...If President Bush were to try it now, even I would feel
that he ought be impeached. You can't get away with that sort of thing
with this democracy."

April 14, 2003: United States forces capture Tikrit, the last major
government-held city in Iraq. The Kitty Hawk and Constellation are withdrawn.
Iraq's national library is burned to the ground, destroying all records.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accuses Syria of testing chemical weapons
within the past fifteen months. British Prime Minister Tony Blair
says that there are "no plans to invade Syria". Australian Prime Minister
John Howard demands that France surrender its United Nations Security Council
veto and seat to be replaced by supporters of the invasion of Iraq
so that the Security Council would present "a far better expression
of world opinion", and condemns "armchair generals" who had criticized
United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's early war plans.

April 14, 2003: The Guardian reports that a high-level discussion
on plans to invade Syria was "shut down" by Bush's order.

April 14, 2003: Rex Nutting of Columbia Broadcast System Market Watch
reports that When individual Americans are accused of helping terrorists,
they're thrown in jail and their names are dragged through the mud. But when
major U.S. corporations are caught trading with the enemy, they get just
a slap on the wrist from the government...neither the government nor
the companies are forthcoming with the public about the details of the
illicit trade with rogue governments like Iraq, Cuba, North Korea, Iran
and Sudan...American citizens...accused of working with terrorist groups
like al-Qaida...can languish in jail for months without any formal
charges...but when multinational corporations like Wal-Mart, Dow Chemical,
ExxonMobil and Amazon.com agree with government prosecutors that they have
violated laws that prohibit doing business with enemy states, the news
is buried on an obscure government Web site...The largest penalty levied
among the 59 public cases was $250,000 against Zim American Israeli
Shipping Co. of Norfolk, Va, for trade with Cuba...Nobody at the Norfolk
office of Zim knew anything concrete about the penalty...But they do know
about terrorism. The company relocated from the 16th floor of the
World Trade Center just a week before the Sept. 11 attack, sparking
speculation in the conspiracy press that the Israeli Mossad had tipped off
the company ahead of time."

April 15, 2003: The United States closes a pipeline that transported
oil to Syria from Iraq. Press Secretary Ari Fleischer says that 
threats of war against Syria are acceptable because Syria is
"harbouring Iraqis".

April 15, 2003: Amnesty International says that "there seems to have
been more preparation to protect the oil wells than to protect hospitals,
water systems or civilians...Protecting people should be a primary
responsibility of any power that expects to enter a country and justifies
its intervention on the basis of liberating the people or protecting their
rights."

April 16, 2003: The North Atlantic Treaty Organization takes over
command of the United Nation's International Security Assistance Force.

April 16, 2003: Los Angeles Times journalist Robin Wright reports that
the United States is promoting al Dawa, a terrorist group which
bombed the US embassy in Kuwait several decades ago, to be part
of the new Iraqi government.

April 16, 2003: Attorney General John Ashcroft orders the jailing
of asylum-seeking immigrants from Haiti, writing that the State Department
"asserts that it has `noticed an increase in third country nations
(Pakistanis, Palestinians, etc.) using Haiti as a staging point
for attempted migration to the United States. This increases the
national security interest in curing use of this migration route".
The State Department denies having ever made such a statment, and the
Coast Guard says that none of the immigrants are such a security risk.
Department of Justice spokesman Jorge Martinez refers journalists'
questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which refers the
journalists to Department of Justice spokesman Jorge Martinez.
Congressman Kendrick Meek declares Ashcroft's decision to be "outright
discrimination and racism by this Bush administration...someone needs
to call the president and let him know we are at war against the Taliban
and al Qaeda, and not the Haitian people." Haitian spokeswoman Ira Kurzban
says that Ashcroft's decision "is part of a concerted plan involving
the destruction of the Haitian people by creating the chaotic economic
conditions in Haiti while forcing people to go back there."

April 16, 2003: Department of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge
appoints Nuala O'Connor, a former executive officer of Doubleclick
consumer data collection and marketing corporation which is famous
for having promised not to collect consumer data, as the Department
of Homeland Security's chief officer for protecting citizens'
privacy rights.

April 17, 2003: Kate Holton of Reuters reports that the United States
is refusing to let humanitarian aid enter Arbil for security reasons
even after the United Nations has declared Arbil a safe area.

April 17, 2003: The United States forbids Quaker pacifist organization
Voices in the Wilderness from meeting with journalists in Iraq
after the group issues a press release stating that "trash removal
has not occured for a month. Electricity, Sanitation and Communications
were all severely damaged during the US war and have yet to be restored
in Baghdad. Cholera outbreaks have been reported in Basra...medications
for conditions such as hypertension and diabetes are no longer
available...The previous distribution system set up under the
'Oil-for-Food' program is in total collapse, and - unless essential
services are immediately restored - Iraq faces a humanitarian
catastrophe...Prior to the war, the Pentagon set up Humanitarian
Operations Coordination Centers...as well as disaster assistance
response teams...to coordinate relief efforts...Not only are HOC,
HAC, and DART personnel not in Baghdad yet, CMOC [US Civil Military
Operations Center] was not even aware of the existence of these
other military-humanitarian coordinating bodies. CMOC reported
that they did not yet have a plan for how to restore essential services
in Baghdad. CMOC also reported that they spent several days locating
hospitals, power plants, and water and sanitation plants in order to
do needs assessments. Apparently no one in the U.S. Military thought
to ask...for any of this information prior...When told that of rumors
of a cholera outbreak in Hilla, CMOC even asked Voices in the Wilderness
where that neighborhood was located in Baghdad - unaware that Hilla
is a major Iraqi city located approximately 1 hour south of Baghdad!
...The U.S. Military has demonstrated that it is neither prepared,
nor interested in becoming prepared, to deal with the humanitarian crisis
caused by their war."

April 17, 2003: Bechtel is granted a contract to rebuild Iraq's
infrastructure after a bidding process in which the US Agency
for International Development chose from among six US corporations
which were secretly notified of the contract.

April 17, 2003: President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property
chairman Martin Sullivan resigns in protest of Bush's allowing the
Iraqi National Museum to be looted. Sullivan says that government
officials "can't speak freely" about such things.

April 17, 2003: Cable News Network declares Syria to be "the new Iraq".

April 17, 2003: Todd Blanchard reports that Time Magazine has deleted
a 1998 article by former President George Bush, titled "Why We Didn't
Remove Saddam", from its commercial Web archives.

April 17, 2003: Attorney General John Ashcroft, under judicial order
not to discuss a case against four suspected terrorists being tried
in Detroit, publicly praises the testimony of prosecution witness
Youssef Hmimssa in this case.

April 17, 2003: Four Belgian doctors working in Baghdad, Iraq,
charge United States General Tommy Franks with war crims, claiming
to have witnessed random executions, intentional attacks on civilian
targets including a passenger bus, and permitting the pillaging of
hospitals.

April 17, 2003: The Nation reports that Comedy Central's news and satire
program The Daily Show is the highest rated news program in the United States.

April 17, 2003: Fox News engineer Benjamin Johnson is arrested
at Dulles Airport for smuggling stolen artwork and government bonds
from Iraq. A quickly leaked copy of the federal affidavit against Johnson
says he told investigators that one of the paintings was to be given
to his employer; this information is deleted from at least one
Associated Press report.

April 17, 2003, Unrelated: The Washington State Supreme Court suspends
the license of lawyer Douglas Schafer for having reported that 
Superior Court Judge Grant L. Anderson was taking bribes. The decision
is supported by Justices Bobbe J. Bridge, Charles Z. Smith, Faith E. Ireland,
Tom Chambers, Susan J. Owens, and an anonymous "Visiting Judge", and
opposed by Barbara Madsen and two anonymous Visiting Judges.

April 17, 2003, Unrelated: Russian Member of Parliament Sergei Yushenkov,
Liberal Party co-chairman and an outspoken opponent of President
Vladimir Putin, is assassinated. Russian media sources report that
Yushenkov had no business interests to cause disfavour with criminal
gangs. Liberal Party member Yuly Rybakov suggests that Yushenkov was
assassinated for investigating the apartment bombings of 1999 which
were blamed on Chechen terrorist groups and used as an excuse to invade
Chechnya, and which United States media have accused the Russian government
of causing. Liberal Party co-chairman Victor Pokhmelkin says that Yushenkov's
greatest political enemy would be Boris Berezovsky, who split the Liberal
party by seeking the integration of the Communist party and was eventually
expelled after Yushenkov's faction gained control.

April 18, 2003: Over 10,000 protest in Baghdad against the United States
occupation. Iraq releases a videotape showing dictator Saddam Hussein
waving to a cheering crowd in Baghdad on what Iraq says was April 9,
although the people are wearing clothes for colder weather. Different
news outlets alternately report that civilians in the area have comfirmed
the event or have said that it never happened. Iraq's electrical power grid,
which the US had refrained from attacking, fails due to unknown causes.

April 18, 2003: Erica Goode of the New York Times reports that
the Department of Health and Human Services is withdrawing funding
for research of sexually transmitted diseases if scientists mention
the existence of homosexuality, prostitution, or drug use in their reports,
according to an anonymous "official at the National Institutes of Health"
and several doctors. Department spokesman Bill Pierce denies the story.

April 18, 2003: Poland buys 48 F-16 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin
for $3.5 billion and is granted a $12 billion loan from the United States.
Polish Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski declares this "the contract
of the century" and a "strengthening of strategic links with the US".

April 18, 2003: General Motors announces that it will upgrade
its manufacturing plant in Poland, which will triple its exports.

April 2003: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says that "I think
France is going to pay some consequences, not just with us, but with
other countries who view it that way".

April 2003: Cuba arrests and jails 75 journalists and democracy activists
while the world's attention is focused on the United States' invasion of Iraq.

April 19, 2003: Iraqi Finance Minister Hikmat Ibrahim al Azzawi
is arrested by Iraqi police and turned over to the United States.

April 19, 2003: Boston Herald reporter Jules Crittenden is arrested
at Logan International Airport for smuggling a stolen painting from Iraq.
A Customs Service official says that Crittenden had reported that "all of
the embedded reporters were doing it".

April 19, 2003: Jordanian border guards report seizing 42 paintings,
stolen from the Baghdad museum, that were being smuggled across the
border by journalists.

April 19, 2003: The Club For Growth, a Republican Party activist organization,
begins running television advertisements declaring Republican Senators
Olympia Snowe and George Voinovich to be "French" "Franco-Republicans"
because they support cutting taxes but not cutting them as deeply
as Bush would like to cut them.

April 19, 2003, Unrelated: Striking oil workers in Lagos, Nigeria,
take 97 foreign workers hostage. The Nigerian navy frees the hostages
two weeks later.

April 19, 2003, Unrelated: India admits that it had rigged Kashmiri
elections in the past but claims to have halted the practice.

April 19, 2003, Unrelated: An Israeli soldier fires upon Arab journalists
during a battle in Nablus, killing one.

April 20, 2003: Judith Miller of the New York Times reports that
the United States Army has reported capturing an Iraqi scientist
who claimed that Iraq's chemical and biological weapons were destroyed
days before the invasion and who led US forces to hidden stockpiles
of unprocessed materials which can be made into chemical weapons.
The San Jose Mercury News reports that Iraqi officers in Baghdad
were ordered to retreat from the city on April 8.  The New York Times
reports that the United States is planning to establish four
permanent bases in Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denies
that the US is consider establishing any permanent bases in Iraq.
Pope John Paul II demands "peace in Iraq" and calls for the United States
to let "the Iraqi people become the protagonists of their collective
rebuilding of their country" with the "support of the international
community". Shia leader Syed Abbas declares himself ruler of Kut.
Mohamed Mohsen al Zubaidi declares himself ruler of Baghdad.

April 20, 2003: The New York Times editorializes that "from the beginning,
the key to Mr. Bush's domestic vision has been massive tax cuts,
which Republican ideologues see both as a reward to the well-heeled,
and a key to starving the government of money that might be spent on
programs like health care or housing. Conservatives once viewed deficits
as the height of bad fiscal policy. Now, they embrace them. There is
no danger that a government swimming in red ink will come up with
new programs to protect the environment, to extend health care for
the poor or provide affordable housing to the homeless. No matter
how much the president says he wants to improve education, the deficit
is an all-purpose excuse to avoid helping public school districts overcome
crippling cuts imposed by local governments that are teetering on insolvency."

April 20, 2003: John Pilger of the Independent opines that
"the Bush regime...every day sails closer to Mussolini's definition
of fascism...the Pentagon's deliberate destruction of Iraq's civilian
infrastructure [in 1991]...together with the imposition of an embargo
as barbaric as a medieval siege, produced a suffering never fully
comprehended in the West...as of last July, the United States...was
willfully blocking humanitarian supplies...which Iraq had paid for
and the Security Council had approved...last month's attack by the two
greatest military powers on a demoralised, sick, and largely defenseless
population was the logical extension of this barbarism...the British
public was called upon to support troops sent illegally and undemocratically
to kill people with whom we had no quarrel...it is bloody conquest,
witnessed by America's mass theft of Iraq's resources and natural
wealth...the fear and hatred of Saddam Hussein have been transferred,
virtually overnight, to Bush and Blair...Andrew Marr, the BBC's political
editor, reported: ''[Blair] said they would be able to take Baghdad
without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would
be celebrating.  And on both of those points he has been proved
conclusively right.''...more than 3000 Iraqis were killed within 24
hours or less...are the vindicators saying that the lives of one set
of human beings have less value than those recognizable to us?...We must
not forget Blair's lies about weapons of mass destruction...and we must
not forget the reason for the bloodbath. Last September, in announcing
its National Security Strategy, Bush served notice that America
intended to dominate the world by force. Iraq was indeed the ''test case''.
The rest was a charade. We must not forget that a British defence secretary
has announced, for the first time, that his government is prepared
to launch an attack with nuclear weapons. He echoes Bush, of course.
An ascendant mafia now rules the United States, and the Prime Minister
is in thrall to it. Together, they empty noble words - liberation,
freedom and democracy - of their true meaning. The unspoken truth is
that behind the bloody conquest of Iraq is the conquest of us all:
of our minds, our humanity and our self-respect at the very least.
If we say and do nothing, victory over us is assured."

April 21, 2003: 4,000 rally in Baghdad to demand the United States
leave Iraq. Demonstrators report that the United States has arrested
Shia leader Sheikh Muhammad al Fartusi.

April 21, 2003: The Guardian reports that Saddam Hussein's Baath party
has returned to power in Iraq with the United States' blessing.

April 21, 2003, Unrelated: Ambassador to India Robert Blackwell
resigns unexpectedly.

April 21, 2003, Unrelated: Senator Rick Santorum says that "If the
Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within
your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right
to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery.
You have the right to anything". Santorum also says that child molestation
is "a basic homosexual act".

April 21, 2003, Unrelated: Lawrence B. Lindsey of the Weekly Standard
reports that the United Nations Childrens' Fund would rather leave children
in "a poor, war-ravaged nation policed by foreign soldiers" than to
allow children to be adopted by families in the United States because
UNICEF is run by French people. The article mentions but glosses over
that UNICEF has a policy against transferring any children away from
their home countries.

April 21, 2003, Unrelated: Terrorists attack a bus in Laos, killing 10.

April 22, 2003: Over 1 million Iraqis make a pilgramage to the tomb of
Imam Hussein bin Ali in Karbala. The march quickly becomes a massive
protest against the United States.

April 22, 2003: The Daily Telegraph discovers documents in Baghdad
recording a series of payments to British Member of Parliament
George Galloway. Galloway claims that "maybe it is the product of the
same forgers who forged so many other things in this whole Iraq picture.
Maybe The Daily Telegraph forged it."

April 22, 2003: Hans Blix claims that United States officials invented
stories about Blix's inspection team hiding information about Iraq's
weapons development programs and then leaked these falsehoods to the media.

April 22, 2003: Former Congressman Newt Gingrich says that "the State
Department is back at work pursuing policies that will clearly throw away
all the fruits of hard-won victory...the people the State Department
has sent to Iraq so far represent the worst instincts of the Bureau 
of Near Eastern Affairs...the last seven months involved six months
of diplomatic failure and one month of military success."

April 22, 2003: Club For Growth President Stephen Moore writes in
the National Review that Senators Olympia Snowe and George Voinovich
should "start acting more like Reagan and less like Daschle".

April 22, 2003, Unrelated: Los Alamos National Laboratory reports having
begun producing plutonium pits, a significant piece of atomic weaponry.
The United States has not produced plutonium pits since 1989.
Nuclear Watch New Mexico reports that the order to begin producing
new pits was made by the Department of Energy in 1996.

April 23, 2003: Congressman Richard Gephardt calls for repealing
Bush's tax cut and for granting businesses tax credits for paying for
their employees' health care.

April 23, 2003: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist praises
Senator Rick Santorum's condemnation of homosexuality and derides
opposition to Santorum's remarks as "just politics". Senator Arlen Specter
says that Santorum is "not a bigot".

April 23, 2003: Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage says that
"it's clear that Gingrich is off his meds and out of therapy".
Asssistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Elizabeth Jones
says that "Newt Gingrich does not speak in the name of the Pentagon
and what he says is garbage. What Gingrich says does not interest me.
He is an idiot and you can publish that." Tom Jones Magazine reports
that "the fact that a written summary of his remarks were provided
in advance to The Washington Post, which obligingly featured them
on its front page, makes it clear that the attack was premeditated
and probably cleared by top Pentagon officials whose war with the
State Department has moved into high gear." Former Congressman Jack Kemp,
a political ally of Gingrich, says that the "thinly veiled attack on
Secretary of State Colin Powell for diplomatic failure and for a deliberate
and systematic effort to undermine the president's policies...[caused]
enormous collateral damage to President George W. Bush both diplomatically
and politically...It appears now he is attempting to drive a wedge between
the president and his secretary of state in the name of reform, which
plays right into the hands of America's adversaries. It also plays right
into the hands of the Daschle Democrats who would love nothing better
than to create dissention over foreign policy within the ranks of
the Bush administration."

April 23, 2003: Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post reports
that "the sugar industry has launched a vigorous campaign to discredit
a World Health Organization report on healthful diets...two senators
[Breaux and Craig] wrote a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary
Tommy G. Thompson, urging him to squelch the report. HHS submitted comments
last year on the draft report, saying in part: 'Evidence that soft drinks
are associated with obesity is not compelling'".

April 23, 2003: In an interview with Ted Koppel of American Broadcast Company,
United States Agency for International Development administrator
Andrew Natsios claims that the United States will need to spend $1.7 billion
to rebuild Iraq. A transcript of the interview is later deleted
from USAID's public Web site.

April 23, 2003, Unrelated: Republican Party fundraiser Richard Anthony
Delguadio, president of the Legal Affairs Council and who called
former President Clinton "a terrible example to our nation's young
people", admits to having sex with minors and distributing child pornography.
He is sentenced to two years of probation and fined $5,000.

April 24, 2003: Peace talks between the United States and North Korea
break down after North Korea admits having nuclear weapons.

April 24, 2003: The Department of Justice orders all employees
to record all communications with members of Congress through the
Congressional Liasion Office.  Senator Charles Grassley calls this
"an attempt to muzzle whistleblowers".

April 24, 2003: The Pennsylvania Patriot News reports that
"[Senator] Santorum's defenders are under a gag order. Officials at
the White House and Republican National Committee told GOP insiders
yesterday, by conference call, voice mail and e-mail not to comment
about Santorum's comments, letting him speak for himself."

April 24, 2003: The Washington Post reports that "Word is that
the White House, in the person of counselor Karl Rove, also had
a little chat with the former speaker [Newt Gingrich] after
the Tuesday foray."

April 24, 2003: Speaking about Santorum's condemnation of homosexuality
and claim that homosexuality is equal to rape and child molestation,
Pennsylvania Republican Party State Committee spokesman Chad Saylor says
'if we're surprised about anything, it's the Democrats' attempts to
hype this. Pennsylvanians are concerned about the war and the economy,
not about this nonsense." Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell admits that
Santorum's remarks were "offensive to every gay man and gay woman in
this state", but says that Santorum is not "personally bigoted".
Senator Arlen Spector "the cannibals" who "devoured Trent Lott without
cause" for being upset at Santorum.

April 24, 2003: British Broadcasting Corporation Director General
Greg Dyke reports being "shocked while in the United States by how
unquestioning the broadcast news media was during this war", saying
that "government, the White House, and the Pentagon [are] all-powerful,
with no news operation strong enough or brave enough to stand up
against it. This is particularly so since September 11, when many
US networks wrapped themselves in the American flag and swapped
impartiality for patriotism...compared to the United States, we see
impartiality as giving a range of views, including those critical
of our own Government's position. I think in the United States, particularly
since 11 September, that would be seen as unpatriotic...I was amazed by
how many people just came up to me and said they were following the war
on the BBC because they no longer trusted the American electronic news
media...We were genuinely shocked when we discovered that the largest
radio group in the US [Clear Channel Worldwide] was using its airwaves
to organize pro-war rallies. We are even more shocked to discover that
the same group wants to become a big player in radio in the UK...In the
area of impartiality, as in many other areas, we must ensure we don't
become Americanised...they [American networks] must be clear that
the rules are different here. What is now defined as impartiality
in the US is different...commercial pressures may tempt others
to follow the Fox News formula of gung-ho patriotism but for
the BBC this would be a terrible mistake."

April 24. 2003: Hearst Corporation fires San Francisco Chronicle
technology writer Henry Norr for having attended a peace rally in March.
The San Francisco Examiner reports that Norr was fired for supporting
the pro-terrorist organization International Solidarity Movement. Later,
Chronicle ombudsman Dick Rogers writes that "the paper's policy prohibits
journalists from engaging in political advocacy related to the war".

April 24, 2003: William Greider of The Nation opines that Bush's "grand
ambition...is to roll back the twentieth century...movement conservatives
envision a restored society in which the prevailing values and power
relationships resemble the America that existed around 1900".

April 24, 2003: Cable News Network founder Ted Turner accuses Fox News
of intentionally promoting war with Iraq, saying "I call it Murdoch's
War". In reporting on this, the Straits Times states as fact that "One-sided
reporting and pro-war coverage by Fox News during the recent invasion
has earned News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch brickbats from fellow media chiefs
Greg Dyke of the BBC and Ted Turner of AOL Time Warner."

April 25, 2003: When asked if Bush thinks homosexuals should be
allowed to exist without being arrested and jailed, Press Secretary
Ari Fleischer says that "the President has always said that when
it comes to legal matters...homosexual groups, gay groups should
not have special rights or special privileges."

April 25, 2003: Two United States soldiers are killed in a battle
with militia near Shkin, Afghanistan. 

April 25, 2003: United States soldiers burn the clothes of three suspected
thieves and force them to walk naked through a park. Army spokesman
Colonel Rick Thomas denies that the event happened despite photographs
from newsmen on the scene.

April 25, 2003: Mary Williams Walsh of the New York Times reports that
the Internal Revenue Service has instituted a requirement for "the most
exhaustive proof of eligibility ever demanded of any class of taxpayers"
for poor people seeking the Earned Income Tax Credit.

April 25, 2003: Secretary of the Army Thomas White resigns unexpectedly.

April 25, 2003: The Treasury Department appoints Peter McPherson
as Financial Coordinator for the Office of Reconstruction and
Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq, and George Worfe as McPherson's deputy.

April 25, 2003: Matt Drudge reports that the Democratic Party has moved
its planned presidential candidates' debate from the Longstreet theatre
at the University of South Carolina after learning that the theatre
is named after a Confederate. In response, American Broadcasting Corporation
reports that it requested the debate be moved "for broadcast reasons".

April 25, 2003: National Broadcast Company reporter Ashleigh Banfield
says that the media's reporting of the Iraq war "was a grand and glorious
picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers
excited about cable TV news, but it wasn't journalism because I'm not sure
Americans are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because
it looked to them like a courageous and terrific endeavor...There were
horrors that were completely left out of this war." NBC says that "We are
deeply disappointed and troubled by her remarks, and will review her
comments with her."

April 25, 2003: John Cochrane of American Broadcasting Corporation reports
that the United States invaded Iraq for "a global show of American power
and democracy" rather than for any causus belli, quoting an anonymous
official as saying "we were not lying" about Iraq's production of
nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, "but it was just a matter
of emphasis".

April 26, 2003: An ammunition dump explodes in a residential district
of Baghdad, killing 6 civilians. Soldiers on the scene report that
militiamen had fired flares into the dump.

April 26, 2003, Unrelated: Tacoma, Seattle police chief David Brame
shoots his wife and commits suicide.

April 27, 2003: The United States arrests Mohammed Mohsen al Zubaidi,
the self-declared ruler of Baghdad, with Central Command saying that
"Zubaidi sent letters to individuals and organisations telling them
not to go back to work at utility plants and banksm unless he approved
it...Without authority, he purported to fire legitimate, licensed
and competent power company employees and in their stead placed
his deputy Ubaidi in charge of power."

April 27, 2003: The Independent reports that "the road to war
was paved with lies...the case for invading Iraq to remove its
weapons of mass destruction was based on selective use of intelligence,
exaggeration, use of sources known to be discredited and outright
fabrication...intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic
were furious that briefings they gave political leaders were
distorted...They [the hawk] ignored intelligence assessments which
said Iraq was not a threat...UN inspectors...found ample evidence
that Iraq was not co-operating, but none to support British and
American assertions that Saddam Hussein's regime posed an imminent
threat...Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who first
pointed out Downing Street's plagiarism...said much of the information
on WMDs had come from Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC),
which received Pentagon money for intelligence-gathering. 'The INC
saw the demand, and provided what was needed,' he said. 'The implication
is that they polluted the whole US intelligence effort'...facing calls
for proof of their allegations, senior members of both the US and British
governments are suggesting that so-called WMDs were destroyed after
the departure of UN inspectors on the eve of war... last week it emerged
that two of four American mobile teams in Iraq had been switched from
looking for WMDs to other tasks".

April 27, 2003: The British Broadcasting Corporation reports that
the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, where international journalists were
publicly stationed by Iraq to keep them safe from fighting, "is being
used as a military base" by the United States.

April 27, 2003: Inigo Gilmore of the Sunday Telegraph reports finding
documents recording Iraq's attempts to seek contact with Osama bin Laden
in 1998. On the documents, bin Laden's name had been erased or covered
with white-out. Gilmore says that "the CIA had been through many of these
buildings but they seem to have missed this particular document."
The Guardian reports that "Representatives from the Mukhabarat are known
to have travelled to Kandahar in the late Nineties to build links with
al-Qaeda. Most analysts believe, however, that the ideological differences
between the Iraqis and the terrorists were insurmountable. The talks are
thought to have ended disastrously for the Iraqis, as bin Laden rejected
any kind of alliance."

April 27, 2003: John Heilprin of the Associated Press reports that
Environmental Protection Agency director Christine Todd Whitman has been
ordering the Agency's criminal investigators away from their jobs
to work as her personal chauffers and secretaries. The report mentions
that the amount of criminal pentalties imposed by the EPA have dropped
by a third over the past year and the number of defendants and average
jail term length have dropped by more than a tenth, while the number
of cases is increasing "almost entirely due to the new focus on
counterterrorism".

April 2003: Nominates Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services
Claude Allen for a judgeship on the Fourth Circuit. Allen opposes
sex education and allowing women to abort pregnancies from rape,
and has condemned political opponents for having support from "queers".

April 2003: Workers' World Party suborganization International
Act Now to Stop War and End Racism issues a press release praising
Cuba's arrest of 75 journalists and democracy activists as "a testament
to the popular support of the Cuban government and its ability to
stand up and confront US aggression" and declares the journalists'
and  activists' existence to be "Bush's new aggression against Cuba". 

April 27, 2003: Congressman Harold Rogers, Chairman of the Homeland
Security Appopriations Subcommittee, threatens to have a Monterey
Peninsula Airport baggage handler fired for trying to weigh Rogers's
luggage as required by safety procedures.

April 27, 2003, Unrelated: Russia announces plans to send additional
forces to Tajikstan.

April 28, 2003: The Associated Press reports that the Agency
for International Development granted a secret contract for reconstruction
in Iraq to Republican Party campaign contributor Stevedoring Services
even though Stevedoring lacked the security clearance needed to be
considered for the contract, and that the Agency subsequently deleted
the security clearance requirement.

April 28, 2003: The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rules
that the government-run Virginia Military Institute's requirement
that cadets pray before meals is illegal. Judges deciding the case
are Robert King, Clyde Hamilton, and Morton Greenberg. Virginia
Attorney General Jerry Kilgore pledges to appeal, stating that "prayers
are part of the fabric of our country and are beyond the scope of
what the Framers intended to prohibit by the First Amendment."

April 28, 2003: The Securities and Exchange Commission drops its
investigation into securities firms Bear Sterns, Citigroup, Credit Suisse
First Boston, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, 
Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, and UBS Paine Webber for falsifying
the ratings of stocks to promote investment in stocks owned by the companies,
in exchange for $1.4 billion in fines.

April 28, 2003: Jake Mayer of The New Yorker reports that
the bin Laden family is heavily invested in Bechtel.

April 28, 2003: National Public Radio reporter Cokie Roberts says that
Democratic presidential candidates Al Sharpton and Vermont Governor
Howard Dean "are not necessarily in the mainstream of the American
voting public".

April 29, 2003: France, Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg begin discussing
the formation of a combined army.

April 29, 2003: The United States announces that it will withdraw
all of its forces from Saudi Arabia. Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan
denies that Saudi Arabia requested the withdrawal.

April 29, 2003: White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer pledges
that the United States "will not reward North Korea for bad behaviour"
by giving it any favours for dismantling its nuclear weapons program.

April 29, 2003: United States forces capture a low-ranking al Qaeda
member in Iraq.

April 29, 2003: The Times reports that a citywide strike is occuring
in Basra, Iraq, after British administrators order workers' wages
cut by more than half "to conform with standards imposed across Iraq
by the United States."

April 29, 2003: United States forces from the 82nd Airborne Division
fire indiscriminantly into a crowd protesting the United States' use
of a school as a military base in Falluja, Iraq, killing 16. Central Command
claims that an eighth of the crowd was armed and firing at the US forces,
US soldiers on the scene claim that the crowd had been firing in the air
and assualting the soldiers, and local Iraqi accounts say the protesters
were unarmed. Some reports say that the Iraqis were also celebrating
Saddam Hussein's birthday and that many were holding large portriats
of Saddam.

April 29, 2003: Rebel forces attack a checkpoint in Spin Boldak, Afghanistan,
killing one Afghan soldier.

April 29, 2003: The President's Council of Economic Advisers' only
remaining member Randall Kroszner tells the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development that the United States' deficit is "reasonable
and manageable...we have no magic number for where the deficit should
be...we anticipate no problems with the current level as long as good
policies are maintained".

April 29, 2003: Jennifer Block of Conciense magazine reports that "the
Bush administration has sought to distort and suppress scientific inquiry,
not to mention sound public health policy, that contradicts its so-called
family values...The Bush administration has stacked scientific advisory
panels with ideologues who have scant credentials and conflicts of interest;
flooded schools with medically inaccurate 'abstinence-only' programs;
punished HIV/AIDS prevention groups with audits; and gagged overseas
healthcare workers who receive US funds, repeatedly exemplifying
its willingness to let ideology trump the very pillars of democracy it 
claims to be defending. This agenda is so ruthless that members of several
domestic sexual and reproductive rights and health organizations speak of
a pervasive "climate of fear" created by the Bush administration... In
middle and high schools across the country, teachers are being directed
to adhere to the Federal Definition of Abstinence-Only Education,
which requires that a program teach, among other things, that 'a mutually
faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the
expected standard of human sexual activity' and that any other sexual
activity "is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects."
By law, teachers cannot "promote or endorse" condoms or show adolescents
how to use them, nor can they recognize any relationship outside of
heterosexual marriage...Schleifer [from Human Rights Watch] spoke to
counselors and teachers who heard from teens, including one who was
an active intravenous drug user, who said they no longer bothered
using condoms because they'd heard on TV they didn't work... All
CDC-funded HIV/AIDS prevention spending is currently under review,
and comprehensive programs are screeching in their tracks. For instance,
an Advocates for Youth parent-child education curriculum, two years
in the works for the CDC, was abruptly terminated last summer. 'They
gave no reason,' says James Wagoner, who later heard a Department of
Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesman tell National Public Radio
that the project's videos were too graphic. 'Young people used the
correct terminology for male and female anatomy,' he says.
'It's absurd, what is the President going to do? Issue an executive order
that henceforth every man, woman and child should refer to the penis
as a dingaling?'...Planned Parenthood and SIECUS [Sexuality Information
and Education Council of the US] were also fielding threats
of audits - probably because all three launched the 'No New Money'
campaign which opposes the taxpayer cash flow toward abstinence-only
programs. Sixteen HIV/AIDS prevention groups also came under scrutiny
in what activists called a witch-hunt after some of them had signed onto
a flyer protesting Tommy Thompson's speech at the 14th International
Conference on AIDS in Barcelona in July 2002. Even before Barcelona,
however, the Stop AIDS project in San Francisco went through back-to-back
federal audits after Mark Souder, a Republican representative from Indiana,
accused the group of 'promoting sex' and demanded an investigation... as per
a recent memo from HHS, Stop AIDS and other prevention groups must now
post disclaimers on their website that warn the content 'may not be
appropriate for all audiences'...There's new evidence that these tactics
are spilling overseas as well to any foreign organization receiving USAID.
A January 9, 2003, cable to local fund managers (based all over the world)
regarding AIDS prevention emphasizes abstinence and directs that
'All operating units should review their own websites and any websites
fully or partially funded by USAID to ensure the appropriateness of
the material'... Even the scientific community-a group that usually
hovers above the political fray- began shoring up its own defenses
as it came to light last fall that the Department of Health and Human
Services was purging scientific advisory committees of scientists
whose research might undermine the Bush administration's political goals
and replacing them with thinly credentialed ideologues, who, for instance,
agree with raising permissible levels of lead in drinking water and
oppose workplace ergonomic standards...Scientists were also incensed
by the manipulation of the National Cancer Institute, which was prompted 
to revise its stance on a rumored link between abortion and breast cancer
(a rumor that traces back to anti-choice groups). While the original
web fact sheet maintained that there was no scientific evidence that
abortion increases a woman's risk of breast cancer, the revised version
called the available research 'inconclusive'... Bush's censorious
activities seem to be gaining momentum, but the strategy was evident
on his very first day in office, when he reinstated the
'global gag rule' (or Mexico City Policy), which literally gags any
foreign recipient of US family planning funds from so much as uttering
the word 'abortion,' even where it is legal and even if they use their
own funds to do so...Bush tried to tighten that grip even more with
his Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief...it was really just an excuse
to extend the gag rule to HIV/AIDS money."

April 29, 2003: Jason Halperin of Alternet reports that "two weeks
ago...I was held, against my will and without warrant or cause,
under the USA PATRIOT Act", recounting how New York police officers
had arrested every customer and employee in a restaurant, an officer
threatened to shoot anybody who tried to leave, an immigrant from
a South Asian country pleaded that people stop trying to assert their
legal rights because "I have been through this before. Please do whatever
they say. Please, for our sake", and that the American Civil Liberties Union
has said that this course of events was, in Halperin's words, "a perfectly
legal one, thanks to the Patriot Act".

April 29, 2003: Latin America elects Cuba to the United Nations
Human Rights Commission. The United States' representatives leave
the UN meeting in protest.

April 29, 2003: The Supreme Court rules on a 5-4 vote that the government
has the power to jail immigrants awaiting deportation hearing without
habeus corpus, bail hearings, or any time limit on the length of their
custody. 

April 29, 2003: Zmag reports that Bush has appointed the Christian supremacist
Grace Digital Media's Grace News Network as the United States' official
television station in Iraq. Grace Digital Media also owns the Federal
News Service.

April 29, 2003: Paul Krugman reports that Microsoft National Broadcast
Company has deleted from its public archives an article which reported
that Bush's claim that the International Atomic Energy Agency had claimed
that Iraq was producing nuclear weapons was a lie.

April 29, 2003, Unrelated: Former Italian minister of defense Cesare Preveti,
also a former personal lawyer to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi,
is convicted of bribery and sentenced to 11 years of prison.

April 30, 2003: Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball of Microsoft National
Broadcast Company report that the Central Intelligence Agency gave Bush
and other high ranking government officials a briefing in July 2001
in which the CIA said that al Qaeda was planning a major attack
against the United States within the coming weeks, and that this information
is in Congress's report which Bush is trying to prevent from being
released to the public.

April 30, 2003: British Prime Minister Tony Blair says that "I am
absolutely convinced and confident about the case on weapons of
mass destruction. To you, and others, who believe somehow that this
was all a myth invented by us...you and others will be eating some of
your words."

April 30, 2003: United States forces in Falluja fire upon a crowd
protesting the killing of 16 protesters the day before, killing two.
The shooting was reportedly in response to the stoning of a US Army vehicle,
although Chris Hughes of the Mirror reports that a young boy had thrown
his shoe at the vehicle. Some reports state that the soldiers are from
the 3rd Cavalry, which relieved the 82nd this day, while some of
the first stories suggested that the 82nd had not been relieved yet.

April 30, 2003: Colonel Matthew F. Bogdanos reports that the
National Museum of Iraq has reported losing 29 artifacts from looting
after the war. Television had shown entire rooms emptied. Bogdanos
soon raises the number to 38 and reports that many of these items
have actually been found in the museum.

April 30, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announces to US soldiers
in Iraq that "You came not to conquer, not to occupy, but to liberate,
and the Iraqi people know this".

April 30, 2003: The United States Navy withdraws from Viques Island,
Puerto Rico.

April 30, 2003: Pakistan reports arresting six al Qaeda members, including
high ranking member Walid Mohammad bin Attash.

April 30, 2003: The Guadalajara Reporter reports that Choicepoint
data mining service has somehow gained copies of confidential Mexican
government files on 65 million citizens, and that the United States
has paid the company $78 million to retrieve this information and similar
information on citizens from other American countries. The Atlanta
Journal Constitution reports that the information goes beyond the
voter rolls, including medical and private sector data, passport
numbers, and taxpayer identification numbers.

April 30, 2003: The Department of Justice appeals the 9th Circuit Court
of Appeals's decision that the addition of the words "under God"
to the Pledge of Allegiance is intended to suggest that there is a God,
with Soliciter General Ted Olson writing that "Whatever else the Establishment
clause may prohibit, this court's precedents make clear that it does not
forbid the government from officially acknowledging the religious heritage,
foundation and character of this nation". The United States was founded 
as a secular government with one of the nation's first treaties noting
that "the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded upon
the Christian Religion" that was and remains the most common religion.

April 30, 2003: Signs into law a bill allowing for the construction of
a public notification system to quickly distribute descriptions of criminal
suspects to citizens across the country. A rider to the law is the
Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act which outlaws any kind of concert
or event where the promoters can assume that drugs will be used.

April 30, 2003: The United States adds Batasuna, Euskal Herritarrook,
and Herri Batasuna to its list of terrorist groups.

April 30, 2003, Unrelated: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
condemns the "Communist judges" who found his lawyer guilty of bribery,
saying that "the politicisation of a certain magistrature, aimed at
determining our political life, is a problem that must be resolved for
the good of the country, for its institutions, and for Italian citizens."
The National Association of Magistrates condemns Berlusconi's remarks.

April 30, 2003, Unrelated: French author Bernard Henri Levy claims that
Wall Street Journal bureau chief Daniel Pearl was executed on the order
of Pakistan's Interservices Intelligence because he "knew too much...Daniel
discovered that the nuclear weapons were less controlled than Mr Musharraf
pretends and less under control than the secret services of occidental
powers believe" and "he was on the point of discovering the identity,
background, roots and area of influence of a very strange man who is
called Gillani...He is the chief of a Muslim sect which has one foot
in Pakistan and one foot in America and he happens to be one of the
gurus of bin Laden", and that Pearl's murderer Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh
"was an agent of al-Qaeda, close to Bin Laden, and an agent of ISI".
Ghilani and variants thereof are a common name.

April 2003: The State Department issues a report on worldwide terrorism
which complains that "Canadian laws and regulations intended to protect
Canadian citizens and landed immigrants from government intrusion
sometimes limit the depth of investigations".

April 2003: Fox News announces its intention to purchase Hughes Electronics,
which owns the DirecTV satellite television network.

April 2003: The Environmental Protection Agency proposes reducing the
calculated value of old peoples' deaths by 37% when determining the
costs of pollution.

April 2003: In reporting on a protest march in Iraq, Charles J. Hanley
of the Associated Press reports that the protesters carried a banner
stating "Sooner or later US killers we'll kill you" when the English
text was "Sooner or later US killers we'll kick you out". The banner
also had Arabic text whose translation is unknown. The text is corrected,
but not until earlier verisons of the story had been published. 

April 2003: Two students at a high school in Oakland, California
are arrested and interrogated by the Secret Service. The children
are not allowed to have a lawyer or their parents present.

April 2003: Laurence W. Britt of Free Inquiry Magazine writes that
Fascist regimes have universally had several common properties: "Powerful
and Continuing Expressions of Nationalism", including "prominent displays
of flags...lapel pins...the ferver to show patriotic nationalism...catchy
slogans...pride in the military, and demands for unity"; "Disdain for the
Importance of Human Rights", in which "through clever use of propaganda,
the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses
by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse
was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation";
"Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause", through
"relentless propaganda and disinformation" against "the target scapegoats,
usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities,
traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists,
homosexuals, and ''terrorists''. Active opponents of these regimes were
inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly."; "Avid
Militarism" in which "Ruling elites always identified closely with
the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it...the
military was...used whenever possible to assert national goals...and
increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite"; "Rampant Sexism"
in which a "male-dominated" ruling class "viewed women as second-class
citizens", "were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic", and "these
attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong
support by the orthodox religion of the country"; "A Controlled Mass
Media" in which the media "could be relied upon never to stray from
the party line" either due to "strict control" or "more subtle" measures
such as "control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure,
appeals to patriotism, and implied threats"; "Obsession With National Security"
through which "inevitably, a national security apparatus was under
direct control of the ruling elite...operating in secret and beyond
any constraints...justified under the rubric of protecting ''national
security'', and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic
or even treasonous"; Religion and Ruling Elite Tied Together" in which
the rulers would "portray themselves as militant defenders of that
religion. The fact that the ruling elite's behavior was incompatible
with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug.
Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders
of the faith" while "opposing the power elite was tantamount to an
attack on religion."; "Power of Corporations Protected", in which
"the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom
was not compromised" even while "the personal life of ordinary citizens
was under strict control"; "Power of Labor Suppressed or Eliminated"
in which worker organizations were "inevitably crushed or made powerless.
The poor formed an underclass viewed with suspicion or outright contempt";
"Disdain and Suppression of Intellectuals and the Arts", in which
"Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to...the
patriotic ideal...Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly
attacked"; "Obsession with Crime and Punishment" with "huge prison
populations" and police bearing "almost unchecked power leading to rampant
abuse" while "fear, and hatred, of criminals or ''traitors'' was often
promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power.";
"Rampant Cronyism and Corruption", in which the powerful "often used their
position to enrich themselves...the power elite would receive financial
gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the
benefit of government favoritism" such as the "stealing [of] natural
resources"; and "Fraudulent Elections" in which elections were controlled
by "maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and
disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes,
and...turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite".

April 2003: Author Kurt Vonnegut says that "American 'conservatives',
as they call themselves...have stolen a major fraction of our private
savings, have ruined investors and employees by means of fraud and
outright piracy...they have squandered our public treasury and then
some...What are the conservatives doing with all the money and power
that used to belong to all of us? They are telling us to be absolutely
terrified, and to run around in circles like chickens with their heads
cut off....they are people who will move heaven and earth, if they have to,
who will ruin a company or a country or a planet, to prove to us and
to themselves that they are superior to everybody else, except for
their pals. They take good care of their pals, keep them out of jail--and
so on. Conservatives are crazy as bedbugs. They are bullies... They have
proved their superiority to admirers of Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain
and Jesus of Nazareth, with an able assist from television".

April 2003, Unrelated: The Democratic party of Bristol Township, Pennsylvania,
erects large signs advertising the Party's candidates for the school board
in which the Party's name is misspelled.

April 2003, Unrelated: Australia seizes a North Korean government-owned
ship, the Pong Su, smuggling 75 kilograms of heroin into the country.


May 1, 2003: Flies to the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to announce
the end to the war in Iraq. Bush wears a military flight suit during
the landing, being the first President since Teddy Roosevelt to wear
military clothes. Some reports state that Bush personally flew 
and landed his aircraft, while others say that it was landed by
a Lincoln pilot. The Associated Press reports that the Lincoln's return
to port was delayed by a day so Bush could arrive, although the ship's
press officer says that delaying the ship's return to port by a day
would not keep the ship at sea any longer than it would have been
had it returned on schedule. Wendell Goler of Fox News says that
"The president has put together one of the all-time great photo
opportunities and convinced the television networks to give him
a prime-time" setting for the speech. Microsoft National Broadcast Company
reporter Chris Matthews praises Bush's appearance in a military uniform
and says that it would be unimaginable to consider Silver Star, Bronze Star,
three-time Purple Heart recipient and poll-leading Democratic Presidential
candidate John Kerry in a military uniform. Later reports state that
Press Secretary Ari Fleischer lied in saying that Bush had to arrive
by fixed-wing plane because the ship was too far away to land
by helicopter as the ship was only 39 miles from shore, and that
the ship was positioned so that news cameras recording the landing
would see the ocean behind the ship instead of California's shore.


May 1, 2003: Proposes allowing the Central Intelligence Agency and
Department of Defense to seize any private record of any United States
citizen without a warrant. Senator Feinstein strongly denounces
the proposed law.

May 1, 2003: United States forces in Kirkuk, Iraq, loot a local bank vault
to pay oil field workers.

May 1, 2003: The United States releases statistics showing that
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which weighs the legality
and necessity of secret warrants, did not refuse any of the 1,228
secret warrants that the Department of Justice requested, and that
the Department of Justice is requesting more such warrants from this
Court and fewer from state and other federal judiciaries.

May 1, 2003: The Department of Commerce raises tariffs on wheat imports
from Canada to 12%, claiming that Canada is dumping wheat on the US
market below its cost. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports
that the US International Trade Commission has found Canadian wheat
to be priced higher than US wheat in 94 of 96 months.

May 1, 2003: British Sustainable Development Commission chairman
Jonathan Poritt says that "I don't think the war would have happened
if Iraq didn't have the second-largest oil reserves in the world"
and that oil was "a very large factor" in the decision to invade.

May 1, 2003: Dack reports that New York Times journalist Judith Miller's
article describing an Iraqi unconventional weapons scientist, whom
United States forces had told her had led them to current stocks
of such weapons, may have been based on retired scientist Nisdsar Hindawi
who has not worked on such programs since 1989.

May 1, 2003: Harper's Magazine publisher John MacArthur says that
the pulling down of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Fardus Square
"was absolutely a photo-op created for Bush's reelection campaign.
CNN, MSNBC, and Fox swallowed it whole" and that "on the propaganda
side, the New York Times is more responsible for making the case for war
than any other newspaper or any other news organization...the concept of
a self-governing American republic has been crippled by this propaganda.
The whole idea that we can govern ourselves and have an intelligent debate,
free of cant, free of disinformation, I think is dead."

May 1, 2003: Retro Poll, a left-wing polling group, reports the
results of a poll of 215 people in 46 states which shows that
30% of respondents did not know that Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991;
43% agreed with the pollsters that the United States funded Osama bin Laden
(most reports suggest that bin Laden wasn't specifically targeted for
funding by the US but was the eventual recipient of some US funds sent
to Pakistan), 17% believe that Iraq supported bin Laden during the 1980s,
and 40% believe that Saddam Hussein worked with the September 11 terrorists;
55% believe there is evidence that Iraq has nuclear weapons;
44% believe there is evidence Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has worked
with al Qaeda; 65% believe Israel's assassination of Palestinian Authority
terrorist leaders is itself terrorism and 40% believe the United States
holds responsibility for supporting such terrorism; 19.5% support
"lengthy detention for anyone, citizen or not, who the U.S. government
decides to arrest without providing criminal charges, proofs or trials";
14% support torture; 82% believe the US should prove its accusations
against other nations before attacking them; 33% belive the War on Terrorism
is strengthening civil rights in the United States while 19% believe
it is weakening them and 22% believe it is having no effect; 59% cannot
name the three branches of the federal government; 12% do not believe the
Bill of Rights defends the right to a speedy and public trial, 17% do not
believe it defends the right to refuse to testify against oneself, and 10%
belive it authorizes the government to "detain suspects indefinitely
and punish them as it sees fit"; and that the vast majority of respondents
are opposed to specific parts of the Patriot Act when they are mentioned.
Nearly 80% of people contacted by Retro Poll refused to participate.

May 1, 2003: Nobel Prize for Peace winners Rigoberta Menchu and Adolfo Perez,
writers Gabreil Garcia Marquez, Luis Sepulveda, and Nadine Gordimer,
actor Danny Glover, and over 160 others issue a statement praising
Cuba's jailing of 75 journalists and democracy activists, stating that
"A single power is inflicting grave damage to the norms of understanding,
debate, and mediation among countries. At this very moment, a strong campaign
of destabilisation against a Latin American nation has been unleashed.
The harassment of Cuba could serve as a pretext for an invasion."

May 2, 2003: Secretary of State Colin Powell visits Syria to demand
that Syria cease its support of terrorism against Israel.

May 2, 2003: Deputy drug czar David Murray threatens that "we would
have to respond. We would be forced to respond" if Canada legalized
marijuana.

May 2, 2003: The unemployment rate surpasses 6%.

May 2, 2003: A gunman attacks a United States military base in Saudi Arabia,
wounding one worker.

May 2, 2003: A special panel of the United States Court of Appeals rules
that it is un-Constitutional to forbid organizations (as opposed to
individuals) from donating to political campaigns, and that it is
un-Constitutional to prevent political ads during the month before
an election.

May 2, 2003: Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mali file a complaint
with the World Trade Organization over the United States' cotton subsidies,
which the smaller countries accuse of flooding the market to their detriment.

May 2, 2003: Cable News Network reports that former United Nations
weapons inspector David Albright has said that "One of the questions
about whether the US government or officials lied is if the US believed 
its own story, that there were so many weapons of mass destruction,
you would expect them to be completely panicked right now because 
they are not protected and they could go easily missing and get into
the hands of terrorists, and yet they're not panicked. So you do have to
start to wonder whether the...people who believed these stories
really were the American people and not the U.S. government."

May 2, 2003: Ed Henry of Ether Zone reports that "the United States
of America...no longer has credit", noting that the Treasury Department's
daily treasury statement has held the national debt at $25 million under
the statutory debt limit of $6.4 trillion since February 20.

May 2, 2003, Unrelated: Talk show host Rush Limbaugh says about
news events that "A good rule of thumb, ladies and gentlemen, is this:
if we haven't talked about it on this program, it's really not worth
you knowing about, much less discussing."

May 2, 2003, Unrelated: After cafeteria workers at the United Nations
headquarters go on strike, United Nations workers loot the abandoned
restaurants.

May 2, 2003, Unrelated: Former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti
is found innocent of dealing with the Mafia.

May 2, 2003, Unrelated: The Old Man in the Mountain, the rock formation 
that is New Hampshire's state symbol, crumbles due to natural erosion.

May 3, 2003: The Washington Post and New York Times independently report
that the United States has not secured sites where the US has said that
nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons are being produced and stored,
and that the US has allowed these locations to be looted by Iraqi civilians.

May 3, 2003: Declares that Iraq still has chemical weapons and that
the captured Iraqi officials who uniformly insist that the weapons
they knew about have been destroyed are all lying.

May 3, 2003, Unrelated: British journalist James Miller is murdered
by Israeli forces. Israel falsely accuses Palestinian Authority forces
of the killing, but an autopsy shows Miller was killed by Israeli forces.

May 3, 2003, Unrelated: British police arrest six people accused of
helping to carry out the bombing of a restaurant in Israel.

May 3, 2003, Unrelated: After the Washington Monthly reports that
former Education Secretary Bill Bennett -- the chairman of Empower America
and the author of "The Book of Virtues" -- has lost $8 million gambling
over the prior decade, United Press International reports that Bennett
"has long been known to be part of a small-stakes poker game in Washington
with Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia
and lawyer Robert Bork" even though such gambling is illegal in the
District of Columbia.

May 2003: KKCS radio station in Colorado Springs suspends two disc jockeys
for playing a song by the Dixie Chicks after receiving hundreds of
listener requests for the music.

April 2003: Richard Becker of the Workers' World Party suborganization
International Act Now to Stop War and End Racism issues a pamphlet
praising the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party
as "45 years of independence" and claiming the United States
had wanted to destroy the Baathists "since 1958" even though
the United States Central Intelligence Agency placed the Baathists
in power with a series of strategic assassinations and interference,
which is acknowledged later in the pamphlet;calling the invasion of Iraq
an "imperialist takeover"; claiming that "Washington's aim was to destroy
everything that made Iraq an independent state"; calling the Iraq-Iran
war "Bourgeois" (middle-class) as a perjorative; condemning Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev's liberal policies as a "counter-revolution" weakening
the Warsaw Pact nations to the point that the Soviet Union could not
mobilize for war against the United States to defend Iraq in 1991;
and proclaiming that "the anti-war movement here and around the world
must give its unconditional support to the Iraqi anti-colonial resistance".

May 2003: Chris Nelson reports that "since October, foreign exchange
markets stopped using US stocks as proxy for financing US current account
deficit."

May 4, 2003: Newsmax reports that Democratic presidential candidate
John Kerry is Jewish, and condemns "his extreme pro-abortion views".

May 4, 2003: Margie Bouie of the Oregonian reports that every person
with the common name of David Nelson "can expect to be hassled, delayed,
questioned, and searched before being allowed to board aircraft anywhere in
the United States for the foreseeable future" because the name David Nelson
is on one of the Transportation Security Administration's no-fly lists,
and that "his week 18 men named David Nelson, all residents of Oregon,
confirmed they have been repeatedly delayed at airport counters and
security checkpoints in the last year or so."

May 4, 2003, Unrelated: A tornado storm hits the Plains states, killing 40. 

May 5, 2003: Calls on all United States citizens to write to Congress
to demand that they pass his new tax cut plan, condemning the "little bitty"
$350 billion per year tax cut that Congress has agreed upon.

May 5, 2003: Pakistan pledges to destroy its nuclear arsenal if India 
will destroy its nuclear arsenal.

May 5, 2003: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and
the Russian Space Research Center agree to cooperate on development
of an unmanned Mars probe. 

May 5, 2003: Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker reports that the Department
of Defense's Office of Special Plans, founded by Paul Wolfowitz
and run by Undersecretary of Defense William Luti and Abram Shulsky,
"rivalled both the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence
Agency...as President Bush's main source of intelligence regarding
Iraq's possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection
with Al Qaeda".

May 5, 2003: In an interview on Turkish television, Assistant Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz suggests that Turkey's military should overthrow
the civilian government to restore trade and diplomatic ties, and says
that the military should have already enacted such a coup when Parliament
refused the United States permission to invade Iraq from Turkey.

May 5, 2003: The United States agrees to allow Russian inspections of
its poultry plants.

May 5, 2003: Nina Khrushcheva of The Nation reports that Russian refugees
who fled the Soviet Union because of its restraints on free speech
are planning to flee the United States for the same reason, writing
that "they welcomed American help to bring down Communists, only to see,
ten years later, the White House employing strategies akin to what America
used to condemn about the Kremlin--an expansionist foreign policy,
disregard for public opinion, propaganda rhetoric and manipulation.
We found ourselves back at the drawing board, turning off George W. Bush's
enthusiastic TV appearances the same way we tuned out robotic CPSU Secretary
Leonid I. Brezhnev...Those who've studied the Soviet Union know that
Kremlin leaders similiarly repeated words and catch-phrases for decades
on end...As much as newspeak was a signature of the Kremlin, it is an
equally apt description of today's White House. Its resolute war message
is similar to Brezhnev's insistence on the superiority of socialism:
Both lack public debate and are handled top-down."


May 5, 2003: The city council of Tucson, Arizona votes 4-3 to
condemn the Patriot Act.

May 5, 2003: Egyptian presidential advisor Dr. Usama al Baz urges
the Palestinian Authority to stop attacking Israeli civilians
to give time for "the Israelis [to] allow us to rebuild our security forces".

May 5, 2003, Unrelated: The Eelam People's Democratic Party accuses
the Tamil Tigers of assassinating EPDP politicians during a ceasefire.

May 5, 2003, Unrelated: The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
executes kidnapped Antioquia Governor Guillermo Gaviria.

May 5, 2003, Unrelated: Four students at Ohio State University are
arrested for running database software because it is possible for
a database to store copyrighted information.

May 6, 2003: Former State Department chief of antiterrorism operations
L. Paul "Gerry" Bremer is appointed ruler of Iraq.

May 6, 2003: Mitch Daniels, the last member of Bush's original
economic advisory committee, resigns.

May 6, 2003: Jim Lacey of Time Magazine writes in the National Review
that nearly all of the patients he saw at a hospital in Najaf
were men of military age who had no family nearby, and the doctor
of the hospital insisted that they were all civilians.

May 6, 2003: Skylink is granted a contract to run the international
airports in Iraq.

May 6, 2003: The United States and Singapore enter into a trade agreement
to reduce tariffs.

May 6, 2003: The Washington Times reports that France gave passports
to Iraqi officials to allow them to escape the United States.

May 6, 2003: Jonathan Duffy of the British Broadcasting Corporation
reports hearing that some United States soldiers encouraged looting
in Nasiriya.

May 6, 2003: Phil Brennan of Newsmax writes that "major figures
in the evangelical movement are talking about withholding support
from the Republican Party" for allowing homosexuality to persist
and for not defending Senator Santorum's recent remarks on the subject
strongly enough.

May 6, 2003: Airbus refuses a contract with US-based company
Pratt and Whitney. The French embassy cites US restraint of French trade
as a possible reason.

May 7, 2003: Appoints former Assistant Secretary of Defense and his
campaign manager for New Mexico Collin McMillan as Secretary of the Navy
and James Roche as Secretary of the Army.

May 7, 2003: United States Defense Department Undersecretary of Defense
for Intelligence Steve Cambone reports the discovery of a mobile
biological weapons laboratory truck in Iraq, stating that it was captured
on April 19.

May 7, 2003: The Los Angeles Times reports that Defense Policy Board
chairman Richard Perle had used intelligence from secret military
briefings to advise corporations of profitable business opportunities
to come from the Iraq war.

May 7, 2003: Germany rejects a Polish offer to base troops in
the Polish quarter of Iraq.

May 7, 2003: Wisconsin state representative Frank Boyle condemns 
"a piece of paper...a stupid, memorializing piece of nothing bullshit"
proposal stating the Assembly's support for soldiers, noting that
this is after Congress has cut billions of dollars from the Veterans'
Administration budget and "the federal government has rejected
medical claims for Vietnam veterans suffering from Agent Orange [poisoning]
and has denied more recent claims for Gulf War syndrome...the troops
returning from the war in Iraq will be treated just as other veterans
have been treated." Republican Party Communications Director Chris Lato
condemns Boyle's remarks as "especially shocking when one considers
that American soldiers are still in harm's way in the Middle East,
risking their lives to free citizens there from a murderous, oppressive
regime".

May 7, 2003: Joshua Micah Marshall reports that Republican Party
activists Paul Erikson and Robert Regier are spending $800,000
and solicting funds for a television campaign to condemn Senator Daschle,
writing that it appears "the key to nailing Daschle as a tool of
out-of-state interests who lacks credibility is to run the operation
through a front organization that hides its own connections to
out-of-state interests".

May 7, 2003: Jack Shafer of Slate Magazine notes that Richard Perle
has not yet filed his promised libel suit against New Yorker journalist
Seymour Hersh.

May 7, 2003, Unrelated: Turkey raids the offices of the Human Rights
Association, accusing it of being a front for terrorism.

May 7, 2003, Unrelated: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
calls on Parliament to amend the Constitution to grant him and
members of Parliament immunity from prosecution for bribery and
other crimes, saying that "We must intervene [in a case against him] but
not to help me as Prime Minister to pass the test of our EU presidency."

May 8, 2003: The House International Relations Committee demands
that Mexico allow United States corporations to buy stock in
Mexico's public oil company Pemex, in violation of the Constitution,
in exchange for loosening controls on immigration

May 8, 2003: The United Nations stops clearing mines in Wardak province
of Afghanistan after its workers repeatedly came under attack.

May 8, 2003: Attorney General John Ashcroft files an amicus curiae
brief supporting Unocal oil company's alleged practice of slavery in Burma,
arguing that the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789, which allows foreigners
to file suit against US residents and businesses in US courts, does
not actually allow this.

May 8, 2003: Wall Street Journal reporter Vochi Dreazen reports
that 101st Airborne General David Petraeus has ordered the seizure
of an independent radio station in Mosul, Iraq, for airing a news
report by al Jazeera, and that Colonel Thomas Schoenback has relieved
Major Charmaine Means of duty for having refused the order. The report
suggests that the station was not seized because of the content of the
news programming, but because of the producer.

May 8, 2003: The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists criticizes Bush's
"lurid" and "alarmist" claims about Iraq and rebuts them.

May 8, 2003: Norwegian Member of Pariliament Jan Simonsen nominates
Bush and Tony Blair for the Nobel Prize for Peace.

May 8, 2003: London Mayor Ken Livingstone calls Bush "this super-patriot
hawk who was a coward when his country was actually involved in a
war which he politically supported" and says "Bush is the most corrupt
American politician since Harding in the Twenties. He is not the
legitimate President."

May 8, 2003: Carlos Torres of Bloomberg reports that over 400,000
people have sought initial unemployment benefits every week for the
past twelve weeks, which logically suggests that about 5 million people
have lost their jobs over the prior 3 months. Other reports state that
the number who have lost their jobs over the past half year is closer
to 500,000 and that 1.2 million jobs have been lost since 2001.

May 8, 2003: Ted Rall opines that "Michael S. Dukakis served with honor
in the US Army for two years. Three decades later, he was ridiculed
for riding in a tank while wearing a helmet and a goofy grin.
George W. Bush, a simian-faced draft dodger, hitches a ride to an
aircraft carrier decked out in full 'Top Gun' regalia and CNN
calls dubs [sic] him our 'warrior president.'...No matter how much
they [Democrats] suck up to corporate CEOs, they can't compete for
contributions with Republicans who invite their backers to write
legislation... even when Dems do win the most votes, cheating Republicans
bully their way into office. As things stand, Dems seem poised to
get their collective ass kicked in '04. While unified Republicans
aren't even bothering to hold presidential primaries next year,
nine small-time Democrats are vying for the chance to take on
a ruthless incumbent with bottomless pockets...Post-attack America
is feeling mean. We've used our pain as justification to kill thousands
of Afghans and Iraqis, but we still haven't touched the bastards
who hit us on 9/11...Americans of all political flavors feel besieged
in a world where most view us as ignorant and bellicose...The only way
Democrats can appeal to a divided and anxious electorate is by playing
mean."

May 8, 2003, Unrelated: In its filing with the Securities and Exchange
Commission, Halliburton admits to paying a $2.4 million bribe to
a Nigerian tax official.

May 9, 2003: The United States reports finding a second truck outfitted
as a biological weapons laboratory. This truck was found at the al Kindi
rocket factory in Mosul by intelligence officers from the 101st Airborne.
Christine Spolar of the Chicago Tribune reports that the truck was
partially disassembled by scavengers, that the truck was equipped
with "compressors, incubator tanks, distillery equipment, and a
large drier", and that a piece of equipment was dated as being
manufactured this year by al Nasr al Adheem State company.

May 9, 2003: The United States asks the United Nations to grant
the US title to all of Iraq's oil sales for one year.

May 9, 2003: Javier David of Reuters reports that Bush has
intentionally weakened the value of the dollar against foreign currencies.

May 9, 2003: Karen Roebuck of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports
that the local branch of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
has formed an agreement with hospital emergency room personnel
called "Strategic Medical Intelligence" in which medical workers
are to give the FBI information about patients with symptoms that
suggest involvement with terrorism, such as a burn, a respiratory illness,
or a missing finger.

May 9, 2003: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports that
HMCS Saint John's commander Brendan Ryan is being tried in a
secret courtmartial for being "between five and ten minutes late"
returning to ship after curfew. It is highly unusual for any Canadian
courtmartial to be closed to the public. Other CBC reports name
Commodore Eric Lerhe as pushing for the charges, note that
Ryan had personally fined the sailors with whom he returned late
to the ship, quote a Navy court filing as stating "The evidence expected
to be tendered before this standing courtmartial deals specifically
with matters effecting public safety and defense interests including
force protection and international relations", and state that the Navy
refused to allow photographers to take pictures of the docked Saint John's.

May 9, 2003, Unrelated: Christine Hall of Conservative News condemns
the Make a Wish Foundation charity for having associated with
the Comicon national comic-book convention held in Pittsburgh because
some comics have "subject matter dealing with witchcraft, spiritualism,
and violence" and because Playboy adult magazine was invited.

May 9, 2003: Joshua Micah Marshall reports that not only have few news
organizations reported that suspected Chinese spy Katrina Leung had been
a prominent Republican Party fund-raiser during the 1990s, but that
Michael Isikoff of Newsweek has reported that Leung was a Democratic Party
fund-raiser.

May 9, 2003, Unrelated: British Secretary of Education Charles Clark
proposes a 99% cut in university funding, stating that there is no value
in education.

May 2003: Barbara Bodine, appointed administrator of Baghdad,
is recalled to the United States.

May 2003: 53 Texan Legislators from the Democratic Party refuse
to attend Legislature, preventing a Constitutionally required quorum
of 100 legislatures, so that the Legislature cannot vote on a
gerrymandering bill. Majority Leader Tom Craddick declares that
"Republicans never once resorted to such an irresponsible stunt"
despite having done the exact same with with 29 other Republicans
in 1971. Governor Rick Perry orders the Texas police to arrest
the Democrats, who flee the state. Perry then asks Oklahoma and
New Mexico for permission for Texan police to cross state lines.
In response, New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid says that
"Texas should understand that since ski season is over, the Santa Fe
Opera has not begun and President Bush was just in town, I don't think
they are in Santa Fe now. Nevertheless, I have put out an all-points
bulletin for law enforcement to be on the look out for politicians 
in favor of health care for the needy and against tax cuts for the wealthy",
while Oklahoma claims to have no authority to get involved.
The Republican Party issues a set of trading cards with the Democrats'
faces printed on them, designed to look like the set of trading cards
with Iraqi war criminals' faces that was distributed to US soldiers
in Iraq, and suggests that the Democrats should be "thrown in jail
by the Department of Public Safety".

May 2003: Mother Jones magazine reports that Bush's planned $1.2 billion
initiative to fund hydrogen fueled automobiles will only fund the
production of hydrogen from oil, coal, gas, and other fossil fuels.

May 2003, Unrelated: The New York Times fires journalist Jayson Blair for
having committed "frequent acts of journalistic fraud" including
"widespread fabrication and plagiarism", and posts ten pages of
corrections and apologies on its public Web site.

May 2003: Columbia Broadcast System reports the results of
a poll showing that 66% of respondents could not name any of
the Democratic Party's candidates for President.

May 2003: The Smithsonian Museum moves an exhibit of photographs
of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from the main floor rotunda
to a basement work area behind some boxes. Senator Ted Stevens praises
the museum staff "for recognizing political advocacy when they see it".

May 2003: Bush's advisor Grover Norquist says that "We are trying
to change the tones in the state capitals, and turn them toward bitter
nastiness and partisanship. Bipartisanship is another name for date rape."

May 10, 2003: Dana Millbank and Dan Balz of the Washington Post
report that Bush is planning to introduce a large tax cut every year,
and that this policy is being pushed by advisor Grover Norquist.

May 10, 2003: Barton Gellman of the Washington Post reports that
"the group [75th Exploitation Task Force] directing all known US
search efforts for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down
operations without finding proof that President Saddam Hussein kept
clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, according to participants"
and that "the hunt will continue under a new Iraq Survey Group".

May 10, 2003: The Washington Post reports that the Federal Bureau
of Investigation has discovered biological laboratory equipment
in a pond near the District of Colombia which may have been used
to produce anthrax.

May 11, 2003: Tele 7 Jours journalist Alexandre Alfonsi, Tele Poche
journalist Stephanie Pic, Television Hebdo journalist Michel Perrot,
Game One journalist Thierry Falcoz, and Game One cameramen Laurent Patureau
and Alex Gorsky are arrested and jailed upon their arrival at Los Angeles
International Airport and permanently expelled from the US the next day.

May 10, 2003, Unrelated: Over 10,000 march in Bilbao, Spain
to show their support for Udalbitza, a front for Euskadi Ta Azkatasuna.

May 11, 2003: New York Times Magazine reports that Senator Saxby Chambliss
recently recommended to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist that a friend
be appointed ambassador to a business group, upon which Frist asked
if "he has lots of dollar figures down there", Chambliss replied
that "That's exactly right, and he did raise a chunk of money for me",
and Frist said "All right. You're a good man".

May 11, 2003: Ian Mather of the Scotsman reports that the Taliban's
former deputy finance minister Engineer Hamidullah has said that
Russia, Iran, and Pakistan are financing the Taliban.

May 11, 2003: Senator Bob Graham condemns Bush's classification
of release information from Senate hearings on the state of the
United States' intelligence agencies prior to the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks, saying that "the American people have been denied
important information for their own protection, for the protection
of the communities. Local agencies have been denied information that
would help them be more effective. First-responders and the American
people do not have the information upon which they can hold the
administration and responsible agencies accountable. I call that
a cover-up."

May 11, 2003: The Washington Post reports that Bush will be making
a campaign stop at an Airlite Plastics plant in Omaha, Nebraska,
and that the plant manager will shut down the plant for the duration
of the speech and force workers to make up for the lost time by working
on the weekend.

May 11, 2003, Unrelated: Columnist Andrew Sullivan says that
it is not hypocritical for morality preacher Bill Bennett to have
gambled away $8 million because he rarely specifically condemned gambling
in his books, and claims that Bennett did not write the parts of his
books which condemned gambling, saying that "yes, his name is on a
lot of books, but it doesn't mean he wrote them."

May 12, 2003: Three apartment centers and the offices of Vinnell
mercenary group are bombed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing 29 people.
al Qaeda is accused of the attack.

May 12, 2003: An Afghan soldier attacks International Security Force
soldiers in Kabul, wounding two Norwegians.

May 12, 2003: Talk Radio Network files a lawsuit against Savage Stupidity,
a Web site criticizing the Network's talk show host Michael Savage,
claiming that the Web site distributes complete copies of Savage's shows
(it only distributes small clips) and claiming that the Web site's
criticism is "false and misleading".

May 12, 2003, Unrelated: Lithuania votes to join the European Union.
91% of voters reportedly voted for joining.

May 13, 2003: The United States demands that the European Union end
a five year moratorium on the import of genetically modified food
which was implemented so the EU could determine if there were any
side effects. The United States has allowed genetically modified food
to be sold directly to consumers without any testing or notification.

May 13, 2003: British International Development Secretary Claire Short
resigns in protest of Prime Minister Tony Blair's support of Bush.

May 13, 2003, Unrelated: Florida Governor Jeb Bush orders the Department
of Children and Families to appoint an official guardian over the
fetus of a woman who was raped so that the woman cannot have an abortion.
The appointment is illegal under Florida law as determined by the
state Supreme Court in 1989.

May 13, 2003, Unrelated: A general strike is held in France in protest
of Prime Minsiter Jean-Pierre Raffarin's plan to cut pensions.

May 13, 2003, Unrelated: Israel arrests Islamic Movement northern
regional leader Sheik Raed Salah and 13 other northern region members
for financing Islamic Resistance.

May 14, 2003: Texas Department of Public Safety Special Crimes Service
Commander Tony Marshall orders the destruction of all records of the
Department's search for Democratic legislators.

May 14, 2003: Fox News reporter Neil Cavuto calls New York Times columnist
Paul Krugman a "hypocrite", "as phony as you are unprofessional",
"you sanctimonious twit", "you pretentious charlatan", and "an ass"
for reporting that Cavuto had said that people who did not support
the invasion of Iraq "were disgusting then, and you are disgusting now"
as a statement of fact during a news broadcast. Fox News runs an
advertisement alongside Cavuto's column stating that readers can
"Get your online news FAIR and BALANCED" with Fox.

May 14, 2003: Microsoft National Broadcast Company talk show host
Michael Savage reports that medical reports of rising autism rates
in California children are all false while supposed autism sufferers are
simply seeking free medicine from the government. Savage mocks autism
sufferers in the report, pretending to have autistic symptoms.

May 15, 2003: The New Republic reports that "Iraq's nascent political
groups are forming armed militias" and that "Hizballah has formed a branch
in Baghdad".

May 15, 2003: France accuses Bush of planting false stories in the
United States news media in a "disinformation campaign aimed at
sullying France's image and misleading the public", condemning
a September 2002 New York Times story claiming France and Germany
had given Iraq triggers for detonating nuclear weapons; a November 2002
Washington Post story claiming France possessed smallpox; a March 7
Washington Times story by Bill Gertz claiming French companies sold
Iraq aircraft parts, and numerous continuing Washington Times stories
claiming the same even after the Times prints a correction;
A March 13 New York Times column by William Safire
and two later Safire columns claiming France has sold missile components
to Iraq, and the New York Times in general for refusing to publish
a French rebuttal; An April 10 Microsoft National Broadcast Company report
by Joe Scarborough claiming that France had sold Iraq "planes, missiles,
armoured vehicles, radar equipment, and spare parts for Iraqi fighter
planes", as well as nuclear reactors; An April 21 Newsweek story claiming
the United States had discovered modern French missile launchers in Iraq;
A May 6 Washington Times story and three subsequent stories claiming France
gave French passports to Iraq's fleeing leaders; a Washington Times
story claiming France and Russia sought to lease Iraqi oil rights
immediately prior to the invasion; and a Microsoft National Broadcast Company
television show during which a guest suggested that biological weapons
had already been discovered in Iraq but this was being kept secret because
the weapons might be French or Russian. The United States denies the
accusations.

May 15, 2003, Unrelated: Ransom Myers and Boris Worm 
report that modern fishing practices have caused a 90% drop in 
populations of large fish in areas tested.

May 15, 2003: Senator Joe Lieberman rpeorts being "deeply troubled
by recent news reports that the Department of Homeland Security wasted
scarce resources to search for a Texas state legislator", following
a Fort Worth Star Telegram report that the Department's Air and Marine
Interdiction and Coordination Center was ordered to search for state
representative Pete Laney's private airplane. The Dallas Morning News
reports that Department of Public Safety Special Crimes Division
Lieutenant Will Crais, while working out of "a conference room next
to [Majority Leader Tom] Mr. Craddick's office", had told the Department
that the plane had been lost while carrying Representatives from Oklahoma
to Texas. The Washington Post reports that Craddick had sought assistance
from the federal government.

May 15, 2003: The Guardian reports that United States forces staged
the rescue of a hospitalized prisoner in Iraq for television propaganda,
and that the soldiers in the rescue did not carry live ammunition. 

May 15, 2003: Eighteen Shell gasoline stations are bombed in Karachi,
Pakistan. No injuries are reported, as the bombs exploded in the stations'
garbage cans during early hours.

May 15, 2003: Venezuela condemns United States Ambassador Charles Shapiro
for hosting an International Press Freedom Day party during which a puppeteer
mocked President Hugo Chavez, with Foreign Minister Roy Chaderton saying
he is "horrified by this media witches' sabbath".

May 15, 2003: Boeing is awarded a $14.92 billion contract to design
and build advanced battlefield vehicles and equipment such as
main battle tanks that weigh a quarter of modern such tanks and
may be unmanned.

May 15, 2003: Michael Kinsley of Slate Magazine reports that Bush
has provided MCT Industries of New Mexico and its founder Ted Martinez
as examples of "the American Dream" that will be assisted by his tax cuts,
and that "MCT Industries seems to be a weird collection of unrelated
businesses whose only unifying theme is selling to government agencies
or needing the approval of politicians. The Martinez family is wealthy
because of tax revenues, not despite them...so you get rich with a dozen
different types of tax-funded help, you become a Republican, and you
live happily ever after complaining about how much you pay in taxes."

May 15, 2003: Microsoft National Broadcast Company talk show host
Joe Scarborough gloats about having convinced Microwave Communication
Incorporated to cancel advertisements featuring actor Danny Glover
because of Glover's support of Cuba.

May 15, 2003, Unrelated: Tarrytown, New York Village Justice William Crosbie
condemns a Christian Arab woman who asked that two tickets for the same
parking violation be combined into one violation, telling her that "You
have money to support the terrorists, but you don't want to pay the ticket".
Crosbie resigns a month later.

May 15, 2003, Unrelated: Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat
calls for the destruction of Israel on the 55th anniversary of the
"catastrophe" of the Arab armies' failure to wholly exterminate the Jewish
race from the Middle East, only cleansing what became the West Bank
and Gaza Strip regions.

May 15, 2003, Unrelated: Troytsk, Russia, Mayor Vadim Naidenov
is assassinated.

May 16, 2003: The United States forbids several thousand Baath Party
members from holding government jobs in Iraq, and forbids Iraqi groups
opposed to Saddam's rule from forming political parties or governments.

May 16, 2003: Amnesty International reports that United States and British
forces had tortured at least twenty Iraqi prisoners of war and civilian
captees.

May 16, 2003: Kuwaiti citizen Umm Abdullah reports that the United States
is creating an Iraqi newspaper titled "al Sabah", which happens to be
the name of the Kuwaiti royal family.

May 16, 2003: The Duluth News Tribune reports that 41 of the Justice
Department's reported 56 terrorism cases had nothing to do with terrorist
activity, including that half of them were simply airline employees charged
with faking their resumes and eight were arrested for protesting on Navy land. 

May 16, 2003: Germany calls for the lifting of United Nations sanctions
on Iraqi trade.

May 16, 2003: Lebanon reports arresting nine people planning an attack
against the United States embassy.

May 16, 2003: In a report titled "The Bush Administration versus
Its Economists - Part 2", Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity reports that
"according to CEA [Council of Economic Advisors], the President's plan
would create 1.4 million additional new jobs in the first two years,
but would also lead to 700,000 fewer jobs being created in 2005-2007
than would have been created without the passage of a tax cut".

May 17, 2003: Terrorists bomb the Belgian consolate, a hotel,
a Spanish restaurant, and a Jewish community center in Casablanca, Morocco,
killing 29. Assirat al Moustaqeem is blamed for the attack.
Morrocan police arrest 30 suspected accomplices.

May 17, 2003: A suspected federal police car runs over Stephen Hatfill,
who is suspected of the anthrax attacks of 2001, when he attempts to
photograph it. Hatfill is slightly wounded, and District of Colombia police
give him a ticket for "walking to create a hazard".

May 17, 2003: Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist Chris Hedges
is jeered off the stage at Rockford College while giving an incendiary
commencement speech condemning the invasion of Iraq and promoting
"comradeship" as an alternative to war.

May 17, 2003: Former talk show host Phil Donahue is jeered while
giving a commencement speech at North Carolina State University
for noting that the Constitution says that "only Congress can declare war".
Several dozen students and audience members walk out in protest.
After the speech, University Chancellor Marye Anne Fox suggests
to the audience that they should "profoundly disagree" with Donahue's views,
but that "it is a true mark of an educated person to be able to listen
carefully to all points of view."

May 18, 2003: The Oakland Tribune reports that California is placing
peace supporters in a database of known terrorists, citing California
Antiterrorism Information Center spokesman Mike van Winkle saying that
"if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's
being fought against is international terrorism...you can almost argue
that a protest against that is a terrorist act."

May 18, 2003, Unrelated: Slovakia votes to join the European Union.
92% of voters reportedly voted for joining.

May 18, 2003, Unrelated: Indonesia places Aceh under martial law
after rebels refuse a ceasefire.

May 19, 2003: The United States pledges to send forces to the Philippines
in violation of the Philippine Constitution.

May 19, 2003: USA Today reports that "State legislatures controlled by 
Republicans increased spending an average of 6.54% per year from 1997
to 2002, compared with 6.17% for legislatures run by Democrats" and 6%
"when legislatures were split".

May 20, 2003: Warren Buffet, the second richest man in the United States,
describes Bush's tax cut plan as a plan "to supply major aid to the rich
in their pursuit of even greater wealth" and notes that under Bush's plan,
his secretary "would be contributing about ten times the proportion
if her income [at 30%] than I would [at 3% given a $1 billion dividend]".

May 20, 2003: The Iraqi National Congress, an exiled rebel group,
announces that it will be forming a government in Iraq regardless
of whether it receives permission from the United States.

May 20, 2003: Department of Defense spokesman Bryan Whitman condemns
the British Broadcasting Corporation's report that the rescue of
a hospitalized prisoner was staged for television cameras in a known
non-hostile area and that much of the information the Department released
about the soldier's experiences and medical condition was outright false,
saying that any suggestions that the United States may have lied
or exaggerated about the soldier or her rescue are "void of all facts
and absolutely ridiculous."

May 20, 2003: Israel states that it is considering joining the European Union.

May 21, 2003: Alaska's state Legislature votes 51-1 to condemn the
Patriot Act and forbid Alaskan police from complying with it. The lone
vote supporting the resolution, Representative Bob Lynn, says that "I don't
think we need to be second-guessing President Bush."

May 21, 2003: United States forces guarding the embassy in Kabul
attack a passing group of Afghan soldiers without warning, killing four.

May 21, 2003: Environmental Protection Agency director Christine Todd Whitman
resigns.

May 21, 2003: The 3rd District Court of Appeals overturns a $145 billion
fine levied against Altria (formerly Philip Morris), Brown and Williamson
Tobacco Corporation, Liggett Group, Lorillard Tobacco, and Richard Joshua
Reynolds tobacco companies for hiding information about the unhealthiness
and addictiveness of tobacco products, ruling that the set of smokers
in Florida does not constitute a class with a claim against the companies
and that it is against the Florida Constitution for any civil claim to
bankrupt a corporation.

May 21, 2003: General Tommy Franks announces his retirement.

May 21, 2003, Unrelated: A small bomb explodes in an empty classroom at Yale.
No injuries are reported.

May 21, 2003, Unrelated: An earthquake strikes Algeria, killing over 2000.

May 22, 2003: The United Nations Security Council votes unanimously,
with Syria abstaining, to lift sanctions on Iraq and to recognize
the United States' and Britain's ownership of the country.

May 22, 2003: Issues Executive Order 13303 forbidding the judiciary
from allowing any civil claims against the Development Fund for Iraq
or any organizations involved in reconstruction or oil drilling,
and citing the threat of lawsuits as "an unusual and extraordinary
threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States"
to declare a national emergency.

May 22, 2003: The United States demands that Qatar prevent Al Jazeera
television from broadcasting the statements of al Qaeda spokesmen. 

May 22, 2003: The United States accuses Iran of assisting the al Qaeda
forces who bombed targets in Riyadh on May 12, and refused to attend
a diplomatic meeting with Iran and United Nations envoy to Afghanistan
Lakhdar Brahimi.

May 22, 2003: Iran reports to the United Nations that it has arrested
several suspected al Qaeda terrorists.

May 22, 2003: United States forces come under attack in Falluja, Iraq,
suffering no casualties. Two people are killed; it is disputed whether
they were combatants.

May 22, 2003: Iraqi National Congress forces enter into a firefight
with unknown gunmen near Baghdad. The United States raids INC leader
Ahmed Chalabi's headquarters in response.

May 22, 2003: Osbot al Nour forces attack Palestinian Authority forces
in Ain el Hilweh, Lebanon. Seven are killed and a reporter is wounded
by the fighting. Osbot al Nour is a branch of Osbat al Ansar, which is
allied with al Qaeda. Days earlier, gunmen had attacked and wounded
Osbat al Nour leader Abdullah Shreidi.

May 22, 2003: House Majority Leader Tom DeLay admits to contacting the
Federal Aviation Administration to request information about
Texas State Representative Pete Laney's private airplane, and that
he gave the information to Texas Legislature Majority Leader
Tom Craddick. The Houston Chornicle later reports that DeLay's request
was forwarded to Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta's office.

May 22, 2003: Russia and India hold naval exercises in the Arabian Sea.

May 22, 2003: Musician Neil Young says that "this big deal about
Bush landing on an aircraft carrier" is like "a six year old kid
with a Tonka toy", and "I think the world today...is experiencing
this kind of Big Brother things. It's not what we though we were
going to be doing. A lot of the people's civil rights have been
compromised, and we don't know what's going on. If I keep speaking
my mind, will I be deported? Music is being banned, and we have people
in control of the radio stations who are the same people in control of
the concert halls. They're also tied into the [US] administration
and are sponsoring pro-war rallies...Bush has polarized the country
and is creating this breeding ground for an opposition. In the next
couple of months, they'll probably make it unpatriotic to be a Democrat."

May 22, 2003: Loring Wirbel of the Electrical Engineer Times reports that
the National Reconnaissance Office is recommending that the United States
Air Force Space Command shoot down any reconnaissance sattelites
that foreign nations attempt to place in orbit, calling this policy
"negation".

May 23 2003: Howard Troxler of the Saint Petersburg Times reports
that Flordia's Legislature is considering a bill to rewrite its
worker compensation laws so that brain damage, spine injuries,
and loss of an eye or limb are no longer considered "catastrophic"
and hence no longer eligible for disability compensation, and that
no worker is entitled to disability compensation from an employer
unless the worker can prove that the employer intended to murder
the worker.

May 24, 2003: David Rennie of the Daily Telegraph reports that
the United States is planning to build an execution chamber at
Guantanamo Bay.

May 24, 2003: The Los Angeles Times reports that Greene Properties
of Vista, California, a company owned by Congressman Darrell Issa,
 has donated $450,000 to a campaign to impeach California Governor
Gray Davis.

May 24, 2003: Left-wing pundit Bob Harris writes that "By now you've
heard of the FCC's pending plan to allow Rupert Murdoch to personally
control everything you see and think...Incidentally, there's one hell of
a huge point to make of all this: if the media really was in liberal hands,
then centralization of that power would be absolutely terrifying to
the right wing. It would be all you ever heard about.  And yet those guys
are strangely silent. On their websites, neither Bill O'Reilly
nor Rush Limbaugh so much as mention the issue".

May 24, 2003: Texas passes a law requiring doctors to tell women
considering an abortion that the procedure causes cancer (a falsehood)
and to show them pictures of mangled fetuses.

May 24, 2003: The Taipei Times reports that "in 2001, America's 25,000
cotton farmers sluiced up US$4 billion in subsidies".

May 25, 2003: Syrian President Bashar Assad suggests that al Qaeda
does not exist.

May 25, 2003: Ed Vulliamy of the Observer reports that the United States
is refusing Iraqi prisoners of war access to International Red Cross
assistance, in violation of the Geneva Convention.

May 25, 2003: Joshua Micah Marshall reports that Congressman Tom Delay
had illegally pressured the Department of Justice to stop an investigation
into violations of Texas's Voting Rights Act by Texas state Representative
Joe Crabb in rushing the redistricting legislation through committee
without proper public notice. Marshall cites Texas state Representative
Richard Raymond as a source.

May 25, 2003, Unrelated: A 727 aircraft refit as a fuel tanker
is stolen from an airport in Africa.

May 26, 2003: Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post reports receiving
a leaked message from Judith Miller of the New York Times in which
she admits that Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi "has provided
most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper" and that
Mobile Team Alpha "is using Chalabi's intell[igence] and document network
for its own WMD work".

May 26, 2003: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon renounces Israel's
claim to the parts of Israel captured by Jordan and Egypt in 1948,
declaring the holdings an "occupation", the term used by anti-semites
to describe Jews' existence on lands that should be purely Arab.

May 26, 2003: Two US soldiers are killed by Iraqi loyalist attacks
near Haditha and Baghdad. 

May 26, 2003, Unrelated: Israeli forces fire upon a Swiss consulate vehicle
carrying diplomats from Switzerland, Britain, Greece, Sweden, and Austria.
There are no injuries.

May 27, 2003: The Supreme Court decides, on a 6-3 vote, in the case of 
Chavez versus Martinez, that people have no right to refuse to answer
policemens' questions if the questions are not asked as part of an
official investigation.

May 27, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announces that
"efforts to  try to remake Iraq in Iran's image will be aggressively
put down".

May 27, 2003: White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer says that
there is "a concern about whether or not the top-level al-Qaeda
that are in Iran are being arrested" and "We continue to have concerns
that a nation that is awash in gas and oil would seek to produce
peaceful nuclear energy".

May 27, 2003: Al Jazeera removes chief executive officer Mohammed Jassem
al Ali from his position. Al Ali had been CEO since the station's founding.

May 27, 2003: Dr. Ahmed Javed Khawaja and Ahmad Naveed Khawaja
are found not guilty of possessing banned weaponry and fake passports.
The two had been arrested on December 19 with seven other family members.

May 27, 2003: Russia and the People's Republic of China report
that their relations have "reached their highest level ever".

May 27, 2003: Two US soldiers are killed by Iraqi loyalists in Falluja.
Two Iraqis are killed in the battle.

May 27, 2003: Texas state Representative Kevin Bailey reports that
Assistant Attorney General Jay Kimbrough, Texas's State Homeland Security
Coordinator, was "heavily involved in the process" of investigating
the truancy of Democratic Texas Representatives, and that Republicans
had deleted over five hours of recordings that would have contained
the call from the Texas Department of Public Safety to the Department
of Homeland Security's Air and Marine Interdiction and Coordination Center.
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Thomas A. Davies demands
that Bailey reveal the names of whistleblowers in his Department
before he will allow any of his personnel to be deposed in court.

May 27, 2003: The debt limit is increased by $984 billion to $7.4 trillion.

May 27, 2003: Four British soldiers report showing symptoms of
the Gulf War syndrome that effected 209,000 veterans of the 1991
war with Iraq.

May 27, 2003: Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien predicts
that the United States deficit will be $500 billion in the coming year.

May 27, 2003: The Associated Press reports that the United States
has increased by 18%, to $1 billion, the value of its contracts
with US companies officially founded in Bermuda to avoid paying
income taxes. The companies with the largest contracts are Accenture
and Foster Wheeler.

May 27, 2003, Unrelated: The United Nations accuses Thailand of
using the War on Drugs as an excuse to attack minorities. Over 2,000
have been killed since the operations began in March.

May 27, 2003, Unrelated: Human rights and foreign aid groups are expelled
from Aceh province of Indonesia. The offices of Kontras are attacked
by goverment supporters.

May 2003: Amnesty International reports that "a combination of forces
sought to roll back the human rights gains of the past five decades
in the name of security and 'counter-terrorism'. But the restrictions
en liberty have not necessarily led to increased dividends
on safety...Greater emphasis on security, far from making the world
a safer place, has made it more dangerous by curtailing human rights
and undermining the rule of international law; by shielding governments
from scrutiny; by deepening divisions among people of different faiths
and origins; and by diverting attention from festering conflicts
and other sources of insecurity...At a time of heightened insecurity,
governments chose to ignore and undermine the collective system
of security which international law represents...The USA continued
to detain prisoners from the war in Afghanistan in defiance of
international humanitarian law, turned a blind eye to reports of torture
or ill-treatment of suspects by its officials and allies, and sought
to undermine the International Criminal Court through bilateral agreements.
In the process, it undermined its own moral authority to speak out
against human rights violations in other parts of the world...entire
communities - identified by race, religion, or national origin - are
being viewed with suspicion...Racial profiling and detention of immigrants
in the USA, and labelling of refugees and asylum-seekers as 'terrorists'
in Europe have compounded the stigmatization. In a climate of increasing
xenophobia and racism, asylum-seekers are being sent back to face
imprisonment, torture or death...Exploiting the international climate
favouring 'counter-terrorism', many governments reinforced and renewed
their crack-down on political opponents and others whose loyalty they doubt,
such as trade unionists, journalists, religious and racial minorities,
and human rights defenders".

May 28, 2003: Signs into law Congress's alternate $80 billion/year
tax cut plan.

May 28, 2003: The New York Times reports that Congress's Republicans
secretly deleted part of the tax cut plan that would have granted
tax credits to poor families with children, but kept the same credit
for more wealthy families.

May 28, 2003: Colonel Tim Madere reports that there were "no underground
facilities. No bodies" at the site the United States bombed on March 20.

May 28, 2003: The Associated Press reports that "U.S. Attorney General
John Ashcroft or his aides blocked investigators from probing U.S. Rep.
Charles Taylor as part of a fraud case involving illegal loans by
the bank Taylor chairs, defense attorneys say."

May 28, 2003: Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says that
"For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of
mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on"
to promote the invasion of Iraq. The Department of Defense deletes
this passage and a passage where Wolfowitz is asked if he believes
Iraq was connected to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (which Wolfowitz
denied) from its public transcript and insists to reporters
that the transcript is complete and accurate. Two weeks later,
Wolfowitz's spokeman says that the deleted portions were off the record,
while his interviewer denies this.

May 28, 2003, Unrelated: Indian President Abdul Kalam calls for
India's computer programmers to avoid using commercial software,
saying that "any small shift in the business practice involving
these proprietary solutions" would "have a devastating effect on
the lives of society" if people allow commercial software to run
their computer systems.

May 28, 2003, Unrelated: California Attorney General Bill Lockyer
calls the DeCSS program, which is an alternate implementation of
the Content Scrambling System protocol to allow for the development
of Digital Versatile Disk players without the need to pay the
DVD Copy Control Association to license the original implementation,
a "burglary tool" used for "breaking, entering, and stealing".

May 29, 2003: The Financial Times reports that former Treasury Department
Secretary Paul O'Neill had commissioned a report in 2002,to be written by
Deputy Secretary Ken Smetters and Treasury Department consultant
Jagadeesh Gokhale, titled "Fiscal and Generational Imbalances:
New Budget Measures for New Budget Priorities", and to be included
in the 2003 Budget, and that the report was not included in the Budget.
The report determined that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were
costing so much that a 66% increase in taxes would be necessary
to continue to fund the programs, and that the US faces an evenutal
$44 trillion debt otherwise. White House Budget Director Mitch Daniels
calls the Financial Times report "the most absurd thing that I can imagine",
and Treasury Department spokesman Rob Nichols says that "this paper
was not prepared at Treasury, by Treasury, or at the request of anyone
at Treasury." Ken Smetters says that the report "was meant to be some
internal thinking...on how to reform the budget", and "never meant
to be a Treasury study" while Gokhale says "my impression was that
it was slated to appear" in the Budget.

May 29, 2003: America Online Time Warner settles its lawsuit with Microsoft
in exchange for $750 million and the right to use Microsoft's Web browser
for seven years. A judge had earlier found Microsoft guilty of
antitrust violations and ordered the company divided, but this order
was nullified on appeal after the Bush administration refused to
press for any punishments.

May 29, 2003: Former President Bill Clinton calls for changing the
Constitution's 22nd Amendment to allow him to run for President again.

May 29, 2003: Ted Turner writes that "the Federal Communications Commission
is expected to adopt dramatic rule changes that will extend the market
dominance of the five media corporations that control most of what Americans
read, see and hear...If these rules had been in place in 1970, it would have
been virtually impossible for me to start Turner Broadcasting or, 
10 years later, to launch CNN."

May 29, 2003: Congressman Henry Waxman reports that Halliburton has
received "nearly 500 million dollars" from the federal government for
its work in Iraq.

May 30, 2003: Announces that the United States has "found the
weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq.

May 30, 2003: The US News and World Report reports that the 
Defense Intelligence Agency had made a report in September 2002
which stated that "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq
is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons".

May 30, 2003: The Drug Enforcement Agency uses the Illicit Drug
Anti-Proliferation Act to force the Billings, Wyoming Eagle Lodge
to cancel a concert to benefit the National Organization for the
Reform of Marijuana Laws, a drug-legalization lobbying group.

May 2003: Corriere della Sera editor Ferruccio de Bortoli is fired
for criticizing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

May 2003: Central Intelligence Agency Foreign Denial and Deception
Committee Vice President James B. Bruce issues a memorandum urging
the prosecution of journalists and newsmen for reporting information
that the CIA has classified, declaring whistleblowers and newsmen
to be an "unholy alliance".

May 2003: A British soldier is arrested after attempting to
develop photographs of his unit torturing Iraqi prisoners of war.

May 2003: Saudi Arabia revokes the licenses of several hundred
religious leaders.

May 2003, Unrelated: McDonald's fast-food corporation sues food critic
Edoardo Raspelli for saying that their hamburgers taste like rubber
and their french fries like cardboard.

May 31, 2003: The Guardian reports that Secretary of State Colin Powell
had called his presentation to the United Nations "circumstantial evidence".



June 2003: Newsweek reports that "A recently retired State Department
intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat,
Greg Thielmann, flatly told NEWSWEEK that inside the government,
'there is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused.
You get a strong impression that the administration didn't think
the public would be enthusiastic about the idea of war if you attached
all those qualifiers.'"

June 1, 2003: The American Association of State Highway and Transportation
Officials changes the number of Highway 666 to Highway 491 because
the Christian religious text the Book of Revelations states that
"Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast,
for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred and sixty six".

June 1, 2003: Joshua Micah Marshall reports that "There's a new rush
of articles claiming that the term 'neoconservative' is actually...a form
of cloaked anti-Semitism. This of course ignores the fact that the term
is itself a coinage of neoconservatives and has been in common usage
by them and their opponents for almost three decades."

June 2, 2003: France arrests Christian Ganczarski, reportedly
one of the highest ranking members of al Qaeda.

June 2, 2003: The Federal Communications Commission eases restrictions
on media marketshare ownership after receiving over 740,000 letters
urging the Commission to avoid this change and fewer than 1,000
supporting it.

June 2, 2003: Thomas White says that the Defense Department is
"unwilling to come to grips" with the need for peacekeeping in Iraq.

June 2, 2003: The Chicago Tribune reports that the Bureau of Land Management
has stopped considering any land for a designatation as wilderness.

June 3, 2003: Joshua Micah Marshall reports that "When I talked to Texas
state Rep. Lon Burnam he told me he had multiple sources...who told him
about illicit document shredding. When he was deposed yesterday, he said
his only source was Roberta Bilsky, a staffer for Kevin Bailey".

June 3, 2003: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says that
economic sanctions would not have worked against Iraq because "the
country floats on a sea of oil." The Guardian falsely reports
that Wolfowitz claimed this as the sole reason to invade Iraq.

June 2003: Attorney General John Ashcroft forbids homosexual workers
at the Department of Justice from holding a traditional annual pride rally.
Ashcroft reverses the decision after this is leaked to the news.

June 2003: After a French transport helicopter strays into the restricted
airspace near the Group of Eight summit, a Swiss air traffic controller
jokingly labels the craft "al-Qaeda". As a result, hastily scrambled
French jets nearly shoot down the helicopter before the pilots
make a visual identification. The incident is reported near the end
of the month and confirmed by Skyguide spokesman Patrick Herr.

June 2003, Unrelated: France sends a peacekeeping force of 700 soldiers
to the city of Bunia in Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

June 2003: France arrests two suspected al Qaeda terrorists.

June 2003: Alan Berlow of the Atlantic Monthly reports that "as the
legal counsel to Texas Governor George W. Bush, Alberto R. Gonzales -- now
the White House counsel and widely regarded as a likely future Supreme Court
nominee -- prepared fifty-seven confidential death-penalty memoranda
for Bush's review. Never before disclosed publicly, the memoranda
suggest that Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise Bush of some of
the most salient issues in the cases at hand...Gonzales devoted
nearly a third of his three-page report on [Terry] Washington
to the gruesome details of the crime...but the summary refers only
fleetingly to the central issue in Washington's clemency appeal -- his
limited mental capacity, which was never disputed by the State of Texas --
and presents it as part of a discussion of 'conflicting information'
about the condemned man's childhood...Gonzales failed to mention that
Washington's mental limitations...were never made known to the jury,
although both the district attorney and Washington's trial lawyer
knew of this potentially mitigating evidence...I have found no evidence
that Gonzales ever sent Bush a clemency position -- or any document -- that
summarized in a concise and coherent fashion a condemned defendant's
best argument against execution".

June 2003, Unrelated: Egypt bans the movie "The Matrix Reloaded"
after a campaign by the press accusing the movie of promoting Judaism.

June 4, 2003: The Department of Education places a prominent graphic
on its Web site's front page promoting Bush's program to increase federal
control over schools, claiming to express "Why /No Child Left Behind/
is Important to America" and showing increasing federal dollar outlays
for educational spending while reading scores remain stagnant. The graph
does not correct for inflation, population growth, or any offset
in decreasing state or local education funding.

June 4, 2003: The University of Maryland Project on International
Policy Attitudes releases the results of a poll showing that 
34% of respondents (including 55% of Republicans who claim to be
following the news) falsely believe the United States has found
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, 22% falsely believe that Iraq
used such unconventional weaponry against United States forces during
the war, and 55% falsely believe that Bush did not exaggerate the threat
posed by Iraq.

June 5, 2003: The United States agrees to withdraw its forces in Korea
to 75 miles from the Demilitarized Zone.

June 5, 2003: Russia agrees to stop its involvement in Iranian
nuclear production.

June 5, 2003: The Associated Press reports that Westar Energy company
documents show that Senator Richard Shelby and Congressmen Tom Delay,
Billy Tauzin, and Joe Barton solicited bribes in exchange for access
to a conference committee.

June 5, 2003, Unrelated: Liberian Deputy National Security Minister John Yormie
and Deputy Minister for Public Works Isaac Vaye are assassinated.

June 5, 2003, Unrelated: New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines
and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd resign.

June 6, 2003: The European Union agrees to extradite terrorism suspects
to the United States.

June 6, 2003: The United States and Chile sign a free trade treaty.

June 6, 2003: Iranian dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declares that
"A military attack against Iran, a great nation with youth ready
to defend their country, would be suicide for the aggressor".

June 6, 2003: The Department of Defense Inspector General
releases a report showing that of 86 contracts issued by the
National Imagery and Mapping Agency, "77 of 86 technical evaluations
were missing or inadequate, 55 of 86 price negotiation memorandums
were missing or inadequate, 85 of 86 independent government cost estimates
were missing or inadequate, and 50 of 54 justifications and approvals
were missing or inadequate." The National Imagery and Mapping Agency
soon orders the report deleted from the Department's public archives,
citing non-existent "organizational numbers and functions that are
exempt from disclosure to the public". The Federation of American Scientists
then publishes a copy of the previously released report.

June 6, 2003, Unrelated: Burmese military forces attack democracy activist
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, kidnapping her and killing four of her colleagues.

June 7, 2003: The Washington Post reports that the Department
of Homeland Security intentionally tried to track down truant
Democratic Texas Legislators, quoting an airport security guard
as quoting a contact from Homeland Security as saying that "this is
just somebody looking for politicians they can't find".

June 8, 2003: Peter Beaumont and Antony Barnett of the Observer,
and Judith Miller and William Broad of the New York Times both
independently report, citing anonymous US intelligence sources,
that the Iraqi trucks alleged to be biological weapons laboratories
do not have the proper equipment for that function. The reports are
nearly identical.

June 8, 2003: A bus carrying German soldiers in Afghainstan is bombed,
killing four.

June 8, 2003: Palestinian Authority forces join with Islamic Resistance
and Islamic Jihad forces in an attack on an Israeli border post.

June 8, 2003: Afghan President Hamid Karzai is knighted by the Queen
of England.

June 8, 2003, Unrelated: Liberian rebels advance on the capitol Monrovia.
France evacuates United States citizens from the country.

June 9, 2003: United States weapons inspectors in Iraq idle
after running out of sites to search.

June 9, 2003: Michael Chertoff is appointed to a judgeship on
the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals on an 88-1 vote. Senator Clinton
cast the only vote against confirmation.

June 9, 2003: The New York Times reports that Senator Larry Craig
has issued a secret hold to prevent the promotions of 850 Air Force
officers, and is demanding that the Air Force station an additional
four cargo planes in his district.

June 10, 2003: Israel attempts to assassinate a leader of Islamic Resistance,
killing two bystanders. Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas
declares this "a terrorist act". Bush strongly condemns the attack.

June 11, 2003: Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts
condemns Democrats for requesting an investigation into the intelligence
that led Bush to claim specific knowledge of Iraqi weapons facilities
and stores that has since been borne out to be false, saying that
an investigation would suggest there had been a "mistake".

June 11, 2003: An Israeli helicopter bombs an Islamic Resistance vehicle,
killing its two occupants, then circles around and attacks bystanders
and rescue personnel, murdering numerous civilians.

June 11, 2003: William Lind of the Free Congress Foundation, a right-wing
group, writes that "it is now evident that Saddam Hussein's possession
of vast quantities of Weapons of Mass Destruction is about as likely
as Mars having canals, complete with gondolas and singing gondoliers",
and determines that "the sudden withdrawal of Americans [in Korea] to
positions south of the Han river reveals our intention to go after
North Korea's nuclear and missile facilities" due to the threat of
artillery fire closer to the cease-fire line.

June 11, 2003: The State Department condemns Belieze, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Burma, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Greece, Haiti, Kazakhstan,
Liberia, North Korea, Sudan, Suriname, Turkey, and Uzbekistan for
making little to no effort to stop the slave trade in their countries.

June 12, 2003: The United Nations Security Council votes 12-0
to grant United States soldiers immunity from prosecution for war crimes.

June 12, 2003: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld threatens for
the United States to cease its part in the construction of a new headquarters
for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Belgium unless Belgium
rescinds a law allowing judgements of foreigners for war crimes committed
in foreign countries.

June 12, 2003: Italian police find and disarm a bomb found on a plane.

June 12, 2003: The Securities and Exchange Commission begins an
investigation into possible accounting fraud by Freddie Mac,
the United States' second largest mortgage lender.

June 12, 2003: The New York Times deletes from its public Web archive
the part of an article that notes that the cornerstone for the new building
at the former site of the World Trade Center will be laid during
the Republican Convention.

June 13, 2003: The United States reports attacking a "terrorist camp"
north of Baghdad, killing 70 while losing one helicopter and no soldiers.

June 13, 2003: United States forces report killing 27 Iraqi soldiers in Balad
after a tank was ambushed, while suffering no casualties. Reports from
Balad state that two Iraqi soldiers were killed in the failed ambush,
and US reinforcements then attacked a field full of civilians who had
fleed their homes expecting that that US forces would bomb them, killing
five. United States spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Greg Julian insists
that all of the dead were armed and firing at United States forces.

June 13, 2003: An oil pipeline to Turkey from Iraq catches fire.
Turkey reports this was an act of sabotage, while the United States
says the fire is caused by a leak.

June 13, 2003: The Washington Post reports that Delta Force Task Force 20
had covertly searched Iraq for long-range missiles and biological, chemical,
or nuclear weapons, weapons programs, and production materials
before the invasion but did not find anything.

June 13, 2003: Larry Margasak of the Associated press reports that
"Halliburton's contract to restart Iraq's oil production has doubled
in cost over the past month, and the no-bid work may last longer
than expected".

June 13, 2003, Unrelated: The European Commission files a grievance with the
World Trade Organization for the United States' consideration of 
sub-items with a negative dumping margin as having a zero dumping margin
when calculating an exported item's average dumping margin, having the
effect of raising anti-dumping tariffs on imported items. In 2001,
India had sued the European Commission in the World Trade Organization
for the same practice and won. Corus Steel then filed a grievance
with the United States, whose Court of International Trade found in March
that the World Trade Organization does not forbid the practice.

June 13, 2003: The United States denies accusations of spraying herbicides
on drug crops in Afghanistan.

June 13, 2003: The United States demands the Tamil Tigers end their
terrorism and return to peace talks.

June 13, 2003, Unrelated: The People's Republic of China fires or demotes
twelve high-ranking naval officers after the loss of a submarine
and its crew of 70 due to unknown causes in the Yellow Sea last month.

June 13, 2003, Unrelated: The Muslim World League's Italian branch
suspends Rome Grand Mosque Imam Abdel-Sami Mahmoud Ibrahim Moussa
for saying that "All of Palestine [Israel] is a territory of war
because all of the Jewish society illegally occupies an Islamic land."

June 14, 2003: Syed Saleem Shahzad of the Asia Times reports that
the United States is entering into peace talks with the Taliban
to promote stability in Afghanistan, and that the United States
is demanding: the deposition of Mullah Omar; the expulsion of
all non-Afghan Taliban soldiers; the release of all Northern Alliance
and United States prisoners of war; and citizenship for all Afghans
living in exile, especially for those living in the United States
and England, regardless of whether they return to Afghanistan.
The report also states that "Kabul is divided into two main factions",
one being President Hamid Karzai and his close allies while the bulk
of the Northern Alliance supports Russia and Iran.

June 14, 2003: The Los Angeles Times reports that Bush has ordered
control of the search for banned weapons in Iraq be transferred to the
Central Intelligence Agency from the Department of Defense. The Times
also reports that the Central Intelligence Agency has reassigned
"two senior officials who oversaw its analysis on Iraq", one to the
personnel department and another to an "extended mission to Iraq"
with the Iraq Issue Group.

June 14, 2003: Jack Epstien of the San Francisco Chronicle reports
that the charities Care International, International Rescue Committee,
Mercy Corps, Save the Children, and Worldvision have refused
United States Agency for International Development aid because of
"unprecedented" restrictions and requirements, including a requirement
that the charities censor all of their outside communications through
the United States military.

June 15, 2003: British intelligence determines that the two trailer
trucks found in Iraq are used to produce hydrogen used in reconnaissance
ballons that direct artillery fire.

June 15, 2003: Major Ronald Hann of Sensitive Site Team Six
reports that "the target folder for Uday's palace at Lake Habbaniyah
was real clean. 'There is the warehouse. There is the poison gas
storage tanks.' Well, the warehouse was a carport. It still had
two cars inside. And the tanks had propane for the kitchen."

June 15, 2003: Retired General Wesley Clark, a Democrat considering
running for President next year, says that "There was a concerted effort
during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11
and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein...it came from the White House,
it came from people around the White House. It came from all over.
I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying,
'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism.
This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.' I said, 'But--I'm willing
to say it, but what's your evidence?' And I never got any evidence."

June 15, 2003: France arrests a suspected al Qaeda terrorist.

June 16, 2003: Publicly condemns people citing his own specific claims
about Iraq's weapons capabilities as "some who would like to rewrite
history. Revisionist historians is what I like to call them".

June 16, 2003: Former National Security Council aide Rand Beers
says that "the administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words
in the War on Terrorism. They're making us less secure, not more secure.
As an insider, I saw the things that weren't being done, and the longer
I sat and watched, the more concerned I became".

June 16, 2003: Senator Carl Levin anounces that "[CIA] Director Tenet
and others within the Administration, including Dr. [Condoleeza] Rice,
have maintained that they briefed the UN inspectors on all high and medium
value suspect cites. Director Tenet so testified publicly. However,
the detailed suspect site information that he has provided to me
in classified form indicated the contrary... Director Tenet's
most recent excuse for withholding from the American people the number
of sites where information has been shared with the UN is
'secrecy arrangements' and 'understandings' with UN inspection
organizations. However, Dr. [Hans] Blix recently wrote to me stating that
he has no objection if the CIA makes public how many site packages 
it provided to the UN inspectors."

June 16, 2003: France arrests another suspected al Qaeda terrorist.

June 16, 2003, Unrelated: A blank motorcyclist dies in an accident
while fleeing police in Benton Harbour, Michigan, setting off two days
of race riots in the town.

June 17, 2003: The Ulema council of Kabul, Afghanistan declares
that journalists Sayeed Mirhassan Mahdawi and his assistant
have committed "offence against Islam" by reporting that
massacres had been committed by people claiming to be Muslims.
Afghan police soon arrest the two, and the United Nations and
Reporters Sans Frontiers condemn the arrest.

June 17, 2003: France arrests 159 members of the People's Mujahideen,
an exiled Iranian rebel group.

June 17, 2003: An anonymous reporter at a White House press conference
notes that Bush does not allow $3 of his taxes to be used
for public financing, but takes public financing from the government
for his own campaigns.

June 17, 2003: Paul Krugman reports that "Last Thursday a House 
subcommittee met to finalize next year's homeland security appropriation.
The ranking Democrat announced that he would introduce an amendment 
dding roughly $1 billion for areas like port security and border security
that...have been severely neglected since Sept. 11. He proposed to pay
for the additions by slightly scaling back tax cuts for people making more
than $1 million per year. The subcommittee's chairman promptly closed
the meeting to the public, citing national security -- though no classified
material was under discussion. And the bill that emerged from the
closed meeting did not contain the extra funding."

June 17, 2003: Joe Conason of Salon Magazine reports that
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner was aghast
at being greeted by a French peacekeeper in Afghanistan, yelling
"What are they doing here? They mucking things up again?"

June 17, 2003: Senator John Edwards, campaigning for the 2004 Presidential
election, says that "There's a fundamental difference between his [Bush's]
vision and mine. I believe America should value work. He only values wealth.
He wants the people who own the most to get more. I want to make sure
everybody has the chance to be an owner...Their economic vision has
one goal: to get rid of taxes on unearned income and shift the tax burden
onto people who work. This crowd wants a world where the only people
who have to pay taxes are the ones who do the work...this is the most
radical and dangerous economic theory to hit our shores since Socialism
a century ago. Like Socialism, it corrupts the very nature of
our democracy and our free enterprise tradition...They don't believe
work matters most. They don't believe in helping working people build
wealth. They genuinely believe that the wealth of the wealthy matters most.
They are determined to cut taxes on that wealth, year after year,
and heap more and more of the burden on people who work."

June 18, 2003: United States soldiers fire upon a mob in Baghdad,
killing two.

June 18, 2003: The Austin-American Statesman reports that
"when [Department of Homeland Security spokesmen were] asked
who instructed the officer to call the interdiction center...the
investigator was told that 'this question was outside the scope'
of the investigation."

June 18, 2003: Joshua Micah Marshall reports that "the report
the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] released yesterday looks
a bit like one of those old cornball FBI surveillance reports
you might find in the back of some Malcolm X Reader...in many places,
the thing is so marked up...with that oversized black magic marker
that you can hardly see what's going on."

June 18, 2003: Joshua Micah Marshall opines that "we have lots of folks
in custody who should know plenty about the [Iraq's] WMD program.
And apparently not one of them has squealed. My governing assumption
has always been that there's a get-out-of-jail-free card, a harem,
a Riviera Chateau and a lifetime supply of jelly beans (and that's
just for day one) for whomever sings first...officials from Tony Blair's
government seem to be telling the Times [of London] it's not true.
According to the article, the Brits are practically begging the Americans
to start cutting some deals."

June 18, 2003: Joshua Micah Marshall of The Hill writes that
"if you were (a) paying attention to this debate, and (b) not an
utterly rabid ideologue, you knew the administration was tossing
around all sorts of improbable, unproven or just plain ridiculous stories.
All that's changed is that something else truly unexpected happened:
We didn't find anything...that fact suddenly made it possible to discuss,
or maybe just impossible to ignore, what most of us knew all along...There
were really two WMD debates. One was about chemical and low-end biological
weapons. The other was about smallpox, nukes, al Qaeda and pretty much
everything else under the sun. On the former, the White House didn't
hoodwink anyone, since virtually everyone in the foreign policy mainstream
figured that Iraq at least maintained a chemical and biological weapons
capacity...Debate No. 2 was an entirely different story. Here,
the administration was clearly in kitchen-sink territory...pretty much
everyone in the press and the political class gave them a pass.
The deal was that all of the more ridiculous and far-fetched statements
would be forgiven and forgotten so long as we found a good stash
of chemicals and biologicals. It was only after even that stuff
didn't turn up that folks gave a long second thought to what
top administration officials had been peddling."

June 18, 2003, Unrelated: Kentucky Governor Paul Patton pardons
his chief of staff Andrew Martin and three other political allies
accused of violating campaign finance laws. Patton claims that
their prosection by Attorney General Ben Chandler, like Patton a Democrat,
was politically motivated "persecution" and "it was obvious from
day one that Ben Chandler was looking at this as an opportunity
to put Paul Patton in prison".

June 18, 2003: New Zealand's TV3 momentarily displays a graphic,
supposed to advertise a weather report, that declares "George W. Bush
Professional Fascist". TV3 spokesman Roger Beaumont declares this
message "a completely unintentional mistake".

June 18, 2003, Unrelated: San Francisco Chronicle journalist William Nessen,
the only journalist with access to Aceh rebels, reports that the
Indonesian army fired upon him when he tried to enter government-controlled
terroitory and is now trying to assassinate him. He is later arrested
and sentenced to 40 days of jail, but is released.

June 19, 2003: Attorney General John Ashcroft announces that "we need
the help of the news industry, the fourth estate, to inform citizens
about the Constitutional tools and methods being used in the war
against terror. We need the media's help, for instance, in portraying
accurately the USA Patriot Act."

June 19, 2003: The Evening Standard reports that "American soldiers
in Iraq today make the astonishing admission that they regularly
kill civilians", citing Specialist Anthony Castillo as saying that
"when there are civilians there...they were at the wrong spot,
so they were considered enemy".

June 19, 2003: The National Wildlife Federation releases an April 29
memo from the Environmental Protection Agency which states that the
White House had ordered such significant changes made to an EPA report
that it "no longer accurately represents scientific consensus
on climate change".

June 19, 2003: Charges are dropped against two pilots who
violated rules of engagement to bomb Canadian forces in Afghanistan.

June 19, 2003: Congressman Mark Steven Kirk says "We need to see
Iraqis running Iraq. When do I see a national police chief? 
When do I see a minister of health? When do we expect to see
an interim government?"

June 19, 2003: Finnish Prime Minister Anneli Jaeaetteenmaeki
resigns after admitting lying to Parliament about whether she had
sought classified documents regarding the coming United States-Iraq war
for her election campaign.

June 19, 2003: The Mirror quotes United States soldier Specialist Corporal
Michael Richardson as describing the routine execution of Iraqi prisoners
and noncombatants, saying "there was no dilemma when it came to shooting
people who were not in uniform. I just pulled the trigger.  If they were
there, they were enemy...once you've reached the objective, and once
you'd shot them and you're moving through, anything there you shoot again.
You didn't want any prisoners of war...There's a picture of the
World Trade Center hanging up byy my bed and I keep one in my flak jacket.
Every time I feel sorry for these people, I look at that. I think,
they hit us at home and now it's our turn...it's pretty much payback."

June 19, 2003: Soldiers for the Truth prints a letter from a soldier in Iraq
claiming that "we did not receive a single piece of parts support for
our vehicles...my unit had abandoned around 12 vehicles and transferred
the soldiers to others in very cramped riding conditions...We all carried
five days of supply with us at LD with the intent of utilizing it
only in an 'emergency' situation...we had to break into them during
the trip...we have liberated a country from conditions that are
indescribable, and in return we are being kept here and are living
in conditions that we liberated the Iraqis from. How is it that
the people that fought and spilled blood on this soil against Iraqi
forces are now given the responsibility of providing them comfort
and humanitarian aid?...There are many units here that were brought here
specifically to replace us and no replacement is being conducted."

June 19, 2003: A test of the anti-ballistic missile system fails
as the interceptor fails to chase the target missile.
Missile Defense Agency spokesman Chris Taylor says that "I wouldn't
consider it a failed test because the intercept was not the primary
objective. It's still considered a success...we just don't know
why it didn't hit.

June 19, 2003: Truck driver Iyman Faris admits to being an al Qaeda
terrorist. He later denies this and is sentenced to 20 years of jail.

June 19, 2003: Britain's Independent Television Commission declares
that Fox News's and al Jazeera's coverage of the Iraq war was impartial.

June 19, 2003: Soccer fans in Saint Etienne, France, jeer the
playing of the United States national anthem before a US game
against Turkey.

June 19, 2003: Fox News threatens to sue Agitproperties, a maker of
T-shirts parodying Fox News as "Faux News".

June 19, 2003, Unrelated: France forbids publication of a book by
the chief prosecutor of ELF corporation, citing ongoing ELF trials
which the book could influence.

June 19, 2003, Unrelated: Over 100 are killed while looting oil
from a leaking pipeline when the oil explodes in Amaokwe Oghughe, Nigeria.

June 20, 2003: Mortar fire strikes a Coalition Provisional Authority building
in Samarra, Iraq, killing one.

June 20, 2003: Jim Washburn of Orange County Weekly reports that
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "staffers have been phoning city
officials, including some in Orange County, and strongly urging
them to structure Fourth of July celebrations around the war in Iraq",
and that "the project even has a name: Operation Tribute to Freedom".

June 20, 2003: The United States closes its embassy in Kenya,
citing "specific information" that an attack is planned. The next day,
Kenyan National Security Minister Chris Murungaru says "These assessments
are wrong and misleading". The embassy is re-opened a week later.

June 20, 2003: Scott McClellan is appointed White House Press Secretary.

June 21, 2003: Russian President Vladimir Putin pledges to assist
Iran in construction of a nuclear power plant, saying that "We won't
let the issue of nuclear proliferation be used to stop Russian companies
dealing with Iran"

June 21, 2003: Indonesia arrests ten suspected members of Jemaah Islamiya.

June 21, 2003, Unrelated: Terrorist leader Harold Keke sacks two
towns on Guadalcanal and threatens to execute 1,200 civilians
if police or military forces attempt to arrest him.

June 21, 2003: University of Chicago archaeologist McGuire Gibson
reports being told by the United States Bureau of Immigration and
Customs enforcement that 6,000 items had been looted from Iraqi museums
and that museum officials are still working on an inventory.
Many reports, nearly all from pro-invasion sources, have stated that
the inventory was completed weeks ago and the total number of stolen
or destroyed items was 33.

June 22, 2003: Pakistan freezes assets belonging to Osama bin Laden
and several persons and organizations suspected of assisting him.

June 22, 2003: Democratic presidential candidate Richard Gephardt
pledges to ignore any Supreme Court ruling that he disagrees with.

June 22, 2003: A United States military ambulance is attacked
in Baghdad, Iraq. One soldier is killed.

June 22, 2003: Military police at Guantanamo Bay force British Broadcasting
Corporation reporters touring the prison to delete their recordings
after a prisoner shouts "Are you journalists? Can we talk to you? 
I've been a long time waiting for you here." Colonel Adolph McQueen
declares the reporters' actions a "breach of security...no media people
have ever done this before."

June 22, 2003: Greek police capture a ship, the Baltic Sky,
carrying 680 tons of explosives in the Ionian sea between Greece and Italy.
The ship flew under the Comoros flag even though its registration had
been revoked. The ship had been loitering in the Agean Sea for nearly a month
with a scheduled destination of Port Sudan via Suez, and had a Ukranian
and Azerbaijani crew.

June 22, 2003: Kenya bans all flights from Somalia.

June 22, 2003: A Hindu man is beaten and nearly lynched in New Bedford,
Massachusetts, by men who believe him to be an Iraqi Muslim.

June 22, 2003, Unrelated: Russia closes TVS, the last private
television station in the country.

June 2003: Describes concerns about the lack of testing of new,
manufactured chemicals placed in food crops as "unfounded,
unscientific fears" and demands that Europe allow the import
of bioengineered crops from the United States so that such crops
can be exported from the United States to African countries,
even though Europe does not restrict trade between the US and Africa.

June 2003: Robert Dreyfuss of the Nation reports that "members of
the Administration failed to produce an intelligence evaluation
of what Iraq might look like after the fall of Saddam Hussein",
quotes "a leading US government expert on the Middle East" as
saying that "the same unit [the Office of Special Plans] that fed
Chalabi's intelligence on WMD to Rumsfeld was also feeding him
Chalabi's stuff on the prospects for postwar Iraq", and quotes a
"former US ambassador with strong links to the CIA" as reporing that
"also feeding information to the Office of Special Plans was a
secret, rump unit established last year in the office of Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon of Israel. This unit, which paralleled Shulsky's
[Office of Special Plans]... prepared intelligence reports on Iraq
in English (not Hebrew) and forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans.
It was created in Sharon's office, not inside Israel's Mossad intelligence
service, because the Mossad...had views closer to the CIA's,
not the Pentagon's, on Iraq."

June 2003, Unrelated: China forces a publisher to stop producing
Peter Rabbit books even though the books came into the public domain
in 1993.

June 23, 2003: The United States bombs an Iraqi civilian convoy in Syria
and attacks a Syrian border patrol to reach the bombing site, 
capturing five Syrian guards. Initial reports suggest the convoy was
carrying refugees, but Seymour Hersh later reports that the convoy
was smuggling gasoline. Hersh also reports that up to 80 people were killed
in the bombing.

June 23, 2003: International Observatory on Terrorism leader Roland Jacquard
reports that al Qaeda dispatched 800 terrorist leaders around the world
in mid-2001 to re-create al Qaeda in the event its Afghan operations
were destroyed in retaliation for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

June 23. 2003: The Supreme Court rules 5-4 that public schools
may give special consideration to applicants who are from minorities
that society discriminates against for the time being although
such consideration will be unnecessary 25 years from now, and rules 6-3
that such consideration cannot be in the form of a point system
or calculation. Bush praises the ruling.

June 23, 2003: The Supreme Court rules 6-3 that Congress has the power
to require libraries to censor access to the Internet in exchange
for federal money.

June 23, 2003: Ernest Partridge of The Crisis Papers writes that
"In colonial Philadelphia, firefighters were employed by private
insurance companies which, of course, had financial incentives
to minimize damage to their clients' properties. Plaques with the
insurance company's insignia were placed on buildings, so that the
fire fighters would know whether or not it was their 'business'
to put out the fires on the premises...Eventually, the absurdity
and outright danger of this system led one prominent Philadelphia
citizen to come up with the idea of a publicly funded and administered
fire department. His name was Benjamin Franklin: America's first
anti-free-enterprise commie pinko nut-case. Franklin's subversive
left-wing ideas were extended to include libraries, post offices,
and public schools, and, if we are to believe some of today's
self-described 'conservatives,' it's been downhill ever since.  
These 'conservatives' contend that virtually all economic and social
institutions are better managed when privatized and unregulated.
According to this libertarian theory, the greed (i.e., 'profit motive')
of investing private individuals is, in virtually all cases, mystically
transformed into the optimum public good."

June 23, 2003, Unrelated: Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi
is arrested and executed by Iranian police.

June 24, 2003: Arnon Regular of Haaratz writes that Bush told
Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas that "God told me
to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then He instructed me
to strike at Saddam, which I did".

June 24, 2003: The Department of Justice drops credit card fraud charges
against Qatari citizen Ali Saleh Kahlah al Marri. Bush declares al Marri
an "enemy combatant" and orders him transferred to Navy military custody
despite nobody ever claiming that he has ever engaged in combat.

June 24, 2003: Six British soldiers are killed near Amara, Iraq.

June 24, 2003: The British Broadcasting Corporation reports that
the United States is forbidding United Nations medical personnel
from investigating reports of radiation poisoning near al Tuwaitha.

June 24, 2003: India and China sign a trade agreement. India officially
recognized China's sovereignty over Tibet.

June 24, 2003: Italian police arrest Gallarate mosque Imam
Mohamed el Mahfoudi and five Tunisian immigrants on charges
of assisting the Salafist Group for Call and Combat.

June 24, 2003: US forces arrest and jail an Iraqi high school student
for insulting them.

June 24, 2003: Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post reports that
New York Times reporter Judith Miller pinned a medal onto
Mobile Team Alpha Chief Warrant Officer Gonzalez's uniform during
an official military ceremony.

June 25, 2003: Federal judge Gilbert S. Merritt reports receiving
a document claiming that Iraqi envoy to Pakistan Abid al Karim Muhamed Aswod
is "responsible for the coordination of activities with the
Osama bin Laden group" and signed by Uday Hussein, Saddam's son.

June 25, 2003: A US soldier is killed in Afghanistan near Gardez.

June 25, 2003: Two US soldiers are captured with their vehicle and equipment
and killed near Balad, Iraq.

June 25, 2003: The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports
that the new US-controlled Iraqi army "was orignially entitled
the New Iraqi Corps, whose initials in Arabic produce a colourful
synonym for fornication."

June 25, 2003: Major Harry Schmidt, who bombed Canadian forces in Afghanistan
against direct orders to hold fire, refuses the Air Force's offer
of an administrative hearing and demands to be court-martialled.

June 25, 2003: Ted Bridis and John Solomon of the Associated Press
report that "within days of President Bush taking office in January 2001,
his top terrorism expert on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke,
urged National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to resume the drone flights
[cancelled due to weather conditions and planned for resumption in March
to track down bin Laden...At a White House meeting of Bush's
national security principals on Sept. 4, 2001, senior officials discussed
several ideas, including use of the drones, as they finalized a plan
to accelerate efforts to go after al-Qaida amid signs of a growing threat
of a domestic attack."

June 25, 2003: The Army signs a $471 million contract with Microsoft
to pay for software, much of which will already be installed on 494,000
desktop computer systems the Army is buying. 

June 25, 2003: The Washington Post reports that "The Bush administration's
top Medicare accountant has calculated how millions of senior citizens 
ould be affected by bringing private managed care into the program,
but the administration won't release the information."

June 25, 2003: Joshua Micah Marshall writes that "under George W. Bush,
the pundits who had no trouble calling Bill Clinton a liar have suddenly
decided lying is a very subtle, hard-to-define, complex matter...Last
January, in his State of the Union Address, President Bush told
the American people that Iraq had recently tried to purchase uranium
from Niger. Later, of course, we discovered that the documents in question
were forgeries -- a low-budget hoax...Condi Rice conceded that the documents
were fraudulent but told Tim Russert that the White House hadn't known
before the speech. 'Maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the Agency,
but no one in our circles knew'...But Rice wouldn't have had to look
too far down into the 'bowels of the Agency' since just about everyone
in the intelligence community -- and at least some people on her own
National Security Council staff -- had known the documents were phonies
for almost a year. Vice President Cheney had first asked the CIA to look
into the matter. And in February 2002 the CIA sent an as-yet-unnamed
former US Ambassador [Joseph Wilson] to Niger back to the country
to investigate. His report back was unambiguous: the story was bogus.
The White House first claimed that the CIA just hadn't told them about
its findings. But in the last several weeks lots of people from the
national security and intelligence apparatus have been coming forward
to say that's just not true...[Nick Kristof's] told him that...'lower
C.I.A. officials did tell both the vice president's office and
National Security Council staff members'...A recently retired
I&R [Bureau of Intelligence and Research] staffer, Greg Thielmann,
told Kristof he was 'quite confident' that that judgment was passed
all the way to the top of the State Department -- presumably to Colin Powell.
Then last week in The New Republic, the unidentified former ambassador
to Niger confirmed to authors Spencer Ackerman and John Judis that
the CIA had in fact sent his report to the vice president's office.
'They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie,' he told the
magazine...On June 19th, NPR's Tom Gjelten added yet another piece to
the puzzle. Apparently the intelligence folks even made their concerns
known during the writing of the speech."

June 25, 2003, Unrelated: Santa Rosa Junior College political science teacher
Michael Ballou assigns students to write an e-mail to an elected official
which says "Kill the President". Ballou says this is intended to
"instill a sense of fear so they would have a better sense of why
more people don't participate in the political process...knowing your
e-mail could be tapped and your phone listened to, you get a wave of fear
over you and you realize we're actually afraid of our own government",
and that "I have used this exercise for a long time and have never
had a problem".

June 26, 2003: Cable News Network reports that the US has found
"parts needed to develop a [nuclear] bomb program" buried behind the house
of scientist Mahdi Obeidi. The report states that the material was buried
around the time of the 1991 war and that Obeidi was never asked afterwards
to restart Iraq's nuclear weapons program. John Lumpkin of the
Associated Press reports that "Assembled, the components would not be useful
in making much uranium."

June 26, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appoints Paul Wolfowitz
the chief justice of military tribunals.

June 26, 2003: Former Central Intelligence Agency analyst Ray McGovern.
says that "the CIA at its best is the one place in Washington that
a President can turn to for an unvarnished truthful answer to
a delicate policy problem...We could tell it like it was and have
career protection for doing that. In other words, that's what our
job was...then you watch what is going on today, it is disturbing
in the extreme...A lot of it has to do with who is Director. In the
best days, under Colby for example, or John McCone, we had very clear
instructions. I myself, junior as I was in those days, would go up
against Henry Kissinger and tell it like we thought it was...So to watch
what is going on now, and to see George Tenet...give up and shade
the intelligence and cave in when his analysts have been slogging
through the muck for a year and a half trying to tell it like it is,
that is very demoralizing, and actually very infuriating...here
was an agency that was created expressly to prevent another
Pearl Harbor...Harry Truman was hell-bent on making sure that,
if there were little pieces of information spread around the government,
that they all came to one central intelligence agency...So here is
September 11...and where were the pieces? They were scattered all around
the government, just like they were before Pearl Harbor. For George Bush
to go out to CIA headquarters and put his arm around George Tenet
and tell the world that we have the best intelligence services in
the world, this really called for some analysis, if you will. My analysis
is that George Bush had no option but to keep George Tenet on as Director,
because George Tenet had warned Bush repeatedly, for months and months
before September 11, that something very bad was about to happen.
On August 6, the title of the briefing was, "Bin Laden Determined
to Strike in the US," and that briefing had the word "Hijacking"
in it...Tenet knows too much about what Bush knew, and Bush didn't know
what to do about it. That's the bottom line for me. Bush was well-briefed.
Before he went off to Texas to chop wood for a month like Reagan did
in California, he was told all these things. He didn't even have
the presence of mind to convene his National Security Council, and say,
'OK guys, we have all these reports, what are we going to do about it?'
He just went off to chop wood...You have Condoleezza Rice. She knows a lot
about Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but she has no idea about
terrorism. She had this terrorism dossier that Clinton NSC director
Sandy Berger left behind, and by her own admission she didn't get to it.
'It was still on my desk when September 11 happened,' she said. They
didn't take this thing seriously.

June 26, 2003: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist says that "I'm not sure"
that the threat of weapons of mass destruction was "the major reason
we went to war" with Iraq.

June 26, 2003: The New York Times reports that the 400 richest taxpayers
have paid less than 30% of their income in taxes during the past eight years,
and that their tax rate has been level around 22% between 1998 and 2000.

June 26, 2003, Unrelated: The Supreme Court declares 6-3 that laws against
homosexuality are illegal. Dissenting Justices Scalia, Rhenquist, and Thomas
write that "the Court has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual
agenda...the Court has taken sides in the culture war".

June 26, 2003, Unrelated: The Supreme Court declares it illegal to
extend the statute of limitations, defining the period of time during which
one may be arrested for a suspected crime, for crimes that have already
been committed, as this is a violation of the Constitution's ex post facto
rule against criminizing a past act that was legal when it was done.
The vote was 5-4, with Kennedy, Rhenquist, Scalia, and Thomas dissenting.

June 26, 2003, Unrelated: The Supreme Court, on a 3-3 vote, refuses
to consider Nike shoe corporation's appeal of a 4-3 ruling by the
California Supreme Court that commercial fraud is not always
Constitutionally protected free speech. Justices for considering the
appeal were Breyer, O'Connor, and Kennedy, and Justices rejecting the appeal
were Stevens, Ginsburg, and Souter, while Rhenquist, Scalia, and Thomas
gave no opinion.

June 26, 2003, Unrelated: Former Senator Strom Thurmond, the longest-serving
Senator in US history and also noted for performing the longest filibuster
in US history, dies at the age of 100.

June 26, 2003, Unrelated: Noah Shachtman reports that the
International Peace Operations Association mercenary consortium
has offered to fight for the United Nations in the Democratic Republic
of Congo in exchange for $200 million. So far, the UN has not been able
to rally more than 1,400 troops from member nations to stop genocide
that has killed 4.5 million people over the past few years.

June 2003: The Central Intelligence Agency kidnaps five suspected al Qaeda
members from Malawi after a judge refuses to allow their extradition
to the United States and orders the government to charge or release them.
News reports state that Malawi's government was complicit in the transfer.

June 2003: The Los Angeles Times reports that Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld has proposed creating a United States version
of the French Foreign Legion which would be used for policing
conquered regions and operate outside the control of the United Nations
and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

June 2003: Laos arrests Belgian journalist Thierry Falise, French cameraman
Vincent Reynaud, and United States citizen Naw Karl Mua on charges of
being rebel soldiers. Laos refuses the European consulates access to
the detained and sentences them to 15 years of prison for obstruction
of justice and possession of firearms, but releases them in July.

June 2003: The Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research
issues a report promoting oil drilling to save forests from clearcutting
and thus help the environment, concluding that effort put into mining
the natural resource of oil is effort that is not put into mining the
natural resource of lumber. The report's author, Sven Wunder, is
a well known environmentalist published in many left-wing journals.

June 2003, Unrelated: A wildfire in Arizona destroys the mountain village
of Summerhaven.

June 27, 2003: British Broadcasting Corporation director Richard Sambrook
reports that "Number 10 [the Prime Minster's residence] tried to intimidate
the BBC in its reporting of events leading up to the war and during
the course of the war itself."

June 27, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denies that there is
any guerilla war or coordinated resistance against United States forces
in Iraq, blaming the deaths of over 20 US soldiers on random acts of violence
by the 100,000 people who were released from Iraqi prisons.

June 27, 2003: Secretary of State Colin Powell says that the reason
no biological or chemical weapons material was detected in two Iraqi
trucks could only be because "one, they hadn't been used yet to develop
toxins; or, secondly, they had been sterilized", ignoring the British
conclusion that the trucks were used to produce simple hydrogen gas
for artillery balloons. 

June 27, 2003: The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests seven people
suspected of being members of Lashkar e-Taiba.

June 27, 2003: The European Commission rejects a proposal to declare
Islamic Resistance a terrorist group.

June 27, 2003: Bob Somerby reports that Meet The Press host Tim Russert
had criticized Democratic Presidential Candidate Howard Dean for
having "no sense of the military" in guessing that the number of soldiers
in the US military was "between one and two million" instead of knowing
it was 1.4 million, misstating the number of forces in Iraq as 
"in the neighbourhood of 135,000" instead of the correct 146,000,
and saying that he would "acquire military advisors who will tell you
these things", while in 1999 Russert did not criticize Texas Governor
George W. Bush in an interview in which Bush admitted not knowing
the number of nuclear missiles in the military or the number allowed
by the START 2 treaty under consideration, and to not knowing anything
about Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

June 27, 2003, Unrelated: Communist forces attack a Philippine army
base in Eastern Visayas, killing 16 soldiers and a civilian.

June 28, 2003: British Fisheries Minister Ben Bradshaw condemns
the British Broadcasting Corporation for reporting that Prime Minister
Tony Blair had lied to Parliament about Iraq's threat to Britain,
and says that "to accuse the government of a smokescreen by challenging
the integrity of BBC journalism is astonishing".

June 28, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accuses Syria of
responsibility for the US attack on an Iraqi refugee convoy in Syria
and a nearby Syrian border patrol, and tells news reporters that
"we don't discuss the rules of engagement...borders are not always
distinct in life".

June 28, 2003: Cable News Network reports that Mahdi Obeidi had
been telling United States forces about the nuclear weapons production
equipment at his home since the US entered Baghdad in April, and the
US had not been interested until the recent decision to hold
an armed raid on his house and jail him. The reports also cites
Obeidi as claiming the Central Intelligence Agency is reneging on
an offer to protect him and his family.

June 28, 2003: Riots break out in Malawi after police attack a march
protesting the illegal transfer of five Muslims to the United States.

June 28, 2003, Unrelated: The United Nations calls for a peacekeeping force
to be sent to Liberia.

June 2003: Time Magazine reports that Bush did not know who was
in charge of the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
reporting that "Turning to his Baghdad proconsul, Paul Bremer,
Bush asked, 'Are you in charge of finding WMD?' Bremer said no,
he was not. Bush then put the same question to his military commander,
General Tommy Franks. But Franks said it wasn't his job either.
A little exasperated, Bush asked, So who is in charge of finding WMD?
After aides conferred for a moment, someone volunteered the name of
Stephen Cambone, a little-known deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, back
in Washington. Pause. 'Who?' Bush asked."

June 2003: Iran arrests over 4,000 people for protesting against
the Guardian Council.

June 2003: At the annual dinner of the American Radio and Television
Correspondents Association, Vice President Cheney praises the media
for supporting the invasion of Iraq.

June 2003: British Broadcasting Corporation reporter Justin Webb
writes "Are American journalists simply spineless? Do they toe the line
because they love the President? or because their employers do?"

June 2003: Fresno City Council Member Jerry Duncan says he wishes
he had a radioactive "dirty bomb" to kill all liberals in Fresno, 
and City County Member Brian Calhoun jokes about ordering the police
to kill members of the Human Relations Commission.

June 2003, Unrelated: Oxford University professor Andrew Wilkie
establishes a policy of rejecting all applicants from Israel,
claiming that being an Israeli Jew makes the applicant a racist
and that Oxford will hence not "accept or condone conduct that
appears to, or does, discriminate against anyone on grounds
of ethnicity or nationality, whether directly or indirectly".

June 30, 2003: William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the 
Sydney Morning Herald report that the United States is forbidding
municipal elections in Iraq.

June 30, 2003: The al Hassan mosque in Falluja, Iraq, explodes,
killing the Imam and four others. Locals accuse the United States
of causing the blast. The United States says "The explosion was
apparently related to a bomb manufacturing class that was being taught
inside the mosque".

June 30, 2003: Annonuces that "we are laying the groundwork for
a national campaign, a national campaign that I believe will result
in a great victory in November 2002". The Associated Press reports
that this misstatement was appluaded without laughter.

June 30, 2003: The Army Times reports that Bush has lobbied Congress
to repeal raises in soldiers' pay and the gratuity paid to the families
of soldiers killed on duty.

June 30, 2003: The Department of Labor stops collecting data on 
repetitive stress injuries such as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome,
claiming that such information is not "useful to identifying
possible causes or methods to prevent injury".

June 30, 2003: Guy Gugliotta and Eric Pianin of The Washington Post
report that "The Environmental Protection Agency for months has withheld
key findings of its analysis showing that a Senate plan to combat
air pollution would be more effective in reducing harmful pollutants
-- and only marginally more expensive -- than would President Bush's
Clear Skies initiative for power plant emissions."


July 1, 2003: The United States ends foreign aid to 35 countries
that have refused to grant US soldiers immunity from prosecution
for war crimes.

July 1, 2003: The University of Maryland Program on International
Policy Attitudes reports the results of a poll showing that
32% of respondents falsely believe Bush was "being fully truthful"
about Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological programs and capabilities
while only 10% noticed Bush was "presenting evidence they knew
was false"; 39% falsely believe Bush was "being fully truthful"
in accusing Iraq of being behind the September 11 terrorist attacks
while only 10% noticed Bush was lying and 25% did not notice that
Bush had "implied" (actually, specifically stated in a written report
to Congress) this responsibility; 61% falsely believe that "Iraq gave
substantial support to al Qaeda", including 25% who falsely believe
that "Iraq was directly involved in carrying out the September 11th
attacks"; 23% falsely believe that such weapons have been found in Iraq,
including 40% of Republicans who claim to have been following the
news closely; 52% falsely believe "the United States has found clear
evidence in Iraq that Saddam was working closely with the al-Qaida
terrorist organization", including 78% of Republicans who claim
to have followed the news closely; 64% believe the United Nations
should set up Iraq's new government while 31% believe the United States
should; 25% falsely believe the majority of people in the world supported
the invasion of Iraq; and non-partisan voters were more likely than
the average sample to be critical of Bush, the intelligence services,
and the war's conduct.

July 1, 2003: Eric Boehlert of Salon Magazine writes that "Many
journalists...seem less interested in being the watchdog than in
assuring Americans that Bush hasn't lied about central issues
like war and peace. Instead, he's simply exaggerated. It's a curious
position. During the 2000 presidential campaign, the press couldn't
stop writing, investigating and carrying on about Al Gore's alleged
exaggerations regarding old movies, canoe trips, and classroom seating
inside a Sarasota school...journalists turned exaggerations into the
pressing issue during the closing weeks of the campaign, as pundits
argued that Gore's embellishments all but disqualified him from serving
as president....Andrew Sullivan last week wrote that charges against
Bush and his crusade against still-missing WMD 'ultimately amounts
to an argument that the administration exaggerated." The clear implication
is that exaggerations are not serious matters that warrant serious
attention. Which is odd, because during the closing days of the 2000 run,
Sullivan, writing in the Sunday Times of London, listed 'exaggerations'
to be among Gore's most damning traits...A recent Washington Post editorial
addressing the fruitless hunt for WMD noted matter-of-factly, 'While the
Bush administration may have publicly exaggerated or distorted parts
of its case, much of what it said reflected a broad international
consensus'... Is this the same Washington Post that, one month
before the 2000 election, ran a Page One piece exploring Gore's
exaggerations?...Or look at the June 22 New York Times Week in Review
essay, 'Bush May Have Exaggerated, but Did He Lie?'... In that piece
the Times assured readers: "A review of the president's public statements
found little that could lead to a conclusion that the president actually
lied" about WMD or his tax plan...Yet a few paragraphs later, the newspaper
reported that Bush had claimed his tax-cut package would mean 'relief for
everyone who pays income taxes.' That's patently false; nearly 10 million
income tax payers will get no relief. Was that a lie, something intended
to create a falsehood? The Times makes no judgment but offers a generous
observation instead: 'If [Bush] had said 'almost all,' it would have been
accurate.'"

July 2003: Calls on disgrunted Iraqi civilians to attack United States
forces, saying "bring 'em on!".

July 2003: Promises to send troops to secure Liberia if Liberian President
Charles Taylor resigns. Taylor agrees, and requests the troops be sent
quickly. A week later, Taylor again requests the troops be sent.

July 2003: The stock market records a 15% increase in the past 3 months,
one of the best rallies ever. The unemployment rate rises to 6.4%.

July 2003: Talk show host Roxanne Cordonier accuses Clear Channel owned
radio station WMYI of firing her for not supporting the invasion of Iraq.

July 2003, Unrelated: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi says that
German Member of Parliament Martin Schulz would make a good Nazi
death camp guard after Schulz suggests that Berlusconi's direct ownership
of the Italian news media monopoly might lead to biased portrayals
of the Prime Minster. Berlusconi then publicly denounces news reports
that he had apologised (following an apology by his spokesman).

July 2, 2003: Says that the United States' intelligence on Iraq's
biological, nuclear, and chemcial weapons programs is "the same intelligence"
that existed in 1998 before a coordinated airstrike of all of Iraq's
suspected biological, nuclear, and chemical weapons research, production,
and storage facilities.

July 3, 2003: Tells newsmen to turn their television cameras off
while he is playing golf.

July 3, 2003: Owais Tohid of the Christian Science Monitor
reports that Afghan policemen are turning to burglary and robbery
due to their low pay, citing Afghan deputy interior minister Hilaluddin Hilal
as saying "Donor countries are not releasing required funds so
we cannot afford to give policemen their salaries".

July 3, 2003: Polish Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz says that
"we have never hidden our desire for Polish oil companies to finally
have access to sources of commodities...[access to Iraqi oil] is our
ultimate objective".

July 3, 2003: Walter Pincus of the Washington Post reports that
"preliminary findings of a CIA internal review panel" have found
that the United States had no information on Iraq's weapons
production systems, and so some intelligence officials simply used
data from before the 1998 bombing of Iraq's weapons production systems
and assumed that these systems were fully operational for the intervening
five years.

July 3, 2003: The Economist condemns Bush as "Red George",
the "most profligate president since the Vietnam war", and writes
that " the Republicans are mighty shrewd when it comes to short-term
political manoeuvring" but "they are almost completely indifferent
to the basic principles of sound finance".

July 3, 2003: Bob Somerby reports that New York Times reporter
Katharine Seeyle, in reporting on Tim Russert's interview of Howard Dean,
"pretended that Dean had 'sidestepped' issues where he actually
gave quite detailed replies...readers weren't told what Dean had said,
only what Seelye thought of his answers." and that "Dean gives a perfectly
accurate estimate of the number of troops in Iraq. Nine days later,
readers of [Mark Barabak's column in] the Los Angeles Times are told
that he made an 'egregrious' error -- and strangely, they aren't provided
the numbers!...the media elite have now made a decision -- they just
don't like Howard Dean. He hasn't given them any free doughnuts,
and he doesn't keep saying how smart they all are. The wages of this
have come clear."

July 3, 2003: San Francisco Chronicle columnist John Carrol writes
"I've been thinking more about that 'culture war' that U.S. Supreme Court
Justice Antonin Scalia and a whole slew of conservative pundits have been
nattering about. As I said a few days ago, it's not so much a war as
a siege. They started it, we didn't. There have been no laws passed
requiring people to engage in homosexual acts, dance naked or write songs
with suggestive lyrics. There have never been mandatory abortions for
all women; there have never been legal injunctions to refrain from prayer.
You can believe in the Ten Commandments or not believe in the
Ten Commandments; your choice. No government agency or private business
has ever required people to smoke marijuana as a condition of employment.
We used to have another name for 'culture war.' It used to be called
'being different.'"

July 3, 2003, Unrelated: Algeria expels all foreign journalists.

July 4, 2003: Gives a "press conference" in which the newsmen do not
ask any questions and applaud every one of his statements.

July 4, 2003: United States forces capture 11 Turkish special forces
soldiers in northen Iraq. The soldiers are released two days later.

July 4, 2003: A mosque in Quetta is bombed, killing 53. Pakistan
imposes martial law in the city and fires the chief of police.

July 4, 2003: United States forces kill 11 guerillas near Balad, Iraq.

July 4, 2003: A United States base near Balad is hit by mortar fire,
wounding over a dozen soldiers.

July 4, 2003: Hwang Yangjop, former advisor to North Korean dictator
Kim Jong Il, says that North Korea had already developed nuclear weapons
at the time of the 1994 treaty.

July 4, 2003, Unrelated: Four inmates escape from a jail run by
Management Training Corporation. The corporation does not notify police,
who only learn of the escape when one of the escapees appears at a hospital
later in the day.

July 5, 2003, Unrelated: A music concert in Moscow is bombed, killing 15.

July 5, 2003: An Iraqi police station is bombed during a graduation
ceremony for Iraqi police who have completed United States training,
killing 7.

July 5, 2003: Hugh MacKay of The Age accuses Bush of planning the
extinction of all mankind, writing that "Somehow, Bush manages to balance
his reputation as the most belligerent president the US has ever produced
with his claim to be a born-again Christian. Such a cocktail of military
might and religious fundamentalism is potentially lethal...Will we, one day,
learn of plans for massive thermonuclear devices, mounted on orbiting
launch platforms, capable of devastating the entire planet?...You can
imagine a Bush clone of the future, addressing the world via an international
TV hook-up: 'We've run out of patience. Today's the day. The Christians
will go straight to heaven - the rest of you will just have to take
your chances. Goodbye, and God bless.'"

July 5, 2003, Unrelated: Somali provincial leaders agree to form
a national Parliament.

July 6, 2003: John Dean writes that "Before asking Congress for
a joint resolution authorizing the use of U.S. military forces in Iraq,
he [Bush] made a number of unequivocal statements about the reason
the United States needed to pursue the most radical actions any nation
can undertake -- acts of war against another nation. Now it is clear
that many of his statements appear to be false...On several occasions,
students asked me the following question: Should they believe the
President of the United States?..I assured the students that these
statements had all been carefully considered and crafted. Presidential
statements are the result of a process, not a moment's though...Second,
I explained that -- at least in every White House and administration
with which I was familiar, from Truman to Clinton -- statements
with national security implications were the most carefully considered
of all...Third, I pointed out to the students, these statements
are typically corrected rapidly if they are later found to be false.
And in this case, far from backpedaling from the President's more extreme
claims, Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer had actually, at times,
been even more emphatic than the President had...Finally, I explained
to the students that the political risk was so great that, to me,
it was inconceivable that Bush would make these statements if he didn't
have damn solid intelligence to back him up...no weapons of mass destruction
have been found, and given Bush's statements, they should not have been
very hard to find -- for they existed in large quantities, 'thousands
of tons' of chemical weapons alone. Moreover, according to the statements,
telltale facilities, groups of scientists who could testify,
and production equipment also existed. So where is all that?...There are
two main possibilities. One, that something is seriously wrong within
the Bush White House's national security operations. That seems difficult
to believe. The other is that the president has deliberately misled
the nation, and the world."

July 7, 2003: General Tommy Franks resigns his command and appoints
General John Abizaid in his stead as Chief of Staff.

July 7, 2003: Britain's Foreign Affairs Committee concludes
that Prime Minister Tony Blair did not exaggerate in making claims
that Britain had conclusive proof Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The Committee also condemns a British Broadcasting report that claimed
press secretary Alastair Campbell had inserted into a major
intelligence briefing the claim that Iraq could deploy such weapons
in 45 minutes, and says that this claim "did not warrant the prominence"
the BBC thought it did.

July 7, 2003: Microsoft National Broadcasting Corporation fires
talk show host Michael Savage for telling a homosexual guest
to "get AIDS and die, you pig...go eat a sausage and choke on it".
Salem Communications Corporation drops Savage's show from its four
radio station.

July 7, 2003: Worldcom is fined $500 million for accounting fraud,
reduced from an earlier fine of $1.5 billion.

July 7, 2003: The British Broadcasting Corporation reports that
the United States has seized control over a murder investigation
in Puerto Rico so that the suspect can be executed when found guilty.
Puerto Rico's Constitution has forbidden execution since 1929.

July 7, 2003: Kuwaiti liberal candidates lose 11 Parliament seats
in elections.

July 7, 2003: Rush Limbaugh says that "if you would have told me
in the 80s or 90s that a Republican in the White House with a Republican
majority in the House and Senate would pass the largest spending program
in 40 years, I wouldn't have believed it."

July 8, 2003: Gives a speech against the evils of slavery while on
Goree Island, Senegal, where the government had arrested and imprisoned
the island's entire population to ensure his safety.

July 8, 2003: The Congressional commission investigating the United States'
intelligence related to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks reports
that the Department of Justice and Department of Defense are refusing
requests for information needed to conduct the investigation.

July 8, 2003: Bev Harris and C.D. Sludge of Scoop Media report that
"Bob Urosevich, CEO of Diebold Election Systems is also the founder
of ES&S, a competing voting machine company. Together these two
companies are responsible for tallying around 80% of votes cast
in the United States...At the county office, there is a 'host computer'
with a program on it called GEMS.  GEMS receives the incoming votes and 
stores them in a vote ledger. But then, we found, it makes another
set of books with a copy of what is in vote ledger 1. And at the same time,
it makes yet a third vote ledger with another copy. The Elections Supervisor
never sees these three sets of books...the Election summary (totals,
county wide) come from the vote ledger 2...Anyone who downloaded
and installed GEMS can bypass the passwords in elections...we were able
to add and delete from the audit without leaving a trace...when using
[Microsoft] Access to adjust the vote tallies we found that tampering
never made it to the audit log at all. A curious plug-in was found
in the GEMS program, called PE Explorer. Presumably, this is used to do
security checks. Another function, though, is to change the date
and time stamp...During the 2002 Mid-term there were numerous reports
of unusual happenings in counties throughout the United States. Among
the phenomena reported were voting numbers suddenly fluctuating
in the middle of the counting process, something you might expect
to see if the backdoor identified above were used clumsily...November 2002,
Baldwin County, Alabama - No one at the voting company can explain
the mystery votes that changed after polling places had closed, flipping
the election from the Democratic winner to a Republican in the Alabama
governor's race...Baldwin County results showed that Democrat Don Siegelman
earned enough votes to win the state of Alabama. All the observers went home.
The next morning, however, 6,300 of Siegelman's votes inexplicably
had disappeared, and the election was handed to Republican Bob Riley.
A recount was requested, but denied."

July 8, 2003: Rioters break into the Pakistani embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan
following reports of Pakistani army movements into Afghanistan.

July 8, 2003: Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas
resigns as deputy chairman of Fatah. 

July 8, 2003: Dr. Nawalaal Mutawalli, director of Iraq's National Museum,
reports that 13,000 objects are missing from the museum's stores,
including 47 objects from the exhibition room.

July 8, 2003: Florida Governor Jeb Bush accuses the state Senate's Republicans
of "jeopardizing access to health care" by not having already restricted
lawsuits against incompetent doctors who injure or kill their patients.

July 9, 2003: Condemns reports that he had claimed Iraq was trying to
buy uranium from Niger as "a lot of attempts to rewrite history".

July 9, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfels says that
"The United States did not choose war. Saddam Hussein did."

July 9, 2003: The Department of Defense increases its estimate
of the cost of maintaining security in Iraq to $3.9 billion per month,
not including recontruction costs, from $2 billion per month.

July 9, 2003: Daniel McGrory of the Times reports that "in recent weeks
there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children
being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off
the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the
capital...Each morning at the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad there is
a silent line of Iraqis queuing to find out where a relative might be.
The American authorities have said that they will not inform the Red Cross
about detainees until 21 days after they have been arrested. The
International Committee of the Red Cross has been allowed to see some
of the prisoners, but says that it cannot even begin to guess at
the numbers detained." The report notes that prisoners are not allowed
access to lawyers or relatives.

July 9, 2003: Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council member
Isam al Khafaji resigns, writing that "my role with the reconstruction
council was sliding from what I had originally envisioned -- working
with allies in a democratic fashion -- to collaborating with occupying
forces... there seemed to be no interest on the part of the coalition
in involving Iraqis as advisers on the future of their country...it seems
like each and every decision must go back to Washington, and we are
the victims of indecision. Iraq is now in almost total chaos...People
cannot understand why a superpower that can amass all that military might
can't get the electricity turned back on."



July 9, 2003: The Department of Homeland Security announces
that it will conduct a domestic law enforcement campaign against
child molesters.

July 9, 2003: White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer says that
"the burden is on those people who think he [Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein]
didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are."

July 9, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says that there
was no "dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons
of mass destruction".

July 9, 2003: The British Broadcasting Corporation reports
that an anonymous Central Intelligence Agency had told the White House
that the story about Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger was false
in March 2002.

July 9, 2003: Two U.S. soldiers are killed by Iraqi forces near Mahmudiyah
and Tikrit, and one commits suicide near Balad. 400 rocket-propelled grenades
are captured between Ramadi and Asad.

July 9, 2003: The State Department grants $20 million to the Palestinian
Authority.

July 9, 2003: A man in Oak Lawn, Chicago, is arrested on suspicion
of being an Iraqi spy.

July 10, 2003: Columbia Broadcast System reports that "Bush Knew
Iraq Info Was False" before his State of the Union address,
having been told by the Central Intelligence Agency.

July 10, 2003: Forbes Magazine reports that "The U.S. Chamber of Commerce
has set an agenda to vote out state court judges supported by trial lawyers,
labor unions and the Democratic Party and install new judges sympathetic
to insurance companies, multinational corporations and the Republican Party.
Since 2000 the chamber has won 21 of 24 judicial elections and 11 state
attorney general races that it has supported".

July 11, 2003: Cancels funding for the Teach For America educational program
which he had cited and promised to increase funding for in his
State of the Union address in 2002.

July 11, 2003: Nigeria razes the poor districts of Abuja to make the
town appear prosperous for Bush's visit. President Ousegun Obasanjo
personally ordered the destruction.

July 11, 2003: National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice says that
the Central Intelligence Agency did not dispute Bush's claim that Iraq
was trying to buy uranium from Niger. Central Intelligence Agency
Director George Tenet admits responsibility for the statement.

July 11, 2003: The World Trade Organization rules that Bush's steel tariffs
are illegal and grants the European Union permission to enact $2.2 billion
in retaliatory tariffs.

July 11, 2003: Gulf Daily News reports that the Army Corps of Engineers
has rescinded a contract granted to Halliburton and has issued public bids.

July 2003: The Commerce Department establishes a tariff on catfish imports
from Vietnam.

July 2003: Former State Department intelligence analyst Greg Thielmann
says that "There was no significant pattern of cooperation between
Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist operation", Senator Bob Graham says
"There was scant evidence there had been any other contacts between
Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden", a "former Bush administration
intelligence official" says "the relationships that were plotted were
episodic, not continuous", and former National Intellience Council
Chairman Gregory Trevorton says "lots of Americans believe that there
was a link between Iraq and al-Qaida despite the lack of intelligence
evidence on that score, according to Matt Kelley of the Associated Press.

July 2003: The Islam in Europe conference held in Grenada, Spain,
calls on all Muslism to overthrow capitalism and return to the
gold standard.

July 2003: Liberian rebels accuse Bush of backing President Charles Taylor,
as promised US forces have not yet arrived to enforce Taylor's resignation,
and threaten to attack US forces when they do arrive.

July 2003: The White House begins requiring petitioners to first state
whether they agree with Bush's political opinions so that petitions
from Bush's opponents can more easily be sorted and disregarded.

July 2003: Voice of America broadcasts into Iran are jammed. The United States
accuses Cuba of jamming the broadcasts.

July 2003: Watauga County, North Carolina District Attorney Jerry Wilson
charges a man with two counts of "unlawful manufacture of a nuclear or
chemical weapon of mass destruction" for producing methamphetamine,
a recreational drug that generally doesn't kill. Country Sheriff Mark Shook
says of the charge "I love it...this really gives us something we can use".

July 12, 2003: United States forces withdraw from Falluja, Iraq.

July 12, 2003: The United States forms an Iraqi parliament.
Governor Paul Bremer announces that the parliament will enact
"a major shift of capital from the value-destroying state sector
to private firms", and accuses "non-Iraqis" of being behind attacks
on US troops. 

July 12, 2003: Liberian President Charles Taylor condemns Bush
for not sending the promised soldiers to keep peace in the country.

July 12, 2003: Microsoft National Broadcast Company reports that
Central Intelligence Director George Tenet had informed
Deputy National Security Advisor Steven Hadley that the claim
of Iraq attempting to buy uranium from Niger was false in October,
before Bush repeated this claim in the State of the Union address.

July 12, 2003: Australian Prime Minister John Howard apologizes
for claiming that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger.

July 13, 2003: National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice announces 
that the claim of Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger was "indeed accurate"
but should not have been used in the speech because it was "raw intelligence"
that has not been refined.

July 13, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says of Bush's claim
that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger that "it's not known...that it
was inaccurate. In fact, people think it was technically accurate."

July 13, 2003: Senator Jay Rockefeller says that "I cannot believe
that Condi Rice... directly, from Africa, pointed the finger
at George Tenet, when she had known -- had to have known -- a year before
the State of the Union. The entire intelligence community has been
very skeptical about this from the very beginning, and she has
her own director of intelligence, she has her own Iraq and Africa
specialists, and it's just beyond me that she didn't know about this,
and that she has decided to make George Tenet the fall person.
I think it's dishonorable."

July 13, 2003: A car is bombed near a police station in Baghdad, Iraq,
killing one.

July 13, 2003: The United States forms an Iraqi national congress
consisting of
Iraqi National Accord founder Iyad Allawi,
Judge Dara Noor Alzin, human rights activist Ahmed al Barak,
Kurdistan Islamic Union Secretary General Salaheddine Bahaaeddin,
Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Massoud Barzani,
Turkmen feminist, teacher, and engineer Sondul Chapouk,
National Democratic Party leader Nasseer al Chaderchi,
Iraqi National Congress founder Ahmed Chalabi,
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution deputy leader Abdelaziz al Hakim,
Iraqi Islamic Party Secretary General and religious author Mohsen Abdel Hamid,
former diplomat Aquila al Hashimi,
Al Daawah Islamic Party spokesman Ibrahim al Jaafari,
regional trade minister and Assyriuan Democratic Movement member Younadem Kana,
hospital director and tribal leader Raja Habib al Khuzaai,
Basra deptuy Chief Justice and/or Governor (reports differ) Wael Abdul Latif,
writer and businessman Samir Shakir Mahmoud,
Communist Party Secretary Hamid Majib Moussa,
Hizballah member Abdel Karim Mahmud al Mohammedawi,
either Al Dawah party member Abdel Zahraa Othman Mohammed
or Al Dawah leader Ezzedine Salim (reports differ),
Kurdish Socialist Party founder Mahmoud Othman,
former Foreign Minister Adnan Pachachi,
human rights activist Mouwafak al Rabii,
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan founder Jalal Talabani,
preacher Mohammed Bahr al Uloum,
and tribal leader Ghazi Mashal Ajil al Yawer.
The council's first action is to declare April 9 a national holidy. 

July 13, 2003: Observer reporter Jason Burke, who has covered al Qaeda
and the Taliban for four years, writes that "al Qaeda comes from the
Arabic root qaf-ayn-dal. It can mean a base, such as a camp or a home
or a foundation. It can also mean a precept, rule, principle, maxim,
formula or method...Abdullah Azzam...a spiritual mentor of bin Laden,
used it to describe the role he envisaged...once the war in Afghanistan
was over. In 1987 he wrote: 'Every principle needs a vanguard to carry it
forward and [to] put up with heavy tasks and enormous sacrifices.
This vanguard constitutes the strong foundation (al qaeda al-sulbah)
for the expected society.'...claims of any links between Saddam and
al-Qaeda were based on a fundamental misconception of the nature
of modern Islamic militancy. They depended, largely, on the idea
that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born militant allegedly sheltered
by Baghdad, was close to bin Laden. Yet Western European intelligence
reports, compiled in 2003, reveal that his group was formed 'in opposition'
to al-Qaeda...over the decades Islamic activism has changed... the extremists
are no longer perceived as the 'lunatic fringe'. Instead they are seen as
the standard bearers. And their language is now the dominant discourse
in modern Islamic activism. Their debased, violent, nihilisitic,
anti-rational millenarianism has become the standard ideology aspired to
by angry young Muslim men. This is the genuine victory of bin Laden
and our greatest defeat in the 'war on terror'."

July 13, 2003: Glen Rangwala and Raymond Whitaker of the Independent
report "20 Lies About the War" and that "more lies are being told
in the aftermath", the initial lies being that "Iraq was responsible
for the 11 September attacks", "Iraq and al-Qa'ida were working together",
"Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa for a 'reconstituted' nuclear
weapons programme", "Iraq was trying to import aluminium tubes to develop
nuclear weapons", "Iraq still had vast stocks of chemical and biological
weapons from the first Gulf War", "Iraq retained up to 20 missiles which
could carry chemical or biological warheads, with a range which would
threaten British forces in Cyprus", "Saddam Hussein had the wherewithal
to develop smallpox", "US and British claims were supported by the
inspectors", "Previous weapons inspections had failed", "Iraq was obstructing
the inspectors", "Iraq could deploy its weapons of mass destruction
in 45 minutes", "The 'dodgy dossier'", "War would be easy", "Umm Qasr",
"Basra rebellion", "the 'rescue' of Private Jessica Lynch", "Troops would
face chemical and biological weapons", "Interrogation of scientists
would yield the location of WMD", "Iraq's oil money would go to Iraqis",
and "WMD were found".

July 13, 2003: Senator Bob Graham says that "There's been a pattern
in this administration, beginning with the development of the energy policy
in the first few weeks, running through environmental policy,
economic policy, and now Iraq and the war on terror, in which
the American people have not been let in to understand what is going on,
what the basis of decisions will be, and we end up having to go through
almost a grammar lesson of word-by-word assessment of what's been said
in order to understand what the leadership of this country is intending
to communicate...we've taken our focus off the major threat to the lives
of Americans in terms of foreign forces, and that is al-Qaeda and the other
international terrorist groups...We allowed al-Qaeda to regroup
and regenerate".

July 13, 2003: Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski
says about Iraq and unconventional weapons that "It's clear that
they weren't armed with these weapons. They didn't use them.
We defeated their army in the field. We have control over their arsenals.
We haven't found them...If they had them, and they were armed to the teeth
with them, why didn't they use them? If they didn't use them and hid them,
that means they were deterred. And how do you hide all of these hundreds
and hundreds of weapons with which they're armed?"

July 13, 2003: The New York Times reports that the percentage of teenagers
able to find summer jobs is at the lowest point in the 53-year history
of the government tracking the statistic.

July 13, 2003, Unrelated: Israel arrests a suspected member of
the Real Irish Republican Army who is accused of training
Palestinian Authority bomb makers. He turns out to be a different man
with the same name, and is expelled from the country anyway.

July 14, 2003: Says that "The larger point is and the fundamental question
is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program?", not limited to banned
or unconventional weapons, "And the answer is absolutely. And we gave him
a chance to allow the inspectors in and he wouldn't let them in."
In reality, Iraq allowed weapons inspectors and it was the United States
that refused to allow a second round of inspections after the inspectors
returned with their initial report.

July 14, 2003: Press Secretary Ari Fleischer condemns "this revisionist
notion" that the United States invaded Iraq over the threat of Iraq
producing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, calling such
notions "a bunch of bull".

July 14, 2003: Holds a conference with over 40 religious zealots
to attempt to dissuade them from their belief that peace between
Israel and the Arabs will delay their goal of the extinction of all mankind.

July 14, 2003: India publicly refuses to send soldiers to police Iraq.

July 14, 2003: Brian Ross of American Broadcasting Corporation reports
that the faked document claiming Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger
had been created in late 2001 by a low-ranking diplomat in Niger's
embassy in Italy, who sold it to the Italian intelligence services.

July 14, 2003: Anonymous "U.S. intelligence sources" report that France's
secret service made the fake Niger-Iraq uranium sale document and that
France simultaneously forbade British intelligence from allowing the
United States to have intelligence on Iraq's WMD material purchases.

July 14, 2003: USA Today reports that "some in the Bush administration
are arguing privately for a CIA director who will be unquestioningly
loyal to the White House as committees demand documents and call
witnesses... Officials in Vice President Cheney's office are angry
at Tenet because they believe the CIA leaked to reporters last week
that it had told White House officials -- before the State of the Union
address -- that allegations Iraq was trying to buy uranium were
probably bogus... Bush administration officials who were hawkish on war
in Iraq also have lingering resentment toward Tenet for his tendency
to be skeptical about the intelligence implicating Iraq."

July 14, 2003: Bush and Congressmen Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt,
and Dennis Kucinich fail to appear at the annual conference
of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.

July 14, 2003: Spinsanity reports that Bush has requested his promised
$15 billion to fight AIDS in Africa be reduced by a third.

July 14, 2003: Cable News Network host Robert Novak writes
that Joseph Wilson "never worked for the CIA, but his wife
is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior
administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him
to Niger to investigate". Two days later. David Korn of the Nation reports
that "if Wilson's wife is such a person -- and the CIA is unlikely to 
have many employees like her -- her career has been destroyed by the
Bush administration." Three days later, Time Magazine reports that Wilson's
wife merely "monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction",
citing "some government officials". A week later, New York Newsday
reports that she indeed worked undercover.

July 14, 2003: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity,
a group of ex-intelligence workers, publishes a letter to Bush
demanding that Vice President Dick Cheney resign, writing that
"There is just too much evidence that Ambassador Wilson was sent
to Niger at the behest of Vice President Cheney's office, and
that Wilson's findings were duly reported not only to that office
but to others as well. Equally important, it was Cheney who launched
(in a major speech on August 26, 2002) the concerted campaign to
persuade Congress and the American people that Saddam Hussein was about
to get his hands on nuclear weapons."

July 14, 2003: Columnist Glenn Reynolds condemns the Democratic Party
because "the Democrats didn't speak up when six competent translators
were fired because they were gay", ignoring speeches and columns from
several prominent pundits and politicians including Barney Frank,
Russ Feingold, John Edwards, Howard Dean, and Paul Begala. After Reynolds
is corrected, he condemns the Democratic Party for not pressing the
issue harder.

Jule 14, 2003, Unrelated: A van containing 15 kilos of depleted uranium
is stolen in Purfleet, Essex, England.

July 15, 2003: North Korea threatens to nuke Australia unless
Australia allows North Korea to sell nuclear weapons and ship them
overseas.

July 15, 2003: Bush's spokesman Scott McClellan says that tax cuts
played no part in the federal deficit. The Office of Management and Budget
has reported that the latest tax cut reduced government revenues
by $177 billion out of an expected $455 billion deficit.

July 15, 2003: Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder report
that the Central Intelligence Agency issued 35 pages of objections
to the Bush administration's claims that Syria is building
weapons of mass destruction, forcing a planned Congressional hearing's
delay to September.

July 15, 2003: Christian preacher Pat Robertson tells his followers
to pray that God coerces Supreme Court Justices John Paul Stevens,
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and a third justice to retire so that Bush
can appoint judges who will allow the jailing of homosexuals
and reestablish Christianity as the official federally enforced religion
of the United States. Robertson calls this campaign
"Operation Supreme Court Freedom".

July 15, 2003, Unrelated: Israel refuses to allow British Broadcasting
Corporation journalists to attend Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's
press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, accusing
the BBC of an anti-Israel bias.

July 16, 2003: The Senate votes 53-41 to allow Bush to spend money
earmarked for use in securing Iraq without stating what the money
is spent on.

July 16, 2003: Harris Whitbeck of Cable News Network reports that
a crowd had cheered for several minutes at the killing of a US soldier
near Baghdad.

July 16, 2003: La Republica reports that one of its reporters had
given the Niger document to British intelligence, and prints several
other faked documents that have not been publicly disclosed before.

July 16, 2003: Mathew Gross of Howard Dean's campaign notes that
the White House web site says "President Bush reviews the State of the Union
address line-by-line and word-by-word."

July 16, 2003: Liberian President Charles Taylor asks Bush to send
promised peacekeeping troops so he can resign without getting lynched.

July 16, 2003: The Washington Post reports that six states' Attorneys General,
all Republicans, had solicied campaign funds from corporations they were
investigating for criminal activity.

July 17, 2003: Biological weapons expert and former United Nations inspector
David Kelly, who is suspected of being behind the British Broadcasting
Corporation's reports that lies were inserted into the British government's
main brief on Iraq, is found dead two days after publicly denying that
he was the source of the BBC's reports.

July 17, 2003: In an interview with a Public Broadcast System
who evidently knew of the situation and led him on in questioning,
General Jay Garner admits that the State Department had created 
the Future of Iraq Project in 2002, led by Tom Warrick, to develop plans
for reconstructing Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime,
that the plans were not well received "in the Pentagon" and "portions of
the executive branch...not the president or anybody like that, but...people
in the executive branch" and the National Security Council, that
he requested Warrick for his reconstruction team and was refused.
The interview is posted on the Internet on October 9.

July 17, 2003: Judicial Watch receives documents from the Energy Task Force
dated March 2001 which detail Iraq's oil and gas fields and Iraq's business
with non-US companies. The documents also detail the same information
about Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and presumably other
countries.

July 17, 2003: The National Bureau of Economic Research reports
that the recession ended in November 2001.

July 17, 2003: The head of America's Second Harvest charity reports
that "last year's food bank donors are now this year's food bank clients".

July 17, 2003: Christian preacher Pat Robertson claims credit
for causing the end of the Soviet Union through his own personal
prayers to God.

July 17, 2003: Chris Nelson reports that National Security Council
member Robert G. Joseph added the claim of Iraq trying to buy uranium
from Niger to Bush's speech, and that National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Steven Hadley approved the claim.

July 17, 2003: The New York Times reports on Congress's review of
intelligence prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks
that "Nearly one entire section of the report, describing the actions
of foreign governments in advance of the attacks, has been cut from
the final report at the insistence of the intelligence agencies,
officials said."

July 17, 2003: Cable News Network reports that CIA Director George Tenet
did not read or clear the final draft of Bush's State of the Union address.

July 17, 2003: United Nations envoy Jacques Klein urges the Economic
Community of West African States to secure Liberia because the United States
is not willing to send peacekeepers until someone else's forces are
in place.

July 17, 2003: Mark Schultz of Creative Loafing magazine reports
being interrogated by FBI agents after he was reported to them for
reading a Weekly Planet article titled "Weapons of Mass Stupidity"
which criticized Fox News, and that the agents threatened "you may
have a problem" if Schultz did not comply with their investigation.

July 17, 2003: The White House press office notifies reporters that
American Broadcasting Corporation reporter Jeffrey Kofman is homosexual
and Canadian, after Kofman narrated a television segment on low troop morale.

July 17, 2003: Patrick Taylor notes that none of Saddam Hussein's body doubles
have been found, writing that "Bush and Blair managed to lose a baker's dozen
of Saddams. Lose one guy and that's bad luck, but losing this many is just
plain negligence."

July 17, 2003: Sky News suspends two journalists for arranging
the crew of the HMS Spendid to go through the motions of preparing
a cruise missile for launch and claiming that this was footage of
actual battle events.

July 17, 2003: Andrew Orlowski of the Register, a technology tabliod,
reports that House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner
illegally took $18,000 from the Recording Industry Association of America
to lobby Taiwan and Thaiand to support the RIAA's positions. The RIAA
says the trip was "so they [Asian countries] understand that this is
a unified message coming from all levels of the U.S. government".

July 17, 2003: Jim Lobe of the Asia Times reports that "it appears
increasingly clear that key officials and their allies outside the
administration decided to use the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,
as a pretext for going to war against Iraq within hours of the attacks
themselves...the principals appear to have included Pentagon chief
Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President
Dick Cheney and his national-security advisor, Lewis Libby, among
others in key posts in the National Security Council and the State
Department. Outside the administration, key figures included close friends
of both Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, including Richard Perle and former
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief James Woolsey - both members
of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB); Frank Gaffney, head of the
arms industry-funded Center for Security Policy; and William Kristol,
editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard and chairman of
the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), among others.

July 17, 2003: The Chicago Tribune refuses to print a Boondocks cartoon
which mocks Bush's "bring 'em on!" taunt by having Bush say "Is that the
best you can do? A few dead, a few injured? Big whup! Y'all shoot like
my blind, one-armed grandmother" and a newscaster say "The President then
informed the guerrilla fighters that they had 'betta bring it like it
ain't neva been brought!' and snapped his fingers twice".

July 17, 2003: Howard Goodman of the South Florida Sun Sentinel
reports that "After months of malarkey, major players in the
medical-malpractice debate curbed the spin...and let slip some admissions
that did serious harm to Gov. Jeb Bush's case for a $250,000 limit
on jury awards" after the state Senate threatened witnesses with perjury
charges if they lied, quoting Senator Ron Klein saying the result "was pretty
scary...people who had testified before us on previous occasions got up there
and told us different things" and noting that "the president of the state's
largest malpractice-insurance company said no, insurers didn't need a cap
on jury awards to be profitable. A state regulator said no, there hasn't
been an explosion of frivolous lawsuits. A state insurance regulator
surprised senators by saying he often depended on insurance companies'
information when deciding whether to raise rates."

July 18, 2003: United States forces seize 6,000 bombs and guns in
a series of raids in Iraq, and arrest 62 "regime leaders".

July 18, 2003: Bush releases part of an intelligence report which
states as a summary that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Africa,
but does not provide examples of specific events. White House officials
admit that neither Bush nor National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice
read the report.

July 18, 2003: An Afghan military vehicle is bombed 25 miles east of Khost,
killing eight soldiers.

July 18, 2003: Fox News talk show host John Gibson accuses journalist
Gregory Palast of arranging a murder.

July 18, 2003, Unrelated: Amnesty International condemns the United States
for executing children, noting that 13 of the 20 people executed for
crimes commited while children were executed in the United States. 

July 18, 2003: House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas
calls Capitol police and orders them to arrest and remove
Congressman Pete Stark, the sole Democrat in the voting chamber
at the time, so that the Republicans can vote for a procedural motion
that requires a unanimous vote to pass. After the police arrest
Democrats convening in a nearby library room but refuse to expel Stark,
Thomas calls for a vote on a motion which requires unanimous passage,
Stark votes against the motion, and Thomas announces that the motion
passed with a unanimous vote. Later, Thomas claims that he called
the police because Stark was trying to kill him, and Republican Congressman
Kevin Brady says that Stark could not "control either his emotions
or his bodily functions". A proposed House bill to condemn Thomas's
actions is defeated on a 170-143 vote. Many news reports deny that
the Democrats were arrested because they had been merely arrested
but not booked or jailed.

July 18, 2003: The Globe and Mail reports that a conference of
weapons inspectors in January 2001 had declared that Iraq had no
nuclear weapons program.

July 18, 2003: Rob Collier of the San Francisco Chronicle reports
that the Army is expelling soldiers who gripe about their situation.

July 18, 2003: Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Di Rita
says that "we'll get better" at securing conquered nations "as we
do it more often".

July 18, 2003: John Dean writes that "The African uranium matter is
merely indicative of larger problems, and troubling questions of
potential and widespread criminality when taking the nation to war.
It appears that not only the Niger uranium hoax, but most everything
else that Bush said about Saddam Hussein's weapons was false,
fabricated, exaggerated, or phony."

July 18, 2003: Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Gilmore
and his wife are kicked off a British Airways plane for wearing a button
with the words "Suspected Terrorist".

July 18, 2003: Liberian rebels renew fighting and enter the capitol Monrovia.
Bush had promised to send peacekeepers two weeks ago.

July 18, 2003: Seymour Hersh reports that Syria had previously been
very helpful in fighting al Qaeda, but that this help has been less
forthcoming since the Bush demanded Syria assist in the invasion of Iraq
as a condition of continuing the intelligence alliance and then threatened
to invade Syria when Syria refused.

July 19, 2003: Mexico arrests nine suspected members of Euskadi Ta Azkatasuna
terrorist movement.

July 19, 2003: Afghan General Rashid Dostum calls on regional governers
to disband their militias.

July 19, 2003, Unrelated: The British Broadcasting Corporation reports
that Russian schools are dropping the writings of anti-Soviet dissidents
from required reading lists.

July 19, 2003: The Asia Times reports that the United States is threatening
retaliation in "critical areas" against India for refusing to send soldiers
to police Iraq.

July 19, 2003: Palestinian Authority forces arrest and torture
Jenin mayor Haider Irsheid, accusing him of attempting to assassinate
Palestinian Authority soldiers.

July 20, 2003: United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan demands
the United States establish "a clear timetable" for leaving Iraq.

July 20, 2003: 2,000 Shiites protest in Najaf, Iraq after preacher
Moqtada al Sadr accuses United States forces of placing his house
under siege.

July 20, 2003: Two US soldiers are killed in Kurdish-controlled Iraq.

July 20, 2003: A US convoy is ambused in Afghanistan near Spin Boldak.
No casualties are reported, but the US reports that return fire
killed 24 attackers.

July 20, 2003: Former British cabinet minister Peter Mandelson
accuses the British Broadcasting Corporation of driving David Kelly
to suicide through the BBC's "obsession" of accusing Prime Minister Blair
of falsifying a dossier on Iraq. 

July 20, 2003, Unrelated: Iran cancels a planned visit by United Nations
envoy Ambeyi Ligabo.

July 2003: The Secret Service questions staff at the Los Angeles Times
over a cartoon by pro-Republican Party propaganda cartoonist
Michael Ramirez that portrays Bush being executed by "politics"
in the manner of a famous photograph of Vietnamese Police Chief
Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing without trial a Communist soldier
who had just killed the wife and children of one of his deputies.

July 2003: 1.6 million Californians sign a petition to fire Governor
Gray Davis. Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante schedules a special election
for October.

July 2003: Jonathan Alter of Newsweek reports that "The nonpartisan
Congressional Budget Office says that Bush's tax cuts have cost the Treasury
nearly three times as much as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
reconstruction after September 11 and homeland-security measures combined."

July 2003: Colin McMillan, whom Bush had appointed Secretary of the Navy,
is found shot to death. Police determine this to be a suicide.

July 2003: Senator Bob Graham says that the September 11, 2001 hijackers
"received...significant assistance from a foreign government which
further facilitated their ability to be so lethal" while they were
in the United States, and that Bush is declaring this information classified
"to protect the country or countries...providing direct assistance
to some of the hijackers".

July 2003: Three nuns are sentenced to two and a half years of prison
for obstructing the national defense by painting a cross on a missile silo.
This is less than the sentencing guidelines' recommended mininum sentence
of six years.

July 2003: Jeb Magruder says that President Richard Nixon personally ordered
Attorney General John Mitchell to send a team to break into the
Democratic Party's campaign headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in 1972.

July 2003, Unrelated: Italy's Department of Justice refuses to allow
a judicial tribunal to investigate accusations of crimes commited
by Mediaset, a corporation owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

July 2003, Unrelated: Pilot Point, Texas police threaten to charge
art gallery owner Wes Miller with giving pornography to children
for having a mural of a semi-nude Eve on the gallery's exterior.

July 2003, Unrelated: The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith
condemns Glenview State Bank for sending customers a newsletter
praising Adolph Hitler's economic policies and denying that Israel exists. 

July 2003: Eubanks Asphalt Paving and Sealing of Tennessee posts the message
"Odai and Qusai dead - way to go 101st" on roadside warning signs,
one near an elementary school. Company head Michael Eubanks denies that
the message was intended as a celebration of death, saying that
"It didn't say 'throw a party'. How many Americans have died
because of these people?"

July 21, 2003: Threatens to invade Syria and Iran, saying "states that
continue to harbour terrorists will be held completely accountable".

July 21, 2003: Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley
admits that the Central Intelligence Agency informed him 
that there is no unfalsified evidence of Iraq seeking to buy uranium
from Africa.

July 21, 2003: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says
"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal
affairs of Iraq."

July 21, 2003: (dated July 28) Michael Isikoff of Newsweek reports
that Congress's report on the government's intelligence failures
in 2001 will show "evidence suggesting that Omar al Bayoumi...may have
been a Saudi-government agent...In January 2000, al-Bayoumi had a meeting
at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles--and then went directly to
a restaurant where he met future hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and 
awaf Alhazmi, whom he took back with him to San Diego. (Al-Bayoumi
later arranged for the men to get an apartment next to his and fronted
them their first two months rent.)"

July 21, 2003: The Chicago Tribune reports that a doctor assigned
to treat Arab immigrants has threatened "if I was in charge, I would
execute every one of you" and was allowed to continue in this position.

July 21, 2003: Liberian rebels shell the United States embassy,
killing 25 refugees. Rebel front-line forces ignore two orders
to halt their advance, given the prior and next day.

July 22, 2003: Uday and Qusay Hussein, sons of dictator Saddam Hussein,
are killed in battle. Baghdad celebrates. Later, Time Magazine reports
that Uday was captured alive and executed on the spot.

July 22, 2003: Saudi police arrest sixteen suspected al Qaeda members
and seize twenty tons of explosives and firearms.

July 22, 2003: Former President Clinton says that Bush's lies about
Iraq's unconventional weapons capabilities were a simple mistake
and "the thing we ought to be focused on is what is the right thing
to do now."

July 21, 2003: Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley
says that National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had received
the same memo from the CIA that he had which said the story about
Iraq trying to buy uranium from Africa was false.

July 22, 2003: Democratic California Assembly members accidentally
discuss budget strategy on an open microphone. Assembly member Fabian Nunez
criticizes the "folks who are heading up the anti-recall effort" for
suggesting they extend the budget crisis to promote legislation that would
require a 55% vote to pass a budget instead of a 66% vote, while most of 
the state blames the Democrats for the budget crisis. Assembly Member
Jackie Goldberg is heard promoting immediate passage of a budget with
severe service cuts, saying that "I think the crisis is better off
this year than next year".

July 22, 2003, Unrelated: Aspiring politician Othniel Askew assassinates
New York City Counciman James Davis a day after filing complaints
against Davis for blackmail.

July 22, 2003, Unrelated: A fire breaks out in one of California Governor
Gray Davis's staffers's office. The fire, in the ceiling, was apparently
caused by faulty wiring.

July 22, 2003, Unrelated: Kashmiri rebels attack an army base,
killing eight soldiers and wounding regional army commander
Lieutenant General Hari Prasad.

July 23, 2003: United States forces kidnap the wife and children
of an Iraqi lieutenant general to coerce him to surrender. 4th Infantry
Division 2nd Brigade commander Colonel David Hogg praises the kidnapping
as "justified" because "it's an intelligence operation with detainees,
and these people have info".

July 23, 2003: Promises to veto a budget bill if Congress includes
a rescinding of the Federal Communications Commission's decision
to allow corporations a larger marketshare of communications media.

July 23, 2003: Former Senator Max Cleland says that "there's no connection"
between Iraq and al Qaeda, and "The administration sold the connection
to scare the pants off the American people and justify the war. What you've
seen here is the manipulation of intelligence for political ends...The reason
this report was delayed for so long -- deliberately opposed at first,
then slow-walked after it was created -- is that the administration wanted
to get the war in Iraq in and over."

July 23, 2003, Unrelated: Senator John Kyl's building manager arrests
five constituents who came to speak to him.

July 24, 2003: Charles Dharapak of the Associated Press issues a photograph
of Bush autographing United States flags, a desecration in violation
of the Federal Flag Code.

July 24, 2003: A joint Congressional committee releases a heavily censored
report on the government's intelligence failures prior to the terrorist attack
of September 11, 2001. All television stations cancel their footage
of the committee's press conference for a statement by Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld.

July 24, 2003: Bush's spokesman Scott McClellan does not deny, when
asked several times, that White House officials intentionally
publicized a Central Intelligence Agency undercover spy's operations
to punish her husband Joseph Wilson for releasing facts that disagreed
with White House statements at the time.

July 24, 2003: Vice President Dick Cheney announces that Iraq was such
an imminent threat that "any responsible leader" would have invaded like
Bush did.

July 24, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reiterates that
there is no paramilitary opposition to the United States presence in Iraq
and any violent deaths of US forces have been random acts by criminals
who were not targeting US forces.

July 24, 2003: The Department of Defense cancels $1 billion worth of
contracts with Boeing and bars Boeing from work on rocketry projects
as punishment for Boeing's theft of 25,000 documents from rival
company Lockheed Martin. Boeing shuts down all operations
in its core Washington business for a day.

July 24, 2003: After much urging from the United States media, the US
releases photographs of Uday and Qusay Hussein's bodies.

July 24, 2003: The New York Times reports that Diebold's voting machines 
"allow voters to cast extra votes and permit poll workers to alter ballots 
without being detected".

July 24, 2003: Senator Charles Schumer calls on Federal Bureau of Investigation
Director Robert Mueller to open an investigation into the leaking of the
identity of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, undercover Central Intelligence
Ageny operative.  Schumer says "This is one of the most reckless and nasty
things I've seen in all my years of government...Leaking the name of
a CIA agent is tantamount to putting a gun to that agent's head.
It compromises her safety and the safety of her loved ones, not to mention
those in her network and other operatives she may have dealt with. On top
of that, the officials who have done it may have also seriously jeopardized
the national security of this nation."

July 24, 2003: A pilot flying a pipeline patrol is brought down and
arrested after accidentally flying over Bush's motorcade, which
the Federal Aviation Administration had failed to issue a temporary
flight restriction over.

July 24, 2003: Microsoft National Broadcast Company columnist Eric Alterman
writes that "William Kristol has chosen to defend President Bush
and his slacker war against terrorism by impugning Richard Gephardt
with the same phraseology that his father used half a century ago
to defend Joe McCarthy. In this morning's Washington Post, Kristol
writes, 'But the American people, whatever their doubts about aspects
of Bush's foreign policy, know that Bush is serious about fighting
terrorists and terrorist states that mean America harm. About Bush's
Democratic critics, they know no such thing.' In the journal Commentary
in 1952, during the McCarthy era, Irving Kristol wrote, 'For there is
one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy; he,
like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesman
for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.' This is
truly amazing. It explicitly links the Neocons' exploitation of the threat
of terrorism to that no-good drunken bum, Joe McCarthy, and his use
of the charge of 'Commie' to ruin lives on a whim through a deliberately
stoked mass hysteria."

July 24, 2003: Comedian Bill Maher opines in the Los Angeles Times
that "New rule: No do-overs. Once you elect an official, unless he
runs off with public funds or gets caught with kiddie porn, you're
stuck with him. He's the governor, not some dude you married in
Las Vegas. What's going on here in California, if you're lucky enough
to not have been following this, is that the economy turned, so we're
getting rid of the governor. But what if we drive him out of office
and the economy still doesn't get better? I guess we'll have to burn him.
And if that doesn't work, we'll kill his dog...Here's why the economy
turned: The dot-com bubble burst. (Obviously on the orders of Gray Davis.)
The airline industry collapsed. (Just as Gray Davis planned.) We fought
two wars. (Playing right into Gray Davis' hands.) And Dick Cheney's friends
at Enron "gamed" the energy market and ripped off the state for billions.
So you can see the problem: Gray Davis.  And the obvious solution:
A Viennese weightlifter. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Finally, a candidate
who can explain the Bush administration's positions on civil liberties
in the original German."

July 24, 2003, Unrelated: Iran accuses Canadian police of attacking
random Iranians in Vancouver, killing one named Keyvan Tabesh. Canada
says that Tabesh was killed three weeks ago for attacking policemen
with a sword.

July 24, 2003: Slate Magazine writes that "Ann Coulter tells the unvarnished
truth" in her new book Treason which accuses everybody who has ever had
a political position that can be considered marginally more liberal than
her own positions of being traitors who should be rounded up and shot.

July 25, 2003: Orders forces deployed to linger off the Liberan shore.
Liberian rebel commanders again order a cease fire, but rebel forces
continue fighting. 

July 25, 2003: US forces capture members of former Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein's personal bodyguard force near Tikrit.

July 25, 2003: Japan's parliament votes 136-102 to send soldiers to Iraq. 
Fighting breaks out in parliamant after the speaker forbids opponents
of the bill from debating.

July 25, 2003: Arianna Huffington reports that a third of corporate
profit taxes owed the government are not paid, citing the Multistate
Tax Commission.

July 25, 2003: Standard and Poor's credit rating company lowers California's
bond rate to two points above junk bond status.

July 25, 2003: Michael Isikoff of Newsweek reports that "Bush was told
that members of Al Qaeda had come to and resided in the United States
'for years' and that the 'group apparently maintained a support structure
here.' during a national security briefing on August 6, 2001 and that
the briefing "also included recent intelligence that bin Laden supporters
were 'planning attacks in the United States with explosives'", while
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has said, in Isikoff's words,
that the briefing "did not constitute a warning for the president".
Isikoff also reports that the recently released Congressional report
does not investigate why no security measures were taken in the District
of Columbia for 40 minutes after it was known that a hijacked plane
was being flown there.

July 25, 2003: Intelligence inquiry member Max Cleland says that
"This commission was formed about mid-December, the 9/11 Commission.
We were supposed to use the joint inquiry report as a launching pad 
to get into this issue of not only fixing the intelligence community,
but moving beyond...well, the independent, bi-partisan commission, hello,
didn't even get the stuff 'til a few weeks ago. I'm saying that's deliberate.
I am saying that the delay in relating this information to the American
public out of a hearing... series of hearings, that several members
of Congress knew eight or ten months ago, including Bob Graham and others,
that was deliberately slow walked... the 9/11 Commission was deliberately
slow walked, because the Administration's policy was, and its priority was,
we're gonna take Saddam Hussein out...It's obvious...the joint intelligence
inquiry, the executive summary, was available December 10th. Why did it take
nine months to go over what ought to be held out of that?...why did it take
eight months to get this 9/11 Commission really cranked up and going...Why
did all of this take so long? Because the real priority of the White House
was not the 9/11 Commission -- they fought it. And it was just, and it
really was their interest was to delay the revelation of this report."

July 25, 2003: Dana Priest of the Washington Post writes that
"President Bush was warned in a more specific way than previously
known about intelligence suggesting that al Qaeda terrorists were
seeking to attack the United States, a report on the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks indicated" and "The CIA refused to permit publication of
information potentially implicating Saudi officials on national security
grounds, arguing that disclosure could upset relations with a key
U.S. ally...The White House, meanwhile, resisted efforts to pin down
Bush's knowledge of al Qaeda threats and to catalogue the executive's
pre-Sept. 11 strategy to fight terrorists."

July 25, 2003: North Korea establishes a tribunal to charge every
United States President since Truman with war crimes.

July 25, 2003, Unrelated: United States jetfighters from Oerland air force
base in Norway intercept and follow a private airplane that was on a leisure
flight through the Geiranger Fjord. Although the incident was videotaped
and also seen by witnesses on the ground, the United States denies it
happened and the US pilots fail to report the incident as required by law. 

July 25, 2003, Unrelated: Russian Colonel Yuri Budanov is sentenced
to ten years of prison for murdering a Chechen woman during war.

July 25, 2003, Unrelated: Former Russian Ministry of Defense treasurer
General Georgy Oleynik is sentenced to five years of jail for embezzling
$60 million from the military.

July 26, 2003: Tom Raum of the Associated Press writes "In the rising
controversy over how the Bush administration built its case for war
in Iraq, one curious fact stands out. Some who gave President Bush
unwelcome information that turned out to be accurate are gone.
Those who did the opposite are still around."

July 26, 2003: Rebelling Philippine soldiers seize the downtown area
the capitol city Manila and threaten to bomb buildings there, accusing
President Gloria Arroyo of planning to declare martial law and cancel
elections. The rebels surrender within a day.

July 26, 2003: Five United States soldiers are killed in scattered
guerrila attacks in Iraq.

July 26, 2003, Unrelated: Cuban dictator Fidel Castro condems
the European Union as a "group of old colonial powers historically
responsible for slave trafficking, looting and even the extermination
of entire peoples" and a "Trojan Horse" to make Europe serve
the United States' interests.

July 2003: The Department of Energy illegally disbands the
National Nuclear Security Administration, whose existence Congress has
required by law to discuss nuclear weapons issues.

July 2003: Saudi Arabia requests that information about its ties to al Qaeda
be declassified so that it can see actual allegations instead of
mostly vague leaks from members of the committee that produced the report.

July 2003: Herman Cohen orders Niger to stop mentioning the forged documents
that falsely claimed Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger.

July 2003: Republican activist Mike Czerwonka condemns the
Democratic Party's "Get Out the Vote" program to encourage voting,
and calls for Republican poll monitors to harass black people
to "protect the integrity of the voting process".

July 2003: The American Physical Society claims that Bush's plan
for ballistic missile defense is physically unworkable against
certain types of missile.

July 2003, Unrelated: Australia invades the Solomon Islands,
leading to the surrender of Solomon Islands terrorist leader Harold Keke
and the Malaita Eagle Force rebel group.

July 27, 2003: Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz accuses
Arab television stations al Jazeera and al Arabiya of "slanting
news incredibly" against the United States.

July 27, 2003: Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz accuses
Iraq of "absolutely" being behind the bombing of the USS Cole
and the Khobar Towers, before admitting that "I don't know
who did the attacks". Both attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.

July 27, 2003: Al Jazeera reporter Nawfal al Shahwani and his chauffeur
are arrested and jailed by United States forces.

July 27, 2003: Niger demands British Prime Minister Tony Blair
release any evidence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger.

July 27, 2003: Senator Bob Graham says that "one of the fundamental reasons"
for Bush refusing to declassify information related to intelligence
failures before September 11, 2001 is "to avoid accountability", and notes
that "nobody's lost their job. Nobody has...had an adverse letter
put in their files".

July 28, 2003: Attorney General John Ashcroft orders all Justice Department
attorneys to report the names of any judges who assign a sentence
which is lighter than sentencing guidelines recommend. In a later report
when the order is made public, Microsoft National Broadcast Company
quotes an anonymous "senior Justice Department Official" as claiming
that judges are required by law to follow these recommendedations
and so the Justice Department has a need to maintain a blacklist of
judges who "felt they were not bound by any guidelines", and Chief Justice
William Rhenquist says the order "would seriously impair the ability
of courts to impose just and reasonable sentences".

July 28, 2003: Steve Kretzmann and Jim Vallette of the Institute
for Policy Studies write that "During the initial assault on Baghdad,
soldiers set up forward bases named Camp Shell and Camp Exxon. Those
soldiers knew the score, even if the Pentagon's talking points dismissed
any ties between Iraqi oil and their blood...In May, the U.N. Security Council
unanimously adopted Resolution 1483, which ended sanctions and endorsed
the creation of Development Fund for Iraq, to be controlled by Paul Bremer
and overseen by a board of accountants, including U.N., World Bank
and IMF representatives. It endorsed the transfer of over $1 billion
(of Iraqi oil money) from the Oil-for-Food program into the Development Fund.
All proceeds from the sale of Iraqi oil and natural gas are also to be
 placed into the fund...Hours after the United Nations endorsed U.S. control
of the 'Development Fund' for Iraq, Bush signed an executive order that
was spun as implementing Resolution 1483, but in reality went much further
towards attracting investment and minimizing risk for U.S. corporations
in Iraq. Executive Order 13303 decrees that 'any attachment, judgment,
decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process is prohibited,
and shall be deemed null and void,' with respect to the Development Fund
for Iraq and 'all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests
therein.'"

July 28, 2003: Texas's Democratic Legislature members again flee the state
as Governor Rick Perry orders the Legislature to hold a special session
to gerrymander the state.

July 28, 2003: Nobel Prize for Economics laureate George Akerlof
says in an interview with Der Spiegel that "this is the worst government
the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history" and describes
Bush's economic policy as "a form of looting".

July 28, 2003: JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup banks pay out a combined
$255 million to settle claims that they helped Enron and Dynegy energy
traders commit fraud.

July 28, 2003: Two Saudi policemen and six suspected terrorists are killed
in a raid in al Qaessim province.

July 28, 2003: The Houston Chronicle reports the results of a survey
of 1,015 people conducted by Rutgers University and the University
of Connecticut that shows 18% of the respondents had lost their jobs
between 2000 and 2003, and only about half (68% of whites, 44% of blacks,
54% of other races) had found full time work since.

July 28, 2003: Liberian rebels capture Buchanan, Liberia's second largest
city, and the eastern town of Gbarnga.

July 28, 2003, Unrelated: Sudan captures a Russian helicopter operating
under United Nations auspices and accuses the crew of smuggling weapons
to rebel forces.

July 29, 2003: The New Democratic Party of Saskatchewan distributes
an internal memo calling Bush "President Shrub".

July 29, 2003: Jeffrey St. Clair of Counterpunch reports that
"All hell is breaking loose in Guatemala...followers of General
Efrain Rios Montt... have charged into the streets of Guatemala City
armed with machetes, clubs and guns. Led by FRG militants, the crowds,
including many members of the Guatemalan army, have marched on the
nation's courts, opposition parties and newspapers, torching buildings,
shooting out windows and bullying opponents of the Bible-spouting
dictator...The riots were orchestrated by Rios Montt's cohorts after
the Guatemalan Supreme Court (the nation's second highest court) suspended
his campaign for the presidency...Journalists appear to have been
a main target of the attackers. In the first wave of street violence,
Hector Ramirez, a reporter for a Left-center television station, was
hounded and chased by a mob until he collapsed in the street and died
of heart failure. As Ramirez was carried away, the rioters chanted,
'Journalist Spotted, Journalist Dead.'"

July 30, 2003: Proposes a Constitutional amendment to criminalize
homosexual marriage.

July 30, 2003: Condemns the news media for having reported that
there was a "march to war" while he was promoting the invasion of Iraq.

July 30, 2003: Mary Dalrymple of the Associated Press reports that
Glen Bower, one of Bush's nominees to the U.S. Tax Court, had cheated
on his taxes for the past three years.

July 30, 2003: Martin Schwarz of the Asia Times reports that former
United Nations weapons inspector David Kay was the source for Bush's
false claim that the International Atomic Energy Agency had said
Iraq could build a nuclear weapon in six months when in fact the IAEA
said no such thing. 

July 31, 2003: Formally declares that Iraq is a continuing threat
to the United States and that sanctions must continue to weaken
the Iraqi government.

July 31, 2003: John Lumpkin of the Associated Press reports that
United States and Australian forces have found "dozens" of fighter jets
buried under the sand at al Taqqadum and al Asad air bases in Iraq.

July 31, 2003: Jack Kelly of the Washington Times lists differences
between the guerrilla wars in Vietnam and Iraq, including that
"The North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies were bright, skilled,
resourceful, well-led, and very brave. In Iraq, we're fighting Arabs."

July 31, 2003: "Abu Aardvark", a pseudonym, writes that Assistant Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz believes the writings of Laurie Mylroie,
"who was invited to testify before the 9/11 commission, co-authored
a book with Judith Miller, is affiliated with AEI, is good friends
with Ahmad Chalabi" and believes that Iraq was solely responsible
for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing,
the 1997 shooting of tourists in Luxor, Egypt, the bombing of the USS Cole,
the September 11, 2001 attacks, and the anthrax attacks on Democratic Senators.

July 31, 2003: Israel breaks terms of a cease-fire with the
Palestinian Authority by inviting construction bids to expand the
town of Neveh Dekalim in the Gaza Strip, where Israel had promised
to halt building. Also, Israel's Knesset passes a law forbidding citizens
of the Palestinian Authority who marry Israeli citizens from moving into
Israel for a year. Also, some news reports state that Israel has forbidden
Muslims from visiting the Temple Mount, one of the holiest sites in Islam,
for "operational reasons", while other reports say the restrition is
on non-Muslims and at the request of the Muslim governor of the site.

July 31, 2003: The Saint Petersburg Times notes that "Gov. Jeb Bush says
that Gulfport Elementary School did so well academically last year it is
a due for a state bonus check of roughly $40,000. President George W. Bush
says Gulfport Elementary School has performed so poorly that its parents
must be allowed, less than a week before school begins, to pull their
children out."


August 1, 2003: The New Republic reports hearing from a confidential source
that the censored part of the congressional intelligence report "involves
connections between the hijacking plot and the very top levels of
the Saudi royal family", quoting the source as saying "they should be
chasing direct links to high levels of the Saudi government. We're not
talking about rogue elements. We're talking about a coordinated network
that reaches right from the hijackers to multiple places in the Saudi
government...If the people in the administration trying to link Iraq
to Al Qaeda had one-one-thousandth of the stuff that the 28 pages has
linking a foreign government to Al Qaeda, they would have been in good shape."

August 1, 2003: Afghan rebel forces attack an Afghan military patrol 
near Kandahar and harass a United States base at Spin Boldak,
inflicting no damage. Four attackers are killed.

August 1, 2003: A teenager is arrested and charged with making a bomb threat
for hiding a note in his luggage that said "Fuck you. Stay the fuck out
of my bag you cocksucker. Have you found a fucking bomb yet? No, just
clothes."

August 1, 2003: Pakitan's Central Bank reports that the United States
has paid $256 million to Pakistan for logistics support of US operations
in Afghanistan.

August 1, 2003: Special Advisor to the Central Intelligence Agency
David Kay, leader of the United States' weapons inspection team,
says that "people should not be surprised by surprises" that will
be revealed by his team soon.

August 1, 2003: Palestinian Authority supporters attack and attempt to
dismantle an Israeli security fence, demanding that Israel retract the fence
and surrender more of Israel's land on the other side.

August 1, 2003: Liberian President Charles Taylor promises to resign.

August 1, 2003: The United States revokes the security clearance
of F. Michael Maloof, reportedly "a key player in the effort to 
ind links between Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida", due to
his association with suspected weapons smuggler Imad El Haje. Maloof
and David Wurmser had formed a team to investigate such allegations
before the creation of the Office of Special Plans.

August 1, 2003, Unrelated: China condemns the United States Department
of Defense for reporting that China has 450 missiles aimed at Taiwan.

August 1, 2003, Unrelated: A Russian military hospital in Mozdok,
North Ossetia, is bombed, killing 50.

August 2, 2003: Dave Eggers of the New York Times writes that "Americorps
needs an emergency infusion of $100 million just to maintain its current
operations. While the Senate voted to appropriate the money, the House
of Representatives refused to approve the emergency funds -- and then
adjourned for the summer. Meanwhile, the administration has been largely
silent...Which is confusing, considering how vocal President Bush has
been about the need to maintain and even expand our national service
programs. At one time, in fact, the president proposed expanding AmeriCorps
to 75,000 members...Must we note that the $100 million that could save
AmeriCorps is less than one-tenth of what we spend in Iraq every week?"

August 2, 2003, Unrelated: A storage of explosives explodes in Pakistan,
killing over 50. It appears to be an accident involving construction
materials.

August 3, 2003: General John Keane begins contacting Lieutenant Generals
and 4-star Generals, ordering them to retire. Microsoft National Broadcast
Company reports that "Keane first contacted half a dozen names, but by
the end of the week the list had reportedly grown to 11" out of 50,
"with more to come within 30 days", and that General Keane, recently appointed
Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker, and Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld are behind the purge.

August 3, 2003: The Transportation Security Administration admits the
existence of a second no-fly list, in addition to the publicly acknowledged
list of suspected terrorists, which contains names of political organizers
who oppose Bush.

August 3, 2003: Omar al Bayoumi publicly denies that he has any link
to al Qaeda, and cites United States investigators who said as much
while he was under investigation.

August 3, 2003: North Korea announces its refusal to have any negations
with United States Undersecretary of State John Bolton.

August 3, 2003: The New York Times prints a story titled "Hispanics
Back Big Government and Bush, Too", noting that Bush's approval rating
among Hispanics is up to 21%. 35% of Hispanic voters supported Bush in 2000.

August 3, 2003: The Tamba Tribune condemns the British Broadcasting
Corporation, arguably the world's most centrist and unbiased news source,
as "a propaganda outlet for peaceniks, neosocialists and various sorts
of America haters", citing Tory-supporting news publisher Conrad Black
as calling the BBC "the greatest menace facing the country it was founded
to serve and inform." The Tribune also writes that the lack of need
to solicit commercials turns public news media into "magnets for
anti-traditionalist, leftist staffers who fondle their ideals over the air".

August 3, 2003, Unrelated: Irish police capture a suspected terrorist
training camp and arrest ten men.

August 2003: The Los Angeles Times reports receiving believable information
that Iran has a nuclear weapons program and is close to finishing development
of its first nuclear weapons, citing French and CIA intelligence reports.  

August 2003: DC Comics releases an issue of Justice League wherein
President Lex Luther is planning to invade "Qurac" and has ordered
Superman and the Justice League to "support the war or be 'neutralized'!"

August 2003, Unrelated: Azerbaijani Prime Minister Heydar Aliyev
appoints his son Ilham Aliyav as Prime Minister. 

August 4, 2003: Days before nuclear weapons inspector David Kelly is buried,
British Prime Minister Tony Blair's spokessman Tom Kelly twice condemns him
as a "Walter Mitty" who cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality.

August 4, 2003, Unrelated: The Associated Press reports that
Massachusetts Superintendent of Schools Wilfredo T. Laboy has
failed to pass a required English literacy test three times.

August 4, 2003: Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press,
Politics, and Public Policy releases the results of a study,
by Michael Tomasky, of four newspapers' editorial bias, showing that
for five policy and five political events of similar form and magnitude
in the Bush and Clinton administrations, the "liberal" New York Times
and Washington Post would attack Clinton 30% of the time and
attack Bush 67% of the time while defending Clinton 36% and defending
Bush 10% of the time, and the "conservative" Wall Street Journal
and Washington Times would attack Clinton 89% of the time 
and attack Bush 7% of the time while defending Clinton 3% and
defending Bush 77% of the time.

August 5, 2003: James W. Crawley of the San Diego Union Tribune reports
that United States forces in Iraq used Mk77 "firebombs" which have exactly
the same effect as the banned weapon napalm, and which troops in the field
refer to as "napalm".

August 5, 2003: A truck is bombed in Iraq, killing a Halliburton employee.

August 5, 2003: The Mariott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia is bombed,
killing 10.

August 5, 2003, Unrelated: All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion
chairman Yury Levada reports that the Russian government has taken over
his polling organization.

August 5, 2003: Judge Stephen Wilson sentences anarchist writer
Sherman Austin to a year of prison and forbids him from any involvement
in politics for three years as punishment for having a Web site that
contained a pointer to another Web site, not under Austin's control,
which had tutorials on building weapons. The prosecutor had requested
a four month sentence after Wilson agreed to plead guilty after being
threatened with a 20-year sentence for terrorism.

August 5, 2003: James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal calls
the Democratic Party partisan group Move On a "far-left pro-Saddam group".

August 5, 2003, Unrelated: The Committee for the Consecration of Bishops
of the American Anglican Church elects V. Gene Robinson as a bishop
on a 62-45 vote, making him the first homosexual Christian bishop.

August 5, 2003: Former judge Michael D. Schattman writes that "In his
vilest public act yet, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, has contrived to insert
religion into the judicial confirmation process and then to accuse
Democratic Sens. Patrick Leahy and Richard Durbin (both Roman Catholics)
of rejecting a nominee because he is Catholic. Hatch, joined by other
non-Catholic Republicans, even had the temerity to announce what made
a 'good Catholic' and therefore define other Catholics as bad...I have
my own view on that. I am Catholic. I was nominated to be a federal judge
by President Clinton. I was blocked by Republicans. I was opposed by
Republicans because my adherence to Catholic principles of social justice
put me at odds with them and their values of social injustice."

August 5, 2003: Hooman Peimani of the Asian Times reports that 10,000
Iraqis were recently recruited into the "Army of al Mahdi", an anti-US
militia based on Shiite Islam, in a single day.

August 5, 2003: Paul Krugman writes that "The agency's analysts find that
they are no longer helping to formulate policy; instead, their job is
to rationalize decisions that have already been made. And more and more,
they find that they are expected to play up evidence, however weak, that
seems to support the administration's case, while suppressing evidence
that doesn't. Am I describing the C.I.A.? The E.P.A.? The National Institutes
of Health? Actually, I'm talking about the Treasury Department, but the
ambiguity is no coincidence. Across the board, the Bush administration
has politicized policy analysis...under the Bush administration
the Treasury takes its marching orders from White House political
operatives. As The New Republic points out, when John Snow meets with
Karl Rove, the meetings take place in Mr. Rove's office...Treasury has
an elaborate computer model designed to evaluate who benefits and who loses
from any proposed change in tax laws...In the 1990's the results of such
 analyses were routinely made public.  But since George W. Bush came
into power, the department has suppressed most of that information,
releasing only partial, misleading tables. The purpose of this suppression,
of course, is to conceal the extent to which Mr. Bush's tax cuts concentrate
their bounty on families with very high incomes...For his June 22 interview
with Howard Dean, Tim Russert asked the Treasury Department to prepare
examples showing how repealing the Bush tax cuts would affect ordinary
families...the examples Treasury provided to Mr. Russert and others
in the media were wildly unrepresentative. To give you a sense:
the Treasury's example of a 'lower income' elderly household was
one receiving $2,000 a year in dividend income. In fact, only about
one elderly household in four receives any dividend income, and only
one in eight receives as much as $2,000."

August 6, 2003: The United States deploys a force of seven Marines
as peacekeepers in Liberia. This is soon raised to a force of 200.

August 6, 2003: Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba condemns the United States
for "nuclear policy that, by openly declaring the possibility of
a pre-emptive nuclear first strike and calling for resumed research
into mini-nukes and other so-called `useable nuclear weapons,'
appears to worship nuclear weapons as God," 

August 6, 2003: Iranian President Mohammad Khatami claims that Iran
does not have a nuclear weapons program.

August 6, 2003: Joshua Micah Marshall reports that the United States
is holding Iraqi nuclear weapons scientist Mahdi Obeidi "against his will
in Kuwait...in a residential setting with his family, under US governmen
supervision, well-fed and so forth. But he can't leave" until Obeidi
tells the United States that Bush's claims were true; and that "Obeidi
has told the US about some on-going WMD work by the Iraqis, but...that
hasn't come out either".

August 6, 2003: The Christian Coalition announces its support
of Alabama Governor Bob Riley's tax increase proposal.

August 6. 2003: Israel frees 339 Arab prisoners, a third of whom were
jailed without habeus corpus, half of whom are convicted militiamen
and/or terrorists, and the rest of whom are common criminals.
Islamic Resistance and Islamic Jihad condemn the release as a publicity
stunt. The Palestinian Authority threatens to end the ceasefire unless
all terrorists are released. Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat
condemns the release as "deceit", noting that many of the released were
near the end of their prison terms.

August 6, 2003: Israeli forces enter Jehrico and arrest ten suspected 
militiamen.

August 6, 2003, Unrelated: Columbia Broadcast System reports receiving
a copy of an order from Catholic Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani in 1962
that nobody is to mention the molestation of children by priests
"under the penalty of excommunication".

August 6, 2003, Unrelated: India's Supreme Court forbids government employees
from striking because their service is a necessity of the community.

August 7, 2003: Stratfor reports that the Taliban has retaken Zabul
province of Afghanistan.

August 7, 2003: The Department of Justice files obscenity charges
against a producer of pornography. Ashcroft pledges to ban all
pornographic material. The Los Angeles Times reports
that "pornography has worked its way to the top of Ashcroft's agenda".

August 7, 2003: The Jordanian Embassy in Iraq is bombed, killing 11.
Immediately after the bombing, a crowd of Iraqis enters the embassy
and vandalizes signs of the Jordanian government.

August 7, 2003: Joshua Micah Marshall reports that Mahdi Obeidi has
reported hearing from other nuclear scientists that Iraq had recently
worked on plans for a future theoretical nuclear weapons program,
with a focus group performing "theoretical R&D, discussing and hashing out
ideas for how the job should be done once the word was given."

August 7, 2003: National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice accuses
people opposed to the invasion of Iraq as being like white supremacists
and suggests that the United States plans to invade every Arab dictatorship,
saying "The view was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham, and it is wrong in 2003
in Baghdad and in the rest of the Middle East". When reporting this,
Wyath Ruthven cites Rice as saying during the 2000 campaign that "It is
not the business of the 82nd Airborne Division to escort children to school
in Kosovo" and posts alongside it "a picture of the 101st Airborne escorting
children to school in Little Rock, Arkansas" during the 1960s.
 
August 8, 2003: Condemns complaints about his lying about the threat
Iraq posed as "pure politics" and "political noise".

August 8, 2003: Newsday reports that "Pentagon hardliners pressing
for regime change in Iran have held secret and unauthorized meetings
in Paris with a controversial arms dealer...at least two Pentagon
officials working for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith
have held 'several' meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian
middleman in U.S. arms-for-hostage shipments to Iran in the mid-1980s."
When a reporter asks Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld whether he had
authorized Pentagon officials to hold talks with Manucher Ghorbanifar,
without mentioning that an article existed, Rumsfeld replies that
"I had not had a chance to see these articles -- or an article, that
I guess exists."

August 8, 2003: Neela Banerjee of the New York Times reports that
the bidding process for reconstruction constracts in Iraq is tilted
to favour Halliburton.

August 8, 2003: Billionaire philanthropist George Soros announces
that he will stop promoting freedom and liberty in Russia, a cause to
which he has already donated a billion dollars, because "the battle
for an open society has got to be fought in the United States because
the United States is inarguably the dominant power in the world. It sets
the tone, it calls the tune for the way the rest of the world is going"
and pledges $10 million to the Democratic Party's Presidential campaign.

August 8, 2003, Unrelated: Air France pilot Philippe Rivere is arrested
at John F. Kennedy Airport for joking about having a bomb in his shoes.

August 9, 2003: At the United States' request, the Republic of China
on Taiwan seizes a North Korean freighter hauling aluminium hydroxide,
a material that can be used in missile production.

August 9, 2003: Israel attempts to arrest an Islamic Resistance terrorist
in the Palestinian Authority controlled city of Nablus, directly violating
the cease-fire. This incites a gunbattle in which his house is destroyed
in an armoury explosion and four Arabs are killed. Islamic Resistance
orders all forces to retaliate.

August 9, 2003: Hizballah shells Israeli border posts in the Golan Heights.
Israel responds with airstrikes in Lebanese territory.

August 2003: Appoints Utah Governor Mike Leavitt, a friend of
mining interests, as director of the Environmental Protection Agency.

August 2003: The Palestinian Authority and Islamic Resistance launch
terrorist attacks against Israel on the same day.

August 2003: The United States Army closes an inquiry into the attack
on the journalists' headquarters Palestine Hotel by determining that
the soldiers who fired upon the hotel did not commit any wrongdoing,
citing the Army's failure to inform the soldiers of journalists' locations
as reason for the soldiers to assume camera flashes were enemy fire
allowing for them to assume that a man standing on a hotel balcony
with binoculars was an enemy combatant. Reporters Sans Frontieres
Secretary General Robert Menard condemns the inquiry as "unacceptable"
and "bad faith", saying that "All the facts at our disposal indicate
exactly the opposite, that there are no grounds for claiming self-defence,
and saying this is a lie. These findings are the umpteenth US military
version of what happened on 8 April and they all contradict each other." 

August 2003: A fishing boat in distress spends more than an hour
floating off John F. Kennedy International Airport attempting to
attract the attention of police before the crew lands and walks
onto the runways. Shortly afterwards, New York Times reporter
Corey Kilgannon, photographer Librado Romero, and their boat captain
are arrested for attempting to repeat the incident.

August 2003: Four Saudi police officers are killed in a raid on
a suspected terrorist base in Riyadh.

August 2003: Liberian President Charles Taylor resigns and accuses
the United States of financing the rebellion.

August 2003: Fox News sues comedian and author Al Franken over the
title of his book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair
and Balanced Look At The Right", for using Fox's trademark "Fair and Balanced"
slogan, and accuses Franken of being a "parasite...commonly perceived
as having to trade off the name recognition of others in order to
make money" and "either intoxicated or deranged...Franken is neither
a journalist nor a television news personality. He is not a well-respected
voice in American politics; rather, he appears to be shrill and unstable".
Over 70 independent political reporters add the phrase "Fair and Balanced"
to their Web sites in protest, as does the 1108th Aviation Classification
Repair Activity Depot for the Mississippi Air National Guard. When the
lawsuit goes to court, the courtroom audience openly laughs several times
as Judge Denny Chin rebuts Fox News's poor arguments, and Chin decides
that "This is an easy case in my view and wholly without merit,
both factually and legally". Afterwards, Franken says "In addition
to thanking my own lawyers, I'd like to thank Fox's lawyers for filing
one of the stupidest briefs I've ever seen in my life."

August 2003: Texas begins fining absent Democratic legislators $5,000
per day.

August 2003: John Poindexter resigns from the Defense Advanced Projects
Research Agency after the media lampoons whis proposal for a stockmarket-like
system whereby people could predict terrorist attacks and be paid if their
predictions were correct. 

August 2003: Jemaah Islamiya leader Riduan Isamuddin, also known as Hambali,
is arrested in Thailand. Hambali is also accused of being a member of
al Qaeda's military counci.

August 2003, Unrelated: Aaj Tak television of India hires Balbir Singh Rajput,
who looks like Minister of Shipping Shatrughan Sinha, to wander around
the Parliament building. After the report is aired, Rajput is arrested
and charged with impersonation and criminal conspiracy.

August 2003, Unrelated: The Boy Scouts of America revoke the charter
of Sebastopol, California Boy Scout Venture Crew 488 due to the crew's
policy stating "we will not discriminate in accepting membership
applications from youth or adults on the basis of race, creed, gender,
color, religion, marital status, sexual orientation, physical handicap,
income, ancestry, or national origin", a statement that the national
Boy Scouts declares a violation of the Scout Oath to "do my duty to God
and my country, to obey the Scout Law, and the keep myself physically strong,
mentally awake, and morally straight".

August 2003, Unrelated: The Republic of Ireland convicts Michael McKevitt
of leading the terrorist group Real Irish Republican Army and sentences
him to twenty years of jail.

August 2003, Unrelated: The United Nations Subcommission for hte Promotion
and Protection of Human Rights calls for nations to allow the United Nations
the power to investigate and condemn corporations for human rights violations
and to require corporations to submit regular reports to the United Nations.

August 2003, Unrelated: Indonesian General Adam Damiri is convicted
of permitting massacres to occur after Timor Leste voted for independence.

August 10, 2003: Tito Titus of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer writes
that "The largely successful practice of naming things what they are not
in order to garner public support remains generally unquestioned
by major media. The newsrooms pick up the new terms as fast as
The Heritage Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and
the Bush administration can spin them out -- as if black has always
been white, as if fish have always been able to fly...Here is a sampling:
	* Anti-American describes someone who suggests perhaps
the United States is losing popularity, trust and allies around the world
as a consequence of its own words and deeds.
	* Big government describes any public program intended to benefit
the poor and disenfranchised or to protect consumers, workers or
the environment. This term does not apply to government snooping into
your private affairs ("Patriot Act") or to war spending regardless of
the amount. It does, however, apply to public-interest regulation;
hence, "deregulation."
	* Celebrity, a derogatory term, describes an entertainer
who speaks out on behalf of a progressive cause. This term is not applied
to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ronald Reagan and Charlton Heston or
to Playboy Playmates(TM) who promote the Iraq war on Fox News.
	* Civil service reform means "flexibility" to replace
civil service protection with cronyism and patronage.
	* Class warfare lets you know what Democrats are up to when
they call attention to the social and economic consequences of
administration policies.
	* Clear Skies Act, perhaps the most Orwellian of all these
ingenious terms, describes the administration's intention to increase
pollution discharges from older power and industrial plants.
	* Coalition of the willing describes the United States, Britain
and a handful of their client states -- not to be confused with
the rest of the world.
	* Conservative describes what was once regarded as right-wing
extremist. See also "moderate."
	* Death tax describes what has been called the estate
or inheritance tax since 1916.
	* Deregulation describes the results of corporate commandeering
of public-interest regulatory agencies, such as Federal Communications
Commission measures to allow increasing concentration of broadcast
media ownership by fewer and larger corporations. It stems from the notion
that what's good for big business is good for you and that faceless
profiteers have your concerns at heart more than public servants.
	* Double taxation of dividends justifies a scheme to exempt
the wealthiest from paying taxes on their income from investments
in corporations that pay minimal, if any, taxes because of myriad
revenue-code loopholes.
	* Edit describes what the White House does to reports from
the Environmental Protection Agency (deleting a scientific summary
of global warming research) and from intelligence agencies (exaggerating
claims regarding weapons of mass destruction).
	* Family Time Flexibility, the name given to House Resolution 1119,
which will authorize employers to require compulsory overtime
for hourly employees regardless of the employee's family situation,
with payment in compensation time (not wages), regardless of the
employee's economic situation.
	* Freedom of the press rationalizes deregulation of major media
use of publicly owned airwaves. This is about as brilliant as wordsmithery
can get, don't you think?
	* Freedom fighter is an obsolete term. For 70 years, Chechnyans
were freedom fighters. Now they are terrorists -- an example of
the alignment (and language) shifts in the New World Order.
	* Free trade has come to mean "Let's gut labor laws and
environmental protection in order to maximize profits of international
corporations." It accompanies the notion that having more and cheaper
stuff to buy will enhance your quality of life, presuming you still
have a job. Most "free trade" schemes promote the transfer of sovereignty
from states and nations to unelected arbiters in organizations such as
the World Trade Organization and North American Free Trade Agreement.
Obviously, these are not your grandfather's conservatives!
	* Liberal media bias promotes a fiction created to mask the fact
that the news media are being acquired by increasingly larger conglomerates
that have either rightist agendas or no taste for news (instead preferring
marketing-driven news departments). This concept also engenders the absurd
notion that CNN is a liberal alternative to MSNBC and Fox.
	* Moderate is used to describe what once was called conservative.
	* No Child Left Behind names a scheme established to justify
transferring public money to private (including "faith-based") schools.
	* Partial-birth abortion -- a political concept, not a medical
one -- describes late-term abortion.
	* Patriot, as cynically used by the president and attorney general,
describes someone who does not employ critical-thinking skills learned
in school. The No Child Left Behind program -- incidentally or not -- will
transfer increased school resources from curricula that inculcate thinking
to testing-preparation curricula, thereby educating more patriots.
	* Peacekeeping force describes what would be called "occupation force"
by any other nation or at any other time in world history.
	* Political correctness ridicules the idea that people ought to
treat one another with decency and respect. The cleverness of this
sarcastic phrase is that it does not apply to this politically correct
conservative lexicon. If one watches the national dialogue closely,
unilateral international aggression is more "politically correct"
than programs for the poor.
	* Privatization justifies the notion that corporations are
more likely to serve the public interest than publicly owned utilities,
schools and prisons.
	* Right to life means prohibition of abortion for any reason,
including saving the life of the mother.
	* States' rights apply only when there is a Democratic majority
in Congress. Today, the phrase is conveniently dropped from conservative
lexicon as the Bush administration exerts increasing control over local
libraries, local school boards, medical marijuana and holocaust survivors'
insurance in California and assisted suicide in Oregon.
	* Support the troops, a brilliant concept, suggests that
if you question foreign policy or war policy, you have the deaths
of our finest young men and women in uniform on your hands. Objective:
to stifle public dissent.
	* Tax and spend, ignoring the successful deficit reduction of
the previous administration, describes what Democrats do. Borrow and
spend, a Republican strategy currently being exercised at unparalleled
heights, is politically correct and unworthy of critique. As we said
before, these are not your grandfather's conservatives.
	* Tax rebate facilitates the largest vote-buying scheme in history,
whereby all taxpayers and their children and their children's children,
regardless of political persuasion, pay for an increased federal deficit
in order to fund checks from the Bush administration to taxpayers.
	* Un-American describes people critical of administration policy.
This collected lexicon, for instance, is un-American. So are the Dixie Chicks.
	* Vouchers, expected to be issued as a result of No Child Left Behind
testing, will authorize the transfer of your tax dollars to private
(often "faith-based") schools.
	* War on terrorism justifies pretty much anything, such as
opening the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploitation.
Opposing any such measure means you are "un-American." If you have
reasons, you're "anti-American."

August 12, 2003: Paul Sperry of World Net Daily reports that former 
Department of Energy Office of Intelligence acting Director Thomas Rider,
who had no intelligence experience before his appointment, had been paid
a $20,500 bonus by Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to say that Iraq 
as trying to build weapons of mass destruction, and had ordered
intelligence officials who disagreed to "shut up and sit down".

August 12, 2003: British arms dealer Hemant Lakhani is arrested for
attempting to import a surface-to-air missile to al Qaeda forces
in the United States.

August 13, 2003: Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage pledges
that United States forces will remain in Iraq "until we find and destroy
Iraq's capability to launch biological, chemical and nuclear weapons",
citing the lack of any evidence of Iraq having such weapons as proof
that the weapons are "far too easy to move and far too easy to hide".

August 13, 2003: Iraqis riot after the United States tears down a flag
of Islam in Baghdad. United States forces fire into the crowd, killing
one. The Associated Press initially reports having videotape
of the banner's removal proving that this was intentional, but this
claim is absent from later reports.

August 14, 2003: Afghan President Hamiz Karzai fires the Governors 
of Kandahar, Wardak, and Zabul, fires the heads of security in
Kandahar, Khost, Kunar, Logar, Paktia, and Tahar, and assumes control
of one of Herat Governor Ismail Khan's military outposts.

August 14, 2003: Edward Epstein of the San Francisco Chronicle reports
that the Department of Defense is cancelling Congressionally-approved
pay increases for soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.

August 14, 2003: The United Nations Committee on the Elimination
of Racial Discrimination condemns Israel's law banning the immigration
of Palestinian Authority citizens who marry Israeli citizens
as a violation of the International Convention on the Elimination
of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

August 14, 2003: Israeli forces kill Islamic Jihad Hebron commander
Mohammed Seder.

August 14, 2003: Maine Attorney General G. Steven Rowe and
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal accuse Bush's
Council on Environmental Quality of lobbying the
Competitive Enterprise Institute to file a lawsuit against
the Environmental Protection Agency in order to forbid the release
of information about global warming.

August 14, 2003, Unrelated: Power outages occur from Detroit to New York
to Toronto.

August 14, 2003: Says of the power outages that "We'll have time to
look at it and determine whether or not our grid needs to be modernized.
I happen to think it does, and have said so all along." Left-wing news
sources note that Bush spoke against three different Congressional attempts
to modernize the power grid, and Republicans in Congress voted them down.

August 14, 2003: Diebold Chief Executive Officer Walden O'Dell writes
that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes
to the president next year". Diebold manufactures voting machines
found by auditors to be designed for vote counts to be illegally modified
and is attempting to sell these machines to Ohio.

August 14, 2003, Unrelated: The French Ministry of Health reports
that 3,000 people have been killed by a heat wave.

August 14, 2003, Unrelated: Thailand forbids Cambodian politician Sam Rainsy
from entering the country.

August 15, 2003: The Chicago Tribune reports that Bush has ordered
Republican Party officials to send a disproportionate number of
nonwhites as delegates to the Republican Party convention
in order to make the Republican Party appear to have support from
minority race groups.

August 15, 2003: Libya accepts responsibility for bombing a civilian airliner
over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, and agrees to pay relatives of the dead
$10 million each, totaling $2.7 billion. France demands Libya pay its people
an equal amount, instead of the $200,000 per person killed agreed to
over the 1989 bombing of a French airliner over Niger.

August 15, 2003: Israel release 73 Arab prisoners.

August 15, 2003, Unrelated: Indian terrorists attack three villages
in Tripura and a bus in Manipur, killing 36. Also, six rebels are killed
in fighting with government forces in Assam.

August 16, 2003: The Iraqi oil pipeline to Turkey is bombed near Baiji.

August 16, 2003: Mosul, Iraq police chief General Mohamed Khairi al Barhawi
survives an assassination attempt in which two of his guards are killed.

August 16, 2003: A New Iraqi Corps base in Mosul is attacked. Ten people
are killed in the fighting,

August 16, 2003: Syed Saleem Shahzad of the Asia Times reports that
"Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-e-Islami Afghanistan, the Taliban and
fighters of Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front" have "grouped
under the banner of the Saiful Muslemeen (the Sword of Muslims)",
and that more than 50 people had been killed in terrorist attacks
by this alliance in the past week.

August 16, 2003, Unrelated: Congressman Janklow speeds through a stop sign
and kills a motorcyclist. The Washington Times falsely reports that
Janklow, a Republican, is a Democrat.

August 16, 2003, Unrelated: Shots are fired in the Dominican Republic's
Congress building as Congress meets to elect a new speaker. No injuries
are reported.

August 16, 2003, Unrelated: Mexican police arrest Armando Valencia Cornelio,
suspected of leading a group that exports one-third of the total amount
of illegal drugs that cross into the United States.

August 17, 2003: 400 Taliban soldiers attack the police headquarters
of Barmal, Afghanistan, killing 7 and destroying the building before
returning to bases in Pakistan.

August 17, 2003: United States forces attack and kill Reuters cameraman
Mazen Dana, a winner of the International Press Freedom Award. Dana's
chauffer Munzer Abbas says that "There were many journalists around.
They knew were were journalists. This was not an accident."

August 17, 2003: Iran announces that it has prevented al Qaeda from
carrying out planned attacks against Iran.

August 17, 2003: Two of Iraq's major northern oil pipelines are bombed,
as is an aqueduct which supplies water to Baghdad.

August 18, 2003: Afghan rebels attack the Mine Dog Center mine-clearing
agency, beating aid workers and destroying their vehicles.

August 18, 2003: Claims that the number of 10,000 troops in Afghanistan is
"down from, obviously, major combat operations" when in fact it is higher
than the 3,000 that were involved in combat and 5,000 that were there
in March 2002.

August 18, 2003: White House staff edits its public Web archive's
historical press releases stating Bush declared an end to combat in Iraq
so that the press releases now say Bush declared an end to "major" combat
in Iraq.

August 18, 2003: House Majority Whip Tom DeLay says that the United States
Constitution demands that Republicans be the majority in Congress.

August 18, 2003: Benevolence International director Enaam Arnaout
is sentenced to 11 years of jail for funding paramilitary groups
in Bosnia and Kosovo while claiming to be a charity for refugees.

August 19, 2003: The United Nations regional headquarters in the Canal Hotel
of Baghdad, Iraq is bombed, killing 19 including United States Council on
Foreign Relations Director of Peace and Conflict Studies Arthur C. Helton
and UN Representative Sergo Vieira de Mello, whose office the bomb targeted.
The United Nations initially reports that de Mello was not killed but
merely wounded even though they haven't found him yet. Fox News suggests
the bombing was "part of some pre-war agreement between Saddam Hussein
and Osama bin Laden", while Glenn Reynolds suggests "maybe the bomb
was planeted by environmentalists" and accuses the United Nations of
actively supporting Iraq's genocide of the Marsh Arabs. Japan stops
deployment of forces to Iraq.

August 19, 2003: Former Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan is
arrested in Mosul.

August 19, 2003: Afghan President Hamid Karzai's brother's house is bombed.
No injuries are reported. The bomb is reported to have been an accident.

August 19, 2003: Taliban forces kill nine Afghan policemen, including
the Logar province police commander. Microsoft National Broadcast Company
reports that "More than 90 people have been killed in the past week"
in Taliban attacks.

August 19, 2003: The Christian Science Monitor reports that Afghanistan
has been suppressing liberal movements with beatings and disenfranchisement.

August 19, 2003: The National Security Agency rejects a Freedom of Information
Act request for documents related to al Qaeda's Project Bojinka -- the plan
discovered in 1995 to hijack a dozen airplanes and crash them into
the World Trade Center, Sears Tower, Pentagon, White House,
and Central Intelligence Agency headquarters while simultaneously
assassinating President Clinton and Pope John Paul II -- declaring that
"all substantive portions of the documents are not releasable".

August 19, 2003: Twenty are killed in a bus bombing in Israel.
Both Islamic Resistance and Islamic Jihad claim responsibility.

August 20, 2003, Unrelated: The Oman Observer reports that Stern Magazine
has reported that the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation
had interrogated September 11 terrorist Ziad Jarrah in Janurary 2000
before releasing him and notifying the Central Intelligence Agency
that Jarrah was taking flight lessons.

August 20, 2003: Texas State Representative Bill Ratliff reports that
Bush's political consultant Karl Rove and Congressman Tom DeLay had asked
him in the summer of 2001, as Lieutenant Governor at the time, to suspend
the state Senate's rule requiring a two-thirds quorum so that the
Republican majority in the state Legislature could force a gerrymandering
of the state's districts.

August 20, 2003: Israel releases another 73 Arab prisoners.

August 20, 2003: Joshua Micah Marshall reports that Peter Berger
has said that thousands of terrorists from Saudi Arabia have entered
Iraq via Syria, and that this movement might have been helped by
a Saudi crackdown on terrorists.

August 20, 2003: John O'Neill's family sues Iraq and al Jazeera television
for carrying out the September 11 terrorist attacks.

August 20, 2003: Rachel Neuwirth of Chron Watch, an extremist right-wing
Web site, reports having personally contacted Council on American-Islamic
Relations Director Ibrahim Hooper, who when asked about terrorist groups
told her that "CAIR does not support these groups publicly" before
Hooper "lost his composure and I suddenly found myself listening
to a dial tone!", and that Hooper has since refused to speak to her
for the past month despite attempts to contact him via telephone and writing.

August 21, 2003: Government Executive Magazine reports that
the anti-ballistic missile defense system is "scheduled to be deployed
by October 2004" but will only be 70% complete at that time.

August 21, 2003: British diplomat David Broucher says that weapons inspector
David Kelly had said "I will probably be found dead in the woods"
by Iraqi hands if Britain invaded Iraq, as Kelly had given Iraq assurances
that Britain would not invade if Iraq cooperated with weapons inspectors.

August 21, 2003: Dexter Filkins of the New York Times reports
that "a senior American official" has said that all of the guards
hired by the United Nations to defend the UN compound that was bombed
had been Iraqi secret service agents whose prior assignment was
to spy on the United Nations, and cites Israeli ambassador to the UN
Dan Gillerman as saying that the truck used in the bombing had recently
been imported from Syria.

August 21, 2003: Rory Carroll of the Guardian reports that Malawi
had secretly arrested five Muslim men and given them to the United States
Central Intelligence Agency who held them for a month before determining
that they had not committed any crime.

August 21, 2003: Joseph Wilson says that "it's of great interest to me
to see Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs"
for revealing that Wilson's wife is an undercover CIA agent.

August 22, 2003: Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, speaking
on Arab radio, suggests that Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran should
tighten their borders to prevent terrorists from entering Iraq.

August 22, 2003: Canada reports having arrested 19 people on the 14th
who were taking flight lessons and investigating a nuclear power plant
near Ontario, and had traveled around the country in groups of 4 or 5,
all changing addresses at the same time.

August 22, 2003: Former Australian Office of National Assessments analyst
Andrew Wilkie says that Prime Minister John Howard "lied every time"
he promoted the invasion of Iraq, saying Howard "skewed, misrepresented,
used selectively and fabricated the Iraq story" and that "Sometimes
the exaggeration was so great, it was clear dishonesty". Wilkie
also says that "Key intelligence qualifiers like 'probably', 'could',
'uncorroborated evidence suggests', were frequently dropped"

August 22, 2003: Microsoft National Broadcast Corporation host
Chris Matthews denies that he has ever allowed Ann Coulter on his show.
Lexis-Nexus reports that Coulter has been on Matthews's show eight times
including three times in the week following the release of one of her
books, although Mike Barnicle had guest-hosted the show three of these 
eight appearances, and that Matthews had once said "Ann Coulter, if it's
anybody else, you owe us lots of money."

August 22, 2003, Unrelated: A rocket explodes on the launch pad during
testing at the Alcantara Launch Center in Brazil, killing 21.

August 23, 2003: France demands that the United States share command
over Iraq with the United Nations as a condition for accepting UN
military assistance.

August 23, 2003, Unrelated: John Geoghan, one of more than 300 Catholic
priests accused of molesting children under his care, is killed by
another inmate while in protective custody at Souza-Baranowski prison
in Shirley, Massachusetts days before he would have been released
due to the statute of limitations having run out on his accused crimes.
Reports state that Geoghan was placed in the same cell as a murderer
who was an anti-Catholic bigot and had been sentenced to life imprisonment
without the possibility of parole, and that prison officials have
openly refused to conduct an investigation. In one poll, over 70%
of respondents said that Geoghan deserved to be killed.

August 23, 2003, Unrelated: The People's Republic of China condemns Japan
after a man is killed after opening barrels of Japanese mustard gas
that were buried sixty years ago and recently unearthed.

August 23, 2003, Unrelated: Russian Sakhalin governor Igor Farkhutdinov
and 19 others are killed in a helicopter crash on the Kamchatka peninsula.

August 2003: The Environmental Protection Agency admits that
it had falsely claimed there was no threat of harm from air pollution
after the destruction of the World Trade Center, and blames Bush
for pressuring the EPA to make this false claim.

August 2003: The American Sociological Assocation gives the Dissertation Award
to Devah Pager for her study of how employers react to prospective employees'
felony records as compared to applicants without felony records. The study
showed that whites with felony records are more likely to be considered
than law-abiding blacks.

August 2003: Republicans in Nevada begin a campaign to recall Governor
Kenny Guinn. Republicans in Pennsylvania propose allowing public recalls
of Governors such as are allowed in California and Nevada.

August 2003, Unrelated: Liberian rebels violate the cease fire and
continue attacking government forces.

August 2003, Unrelated: Over 2,500 mosltly computer software Web sites
temporarily close to protest the European Union's consideration
of granting patents for common and simple software programming techniques.
The Web sites include those of the Apache web server, Anjuta integrated
development environment, Barrapunto computer news site, Debian Linux
operating system, FreeS/WAN network administration utility, Gentoo Linux
operating system, Gnome Foundation, Gimp Tool Kit window programming library,
GNU Image Manipulator, K Desktop Environment's Spanish site,
Open Office's Basque, Danish, Italian, Dutch, and Spanish sites,
Independent Media's Belgium, Madrid, Germany, and Italy sites,
RPM Find software search engine, and the MPlayer and Xine video players.

August 2003, Unrelated: Two Australian government computers are stolen
from a restricted area at Sydney Airport. The Sydney Morning Herald later
reports that the computers contained suspect tracking data collected
by Customs, Australian Security Intelligence Organization, and federal police,
while Australia reports that the computers "did not contain personal,
business-related, or national security information".

August 24, 2003: The Hutton inquiry into the death of weapons inspector
David Kelly reports finding over 40 documents showing that Press Secretary
Alastair Campbell, claiming to be following Prime Minister Tony Blair's
orders, had requested false information be placed in a dossier
on Iraq's weapons capabilities, including a claim that Iraq could
build a nuclear weapon within months.

August 24, 2003: Andrew England of the Associated Press reports that
tank crews forced by circumstance to act as infantry in Iraq have needed
to equip themselves with captured AK-47 rifles because the Army only
supplies two M4 rifles and four pistols to a four-man tank crew.

August 24, 2003: New York Times columnist Tom Friedman writes that
the invasion of Iraq was "about Western powers, helped by the U.N.,
coming into the heart of their world to promote more decent, open, 
tolerant, women-friendly, pluralistic governments by starting with Iraq".
Chris Kelly notes that Friedman had written in June that "The 'real reason'
for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed
to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world."

August 24, 2003: The Los Angeles Times reports that county singer
Toby Keith, who rose to nationwide prominence after the September 11
terrorist attacks by writing a song which told terrorists "we'll put a boot
in your ass, it's the American way", led the campaign to condemn
the Dixie Chicks, and later wrote a song praising the days when
lynchings were common in lieu of justice, was overheard privately saying
that "I'm still doing the math" about whether the Iraq war was necessary,
and "My stance is I pick and choose my wars. This war here, the math
hasn't worked out for me on it. But I'm smart enough to know there's
people smarter than me... this is their job...I know a tyrant is gone
and all of that, but whether it was our duty to go do that, well,
I haven't figured that out."

August 24, 2003, Unrelated: Iran charges two of its homeland security
personnel with murder for killing Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi.
Two days later, Iran's central government condemns the judicial inquiry
and insists that the agents are innocent of any wrongdoing.

August 25, 2003: Jack Pritchard, the State Department's top analyst
for North Korea, resigns.

August 25, 2003: United States and Afghan forces report attacking Taliban
forces in Zabul province, killing 14.

August 25, 2003: The United States objects to a proposed United Nations
resolution which would define terrorist attacks on aid workers as
a crime punishable under the International Criminal Court.

August 25, 2003, Unrelated: The Gateway of India and a jewelry store
in Zaveri Bazaar, Bombai, India are bombed, killing 47. A third series
of bombs targeting a trainful of Hindu pilgrims was defused. The Gateway
is not damaged.

August 25, 2003, Unrelated: French forces arrest ten people in Cote D'Ivoire
accused of planning to overthrough the government.

August 26, 2003: William Scher of Liberal Oasis reports that "Bush Inc.
has said the campaign wont abide by spending caps during the primary,
but will during the general election. The Bush plan sounds innocuous,
since he doesnt face anyone significant in the primary. But the trick is
the primary period doesnt end until the candidate is officially nominated.
And the RNC pushed the nomination all the way to Sept. 2, past
the traditional August date for the incumbent party. Since Bush is aiming
to raise upwards of $200M for the "primary," he can dump all of that
during the winter, spring and summer. Then, scoop up about $74M of taxpayer
cash in the general election grant.

August 26, 2003: Mike Collett-White of the Associated Press reports
that "the Taliban and their allies have succeeded in destabilizing
large parts of Afghanistan... Aid and reconstruction is suspended 
across swathes of territory in the center, south and southeast,
giving Afghans the impression the international community has abandoned
them".

August 26, 2003: The Associated Press reports that an anonymous
United Nations diplomat has said traces of weapons-grade uranium
has been found in Natanz, Iran.

August 26, 2003: The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports
that "If tax increases and cuts in Social Security, Medicare, defense,
and homeland security are ruled out, achieving budget balance by 2008
would require cutting all remaining programs by 41 percent."

August 26, 2003: An Israeli attempt to assassinate Islamic Resistance
member Khaled Massoud misses, killing a bystander. The United States
condemns this as a terrorist act.

August 27, 2003: Writes that "Full statutory civilian pay increases
costing 13 percent of payroll in 2004 would interfere with our Nation's
ability to pursue the war on terrorism...Such cost increases would threaten
our efforts against terrorism or force deep cuts in discretionary spending
or Federal employment to stay within budget."

August 27, 2003: Richard Perle says taht "we haven't done everything right"
in Iraq, and "Today, the answer is to hand over power to the Iraqis
as soon as possible".

August 27, 2003: The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
withdraw from Iraq and indefinitely postpone. reconstruction efforts there. 

August 27, 2003: The United States condemns al Arabia television
for broadcasting a group of masked men promising to kill 
the governing council in Iraq and any Iraqi who follows the United States.

August 27, 2003: Britain freezes the assets of Interpal, also known as
the Palestinian Relief and Development Fund, for being a front
for the Islamic Resistance terrorist group. A month later, Britain
determines that Interpal has no connections to Islamic Resistance.

August 28, 2003: North Korea promises to begin holding nuclear weapons tests
soon.

August 28, 2003: British Prime Minister Tony Blair pledges to resign
if any evidence is found that he or his Press Secretary Alastair Campbell
had attempted to influence the dossier on Iraq.

August 28, 2003: Howard Altman of the Philadelphia City Paper reports
that Attorney General John Ashcroft is refusing to allow newspaper reporters
to attend his publicity tour to promote the Patriot Act, only allowing
television reporters.

August 28, 2003: Former Navy Secretary James Webb says that
"I am very troubled by the fact that we went into Iraq and
very troubled about how we're going to get out of Iraq...We need to
get out of there before the mistake we made gets worse".

August 28, 2003, Unrelated: The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests
an 18-year-old who had renamed the "MSBlast" computer network worm
to "Penis32" and to his own chat handle "Teekid", and had modified it
to send messages to his personal internet server that is registered
under his name and address.  Most media accuse him in headlines of being
the original author of the MSBlast worm, which had shut down several
Microsoft-based computer systems for a day, even as the FBI and the
media's own article text reports that he was not the original author.

August 29, 2003: The Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf is bombed, killing 95
including Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al Hakim, the top Shiite leader in Iraq.
Immediately before, al Hakim had accused supporters of the former
Iraqi government of threatening to kill Shiite leaders. The United States
reports that it and its allies have no forces in Najaf in order to placate
Muslims who consider it a holy city.

August 29, 2003: British Press Secretary Alastair Campbell resigns.

August 29, 2003: John Dean reports that Vice President Dick Cheney
had lied to Congress by claiming to have delivered requested documents
when he had not done so.

August 29, 2003: The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission imposes
fines totaling $1 million on several energy companies found to have
defrauded California of nearly $9.6 billion. 

August 29, 2003: The Environmental Protection Agency announes
that industrial releases of carbon dioxide, suspected to be
the most significant contributing factor to the Earth's increasing
temperature, are not really pollution.

August 29, 2003: The port of Dover, England is closed after firearms
are discovered being smuggled in a car on a ferry.

August 30, 2003: Sulaymaniyah, Iraq provincial police chief Hama Hussein
is assassinated by suspected members of Ansar al Islam.

August 30, 2003: Iraqi police arrest 19 poeople accused of bombing
the Imam Ali mosque. Two of those arrested are from Saudi Arabia.

August 31, 2003: Pakistan arrests Lieutenant Colonel Khalid Abbassi
and two junior officers accused of supporting terrorism.

August 31, 2003: Time Magazine cites an excerpt from Gerald Posner's
book Why America Slept which details that during Abu Zubaydah's interrogation,
he gave United States agents posing as Saudis the telephone number of
Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz to arrange his release, told them
that Prince Turki al-Faisal bin Abdul Aziz was the connection between
the Saudi government and al Qaeda and that Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki
and Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir along with Prince Ahmed were
the chief financiers of al Qaeda. The book's ending notes that the
three financiers died within ten days of each other.

August 31, 2003, Unrelated: The Union Internationale des Avocats
calls for the United Nations to accept more permanent members
to the Security Council and to remove the permanent members' veto power.


September 1, 2003: Stephen F. Hayes of the Weekly Standard reports
that "The CIA has confirmed, in interviews with detainees and informants
it finds highly credible, that al Qaeda's Number 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri,
met with Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad in 1992 and 1998...the Agency
has "irrefutable evidence" that the Iraqi regime paid Zawahiri $300,000
in 1998, around the time his Islamic Jihad was merging with al Qaeda.
'It's a lock,' says this source...four sources spread across
the national security hierarchy have confirmed the payment."

September 1, 2003: Howard Hoffman reports that Regnery publishers
have released Richard Miniter's book "The Duel: Clinton and Bin Laden's
Secret War" with the new title "Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's
Failures Unleashed Global Terrorism".

September 2003: Former Army Secretary Thomas White condemns
the preparations for Iraq's reconstruction as "totally inadequate".

September 2, 2003: Saudi Arabia and Russia sign an energy trade treaty
to collaborate in the oil market.

September 2, 2003: Robert Pear of the New York Times reports that
the Bush administration has nullified a law that had required
hospitals to treat anybody who needs immediate medical attention
regardless of the patient's ability to pay for services.

September 2, 2003, Unrelated: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
sues Democratica di Sinistra party leader and European Commission President
Piero Fassino for libel after Fassino accuses Berlusconi of being behind
claims that Fassino had taken bribes.

September 3, 2003: State Department spokesman Richard Boucher
officially condemns the fledgling European military alliance
as "the chocolate makers" who "got together and had a little bitty summit".

September 3, 2003: Former National Security Council head Richard Clarke
admits that White House officials approved the evacuation flights of Saudi
royal family members during the days after the September 11 2001 terrorist
attacks when all flights were supposed to be grounded, and says that
the Federal Bureau of Investigation had approved the flights. Sky News
reports that Clarke had said the flights included members of Osama bin Laden's
family.

September 3, 2003: Rich Miller of the River Cities' Reader reports
that "A year ago, American General John Abizaid published an internal
Defense Department book about urban warfare. Abizaids Doctrine for
Joint Urban Operations was all but ignored by Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks...Abizaid wrote about the
massive troop requirements for urban warfare; warned of rapid burnout
of soldiers and equipment assigned to urban battlegrounds; and
time and again referenced catastrophic instances of over-confidence
and under-preparedness among commanders and of disastrous misunderstandings
of local cultures and their motivations. He also stressed how essential
it is that law enforcement and other routine activities be returned
to civilian agencies as quickly as possible."

September 4, 2003: The United States, Australia, Britain, France, Germany,
Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, and Spain form the
American Proliferation Security Initiative alliance to allow each other
to stop and search ships suspected of carrying weapons.

September 4, 2003: Saudi police report seizing a truckload of
surface-to-air missiles destined for terrorists.

September 4, 2003: Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
claims that the United Nations had no interest in weakening
the United States' authority over Iraq until the bombing of
the UN mission in Baghdad.

September 4, 2003: David Corn of The Nation reports that commercial cargo
on passenger planes is not searched the way passengers' private luggage is.

September 4, 2003, Unrelated: Colombian and British police report 
having seized $6 billion in United States savings bonds in London raids
in July and August.

September 2003: The United States reports having routed Taliban forces
from Zabul province, Afghanistan.

September 2003: Israel bombs militia positions in Lebanon.

September 5, 2003, Unrelated: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
says of judges that "To do that job you need to be mentally disturbed,
you need psychic disturbances...If they do that job it is because they
are anthropologically different from the rest of the human race."

September 5, 2003: Al Jazeera correspondant Tayseer Alouni is arrested
in Spain on suspicion of supporting al Qaeda.

September 5, 2003: The Washington Post reports the results of a poll
showing that 80% of Republicans, 62% of Democrats, and 67% of others
respondents believe that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was
behind the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

September 6, 2003: The Hutton Inquiry discovers a memo from 
Joint Intelligence Committee Chairman John Scarlett declaring
that "ownership" of the Iraq intelligence dossier "lay with No 10",
Prime Minister Tony Blair's residence. Blair had claimed that
the dossier was entirely the work of the JIC.

September 6, 2003: Undersecretary of State John Bolton says that
"Whether he [Iraq] possessed them [nuclear weapns] today or four years ago
isn't really the issue", but that the United States has the right to
invade anybody with "the capability" to have "sought to have...WMD programs".

September 6, 2003: Microsoft National Broadcast Company reports receiving
memos detailing that the Stryker armoured personnel carriers are equipped
with faulty armour tiles that may be vulnerable to small arms fire.

September 6, 2003: The European Union declares Islamic Resistance to be
a terrorist group.

September 6, 2003: Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas
resigns in protest of Yasser Arafat's refusal to stop supporting terrorism.
Arafat appoints Ahmed Qureia as Abbas's replacement.

September 6, 2003: The Sydney Morning Herald reports about memos "from top
Bristol-Myers executives" to employees in 2000 ordering them to donate
to Bush's campaign the maximum $1000 allowed by law and an additional
$1000 in their wives' names under the threat that "their names would
be forwarded to the company's then chief executive, Charles Heimbold".

September 7, 2003: Gives a speech requesting $87 billion for rebuilding Iraq.
As most stations broadcast the speech, Fox shows football games instead. 

September 7, 2003: Charles Hanley of the Associated Press 
cites former United Nations chemical weapons advisor Ron G. Manley
as saying that numbers of unaccounted-for chemical and biological weapons
in Iraq may be due to Iraqi officers inflating production numbers
during the 1980s to please their supervisors.

September 7, 2003: Judith Miller reports that "I was embedded for over
four months with weapons of mass destruction hunters, and as we went through
Iraq, we found ammunition facility after ammo facility, where there were
mortars and shells and RPGs and everything stored, and we would leave
those facilities unguarded simply because the unit soldiers told me,
they didn't have the manpower to guard them. And I said, 'What's going
to happen to all of this ammunition?' Well, now we know what's happening
to it. Some of it's being used to kill American soldiers and others in Iraq."

September 7, 2003: The Wall Street Journal breaks down the monthly costs
of reconstruction in Iraq as $3.9 billion for maintaining 140,000 soldiers
(or $27,800 per soldier), $200 million for food aid, $190 million for 
Iraqi pensions and the salaries of Iraq's government officials,
$143 million for the Iraqi government's administration expenses, 
$141 million for oil field work, $101 million for improving 
the capital infrastructure of Iraq's government, $100 million for
contractors such as Halliburton, and $283 million for other unidentified
expenses, totalling $5.058 billion per month or $60.696 billion per year.

September 7, 2003: The Wall Street Journal reports that "The U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers recently did a helicopter survey of Iraq's high-voltage
distribution wires: Over about 700 miles, they found 623 destroyed towers,
up from fewer than 20 just after the war."

September 8, 2003: The Arab League officially recognizes Iraq's
US-appointed governing council as the government of Iraq.

September 8, 2003: The Madison Capitol Times notes that the $87 billion
requested by Bush for Iraq "could pay for 1.4 million new teachers at home.
It could help 11 million low-income families meet housing needs.  It could
provide health care coverage for 30 million children...the $87 billion
would balance every state budget...$87 billion could, according to UNICEF,
meet the basic human needs of every impoverished person on Earth."

September 8, 2003: Former British Environment Minister Michael Meacher
writes that "the so-called war on terrorism is being used largely
as a bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical
objectives...The evidence again is quite clear that plans for
military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before
11 September...The global war on terrorism has all the hallmarks of
a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different
agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force
command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project."

September 8, 2003: Salon Magazine quotes residents of Redmond, Oregon
as reporting seeing three Chinook-class transport helicopters land
in a nearby forest immediately before the start of forest fires
which Bush soon used as the backdrop of a speech to promote logging
in order to save forests from fires. Salon also quotes the United States
Forest Service as reporting that their helicopters did fly through
the area at the time but "were doing routine surveillance".

September 8, 2003: The New York Times reports that $194 million of the money
from a relief fund intended for small businesses who had their entire
businesses destroyed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks
has instead been delivered to large businesses who were not as greatly
harmed, while only $38 million has gone to intended targets.

September 8, 2003: Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports
that "Last February...sources in the Bush administration told Newsweek
that they were expecting a postwar occupation of Iraq of 30 to 90 days"
and cites the US Army War College of having issued a report which
"reads like an after-the-fact autopsy", stating instead that "Having
entered into Iraq, the United States will find itself unable to leave
rapidly, despite the many pressures to do so...A small number of
terrorists could reasonably choose to attack U.S. forces in the hope
that they can incite an action-reaction cycle that will enhance their
cause and increase their numbers...If the United States assumes control
of Iraq, it will assume control of a badly battered economy...To tear apart
the [Iraqi] army in the war's aftermath could lead to the destruction
 of one of the only forces for unity within the society...Without
an overwhelming effort to prepare for occupation, the United States
may find itself in a radically different world over the next few years,
a world in which the threat of Saddam Hussein seems like a pale shadow
of new problems of America's own making."

September 9, 2003: The Los Angeles Times reports hearing from
"administration officials" that the cost of occupying Iraq for
the next year would be $142 billion, not the $87 billion that Bush
publicly requested.

September 9, 2003: Richard Parker notes that $142 billion can buy
enough gold to plate all the highways in the United States.

September 9, 2003: Saudi Arabia issues a countrywide call for all parents
to report any missing sons to the government for fear they might have
joined a terrorist militia.

September 2003: In a prepared speech, claims that "the budget for next year
boosts funding for elementary and secondary education to $53.1 billion"
when in fact only $34.9 billion will be spent on this and the amount is down
from $35.8 billion in the current fiscal year.

September 2003: Senator Christopher Bond adds an amendment to the
Environmental Protection Agency spending bill which would forbid
states from enacting any environmental regulations.

September 2003: The Washington Post reports that the Transportation
Security Administration is creating a database of all United States
citizens and residents in which "An estimated 1 to 2 percent will be
labeled "red" and will be prohibited from boarding. These passengers
also will face police questioning and may be arrested."

September 2003: African peacekeepers wrest control of Kakata, Libera
from rebel forces.

September 2003: Jane's Defense Weekly reports that China was able
to collect military secrets from the EP-3 surveillance aircraft 
it captured from the United States in 2001.

September 10, 2003: Declares September 11 to be "Patriot Day",
praises the Patriot Act for enchancing police powers beyond
what the Constitution allows, and warns the people that terrorism
cannot be stopped unless an even greater enhancement of police powers
is permitted.

September 10, 2003: al Qaeda releases a videotape of Osama bin Laden
and Ayman al Zawahri.

September 10, 2003: The Senate votes 54-45 to reject Bush's proposal
to eliminate overtime pay. Republican Senators Arlen Specter, Ben Nighthorse
Campbell, Lisa Murkowski, and three others split from the Party
to vote with the Democrats.

September 10, 2003: Alabama votes 62-32% to reject Governor Bob Riley's
plan to raise taxes on the rich and lower taxes on the poor and middle class.

September 10, 2003: Chistine Amanpour of Cable News Network says 
about media censorship during the invasion of Iraq that "I think the press
was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled. I'm sorry to say,
but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my station
was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News.
And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship,
in my view, in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did...All of
the entire body politic in my view, whether it's the administration,
the intelligence, the journalists, whoever, did not ask enough questions,
for instance, about weapons of mass destruction. I mean, it looks like
this was disinformation at the highest levels." In response, Fox News
spokesperson Irena Briganti says that "given the choice, it's better
to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than a spokeswoman for al-Qaeda."

September 10, 2003, Unrelated: Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh
is assassinated.

September 10, 2003: Over 25 Democratic Congressmen including Nancy Pelosi
and Howard Berman condemn Howard Dean for saying that "it's not our place
to take sides" in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

September 11, 2003: Canadian Muslim leaders Ahmad Kutty and Abdul Hamid,
are arrested, jailed, and expelled from the United States for attempting
to enter the US as Muslims on a September 11.

September 11, 2003: KRON television reports that "Some National Guard troops
are coming home earlier. Congress is investigating complaints that they
are from states that supported the Bush election campaign."

September 11, 2003, Unrelated: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
praises Benito Mussolini's dictatorship as a good, benign dictatorship
as compared to Arab dictatorships, saying "Mussolini never killed anyone.
Mussolini sent people on vacation abroad."

September 11, 2003: Israel's Cabinet publicly and officially recommends
that Palestinian Authorit President Yasser Arafat be assassinated
or expelled from Israel.

September 11, 2003: Actor and comedian Tommy Chong is sentenced
to 9 months of prison for selling bongs that can be used to smoke
either legal or illegal materials.

September 11, 2003: Dow Jones Newswire reports that Halliburton
will earn at least $2 billion from Iraq-related contracts granted
by the United States government, including a contract initially granted
without a bidding process whose cost increased by $200 million after being
reviewed, and a contract for Army Field Support Command that increased
to $1 billion from less than $600 million.

September 11, 2003: Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor urges citizens
to arm themselves and purchase intrusion detection equipment because
the state will be cutting back police forces severely.

September 11, 2003: A Muslim schoolgirl is expelled from school
in Muskogee, Oklahoma for wearing the headscarf required by
an orthodox interpretation of her religion.

September 12, 2003: Chris Nelson reports that "Reliable sources confirm
intel on Iran ['s nuclear program] is real, not Feith-based."

September 12, 2003: United States forces attack and kill 8 Iraqi policemen
near Falluja where the police were chasing suspected thieves shortly
after midnight, and also attack a nearby hospital that allied peacekeepers
were guarding, killing 1 Jordanian soldier. The United States claims that
the policemen attacked a US patrol, while wounded policemen individually
and unanimously report that the United States fired first and continued
attacking for nearly an hour while the policemen attempted to surrender.
The United States later clears its soldiers of any wrongdoing, in its report
claiming that the battle lasted only 30 seconds.

September 12, 2003: Paul Bremer admits that "there are many things
to do in Iraq", citing hopes for "better security, more electricity,
adequate fuel supplies, constant water service, better schools,
more school books and other things", and enumerates Bush's $87 billion
request as $6 billion for electricity, $4.7 billion for water
and sewer systems, $2 billion for police, $2 billion for a new army,
$2 billion for the oil industry, $1 billion for the judiciary,
$900 million for health care, $800 million for transportation
and telecommunications, $500 million for urban development,
and $300 million for vocational training.

September 12, 2003: The United Nations ends sanctions against Libya
related to Libya's bombing of civilian passenger airplanes in the 1980s.

September 12, 2003, Unrelated: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
condemns the outrage of his public praising of dictator Benito Mussolini
as having "discredited and scorned Italians".

September 12, 2003: Indian police report killing Nasir, the leader
of the group responsible for bombings in Bombai in August.

September 12, 2003: The Associated Press reports that "A federal audit
that was delayed at the request of Gov. Jeb Bush's office during
his re-election campaign found that Florida's public pension fund
owes the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services $267 million."

September 12, 2003, Unrelated: The Washington Post reports that
"Two weeks ago, MSNBC talk show host Joe Scarborough introduced
a guest, attorney Mike Papantonio, to point a finger at
the 'Rat of the Week.' Papantonio slammed a wood-preserving company
called Osmose, saying it makes a dangerous product used in playground
equipment and has 'figured out how to poison our children and
make a profit in the meantime.' What Scarborough didn't say is that
Papantonio is his law partner, and that their firm has filed a lawsuit
against Osmose. Instead, he urged viewers to demand that the government
recall the company's product". The Post also reports that Scarborough
has publicly apologized after being contacted by the Post.

September 13, 2003: The Maryland Republican Party expels the Maryland
Hispanic Republican Caucus after Caucus leader Jorge Ribas notes
that Governor Robert Ehrlich has not appointed any Hispanics
to high positions in the goverment.

September 13, 2003: A US military vehicle is bombed near Falluja, Iraq,
killing one soldier.

September 13, 2003, Unrelated: Indiana Governor Frank O'Bannon dies.

September 13, 2003, Unrelated: The China Daily reports that Shanghai
is sinking a centimeter and a half per year under the weight of
its buildings.

September 2003: Michael Isikoff of Newsweek reports that Bush has appointed
Jean Lewis -- who had falsely accused Bill Clinton, several other Democrats,
and all of Clinton's campaign contributors at a fundraiser at Madiso Guaranty
of involvement in Madison Guaranty's defrauding the state in what became known
as the Whitewater scandal, leading the Federal Bureau of Investigation 
to write that there was "absolutely no factual basis to suggest criminal
activity on the part of any of the individuals listed" -- as Inspector General
of the Department of Defense.

September 2003: Jet Blue airlines admits giving its passenger records
to the federal government.

September 14, 2003: Vice President Dick Cheney claims that Iraq
was "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault
now for many years, but most especially on 9/11".

September 14, 2003: The National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys
reports that "within six months of passing the Patriot Act, the
Justice Department was conducting seminars on how to stretch
the new wiretapping provisions to extend them beyond terror cases".

September 14, 2003, Unrelated: Sweden votes 56%-42% to keep its own currency
instead of using the Euro.

September 15, 2003: A 3-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
orders the California governor's recall election postponed until
poor districts can replace punch-card voting machines, citing
both the Supreme Court's decision in Bush versus Gore and California's
statements, resulting from a lawsuit filed in 2000, that the voting machines
are faulty and should not be used. California appeals, and the full
Ninth Circuit offers to hear the case.

September 15, 2003: MI6 Director Richard Dearlove testifies that
the claim Iraq could have deployed chemical and biological weapons
within 45 minutes came from "well-sourced intelligence".

September 15, 2003: The Sunday Morning Post reports that China
has deployed 150,000 troops to the North Korean border.

September 15, 2003: Parti Islam SeMalaysia leader Abdul Hadi praises
terrorism against Jews and Russians as "self-defense", but condemns
terrorism against targets in Indonesia, saying "We are against terrorism.
We are against any act of aggression. We do not condone any activities
that are related to civilians."

September 15, 2003: Atlanta Journal-Consitution columnist Jay Bookman
writes that "with Iraq-related expenses thrown in, we will incur more debt
as a nation over the next 5 years alone than we did during the first
223 years of this country's existence. According to the nonpartisan
Congressional Budget Office, a majority of the blame for that soaring
deficit can be attributed to higher spending and tax cuts enacted
in just the last three years." This paragraph is deleted from the
Journal-Constitution's public Web archive.

September 16, 2003: The Washington Post reports that "State Department types
were taken aback last week to find that a longtime diplomatic photo exhibit
along a busy corridor to the cafeteria had been taken down. The two dozen
mostly grainy black and white shots were a historic progression of
great diplomatic moments, sources recalled.  There was an original
political cartoon from the Jefferson era showing Britain and France
pick-pocketing the Americans; there were pictures of negotiations
with Indian tribes over land; President Woodrow Wilson at Versailles;
former secretary of state Elihu Root somewhere; Roosevelt and Churchill
signing the Atlantic Charter; former secretary of state James A. Baker III
and former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze in cowboy boots
at Jackson Hole; a splendid shot of the old State Department building;
and a photo of President Ronald Reagan at a meeting with a very young
Colin L. Powell seated behind him. Then they were gone. And what was put up
in their place? What else? A George W. Bush family album montage
of 21 large photos of the president as diplomat."

September 16, 2003: The United States vetoes a United Nations resolution,
which otherwise would have passed unanimously, which would have ordered
Israel to "desist from any act of deportation and cease any threat to
the safety" of terrorist mastermind Yasser Arafat.

September 16, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says "I've not seen
any indication that would lead me to believe that I could say that"
Iraq was involved in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

September 16, 2003: California and New York's state pension fund managers
demand that New York Stock Exchange chairman Richard Grasso resign
for accepting a $375 million salary. Grasso resigns the next day.

September 17, 2003: Says that "There's no question that Saddam Hussein
had al-Qaida ties."

September 17, 2003: Former North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Supreme Commander Wesley Clark announces his candidacy for President.

September 17, 2003: British Broadcasting Corporation reporter Andrew Gilligan
admits to having lied about David Kelly's status, reporting his
then-anonymous source as "one of the senior officials in charge of
drawing up the dossier", claiming this was on Kelly's request, and
to have made a "slip of the tongue" in citing Kelly as an "intelligence
service source" during a live broadcast.

September 17, 2003: The United States admits to holding 4,400 Iraqis
as "security detainees" without legal rights, including six who claim 
to be United States citizens and two who claim to be British. There are
also 300 Iraqis held as prisoners of war, and 5,300 held as criminals.

September 17, 2003: Kabul, Afghanistan's head of security Basir Salangi
is fired for ordering the destruction of poor peoples' homes in order to
open the land up for wealthy developers.

September 17, 2003: Syria rejects United States demands for it to
stop supporting terrorism and destroy its supplies of chemical weapons.

September 17, 2003, Unrelated: Guinea Bissau dictator Kumba Yala
is forced to resign in a military coup.

September 18, 2003: Senator Ted Kennedy says that "there was no
imminent threat" in Iraq, and "this was made up in Texas, announced
in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place
and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud".

September 19, 2003: The United States claims that all major Iraqi cities
and 85% of townships have locally elected governments.

September 20, 2003: Army chaplain Captain James Yee is arrested
with maps of Guantanamo Bay and information about the prisoners there,
claimed by the United States to be classified information that he was
not permitted to carry and had intended to deliver to al Qaeda.
Three months later, Yee is charged with infidelity towards his wife.

September 21, 2003: The Iraqi Governing Council announces plans to
privatize all government-run industries except for the oil industry,
allow six foreign banks control of Iraq's banking industry, institute
tariffs of 5% on all products, and to establish the maximum tax bracket
at 15%.

September 21, 2003: Iraqi Governing Council member Aqila al Hashimi
is assassinated.

September 21, 2003: The Environmental Protection Agency leaks a memo
detailing how Bush ordered the Agency to delete part of its
Report on the Environment which reported on worldwide climate change.
An excerpt from the memo states "Conclusions of the NRC (2001) are discarded,
that multiple studies indicate recent warming is unusual. The 1000-year
temperature record is deleted...Emphasis is given to a recent, limited
analysis support the Administration's favored message."

September 21, 2003, Unrelated: Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri
says that Iranian revolutionaries should not have closed the United States
embassy in 1980, and calls for reopening of relations with the United States.

September 22, 2003: Denies reading the news, saying instead that
"the best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most
objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening
in the world."

September 22, 2003: National Basketball Association commissioner
David Stern says that ballplayer Kobe Bryant should be allowed to play
despite having been charged with rape because "We don't have a Patriot Act
in the NBA. That means that you're innocent until proven guilty."

September 22, 2003: Congressman Jim Marshall accuses the news media
of murdering soldiers by having reported that the invasion of Iraq
was not going as well as government officials said it was, and
writes that "fair and balanced reporting is critically important
to our chances of success" in pacifying Iraq.

September 22, 2003: A report by John Pilger includes television footage
of Secretary of State Colin Powell saying in 2001 that Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein "has not developed any significant capability with respect
to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power
against his neighbours."

September 22, 2003: The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith
holds a dinner to honor Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi,
a Fascist. In introducing Berlusconi, ADL director Abraham Foxman
announces "I like Bush. I like Sharon. And Silvio Berlusconi,
we are delighted to have you here tonight." Reportedly, this remark
gained great applause from the attendees.

September 2003: Time Magazine publishes on its front cover
the falsehood that Ronald Reagan "beat the Soviets", who collapsed
in a civil war between Gorbachev's liberals and Communist conservatives
during the George H. W. Bush administration. The same issue includes
a full-page essay by Gregg Easterbrook praising George W. Bush
as one of the most pro-environment Presidents ever.

September 23, 2003: The Iraqi Governing Council bans al Jazeera
and al Arabiya television networks from covering government events
for two weeks, claiming that both networks are inciting violence.

September 23, 2003: Air Force Senior Airman Ahmad al Halabi, a translator
stationed at Guantanamo Bay, is charged with espionage for having
sent information about al Qaeda prisoners and camp flight schedules
to contacts in Syria. According to news reports, al Halabi was arrested
on July 23.

September 23, 2003: An eleven-judge panel of Ninth Circuit judges
unaninimously overrules an earlier ruling by a three-judge panel
of Ninth Circuit judges which had postposed the gubernatorial recall
election.

September 23, 2003: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's
entire Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel resigns along with two
consultants to the panel.

September 23, 2003: Diebold forces the closing of Black Box Voting,
a Web site detailing how Diebold's voting machines are designed
to allow voting fraud.

September 23, 2003: (dated September 29) Microsoft National Broadcast Company
reprints Wesley Clark's statement, in an unpublished book, that "I went back
through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff
officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against
Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of
a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries,
beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan.
So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about draining the swamp.
It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a state sponsor,
and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after
individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations."

September 23, 2003: La Vanaguardia reports that the Federal Bureau
of Investigation has accused al Jazeera reporter Tayseer Alouni
of being an al Qaeda member "in charge of al Qaeda propaganda
for Europe and the United States."

September 24, 2003: Speaks before the United Nations to request assistance
in rebuilding Iraq while demanding that the United States retain sovereign
power over Iraq.

September 24, 2003: Juan Cole reports that the Iraqi National Congress,
an exile group led by convicted financial fraudster Ahmed Chalabi,
will be taking control of Iraq's finances.

September 24, 2003: An anonymous leak from David Kay's weapons inspection
team, which was supposed to have released a report in mid-September
proving that Iraq had nuclear, chemical, and/or biological weapons,
reports that in fact the team has found no evidence of such weapons
or the materials needed to make them.

September 24, 2003, Unrelated: Bryonn Bain of the Village Voice reports
having been jailed for three days and accused of terrorism, writing
"The police officer who ran my license claimed I had multiple warrants
out for my arrest...During the next three days, I was interrogated
about 'terrorist activity' -- whether I was involved with a terrorist group
or knew anyone else who was -- without an attorney present. My Legal Aid
lawyer claimed she was also a medical professional and diagnosed me
as mentally ill when I told her I teach poetry at New York University.
After my bail was posted, I was held behind bars another night because
central booking ran out of the receipts required for my release. On my
third day in jail, accused of two misdemeanors and a felony I knew nothing
about, I was finally found innocent, and allowed to go home."

September 25, 2003: The United Nations withdraws nearly all its personnel
from Iraq.

September 25, 2003: Joshua Micah Marshall reports that former Bush-appointed
Federal Emergency Management Agency director Joe Allbaugh, described 
by Marshall as "part of the president's so-called 'Iron Triangle' -- the
other two being Karl Rove and Karen Hughes", has formed a company called
New Bridge Strategies "that helps your company get the sweetest contracts
in Iraq".

September 25, 2003: The United States drops all charges against
Zacarias Moussaoui, accused of involvement in the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001, to prevent his defense team from being allowed
any contact with other suspected terrorists.

September 25, 2003: The Aike Hotel in Baghdad, Iraq is bombed,
killing one Somali security guard. News reports suspect that the
United States-based National Broadcast Company might have been the
target of the attack.

September 25, 2003: Joseph Galloway, author of "We Were Soldiers Once...
And Young", writes that "It took the better part of 20 years to rebuild
the Army from the wreckage of Vietnam...In just over three years,
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and his civilian aides have done
just about everything they could to destroy that Army."

September 25, 2003: The Saint Petersburg Times reports that
Florida's pension fund is buying Edison Schools, the company which
manages 150 public schools in 23 states and has never turned a profit.
Another report notes that Edison founder Chris Whittle has increased
his salary to $600,000 a year following the purchase.

September 25, 2003, Unrelated: The Star Tribune reports the results of a study
of 200,000 traffic stops by Minnesota police showing that "Blacks, Latinos
and American Indians are more likely than whites to be stopped by police
and searched but much less likely to be found with anything illegal".

September 25, 2003: The Washington Times edits a rebuttal by the
Congressional Black Caucus to a column by Deborah Simmons after promising
to run the rebuttal in full, deleting the CBC's description of the column
as "inaccurate and misleading" and its statement that "editorial criticisms
are far more convincing if they are grounded in fact", deleting three
paragraphs promoting the Annual Legislative Council, replacing references
to "the Times" and "Times editorial" with "Mrs. Simmons" and "the column",
and oddly replacing a reference to Republicans as "the Majority Party"
with the phrase "members of the majority party".

September 25, 2003: Actor Bruce Willis posts a $1 million bounty
for capturing former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

September 25, 2003: After Cable News Network discussion host Tucker Carlson
publicly supports telemarketing and is subsequently asked to announce
his home telephone number on the air so viewers can call him, Carlson 
gives the number for Fox News's Washington bureau, saying "Get out your
pen...you can reach me there anytime...feel free to call me. Someone is
always there". Fox News retaliates by publicly announcing Carlson's
real home telephone number and claims that Carlson's act was planned.

September 26, 2003: The Central Intelligence Agency recommends that
the Department of Justice seek charges against the White House
for revealing the name of an undercover CIA operative to punish
her husband for revealing that Bush knew that Iraq was not trying
to purchase uranium from Niger.

September 26, 2003: The European Commission pledges E200 for reconstruction
in Iraq and requests member states make additional pledges.

September 27, 2003: The United States and Russia declare a mend in relations
and jointly threaten Iran.

September 27, 2003, Unrelated: A unified military is formed in Bosnia.

September 27, 2003, Unrelated: Nigeria launches a space sattelite.

September 28, 2003: Iran publicly refuses to back down from
its nuclear weapons program.

September 28, 2003: The Central Intelligence Agency denies that
it used old, obsolete intelligence from 1998 in determining the
threat level from Iraq.

September 28, 2003: Newsweek cites an Iraqi diplomat as saying that
the United States' Coalition Provisional Authority's 800 personnel
included "Seventeen of whom speak Arabic. One is an expert on Iraq."
Newsweek also reports that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had
16 of the Authority's original 20 experts on Iraq fired for supposedly
being "Arab apologists" or supportive of the United Nations, and that
on Rumsfeld's orders "doctors sent to restore medical services
had to be anti-abortion".

September 28, 2003: Mike Allen and Dana Priest of The Washington Post
cite a "senior administration offical" saying that the White House's
blowing the cover of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, a CIA agent,
was "meant purely and simply for revenge" against Wilson, and that
in the authors' words "two top White House officials called at least
six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation
of Wilson's wife", and also saying that "there was no indication
that Bush knew about the calls."

September 28, 2003: Taliban forces ambush a caravan of Helmand
Governor Sher Mohammad Akhund Zada's bodyguards, killing seven.

September 28, 2003: The Saint Petersburg Times reports receiving documents
outlining how Special Operations Command had falsely inflated its
budget by $20 million upon orders from the Department of Defense.

September 28, 2003: Rush Limbaugh, working as a sports analyst
for ESPN, claims that two-time Pro Bowl quarterback Donovan McNabb
is incompetent but only gets "social concern in the NFL" because
"the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well".
When criticized, ESPN praises Limbaugh for "his ability to express opinion
and spark debate as a football fan". McNabb says ""It's sad that you've
got to go to skin color. I thought we were through with that whole deal."

September 28, 2003, Unrelated: Chechen Prime Minister Anatoly Popov
is poisoned.

September 29, 2003: The Washington Post reports that "Bush has no plans
to ask his staff members whether they played a role in revealing the name
of an undercover officer who is married to former ambassador
Joseph C. Wilson". Bush's spokesman Scott McClellan says that
"the President knows" that Karl Rove "wasn't involved" and that
the Department of Justice has not attempted to contact anyone
in the White House, and implies that there will be no investigation
by the Department of Justice. In a new Washington Post article by Mike Allen,
sources formerly described as "senior administration officials" are now
referred to as "administration officials", and "top white house officials"
are referred to as "white house officials". Bob Novak claims that
he was not called to have the information given to him, but that 
it was released as he interviewed a senior administration official.

September 29, 2003: Mark Rasch of Security Focus reports that
the Federal Bureau of Investigation is ordering journalists to turn over
all materials they have regarding computer system infiltrator Adrian Lamo 
under threat of imprisonment.

September 29, 2003: David Hackworth of Soldiers for the Truth reports
that "Recently in Iraq, an Army two-star general put himself in for
the Silver Star, a gallantry award, for just being there, and for
the Combat Infantryman Badge, an award designed for infantry grunts
far below the rank of this division commander. During the war, members of
an Air Force bomber crew were all awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross
for lobbing a smart bomb from 30,000 feet onto a house where Saddam
was rumored to be breaking bread even though Saddams still out there
somewhere sucking desert air. In 1944, the only way a bomber crew
might have gotten the DFC would have been if it had wobbled back
from Berlin on one wing and a prayer after a dozen-plus missions
of wall-to-wall flak. Heres another Believe It or Not: When the Scuds
were thumping down on Kuwait, a Navy two-star admiral and six of his
flunkies were awarded the Bronze Star after a missile struck 10 miles
away...Sgt. Bill Casey, whose unit saw heavy combat in Iraq, says:
'Our awards were not given out on heroism. They were based entirely upon
rank and duty position. If you were a company commander, you got
a Silver Star. If you were a platoon leader or platoon sergeant,
you got a Bronze Star. If you did a good job at a level below that,
 you might get a Bronze Star'... The U.S. Air Force has approved more than
50,000 medals for operations in the Middle East. The U.S. Army, trying
to catch up with the folks in blue who flew through all that imaginary
Iraqi flak, has issued medals as though they were Cracker Jack prizes.
So far they've pinned on tens of thousands of awards, from the coveted
Distinguished Service Cross to the CIB. More than 5,000 Bronze Stars
alone have been awarded. One-half the members of a 700-strong aviation
squadron at Fort Stewart, Ga., were recently presented Bronze Stars
and Commendation medals. But as of Sept. 22, 2003, the U.S. Marine Corps
has approved only 56 Meritorious Bronze Stars -- 46 to officers,
10 to enlisted -- and 15 Bronze Stars for valor -- 11 to officers
and four to enlisted -- for their 70,000 fighters who kicked more than
a little butt during the war in Iraq."

September 2003: The Department of Justice gives the White House
an evening's notice of their impending investigation.
National Public Radio deletes its report on the event
from its transcripts.

September 2003: Steve Rosenfield of Tom Paine magazine writes that
"The Army and Air Force failed to obey Congress' orders to create
baseline medical records for soldiers sent to overseas war zones".

September 2003: American Muslim Council leader Abdurahman Almoudi
is arrested for trading with Libya in violation of sanctions.

September 2003: Ahmed Mehalba, a translator working at Guanatanamo Bay,
is arrested after classified information is found in his possession.

September 2003: Portland Business Journal publisher Craig Wessel forbids
the paper from running an interview with the regional chief executive
of Planned Parenthood, the most mainstream and widespread sex education
and contraceptive provider, because he "doesn't cover extremist groups".
Editor Dan Cook and Managing Editor Sharon Debusk resign.

September 2003: Fresno County, California Sheriff Richard Pierce
denies that anti-terrorism investigator Aaron Kilner had been
investigating the Peace Now anti-Bush group, after Kilner dies
in an accident and group members recognize him as one of their
frequent attendees.

September 2003, Unrelated: Clear Channel radio stations in Cleveland,
Houston, and Raleigh urge listeners to kill bicyclists.

September 30, 2003: Condemns Congress for leaking classified information.
Bush's lawyer Alberto Gonzalez orders all White House staff to retain
documents pertaining to the investigation, including records of
"Contacts with reporters Knut Royce, Timothy M. Phelps, or Robert D. Novak".
To this point, Royce and Phelps have been unconnected with the scandal.

September 30, 2003: Scott Taylor of Esprit de Corps reports that
"The American soldiers in Iraq are completely demoralized at this
stage...the biggest complaint was that they've had no R & R since
being deployed in theatre...The US troops in Kirkuk have started
to mount joint security patrols with local Iraqi policemen.  When
I asked one young soldier how they had screened the police applicants,
he said with a Texan drawl, '...well, seeing as how it was the Kurds
that was doing all the looting, we just went out and hired the Ay-rabs.'
When I asked him why they had not considered hiring some Turkmen
(who actually constitute the majority of Kirkuk's population),
the GI replied, 'what the fuck is a Turkman?' At this point his
Iraqi translator - who had been standing patiently beside us right up
until this point - suddenly went berserk. 'I am a Turkman! I am a Turkman!
I tell you everyday about my people, and still you don't understand!'"

September 30, 2003: Former Attorney General Ed Meese condemns
librarians for opposing the Patriot Act, saying "librarians
are more interested in pushing pornography than fighting terrorism".

September 30, 2003: Zogby publishes the results of a poll showing
that "a significant majority" in the United States believes that France,
which has been the United States' closest ally since the Revolutionary War
excepting the period of the Directory's tyranny, "has never been
a good U.S. ally".

September 30, 2003, Unrelated: The National Post reports that
Libya has been laundering money to "American Islamic" groups
in the United States through its embassy in Canada.


October 1, 2003, Unrelated: China repeals a law requiring people
to have the permission of their bosses before they can get married.

October 1, 2003: Rush Limbaugh resigns from ESPN. Philadelphia Eagles
owner Jeffrey Lurie condemns ESPN for "institutional racism"
in hiring Limbaugh.

October 2003: The National Enquirer, a tabloid, accuses Rush Limbaugh
of illegal drug additicion. The allegations are confirmed by police.

October 2003: As Bush proclaims his opposition to "leaks", anti-Bush
Web sites reproduce an April 2002 article from the Providence Journal
which describes Bush "speaking candidly about classified information"
during an interview with Bob Woodward.

October 2, 2003: Weapons inspector David Kay reports that the United States
has found stocks of ricin, Brucella, Congo-Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever,
aflatoxin, botulinen, and other chemical and biological weapons in Iraq
stored both in scientists' homes and in research centers. The report
also states that Iraq continued to produce fuel useful only for banned
Scud missiles, had attempted to acquire designs for North Korean No Dong
missiles (also banned), and had designed a native missile with a 1000km
range. The report also states that Iraq's nuclear weapons program,
cited by Bush as the main reason for invading the country, had ended
in 1998. Despite reporting seizing stocks of chemical and biological weapons,
Kays says that "We have not found at this point actual weapons."

October 2, 2003: The World Trade Organization find the United States'
foreign sales corporations provision and illegal barrier to trade
and permits the European Union to impose $4 billion in penalties
unless the United States revokes the law by the new year.

October 2, 2003: Carl Bernstein says that "Novak allowed himself
to be used in a really unfair way for ideological purposes" and claims
that "If somebody from the White House called me under those circumstances,
I would not print that she was a CIA operative. The story would be
the conduct of the White House."

October 2, 2003: Pat Holt of the Christian Science Monitor writes
that "Attorney General John Ashcroft is running a dead heat with
A. Mitchell Palmer, attorney general in the Wilson administration,
for the distinction of being the worst in that job in the history
of the United States."

October 2, 2003: Grover Norquist says that estate taxes levied on large
estates are like the Holocaust.

October 2, 2003: The Washington Post reports that Saudi official
Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman al Hussayen had stayed in the same hotel as
three of the terrorists of September 11, 2001 the night before the
attacks, had been allowed to leave the United States over the objections
of FBI agents after he faked illness to avoid questioning, and has since
been promoted to managing the Grand Mosque of Mecca and Prophet's Mosque
of Medina.

October 2, 2003: The University of Maryland Program on International
Policy Attitudes publishes the results of a poll showing that
people who watch Fox News are far more likely to believe common
falsehoods about Iraq, such as its nonexistent connections to al Qaeda
or possession of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, than
people who get their news from other sources.

October 3, 2003: Robert Novak, in a syndicated column, reports that
Ambassador Wilson's wife's employer is a Central Intelligence Agency
front company, and gives the name of the company.

October 3, 2003: John Dean writes that "I thought I had seen political
dirty tricks as foul as they could get, but I was wrong...Bush's people
have out-Nixoned Nixon's people. And my former colleagues were not amateurs
by any means...Colson at his worst could barely qualify to play on Bush's
team. The same with assistant to the president John Ehrlichman..neither
Colson nor Ehrlichman nor anyone else I knew while working at the Nixon
White House had the necessary viciousness, or depravity, to attack the wife
of a perceived enemy by employing potentially life-threatening tactics".

October 3, 2003: Says that "free nations don't develop weapons
of mass destruction".

October 3, 2003: The Lexington Herald-Leader reports that Bush has been
ordering cities to pay for the security costs of his fund-raisers,
and that Portland, Oregon has billed the Republican Party for $145,000
to reimburse them.

October 3, 2003: The New York Times reports that the Governing Council
of Iraq has asked the United States for explainations of why they are
paying $20 million to buy new weapons for the Iraqi police when the US
has been confiscating more than enough of the same kinds of weapons,
and why Iraqi police are being trained in Jordan at a cost of $35,000
per person when the same training could be done in Iraq at a lower cost.

October 3, 2003: Announces "Marriage Protection Week", a campaign
to deny homosexual couples the legal privileges granted to heterosexual
couples. Eschaton, a left-wing news source, notes that this announcement
was made on the anniversary of the lynching of homosexual Matthew Shepard,
and that Bush had condemned affirmative action policies on the anniversary
of Martin Luther King Jr's birthday.

October 4, 2003: Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby
and National Security Council Director for Middle East Affairs Elliott Abrams
publicly deny leaking the identity of a CIA agent who happened to be
Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife.

October 4, 2003: Iraqi ex-soldiers riot to demand the United States
give them owed pay. 

October 5, 2003: Israel bombs an Islamic Jihad training camp in Syria.

October 5, 2003: Microsoft National Broadcast Company host Chris Matthews
condemns guest Gloria Allred for suggesting that unwelcome sexual assualt
is worse than Bill Clinton's lying about consensual sex, before admitting
that "My producer is telling me to shut you up."

October 5, 2003, Unrelated: The Associated Press reports that the
Baptist State Convention of North Carolina has expelled McGill Baptist Church
of Concord for accepting homosexuals as church members.

October 6, 2003: Forms the Iraq Stabilization Group to take control
of Iraqi reconstruction. Condoleezza Rice is appointed leader of the group.

October 6, 2003, Unrelated: The Village Voice reports that the
Recording Industry Association of America is raiding record stores,
with police firepower and without a warrant, to seize remixes of
music tracks that had been authorized by the original author of the music.

October 2003: Kendel Ehrlich, wife of Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich,
says "If I had an opportunity to shoot Britney Spears, I think I would."

October 2003, Unrelated: Following the bombing of a restaurant in Haifa,
Israel for the first time since 1978 introduces a resolution to
the United Nations General Assembly to condemn attacks on Israeli children
and mirroring language in a recent General Assembly resolution to condemn
Israel for supposedly intentionally massacring Arab children.
The next month, Israel withdraws the request after the General Assembly,
Non-Aligned Movement, appears ready to amend the resolution
to condemn all Israeli military action against enemy armed forces
and remove all other references to Israel as an existing entity.

October 7, 2003: A force of hundreds of Iraqi loyalists seizes control
of Baiji, burning down the mayor's house and forcing pro-US police
to flee the city.

October 7, 2003: Brushes aside complaints about his refusing to take
any action against the White House officials who publicized the identity
of a CIA agent by saying "this town is a town full of people who
like to leak information...this is a large administration, and there's
a lot of senior officials", and  accuses the media of inhibiting
the investigation because "you do a very good job of protecting the leakers".

October 7, 2003: Arnold Schwarzenegger, a white supremacist and
Nazi aficionado who ran a campaign denouncing homosexuals, women,
workers, and Latinos while the news media portrayed him as a moderate,
is elected governor of California in a landslide. 31% of Latinos,
37% of unionists, and 43% of women vote for Schwarzenegger. 

October 7, 2003: Congressman John Conyers demands that Karl Rove resign.

October 8, 2003: Arnold Schwarzenegger publicly thanks the news media
for "your being part of my campaign".

October 8, 2003: Mark Crispin Miller reports that "I ran a number crunch
of CA counties that use Diebold machines to cast/count votes and found 
some weird figures that show a skim of votes from top candidates
to people who were unlikely to affect the outcome...One would expect
some of the 'fringe' candidates to do well in their home county and then
to have a very even distribution across the rest of the state. That is
not the case. In Diebold counties (those who use machines made by Diebold,
a corporation that supports George Bush) the results are skewed towards
low scoring candidates by unbelievably large amounts." Miller lists
a table showing low-profile candidates getting 50% of their vote total
from Diebold districts while high profile candidates get closer to 18%
of their total from these districts, where 17.89% of the votes were cast.
The table suggests Schwarzenegger may have been the victim of any fraud,
taking only 16.36% of his vote count from Diebold counties, which include
Alemeda, Fresno, Humboldt, Kern, Lassen, Marin, Placer, Plumas, San Joaquin,
San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Trinity, and Tulare.

October 2003: Following a tour of Iraq by Congressional Republicans,
the Air Force denies Congressional Democrats permission to tour Iraq.

October 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announces plans
to close a third of Army bases and a quarter of Air Force bases.

October 2003: Christian preacher Pat Robertson promotes the nuclear bombing
of the Department of State, saying that "If I could just get a nuclear device
inside Foggy Bottom, I think that's the answer." Robertson had also
suggested nuking the State Department in June.

October 2003: The Washington Post bans a week of the Boondocks comic strip
for a story arc in which the characters attempt to find a boyfriend
for National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice. 

October 2003: Supporters of California gubernatorial candidate
Arnold Schwarzenegger attack and beat opposing candidate Georgy Russel.

October 2003, Unrelated: Sarpy County, Nevada judge Ronald E. Reagan
forbids a man from speaking to his daughter in Spanish.

October 10, 2003: Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada al Sadr announces having
formed a new government of Iraq.

October 10, 2003: California Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger
orders California Governor Gray Davis to stop performing his job duties
even though Schwarzenegger has not been sworn in yet.

October 10, 2003: Journalist Declan McCullagh reports that "The FBI
is convinced that I'm an Internet service provider. It's no joke.
A letter the FBI sent on Sept. 19 ordered me to "preserve all records
and other evidence" relating to my interviews of Adrian Lamo...There
are a number of problems with this remarkable demand, most of which
I'll get to in a moment, but the biggest is the silliest. FBI Supervisory
Special Agent Howard Leadbetter II used the two-page letter to inform me
that under Section 2703(f) of the Electronic Communication Transactional
Records Act, I must 'preserve these items for a period of 90 days' in
 anticipation of a subpoena. So far I haven't received such a subpoena,
which would invoke a lesser-known section of the USA Patriot Act. Leadbetter
needs to be thwacked with a legal clue stick. The law he's talking about
applies only to Internet service providers, not reporters. Section 2703(f)
says in its entirety: 'A provider of wire or electronic communication services
or a remote computing service, upon the request of a governmental entity,
shall take all necessary steps to preserve records and other evidence
in its possession pending the issuance of a court order or other process.'
Last I checked, electronically filing this column to my editors does not
make me a provider of 'electronic communication services.' Nor does tapping
text messages into my cell phone transform me into a 'remote computing
service,' as much as I may feel like one sometimes."

October 11, 2003: Two car bombs explode after being forced away from
the United States' Iraqi headquarters in Baghdad, killing six Iraqis
inluding two security guards.  Reports say that one was destroyed
by guards' fire before reaching the compound.

October 11, 2003: Shankar Vedantam of the Washington Post reports
that Bush is planning to allow US citizens in foreign countries
to poach species under threat of extinction, with the excuse that
profits from trade in endangered species will boost the nations' economies
enough to allow them to protect the eliminated animals.

October 11, 2003: The Olympian reports that newspapers around the United States
are getting form letters claiming to be from US soldiers in Iraq stating 
how successful the war has gone. Later reports state that soldiers 
from the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Airborne Infantry were "asked" to
sign the letters, and that the letters came from battalian commander
Lieutenant Colonel Dominic Caraccilo.

October 11, 2003, Unrelated: Morocco King Mohammed VI orders that
women be permitted greater freedom to divorce abusive husbands
and equal power over the household.

October 12, 2003: The Washington Post repeats that its anonymous source
in the matter of the White House leaking the name of an undercover CIA agent
was a "senior administration official" who accused two "top White House
officals" of causing the leak. Some reports of the past two weeks had used
milder titles. The Post also reports that "On July 12, two days before Novak's
column, a Post reporter was told by an administration official that
the White House had not paid attention to the former ambassador's
CIA-sponsored trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle
by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass
destruction...[whose] name was never mentioned...the purpose of
the disclosure did not appear to be to generate an article,
but rather to undermine Wilson's report."

October 12, 2003: The Independent reports that United States forces
are destroying Iraqi Khazraji farmers' crops if the farmers fail to provide
information to track down guerrilla.

October 12, 2003: Jake Tapper reports that stunt performer Rhonda Miller,
who claims to be the victim of sexual assualts by Arnold Schwarzenegger,
is not a prostitute as Schwarzenegger's spokesman Sean Walsh claims
but that a different woman with the same name is listed in police databases
as a prostitute.

October 2003: California Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger announces
that he has hired a private investigator to investigate women who
have accused him of sexual harassment.

October 13, 2003: The United Nations Security Council begins allowing
countries other than the United States to participate in peacekeeping
operations in Afghanistan.

October 13, 2003: Praises soldiers who died in Iraq, a country totally
unrelated to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, because
"They remember the lessons of September 11th, 2001, and so do I."

October 13, 2003: Gallup releases the results of a poll showing that 71%
of respondents in Baghdad, Iraq do not want the United States to leave yet.

October 13, 2003: The International Monetary Fund reports that Germany
has become the world's largest exporter, with exports totalling 7% more
than the United States' exports.

October 13, 2003: The Log Cabin [homosexual] Republicans demand
that Republicans for [Howard] Dean cease promoting them, writing that
"Every moment that our names continue to be listed on your website
is an insult, disgrace, and defamation of our groups, and must
stop forthwith!" and demanding that Republicans for Dean publish
an apology.

October 14, 2003, Unrelated: China launches its first manned mission
into space. The United States' television media totally ignores the launch.

October 14, 2003: Andrew Gumbel of the Independent accuses Republicans
of using Diebold's machines to commit voting fraud in the 2002 elections
in the state of Georgia, citing polls the day before the vote showing
the Democrats several points ahead of their Republican challengers.

October 14, 2003: Jim Rarey, author of a radical newsletter,
claims that British weapons inspector David Kelly was murdered
and the police helped to cover it up, citing the Hutton inquiry
in writing that Kelly's body was found propped against a tree
but had been moved by Detective Constable Graham Peter Coe
and two other police officers who were not part of the search party
but just happened to be in the area; that Coe and an unidentified
police officer, later identified as DCI Alan Young, seized documents
from Kelly's house; that Kelly had a habit of taking walks at the time
he did, and his leaving the house at the time was not unusual; that
Kelly's wrist was slashed in a manner that did not damage the radial
artery, which would be hard to miss for someone committing suicide but
would fit someone else slashing the wrist from the side; and that forensic
pathologist Nicholas Hunt and his coworker forensic biologist
Roy James Green had said there was quite a bit of blood at the scene
and Hunt had said that Kelly's abrasions could have been caused
by "stumbling around" in the bushes, while paramedics had said
there was little blood at the scene and police said there was
no evidence of anyone stumbling around in the bushes.

October 14, 2003, Unrelated: 150 are arrested for staging an anti-government
protest in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

October 15, 2003: The United States vetoes a United Nations Security Council
resolution to forbid Israel from building a fence between peaceful areas
and Palestinian Authority controlled areas plus a great deal of land,
composing most of the West Bank, expected to be granted to the
Palestinian Authority in future negotiations. Angola, Chile,
the People's Republic of China, France, Guinea, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia,
Spain, and Syria voted for the resolution, while Bulgaria, Cameroon,
Germany, and Britain abstained.

October 15, 2003: An armed United States convoy in Gaza is bombed,
killing 3 United States citizens reported to be civilian security guards.
An eyewitness states that the last car in a convoy of three was targeted
and that the other two cars were manned by Palestinian Authority police. 
Nobody claims responsibility, with Islamic Jihad and Islamic Resistance
quickly denying responsibility. Agence France Presse initially reports
that the Popular Resistance Committee, part of the Palestinian Authority's
Preventative Security Service, has claimed responsibility in an anonymous
phone call, but the Committee denies responsibility after this report
is published. United States investigators are driven off by an angry mob.

October 15, 2003: Former President Bill Clinton claims that "In his campaign,
Bush had said he thought the biggest security issue was Iraq and
a national missile defence. I told him that in my opinion, the biggest
security problem was Osama bin Laden."

October 15, 2003, Unrelated: A ferry crashes into a pier in New York City,
killing 10.

October 16, 2003: The United Nations Security Council approves
the United States' plans for revising Iraq's government.

October 16, 2003: Stars and Stripes reports the results of a poll
of United States soldiers throughout Iraq showing that 34% report
low morale while 27% report high morale, 31% say that the invasion
had little or no value for the United States, and "slightly more
than a third" say their mission was "not clearly defined" or
"not at all defined". The United States claims that morale is high. 

October 16, 2003: The United States admits that 13 soldiers in Iraq
have committed suicide.

October 16, 2003: Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed announces
that "1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million
Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think,
to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then
to counter-attack. As Muslims we must seek guidance from the Al-Quran 
and the Sunnah of the Prophet...At Hudaibiyah he was prepared to accept
an unfair treaty, against the wishes of his companions and followers.
During the peace that followed he consolidated his strength and eventually
he was able to enter Mecca and claim it for Islam...For well over half
a century we have fought over Palestine. What have we achieved? Nothing.
We are worse off than before. If we had paused to think, then we could have
devised a plan, a strategy that can win us final victory. The Europeans
killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million, but today the Jews rule the world
by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them...They invented
and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy
so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy
equal rights with others."

October 2003: Promises to restore military aid to Indonesia.

October 2003: Diebold threatens to sue dozens of websites, including
that of Independent Media, for hosting or directing users to leaked
Diebold memos showing the company illegally installing voting software
and equipment without certification.

October 2003: The Los Angeles Times and National Broadcast Company
report quotes from Lieutenant General William Boykin, Deputy Undersecretary
of Defense for Intelligence, calling Islam an idolatrous religion,
calling Christianity the sole acceptable religion for the United States,
and claiming that Bush was appointed President by God to lead
a genocide of Muslims.

October 2003: White House briefing notes given to journalists traveling
to Australia refer to Prime Minister John Howard as "John Major",
the former British Prime Minister.

October 2003, Unrelated: Gregg Easterbrook of the New Republic, in an
article condemning the violent movie Kill Bill, writes "Disney's CEO,
Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish.
Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship
money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence.
Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else,
by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history
alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about
glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice".
Easterbrook is fired from another job at ESPN, which is owned by Disney.

October 2003: Albertsons supermarket chain forbids 70,000 employees
from working after an affiliated union strikes at a store affiliated
with Albertsons.

October 17, 2003: Militiamen under Shiite preacher Mahmoud al Hassani
refuse to disarm and open fire on United States forces, killing 4 US soldiers
including a lieutenant colonel.

October 17, 2003: France vetoes a European Union declaration to condemn
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed's antisemitic statements.

October 17, 2003: David S. Cloud of the Wall Street Journal reports
receiving a memo showing that Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife had
recommended him for the mission to investigate claims of Iraq attempting
to purchase uranium from Niger.

October 17, 2003: The United States begins a search of every commercial
airplane in the country after finding three bags containing clay, bleach,
razors, and notes complaining about the lack of security.

October 17, 2003: Saudi reformist Mohammed Said Tayeb reports that
Defence Minister Prince Sultan has said there will be elections
for national offices in three years.

October 17, 2003: Mark Benjamin of United Press International reports
that "Hundreds of sick and wounded U.S. soldiers including many who served
in the Iraq war are languishing in hot cement barracks here while
they wait -- sometimes for months -- to see doctors. The National Guard
and Army Reserve soldiers' living conditions are so substandard,
and the medical care so poor, that many of them believe the Army is
trying push them out with reduced benefits for their ailments.
One document shown to UPI states that no more doctor appointments
are available from Oct. 14 through Nov. 11 -- Veterans Day."

October 17, 2003, Unrelated: Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada
resigns in the face of mass protests and hides at a military base
before fleeing the country. Vice President Carlos Mesa assumes the Presidency.

October 17, 2003, Unrelated: Senator Joseph Lieberman is heckled 
in a speech at the Arab American Institute for saying that it is
not terrorism for Israel to arrest Arab terrorists. Lieberman 
also condemns Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Boykin's
Christian supremacist statements as "a desecration" of Islam.

October 18, 2003: A car bomb explodes outside the Turkish embassy
in Iraq, killing the bomber. 

October 19, 2003: Eight Marines are arrested for abusing prisoners of war
in Iraq. Two are accused of killing a prisoner.

October 19, 2003: Iraqi police, said to be following orders from
the United States, arrest an Agence France Presse photographer
and a Reuters cameraman near the scene of the destruction of a US ammo truck.

October 19, 2003: Richard Wolffe and Rod Nordland of Newsweek report
that "In Baghdad, official control over the news is getting tighter.
Journalists used to walk freely into the city's hospitals and the morgue
to keep count of the day's dead and wounded. Now the hospitals have been
declared off-limits and morgue officials turn away reporters who aren't
accompanied by a Coalition escort. Iraqi police refer reporters' questions
to American forces; the Americans refer them back to the Iraqis...American
officials accuse reporters of indulging in a morbid obsession with death
and destruction, and ignoring how Iraq has improved since Saddam Hussein
was toppled".

October 19, 2003: The New York Times reports that the State Department
had created the Future of Iraq Project in April 2002 to develop plans
for reconstructing Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. 

October 20, 2003: Bush's spokesman claims that Bush personally condemned
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed for calling for a final genocide
of Jews. Mohammed claims that never took place, and cites Western condemnation
of his remarks as justification for them.

October 20, 2003: The United States calls for a special meeting
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to discussion the
European Union's military plans.

October 20, 2003: Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker cites an intelligence
official as saying that "some of the old-timers in the community
are appalled by how bad the analysis was" on Iraq, and "if you look at them
side by side, C.I.A. versus United Nations, the U.N. agencies come out ahead
across the board"; Former National Security Council Iraq analyst
Kenneth Pollock saying that Bush managed to "dismantle the existing
filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers
from getting bad information...They were forcing the intelligence community
to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that
the intelligence analysts didn't have the time or the energy to go after
the bad information"; a retired CIA official saying "The analysts at
the CIA were beaten down defending their assessments, and they blame
George Tenet for not protecting them. I've never seen a government
like this"; Bureau of Intelligence and Research arms control expert
Greg Thielmann, liason to Undersecretary of State for Arms Control
John Bolton, saying that "Bolton seemed to be troubled because INR
was not telling him what he wanted to hear" and that Bolton soon
banned him from meetings and arranged to see unanalyzed intelligence
reports himself without any checking on the source's reputation
and the information's validity; an anonymous official saying that 
the Department of Defense's plan for overthrowing Iraq "was analogous
to tossing a coin five times and assuming that it would always come up
heads". Hersh also writes that "The Bush Administration took many intelligence
operations that had been aimed at Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups
around the world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf. Linguists
and special operatives were abruptly reassigned, and several ongoing
anti-terrorism intelligence programs were curtailed"; disputes earlier
reports that a Niger Embassy official had faked the yellowcake papers
for side money, instead suggesting that they may have been faked by
the Italian intelligence agency or disgruntled CIA officials, quoting
a CIA official to support the latter theory; reports that "Many of the
most senior [Iraqi] weapons-industry officials, even those who voluntarily
surrendered to U.S. forces, are being held in captivity at the Baghdad
airport and other places, away from reporters" citing an Iraqi saying
that "The Americans are hunting them down one by one. Nobody speaks for them,
and there's no American lawyer who will take the case";

October 20, 2003: Mullah Janan, reportedly the Taliban's highest ranking
envoy to al Qaeda, is arrested in Uruzgan, Afghanistan.

October 20, 2003: Israel bombs five suspected terrorist and militia
positions in Gaza, reportedly killing eleven. Israel disputes the
casualty count and releases videotape of one of the bombings showing
a deserted road where the Palestinian Authority claimed Israel
had fired missiles into a crowded street.

October 20, 2003, Unrelated: Jordanian Prime Minsiter Ali Abu al Ragheb
resigns.

October 2003: It is reported that Halliburton is charging United States
forces in Iraq $1.59 per gallon of oil where the market price is 98 cents.

October 21, 2003: Israeli military intelligence head General Aharon Zeevi
tells Knesset that Saudi Arabia is attempting to buy nuclear weapons
from Pakistan. The United States State Department denies this,
and Chris Nelson reports that "reliable sources in Washington
(including Capitol Hill, professional Middle East watchers, and fellow
journalists) all say that the 'Pakistan/Saudi nuclear weapons' story
being passed around by UPI, The Washington Times, and by the head
of Israeli intelligence in testimony to the Knesset, is false...several
sources note the 'coincidence' that the stories come barely one day after
the EU, Iran and Russia reached separate but interlocking agreements
which offer real hope of defusing the Iran nuclear weapons crisis before
it gets out of hand."

October 21, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld condemns unnamed
members of the Defense Department's inner circle for leaking a highly
confidential memorandum about Iraq to the press. The memo shows Rumsfeld
asking several strategic questions which have been posited in the
anti-war press. Congressmen report that Rumsfeld had been personally
handing the memo out to people on Capitol Hill, and the memo is displayed
in full on the Defense Department's public Web site.

October 21, 2003, Unrelated: Radio France International correspondent 
Jean Helene is murdered by a police officer in Abidjan, Cote D'Ivoire.

October 2003: Claims to have personally condemned Mahathir Mohamad,
repeating the claim by a spokesman a few days earlier. Mohamad denies this
and says "if you can tell a lie about the existence of weapons
of mass destruction and go to war because of it I'm not surprised
if he is prepared to lie about what he said to me."

October 2003: American Muslim Foundation director Abdurahman Alamoudi
is indicted on charges of laundering money for terrorists. He had been
arrested in September, but this never made the news. Reports suggest
that Alamoudi was one of the most significant ties between Bush
and al Qaeda and that he had arranged an Arabic interpreter network
in Guantanamo Bay that acted as a spy organization for al Qaeda.

October 2003: Former President George Bush grants Senator Ted Kennedy
the George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service for his
opposition to the invasion of Iraq, according to Georgie Anne Geyer
of the Boston Globe.

October 2003: The United Nations General Assembly votes 144-4
to demand that Israel tear down a security barrier being built
to separate Israeli territory from Palestinian Authority controlled
territory.

October 2003: Reporters Sans Frontieres releases its second annual
World Press Freedom Ranking report on press freedom throughout the world,
which lists the United States as tied with Greece for the 31st most free
press in the world out of 166 countries and governments examined.
This is down from 17th place last year. The United States' government
of Iraq is split out and ranked 135th, worse than Saddam Hussein's
Iraqi government at 124th.

October 2003: The Maryland Transportation Authority sends the
Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate a 7th-grade student
who was doing a research paper on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and had
asked what the bridge was built out of.

October 2003: Congress passes a bill banning dilation and extraction
abortions. David Flores, a user of the Plastic Web-based bulletin board,
refers to the Google database's archive of news stories of the past few
years showing that fewer than 40 articles use the medical term when
referring to the procedure while over 1500 use the propaganda term
"partial birth".

October 2003: A poll of registered Democrats shows that fewer than
five percent care about terrorism or national security.

October 2003: The Palestinian Authority and Islamic Jihad jointly
abduct and execute two people accused of providing Israel with information
used to assassinate a terrorist commander.

October 2003: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia condemns a recent
Supreme Court ruling legalizing homosexuality as a human right,
saying that homosexuality was illegal when the United States was founded.

October 2003: Reporters note that the White House has put rules on its
Web server forbidding search engine spiders from entering certain
directories, including nearly every page or set of pages dealing with Iraq.

October 2003: The Environmental Protection Agency approves a report
by developers which stated that wetlands generate pollution and
encouraged transforming wetlands into golf courses to preserve
local water supplies.

October 2003: Environmental Protection Agency biologist Bruce Boler
resigns in protest of an EPA policy stated by Regional Administrator
Jimmie Palmer that the EPA "would not oppose state positions, so if
a state had no water quality problems with a project then neither
would EPA".

October 22, 2003: James Zogby condemns Vice President Dick Cheney
and the American Enterprise Institute for lying about the results
of a Zogby poll.

October 23, 2003: Speaks before Australia's Parliament, which for the
first time in Australia's history is closed to the public. Citizens
including press are banned from within 1 kilometer of the Parliament building.
Two Senators from the Green Party heckle Bush and are subsequently banned
from Parliament for the next day's visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao 

October 23, 2003: Says of China that "We see a China that is stable
and prosperous, a nation that respects the peace of its neighbors
and works to secure the freedom of its own people." The White House
later changes written transcripts to have Bush say "seek" instead of "see",
but audio recordings clearly show Bush saying "see".

October 23, 2003: Christian Aid reports that the United States
has embezzled $4 billion of Iraq's oil export revenue into
"opaque bank accounts" in violation of United Nations resolutions.

October 23, 2003: British Member of Parliament George Galloway
is expelled from the Labour Party for opposing the invasion of Iraq.

October 23, 2003: Hamza Handawi of the Associated Press reports that
the United States had arrested all 79 inhabitants of the Iraqi village
of Habbariyah last month.

October 23, 2003: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration
reports that Arctic perennial sea ice has been steadily diminishing
by an average 0.9 percent per year for the past 24 years.

October 23, 2003, Unrelated: Wal-Mart headquarters and 60 stores
are raided for employing illegal immigrants at $2 per day.

October 24, 2003: The Senate Intelligence Committee promotes an upcoming
report harshly condemning the Central Intelligence Agency and the larger
"intelligence community" for seeking out false and unverifiable data
about Iraq to pass on to the blameless executive branch, and claims
that not one intelligence official was ever pressured to change or promote
intelligence for political reasons. Senator Jay Rockefeller accuses
the Republicans controlling the Committee of refusing to recognize
any poor leadership by Bush or the executive branch, and demands that
the Committee investigate the Office of Special Plans. The CIA notes
that the Committee refused an offer to depose George Tenet.
Joshua Micah Marshall calls the report "a joke", a "Moscow show trial",
and "up-is-downism of the worst and most transparent sort". At the end
of the day, Senator Pat Roberts, who made these statements condemning
the CIA, accuses newspapers of having "mischaracterized" his words.

October 24, 2003: The Associated Press refers to supporters of
the invasion of Iraq as "patriotic" and implies that opponents
of the invasion are not patriotic.

October 24, 2003: Matt Groening reports that Fox News threatened to
sue his cartoonist team for a Simpsons television show which had
a parody Fox News banner displaying headlines like "Do Democrats
Cause Cancer?". Groening later admits he was joking.

October 24, 2003, Unrelated: The car of Israeli Knesset member Issam Makhoul
is bombed. There are no injuries. Makhoul is an Arab and member
of Hadash-Ta'al party, a coalition of a Communist and an Arab nationalist
party.

October 25, 2003: Declares "Protection from Pornography Week"
to condemn pornography and obscenity.

October 25, 2003, Unrelated: Yukos chairman Mikhail Khodorkovsky,
the richest man in Russia, is arrested and charged with fraud, forgery,
tax evasion, and embezzlement. Putin's chief of staff Alexander Voloshin
resigns in protest, calling the prosecution an affront to capitalism.
Newspapers worldwide accuse Putin of ordering Khodorkovsky's arrest
because Khodorkovsky is a capitalist and successful businessman,
with the New York Times accusing Putin of wishing Russia's return
to Soviet state control of the economy. Khodorkovsky is a major
supporter of Putin's opposition.

October 25, 2003, Unrelated: Communist forces kill 13 to protest
Colombia's democratic elections.

October 26, 2003: Missiles are fired at the Rashid hotel used as
a headquarters by the United States in Baghdad, Iraq, killing one.
Eleven missiles failed to launch due to mechanical or electric failure. 
The missiles were a combination of French 68mm missiles and
Russian 85mm missiles, with the French weapons having been recently
constructed and imported.

October 26. 2003: Barton Gellman of the Washington Post
reports that "According to records made available to The Washington Post
and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain
and Australia, it did not require a comprehensive survey to find
the central assertions of the Bush administration's prewar nuclear case
to be insubstantial or untrue."

October 26, 2003: United States Ambassador to Russia Mikhail Khodorkovsky
questions "whether or not Russian legislation is being applied selectively"
in the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

October 26, 2003: Afghan regional governors Abdul Rashid Dostum
and Ata Muhammad agree to end their war and merge their forces
under the central Afghan government's control.

October 26, 2003: Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Hamza is arrested
by United States forces in Iraq. Upon Hamza's release two days later,
Al Jazeera reports that more than 15 of its personnel have been arrested. 

October 26, 2003, Unrelated: A series of fires in California kill twenty
over the next week, destroy 2000 homes and 600,000 acres, force the closing
of air travel to the southern part of the state, and force the next day's
San Diego-Miami football game to move to Phoenix, Arizona. Two days earlier,
the Federal Emergency Management Agency had denied Governor Gray Davis's
request for $430 million to clear brush from the areas.

October 26, 2003, Unrelated: Italy arrests six people claimed to be
the leadership of the Red Brigades terrorist organization.

October 27, 2003: The Associated Press reports that some of the commercial
charter schools in Michigan "fail to produce test scores that match
even low-scoring traditional public schools".

October 27, 2003: 37 are killed in five car bombings in Baghdad, Iraq,
directed at four police stations and the Red Cross regional headquarters
which was bombed by a Red Crescent vehicle. The bombings occur
on the first morning of Ramadan. Bush praises the attacks as proof
that the United States is successfully securing Iraq and promises that
such attacks will become more violent and common as victory becomes
closer.

October 27, 2003: Commerce Secretary Don Evans condemns
the People's Republic of China for "exploiting our open markets
and...creating an unfair advantage that is undercutting American
workers" by undervaluing its currency and 

October 27, 2003: Israel pledges not to assassinate terrorist mastermind
and Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat.

October 27, 2003: Israel raids the Anglican Hospital in Nablus and arrests
patient Khaled Hamed, a member of Islamic Resistance who was in
critical condition according to doctors. Israel also raids the Rafidiyeh
Hospital and arrests a member of the Palestinian Authority who was
using the hospital as a base of operations for terrorist activity.

October 27, 2003: Cher, a singer traveling with the United Service
Organizations, reports that many of the wounded in Iraq have lost limbs
because military vehicles cannot take hits from rocket-propelled grenades.

October 27, 2003, Unrelated: Zimbabwe arrests five directors of
the country's only private newspaper.

October 27, 2003, Unrelated: Russia temporarily forbids trading in
the shares of the Yukos oil company after shares lose a fifth of
their value.

October 2003: Speaks at a Christian youth center where banners
proclaim him "King of Kings" and "Lord of Lords".

October 2003: Two Central Intelligence Agency agents are killed
in Afghanistan during a battle with rebel forces.

October 2003: Newsweek runs an article referring to the reconstruction
of Iraq as "The $87 Billion Money Pit" and suggests that much of
the money is being embezzled rather than used for reconstruction.

October 2003: Conservative News founder Brent Bozell calls an upcoming
movie about Ronald Reagan a "partisan political attack against one of
America's most beloved presidents". Columbia Broadcast System
President Les Moonves notes that the film is still being produced
and has not yet been seen by those condemning it.

October 2003: Eric Massa is fired from the House Armed Services Committee,
for whose Republican Party majority he worked as a staffer,
for having greeted Wesley Clark whom he had formerly served as
an aide to.

October 2003: The Department of Justice files criminal conspiracy charges
against Greenpeace after Greenpeace members board the
American President Lines cargo ship Jade that was smuggling mahogony
rainforest lumber to the United States and hang a banner off the ship
asking Bush to "stop illegal logging".

October 2003: The United States reopens its embassy in Equatorial Guinea,
which had been closed since 1995 officially due to budget cuts
but unofficially in protest of dictator Teodoro Obiang who had
executed his political opposition and threatened to assassinate
the US ambassador.

October 2003: The Young Womens' Christian Association charity fires CEO
Patricia Ireland for supporting equal rights for women.

October 2003, Unrelated: Audiotapes are discovered of then-President
John F. Kennedy ordering United States forces to withdraw from Vietnam
within two years, with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara approving
this policy.

October 28, 2003: Claims that he had nothing to do with the 
"Mission Accomplished" banner hanging over his speech
on the USS Lincoln in May, and that it was raised by Navy crew.
The Navy claims the banner was provided by White House personnel.

October 28, 2003: Says that "the world is more peaceful and more free
under my leadership".

October 28, 2003, Unrelated: RJ Reynolds tobacco producer buys
British American Tobacco.

October 28, 2003: Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton
says opposing Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean's
"opposition to affirmative action, his current support for the
death penalty and historic support of the NRA's agenda amounts to
an anti-black agenda...any so-called African American leader that
would endorse Dean despite his anti-black record is mortgaging
the future of our struggle for civil rights and social justice".

October 28, 2003: Jason Leopold of Common Dreams reports that Halliburton
is doing business in Iran in spite of trade sanctions against the company.

October 29, 2003: Congressmen Henry Waxman and John Dingell report
that the United States is purchasing oil from Halliburton for $2.65
per gallon and selling it to Iraq for $0.04 per gallon, while Iraq
can import oil from other nations at a market value of $0.97 per gallon.

October 29, 2003: Task Force "Restore Iraqi Oil" reports that Iraq
has been producing 2 million barrels of oil per day. Before the invasion,
Iraq was producing 2.5 million barrels of oil per day.

October 29, 2003: Senator Trent Lott suggests that "we just
mow the whole place down" to pacify Iraq.

October 29, 2003: Halliburton reports that its Kellogg Brown and Root
subsidiary's profits have quadrupled.

October 29, 2003: The Senate Intelligence Committee orders the
Central Intelligence Agency to provide it with all of the CIA's
intelligence on Iraq.

October 29, 2003: National Review editor Donald Luskin threatens to sue
and reveal the identity of the anonymous editor of the left-wing
Eschaton news Web site after Eschaton calls Luskin "a Stalker"
in reference to a Luskin column proclaiming how "We Stalked" Paul Krugman.

October 29, 2003: Former Fox News producer Charlie Reina writes that
"Not once in the 20+ years I had worked in broadcast journalism prior
to Fox - including lengthy stays at The Associated Press, CBS Radio
and ABC/Good Morning America - did I feel any pressure to toe a management
line. But at Fox, if my boss wasn't warning me to 'be careful' how I handled
the writing of a special about Ronald Reagan ('You know how Roger feels
about him.'), he was telling me how the environmental special I was to
produce should lean ('You can give both sides, but make sure
the pro-environmentalists don't get the last word.') Editorially,
the FNC newsroom is under the constant control and vigilance
of management...it's a news network run by one of the most high-profile
political operatives of recent times. Everyone there understands that FNC
is, to a large extent, 'Roger's Revenge' - against what he considers
a liberal, pro-Democrat media establishment that has shunned him
for decades. For the staffers, many of whom are too young to have come up
through the ranks of objective journalism, and all of whom are non-union,
with no protections regarding what they can be made to do, there is undue
motivation to please the big boss...the roots of FNC's day-to-day on-air
bias are actual and direct. They come in the form of an executive memo
distributed electronically each morning, addressing what stories will
be covered and, often, suggesting how they should be covered...The Memo
was born with the Bush administration, early in 2001, and, intentionally
or not, has ensured that the administration's point of view consistently
comes across on FNC...One day this past spring, just after the U.S.
invaded Iraq, The Memo warned us that anti-war protesters would be
'whining' about U.S. bombs killing Iraqi civilians, and suggested they
could tell that to the families of American soldiers dying there. Editing
copy that morning, I was not surprised when an eager young producer killed
a correspondent's report on the day's fighting - simply because it included
a brief shot of children in an Iraqi hospital.These are not isolated incidents
at Fox News Channel, where virtually no one of authority in the newsroom
makes a move unmeasured against management's politics, actual or perceived."
In response, Fox News spokesman Rob Zimmerman says that "these accusations
are the rantings of a bitter, disgruntled former employee. It's unfortunate
that Charlie's career ended the way it did, but we wish him well" and
says that Reina's clames about a memo are "false accusations".

October 29, 2003: Arizona State Senator Ben Miranda, a Democrat,
urges Democrats to avoid supporting Joe Lieberman because Lieberman
is Jewish. John Kerry condemns the statements.

October 29, 2003: Dixiecrat Senator Zell Miller endorses Bush for President.
Miller has always sided with the Republican Party over the Democrats
on contentious issues.

October 29, 2003, Unrelated: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg
urges medicine companies to boycott Canada until Canada eases price controls.

October 30, 2003: Congressmen Roscoe Bartlett, Joseph Crowley, Eliot Engel,
Kendrick Meek, Jeff Miller, Solomon Ortiz, Silvestre Reyes, Charles Taylor,
Curt Weldon, and Joe Wilson condemn Bush for cancelling their planned
diplomatic trip to North Korea and condemn the National Security Council
for accusing a prior Congressional delegation of having leaked a document
that the White House had published on the public Internet.  

October 30, 2003: Iran demands the United States release two journalists
who were arrested in Iraq on July 1.

October 30, 2003: The United Nations retreats from Baghdad.

October 30, 2003: Pakistan arrests politician Mahkdoom Javed Hashmi
for supposedly inciting the military to rise up against Musharraf.

October 30, 2003: Warren Richey of the Christian Science Monitor
reports of a case in which "even though two different federal courts
have conducted hearings and issued rulings, there has been no public
record of any action. No documents are available. No files. No lawyer
is allowed to speak about it" and "is now headed to the US Supreme Court
in what could produce a significant test of a question as old as the
 Star Chamber, abolished in 17th-century England: How far should a policy
of total secrecy extend into a system of justice?"

October 30, 2003: The Senate votes 55-43 against a bill which would have
required power plants to reduce pollution. The bill was sponsored by
John McCain and Joe Lieberman, two of the most conservative Senators.

October 30, 2003: New Zealand citizen Bruce Hubbard is arrested
for sending a letter to the United States Embassy accusing the United States
of overthrowing democracies by military force and establishing dictatorships.

October 30, 2003: Fox News Vice President of News Operations Sharri Berg
calls Charlie Reina a "disgruntled employee" with "an ax to grind",
denies that Fox News managment attempts any indoctrination of newsmen,
specifically denying the existence of a daily memo,
and quotes an employee as saying "Charlie actually NEVER had a job
in the newsroom. He worked out of some space up on 17 or 18 reserved
for overpaid feature producers on career life support. The 'grunts'
knew him mainly as one of any number of clueless feature producers
who would call the desk at random and ask 'do we have...' The kind of
calls where after you hang up you say to the phone 'go fuck yourself.'
In fact, its not editorial policy that pisses off newsroom grunts -- its
people like Charlie".

October 30, 2003, Unrelated: A worker brings a toy gun to
the Cannon Office Building of the Capitol as part of a Halloween
costume, causing the evacuation of the building. 

October 30, 2003, Unrelated: Russia's Supreme Court voids a law
which would have restricted media coverage of election candidates.

October 31, 2003: The United States freezes the assets of
the Maoist Communist Party of Nepal as a terrorist group.

October 31, 2003: Senator Patrick Leahy reports that the House
of Representatives had removed an amendment to Bush's $87 billion
Iraq spending bill that would have banned fraud and embezzlement.

October 31, 2003: David Cohen reports that "The daily Fox News Channel
coverage memo" mentioned by Charlie Reina "exists. I saw one once while
visiting a friend who works there."

October 31, 2003: Matt Gross writes that "As a former editor at Foxnews.com
 -- and therefore clearly a disgruntled ex-employee -- let me just say that
the right-wing bias was there in the newsroom, up-front and obvious, from
the day a certain executive editor was sent down from the channel to bring
us in line with their coverage. His first directive to us: Seek out stories
that cater to angry, middle-aged white men who listen to talk radio and yell
at their televisions...What followed was a dumbing-down of what had been
an ambitious and talented news operation. Stories could be no more than
1,000 words, then 800...More and more effort was devoted to adapting FNC
'scripts' into Web stories, which meant we were essentially correcting
the errors of FNC 'reporters' who couldn't be bothered to get the facts.
To me, FNC reporters' laziness was the worst part of the bias. It wasn't
that they were toeing some political line (though of course they were;
see the embarrassing series on property rights from 2000), it was that
the facts of a story just didn't matter at all."

October 31, 2003, Unrelated: An Italian judge nullifies a law passed
during Mussolini's time that required schools to display the Christian
crucifix. Pope John Paul II condemns the ruling, saying that display
of the cross is necessary to instill in society the acceptance of
Christian supremacy over other religions.

October 31, 2003, Unrelated: German Member of Parliament Martin Hohmann
accuses Jews of planning the worst atrocities of the Russian revolution
and suggests that Jews could be called "a race of perpetrators"
just as Germans have been accused of Nazi crimes before saying that
neither Jews or Germans should be held responsible for their crimes.
In the coming weeks, Hohmann is expelled from the Christian Democratic party.

November 2003, Unrelated: South Korea enacts law allowing unionists
to be sued for lost production caused by strikes.

November 2003: Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada al Sadr announces that
"Saddam Hussein and his followers are the enemies of Iraq, not the Americans",
and orders his followers to treat United States forces like guests.

November 2003: Columbia Broadcast System executives ordes changes to
an upcoming biography of Ronald Reagan after complaints from conservatives
that it might not worship him greatly enough. CBS then refuses to run
the show.

November 2003: The European Commission releases the results of a poll showing
that 59%, the largest number, of Europeans think that Israel is a threat
to world peace, 53% think that of Iran, North Korea, and the United States,
and 52% think that of Iraq. After being asked why the Palestinian Authority
was not an option in the poll, Commission spokesman Gerassimos Thomas
says that the Palestinian Authority "is not a country".

November 2003: Afghanistan creates a draft Constitution.

November 2003, Unrelated: Matt Taibbi of the New York Press writes that
"The clash between two of the world's baddest gangsters--Putin and
Khodorkovsky--is also a great symbolic battle, each side representing
one of the two great remaining pretenders to global rule. Putin represents
the past, which also happens to be the American present: the fictional
democracy, in fact a ruthless oligarchy of corporate interests, with
the state as the castrated referee. Khodorkovsky represents the future:
no referee. Which is why our media establishment has chosen to take up
arms for him. They are making his case into an open referendum on the
neo-con revolution that until now has been fought in a largely clandestine
manner here at home...The basic story is that the U.S., in conjunction
with the Yeltsin administration, decided to create a super-wealthy class
of oligarchs who would ruthlessly defend their assets against any attempt
to renationalize the economy. In return--and this is the key point--they
were to support, financially, the ruling, Western-friendly 'democratic'
government. It is through such machinations that we were able to bring about
a compliant Russian state...The key moment in this story was the winter
of 1996. Polls showed that Yeltsin was certain to lose a reelection bid
against the idiot communist Gennady Zyuganov. So the state, in conjunction
with U.S. advisors, sold off the crown jewels of the Russian economy
to these crooks for pennies on the dollar. In return, these beneficiaries
massively funded Yeltsin's reelection campaign. This is how Khodorkovsky,
then the chief of a bank called Menatep, came to control the precious
Yukos empire that is now under siege. It was given to him...That doesn't
begin to tell the Khodorkovsky story...Menatep (allegedly, I have to say
in America) bought the company [Avisma], then forced its directors to sell
its commodities to a Menatep shell company called TMC at pennies on
the dollar. TMC then sold the goods (mainly titanium) to Western investors
at cost. To make matters worse, TMC then (allegedly) induced Avisma to buy
materials from them above cost. Readers are invited to imagine what words
like "forced" and "induced" mean in this context. In the end, nothing
was left but a skeletonized carcass. Any Brooklyn restaurant owner who
has been taken over by the Lucchese or Gambino families will recognize
this technique. This was what was described as 'the encouraging emergence
of market capitalism' in the new Russia...Until this year, that is,
when Khodorkovsky broke the rules...He decided he no longer wanted to
pay the piper--Putin. Instead of ponying up the agreed-upon tribute,
he started making noise about wanting to be president himself...Putin
decided to make an example of Misha. In America, we settle these disputes
by giving the F-117 contract to a different company. In Russia, the methods
are a little different: an untimely car accident, an exploding briefcase,
a mysterious fatal illness contracted after a routine phone conversation.
Absolutely the most civilized of these options is imprisonment and seizure
of assets...Putin decided, for once, to enforce the laws of the state.
How anyone can find morality in any of this is beyond me. But it is not
beyond the New York Times, and it is not even beyond the Boston Globe.
These papers, along with the vast majority of Western media outlets around
the world, have cast this smarmy fight over assets long ago stolen from
the Russian people as a battle between the evil forces of nationalization
and the good, industrious representatives (Khodorkovsky) of
the people-friendly market economy."

November 2003, Unrelated: Sri Lankan President Kumaratunga disbands Parliament
and fires the ministers of information, defense, and interior.

November 4, 2003: Daniel Drezner of Slate magazine reports that
most of the winners of large Iraq reconstruction contracts
barely donated any money to the Republican Party, with only
Halliburton, Bechtel, Fluor, and Washington Group International
out of the top ten contract recipients donating over $1 million;
and that many of the largest donors received small contracts.

November 4, 2003: Najaf, Iraq governor Haydar Abdul Munim is jailed
for kidnapping, extortion, and ambezzlement. Munim was appointed
by the United States, who according to the British Broadcasting Corporation
"initially ignored repeated complaints about Munim's behaviour"
until US forces found three missing teenagers imprisoned in their
own headquarters.

November 4, 2003: The United Nations General Assembly votes 179-3
to demand the United States end its embargo against Cuba. Only
Israel and the Marshall Islands vote against the resolution.

November 4, 2003: Cryptome reports having been visited by
Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agents Todd Renner
and Christopher Kelly from the Joint Terrorist Task Force
who made vague accusations that Cryptome was publishing
unspecified data which might be a threat to the United States.

November 4, 2003, Unrelated: German Defense minster Peter Struck
fires Brigadier General Reinhard Guenzel, commander in chief of
Germany's special forces, for praising Martin Hohmann.

November 4, 2003, Unrelated: Australian forces occupying the Solomon Islands
arrest a police superintendent accused of kidnapping and rape.

November 5, 2003: The Los Angeles Times orders its reporters
to stop describing Iraqi loyalist forces as "resistance fighters",
and to call the "insurgents" or "guerrillas" instead.

November 5, 2003: James Risen of the New York Times and
Brian Ross and Chris Vlasto of the American Broadcasting Corporation
write that Iraq had been trying to surrender from February to March,
offering to allow United States military forces into Iraq to search for
weapons of mass destruction, oil concessions to US companies, and
turning over al Qaeda member Abdul Rahman Yasin, said to be a prisoner
in Iraq's jails. The reports state that these offers were sent
through Iraqi agent Imad El Haje, who relayed them to United States
Office of Special Plans senior official F. Michael Maloof and met
with Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle to discuss the surrender.

November 5, 2003: Joshua Micah Marshall writes, "Last October, a reporter
put this to Ari Fleischer: 'Ari, the president has been saying that the
threat from Iraq is imminent, that we have to act now to disarm the country
of its weapons of mass destruction, and that it has to allow the U.N.
inspectors in, unfettered, no conditions, so forth.' Fleischer's answer? 'Yes.'
In January, Wolf Blitzer asked Dan Bartlett: 'Is [Saddam] an imminent threat
to U.S. interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right
here at home.' Bartlett's answer? 'Well, of course he is.' A month after
the war, another reporter asked Fleischer, 'Well, we went to war, didn't we,
to find these -- because we said that these weapons were a direct
and imminent threat to the United States? Isn't that true?' Fleischer's
answer? 'Absolutely.' I could go on. But I trust you get the point.
It's true that administration officials avoided the phrase 'imminent threat.'
But in making their argument, [Andrew] Sullivan and others are relying on
a crafty verbal dodge -- sort of like 'I didn't accuse you of eating the cake.
All I said was that you sliced it up and put it in your mouth'... Here's how
Vice President Cheney described the threat in August 2002: 'What we must not
do in the face of a mortal threat is give in to wishful thinking or willful
blindness.' A month later, Bush called Iraq an 'urgent threat to America.'
The next month, he described the threat like this: 'Iraq could decide on
any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist
group or individual terrorists. ... Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot
wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form
of a mushroom cloud.' Or Fleischer two days after that: 'Another way to look
at this is if Saddam Hussein holds a gun to your head even while he denies
that he actually owns a gun, how safe should you feel?' Or the president
justifying war as it got under way: 'The people of the United States and
our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime
that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.' For more than
six months, Bush and his top deputies told Americans that Iraq posed a grave,
immediate and imminent threat. Delay risked horrors like WMD terrorist
handoffs or mushroom clouds billowing over American cities." In response,
Andrew Sullivan writes "Desperate to prove the notion that the administration
did too call the threat from Saddam imminent, Josh Marshall, becoming
ever more stridently anti-Bush...comes up completely empty. No administration
official used that term. None."

November 6, 2003: Steven Kelman, former administrator of the
Office of Federal Procurement Policy during the Clinton administration,
calls accusations of the government giving contracts to Bush's friends
and campaign donors without a competitive bidding process "highly improbable
and utterly absurd", writing that "government keeps a watchful eye
on contractor profits -- and government work has low profit margins
compared with the commercial work the same companies perform...Over
the past decade we have tried to make procurement more oriented toward
delivering mission results for agencies and taxpayers, rather than focusing
on compliance with detailed bureaucratic process requirements. The charges
of Iraq cronyism encourage the system to revert to wasting time, energy
and people on redundant, unnecessary rules to document the nonexistence
of a nonproblem."

November 2003: A US military helicopter is shot down near Tikrit,
killing six. Another helicopter in the same group was returning
the Army Judge Advocate General Thomas Romig from a secret mission.
In retaliation, United States forces move through Tikrit and
fire into random homes.

November 2003: Signs a law banning dilation and extraction abortions.
After federal judges in three districts immediately overturn it as being
unconstitutional, promises to enforce the law anyway.

November 2003: The economy is reported to have grown 7.2% over
the last quarter, and the Bureau of Labour reports that unemployment
is declining as the economy creates 125,000 jobs per month. A later
report revises the growth number to 8.2%.

November 2003: The Christian Science Monitor reports that US-edited
textbooks in Iraq fail to mention the United States or Israel.

November 2003: Rescued prisoner of war Private Jessica Lynch condemns
the Department of Defense for repeatedly lying about her capture
and imprisonment to turn her into a hero.

November 2003: Novelist Paulo Coelho writes "an open letter of praise
for President Bush", writing "Thank you for showing everyone that
the Turkish people and their parliament are not for sale, not even
for 26 billion dollars. Thank you for revealing to the world the gulf
that exists between the decisions made by those in power and the wishes
of the people. Thank you for making it clear that neither José María Aznar
nor Tony Blair give the slightest weight to or show the slightest respect
for the votes they received. Aznar is perfectly capable of ignoring the
fact that 90% of Spaniards are against the war, and Blair is unmoved
by the largest public demonstration to take place in England in the last
thirty years. Thank you for making it necessary for Tony Blair to go to
the British parliament with a fabricated dossier written by a student
ten years ago, and present this as 'damning evidence collected by
the British Secret Service'. Thank you for allowing Colin Powell to
make a complete fool of himself by showing the UN Security Council
photos which, one week later, were publicly challenged by Hans Blix,
the chief weapons inspector in Iraq...Thank you for your rhetoric
stating that 'the UN now has a chance to demonstrate its relevance',
a statement which made even the most reluctant countries take up
a position opposing any attack on Iraq. Thank you for your foreign policy
which provoked the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, into declaring
that in the 21st century, 'a war can have a moral justification', thus
causing him to lose all credibility. Thank you for trying to divide
a Europe that is currently struggling for unification; this was a warning
that will not go unheeded. Thank you for having achieved something that
very few have so far managed to do in this century: the bringing together
of millions of people on all continents to fight for the same idea,
even though that idea is opposed to yours..."

November 2003, Unrelated: Israel accidentally broadcasts footage of
a secret artillery test by sending the footage over a commercial satellite.

November 2003, Unrelated: 10,000 protest in Tbilisi, Georgia,
against vote fraud by the government which had been condemned
by international observers.

November 7, 2003: White House Office of Administration Director
Timothy Campen announces that Bush will no longer answer questions
from Democratic Congressmen, instead requiring that Congressmens'
questions be routed through committee chairmen, all Republicans,
who must give their signed approval to written statements.

November 7, 2003: The United States closes its embassies in Saudi Arabia
due to a terrorist threat.

November 7, 2003: Staff Sergeant Georg Andreas Pogany is court-martialed
for cowardly conduct as a result of fear for seeking counseling after
seeing a dead Iraqi and becoming too shaken up to perform his translation
duties. A military judge quickly throws out the charge, and Pogany
is immediately charged with dereliction of duty.

November 7, 2003: Marine Corps intelligence analyst Sergeant Robert Ferriol
reports having been kicked out of the military and charged with
"disloyal statements" for having what his accusers called "liberal beliefs".

November 7, 2003: The New York Times reports that the United States
is deploying the Old Guard, a largely ceremonial unit which guards military
cemetaries and diplomatic convoys, to Djibouti. According to earlier reports
by Specialist Eric Matthew McKeeby of the Old Guard Public Affairs Office,
the Old Guard has by now had two weeks of training in modern weapons
and tactics.

November 7, 2003: Pakistan admits buying weapons from North Korea
but claims to have no relations with the country now.

November 7, 2003, Unrelated: Philippines Air Transport Office director
Panfilo Villaruel and Navy officer Richard Gatchalian commandeer
Manila airport control tower and call for people to vote against
President Gloria Arroyo in upcoming elections. They are murdered
by police after attempting to surrender.

November 7, 2003, Unrelated: Film critic Roger Ebert reports that
"The day after Columbine [high school massacre], I was interviewed
for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned
a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. 'Wouldn't you say,'
she asked, 'that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?'
No, I said, I wouldn't say that...The reporter looked disappointed,
so I offered her my theory. 'Events like this,' I said, 'if they are
influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own.
When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting,
it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming
and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and
a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia.
The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country:
If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about
nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking.
The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed
with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory'...Of course the interview
was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent
movies, and everybody was happy."

November 8, 2003: The Red Cross withdraws from Baghdad.

November 8, 2003: A guarded residential compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
is bombed, killing 18. The victims are all Arab, and the bombing reportedly
turns public opinion against al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. The compound bombed
had years earlier been used by Boeing to house workers from the United States.

November 8, 2003, Unrelated: The Indian state of Tamil Nadu's parliament
passes a bill of attainder against The Hindu newspaper's publisher,
2 editors, and 2 of its journalists 

November 8, 2003: Nigeria condemns the United States for offering
a $2 million bounty for the arrest of exiled Liberian President
Charles Taylor.

November 8, 2003: State Department Intelligence and Research Bureau
Arms Control and Disarmament Agency employee John Kokal is found dead
from a fall from the top of the building into a 20-foot deep concrete
window well. The State Department denies that Kokal, who worked in
the Office of Analysis for Near East/South Asia, was an intelligence analyst.

November 8, 2003, Unrelated: Fifty armed mercenaries raid and force the
closure of the offices of billionaire George Soros's Open Society Institute.
Landlord company Sector-1 claims that the Institute failed to pay rent
of $100,000 per month imposed retroactively, even though a Moscow court
held the existing contract for $10,500 per month to remain in force.

November 8, 2003, Unrelated: Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga
declares that a cease fire with the Tamil Tigers signed by Prime Minister
Ranil Wickramasinghe the prior year is illegal.

November 2003: National Mine Health and Safety Academy Superintendant
Jack Spadero is fired for accusing Bush's appointees to the Mine Health
and Safety Administration of failing to investigate a coal sludge spill
in Kentucky and giving no-bid contracts to friends of Assisstant Secretary
of Labour for Mine Safety and Health David Lauriski.

November 2003: Mohannad Ghazi al Kaabi, the United States appointed mayor
of Saddam City, a borough of Baghdad, is executed by United States forces
for his "refusal to follow instructions from the on-site security official,
who wasenforcing security procedures...in accordance with standard rules
of engagement" according to a statement by the United States.

November 2003: George Soros compares the Bush administration to
"my experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule".

November 2003: The Senate votes 89-4 to support a bill that
would grant the President the authority to impose or weaken sanctions
against Syria.

November 2003: Time Magazine deletes from its public Web archives
an interview with former President George Bush in which Bush says
"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation
of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives
in midstream, engaging in 'mission creep,' and would have incurred
incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably
impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew
intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect,
rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs
deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those
circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set
a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in
and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate,
would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression
we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could
conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.
It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome."

November 2003: Republic of China (Taiwan) People First Party Chairman
James Soong accuses President Chen Shui-bian of paying Bush $1 million
to meet Neil Bush.

November 2003: Cable News Network admits to rigging questions
asked during a debate of Democratic candidates.

November 2003: Tom Friedman of the New York tiems reports that
"the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, which is supposed to
come up with a plan for forming the constitution-writing committee,
is becoming dysfunctional. Several key G.C. members, particularly
the Pentagon's favorite son, Ahmad Chalabi, have been absent
from Iraq for weeks. Only seven or eight of the 24 G.C. members
show up at meetings anymore."

November 2003: George Soros dontates $5 million to Move On,
a partisan Democratic Party lobbying group, citing the similarity
between the modern United States and his experiences living
under Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as reason to oppose Bush.

November 2003, Unrelated: Ethobia bans the Ethiopian Free Press
Journalists' Association.

November 9, 2003: United States warplanes are called into service
for the first aerial bombing in Iraq since Iraq was secured,
striking points in Falluja.

November 10, 2003, Unrelated: United Nations Undersecretary General
for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland calls the civil war in Uganda
"biggest forgotten and neglected humanitarian emergency in the world
today... this crisis is in many ways worse than Iraq".

November 10, 2003, Unrelated: Declan McCullagh reports that Massachusetts
has sent invoices for unpaid cigarette taxes to 3,264 citizens
who had purchased cigarettes over the Internet.

November 11, 2003: Paul Bremer is recalled to the United States
for an emergency meeting to discuss the future of Iraq.
Bush is not part of the meeting.

November 11, 2003: British Prime Minister Tony Blair orders police
to create an "exclusion zone" where protests are forbidden during
the Bush's visit to London. London Mayor Ken Livingstone calls for
people to protest against Bush.

November 11, 2003: An Iraqi civilian is arrested and gagged
for "making anti-coalition statements".

November 12, 2003: Italy's headquarters in Nasiriya, Iraq, is bombed,
killing 26 including 18 Italians.

November 12, 2003: National Broadcast Company reports that
the Department of Defense is delaying pay by up to three months
for National Guard soldiers who are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and ending pay and benefits for soldiers who are wounded.

November 12, 2003: Associated Press Managing Editors President
Stuart Wilk condemns the Department of Defense for United States
soldiers' harassment of journalists in Iraq.

November 12, 2003: Iranian journalists Saeed Abu Taleb and Soheil Karimi
report having been tortured by United States forces while under arrest.

November 12, 2003: The Republican Party lauches a 39-hour filibuster
to condemn the Democratic Party for only confirming 168 of Bush's
172 judicial appointments. At Fox News's request, the filibuster
is timed to begin a few minutes into the Brit Hume show so that
Fox News can show the entire Republican Senate walking onto the
Senate floor as one body.

November 12, 2003: When presented maps highlighing wildlife locations,
Florida Governor Jeb Bush says "It looks like the people of San Francisco
are an endangered species, which may not be a bad thing. That's probably
good news for the country."

November 12, 2003, Unrelated: Vietnam jails Tran Dung Tien, a former
bodyguard of Ho Chi Minh, for signing a petition for democratic reforms.

November 13, 2003, Unrelated: Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore
is expelleed by a unanimous vote of the Court of the Judiciary
for refusing to follow a federal court's order to remove a
monument to Christianity that he had surreptitiously installed
in the state court's main rotunda overnight several months ago.

November 13, 2003: The Financial Times reports on a leaked United Nations
study claiming that al Qaeda is still able to raise funds and arm itself
freely.

November 13, 2003: Judges Alex Kozinski, Thomas Nelson, and Jane A. Restani
of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals delare that the Constitution does not
grant Congress the power to restrict ownership of guns that were modified
by the owner to become machine guns.

November 13, 2003: Andrew Sullivan writes that anybody who publicly
opposes Bush is "supporting the forces of terrorism in the Middle East".

November 13, 2003: John Hopkins University Information Security Institute
technical director Aviel D. Rubin accuses the Maryland government
of censoring a review of Diebold's voting machines by refusing to release
two thirds of the report to the public. In response, Maryland
Election Laws State Board Administrator Linda Lamone accuses Rubin
of "doing a great disservice to democracy" by suggesting that people
should not trust the government.

November 13. 2003: The University of Maryland Program on International
Policy Attitudes publishes the results of a poll showing that
87% of respondents believe Bush implied that Iraq was an imminent threat
to the United States, 71% believe Iraq had a nuclear, chemical, or biological
weapons program and 40% believed such program was an imminent threat,
61% believe that more time should have been spent on weapons inspections,
42% believe Bush is "honest and frank", 63% believe that Bush would have
invaded Iraq regardless of whether he thought Iraq had nuclear, chemical,
or biological weapons, 78% wrongly believe that there are fewer than
15 attacks on US forces in Iraq per day while only 13% guessed near
the correct number of 33 at time of polling, 45% wrongly believed there
to be far more deaths of US soldiers since the fall of Baghdad than
the correct number, 31% believe that the Bush administration planned well
for the post-war occupation of Iraq, and 35% report that Bush's handling
of the Iraq occupation will make them more likely to vote for Bush in 2004.

November 13, 2003, Unrelated: Secure Science Corporaton reports that
Citibank's Web-based fraud reporting service is being run by fraudsters
who apparently broke into Citibank's computers who use it to steal
customer information, and that Citibank knows this and does not seem to care.

November 14, 2003: Pledges that the United States will occupy Iraq
until Saddam Hussein is found.

November 14, 2003: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi says
that he tried to dissuade Bush from invading Iraq.

November 14, 2003: National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice
admits that there is no evidence that Iraq had removed part of its
alleged chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons arsenal to Syria.

November 14, 2003, Unrelated: Mercenaries hired by George Soros's
Open Society Institute raid the building formerly occupied by the Institute,
wounding several.

November 14, 2003, Unrelated: Council of Conservative Citizens
board member Earl Holt writes a letter to the anonymous Arch Pundit
blogger, writing "Hey Commie: Imagine my chagrin when I used
a search engine to find commentary about myself, and there was your
shallow, dilettante, asshole self, labeling me a 'white supremacist.'
Being the shallow, nigger-loving dilettante that you are, you probably
DO consider niggers to be your equal (who am I to question this?):
Yet, unlike you and your allies, I have an I.Q. in excess of 130,
which grants me the ability to objectively evaluate the Great American
Nigro (Africanus Criminalis.)...the nigro is still as criminal, surly,
lazy , violent and stupid as he/she ever was, while his illegitimacy
rate is 80% nationwide, and over 90% in the 'large urban areas.'...Also,
you lying asshole, in the 2003-2004 school year, St. Louis spent $11,711
per nigger-idiot in the public schools, yet, half of all students test
at the 20th percentile (or lower) on nationally-standardized tests.
(If I were Emperor, I would forcibly hand over you and all your commie
apologists for nigro under-achievement to White, working-class parents
of public school students, and let them have their way with you...)
Some day, You sanctimonious nigger-lovers will either have to live 
amongst them ('nothing cures an enthusiasm for integration like a good dose
of niggers') or else defend yourselves against them. My guess is that
you are such a cowardly and pusillanimous lot of girly-boys, they will
kill fuck, kill and eat you just as they do young White males in every
prison system in the U.S. That's right: When defending this savage
and brutish lot, you must also consider their natural (or should
I say UN-natural) enthusiasm for buggery! I honestly pray to God that
some nigger fucks, kills and eats you and everyone you claim to love!"

November 2003: The Weekly Standard receives and reports on
a leaked memo from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith,
dated October 27, to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller
writing that "Iraqi officials were carefully considering offering
safe haven to bin Laden and his closest collaborators in Nov. 1999.
The source indicated the idea was put forward by the presumed head
of Iraqi intelligence in Islamabad (Khalid Janaby) who in turn was
in frequent contact and had good relations with bin Laden...During
a custodial interview, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi [a senior al Qaeda operative]
said he was told by an al Qaeda associate that he was tasked to travel
to Iraq (1998) to establish a relationship with Iraqi intelligence
to obtain poisons and gases training. After the USS Cole bombing in 2000,
two al Qaeda operatives were sent to Iraq for CBW-related training
beginning in Dec 2000. Iraqi intelligence was "encouraged" after
the embassy and USS Cole bombings to provide this training...According
to sensitive CIA reporting,...the Saudi National Guard went on
a kingdom-wide state of alert in late Dec 2000 after learning Saddam
agreed to assist al Qaeda in attacking U.S./U.K. interests
in Saudi Arabia...CIA can confirm two Atta visits to Prague--in Dec. 1994
and in June 2000; data surrounding the other two--on 26 Oct 1999
and 9 April 2001--is complicated and sometimes contradictory
and CIA and FBI cannot confirm Atta met with the IIS. Czech
Interior Minister Stanislav Gross continues to stand by his information."
In response, the Department of Defense states that "News reports that
the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect
to contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence
Committee are inaccurate...The items listed in the classified annex
were either raw reports or products of the CIA, the NSA, or, in one case,
the DIA.  The provision of the classified annex to the Intelligence Committee
was cleared by other agencies and done with the permission of
the Intelligence Community.  The selection of the documents was made
by DOD to respond to the Committee's question.  The classified annex
was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between
Iraq and al Qaida, and it drew no conclusions.", and threathens that
"Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information
are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable
and may be illegal." The Weekly Standard highlights the memorandum
with a front-page image of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden
with the words "CASE CLOSED".

November 2003: A memorandum is leaked from Democratic members of the Senate
Intelligence Committee investigating the United States' intelligence
failures prior to the September 11 attacks and the Iraq invasion. The memo
describes plans to cajole the Republicans on the committee into allowing
an investigation of the executive branch's intelligence failures, seeking
examples of "improper or questionable conduct by administration officials";
to "Assiduously prepare Democratic 'additional views' to attach to any
interim or final reports the committee may release" in the expectation
that such endnotes will be necessary to complete the report in the face of
"the majority...seeking to limit the scope of the inquiry", and to use
the vast differences between the Democrats' reports and the expected
Republicans' reports to demand the opening of a new, "independent" inquiry;
and to make preparations for the new inquiry "Once we identify solid leads
the majority does not want to pursue". Newsmax calls the memo
an "Anti-Bush Plot", and Senator Zell Miller demands the Democrats
be executed for treason.

November 2003: After several days of the Arnold Schwarzenegger campaign
releasing photographs and press releases of Schwarzenegger meeting with
California officials in Sacramento to prepare for his administration,
it is reported that Schwarzenegger has been vacationing in Hawaii
the entire time.

November 2003: Stunt actress Rhonda Miller, who accused Arnold Schwarzenegger
of attempting to rape her, reports that she is now unable to find work
in the entertainment industry and has been told by several casting directors
that she has chosen to close the door on her career.

November 2003: Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat, is elected Governor of Louisiana 
in a close election against Bobby Jindal, an Indian running on the Republican
ticket.

November 2003: The Italian group Campo Antiimperialista raises E12,000
to send to Iraqi Communists to fight the United States.

November 2003: Lieutenant Colonel Allen West is court-martialed
for torturing and shooting beside an Iraqi prisoner of war.
Town Hall columnist Trevor Bothwell praises these "heroic tactics"
and writes that "Most Democrats and critics of this war seem to think
we can defeat radical Islamists by sending the cast of 'Queer Eye
for the Straight Guy' [homosexuals] into the desert to slap our way
to victory...Col. West exemplifies the bravery and nerve that we'd
better demand if we expect to come out of this campaign on top";
Federalist publisher Mark Alexander calls the courtmartia
 a "grossly misguided criminal prosecution"; Michael Reagan declares
West "a true American hero"; Joseph Farah of World Net Daily writes
"Do you want a surefire recipe to lose the Iraq war? It's easy, really.
Just allow the Pentagon to move forward with plans to court martial
Lt. Col. Allen B. West...West isn't getting a medal for this conduct
- which would be appropriate in my opinion."; Mona Charen writes
"I sometimes wonder whether a nation that sends girls like Jessica Lynch
into battle and punishes soldiers like Lt. Col. Allen West is quite
in its right mind... Does the Army want all of its soldiers to
be Jessica Lynches?...If he is prosecuted or threatened in any way,
it will be a terrible affront to justice and common sense.";
and Congressman Jimmy Duncan declares West's actions "a great thing
and it's something he should be commended for and not be condemned for,
and he shouldn't be having to face a court-martial".

November 2003: Mexico fires Ambassador to the United Nations Adolfo Zinser
for saying that the United States had a "relationship of convenience
and subordination" with Mexico and "sees us as a backyard".

November 15, 2003: The Times reports that Bush will allow British businesses
to begin bidding on reconstruction contracts for Iraq as a reward
for their military assistance in invading and occupying the country.

November 15, 2003: Two United States helicopters are shot down
over Mosul, Iraq, killing seventeen soldiers.

November 15, 2003: Senator Ted Kennedy condemns the conservative extremism
of Bush's judicial appointees, pledging that the Senate will "continue
to resist any Neanderthal that is nominated by this President of
the United States for any federal court in the United States."
In response, World Net Daily founder Joseph Farah, Fox News Channel
host Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Microsoft National Broadcast Company
guest and former Attorney General Edwin Meese accuse Kennedy of being
a white supremacist.

November 15, 2003, Unrelated: Two synagogues in Istanbul, Turkey are bombed,
killing 25. al Qaeda claims responsibility.

November 16, 2003: The Guardian reports that "The Taliban are expanding fast.
The deputy governor of Zabul admits most of his province is now controlled
by the militia. Most of Oruzgan province and around half of Kandahar province
is now beyond government authority."

November 16, 2003: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees employee
Bettina Goislard is assassinated  in Ghazni, Afghanistan. The United Nations
orders all workers in Kandahar, Jalalabad, Gardez, and Ghazni to stay
inside their guarded compaunds, and within days withdraws completely
Kandahar, Khost, Nangarhar, and Paktia provinces.

November 16, 2003, Unrelated: The governor of Okinawa asks the United States
to reduce its military presence on the island.

November 17, 2003: The Wall Street Journal reports that United States
military and reconstruction forces have withdrawn from Iraq's populated
areas.

November 17, 2003: Italian advisor to the United States occupation
authority of Iraq Marco Calamai resigns, saying that "The provisional
authority simply doesn't work...Reconstruction projects that were promised
and financed have had practically no results...There needs to be a radical
change with respect to the policies taken so far by the USA".

November 17, 2003: European Union foreign policy minister Javier Solana
reports that Bush has agreed to surrender authority of United States
forces in Iraq to an international coalition.

November 17, 2003: The Mirror reports that Bush has cancelled plans
to speak to Parliament because he would see people who do not support him.

November 17, 2003: The Confederation of British Industry reports
that Bush is offering compensation to US-based corporations who withdraw
from Britain and relocate their British facilities to the United States.

November 17, 2003: George Packer of the New Yorker reports that
Iraq Acting Minister of Higher Education Drew Erdmann, a doctor
of history whose dissertation was partly on postwar reconstruction,
had written a fifteen page memo applying lessons learned after
reconstructions from the World Wars through present conflicts
to what could be expected in Iraq, and this memo had been delivered
to Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
and National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice by Secretary of State
Colin Powell in late 2002; the Department of Defense's postwar planning
study had been conducted by Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy
Douglas Feith and Under-Secretary of Defense William Luti who
"pointedly excluded Pentagon officials with experience in postwar
reconstructions" because "such people would offer pessimistic scenarios,
which would challenge Rumsfeld's aversion to using troops as peacekeepers"
and "these scenarios might dampen public enthusiasm for the war"; that
a "senior Administration official" said "There was a desire by some
in the Vice-President's office and the Pentagon to cut and run from Iraq
and leave it up to Chalabi to run it" and said the Department's planning 
"isn't pragmatism, it isn't Realpolitik, it isn't conservatism,
it isn't liberalism. It's theology."; that "According to a senior
Administration official, not long ago in Washington, Cheney approached
Powell, stuck a finger in his chest, and said, 'If you hadn't opposed
the I.N.C. and Chalabi, we wouldn't be in this mess.'; and that Captain
John Prior of Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 6th Infantry had recorded
meetings with Iraqis who spoke in perfect English and issued vague
warnings of troubles, but lost their grasp of the language when questioned.

November 17, 2003: In his first acts as Governor of California,
Arnold Schwarzenegger issues an executive order repealing a
legislatively mandated increase in vehicle registration taxes
that had automatically gone into effect when the state's budget
entered a deficit, orders a "review" of every single act passed
by former Governor Gray Davis throughout both of his terms,
and orders the state Legislature to convene in an emergency session
to repeal a recently passed law allowing drivers licenses to be
given to illegal immigrants.

November 17, 2003: Grand Old Party USA opinionist James Hall writes
that "Satan lives in George Soros...The fiction which is interdependency
has a prolocutor in the congregation of Moloch...No other single person
represents the symbol and the substance of Globalism more than
this Hungarian-born descendant of Shylock. He is the embodiment
of the Merchant from Venice. His public reputation as an astute
currency speculator is generous, while his skills as a manipulator
and procurer of pain and suffering is shrouded in the footnotes
of the financial journals. Claiming to be a philanthropist,
his record is literally one of being a patron for indentured
enslavement...While it is reported widely that Soros funded groups
that support increased government spending, tax increases, oppose
the death penalty and President Bush's judicial nominees; there is
a far more sinister scheme...drug legalization, euthanasia,
immigration entitlements and feminism...beware of his public attempt
to influence his tribe, by insulting their benefactors. Before the
Jewish Funders Network, he recently made these remarks: 'There is
a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush
administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that'...The
inevitable outcry from the usual suspects, just illustrates the orchestrated
nature of the Soros effort to rationalize his own social agenda,
while deflecting criticism back to his ancestral blood line... As is
the normal practice, it's not about anti-Semitism! Mahathir Mohammad
was just stating the truth...Soros wants to drug you so you can't think,
terminate you when you can no longer pay tribute, force you to intermingle
with alien invaders and emasculate you to an unnatural equality.
If that isn't the plan of the devil, what else would you call it?"
Grand Old Party USA deletes the article from its archives the next day.

November 17, 2003, Unrelated: Canadian right-wing news maven Conrad Black
resigns from the Daily Telegraph after admitting to embezzling L19 million.

November 18, 2003: The Massachusetts Supreme Court declares that
the state's Constitution does not grant the Legislature the power
to forbid homosexual marriage.

November 18, 2003: Declares that "Marriage is a sacred institutio
 between a man and a woman. Today's decision of the Massachusetts
Supreme Judicial Court violates this important principle. I will
work with congressional leaders and others to do what is legally
necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage."

November 18, 2003: Imposes quotas on textile imports from China.

November 18, 2003: Food and Drug Administration commissioner Mark McClellan
urges Canada to restrict the sales of medicines.

November 18, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declares North Korea
an "evil regime".

November 18, 2003: 48 foreign exchange traders are arrested
on suspicion of fraud.

November 19, 2003: Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle says
that the invasion of Iraq was against international law,
which "would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone".

November 19, 2003: The World Tribune reports that the United States
has deployed 20,000 troops to the Iraqi-Syrian border to prevent
weapons smuggling and militia travel.

November 19, 2003: Iraqi Governing Council member Jalal Talabani
reports that Iran is offering its support in securing Iraq.

November 19, 2003: The Mirror reports receiving a leaked record
of the National Executive Committee meeting in which Prime Minister
Tony Blair says that Tory party leader "Michael Howard's soft centrist
language was an illusion, like the US Republicans' compassionate conservatism."

November 19, 2003: The United States frigate Vandegrift docks
in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, the first US ship to dock in Vietnam
since the war.

November 19, 2003, Unrelated: The People's Republic of China
threatens war with the Republic of China on Taiwan.

November 19, 2003, Unrelated: Spanish police arrest twelve
suspected leaders of Euskadi Ta Azkatasuna.

November 20, 2003: Announces that "Muslims worship the same
Almighty...we worship the same God." In response,
Southern Baptist Convention President Richard D. Land
calls Bush "mistaken" and National Association of Evangelicals
President Ted Haggard says that "The Muslim God appears to
value the opposite" of "the Christian God".

November 20, 2003: The British Embassy and Hong Kong Shanghai
Banking Corporation headquarters in Instanbul, Turkey, are bombed,
killing 21 including British Consul General Roger Short.

November 20, 2003: 70,000 protest against Bush's presence in London, England.

November 20, 2003: A guard at the Jordanian Embassy is killed.
Bombs explode near the office of Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party
leader Jalal Talabani in Kirkuk and home of Duleim Sunni tribe leader
Sheik Amer Ali Suleiman, a supporter of the United States, in Ramadi,
killing six.

November 20, 2003, Unrelated: Britain's Parliament passes legislation
eliminating protection from double jeopardy, the prosecutoral practice
of re-arresting and re-trying someone found innocent of a crime
until a judge or jury is found that will find them guily.

November 2003: Newsweek cites Paul Bremer as saying that Bush ordered
the disbanding of the Iraqi army against his wishes and the wishes of
the Central Intelligence Agency, which had warned that "That's another
350,000 Iraqis you're pissing off, and they've got guns."

November 2003: The American Association of Retired Persons launches
a large-scale advertising campaign supporting the Republican Party's
legislation that forbids Medicare from buying medicines at market prices,
instead forcing the agency to pay whatever the manufacturer demands,
and will greatly increase the cost of buying into Medicare. In response,
Representative Lynn Woolsey calls on AARP members to resign. 
Public Citizen notes that 60% of AARP's income comes from its
insurance business, which stands to gain from the bill.

November 2003: Italy's state-owned Rai TV network cancels the political satire
RaiOt after Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's Mediaset network
files a lawsuit alleging defamation. The show's only aired episode
was the most viewed late-night show in Italy's history.

November 2003: Jeffrey S. Lubbers responds to Senator Orrin G. Hatch's
claims that filibusters of Bush's judicial appointees are unprecedented
and unconstitutional by writing "This led me to dig up some old Congressional
Records from April 1980, when Senate Republicans mounted a filibuster
against President Carter's nominee for general counsel of th
National Labor Relations Board...The senator leading the filibuster
said...he was 'too pro-labor' and other qualified nominees would
be 'acceptable to business'...The reason I remember this episode so well
is that the nominee was William A. Lubbers, my father, and the senator
leading the filibuster was Orrin G. Hatch."

November 2003: The Economist publishes projections from the Congressional
Budget Office projecting a return to a $200 billion surplus by 2013
if Bush's tax cuts are repealed, spending increases are kept to 2.7%
per year, and Congress fails to pass alternative minium tax reform
and a Medicare drug benefit; but if the reverse is true, the Office
projects a nearly $800 billion annual deficit by 2013. The numbers show
that the tax cut is the greatest factor, worth about $450 billion,
with discretionary spending being the next greatest factor at around
$350 billion.

November 2003, Unrelated: Haiti demands that France pay $21,685,135,571.48
in slavery reparations.

November 21, 2003: Congress passes a bill to greatly expand police powers.
The provisions were hidden inside an intelligence appropriations bill
which passed the Senate on a voice vote. One of the provisions redefines
"financial institution" to mean nearly any business, as all businesses
involve finance, thereby allowing use of special bank regulation powers
against all manners of business.

November 21, 2003: The United States condemns the International Atomic
Energy Agency for failing to find any evidence that Iran is building
nuclear weapons.

November 21, 2003: Terrorists shell the Iraqi oil ministry,
Sheraton hotel, and journalists' headquarters Palestine Hotel.

November 21, 2003: Congressmen Todd Akin, Cass Ballenger, Sanford Bishop,
Roy Blunt, John Boozman, Kevin Brady, Ginny Brown-Waite, Michael C. Burgess,
Dan Burton, Steve Buyer, Eric Cantor, John Rice Carter, Chris Chocola,
Philip Crane, Ander Crenshaw, Christopher Cox, John Culberson,
Randy Cunningham, Jo Ann Davis, Tom DeLay, Jim DeMint, Lincoln Diaz-Balart,
Mario Diaz-Balart, John T. Doolittle, David Dreier, John J. Duncan,
Jennifer Dunn, Tom Feeney, J. Randy Forbes, Trent Franks, Elton Gallegly,
Scott Garrett, Jim Gibbons, Virgil H. Goode, Dennis Hastert, Wally Herger,
Pete Hoekstra, John N. Hostettler, Duncan Hunter, Darrell Issa,
Walter B. Jones, Pete King, Steve King, Jack Kingston, Ray LaHood,
John Linder, Don Manzullo, Buck McKeon, Marilyn Musgrave, Sue Myrick,
Charlie Norwood, Tom Osborne, Doug Ose, C. L. Otter, Ron Paul, Steve Pearce,
Mike Pence, Joe Pitts, Richard Pombo, George P. Radanovich, Jim Ramstad,
Denny Rehberg, Dana Rohrabacher, Pete Sessions, John Shadegg, John Shimkus,
Mark Souder, William Tauzin, Lee Terry, Mac Thornberry, William Thomas,
Todd Tiahrt, Patrick J. Toomey, Greg Walden, Zach Wamp, Dave Weldon,
Jerry Weller, and Joe Wilson introduce the Ronald Reagan Dime Act
to replace the image of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
on the dime with that of Ronald Reagan, declaring Reagan "the Freedom
President", falsely claiming Reagan brought "honor to the Office
of the President", falsely claiming Reagan promoted "principles
of ordered liberty, and the heritage of Western Civilization", 
and declaring Congress's support for banning all forms of abortion.
In response, Nancy Reagan says that "I do not support this proposal
and I am certain Ronnie would not" because "it would be wrong to remove"
Franklin Roosevelt from the dime.

November 21, 2003, Unrelated: Rick Casey of the Houston Chronicle
reports that Neil Bush signed a contract with Grace Semiconductor
Manufacturing Company CEO Winston Wong in which Bush is "To provide
GSMC from time to time with business strategies and policies; latest
information and trends of the related industry, and other expertized
advices" and "To attend Directors Board Meetings" in exchange for
$400,000 of company stock per year and $10,000 for each board meeting
he attends.

November 21, 2003, Unrelated: The Financial Times reports that
the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia censored
a report from the Berlin Technical University Centre for Research
on Antisemitism which had concluded that antisemitic acts were largely
being conducted by Muslims and Communists, with the Monitoring Centre's
chief objection being that the Berlin report had defined some anti-Israel
acts to be anti-semitic as well.

November 22, 2003: Police stations are bombed in Khan Bani Saad and Baquba,
Iraq, killing 18.

November 22, 2003: A Dalsey Hillblom Lynn cargo plane is hit by a missile
upon takeoff from Baghdad, and returns safely. The United States
orders a halt to civilian flights to Baghdad.

November 22, 2003: Iraqi Colonel Abdul Salam Qanbar, commander of
a police division in Mosul, is assassinated.

November 22, 2003, Unrelated: Georgia's Parliament and Chancellery are seized
by citizens angry at the fraudulent election of Eduard Shevardnadze.
Nino Burdzhanadze declares herself dictator. Shevardnadze resigns
the next day, and the United States recognizes Burdzhanadze's rule
as the official government. Soon, Burdzhandadze promises elections
within 45 days.

November 23, 2003: Two United States soldiers are lynched after being
run off the road by gunfire in Mosul, Iraq.

November 23, 2003: A gas pipeline supplying Iraq's Baiji oil refinery
is bombed.

November 23, 2003, Unrelated: The Observer reports that the Carlyle Group
is planning to support Conrad Black by investing in Hollinger International.

November 24, 2003: Claims that "our military went to Afghanistan,
destroyed the training camps of al Qaeda, and put the Taliban
out of business forever" and describes Iraq immediately prior
to the invasion as being "armed with deadly weapons".

November 24, 2003: Northern Alliance soldiers demanding their unpaid salaries
riot at the Defense Ministry in Kabul. One is killed as soldiers guarding
the ministry fire into the crowd.

November 24, 2003: The office of al Arabiya television network
are raided in Iraq.

November 24, 2003: Congressman Nick Smith, a Republican, reports that
the Republican Party had threatened to support opposing candidates
in his son's campaign for the seat he plans to vacate, if he failed
to support the Medicare bill.

November 2003: The Republican Party issues a television ad claiming
that Democrats are "attacking the President FOR ATTACKING THE TERRORISTS."
In response, Wesley Clark says that "I'm attacking him because he's
not attacking terrorists...I think it really strikes at the heart
of a democracy when you accuse your opponents of somehow aiding the enemy,
and that's what these ads are implying." In response, Senator John McCain
says that the ad is simply "portraying the president's leadership
that he's displayed since September 11, which I support" and "a very
legitimate statement to be made in the coming Presidential election."
The commercial also includes a quote from the State of the Union address
which has been modified to replace mumbling with clear speech.

November 2003: The Iraqi Governing Council forbids Al-Arabiya from
broadcasting in Iraq, accuing the station of "encouraging terrorism"
for repeating a statement from Saddam Hussein.

November 2003: One of Senator Orrin Hatch's aides is found to have
broken into Democratic computers. Hatch denies knowledge of the event.

November 2003: The Department of Defense forbids press coverage
of soldiers' funerals at Arlington Cemetery.

November 2003: The Department of Labor reports that the number of
unemployment claims is down 15,000 in the previous week, the first
reduction in years.

November 2003: Mike Littwin of the Rocky Mountain News reports that
"Before the press was herded into the giant hangar in advance
of George W. Bush's pep rally/photo op with the Fort Carson troops,
we were given the rules. No talking to the troops before the rally.
No talking to the troops during the rally. No talking to the troops
after the rally. In other words, if I've done the math right, that
means no conversation at all...the last thing anyone heard as
the president left the room was some in the audience chanting,
'Four more years.' And no one got to ask their names."

November 2003: Public Broadcasting System cancels an interview
with media critic Michael Wolff in which he had criticized media
corporation owners.

November 2003: Nathan Newman reports that the television show
"The Practice has always been as much about legal ethics as about
courtroom drama" but "the show introduced a compelling new character"
who "deliberately violates every ethical rule possible-- breaking
attorney-client privilege, blackmailing opposing counsel, paying off
clients to cover up malpractice, and so on. In last night's episode,
he topped past shows in a double-header. In one murder case, he personally
hid a murder weapon to help a client escape indictment. In the other,
he hacked opposing counsel's computer and used the contents to blackmail
the client. But here's the thing -- in every decision made, the result
has been substantively just, far more ethical and right than many stories
in past seasons where guilty clients have gotten off on a technicality,
or evil corporate defendants have tragically been able to win their case."

November 2003, Unrelated: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes that "In a
ferocious three-year attack, the Bush administration has initiated
more than 200 major rollbacks of America's environmental laws.... Cloaked
in meticulously crafted language designed to deceive the public,
the administration intends to eliminate the nation's most important
environmental laws by the end of the year. Under the guidance
of Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the Bush White House has actively
hidden its anti-environmental program behind deceptive rhetoric,
telegenic spokespeople, secrecy and the intimidation of scientists
and bureaucrats...The attacks began on Inauguration Day, when
President Bush's chief of staff and former General Motors lobbyist
Andrew Card quietly initiated a moratorium on all recently adopted
regulations. Since then, the White House has enlisted every federal agency
that oversees environmental programs in a coordinated effort to relax
rules aimed at the oil, coal, logging, mining and chemical industries
as well as automakers, real estate developers, corporate agribusiness
and other industries...This onslaught is being coordinated through
the White House Office of Management and Budget -- or, more precisely,
OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, under the direction
of John Graham, the engine-room mechanic of the Bush stealth strategy.
Graham's specialty is promoting changes in scientific and economic
assumptions that underlie government regulations -- such as recalculating
cost-benefit analyses to favor polluters. Before coming to the White House,
Graham was the founding director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis,
where he received funding from America's champion corporate polluters:
Dow Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto, Alcoa, Exxon, General Electric
and General Motors. Under the White House's guidance, the very agencies
entrusted to protect Americans from polluters are laboring to destroy
environmental laws...Criminal cases referred for federal prosecution
have dropped forty percent...Last year, the EPA's two most senior career
enforcement officials resigned after decades of service. They cited
the administration's refusal to carry out environmental laws. The
White House has masked its attacks with euphemisms that would have
embarrassed George Orwell. George W. Bush's 'Healthy Forests' initiative
promotes destructive logging of old-growth forests. His 'Clear Skies'
program, which repealed key provisions of the Clean Air Act, allows
more emissions..."

November 2003: A writer for the American Enterprise Institute
writes that "The Medicare prescription drug vote...was the ugliest
and most outrageous breach of standards in the modern history of
the House. It was made dramatically worse when the speaker violated
the longstanding tradition of the House floor's being off limits
to lobbying by outsiders (other than former members) by allowing
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson on the floor
during the vote to twist arms -- another shameful first."

November 2003: As Bush signs the Medicare bill, a brass band 
plays J.P. Sousa's Liberty Bell March, better known as the theme song
to the Monty Python television serious which often satirized
foolish politicians.

November 2003, Unrelated: Los Angeles County bans the use of
the technical terms "master" and "slave" to refer to IDE hardware devices.

November 26, 2003: General Jay Garner reports that Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld had ordered him to remove Future of Iraq Project leader
Tom Warrick from his reconstruction team, and that Rumsfeld had said
the order "came to me from such a high level that I can't overturn it".

November 25, 2003: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claims that
there is "compelling evidence" that al Arabiya television network
is assisting in terrorist attacks against reconstruction efforts.

November 25, 2003, Unrelated: Congress legalizes unsolicited Internet
advertising known as spam, with a 392-5 vote in the House and
a unanimous vote in the Senate.

November 26, 2003: Lord Johan Steyn condemns the United States' military
tribunals as a "kangaroo court" and "a pre-ordained arbitrary rush
to judgment by an irregular tribunal which makes a mockery of justice",
and calls on Britain to "make plain, publicly and unambiguously,
our condemnation of the utter lawlessness" at Guantanamo Bay
where "The purpose...is to put them beyond the rule of law,
beyond the protection of any courts, and at the mercy of
the victors...the rules expressly provide that statements made by
a prisoner under physical and mental duress are admissible".

November 26, 2003: The Guardian reports that "Families have come forward
with accounts of how American soldiers shot dead or seriously wounded
unarmed Iraqi civilians with no apparent cause. In many cases their
stories are confirmed by Iraqi police investigations.  Yesterday
the US military in Baghdad admitted a total of $1,540,050 has been
paid out up to November 12 for personal injury, death or damage
to property. A total of 10,402 claims had been filed...No American
soldier has been prosecuted for illegally killing an Iraqi civilian
and commanders refuse even to count the number of civilians killed
or injured by their soldiers. Iraqi courts, because of an order issued
by the US-led authority in Baghdad in June, are forbidden from hearing
cases against American soldiers or any other foreign troops or foreign
officials in Iraq. 

November 2003: Ellen Mariani sues Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney,
Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet,
Department of Transportation Director Norman Mineta,
Council of Foreign Relations Board Chairman Peter G. Peterson,
National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, former President George Bush, 
and September 11 Victim Compensation Fund Special Master Kenneth R. Feinberg
on behalf of her husband and all others killed in the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks, claiming that   "Defendant GWB failed to act
and prevent '911' knowing the attacks would lead to our nation having
to engage in an 'International War on Terror (IWOT)' which would benefit
Defendants both financially and for political reasons... Defendants knew
or should have known the attacks on '911' would be carried out
and intentionally and deliberately failed to act and prevent
these deadly attacks...GWB et al, allowed the attacks to take place
to compel public anger and outcry to engage our nation and our military men
and women in a preventable 'IWOT' for personal gains and agendas...on or
about, August 6, 2001, Defendant GWB received intelligence reports that
a potential attack against the United States of America was being planned
by the use of hijacked civilian airliners. The American people were never
warned of this potential threat to their health and well-being as Defendant
GWB owed a duty to inform and warn the public as apparently high level
cabinet members to include Defendants Rumsfeld and Ashcroft stopped
flying commercial aircraft prior to the '911' attacks...Defendant
Feinberg's appointment by Defendant Aschroft was tactical placement
of a 'go along to get along' move by Defendant GWB to ensure all '911'
families joined the fund to prevent any questions of liability, gross
or criminal negligence on behalf of Defendant GWB and his administration
for failing to act and prevent the '911' attacks."

November 2003: The Internal Revenue Service launches an audit
of the National Education Association.

November 2003: Clear Channel issues a memo to its highest paid managers
and executives asking them to contribute to its political donations fund,
of which most goes the Republican Party, in exchange for items of value.

November 2003: Robert Riggs and Todd Bensman of Columbia Broadcast System 
Channel 11 from Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas report that
the Federal Bureau of Investigation has captured a group of three
people who apparently built and sold bombs, including a cyanide bomb
and another bomb disguised as a briefcase, and had given tactical advice
to unknown terrorist groups within the United States. The three were
William J. Krar, Judith Bruey, and Edward Feltus.

November 2003: Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament secretary Jimmy Barnes
reports that "CND itself is now a small divided group with little future,
unless there is a change" due to Communist infiltration.

November 2003: A family in Ohio raises money to buy a flak jacket
for their son, a soldier stationed at Baghdad Airport. The Associated Press
reports that " Nearly one-quarter of the 130,000 American troops in Iraq
had not been issued the newest body armor as of last month."

November 2003, Unrelated: The Canadian Alliance Party fires
Family Issues Critic Larry Spencer for advocating the criminalization
of homosexuality.

November 2003, Unrelated: San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown,
one of California's most powerful politicians, claims of Green Party
mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez that "He's got some kind of defect
in his head that makes him believe African Americans aren't qualified".

November 2003, Unrelated: The College Republicans of Pennsylvania State
University distribute photographs from their Halloween party in which
members dressed as Ku Klux Klan terrorists, a black-faced Negro thief,
a "typical stoned liberal hippie. Rot in hell", and a Catholic preist 
who enjoys a "drink before they go get the boys".

November 27, 2003: Makes a secret flight to Iraq to visit with soldiers
on Thanksgiving Day. Cable News Network claims that he said "he would not
have made the trip if the press had not been able to accompany him",
in CNN's words. One of the newsmen is Mike Allen of the Washington Post,
who had broken the story about senior Administration officials
intentionally releasing the name of an undercover CIA operative
who was the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson. After Bush returns
White House spokesmen claim that a British Airways flight had
flown close enough to Bush's secret flight, without meeting 
resistance from any escort, to exclaim "Did I just see Air Force One?"
Manufactured pins bearing this phrase go on sale at Bush's ranch's
gift shop within hours of Bush's landing and sell out by the end of
the week. Questionable reports of the time are that Bush landed in
the morning, apparently spread due to a typing error in a Washington Post
story and repeated in other claims that the flight was during the night;
and that Bush was flying in a Gulfstream 5 instead of the Boeing 747
commonly known as Air Force One, reported by an individual claiming
to be a soldier in Iraq and bolstered by the White House's claimed response
to the claimed British Airways pilot that the 747 was a Gulfstream.

November 27, 2003: Senators Hillary Clinton and Jack Reed visit soldiers
in Afghanistan, and travel to Iraq the next day.

November 28, 2003: The Washington Post reports that "Benamar Benatta
sits in a whitewashed cell, lost in a post-Sept. 11 world. Jailed
the night of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon,
the Algerian air force lieutenant with an expired visa has spent
the past 26 months in federal prisons, much of that time in solitary
confinement -- even though the FBI formally concluded in November 2001
that he had no connection to terrorism."

November 28, 2003: Italian and German police report arresting three
of five leaders of an Ansar al Islam recruiting cell.

November 28, 2003, Unrelated: South Ossetia province of Georgia
requests admission to Russia.

November 29, 2003: Seven Spanish intelligence agents are assassinated
south of Baghdad, Iraq. Two Japanese diplomats and their Iraqi chauffer
are assassinated in Tikrit, Iraq.

November 30, 2003: United States forces report killing 46 militiamen
after being ambushed in Samarra, Iraq.

November 30, 2003: David Sanger and Thom Shanker of the New York Times
report that Iraq had recently paid $10 million to North Korea
for its missile technology, but North Korea reneged on the agreement,
and that arrangements for the deliveries had been made through Syria.

November 30, 2003: Two South Korean electricians are assassinated
in Iraq near Tirkit, and a Colombian mercenary is killed in Balad.

November 30, 2003: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez claims
that businesses are forcing employees to sign a petition to hold
a referendum to expel him.

November 30, 2003: Syria extradites 22 suspected terrorists to Turkey.

November 30, 2003: Congressman John McCain compalains that "Congress is
now spending money like a drunken sailor. And I've never known a sailor
drunk or sober with the imagination that this Congress has."

November 30, 2003: Time Magazine reports that some of the prisoners
at Guantanamo Bay "had been kidnapped by Afghan warlords and sold
for the bounty the U.S. was offering for al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters"
and according to "a U.S. military official", the US is waiting for
"a politically propitious time to release them". The official also says
that "Many would not have been detained under the normal rules of engagement".

November 30, 2003: Austan Golsbee of the University of Chicago
reports that "the unemployment rate has been low only because
government programs, especially Social Security disability, have
effectively been buying people off the unemployment rolls
and reclassifying them as 'not in the labor force.'..It has been
a more subtle manipulation than the one during the Reagan administration,
when people serving in the military were reclassified from 'not in
the labor force' to 'employed' in order to reduce the unemployment
rate. Nonetheless, the impact has been the same." Golsbee traces
this policy back to the 1980s. 

November 30, 2003, Unrelated: 10,000 protest in Chisinau, Moldova,
against plans to grant Transdniester autonomy.  

December 1, 2003: he Christian Science Monitor reports that
"the United States is heading toward an almost flat tax. That means
the middle class will pour nearly as large a share of its income
into tax coffers as millionaires and billionaires do. Throw in another
tax cut along the lines of the two successfully supported by President Bush,
and the middle class could actually pay a little more...Ever since
the inauguration of the modern income tax, in 1913, the US has relied
on a simple rationale. The well-to-do pay a larger share of their income
in federal taxes than the rest of Americans, because the rich can afford it.
In return, the government protects their wealth and property...at the top,
the tax system has already become regressive. The super-rich pay
proportionately less in federal income tax than the merely rich.
In 2000, the nation's 400 richest taxpayers, making an average $173 million,
paid an effective tax rate more than 5 percentage points lower than
those making $1.5 million to $5 million, notes economist Martin Sullivan
in Tax Notes magazine...Congress also cut the capital gains rate from
20 to 15 percent - a provision especially beneficial to the rich...Prior
to the 2001 tax cut, the richest 1 percent of households, making an average
annual income just above $1 million, paid 42 percent of their income,
or $431,800, in taxes to all levels of government.  Under current law,
they would pay 36.1 percent, or $371,200...if the tax cuts are mad
permanent, these wealthy individuals would pay 33.3 percent or $342,600
in taxes".  

December 1, 2003: On a 5-2 ruling, Colorado's Supreme Court declares
the Republican-led Assembly's gerrymandering to be unconstitutional
because the districts had already been drawn by the judiciary in 2002
and can only be redrawn once per decade. 

December 1, 2003: A 3-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals
unanimously strikes down a Department of Labour rule requiring farms
to place toilets within a quarter mile's walk of foot workers
excepting cases where extreme terrain makes this impossible,
citing a portion of the Occupational Safety and Health Review Preamble
which specifically upholds the rule in the circumstances at question
and ruling that because nobody farms on such extreme terrains noted
as terraces, rice paddies, or soggy fields, the extreme terrain exception
applies to all circumstances. The judges were Judges Pasco M. Bowman,
William Jay Riley, and Roger L. Wollman.

December 2, 2003: The United Nations issues a report stating that
al Qaeda is evading UN sanctions and calling on the Security Council
to pass a resolution ordering countries to comply with the sanctions.

December 2, 2003: The Department of Defense announces its procedures
for trials of prisoners of war, including that prisoners will not be
allowed access to a lawyer until their questioning is completed.

December 2, 2003: Eli Lake of the New York Sun reports that
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has ordered an end to meetings
with any Iranian democracy advocates and that requests for any future
meetings be routed through Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.

December 2, 2003: George Monbiot reports that "the resource upon which
our lives have been built is running out. We don't talk about it because
we cannot imagine it...Oil itself won't disappear, but extracting what
remains is becoming ever more difficult and expensive. The discovery of
new reserves peaked in the 1960s. Every year we use four times as much
oil as we find. All the big strikes appear to have been made long ago:
the 400m barrels in the new North Sea field would have been considered
piffling in the 1970s...No one with expertise in the field is in any doubt
that the global production of oil will peak before long. The only question
is how long. The most optimistic projections are the ones produced by
the US department of energy, which claims that this will not take place
until 2037. But the US energy information agency has admitted that
the government's figures have been fudged: it has based its projections
for oil supply on the projections for oil demand...Petroleum can be
extracted from tar sands and oil shale, but in most cases the process
uses almost as much energy as it liberates, while creating great mountains
and lakes of toxic waste...Natural gas is a better option, but...the world
has about 50 years' supply, but if gas were to take the place of oil
its life would be much shorter. Vehicles could be run from fuel cells
powered by hydrogen...But the electricity which produces the hydrogen
has to come from somewhere. To fill all the cars in the US would
require four times the current capacity of the national grid...Running
the world's cars from wind or solar power would require a greater
investment than any civilisation has ever made before. New studies
suggest that leaking hydrogen could damage the ozone layer and exacerbate
global warming...running the United Kingdom's cars on rapeseed oil would
require an area of arable fields the size of England. There is one possible
solution...setting light to coal seams which are too deep or too expensive
to mine, and catching the gas which emerges. It's a hideous prospect,
as it means that several trillion tonnes of carbon which was otherwise
impossible to exploit becomes available, with the likely result that
global warming will eliminate life on Earth."

December 3, 2003: Signs legislation to end Fish and Wildlife Service
and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration enviornmental review 
of Forest Service decisions to allow commercial logging in nationally
protected forestland. 

December 3, 2003: White House Spokesman Scott McClellan cites and quotes
a non-existant British National Air Traffic Services press release
recording the transaction between British Airways and Air Force One
on the way to Iraq on Thanksgiving.

December 3, 2003: The Guardian reports that "a former military lawyer
with good contacts in the US military legal establishment" had reported
that all members of the Department of Defense's legal defense
team for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay wered fired on their first day
on the job after several complained during a briefing on their powers
that they will not be permitted to offer their clients any defense.
Department of Defense spokesman Major John Smith denies the claim.

December 3, 2003: Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
reports that "the president directed that" the Inspector General
for Iraqi contracts "shall refrain from initiating, carrying out,
or completing an audit or investigation, or from issuing a subpoena,
which requires access to sensitive operation plans, intelligence matters,
counterintelligence matters, ongoing criminal investigations by
other administration units...related to national security, or other
matters the disclosure of which would constitute a serious threat
to national security."

December 3, 2003: Scott Taylor of the Halifax Herald reports that
United States forces threatened to kill him if he took pictures of
a helicopter that had crashed after a mechanical accident, and had
ordered him to "forget what you think you saw here".

December 3, 2003: The People's Republic of China issues a White Paper
detailing its efforts to stop the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological
weapons.

December 3, 2003, Unrelated: The Supreme Court unanimously rules that
drug addiction is not a disability covered under the Americans with
Disabilities Act.

December 3, 2003, Unrelated: The People's Republic of China declares
its intent to land a man on the moon by 2020.

December 3, 2003, Unrelated: Russia condemns Georgia for allowing
suspected fraudster Boris Berezovsky to travel through the country.

December 2003: Democratic presidential candidate Dick Gephardt threatens
the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees
and the Service Employees International Union that he will support
the voiding of their labour contracts if they support opposing Democrat
Howard Dean.

December 2003, Unrelated: The British Commonwealth forbids Zimbabwe
from attending a meeting in Nigeria under the threat that the white nations
of Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand would boycott the meeting.
No African nation was a part of the threatened boycott.

December 4, 2003: Repeals steel tariffs. Europe waives the punitive tariffs
allowed by the World Court.

December 4, 2003: United States Ambassador to Canada Paul Celluci
announces that the United States will continue to illegally deport
Canadian citizens to other countries where they will tortured under
the orders of the United States, instead of returing them to their
country of origin as required by treaty.

December 4, 2003: Microsoft News Broadcasting Corporation host
Joe Scarborough complains that Rush Limbaugh, caught having bought
illegal drugs and illegally searching for multiple doctors to prescribe
the drugs at the same time but who has never been charged with a crime
or arrested, is being "singled out by a Democratic prosecutor because
he's the most powerful conservative voice in America today" and "isn't
 getting the same privacy rights as everybody else" because the prosecutor
had suggested that he might charge Limbaugh with the latter crime;
denies that Limbaugh had an "illegal drug problem" despite Limbaugh's
illegal use of illegal drugs; denies that anybody has ever gone to jail
for illegal use of illegal drugs illegally prescribed by a doctor;
approves Limbaugh's statement that Philadelphia Eagles quarterback
and National Football Conference Offensive Player of the Month
Donovan McNabb, who has led his team on a 7-game winning streak,
is only allowed to play because he is black, as an example of speaking well
such that "a lot of people who would like to be able to speak as well off
of all drugs as Rush Limbaugh's been doing" and "Donovan would do well
to speak as well as Rush Limbaugh"; states for a fact that "CBS and
Showtime tried to turn the Reagans into caricatures" even though almost
all reviews of CBS's Reagans movie report that it not biased against
the Reagans and even cut out unsavory parts of Ronald Reagan's life;
says that public schools' failing to force children to sing hymns
about Jesus Christ at Christmastime leaves a song routine that "sounds
like a South Park episode", referring to a cartoon show known chiefly
for its profanity-filled dialogue said by voice-actors portraying children;
Condemns a Colorado judge's ruling that state payment of religious schooling
through vouchers violates the Constitution's statement "The public school
fund of the state shall, except as provided in this article IX, forever
remain inviolate and intact and the interest and other income thereon,
only, shall be expended in the maintenance of the schools of the state"
and an entire section titled "Aid to private schools, churches,
sectarian purpose, forbidden" as "more judicial activism", exclaiming
"Give me a break!"; calls John Kerry a "French-looking candidate";
Claims that anti-war activist David Livingstone's "Babes Against Bush"
business selling pornographic calendars interspersed with anti-Bush
statements is not only sanctioned and run by the Democratic Party
but is "their last line of defense". During the show, guest and
defense attorney Mickey Sherman states that "We don't need to be
prosecuting" Rush Limbaugh because "In this case, this man's richness,
the fact that he is a zillionaire, exonerates him."

December 4, 2003: The Economist reports that "Argentina's economy
is showing signs of life...A year ago, the consensus on Wall Street
was that the economy would grow a mere 2% this year while inflation
would run at 20-25%. In fact, inflation is likely to end the year
at 3% and GDP to expand by 7%...Even if growth continues at its current
brisk rate, GDP will not return to its 1998 level until 2005. Unemployment
is down from its peak of 21.5% last year, but is still at 15.6%.
One Argentine in two now lives in poverty...macroeconomic policy has been
more effective than critics admit. Booming tax revenues have enabled
the government to hit fiscal targets agreed with the IMF in September,
though these do not allow Argentina to resume servicing most of its debts.
Monetary policy has provided enough liquidity while keeping inflation
at bay. Devaluation, plus the adoption of a floating exchange rate,
combined with strong world demand, have stimulated exports...the government
has focused on boosting domestic consumption at the expense of the demands
of foreign creditors, banks, and privatised utilities. This is controversial,
but has arguably made economic sense."

December 4, 2003, Unrelated: The Portland Press Herald reports that
School Administrative District 1 has forbidden teachers from mentioning
any non-Christian civilizations such as ancient Greece, China, Japan,
or the Muslims or Jews.

December 2003: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
National Climatic Data Center Director Thomas Karl and National Center
for Atmospheric Research Climate Analysis Section director Kevin Trenberth
announce that " "There is no doubt that the composition of the atmosphere
is changing because of human activities, and today greenhouse gases are 
the largest human influence on global climate."

December 2003: Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich announces
his support for repealing federal laws against marijuana ownership.

December 5, 2003: Appoints former Secretary of State James A. Baker
as envoy to Iraq.

December 5, 2003: Stars and Stripes Magazine reports that soldiers
from units not specifically invited to Bush's Thanksgiving dinner
appearance were forbidden from visiting Bush.

December 5, 2003: Congressman Gene Taylor reports that some National Guard
forces wounded in combat in Iraq are being denied Purple Heart medals,
as their injuries are being classified as "noncombat".

December 5, 2003: The Washington Post reports that the 82nd Airborne,
101st Airborne, 1st Armoured, and 4th Infantry divisions will not return
to combat readiness "for up to six months".

December 2003: Canadian lawyer Rocco Galati quits his representation
of Abdurahman Khadr, recently released after a year at Guantanamo Bay,
after receiving a telephone message stating "Well, Mr. Galati. What's this
I hear about you working with the terrorist now, helping to get that
punk terrorist Khadr off. You a dead wop." Galati claims that he recognized
the voice as being one that had made threats two times earlier, shortly after
one of which his client in that case had disappeared.

December 2003: California's Senate rejects Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's
plan for $15 billion in loans. Initial reports imply or state that the vote 
was party line, with the Democratic majority overriding the Republican
minority supporting the loan, but in fact the loan's only support was from
five Democrats. Schwarzenegger condemns the Legislature for thinking they
have a "state credit card" to take out loans and pledges to "throw it away,
into the garbage can" by refusing to allow the state to take on loans,
and proposes taking on a $10.7 billion loan without voter approval
in a manner that he had described as "illegal" during his campaign. 

December 2003: Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says that Israel
should remain ethnically pure by maintaining an 80% Jewish population,
starting by withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza Strip from which
Jews had been eliminated in the 1948 war.

December 2003, Unrelated: Riots occur in the Balochistan region of Iran.

December 6, 2003: Iraqi Lieutenant Colonel al-Dabbagh reports his unit
having received rocket-propelled grenade warheads apparently loaded
with chemical weapons, and claims to have been the source behind Britain's
claim that Iraq had chemical warheads that could be delivered within
45 minutes.

December 6, 2003: California's Senate votes 34-0 against Governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposal to constitutionally limit spending
increases to 4% per year.

December 6, 2003, Unrelated: Argentina demands that Britain apoligise
for having armed some of its ships with nuclear weapons during
the Falklands war of 1982.  

December 6, 2003: James Risen of the New York Times reports that 
Department of Defense officials working for Undersecretary of Defense
Douglas Feith met with Iran-Contra middleman Manucher Ghorbanifar, 
listed as "an intelligence fabricator and a nuisance" by the Central
Intelligence Agency, in a December 2001 meeting in Rome arranged
by Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, and met again
in Paris in 2002. The meetings reportedly involved enabling United States
support for Iran's pro-democracy movement, and were ended on
the recommendation of the CIA and State Department.

December 6, 2003, Unrelated: A passenger train in bombed in Russia,
killing 46.

December 7, 2003: In an interview with Senator Hillary Clinton,
National Broadcast Company host Tim Russert asks Clinton thirteen times
if she will run for President in 2004. Clinton had famously promised
not to run as a condition of being elected to the Senate in 2000.
Russert also denies that Bush can be considered "radical or extreme"
because Democrats sometimes vote for his agenda, "so it's bipartisan",
and denies that there is any organized right-wing movement in 
the United States.

December 8, 2003: David E. Kaplan of  US News and World Report reorts that
"The CIA's Illicit Transactions Group...is one of those tidy little
Washington secrets, a group of unsung heroes whose job is to keep track
of smugglers, terrorists, and money launderers. In late 1998, officials
from the White House's National Security Council called on the ITG to help
them answer a couple of questions: How much money did Osama bin Laden have,
and how did he move it around?...Al Qaeda, says William Wechsler, the
task force director, was 'a constant fundraising machine.' And where
did it raise most of those funds? The evidence was indisputable:
Saudi Arabia...Saudi Arabia's quasi-official charities became the primary
source of funds for the fast-growing jihad movement...The charities were
part of an extraordinary $70 billion Saudi campaign to spread their
fundamentalist Wahhabi sect worldwide...Saudi largess encouraged U.S.
officials to look the other way, some veteran intelligence officers say.
Billions of dollars in contracts, grants, and salaries have gone to
a broad range of former U.S. officials who had dealt with the Saudis:
ambassadors, CIA station chiefs, even cabinet secretaries...in 1996,
CIA officials finally pulled together what they had on Islamic
charities...The agency identified over 50 Islamic charities engaged in
international aid and found that, as in the Balkans, fully a third
of them were tied to terrorist groups...Vast sums from Saudi contracts
have bought friends and influence here. In his recent book Sleeping With
the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, former CIA
operative Bob Baer calls it 'Washington's 401(k) Plan.' 'The Saudis
put out the message,' Baer wrote. 'You play the game--keep your mouth
shut about the kingdom--and we'll take care of you.' The list of
beneficiaries is impressive...nonprofits from the Kennedy Center
to presidential libraries. The high-flying Carlyle Group has made
fortunes doing deals with the Saudis. Among Carlyle's top advisers
have been former President George H.W. Bush; James Baker, his secretary
of state; and Frank Carlucci, a former secretary of defense.
If that wasn't enough, there was the staggering amount of Saudi
investment in America--as much as $600 billion in U.S. banks
and stock markets...So sensitive were relations that the CIA instructed
officials at its Riyadh station not to collect intelligence on Islamic
extremists... The attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
in August 1998 changed all that...So limited was the CIA's knowledge
that it began using al Qaeda's real name only that year...the Saudis
had virtually no financial regulatory system and zero oversight
of their charities...Saudi police and bank regulators had never
worked together before and didn't particularly want to start...Changes,
they said, would be made. But none were...Only after triple suicide
bombings struck Riyadh on May 12 did the regime get serious about
cracking down...Saudi officials announced the closing of all of 
al Haramain's offices overseas. That came as news to its director,
al-Aqil, who in July told Reuters that he was still running branches
in Egypt, Yemen, Sudan, Mauritania, Nigeria, and Bangladesh".

December 8, 2003: In an article dated December 15, Mark Hosenball
and Michael Isikoff of Newsweek report receiving a memo showing that
"the INC [Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress] last year was directly
feeding intelligence reports about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
and purported ties to terrorism to one of Cheney's top foreign-policy
aides. Cheney staffers later pushed INC info--including defectors'
claims about WMD and terror ties--to bolster the case that Saddam's
government posed a direct threat to America...For months, Cheney's office
has denied that the veep bypassed U.S. intelligence agencies to get intel
reports from the INC. But a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist
Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior
national-security aide on Cheney's staff, as one of two 'U.S. governmental
recipients'... it even provides his direct White House telephone number.
The only other U.S. official named as directly receiving the INC intel
is William Luti, a former military adviser to former House Speaker
Newt Gingrich who...oversaw a secretive Iraq war-planning unit called
 the Office of Special Plans. Hannah did not respond to a request
for comment. But another Cheney aide insisted that the memo was misleading,
and flatly denied that the vice president received 'raw' intelligence
from the INC...A Pentagon official also denied Luti directly got INC
intel reports".

December 8, 2003: Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker reports that
"A new Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121, has been
assembled from Army Delta Force members, Navy seals, and C.I.A.
paramilitary operatives...The revitalized Special Forces mission
is a policy victory for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
who has struggled for two years to get the military leadership to accept
the strategy of what he calls 'Manhunts'...Israeli commandos
and intelligence units have been working closely with their American
counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg,
North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations
in Iraq. Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers--again,
in secret--when full-field operations begin...An American who has advised
the civilian authority in Baghdad said, 'The only way we can win is to
go unconventional. We're going to have to play their game. Guerrilla
versus guerrilla. Terrorism versus terrorism. We've got to scare
the Iraqis into submission'...many of the officials I spoke to...fear
that the proposed operation--called 'preemptive manhunting' by one Pentagon
adviser--has the potential to turn into another Phoenix Program...Phoenix
claimed nearly forty-one thousand victims between 1968 and 1972...Some of
those assassinated had nothing to do with the war against America
but were targeted because of private grievances...One of the key
planners of the Special Forces offensive is Lieutenant General
William (Jerry) Boykin"...An American military analyst who works with
the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad told me
he has concluded that 'mid-ranking Baathists who were muzzled by
the patrimonial nature of Saddam's system have now, with the disappearance
of the high-ranking members, risen to control the insurgency.'...Rumsfeld
repeatedly criticized Air Force General Charles Holland... for his
reluctance to authorize commando raids without specific, or 'actionable,'
intelligence...There is a debate going on inside the Administration about
American and Israeli intelligence that suggests that the Shiite-dominated
Iranian government may be actively aiding the Sunni-led insurgency
in Iraq...the Pentagon adviser compared it to 'the Chalabi stuff'...But
I was told by several officials that the intelligence was considered
to be highly reliable by civilians in the Defense Department...one possible
response under consideration was for the United States to train and equip
an Iraqi force capable of staging cross-border raids...The Special Forces
in-country numbers are not generally included in troop totals...there is
no legislation that requires the President to notify Congress before
authorizing an overseas Special Forces mission. The Special Forces
have been expanded enormously in the Bush Administration...A recent
congressional study put the number of active and reserve Special Forces
troops at forty-seven thousand".

December 8, 2003: Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian writes that
"Osama bin Laden...appears to be winning...from Kandahar to Baghdad,
from Istanbul to Riyadh, blood is being shed in the name of Bin Laden's
jihad...look back on interviews by Bin Laden in the 1990s to see what
he has achieved...The objectives were: the removal of US soldiers
from Saudi soil; the overthrow of the Saudi government; the removal
of Jews from Israel; and worldwide confrontation between the west
and the Muslim world. His success in the first is clear-cut...After
September 11, the US did exactly what Bin Laden wanted. It pulled almost
all its troops out of Saudi Arabia...Bin Laden has not succeeded
in his second objective of overthrowing the Saudi regime. But its
position is much more precarious than when he first called for it
to be deposed...Bin Laden has not achieved his third objective either:
the destruction of Israel...Israel is in the ascendant...But the one-sided
nature of the conflict and the emotions it arouses beyond its boundaries
have helped Bin Laden achieve the fourth and most important of his
objectives: polarisation...The resolution of the Israel-Palestinian
conflict...is the only immediate way of reversing the dangerous
polarisation of the world that Bin Laden seeks."

December 8, 2003: Simon Jenkins of the Times reports that "US strategists
in Iraq are contemplating what they have always denied, the search for
a 'strong man with a moustache'...This strategy is now being rammed down
the throat of the US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, by
George W. Bush's new 'realist', Deputy National Security Adviser
Bob Blackwill. He answers to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice,
not US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and is the new boss of Iraq."

December 8, 2003: Tara Copp of Scripps Howard News Service reports that
"On its corporate Web site... Bechtel Group showcases sparkling new
classrooms filled with happy, young Iraqi students...But the reality
is far different...'reports started coming in about poor quality,'
said 422nd Civil Affairs Battalion Maj. Linda Scharf...'So I asked
one of my teams to go verify the rumors...and the reality turned out
to be worse than the rumors'...The subcontractors Bechtel hired
left paint everywhere - on the floors, on desks, all over windows.
The classrooms were filthy, the school's desks and chairs were thrown out
into the playground and left, broken. Windows were left damaged,
and bathrooms that were reportedly fixed were left in broken,
unsanitary condition...Bechtel officials would not attend regular
education ministry meetings, or answer her [Iraqi Education Ministry
city planner Israa Mohammed's] questions... When Scharf read the Bechtel
response, she simply laughed out loud."

December 8, 2003: The anonymous political writer Atrios reports that
National Public Radio has assigned Fox News reporters Juan Williams
and Mara Liasson to cover the Democratic Party's presidential campaign.

December 2003: Knight Ridder reports that "Civil enforcement of pollution
laws peaked when the president's father, George H.W. Bush, was in office
from 1989-93 and has fallen ever since...pollution citations dropped
12 percent from 2001 to 2002, and another 35 percent from 2002 through
the first 10 months of 2003...Administrative fines since January 2001
are down 28 percent...Civil penalties average 6 percent less, when
adjusted for inflation. And the number of cases referred to
the Justice Department for prosecution is down 5 percent. Some current
EPA enforcement officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity
to avoid retaliation from their bosses, say they're getting the signal
to slow down enforcement cases."

December 8, 2003, Unrelated: Congressman Bill Janklow resigns
after being found guilty of manslaughter.

December 2003: Forbids companies from France, Germany, Russia, and Canada
from bidding on Iraq reconstruction contracts, after personally calling
Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and denying that Canada would be
denied access to contracts.

December 2003: Al Gore publicly announces his support for Howard Dean.

December 2003: California's Legislature agrees to Arnold Schwarzengger's
budget plans. Both parties had opposed the plans just days earlier.

December 2003: Retired Brigadier Generals Keith H. Kerr and Virgil A. Richard,
and retired Rear Admiral Alan M. Steinman, all homosexuals, denounce
the military's discrimination against homosexuals.

December 9, 2003: Frank Gaffney reports that the Islamic Institute
was founded with donations from Islamic Resistance and Hizballah supporter
Abdurahman Alamoudi and that the organization was led by Alamoudi's
political ally Khaled Saffuri; that Saffuri became Bush's National Advisor
on Arab and Muslim Affairs; that White House Muslim affairs officer
Suhail Khan's father Mahboob Khan had hosted al Qaeda second in command
Ayman al Zawahiri, who "raised funds for al-Qaeda's operation at
[Mahboob] Khan's mosque"; and that Grover Norquist had denounced people
who raised questions about the connection as "racists and bigots";
that Suhail Khan's job was taken by "Ali Tulbah, a Muslim-American
Norquist protégé who formerly headed the Washington office of
the Young Republicans" and "was responsible for liaison with three of
the most sensitive federal agencies in the War on Terror: the Departments
of State, Defense and Justice", and was publicly thanked by the 
American Muslim Council for promoting their members and members of the 
Council on American-Islamic Relations in the White House as representatives
of mainstream Islam, and that Norquist had accused Gaffney of "racism
and bigotry" for questioning these groups' propriety; and that Norquist
has allied with the "radical Left" to oppose the USA PATRIOT Act.
The detailed report does not find a direct connection between
the Islamic Institute and al Qaeda as had been claimed in vaguer reports
by Newsweek, Greg Palast, and numerous left-wing sources, only finding
that many Institute personalities were probable Islamic Resistance members
who happened to support al Qaeda's goals. In response to the articles,
Glenn Reynolds condemns the Democrats for not raising questions about
the Islamic Institute, ignoring Representative Cynthia McKinney whose
questions about the same subject Reynolds had derided as "BIZARRO THEORIES"
and "wacky claims".

December 9, 2003: In a debate hosted by American Broadcasting Corporation
television host Ted Koppel, all Democratic presidential candidates
other than Howard Dean deny that Dean has any chance of defeating Bush
in 2004. Koppel asks 18 questions without mentioning any kind of governing
policy initiative. Also, Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich
says that "I want the American people to see where media takes politics
in this country. We start talking about endorsements, now we're talking
about polls and then talking about money. When you do that you don't
have to talk about what's important to the American people." In response,
American Broadcasting Corporation orders its reporters to end coverage
of the Kuchinich, Sharpton, and Mosley-Braun campaigns.

December 10, 2003: Associated Press writer Nedra Pickler calls John Kerry
a liar for having claimed that a family with a polluted well cannot use
their own well water, pointing out that the family is importing water
from a nearby town; calls Joe Lieberman and Howard Dean liars for claiming
that 3 million people have become unemployed since 2001, because unemployment
has decreased over the past two quarters; calls Howard Dean and Wesley Clark
liars for citing Bush's current inaction in Afghanistan and concentration on
the unrelated Iraq, because past actions in Afghanistan had been successful;
calls Howard Dean a liar for proposing the number of foreign troops in Iraq
be increased, citing that there are already some foreign troops in Iraq;
calls John Edwards a hypocrite for not taking money donations from lobbyists
but having his campaign run by lobbyist Nick Baldrick; and calls Wesley Clark
a hypocrite for currently being opposed to the invasion of Iraq with
the information he knows now but having said he would supported the invasion
with the information he had at the time of the Congressional resolution
authorizing the war.

December 11, 2003: The Department of Defense finds that Halliburton
has embezzled millions of dollars from the United States by overcharging
for products and services related to the Iraq war.

December 11, 2003: Germany orders the release of Abdelghani Mzoudi
after finding him innocent of any connection to al Qaeda. United States
Attorney General John Ashcroft says that "When we encounter a circumstance
like they encountered in Germany, there are ways in which that is... resolved
at a higher level", referring to Bush's power to order innocent men jailed
forever without a trial.

December 11, 2003: Iskander Jawad Witwit, appointed mayor of Hilla, Iraq,
resigns after three days of pro-democracy protests.

December 11, 2003: An Aegis short-range ballistic missile defense system
test succeeds after being rigged by not turning on the anti-missile missile's
pulse engine, which had failed in a test the previous year but is expected
to be turned on when the system is deployed.

December 12, 2003: The Department of Justice accuses accounting firm
Kellogg Peat Marwick Groups of "a concerted pattern of obstruction
and non-compliance" with an Internal Revenue Service audit of the company.

December 12, 2003: The Daily Telegraph reports that September 11, 2001 
terrorist Mohammed Atta had been trained in Iraq by Abu Nidal
according to a memo which also notes the reception of a shipment
of nuclear weapons grade uranium from Niger.

December 12, 2003: The Associated Press reports that Bush is planning
to cut the federal budget deficit in half by lowering taxes.

December 12, 2003, Unrelated: Rebel forces attack the state television building
in Cote D'Ivoire. Nineteen are killed in a battle with the building's guards.

December 2003: Approves sanctions against Syria, passed by Congress,
unless Syria withdraws from Lebanon and stops supporting terrorism
against Israel.

December 2003: Transcripts are released of a speech given by
Deputy Commerce Secretary Samuel W. Bodman in which Bodman had said
"it is very hard for this government to have a vision on anything.
We are totally stove-piped, and we live within these compartments."

December 2003, Unrelated: French President Jacques Chirac calls for
a law to ban the wearing of "ostentatious signs of religious proselytism"
like Muslim headscarves, Christian crosses, or Jewish yarmukles.

December 13, 2003: Ariana Eunjung Cha of the Washington Post reports
that "More than half the men in the first unit to be trained for
the new Iraqi army have abandoned their jobs because of low pay,
inadequate training, faulty equipment, ethnic tensions and other concerns".

December 13, 2003: The Red Cross reports that several Iraqi prisoners have
"suffered serious injuries" and "may be permanently disabled", in the
words of the BBC. 

December 13, 2003: Czechoslovakia publicly denies that al Qaeda terrorist
Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi diplomat in Prague.

December 14, 2003: Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is captured
by United States forces.

December 14, 2003: An Iraqi police station is bombed, killing 17.

December 14, 2003: United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi says that
the UN may have to withdraw from Afghanistan due to lack of security.

December 14, 2003: US military trucks traveling in Kuwait are attacked.
Four soldiers are wounded.

December 14, 2003: A bomb misses the convoy of Pakistani dictator
Pervez Musharraf.

December 14, 2003: In writing on the capture of Saddam Hussein,
Andrew Sullivan announces that "I have never been prouder to be
an Anglo-American".

December 14, 2003: Hundreds of Muslims protest against the presence
of a United States Marine Corps hospital in Kenya.

December 14, 2003, Unrelated: During a concert at the Vatican, singer
Lauryn Hill announces that "I am not here to celebrate, like you,
the birth of Christ but to ask you why you are not in mourning for
His death in this place. Holy God has witnessed to the corruption
of your leadership, of the exploitation and abuses which are the minimum
that can be said for the clergy...some of you may be offended by what
I'm saying, but what do you say to the families who were betrayed
by the people in whom they believed, and what do you say to those
children who were violated in body and mind?"

December 15, 2003: In his last press conference of the year, 
condemns United Nationa weapons inspector Hans Blix for not finding
that Iraq was in violation of United Nations resolutions when Blix did
in fact find this in his report; claims that David Kay found Iraq's
biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs when in fact Kay
did not and mentioned this in his report; and claims that "I'm reluctant
to use military power...we tried all...diplomatic means and persuasion"
in Iraq, when he had rejected diplomatic overtures from Iraq and
administration officials are on record stating that no solution
other than war would be accepted.

December 15, 2003: Associated Press writer Nedra Picker writes that
"Democratic presidential candidates sought new grounds for criticism
of White House foreign policies Monday as President Bush basked in
the capture of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein", insinuating that Bush's lies
to promote the war are no longer reason to have opposed the invasion
because of Saddam's capture.

December 2003: Calls for former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to be killed
regardless the outcome of any trial, calling this idea "justice".

December 2003: The United States reports capturing over 200 Iraqi loyalists
due to information found with former dictator Saddam Hussein.

December 2003: Libya offers to end its nuclear, biological, and chemical
weapons programs. Different media sources alternately report either
that it was the product of secret negotiations with the United States,
was the product of negotiations with the United Kingdom, or was
a voluntary act on the part of Libya.

December 2003: The Discrimination Research Center releases the results
of a study of temporary employment agency hiring practices showing
that, when given the choice of a white applicant or a more qualified
black applicant, agencies in San Francisco preferred the white applicant
17 out of 41 times and preferred the black applicant 7 times,
while agencies in Los Angeles preferred the white applicant
13 out of 23 times and preferred the black applicant 3 times.

December 16, 2003: In an interview with Diane Sawyer, when asked
about discrepencies between his early statements that Iraq had
stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons versus his later
statements that Iraq could possibly start a nuclear, chemical, or biological
weaposn program, says that "you can keep asking the question, and my answer
is going to be the same. Saddam was a danger, and the world is better off
because we got rid of him." When asked again, says that "So what's
the difference?"

December 16, 2003: Doug Schmitz of Intellectual Conservative writes that
"Those of us who truly cherish the First Amendment need to be thankful
for such independent news and information sources as the Fox News Channel,
Matt Drudge, the Washington Times, Newsmax.com, WorldNetDaily.com
and CNSNews.com [Conservative News Service] -- literally. In short,
if Democratic presidential wannabe Howard Dean had his way, there would
no longer be an independent media: Those intellectually honest anchors
and reporters...Dean would presumably place KGB-style political operatives
within the FCC, who would not only agree with his Far Left ideology,
but would also equally hate the very idea of Americans freely choosing
the independent media as a valuable news venue...much like Baghdad's
al-Jazeera TV...if Dean's cult followers seriously believed their
candidate was the best choice for the White House, they wouldn't feel
so threatened by the independent media...Moveon.org is a veritable,
caustic rage machine - the likes of which we've never seen in American
politics...While CNN never strays from its typical leftist format,
Fox News presents BOTH sides of the issues...Dean would probably use
the FBI, CIA and IRS, as well as the already doting left-wing media,
to go after his perceived political enemies...Dean and Gore truly
embody the Far Left...Truly, the mere mention of Howard Dean as
a possible commander-in-chief in 2005 is an extremely terrifying thought
to those of us who value the freedoms of speech and press, and a strong
national security, coupled with a presidentially-supported military...the
Democrats already own CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC and PBS. In addition,
liberals also control the major dailies and magazines: New York Times,
Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe,
Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, USA Today,
Denver Post, Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, Seattle Times,
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Des Moines Register, Time, Newsweek, Nation,
Washington Monthly, the American Prospect, etc..Read this article
by Nedra Pickler, an intellectually honest AP writer, on how Dean
and other Democratic candidates are distorting the facts concerning
the Bush Administration, just to score political points."

December 2003: Thomas Kean, appointed by Bush to head the commission
investigating the United States' intelligence failures before
the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, announces that "This is a very,
very important part of history and we've got to tell it right...you're
going to have a pretty clear idea what wasn't done and what should have
been done...This was not something that had to happen...There are people
that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position
they were in at that time because they failed."

December 2003: The Federal Election Commission rules that Attorney General
John Ashcroft had illegally taken $110,000 for his 2000 Senatorial campaign
from a committee formed to determine his chances of running for President.

December 18, 2003: Second Circuit Court of Appeals judges Rosemary S. Pooler
and Barrington D. Parker rule that the President does not have the authority,
as Commander in Chief of the armed forces, to order the military to have
citizens living in the United States arrested and punished without trial.
The ruling demands that Jose Padilla be released into civilian police custody
within 30 days. Dissenting judge Richard C. Wesley opines that a President
does have this authority, but says that a President does not have
the authority to forbid such a prisoner from receiving legal counsel.

December 19, 2003: The Boston Globe reports that the United States
is planning to become the primary source of television footage from Iraq.

December 2003: Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judges Stephen Reinhardt
and Susan B. Graber rule that the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay
have the right to be charged with crimes and to speak to lawyers.
Dissenting judge Milton I. Shadur opines that the court should not give
an opinion until the Supreme Court has decided in a similar case.

December 21, 2003: The Department of Homeland Security raises
the terrorist threat level to "orange", citing "a substantial increase
in the volume of threat-related intelligence reports" from "credible
sources" showing that "extremists abroad are anticipating near-term
attacks that they believe will either rival or exceed the attacks"
of September 11, 2001. When asked how the intelligence compares
to that which led to a similar increase in the threat level in February,
Director Tom Ridge says that "it's more important to focus on the fact
that there is that consensus within the intelligence community" for increasing
the threat level. Ridge also notes that suicide bombing is "a tactic
that's been employed around the country" when in fact it has not.

December 23, 2003: The Washington Post reports that the National Parks Service
has ordered all pictures of recognizable homosexuals to be removed
from promotional material and replaced with images of Christian activists
and supporters of the invasion of Iraq, and has ordered Bible verses
posted in Grand Canyon National Park and ordered the bookstore to stock
books claiming that the Canyon was created by God instead of natural erosion.

December 2003: The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies reports
that "The women on the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) are not allowed
to serve on the Presidential Council. No women were selected for
the Constitutional Committee or the new Fundamental Law Committee
that will write Iraq's interim Constitution. There is only one female
deputy minister, although the CPA committed to at least five.
The CPA-appointed provincial councils are dominated by men who have
either ignored unofficial CPA quotas for women, or have selected women
they can control and intimidate. Local councils in parts of Iraq are
excluding women from positions of power. In Najaf, a woman appointed
to be a judge is being denied her post because the council says it is
against Islam for women to serve as judges. In the Al Mutanabi District
of Baghdad, the CPA allowed the distribution of leaflets stating that
women could not nominate or vote for council members in CPA-sanctioned
elections."

December 2003, Unrelated: For the first time, bovine spongiform encephalopathy
(also known as mad cow disease, suspected of causing brain damage in humans
who eat infected meat) is diagnosed in a cow in the United States.
Many countries immediately ban beef imports from the US. The United States
insists that there is no diseased beef and demands that these countries
reinstate the beef trade. The cattle futures market drops as far as
regulations permit.

December 24, 2003: The Environmental Protection Agency announces being
"dissapointed with the court's decision" after a court finds that
the EPA should protect the environment. The New York Times deletes
from its archives part of a paragraph which had noted that the regulations
under review by the court would save 19,000 lives per year if enforced.

December 25, 2003: Two truck bombs hit the convoy of Pakistani dictator
Pervez Musharraf, killing 14.

December 25, 2003, Unrelated: A man of Indian descent is lynched
on a highway in Mississippi.

December 2003: The Bureau of Intelligence and Research releases to right-wing
news sources a transcript of a Central Intelligene Agency meeting in which
CIA members discussed Joseph Wilson's trip to Africa. The CIA claims that
the transcript is fake, noting that one of the persons attending the meeting
was physically incapable of doing so.

December 2003: Pennsylvania increases taxes by about 10%.

December 2003: California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposes
releasing a fifth of prisoners from prison and ending supervision for
a third of prisoners on parole.

December 2003: An earthquake strikes Iran, killing 25,000. Iran refuses
aid from Israel.

December 2003: European Union Member of Parliament Ilka Schroedoer 
prasise the European Union's financial support of the Palestinian Authority's
terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians as "a proxy war between
Europe and the United States" through which Europe will "challenge the US
and present themselves as the future global power". In response,
Glenn Reynolds proposes the United States and Israel fund terrorist attacks
against European civilians.

December 27, 2003: David Brooks of the New York Times praises Bush's lack
of plans for governing Iraq as being in the style of the Founding Fathers'
spirit of individual freedom.

December 27, 2003: The Daily Telegraph reports that "American Christian
missionaries have declared a 'war for souls' in Iraq, telling supporters
that the formal end of the US-led occupation next June will close an
historic 'window of opportunity'... to 'save' Muslims from their 'false'
religion."

December 29, 2003: The Federal Bureau of Investigation announces
that people owning weather almanacs, atlases, maps, and photographs
of landmarks are likely to be terrorists.

December 29, 2003: The United States requires armed guards be places
on all flights into the United States.

December 29, 2003: Harry Jaffee of the Washingtonian reports that
"When George Bush's Pentagon doesn't like what a reporter writes,
it attempts a preemptive strike. In the case of Tom Ricks...Defense Department
spokesman Larry DiRita first sent a letter of complaint to the Post;
then he met with the paper's top editors to press his points...In his
more than two decades covering the military, Ricks has developed many
sources, from brass to grunts. This, according to the current Pentagon,
is a problem. The Pentagon's letter of complaint to Post executive editor
Leonard Downie had language charging that Ricks casts his net as widely
as possible and e-mails many people. Details of the complaints were hard
to come by. One Pentagon official said in private that Ricks did not give
enough credence to official, on-the-record comments that ran counter to
the angle of his stories. DiRita followed his shot across Ricks's bow
with a personal visit to the Post. He met with Downie and editors Steve Coll,
Liz Spayd, and Mike Abramowitz."