A United Nations special court in Sierra Leone issued an indictment against Liberian warlord and occasional Holy Savior impersonator Charles Taylor yesterday. Taylor was accused of "war crimes (murder, taking hostages); crimes against humanity (extermination, rape, murder, sexual slavery); and other serious violations of international humanitarian law (use of child soldiers)." Human Rights Watch calls Taylor "one of the single greatest causes of spreading wars in West Africa."

Remember the heat that Pat Robertson got for his shady gold mine deals with Charles Taylor? Maybe Pat will send him a "Hang in There" card, with a postscript along the lines of, "BTW, keep your mouth shut if they arrest you, lest the wrath of God smite you down."

The U.S. government spent hundreds of millions of dollars helping develop Taxol, the best-selling cancer drug ever, but failed to get the money back for taxpayers, a government report issued on Friday said.

Drugmaker Bristol Myers Squibb earned $9 billion from Taxol, which has been used to treat a million cancer patients, but the National Institutes of Health got back only $35 million in royalties, the U.S. General Accounting Office report found.

Medicare, the state-federal health insurance plan for the elderly, paid $687 million for Taxol over five years -- triple what other federal programs paid for other widely used cancer drugs, the GAO found.

The NIH does the early, riskiest, research on many drugs and then turns them over to companies to develop for market.

Based on an extract taken from the bark of the Pacific yew tree, Taxol was tested at the National Cancer Institute's Natural Products Program, which tests natural compounds, from seaweed to snail toxins as potential drugs.

The NIH took the drug through phase II clinical trials, the longest and riskiest part of drug development, which show a drug is safe and may work in people.

In 1989 it advertised for a partner to finish the testing and licensing process and take the drug to market, finally signing an agreement with Bristol-Myers Squibb. The corporation was asked to find an alternative to the slow-growing and potentially endangered yew tree for the drug.

The GAO, the U.S. Congress' investigational arm, said the NIH spent $484 million in research on Taxol through 2002. Under a 1991 contract called a cooperative research and development agreement or CRADA, Bristol Myers Squibb then took over development and marketing of the drug.

As might have been expected, a denial reflex took over in official circles. The immediate reaction in Washington was to disavow any connection with the plane. Secretary of State [George] Schultz said that it had been "hired by private people" who "had no connection with the US government at all." ... [Elliot] Abrams exhibited the most bravado in his first public statement on October 7. He said that "some very brave people" had been willing to bring materiel to Nicaragua, and added: "God bless them ... If these people were involved in this effort, then they were heroes." On October 8, President Reagan denied that there was any US government connection with the flight; he praised the efforts to arm the contras and compared them to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.

Before the president made his speech, [John] Poindexter for the first time gave background briefings on the Iran affair - two for the benefit of congressional leaders, the third to reporters. ... The reporters were equally skeptical. They pressed Poindexter about arms shipments in 1985, about which the media had become increasingly suspicious. A question forced Poindexter into a corner and brought from him a reply that showed how the administration had opened itself to outright falsification by adopting the new policy of justifying itself publicly:

Question: - a few things on the shipments, just to clarify this. Any shipments that were made prior to January of 1986 you're saying the US had no role in, either condoning, winking, encouraging or anything of that nature? Is that correct.

Poindexter: That's correct.

It was not correct. The unfortunate shipment of November 1985 had been carried out with the cooperation of American officials, from [Oliver] North and [Robert] McFarlane to CIA and State Department personnel in Washington and Lisbon.

Reagan: "The charge has been made that the United States has shipped weapons to Iran as ransom payment for the release of American hostages in Lebanon, that the United States undercut its allies and secretly violated American policy against trafficking with terrorists. Those charges are utterly false.... It's been widely reported, for example, that the Congress, as well as top executive branch officials, were circumvented .... all appropriate Cabinet officers were fully consulted.... We did not - repeat - did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages nor will we."

Draper: The charges that arms payments had been made for the freed hostages ... were not false.... Top executive branch officials had opposed the arms-for-hostages deals and had been circumvented. Weapons had been traded for hostages, at least indirectly, through Iran.

Criminal courts are now reopening. Day by day, the United States and our coalition partners are making the streets safer for the Iraqi citizens. We also understand that a more just political system will develop when people have food in their stomachs, and their lights work, and they can turn on a faucet and they can find some clean water -- things that Saddam did not do for them.

One thing else we've done is we made sure that Iraq is not going to serve as an arsenal for terrorist -- for terrorist groups. We recently found two mobile biological weapons facilities which were capable of producing biological agents. This is a man who spent decades hiding tools of mass murder. He knew the inspectors were looking for them. You know better than me he's got a big country in which to hide them. We're on the look. We'll reveal the truth.

But one thing is certain: no terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the Iraqi regime is no more.

There is another solution. A number of for-profit companies with years of experience in peace operations have been formed into a consortium and are prepared to fill the vacuum in Congo. In recent years international peace operations have increasingly relied on the private sector to provide essential services, with impressive success thus far. Aviation companies have proven willing to brave bullets to support peacekeepers in West Africa, and logistics companies have provided remarkably efficient services even in the midst of widespread chaos where little else functions. This private consortium is offering the most comprehensive package yet assembled to assist U.N. peacekeeping.

The consortium would operate under the U.N. commander and would bring the means and motivation to carry out the full mandate by providing key services to fill the gaps in the Congo unit's capabilities: high-tech aerial surveillance and armed rapid deployment police (including nearly 500 former British Gurkhas from Nepal) who could bring years of peacekeeping experience and NATO-level professionalism. They would be assigned specifically to protect vulnerable populations, while a helicopter firm would be able to quickly transport the police to hot spots as well as assist with emergency evacuations and humanitarian supply. Another firm would give Congolese gendarmes police and human rights training so they could gradually take over the quick reaction duties, control the international borders and ultimately supplant the U.N. peacekeepers. The private consortium would be a "force multiplier," making the U.N. operation substantially more effective for a fraction of the cost of its current budget. This private sector option could even be a model for improved peace operations in the future.

Proposals like the one being debated today in the Rules Committee have been endorsed by congressional experts from think tanks as diverse as the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings and Cato.

As all 10 freshman senators detailed in a bipartisan letter to Senate leadership on April 30, it is time for a fresh start. The ill will of the past should not dictate the terms and direction of the future.

For too long, this process has been caught in a downward spiral of politics and delay. During the administrations of former Presidents Bush and Clinton, for example, too many appeals court nominees were never voted on at all.

The problem is even worse today

The result: vacant judgeships and empty courtrooms, compelling the U.S. Judicial Conference to declare "judicial emergencies" across the country. People seeking redress for their injuries wait years for their cases to be tried and appealed, while judicial nominees languish in the Senate waiting for an up-or-down vote. The broken confirmation process translates into denial of access to justice in our nation's most important courts.

"If we trample the Constitution in the name of security," Jeanne Butterfield, director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and a participant in the forum, warned, "the terrorists have won."

The stereotype that terrorists are driven to extremes by economic deprivation may never have held anywhere, least of all in the Middle East. New research by Claude Berrebi, a graduate student at Princeton, has found that 13 percent of Palestinian suicide bombers are from impoverished families, while about a third of the Palestinian population is in poverty. A remarkable 57 percent of suicide bombers have some education beyond high school, compared with just 15 percent of the population of comparable age.

This evidence corroborates findings for other Middle Eastern and Latin American terrorist groups. There should be little doubt that terrorists are drawn from society's elites, not the dispossessed.

Yet some stereotypes die hard. In 1958 the political scientist Daniel Lerner argued, "The data obviate the conventional assumption that the extremists are simply the `have-nots.' "

It is still possible that well-off people in poor countries with oppressive governments are drawn to terrorism. President Bush argued something along these lines in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on the anniversary of Sept. 11. "Poverty does not transform poor people into terrorists and murderers," he acknowledged. "Yet poverty, corruption and repression are a toxic combination in many societies, leading to weak governments that are unable to enforce order or patrol their borders and are vulnerable to terrorist networks."

To investigate this possibility, I have analyzed data the State Department collects on significant international terrorist incidents. The home countries of the perpetrators of each event were identified. More terrorists do come from poor countries than rich ones, but this is because poor countries tend to lack civil liberties.

Once a country's degree of civil liberties is taken into account — measured by Freedom House, a nonprofit organization that promotes democracy, as the extent to which citizens are free to develop views, institutions and personal autonomy without interference from the state — income per capita bears no relation to involvement in terrorism. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which have spawned relatively many terrorists, are economically well off yet lacking in civil liberties. Poor countries with a tradition of protecting civil liberties are unlikely to spawn terrorists.

Evidently, the freedom to assemble and protest peacefully without interference from the government goes a long way to providing an alternative to terrorism.

"The new May survey, the update, shows the world's public further divided by the Gulf War but at the same time the broader survey shows wide support for fundamental economic and political values that the US has long promoted....The very bad news is that there is a great deal of collateral damage to public opinion from the war in Iraq. The image of the United States has fallen even further. The current ratings are well below last year's measures in favorability ratings and last year's measures were well below what the State Department was showing in 1999 and 2000."

"The headline we had last year when we talked to you that the attitude toward America has soured, well it has soured even further.... The rift between Americans and Western Europeans has widened. Large majorities of Europeans say they want a less-close diplomatic and security relationship with the United States and opinions are strained on both sides of the Atlantic. Only 53 percent of Americans say they want to continue a close relationship with the Europeans."

"Unlike anti-Americanism in other parts of the world, Muslim publics not only dislike the United States but they dislike Americans. The percentage of Muslims thinking we are a serious threat to Islam has increased in most countries. It goes as high as 97 percent in Jordan and 91 percent in the Palestinian Authority. Majorities in 7 of 8 Muslim populations even think that the US might become a military threat to their country."

American Way of Life Has Fans All Around the World

A new Pew Research Center survey finds the globe in love with cell phones, the Internet, the English language, democracy, a fast-paced life and other hallmarks of American culture.

Americans didn't do so bad either.

Even if countries oppose U.S. policies or take issue with its global "image," 14 out of 21 nations surveyed still hold a positive view of the American people, with Great Britain, Israel, Canada, Italy and Australia our top five admirers.

The Public Integrity people examined the travel records of FCC employees and found that they have accepted 2,500 trips, costing nearly $2.8 million over the past eight years, paid for by the telecommunications and broadcast industries, which are, theoretically, "regulated" by the FCC. The industry-paid travel is on top of about $2 million a year in official travel paid for by taxpayers.

According to the center, FCC commissioners and agency staffers attended hundreds of conventions, conferences and other events all over the world, including Paris, Hong Kong and Rio de Janeiro. They were put up at luxury hotels such as the Bellagio in Las Vegas and ferried about by limo. Vegas was the top destination -- 330 trips -- New Orleans second with 173, then New York at 102 and London with 98 trips. Why London, you may ask. Well, do ask.

Buried toward the end of the piece Elaine Sciolino reported: "The king is widely credited in the United States for being an unabashed ally in the war on terror. Morocco has a very close relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency, which has used the kingdom to conduct interrogations of suspected terrorists, often without regard to due process." Why isn't the CIA's outsourcing of torture front-page news?

Everything a black hole swallows gets compressed into an unimaginably tiny central region called a singularity. According to our current knowledge, this singularity is infinitely dense, and infinitely small. And if you think that doesn't make any sense, you're not alone. Scientists have long viewed the central region of a black hole with the same kind of suspicion that early mariners held for regions of the map that read "there be monsters." It just can't be right.

In the 1970's, the well-known physicist Stephen Hawking proposed a way in which black holes radiate energy away, eventually "evaporating" completely. Over time, the black hole gradually leaks away all its energy and disappears in a final burst of radiation.

The final death throes of a black hole, scientists suspect, might be very illuminating indeed. Exactly how a black hole dies and what sort of information is carried in the Hawking radiation could tell us quite a bit about what the center of a black hole is really like....

For the best chance to observe Hawking Radiation and evaporation, you'd want a black hole that was much closer than naturally occurring black holes, and much less massive. It's a common misconception that you have to have a huge amount of mass to create a black hole. Any amount of mass will do, as long as you cram it into a sufficiently small space. A super-massive black hole with the mass of a billion Suns might be the size of our Solar System, but the Earth could be a black hole too if you packed it into the volume of a marble. Even a person will do, although you'd have to cram them into the space occupied by a single electron.

Then there was the question last week from "John from Rocky Mount," which sounded as if it had been planted by Bush's budget director, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. John wanted to know how much his family of four earning $41,000 would save with the tax cut. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said their taxes would drop 96 percent, from $1,178 to $45. Turns out that's the same example Bush used that same day in signing the legislation. Coincidence, said White House Web chat coordinator Jimmy Orr, who called the question "absolutely legit."

Now, if I sounded angry, I was. Imagine sitting next to somebody calling you a liar for that period of time. If that happened 200 years ago, there would have been a dual, and trust me, he would have lost.

Investigative humorist Al Franken thought something was amiss when Fox News star Bill O'Reilly -- whose Feb. 10 speech at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach was featured last weekend on C-SPAN's "Book TV" -- claimed that his previous show, the syndicated tabloid "Inside Edition," had won the coveted George Foster Peabody award.

"It seemed strange to me, but he was so adamant," Franken told us about the self-styled conservative populist, who regularly trashes liberal elites like Franken on his weeknight show, "The O'Reilly Factor." "I thought back and figured maybe 'Inside Edition' won a Peabody for its story 'Swimsuits: How Bare Is Too Bare?' or maybe for its three-part series on the father of Madonna's first baby."

Digging deeper, Franken did a Nexis search and discovered repeated instances where O'Reilly has defended his involvement in "Inside Edition" with such claims as: "I anchored a program called 'Inside Edition,' which has won a Peabody Award for investigative reporting" ("The O'Reilly Factor," Aug. 30, 1999); "All I've got to say is that 'Inside Edition' has won, I -- I believe, two Peabody Awards, the highest journalism award in the country" ("The O'Reilly Factor," May 8, 2000); and "A program that wins a Peabody Award, the highest award in journalism, and you're going to denigrate it?" ("The O'Reilly Factor," May 19, 2000). Franken also discovered that O'Reilly's claims are wrong.

"I called Bill and he was nice enough to get back to me," Franken told us. "Turns out he's been confused: In 1996, 'Inside Edition' won a Polk, which does start with a 'P.' You know, it's one thing to get your facts wrong on Fox. That's expected. But lying on C-SPAN? I don't think you should do that."

Yesterday O'Reilly told us: "Al Franken is on a jihad against me. So I got mixed up between a Peabody Award and a Polk Award, which is just as prestigious. Is this an illogical mistake? My comment is: We did good work. There was no intention to mislead. I really don't understand what Franken's problem is."

Alas, O'Reilly left "Inside Edition" in 1995 -- the year before the show did its George Polk Award-winning exposé on insurance-industry exploitation of poor people.

U.S. reconstruction officials will soon hand out pink slips to nearly half a million Iraqi military and civilian personnel, exacerbating an unemployment crisis that experts say could slow the pace of postwar reconstruction.

The layoffs will mean the loss of a government paycheck for roughly 1 in 10 Iraqi workers. The Bush administration hopes to soften the blow by making cash "termination payments" to members of Saddam Hussein's armed forces, Information Ministry employees and other government workers whose services are no longer wanted. The amount of the payments had not been announced.

Officials of the U.S.-led reconstruction effort acknowledged that the dismissal of so many people will magnify the economic misfortune of a country where a majority of the population depends on food rations; an estimated 30% of the labor force works for the government; and unemployment, as best anyone can tell, already exceeds 20%. The layoffs will be the latest blow to the once-thriving trading nation, already reduced to Third World subsistence levels by nearly three decades of authoritarian rule, international sanctions and intermittent war.

Q Is the President satisfied with the intelligence he got before the war? Because now one Cabinet officer is saying that they buried the weapons; another said they destroyed them; and another official said they -- what is the President's view on all this?

MR. FLEISCHER: The President is indeed satisfied with the intelligence that he received. And I think that's borne out by the fact that, just as Secretary Powell described at the United Nations, we have found the bio trucks that can be used only for the purpose of producing biological weapons. That's proof-perfect that the intelligence in that regard was right on target.

Q We go to war for two trucks?

MR. FLEISCHER: I'm sorry?

Q You would go to war from the finding of two trucks?

MR. FLEISCHER: Well, I don't think it's anything to dismiss. Iraq had, contrary to their protestations to the United Nations, trucks for the purpose of producing biological weapons. They said they didn't have them; they got caught -- proof-perfect that they had them. The only use for those trucks is to produce biological weapons. And so that's one item of it. And on the rest of all the intelligence, of course, the President continues to be satisfied with it. He thinks it's borne out.

The concern as it was expressed repeatedly at the United Nations is that when the United Nations was thrown out of Iraq in the late 1990s, the United Nations reported that Iraq had not accounted for the botchulin, the toxin, the VX, the sarin gas. They said, not accounted for. They didn't say, locked and loaded. And we repeatedly cited the U.N.'s words and said, not accounted for.

"Tell those sons of whores we can kill them any time we like"

The technology, instituted for security reasons and for bookkeeping purposes, is being used in Ohio's Garfield Heights district and in a sprinkling of colleges, universities, and businesses across the country.

Students' fingerprints will be put into a scanner that will make a template of binary numbers corresponding with the swirls and arches of each print. When students go through the lunch line, they will place their finger on a scanner identifying them based on the stored template. Designers of the system say the original fingerprints will be deleted. School board members have received numerous phone calls and e-mail messages from parents who have concerns about their children being fingerprinted. And the policy has drawn attention from groups like the ACLU, which is concerned the scans will be used to track students' eating habits.

Those opposed to the system will have the option of having their children use an identification card. Board members discussed the merits and drawbacks of the system for nearly 45 minutes before voting Tuesday to spend $700,000 on the modernized cafeteria system.

It will include new touch-screen registers, software, fingerprint imaging scanners, staff training, and maintenance. ''I think we need to enter the 21st century,'' said a board member, Linda Kersker. ''We need to move forward and not backward.''

Bill O'Reilly, the conservative talk show host, first decried political commentators who "call people names." Then he called Al Franken, the liberal humorist, an "idiot."

When Franken tried to interrupt, O'Reilly went ballistic.

"Hey, shut up! You had your 35 minutes - shut up!" he shouted, visibly furious.

"We're supposed to be on here for 15 minutes - this idiot goes 35."

"This isn't your show, Bill," Franken shot back.

Time magazine reports that controversy continues to grow over the use of pre-war intelligence that justified US and British claims that Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction and was poised to use them at a moment's notice.

The Sunday Herald of Scotland writes that British Prime Minister Tony Blair disregarded the advice of his own intelligence agencies and chose instead to believe "selective and defective" information from a Pentagon unit set up to validate war against Mr. Hussein by proving that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The Herald says that British intelligence sources told the paper that France and Russia actually had the most accurate intelligence on what was going on inside Iraq and those countries were telling the US and Britain that "there was effectively no real evidence of a WMD program" in Iraq.

On Saturday, the Guardian reported that British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and US Secretary of State Colin Powell privately expressed serious doubts about the quality of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons program "at the very time they were publicly trumpeting it to get UN support for a war on Iraq." The comments, which are being called the "Waldorf transcripts" were allegedly made shortly before a crucial UN security council session on February 5. The Age reports that a British Foreign Office spokesman quickly denied the report. Meanwhile the Daily Telegraph reports that the British Foreign Office says it was impossible for Straw to meet with Powell in the few moments before the February 5 United Nations meeting.

The news of the alleged meeting between Mr. Powell and Mr. Straw came a day after US News and World Report wrote that Powell was under constant pressure from the Pentagon and the White House to include questionable intelligence in the report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction he delivered at the United Nations last February. The magazine says the first draft of the report was written for Powell by Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of state Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in late January. Powell was allegedly so upset at the use of questionable material in the report that he threw several pages in the air and declared "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit."

These remarks come after earlier statements by the top US Marine general in Iraq that intelligence reports that chemical weapons had been deployed around Baghdad before the war were "wrong," and that his troops had not found any evidence of WMD.

Perhaps sensing they are being overwhelmed by damaging news on this front, British and US administration officials have started to fight back. The Observer reports that British Prime Minister Tony Blair says he has "secret proof" that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq. Blair said he was waiting to publish a "complete picture" of both intelligence gained before the war and "what we've actually found."

The administration also announced that it was sending 1,400 more experts to look for evidence of WMDs. The Associated Press reports that the man heading the effort, Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, said Friday that his team would change the focus from sites identified as suspicious before the war and instead concentrate on areas where documents, interviews with Iraqis, and other new clues suggest biological or chemical weapons could be hidden.