"This has been a very ugly campaign," says Frankie Trull of the Foundation for Biomedical Research in Washington DC. "We're pleased that the judge has made clear that such actions will not be tolerated."

Despite the convictions, Trull says new legislation is needed to deal with the growing number of attacks by animal rights activists in the US. Earlier this month, Republican senator James Inhofe and Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein introduced the Animal Enterprise Terrorism bill, which would increase protection for anyone associated with animal research. The bill is under consideration by the Senate and House Judiciary committees.

From issue 2570 of New Scientist magazine, 23 September 2006, page 4

There's a debate about the real extent of U.S. hunger. The direst statistics, like those above, come (it is claimed) from advocacy groups. Others claim that "the poor here aren't really poor." Another claim is that the numbers are inflated or somehow "aren't that big," given the hugeness of the whole country. We are about to crest the 300 million mark in total population, and 13 million doesn't "sound so big" up against that. Divide 13 million by 50 states and you get about 65,000 hungry kids per state. That isn't so much - is it? Still others say that "the numbers are skewed by how bad the big cities are," as if somehow we shouldn't count the situation in, say, New York, when we look at the entire country's children. If you manhandle the numbers, you can make the problem sound smaller.

While I wish to acknowledge the controversy, I'm really not at all persuaded by these cavils. In my travels around the world, I see a lot of poor children. And I would say that, ironically, hungry children in places like the Philippines or India may be less miserable than hungry children in the United States - simply because the horizons of expectation are so much lower for the Filipino or Indian children. If we have even 10 million truly hungry children in the United States, even five million, we have a crisis, and if they are the world's most miserable children - hungry while the computer age whirls about them, denied entry into that age of plenty - we have a treble crisis.

Let's look closely at New York - that city we shouldn't include in our averages. The latest statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau show that more than one in four New York City children and adolescents younger than 18 live below the federal poverty level. And indeed, this figure is 50 percent higher than the national average. What makes this particularly worrisome is that between 2000 and 2005, the number of children living in poverty in New York City has increased by 5 percent, a trend that will probably continue.

According to recent information from the Food Bank for New York City and City Harvest, published in "Growing Up Hungry in New York City: An Analysis of Hunger Among Children," hunger among children has reached critical levels. Almost a third (29 percent) of New Yorkers who receive emergency food aid are children.

Hunger is one of the clearest expressions of poverty. A child is born into poverty every 17 minutes in New York City. Children who are chronically hungry suffer from malnutrition, which can have devastating effects on their physical and mental development. Malnutrition can result when children are undernourished, or overnourished with the wrong kind of foods, particularly those that are fried and high in fats.

I'll admit that the District of Columbia is in some ways a worst case - and yet, the badness of the actual case can be surprising. The infant mortality rate in the District of Columbia, the nation's capital, is more than twice as high as in Beijing. In 2002 in the district, the number of babies who died before their first birthday was 11.5 per thousand live births versus 4.6 in Beijing. The United Nations Development Program reports that an African American baby in Washington has less chance of surviving its first year than a baby born in urban areas of the state of Kerala in India. The United States ranks 43d in the world in infant mortality levels.

In the United States, it's often said that "it isn't race - it's class." Fine. But the fact is, hunger and race are strongly related: 41.9 percent of African American children and 40 percent of Latino children are chronically hungry, compared to 16.2 percent of white children - and that percentage of white children is terribly high!

UNICEF has indicated that although the United States is still the wealthiest country in the world, with incomes higher than any other country's, it has also one of the highest incidences of child poverty among the rich, industrialized nations. Denmark and Finland have levels of less than 3 percent, closely followed by Norway and Sweden. All of those countries have high levels of social spending.

Several factors contribute to poverty and hunger among children and their families in the United States. Among those factors are poor education; discriminatory practices against minorities and women; limited job opportunities; unstable family life; mental illness; and substance abuse. Perhaps the most important factors are unemployment and gender earning disparities.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has stated: "A person may have little means of commanding food if he or she has no job, no other sources of income, no social security. The hunger that will result can coexist with a plentiful supply of food in the economy and the markets." These are conditions that apply to the United States, where there are increasing gaps between the rich and the poor, who remain permanently marginalized and forgotten.

We can't totally eliminate poverty or its consequences. We can, however, lower the number of poor by acting on all of the factors that contribute to their poverty. No matter how rich a country is, if it doesn't fill the needs of its children it is, in fact, a poor country.

César Chelala, is an international public health consultant and author of Children's Health in the Americas, a publication of the Pan American Health Organization

"The housing market continues to weaken, but the deterioration in this report was relatively modest," said John Ryding, economist at Bear Stearns.

The Federal Reserve has recently justified its pause in interest rate rises by saying that weakness in the housing sector will put the brakes on growth and help slow down inflation. The latest numbers suggest that the central bank may soon start lowering rates.

''Housing is in trouble, the economy is a lot weaker than people think and the Fed will ease policy much faster than what is currently priced by markets," said Michael Kastner, head of fixed income at SterlingStamos.

The housing data pulled the yield on the two-year Treasury note down to about 4.65 per cent, its lowest level since March.

David Lereah, the NAR's chief economist, said home sales appeared to be levelling out after a sharp drop in July. "After a stronger-than-expected drop in July, the fairly even sales numbers in August tell us the market is at a more sustainable pace," he said.

The decline follows weak data on housing starts and building permits in August.

The median existing home price was $225,000 in August, down 1.7 per cent from a year earlier - the first price fall since 1995 and the second biggest decline on record . "This is the price correction we've been expecting - with sales stabilising, we should go back to positive price growth early next year," Mr Lereah said.

Housing inventory levels rose 1.5 per cent to a 7.5 month supply at the current sales pace, compared with 6.3 months in July, and 4.7 months at this time last year. The inventory was at its highest since since condominiums were added to the survey in 1999.

Existing home sales account for about 85 per cent of the housing market. They have fallen every month since March.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

But the sentences handed down in the cases have sparked a renewed debate over the way the US should punish white-collar crime, with some defence lawyers now arguing that jail time is being decided with reference only to the "baying mob".

At 65 and suffering from a heart complaint, Ebbers is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison. He will report today to a correctional facility near WorldCom's one-time home in Mississippi to be fingerprinted, photographed and given standard issue prison garb, before being assigned a bed in what is likely to be a dorm room in a low-security wing.

In due course, he will be assigned a job within the prison, where pay of $5 a month is a far cry from the multimillion-dollar salary he enjoyed in his pomp.

Canadian-born Ebbers built the company through an orgy of deal-making, bolting on more than 60 acquisitions to what was originally just a long-distance phone calls business set up as an offshoot to his Mississippi motels chain.

In the biggest deal of his career, he beat British Telecom to acquire MCI, turning WorldCom into the third-largest phone carrier in the US. In the process he had become a Wall Street star, feted for his buccaneering style, for wearing cowboy boots to the office and for beginning board meetings with a prayer.

He has been free for 18 months since conviction as he exhausted appeals against the conviction and the length of the sentence. Reid Weingarten, Ebbers' lead attorney, said: "The purpose of the sentence was to please and appease the howling mob demanding Ebbers' head, not a worthy goal of the criminal justice system."

The Enron and WorldCom scandals changed the perception of white-collar crime in the US, revealing as they did the financial ruin that can be inflicted on small investors and the employees of the companies involved. Some 20,000 WorldCom employees lost jobs when it went under in 2002.

Andrew Fastow, Enron's former chief financial officer, pleaded guilty to two fraud counts and agreed to testify against his former bosses in return for a maximum 10-year jail term. The victims of Enron's collapse will have a right to speak to the Houston court today, before he is formally sentenced.

Fastow's plea bargain caps his possible sentence at 10 years, but Jeffrey Skilling, Enron's chief executive, who was convicted in part on the basis of his testimony, faces spending more than two decades in prison when he is sentenced next month.

Barry Boss, a Washington defence attorney who has advised the US government on sentencing white-collar crime, says there has been "jail-term inflation" as other non-violent crimes, particularly drug possession and dealing, have attracted tougher sentences too. "No person in Bernie Ebbers' position wants to go to prison for 10 years. There is no incremental deterrence in 25 years. Being 'tough on crime' is a campaign slogan," he said.

"Sentences only get ratcheted up because that's the easy answer to the problem, although it is the solution least likely to make any significant difference. We are a vindictive country."

I was not disappointed. The place is quite astonishing, designed in 1911 and modelled on the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus in what is now Turkey, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The great bronze external doors are guarded by sphinxes. Inside is a cavernous hall supported by black columns. Everything is polished stone. The designs are geometric, the motifs Egyptian. For the rest, though, the temple defied my preconceptions of Freemasonry.

In Europe at least, Freemasonry is a mystery of secret rites and occult power, the stuff of a million conspiracy theories. None more so, of course, than Propaganda Due, or P-2, the lodge involved in the Calvi case, a veritable state-within-a-state, linked to attempted coups, right-wing terrorism and skulduggery of every variety.

Not so the splendid temple on 16th Street. A guide proudly showed me around, taking me to see the great collection of books owned by the poet Robert Burns and the "Freemasons' Hall of Fame", featuring the likes of the politician Bob Dole and the golfer Arnold Palmer. Then there was the library itself, with 250,000 volumes and a fabulous collection of masonic memorabilia, and the assembly room where the Supreme Council for the Rite's 33rd Degree, its highest, holds its meetings.

In its US incarnation, Freemasonry is primarily a social and philanthropic organisation. "We are not a religion, we don't hold services and pray," I was told. The only requirement is a broad belief in God. Beyond that, anyone - Christian, Jew or Muslim - is welcome. Essentially it is one of those brotherhoods of which Americans are fond.

George Washington was a mason, and so were 13 other Presidents, most recently Gerald Ford. Freemasonry is ideologically entwined with America's birth. Back in the 18th century the movement was identified with the Enlightenment and resistance to the obscurantist rule of the church and absolute monarchies. Of those who signed the Declaration of Independence, nine were masons, as were 13 of the signatories of the US constitution.

Just across the river in Alexandria is the George Washington Masonic Memorial, inspired by the lighthouse in ancient Alexandria in Egypt, another of the seven wonders. There are said to be masonic connections between the White House and the Capitol building; some believe that the entire city is designed on a masonic plan. And look on the back of a dollar bill. The pyramid and "all-seeing eye" above it have strong masonic connotations.

American Freemasonry is no furtive creature of the dark, as far from the malevolent P-2 as you can imagine. But it too has problems - or rather competitors. There are new outlets aplenty for philanthropy and giving. Generation X-ers seem less inclined to take the trouble of joining, while the movement must cope with the resurgence of organised religion. Membership has fallen from a peak of around four million in the 1950s to 1.5 million today.

Paradoxically, mason- ry's lingering mystique could yet rescue its popularity. Templars, masons and other ancient orders are all the rage. Dan Brown has a new book out next year called The Solomon Key, which is believed to deal with Freemasonry, Washington and the Founding Fathers.

Some fear that it will do for the masons' reputation what The Da Vinci Code did for Opus Dei. But in the US, the latter's sinister aura is entirely absent from Freemasonry. And nowhere is this absence more evident than here, amid the broad vistas and handsome buildings of Washington, the mason's city par excellence.

"Are you an ifeminist? Take this quiz to find out."

I click on the link. 'Interesting,' I think to myself. 'This will be an entertaining yet informative way to kill an idle ten minutes before my class.'

But what is "ifeminism," anyway? More than likely, we are all at least somewhat familiar with liberal feminism, radial feminism, ecofeminism, and a whole host of others. But I for one had never even heard of ifeminism. Curious to learn about it, I happened upon a website called ifeminists and read the introduction.

I came to discover that Ifeminism, formally known as "Individualist Feminism," premises itself on the goal equal rights between the genders. That makes perfect sense to me. After all, isn't that our goal? So does that make me an ifeminist? I didn't see why not.

But as I continued to read, I began to feel less and less sure. States Wendy McElroy, the founder of ifeminism.com: "Ifeminists believe that freedom and diversity benefit women, whether or not the choices that particular women make are politically correct. They respect all sexual choices, from motherhood to porn."

According to ifeminism, "freedom and choice do not threaten women. Government and orthodoxy do." Functioning within a libertarian, post second-wave politic, ifeminists propose that women are both intelligent and empowered enough to know what is right for them. They believe that telling women what is or is not best for them by enacting legislation against pornography is "paternalistic" to women who choose to work in the sex-industry, and affirmative action only "embeds gender privilege" for women in the law.

So then what's wrong with ifeminism?

Plenty.

As feminists, we all want equality. But according to ifeminism, "equality" is synonymous with equal treatment under the existing legal, economic and social systems. In other words, rather than opposing the status quo, ifeminism operates within it. While other feminists view the law as inherently unjust and in need of reconstruction, ifeminists have absolutely no desire to prosecute pimps, legislate against sexual harassment, or otherwise compromise and challenge the default male standard.

And this is supposed to help women progress as a class how?

What ifeminists need to realize is that because the law was designed without significant input by women and other minorities, it innately disfavors them. Ifeminists argue that affirmative action tramples on the rights of individuals, thereby completely disregarding the fact that the system is fundamentally flawed and unbalanced. Common sense, however, dictates otherwise. If the system was not designed by a privileged group, then there would have been no need for affirmative action in the first place, because women and other minorities would have always been equally represented from the very beginning.

But there you have it. The crux of ifeminist analysis can be summed up in two words: Anything goes. There's nothing inherently sexist about the sex-industry (but where are all the male prostitutes and victims of the sex trade?), and all women who participate in it are doing so of their own "choice" (hell, if I had no economic privilege and a history of sexual abuse, I'd probably "choose" to sell my body too!)

Are these responsible positions for a feminist to take?

A decent dose of "individualism" is the cornerstone of mental health and productivity for all each of us. As distinctive human beings, we often find ourselves placed at different intervals on the full spectrum of political beliefs. This is a good thing. Without individuality, there would be no difference of opinion and therefore no progress.

But by denying that current inequities even exist, do ifeminists have a legitimate claim to feminism, or is the very term "Individualist Feminist" an oxymoron?

So what kind of feminist am I? Well, I don't know - I never bothered taking the quiz. But I do know for certain that I am not an "ifeminist", nor am I inclined to take ifeminism, or any other specious euphemisms for conservative/libertarian agendas, very seriously.

The NLGJA doesn't fancy itself an "activist" group, but it did send a letter to members requesting that they not have homophobes as commenters on gay issues "just as white supremacists shouldn't be regularly quoted in articles about immigration."

AFT's LaBarbera, tipping us to his homophobia, replied:

"He's basically saying that I am the moral equivalent of the KKK," says LaBarbera, a former Washington Times reporter who occasionally attends leather extravaganzas to do "research" and likes to drink at gay bars to spot gay trends. "It's just outrageous."

I'd say more like Fabulous.

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.

It was not the first time, of course, that Israel had called on American loyalists to help it out of trouble. In Beyond Chutzpah, Norman Finkelstein documents the advent of claims about a new anti-Semitism to Israel's lacklustre performance in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. On that occasion, it was hoped, the charge of anti-Semitism could be deployed against critics to reduce pressure on Israel to return Sinai to Egypt and negotiate with the Palestinians.

Israel alerted the world to another wave of anti-Semitism in the early 1980s, just as it came under unprecedented criticism for its invasion and occupation of Lebanon. What distinguished the new anti-Semitism from traditional anti-Jewish racism of the kind that led to Germany's death camps, said its promoters, was that this time it embraced the progressive left rather than the far right.

The fresh claims about a new anti-Semitism began life in the spring of 2002, with the English-language website of Israel's respected liberal daily newspaper, Haaretz, flagging for many months a special online supplement of articles on the "New anti-Semitism", warning that the "age-old hatred" was being revived in Europe and America. The refrain was soon taken up the Jerusalem Post, a rightwing English-language newspaper regularly used by the Israeli establishment to shore up support for its policies among Diaspora Jews.

Like its precursors, argued Israel's apologists, the latest wave of anti-Semitism was the responsibility of Western progressive movements -- though with a fresh twist. An ever-present but largely latent Western anti-Semitism was being stoked into frenzy by the growing political and intellectual influence of extremist Muslim immigrants. The implication was that an unholy alliance had been spawned between the left and militant Islam.

Such views were first aired by senior members of Sharon's cabinet. In an interview in the Jerusalem Post in November 2002, for example, Binyamin Netanyahu warned that latent anti-Semitism was again becoming active:

"In my view, there are many in Europe who oppose anti-Semitism, and many governments and leaders who oppose anti-Semitism, but the strain exists there. It is ignoring reality to say that it is not present. It has now been wedded to and stimulated by the more potent and more overt force of anti-Semitism, which is Islamic anti-Semitism coming from some of the Islamic minorities in European countries. This is often disguised as anti-Zionism."

Netanyahu proposed "lancing the boil" by beginning an aggressive public relations campaign of "self-defence". A month later Israel's president, Moshe Katsav, picked on the softest target of all, warning during a state visit that the fight against anti-Semitism must begin in Germany, where "voices of anti-Semitism can be heard".

But, as ever, the main target of the new anti-Semitism campaign were audiences in the US, Israel's generous patron. There, members of the Israel lobby were turning into a chorus of doom.

In the early stages of the campaign, the lobby's real motivation was not concealed: it wanted to smother a fledgling debate by American civil society, particularly the churches and universities, to divest -- withdraw their substantial investments -- from Israel in response to Operation Defensive Shield.

In October 2002, after Israel had effectively reoccupied the West Bank, the ever-reliable Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, lumped in critics who were calling for divestment from Israel with the new anti-Semites. He urged a new body established by the Israeli government called the Forum for Co-ordinating the Struggle against anti-Semitism to articulate clearly "what we know in our hearts and guts: when that line [to anti-Semitism] is crossed".

A fortnight later Foxman had got into his stride, warning that Jews were more vulnerable than at any time since the Second World War. "I did not believe in my lifetime that I or we would be preoccupied on the level that we are, or [face] the intensity of anti-Semitism that we are experiencing," he told the Jerusalem Post.

Echoing Netanyahu's warning, Foxman added that the rapid spread of the new anti-Semitism had been made possible by the communications revolution, mainly the internet, which was allowing Muslims to relay their hate messages across the world within seconds, infecting people around the globe.

It is now clear that Israel and its loyalists had three main goals in mind as they began their campaign. Two were familiar motives from previous attempts at highlighting a "new anti-Semitism". The third was new.

The first aim, and possibly the best understood, was to stifle all criticism of Israel, particularly in the US. During the course of 2003 it became increasingly apparent to journalists like myself that the American media, and soon much of the European media, was growing shy of printing even the mild criticism of Israel it usually allowed. By the time Israel began stepping up the pace of construction of its monstrous wall across the West Bank in spring 2003, editors were reluctant to touch the story.

As the fourth estate fell silent, so did many of the progressive voices in our universities and churches. Divestment was entirely removed from the agenda. McCarthyite organisations like CampusWatch helped enforce the reign of intimidation. Academics who stood their ground, like Columbia University's Joseph Massad, attracted the vindictive attention of new activist groups like the David Project.

A second, less noticed, goal was an urgent desire to prevent any slippage in the numbers of Jews inside Israel that might benefit the Palestinians as the two ethnic groups approached demographic parity in the area know to Israelis as Greater Israel and to Palestinians as historic Palestine.

Demography had been a long-standing obsession of the Zionist movement: during the 1948 war, the Israeli army terrorised away or forcibly removed some 80 per cent of the Palestinians living inside the borders of what became Israel to guarantee its new status as a Jewish state.

But by the turn of the millennium, following Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, and the rapid growth of the oppressed Palestinian populations both in the occupied territories and inside Israel, demography had been pushed to the top of Israel's policy agenda again.

During the second intifada, as the Palestinians fought back against Israel's war machine with a wave of suicide bombs on buses in major Israeli cities, Sharon's government feared that well-off Israeli Jews might start to regard Europe and America as a safer bet than Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. The danger was that the demographic battle might be lost as Israeli Jews emigrated.

By suggesting that Europe in particular had become a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, it was hoped that Israeli Jews, many of whom have more than one passport, would be afraid to leave. A survey by the Jewish Agency taken as early as May 2002 showed, for example, that 84 per cent of Israelis believed anti-Semitism had again become a serious threat to world Jewry.

At the same time Israeli politicians concentrated their attention on the two European countries with the largest Jewish populations, Britain and France, both of which also have significant numbers of immigrant Muslims. They highlighted a supposed rise in anti-Semitism in these two countries in the hope of attracting their Jewish populations to Israel.

In France, for example, peculiar anti-Semitic attacks were given plenty of media coverage: from a senior rabbi who was stabbed (by himself, as it later turned out) to a young Jewish woman attacked on a train by anti-Semitic thugs (except, as it later emerged, she was not Jewish).

Sharon took advantage of the manufactured climate of fear in July 2004 to claim that France was in the grip of "the wildest anti-Semitism", urging French Jews to come to Israel.

The third goal, however, had not seen before. It tied the rise of a new anti-Semitism with the increase of Islamic fundamentalism in the West, implying that Muslim extremists were asserting an ideological control over Western thinking. It chimed well with the post 9-11 atmosphere.

In this spirit, American Jewish academics like David Goldhagen characterised anti-Semitism as constantly "evolving". In a piece entitled "The Globalisation of anti-Semitism" published in the American Jewish weekly Forward in May 2003, Goldhagen argued that Europe had exported its classical racist anti-Semitism to the Arab world, which in turn was reinfecting the West.

"Then the Arab countries re-exported the new hybrid demonology back to Europe and, using the United Nations and other international institutions, to other countries around the world. In Germany, France, Great Britain and elsewhere, today's intensive anti-Semitic expression and agitation uses old tropes once applied to local Jews -- charges of sowing disorder, wanting to subjugate others -- with new content overwhelmingly directed at Jews outside their countries."

This theory of a "free-floating" contagion of hatred towards Jews, being spread by Arabs and their sympathisers through the internet, media and international bodies, found many admirers. The British neo-conservative journalist Melanie Philips claimed popularly, if ludicrously, that British identity was being subverted and pushed out by an Islamic identity that was turning her country into a capital of terror, "Londonistan".

This final goal of the proponents of "the new anti-Semitism" was so successful because it could be easily conflated with other ideas associated with America's war on terror, such as the clash of civilisations. If it was "us" versus "them", then the new anti-Semitism posited from the outset that the Jews were on the side of the angels. It fell to the Christian West to decide whether to make a pact with good (Judaism, Israel, civilisation) or evil (Islam, Osama bin Laden, Londonistan).

We are far from reaching the end of this treacherous road, both because the White House is bankrupt of policy initiatives apart from its war on terror, and because Israel's place is for the moment assured at the heart of the US administration's neoconservative agenda.

That was made clear last week when Netanyahu, the most popular politician in Israel, added yet another layer of lethal mischief to the neoconservative spin machine as it gears up to confront Iran over its nuclear ambitions. Netanyahu compared Iran and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Adolf Hitler.

"Hitler went out on a world campaign first, and then tried to get nuclear weapons. Iran is trying to get nuclear arms first. Therefore from that perspective, it is much more dangerous," Netanyahu told Israel's anti-terrorism policymakers.

Netanyahu's implication was transparent: Iran is looking for another Final Solution, this one targeting Israel as well as world Jewry. The moment of reckoning is near at hand, according to Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister, who claims against all the evidence that Iran is only months away from posssessing nuclear weapons.

"International terrorism is a mistaken term," Netanyahu added, "not because it doesn't exist, but because the problem is international militant Islam. That is the movement that operates terror on the international level, and that is the movement that is preparing the ultimate terror, nuclear terrorism."

Faced with the evil designs of the "Islamic fascists", such as those in Iran, Israel's nuclear arsenal -- and the nuclear Holocaust Israel can and appears prepared to unleash -- may be presented as the civilised world's salvation.

-Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net