WEWS reported it would also pave the way for everyone entering critical transportation sites such as, train stations, airports and bus stations to show ID.

"It brings us frighteningly close to a show me your papers society," said Carrie Davis of the ACLU, which opposes the Ohio Patriot Act.

There are many others who oppose the bill as well.

"The variety of people who opposed to this is not just a group of the usual suspects. We have people far right to the left opposing the bill who think it is a bad idea," said Al McGinty, NewsChannel5's terrorism expert.

McGinty said he isn't sure the law would do what it's intended to do.

"I think anything we do to enhance security and give power to protect the public to police officers is a good idea," he said. "It is a good law in the wrong direction."

Gov. Bob Taft will make the ultimate decision on whether to sign the bill.

WEWS was told that Taft is expected to sign the bill into law, but legal experts expect that it will be challenged in courts.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, then Attorney General John Ashcroft loosened restrictions on the FBI's investigative powers, giving the bureau greater ability to visit and monitor Web sites, mosques and other public entities in developing terrorism leads, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

The FBI has used the authority to investigate not only groups with suspected ties to foreign tourists, but also protest groups suspected of having links to violent or disruptive activities, the report said.

The documents, coming after the Bush administration's confirmation that President George W. Bush had authorized some spying without warrants in fighting terrorism, prompted charges from civil rights advocates that the government had improperly blurred the line between terrorism and acts of civil disobedience and lawful protest, the report said.

Most of the investigative documents turned over by the FBI were heavily edited, making it difficult to determine the full context of the reference, according to the report.

FBI officials said their investigations had no intent in monitoring political or social activities and that any investigations that touched on advocacy groups were driven by evidence of criminal or violent activities at public protest and in other settings.

But officials of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said the latest batch of documents released by the FBI indicated the agency's interest in a broader array of activist and protest groups than they had previously thought.

"It is clear that this administration has engaged every possible agency ... to engage in spying on Americans," Ann Beeson, associate legal director of the ACLU, was quoted as saying.

The Post reported that prisoners were routinely tortured, using such techniques as “waterboarding” — submerging a prisoner in restraints in water to convince him he was drowning — mock execution, prolonged shackling, being threatened with dogs, and “cold cell,” in which prisoners are held naked in low temperatures and doused with cold water.

The Rice trip was intended to rebuild America’s damaged bridges with its European allies. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was particularly eager to end German-American bickering over the Iraq war. Instead, before boarding her flight, Rice felt compelled to deliver a statement asserting that as a “matter of policy” America “does not torture”, while sidestepping the issue of the alleged secret prisons.

But in Europe, torture and rendition refused to go away. They were a central theme in virtually all of the press appearances Rice made following her meetings with European leaders. The issues were particularly contentious in Germany, where a German citizen, Khaled Al-Masri, announced he is suing the former CIA Director George Tenet for forcibly taking him from Macedonia and to Afghanistan, where he was imprisoned incommunicado for five months. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is pursuing the case on the German’s behalf. Rendition is known to have been a CIA practice for some years. But its frequency increased exponentially after 9/11, with reportedly dozens of prisoners being kidnapped from Italy, Sweden and other European countries, as well as from the US, and sent to other countries with well-known histories of torturing prisoners. Italy is currently suing the US for kidnapping an Italian citizen on Italian soil.

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a major advocacy group, filed the first court challenge to rendition this year. The case is pending.

Fuelling the prisoner fire, Louise Arbour, the high commissioner for human rights at the United Nations, said that the US-led fight against terrorism is eroding the time-honored international prohibition of torture and other forms of cruel or degrading treatment of prisoners. She said that holding suspects incommunicado in itself amounts to torture.

But America’s European problems are only the latest in a long litany of rendition and torture issues that began to come to light with release of the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

That disclosure created a firestorm of protests and questions that eventually implicated other military prisons in Iraq, the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, and other detention centers around the world.

The Department of Defense (DOD) has carried out 15 separate investigations of prisoner abuse and rendition issues. A number of enlisted soldiers were court-martialed and sent to jail, and a few higher-ranking officers were reprimanded or demoted. But no accountability was demanded of the CIA, private contractors, or the Bush Administration, which critics say failed to train interrogators and created an environment of legal abuse by using presidential power to designate people as “enemy combatants” and thus deny them the protections of the Geneva Conventions.

The most recent of these investigations recommended that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller be reprimanded for his mistreatment of Guantanamo prisoners and for “migrating” his “aggressive” interrogation techniques to Iraq. But a higher military authority rejected the recommendation.

Meanwhile, Guantanamo Bay has become a legal nightmare for the US. American authorities sent more than 800 alleged terrorists to the prison at Guantanamo Bay, largely from Afghanistan, but from other countries as well. Guantanamo was chosen because it was thought to be beyond the reach of US law, but courts ruled that the base, which is leased from the government of Cuba, was effectively under American control.

The ACLU and other organizations sued the government under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and obtained a massive trove of documents in which agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reported that military interrogators were abusing prisoners.

US soldiers have also been charged with the murder of a detainee in Afghanistan.

Equally problematic, the Defense Department’s system for reviewing the status of each prisoner denies the accused the most basic legal rights, including access to lawyers, the opportunity to see the evidence against them — which is often classified — or to call witnesses to prove they were being held in error. Several US civilian courts ruled the system unconstitutional and no trials have been conducted.

Meanwhile, a federal appeals court panel ruled unanimously that President Bush has the authority to indefinitely detain an American citizen, Jose Padilla, arrested in the US, as an enemy combatant.

But another appeals court questioned the Bush administration’s operations at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (Gitmo), where almost all detainees have been categorized by military tribunals as enemy combatants.

Padilla was charged in civilian court with lesser offenses two weeks ago in order to keep the Supreme Court from hearing his appeal.

In an earlier case involving a non-American, Yaser Esam Hamdi, the Supreme Court ruled that an American citizen could be detained by President Bush as an enemy combatant because he was purportedly captured while fighting in Afghanistan. But, even under that circumstance, the court added to the ambiguity by ruling that Hamdi was entitled under the Constitution to contest the allegations made against him by “a neutral decision-maker.” Hamdi was hurriedly sent back to his home country before his case could be resolved.

After last year’s Supreme Court ruling, the Pentagon set up a new system of tribunals of US military officers to review the detainees’ status. The tribunals have been criticized by many senior military lawyers, who have called them kangaroo courts. The Pentagon is currently holding more than 500 prisoners at GITMO. More than 200 of them are currently staging a hunger strike to protest their treatment.

Brian J. Foley, a professor at Florida Coastal Law School, told IPS regarding the Padilla case, “For a court to say that any person imprisoned by the government, especially an American citizen, can be held without access to a judge for an evidentiary hearing and without any right to habeas corpus is frightening, and contrary to hundreds of years of our legal tradition.”

Torture has — critics say belatedly — recently become a headline-grabbing issue in Congress. Sen. Lindsay Graham, a conservative Republican from South Carolina and a former military judge, introduced a measure that would make the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) the absolute rulebook for how prisoners should be treated. The UCMJ forbids cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees. The measure was approved 91 to 9. The measure rejected a detainee’s right to file for habeas corpus, but provided for a Federal appeals court to review cases involving sentences of more than 10 years At the same time, the senate overwhelmingly passed a measure by Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain that would prohibit cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners by anyone representing the US - including the CIA. The Bush administration, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, has been lobbying to exempt the CIA, threatening a presidential veto if it were passed. It now appears that the administration’s objections have failed, and Cheney is now seeking language that would protect CIA operatives from punishment in certain circumstances. The Senate also passed an amendment mandating that the Defense Secretary inform Congress about US-run secret prison facilities in foreign countries.

But at the same time, the Republican-led Senate rejected a Democratic effort to establish an independent commission to investigate US military interrogation practices. The 55 to 43 vote was split largely along party lines. Democrats were trying to set up a panel along the lines of the 9/11 Commission to investigate US detainee treatment in Iraq, Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo.

The McCain proposal will be a top item on the Senate’s agenda when it returns from its Thanksgiving recess next week. With the 2006 Congressional elections less than a year away, and President Bush’s poll numbers falling, many Republicans as well as almost all Democrats are struggling to distance themselves from his positions. That is likely to ensure that torture and rendition are not disappearing from the national dialogue any time soon.

That leaves the alternative media to ask the questions. And we can ask the right questions. The problem is, we don't get to ask Bush, or the NSA, or the criminal congressmen who he told, who abetted if not collaborated in his crime.

We don't get to broadcast an answer to millions of viewers.

But at least we are taking a shot at seeking the truth. At least we are concerned about the truth and about the law and about the safety and future of American democracy.

Somehow, this insane situation can not stand. Bush broke the law. His confidant congressional partners in crime also broke the law. They cannot spin their way out of this one. They cannot block an investigation. The chronically spineless, ineffectual Democrats are going to have to get off their asses and take this one. Russ Feingold did it. He got up in congress and expressed his outrage. And enough senators, including Republicans, who, perhaps have begun to wake to see that they have been supporting a stupid, lying, idiot criminal, got together to block the continuation of the patriot act.

They told Bush to go f*ck himself. They sent a message tp the neocons that their "protecting the nation from terrorism" line is a pile of bullshit. And that was huge. But it is not enough. The lying idiot is still in the Whitehouse, still running the spy ops.

Alberto Gonzalez claims that the congress's authorization to go to war gives Bush the right to engage in spying, to "engage in signal intelligence."

It is time for the congress to make it clear that Bush was NEVER, not EVER authorized to spy, that the authorization to go to war was not a blank check.

We need to raise our voices, get out on the streets, holler bloody murder and make it clear to our elected representatives that we don't accept Gonzalez's half-assed, bullshit explanation of Bush's criminal actions.

We need to ask our legislators who voted to give Bush permission to go to war if they intended to give him permission to spy on Americans, violating our laws.

Write to your elected legislators. Write to your local paper. Demand that they clearly pass a bill that makes it clear that Bush does not and never had the right to spy on Americans and break clearly defined laws.

Remember, this is not about security. Even in an emergency, spying can be ordered and then, shortly afterward, a court order can be obtained to cover it. There is NO EXCUSE for spying without court authorization. There is every reason to believe that the only reason this would be done was because Bush had something to hide, that he was doing things that US courts would not allow. This is totally intolerable. At the least, contact your legislators and local paper. If we don't act on this one, we are lost.

"I feel unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse, these activities," West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the Senate Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, said in a handwritten letter to Vice President Dick Cheney in July 2003. "As you know, I am neither a technician nor an attorney."

Rockefeller is among a small group of congressional leaders who have received briefings on the administration's four-year-old program to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the United States with suspected ties to al-Qaida.

The government still would seek court approval to snoop on purely domestic communications, such as calls between New York and Los Angeles.

The White House brushed aside Democrats' contention that they weren't provided enough information on the program. "They were briefed and informed," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said, repeatedly refusing to address Democrats' specific complaints. "Congress has an important oversight role."

Some legal experts described the program as groundbreaking. And until the highly cl conference that he was assuming unlimited powers.

"To say 'unchecked power' basically is ascribing some kind of dictatorial position to the president, which I strongly reject," he said angrily. "I am doing what you expect me to do, and at the same time, safeguarding the civil liberties of the country."

Despite the defense, there was a growing storm of criticism in Congress and calls for investigations, from Democrats and Republicans alike. Until the past several days, the White House had only informed Congress' top political and intelligence committee leadership about the program that Bush has reauthorized more than three dozen times.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he and other top aides were now educating the American people and Congress.

Comment: You see, Gonzales thinks that the American people are idiots. Since they can't understand what the administration is doing, he'll explain it to us all using small words that we recognize. It doesn't matter that the lies, deception, and illegal actions have finally caught up with the Bush administration - they'll just twist the whole thing around and try to convince us that we don't understand the complexities of the law.

"The president has not authorized ... blanket surveillance of communications here in the United States," he said.

The spying uproar was the latest controversy about Bush's handling of the war on terror. It follows allegations of secret prisons in Eastern Europe and of torture and other mistreatment of detainees, and an American death toll in
Iraq that has exceeded 2,150. [...]

By ordering the National Security Agency -- the N.S.A, so secretive that in Washington its initials are said to stand for "No Such Agency" -- to wiretap and eavesdrop on thousands of American citizens without a court order, Bush committed actions specifically forbidden by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Passed in 1978 after the Senate's Church Committee documented in detail the Nixon administration's widespread use of U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on the anti-Vietnam war movement and other political dissidents, FISA "expressly made it a crime for government officials 'acting under color of law' to engage in electronic eavesdropping 'other than pursuant to statute.'", as the director of the Center for National Security Studies, Kate Martin, told the Washington Post this past weekend.

And the FISA statute required authorization of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to make such domestic spying legal. Bush and his NSA sought no such authorization before invading American citizens' right to privacy -- a blatant flouting of the law that made both wavering Democrats and libertarian Republicans mad enough to vote against extending the hideous Patriot Act, which thankfully will now expire at the end of the year.

Bush not only acknowledged, and defended, this illegal eavesdropping in a Saturday radio address, he went further in a Monday morning press conference, saying he'd "suggested" it. But as Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold -- who, together with conservative Idaho Republican Larry Craig, led the filibuster that defeated the Patriot Act's renewal -- said this weekend, "This is not how our democratic system of government works--the president does not get to pick and choose which laws he wants to follow."

But Bush had plenty of bipartisan help from Democratic co-conspirators in keeping knowledge of this illegal spying from reaching the American public. It began in November 2001, in the wake of 9/11, and -- from the very first briefing for Congressional leaders by Dick Cheney until today -- Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees were told about it. Those witting and complicit in hiding the crime included Democratic Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, former chairman and later ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, former ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee. They knew it was a crime -- Rockefeller, for example, warned the administration against it -- and yet did not make it public. They were frightened by polls showing security hysteria at its height.

Worse, the New York Times itself was part of the coverup. When it broke its scoop last Friday, the Times in its article admitted that, "After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted."

In other words, the Times sat on its story until after the 2004 presidential elections, when American voters might have been able to stop this criminal conduct by voting out the criminal. Not content with employing Judith Miller as the megaphone for relaying the Bush administration's lies about Saddam's having weapons of mass destruction, the Times again proved its servility to power by not telling its readers it knew of criminal spying on them for an entire year, until the election cycle was long past. Yet this aspect of the Times' story has gone unremarked in the mass media.

Bush's excuses for the illegal eavesdropping are indeed risible. The Times didn't mention it, but of 19,000 requests for eavesdropping the Federal Intelligence Security Court has received from the Executive Branch since 1979, only five have ever been refused. Bush claimed again on Monday that this flagrant flouting of the FISA law was necessary because fighting "terrorists" needed to be done "quickly." Yet, as the Times reported, the secret court can grant approval for wiretaps "within hours."

And the excuse Bush offered Monday morning that this illegal subversion of FISA was necessary to prevent 9/11-style terrorism is equally laughable. As the ACLU pointed out in a study of FISA two years ago, "Although the Patriot Act was rushed into law just weeks after 9/11, Congress's later investigation into the attacks did not find that the former limits on FISA powers had contributed to the government's failure to prevent the attacks."

A Zogby poll released Nov. 4 showed that, when asked if they agreed that, "If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment," Americans answered yes by 53 percent to 42 percent. It is therefore not simply extremist raving to suggest that impeachment of George Bush should be put on the table.

Remember that, in the impeachment of Richard Nixon, Article 2 of the three Articles of Impeachment dealt with illegal wiretapping of Americans. It said that Nixon committed a crime "by directing or authorizing [intelligence] agencies or personnel to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office."

There was no national security justification for Bush's illegal NSA wiretaps -- which could easily have been instituted by following the FISA law's provisions -- and, instead of being related to "enforcement of laws," Bush's eavesdropping was indisputably in contravention of the law of the land.

And when a president commits a crime in violation of his oath of office swearing to uphold the law, it is time to impeach.

The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security, as Bush claimed at his press conference. His comparison to the damaging pre-9/11 revelation of Osama bin Laden’s use of a satellite phone, which caused bin Laden to change tactics, is fallacious; any Americans with ties to Muslim extremists—in fact, all American Muslims, period—have long since suspected that the U.S. government might be listening in to their conversations. Bush claimed that “the fact that we are discussing this program is helping the enemy.” But there is simply no evidence, or even reasonable presumption, that this is so. And rather than the leaking being a “shameful act,” it was the work of a patriot inside the government who was trying to stop a presidential power grab.

No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story - which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year - because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had “legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force.” But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force” in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.

What is especially perplexing about this story is that the 1978 law set up a special court to approve eavesdropping in hours, even minutes, if necessary. In fact, the law allows the government to eavesdrop on its own, then retroactively justify it to the court, essentially obtaining a warrant after the fact. Since 1979, the FISA court has approved tens of thousands of eavesdropping requests and rejected only four. There was no indication the existing system was slow - as the president seemed to claim in his press conference - or in any way required extra-constitutional action.

This will all play out eventually in congressional committees and in the United States Supreme Court. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced. Similar abuse of power was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in 1974.

In the meantime, it is unlikely that Bush will echo President Kennedy in 1961. After JFK managed to tone down a New York Times story by Tad Szulc on the Bay of Pigs invasion, he confided to Times editor Turner Catledge that he wished the paper had printed the whole story because it might have spared him such a stunning defeat in Cuba.

This time, the president knew publication would cause him great embarrassment and trouble for the rest of his presidency. It was for that reason - and less out of genuine concern about national security - that George W. Bush tried so hard to kill the New York Times story.

With lawmakers in both parties raising questions, Specter has promised a separate hearing on Bush's recently disclosed order to permit eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, without court approval, on Americans with suspected terrorist ties.

WHAT O'CONNOR SAID

Specter noted that Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, in a separate matter, recently said, "war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens."

"Do you agree?" Specter asked Alito, who if confirmed by the full Senate would replace the retiring O'Connor on the high court.

Specter added: "In light of Justice O'Connor's statement, what jurisprudential theory would you invoke to evaluate the limits on the president's authority to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens without going through the court system?"

Bush has maintained the U.S. Constitution provided him the authority to permit the eavesdropping to defend the nation.

The administration also argued Bush obtained such authority in the congressional resolution passed after the September 11, 2001, attacks to respond with "all necessary and appropriate force."

Specter wrote Alito: "What jurisprudential approach would you use to determine whether this resolution gives the president the power to issue an executive order permitting the National Security Agency to conduct domestic surveillance on international communications without first obtaining a search warrant?"

Specter also asked Alito under what "jurisprudential theory" would he determine Bush's power to have taken such action as commander in chief.

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, also wrote Alito on Monday, saying he planned to ask him about Bush's eavesdropping order at his confirmation hearing.

Humans are born suspicious of one another. Just try handing a baby to a stranger and see what happens. Distrust is programmed right into our DNA, and it knows no bounds. Employers and employees share a mutual distrust of one another. Parents don't trust their own kids unless they're right under their noses. And we trust those we don't know anything about least of all.

So, when the President of the United States gives the nation's most technologically intrusive spy agency, the NSA, the green light to snoop on U.S. citizens it's not just another legalistic nuance, it's a sea change, a very dangerous one.

Why? Because there really is only about six degrees of separation between all of us. One monitored individual's phone calls, for example, inevitably leads to dozens of other suspects. Which leads to the next inevitable question: Who are they? And then: Are they part of it? (Whatever the it, real, feared or just imagined, may be.)

If Bush wants to know where domestic spying leads a nation all he has to do is have one of his aides read aloud to him some of the millions of files the East German Stasi compiled on its own citizens.

"The Stasi's influence over almost every aspect of life in the German Democratic Republic cannot be overestimated. Until the mid-1980s, a civilian network of informants grew within both Germanys, East and West. By the East German collapse in 1989, it is estimated that the Stasi had 91,000 full-time employees and 300,000 informants. This means approximately one in fifty East Germans collaborated with the Stasi, one of the highest penetrations of any society by an organization.... The Stasi monitored politically incorrect behavior among all citizens of East Germany. During the 1989 peaceful revolution, the Stasi offices were overrun by enraged citizens, but not before a huge amount of compromising material was destroyed by Stasi officers. The remaining files are available for review to all people who were reported upon, often revealing that friends, colleagues, husbands, wives, and other family members were regularly filing reports with the Stasi."

An extreme example? Not at all. You can be certain that if we could get unfettered access to the intel files of Israel, Egypt, Libya, Russia, China and other nations with neither the scruples or constitutional limits on domestic spying, we'd find Stasi-like files there too.

Domestic spying attracts folks that suffer from a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder. Once they begin collecting information on fellow citizens, they can't stop themselves. All that's required is that you come to their attention. After that, they must know all they can about you: your finances, your habits, your thoughts, your friends, your family. It must all be observed, examined, categorized, kept and updated.

The President contends that we must make an exception to the usual rules because the nation is at war -- a "different kind of war." Our enemy this time is not a nation but "terrorists." And who are these enemies? We can't be sure. They travel. Some come here. Some are here already.

So who are the enemies within? After 9/11 it was just young Arab men. But then a young American, John Walker Lindh, was caught fighting in Afghanistan. And another American, Jose Padilla, was caught hanging with al Qaeda types. The enemy within suddenly had an American face. So, the Pentagon was given the green light to spy on Americans. And who did they catch? A group of Quaker anti-war activists.

The Quaker peace activists were detailed in a Pentagon risk assessment list as a "serious threat." How can a group that espouses non-violence be a serious threat to national security? Ideologically, of course. The Pentagon has a long memory and it has not forgotten how the peace moment of the '60s and '70s spread, causing the U.S. -- in Pentagon-think -- to "lose the Vietnam War." So the Quakers had to be collected.

That meant someone had to report on the Quaker group's meetings. Who? Someone the group considered "one of them." Betrayal, Stasi style.

That's where unhindered domestic spying always leads. Friends report on friends, neighbors on neighbors, teachers on students, students on teachers, even children on parents. It's a chain reaction of paranoia, a self-generating, self-perpetuating daisy-chain of deception, deceit and betrayal.

Bush needs to remember the hard lesson he learned about booze - that one is never enough. Just don't go there. Ditto on torture and domestic spying. But is it already too late? Has America fallen off the 4th Amendment wagon? Has binge spying already begun?

President Bush says no, his administration is not on a binge. They are just engaging in a bit of social spying. We should not worry because they can stop any time they want. He wants us to let them torture a few more prisoners and spy on a few more Americans. Then they'll go cold turkey on the stuff. Promise.

But the damage may already be done.

4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Stephen Pizzo is the author of numerous books, including "Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans," which was nominated for a Pulitzer.

Kinsley, to his credit, answers no to each of these cases, in a response to a pro-torture argument made in – where else – the Weekly Standard, by neoconservative writer Charles Krauthammer. Kinsley’s response, though based on basic morality, strives to differentiate between the point at which such acts of torture would be justified. (Surprise: Krauthammer would use torture before Kinsley.)

But there are other objections to these justifications of torture. The first is based on efficiency grounds. It is well established that information extracted via torture is not reliable. Let’s say some high level terrorist is tortured, he spills some information, agents of the U.S. government act on that information, and nothing happens. So what? Maybe nothing was going to happen in the first place. Torture advocates must claim otherwise – how else can they look themselves in the mirror? Economists call such outcomes credence goods: goods for which, once purchased, the consumer can never know whether he or she actually received it.

Second, is it ever possible to look at any baby and know it will be a Hitler? Of course not, so while the argument may be fun to think through, it doesn't have any practical applications and it justifies nothing. If it did, it would imply that it can be moral to torture or kill many in the hope of catching the one threat in the group, a position embraced by Herod. (Maybe we should call the torture advocates the neo-Herodians.)

Third, the torture debate obfuscates the real issue. Should we allow torture to stop bad things – worse things – from happening? This is simply Bentham-ite utilitarianism, and it is an old controversy drawing attention from the question – that neither Kinsley nor Krauthammer asks – of why is there is today a heightened threat of terrorism. Would the threat be moot if the U.S. empire were rolled back, if most of our overseas military bases were shuttered, if we stopped fighting the Israeli government’s wars and supporting its military to the tune of several billions of dollars each year? If we focused more on fostering commerce between nations, rather than military alliances, as urged by George Washington in his Farewell Address? All this torture talk draws attention away from other more relevant issues that make the threat of terrorism exist in the first place.

Of course, there is another theme here as well. The State claims the right to bring life in the world, to end it, to control the weather – to do anything. To deny its right to torture is to deny its omnipotence. Some people argue that the medieval scholastics’ development of Just War theory actually served to provide the king with the moral justification to engage in war. Maybe today’s torture debate is serving a similar purpose: to provide justification for the State to engage in torture. One could argue, after all, that people like Kinsley and Krauthammer are this generation's version of Francisco Suarez and Hugo Grotius.

But unlike the great Scholastics thinkers – who debated everything – the neoliberals and neoconservatives of today consider some areas of inquiry off-limits, at least when they might conclude with moral constraints on government. They will wring their hands about torture while they debate Sen. John McCain’s desire to regulate it, but let’s not fool ourselves that such a debate ever comes close to the heart of the matter.

So I’d like to propose a counter thought experiment, one that is close to the heart of the matter and therefore avoided by D.C.’s favorite media pundits. Assume that it is recognized that large, centralized nation-states threaten liberty and foment both war and terror, relative to nations characterized with more decentralized power structures. Surely this is the lesson of the 20th century, as well as this first decade of the 21st. Would it be moral to dismantle them?

Chris Westley is an assistant professor of economics at Jacksonville State University, Alabama.

Cheney spoke from his plane's private cabin as he was making a trip aimed at boosting the United States' image abroad and its relationships with its war-on-terror partners. But after visiting Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, he was cutting his travels short, skipping planned stops in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to return to Washington to be on hand for session-ending Senate activity that could require his tie-breaking votes.

Cheney said he believes the American people support
President Bush's terror-fighting strategy. "If there's a backlash pending," because of reports of National Security Agency surveillance of calls originating within the United States, he said, "I think the backlash is going to be against those who are suggesting somehow that we shouldn't take these steps to defend the country." [...]

"Either we're serious about fighting the war on terror or we're not," the vice president said. "The president and I believe very deeply that there is a hell of a threat."

The vice president also told reporters that in his view, presidential authority has been eroded since the 1970s through laws such as the War Powers Act and anti-impoundment laws.

"Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both during the '70s served, I think, to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area," Cheney said. But he also said the administration has been able to restore some of "the legitimate authority of the presidency."

Cheney said the White House helped protect presidential power by fighting to keep secret the list of people who were a part of his 2001 energy task force. The task force's activities attracted complaints from environmentalists, who said they were shut out of discussions on developing a national energy policy while corporate interests were present. A protracted lawsuit ensued.

"I believe that the president is entitled and needs to have unfiltered advice in formulating policy," Cheney said. "He ought to be able to seek the opinion of anybody he wants to and that he should not have to reveal, for example, who he talked to that morning. That issue was litigated all the way up to the Supreme Court and we won."

Cheney said that "many people believe" the War Powers Act, enhancing the power of Congress to share in executive branch decision-making on war, is unconstitutional and said "it will be tested at some point. I am one of those who believe that was an infringement on the authority of the president."

Comment: Hint, hint...

Cheney noted he had served in the House for 10 years and said he has "enormous regard" for the legislative branch.

"But I do believe that especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the threats of we face — and this is true during the Cold War as well as I think is true now — the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy," the vice president said.

Cheney conceded that arguments over eavesdropping won't likely pass any time soon, saying, "It's an important subject."

"I would argue that the actions that we've taken there are totally appropriate and consistent with the constitutional authority of the president," he added. [...]

The school board policy, adopted in October 2004, was believed to have been the first of its kind in the nation.

"The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy," Jones wrote. "It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."

The board's attorneys said members sought to improve science education by exposing students to alternatives to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection causing gradual changes over time; intelligent-design proponents argue that it cannot fully explain the existence of complex life forms.

The plaintiffs argued that intelligent design amounts to a secular repackaging of creationism, which the courts have already ruled cannot be taught in public schools.

The Dover policy required students to hear a statement about intelligent design before ninth-grade biology lessons on evolution. The statement said Charles Darwin's theory is "not a fact," has inexplicable "gaps," and refers students to an intelligent-design textbook, "Of Pandas and People," for more information.

Jones said advocates of intelligent design "have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors" and that he didn't believe the concept shouldn't be studied and discussed.

"Our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom," he wrote. [...]

After a dramatic 5.7 percent decline in the number of murders last year, the murder rate ticked upward 2.1 percent between January and June. Citing figures collected under its uniform crime reports, the FBI said cities with fewer than 10,000 people saw the largest increases in their murder rates.

Murder rates rose across the country, but the Midwest saw the highest increases with 4.9 percent. Kansas City, for example, reported 56 murders in the six months of this year but only 39 during the same time in 2004.

The FBI did not disclose its raw crime counts for all communities because it considers these six-month reports to be preliminary. But for all cities with more than 100,000 people, it reported 4,080 murders in 2005 and 3,979 in 2004.

Glendale, Calif., saw its murder rate spike dramatically by 1,300 percent because of a single crime: A suicidal man parked his SUV on railroad tracks in January and caused two commuter trains to crash, killing 11 people. Those victims accounted for nearly all Glendale's 14 deaths classified as murders.

The FBI said rapes nationwide fell nearly 5 percent, and arson crimes fell nearly 6 percent. Property crimes _ which include burglary, larceny and vehicle thefts _ declined overall 2.8 percent.

Assault fell just under 1 percent.

The FBI based its figures on crime reports from 10,374 police agencies around the country.

Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives confirmed today they are investigating the large theft from Cherry Engineering, a company owned by Chris Cherry, a scientist at Sandia National Labs.

The theft was discovered Sunday night by local authorities. The thieves used blowtorches to cut through thick steel walls at the bunker, authorities told ABC News.

The missing 400 pounds of explosives includes 150 pounds of what is known as C-4 plastic, or "sheet explosive," which can be shaped and molded and is often used by terrorists and military operatives.

"It is a very dangerous material, we want to keep this off the streets," Cherry told ABC News.

Also, 2,500 detonators were missing from a storage explosive container, or magazine, in a bunker owned by Cherry Engineering.

Authorities have no leads in the theft and said there is no indication terrorism is involved.

The theft is one of the largest reported cases from a facility in the United States in the last decade ending 2004. During that time, a total of about 1,000 pounds was reported stolen from government facilities in 14 reported incidents. It is unknown whether there is any connection to terrorism.

A special agent at ATF said the incident was unusual because such high-powered material was targeted.

The missing material could potentially make numerous bombs.

In a letter that began "Dear Mister Mayor," Schwarzenegger said he decided to spare the Graz city council "further concern" should he be forced to make other clemency decisions while he's governor. Another inmate is scheduled to be executed in California Jan. 17.

"In all likelihood, during my term as governor, I will have to make similar and equally difficult decisions," Schwarzenegger said in the letter. "To spare the responsible politicians of the city of Graz further concern, I withdraw from them as of this day the right to use my name in association with the Liebenauer Stadium."

The stadium was renamed for the former Hollywood star in 1997. He asked that the lettering be removed by year's end.

Schwarzenegger spokeswoman Margita Thompson said the letter was faxed Monday to the Graz city hall. The city council was expected to take up the matter next month.

In the letter, Schwarzenegger also said he would no longer permit the use of his name "to advertise or promote the city of Graz in any way" and would return the city's "ring of honor."

The ring was given to him in a ceremony in Graz in 1999. At the time, Schwarzenegger said he considered it "a token of sincere friendship between my hometown and me."

"Since, however, the official Graz appears to no longer accept me as one of their own, this ring has lost its meaning and value to me. It is already in the mail," the governor wrote.

Williams, co-founder of the Crips gang, was convicted of four 1979 murders. He was executed shortly after midnight Dec. 13.

"Systematically recording and publicly releasing civilian casualty numbers will assist in helping the victims who survive to piece their lives back together," wrote Ruzicka shortly before she was killed. "A number is important not only to quantify the cost of the war, but to me each number is also a story of someone whose hopes, dreams and potential will never be realized, and who left behind a family."

President Bush put the issue center-stage last week, when, answering questions following a speech, he said that the number of Iraqis who had died in the war was "30,000, more or less."

The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, a non-profit founded by Ruzicka last year, welcomed the president's comments. "The official recognition of and compassionate response to civilians injured and killed due to U.S. military action is critical to building stability in Iraq," said retired Col. Jay Parker, a member of the group's board. "With this important public statement ... the President correctly highlights this critical element of our mission."

White House staff said later Bush was citing media reports, which put the figure at between 27,000 and 30,000, not an official government estimate.

The 27,000 to 30,000 range cited by staff matches exactly a widely quoted figure for civilian casualties compiled by an anti-war non-profit called the Iraq Body Count.

"Civilian casualties are the most unacceptable consequence of all wars," says the group on its Web site. "We believe it is a moral and humanitarian duty for each such death to be recorded, publicized, given the weight it deserves and, where possible, investigated to establish whether there are grounds for criminal proceedings."

The group's estimates are based on media accounts, which experts say can under-count deaths in the chaos of war. Other estimates, including a tendentious one based on statistical projections of mortality and published in the medical journal Lancet, put the civilian death toll as high as 100,000.

The Pentagon has always maintained that it does not keep a tally of civilians killed or injured in U.S. military operations. But military officials say that troops are generally required to fill out some kind of incident report if they shoot a non-combatant, and that such reports could be tabulated with relative ease.

Anecdotal reports, including one from Ruzicka herself, suggest that, in some areas, commanders already keep a running tally.

Now the new law will enable lawmakers and campaigners alike to gauge the accuracy of such reports and gain an insight into what kind of records the military keeps to backstop the compensation schemes it runs.

The posthumous victory is by no means the first for the plucky California blond, who bemused the nation's straight-laced capital by calling everyone "Dude," and arriving at meetings on roller-blades.

For three years running, Ruzicka, who was just 28 when she was killed, worked with Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., to put money in the annual Foreign Operations spending bill -- providing a total of nearly $40 million dollars for individuals and communities in Afghanistan and Iraq that suffered what the military calls collateral damage.

In the latest bill, passed over the summer, the civilian assistance program was named the Marla Ruzicka Iraqi War Victims Fund, in her honor.

A Leahy aide told United Press International that about half the amount appropriated -- $25 million for Iraq and $13 million for Afghanistan -- has been doled out so far. The money is spent by the U.S. Agency for International Development in collaboration with relief groups and other non-governmental organizations. The funds are used to provide in-kind assistance, such as medical care, equipment to start a business, or the replacement of damaged or destroyed property like homes and schools, said the Leahy aide, Tim Rieser.

And millions of dollars in cash have also been paid out by the military, under U.S. regulations that give unit commanders access to a special fund to "respond to urgent humanitarian relief and reconstruction requirements."

In many parts of Iraq, the U.S. military uses these funds to run programs generally paying out up to $2,500 per victim to the families of those killed, and smaller amounts to those who are injured or have property destroyed or who were detained.

The fund, the Commanders' Emergency Response Program, was authorized by the Coalition Provisional Authority in June 2003, initially with cash seized or captured by the U.S. military and money from the United Nations' Development Fund for Iraq -- oil revenues which the provisional authority administered as the occupying power, according to a report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen.

CERP, as the fund is called by the military, was worth $340 million last year -- $160 million of it seized or captured in Iraq. The remaining $180 million was in the 2004 war supplemental appropriation. This year, the U.S. congress has appropriated $854 million, according to Pentagon Spokeswoman Lt. Col. Roseann Lynch, who did not say whether Iraqi or U.N. money would continue to be spent by CERP.

But the discretionary "condolence payments," as the military calls them, are only one of a wide variety of small dollar-value projects on which the cash is spent -- including a shopping list of infrastructural and civic repairs and improvements -- and no breakdown was available.

The military has traditionally been chary of anything that smacks of compensation, because of concerns about the potentially vast liability that would be assumed if such payments could be inferred to recognize a right to recompense for any civilian impacted by its operations.

"This system of sympathy payments is designed to avoid any assumption of legal liability by the military," said Rieser, who has been briefed by the Pentagon on the program. "But in doing so they are acknowledging that a mistake was made, that harm was done, and that compensation is warranted."

Rieser said the payments were "completely discretionary," and added that "the evidentiary bar (for compensation) seems to vary depending on the U.S. military commander in the field.

"That is one of its weaknesses."

Rieser said that the payments were generally made after some effort to corroborate the applicant's account and establish how the death had happened. "They are not just handing out money to anyone who asks for it," he said.

In Baghdad, Ruzicka assisted families in negotiating the application process for both cash and in-kind compensation, which she said could be equally daunting for stricken relatives.

She was on her way to a meeting about such a case when she was caught up in a suicide car bomb attack against a U.S. convoy on Baghdad's notorious airport road.

Her supporters say Ruzicka would have been proud of her latest victory.

"It was hard to say no to Marla," Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., once said of her lobbying skills. "Heck, it was all but impossible to say no."

Perhaps it still is.

"You can't get any simpler than this -- a laptop with a bunch of antennas and cables," said Lt. Col. Gregory E. Harbin, of the 609th Combat Operations Squadron at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C. "Yet, the ROVER is bringing a phenomenal capability to our people on the ground."

ROVER -- the Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receiver -- is a system that has proven vital in both combat and humanitarian missions.

Cameras mounted on aircraft collect images and send them as full-motion streaming video to the systems carried by ground forces. The real-time imagery provides joint terminal attack controllers an aerial view of what is happening in an area before and after they call in close air support.

Pilots in the sky and JTACs on the ground see the same images -- and even better, "the pilots can look exactly where we need them to look," said Staff Sgt. Justin Cry, a Shaw JTAC who's used the system in both Iraq and New Orleans.

"I can circle an area on my screen, drawing arrows for emphasis, and what I'm drawing appears on (the pilots') screens as well," he said.

It's simple technology that's existed for years. It took young Airmen on the ground asking a lot of questions to bring it to the field.

"It's the Xbox generation," Colonel Harbin said. "When I took the earlier systems into the field, not only did these young men learn how to use them quickly, but they started making lists of improvements." The colonel said they started "asking questions like, 'Can it do this' and 'Why can't I do that?' It was their inputs that made ROVER what it is today."

Though created for combat, ROVER has proven its lifesaving capabilities, too.

A few months ago, Iraqi civilians called in reports of a suspicious group of people gathering at a soccer field. Instead of sending troops into a potentially dangerous situation, the Air Force sent up an aircraft with a camera, which flew over and captured real-time video of the group.

"It turned out to be a group of Iraqi schoolchildren playing soccer," Colonel Harbin said. "We were able to check it out without injuring anyone or putting anyone's life at risk."

The ROVER was also used in search-and-rescue efforts after Hurricane Katrina. Perched on a New Orleans hotel roof, cameras captured video images for responders to use in their search for survivors.

"A lot of the civilian emergency teams were very impressed with the ROVER," Colonel Harbin said. "This is something that has a lot of appeal both in the military and in civilian circles."

Sergeant Cry said the appeal helps strengthen relationships within the joint warfighting environment, too.

"Oh, the Marines can't get enough," he said of his experiences in Iraq. "They know we're going to lead the aircraft directly to the target."

The Army has also seen the ROVER in action, Sergeant Cry said.

"It's only a matter of time before the services are all linked together," he said.

Colonel Harbin said he wouldn't be surprised if ROVER becomes a common word in Air Force terminology.

"This is a tool that lets Airmen use all the assets available to them in the field, and it gives commanders more information before they have to make important decisions," he said. "The Air Force has put this technology out there, and it simplifies the process of putting bombs on targets, and it's saving lives, too.

"It's truly changing the face of war-time technology," he said.

The US had previously refused to release the women on the grounds that they were "high value detainees".

Dr Taha, who completed a PhD in plant toxins at the University of East Anglia, which she attended between 1980 and 1984, was cited by the British government in its dossier of September 2002 which claimed she had played a leading role in the manufacture of anthrax and other biological agents. In May, 2003, following the US and British invasion, Dr Taha, was among a number of former officials who gave themselves up to coalition forces.

Fresh attention was drawn to the two scientists last September when insurgents demanded the release of unidentified Iraqi women prisoners in exchange for sparing the life of British hostage Kenneth Bigley, an engineer from Liverpool. Two other engineers captured along with Mr Bigley, Americans Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong, were executed almost immediately but the kidnappers - apparently linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - said the Briton's life would be spared if the women were released. Coalition officials said Dr Taha and Dr Ammash were the only women being held.

Shortly afterwards, the Iraqi justice ministry said Dr Taha would be released on bail because she had cooperated with authorities. However, this arrangement was scuppered when the then secretary of state, Colin Powell, announced there would be no negotiations with terrorists.

Shortly afterwards, iIraq's Interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, announced that neither Dr Taha nor Dr Ammash would be released. Mr Bigley was beheaded two weeks later.

Yesterday, a coalition spokesman, Lt Col Barry Johnson, said that on Saturday night the US released eight people formerly designated as "high-value". He said the prisoners - who he would not identify - had been released after a review board decided they were no longer a security threat.

Dr Ammash reportedly has cancer.

Reports said those released also included Hossam Mohammed Amin, the former head of the weapons inspections directorate; Aseel Tabra, an Iraqi Olympic Committee official; General Dhiaa Maher al-Tikriti; Ibrahim al-Ani, an intelligence official and Hamid al-Janabi, a prison director.

Last year it was reported that Dr Taha had explained to US officials what had happened to 1,800 gallons of anthrax which had been unaccounted by UN inspectors. Dr Taha told inspectors the chemicals had been stored close to a presidential palace. After the anthrax was deactivated the affair had been hushed up out of embarrassment at the chemical being stored close to one of Saddan Hussein's residences.

The Sunni officials registering complaints about the vote concentrated their protests on results from Baghdad province, the biggest electoral district.

"It was obvious to us that the forgery and the falsification have been taking place even before the opening of the ballot boxes," the Iraqi Accordance Front said.

The group said it considered the results "a falsification of the will of the people."

If no measures are taken, "we will demand that the elections be held again in Baghdad," said Adnan al-Dulaimi, head of the Sunni alliance. "If this demand is not met, then we will resort to other measures."

A senior member of the United Iraqi Alliance, Jawad al-Maliki, responded that the Sunnis needed to respect the outcome. "Democracy means accepting the opinion of the majority," he said. [...]

According to the US Geological Survey, the quake, which occurred 6 km below the seabed, was centered 425 km southwest of Yap in Micronesia and 435 km west-southwest of Hagatna, Guam.

No injures or damage have been reported so far and there was no tsunami warning issued by the Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii.

"It was such an explosion from it," she said.

"It was just [as] if someone had shot off a gun in the truck. It was just amazing."

Knee and her husband returned to the spot Saturday to find a pile of charcoal-like rock.

They picked up a sample, and after a little digging observed that a cylindrical piece of the material was lodged deep into the side of the road.

Knee said there was no sign of construction or of people working in the area.

Joe Hodych, who teaches earth sciences at Memorial University, said it is possible that the object came from space, and that he is anxious to see the sample.

"Meteorites are very rare. So most reports turn out not to be meteorites in the end," Hodych said.

"But they're extremely important to science."

Knee hopes someone like Hodych will analyze the rock.

However, Knee would like to keep at least a part of the rock as a souvenir.

Several discoveries

What is now called the Kuiper Belt was proposed in the 1940s by Irish economist and astronomer Kenneth Edgeworth and separately by American astronomer Gerard Kuiper in 1951. The first object out there was found in 1992. Now several worlds a third as massive as Pluto and larger are known to roam the solar system’s outskirts, including one revealed this year that is at least as big as Pluto and considered by some to be the 10th planet.

Meanwhile, discoveries of binary setups in the Kuiper Belt have led experts to estimate that at least 10 percent of large Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) have moons.

The premier KBO is actually Pluto, considered by most astronomers to be a member of the region rather than a true planet (though many say its historical and cultural significance as a planet suggest it should have dual status). In October, Pluto was found to have two small satellites in addition to its large moon Charon.

A KBO known as 2003 EL61, which is about one-third as massive as Pluto, was found in January to have a moon. This month, researchers led by Mike Brown at Caltech announced it has a second small satellite. Many other KBOs could have multiple moons that can’t yet be detected.

"It appears likely, now, that other [large] Kuiper Belt Objects ... might also have multiple satellite systems," Brown said.

Inexplicable path

On Dec. 13, another group said they’d found an object half the mass of Pluto orbiting twice as far from the Sun as Neptune. The object’s path has them puzzled.

The faraway world is catalogued as 2004 XR 190 and known temporarily as Buffy. It was discovered as part of the Legacy Survey on the Canada France Hawaii Telescope.

"It was quite bright compared to the usual Kuiper Belt Objects we find," said the University of British Columbia’s Lynne Allen, who was part of the international discovery team. "But what was more interesting was how far away it was."

Buffy never gets closer than 52 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, or 52 times the distance from Earth to the Sun. Neptune is 30 AU from the Sun. Pluto ranges from 30 to 50 AU.

What makes Buffy special is its nearly circular path, which extends out to just 62 AU.

"To find the first known object with a nearly circular orbit beyond 50 AU is indeed intriguing," said Brian Marsden, who runs the Minor Planet Center where all of these objects are catalogued.

Most other known KBOs are on highly elliptical orbits and off-center orbits, typically coming to within 38 AU of the Sun and then soaring out beyond 50 AU. Theory suggests Neptune has acted on them like a gravitational slingshot to produce these eccentric paths.

A passing star?

Other than the KBOs that slice in and out of the zone, the space beyond 50 AU seems fairly empty, as though it represents the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt.

But then there is Sedna, which ranges from 76 to 900 AU.

In late 2004, Scott Kenyon of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Benjamin Bromley from the University of Utah proposed a passing star long ago may have played a role in all this.

At a distance of 150-200 AU, the star could have stolen objects from the outer Kuiper Belt and lured Sedna into its present orbit without affecting Neptune or the inner planets, the researchers concluded through computer modeling.

Intriguingly, the model suggests some KBOs in our solar system (not including Sedna) are actually alien worlds that were captured from the passing star in a two-way swap of material.

"A close fly-by from another star solves two mysteries at once," Bromley said then. "It explains both the orbit of Sedna and the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt,"

Buffy baffles

The stellar flyby scenario does not appear to explain Buffy, however.

Buffy is too far out there to have been affected by Neptune, at least given Neptune’s current position, say its discoverers. Yet Buffy’s very extreme orbital tilt, which takes it 47 degrees above and below the main plane of the solar system, raises another question. All of the planets, asteroids, comets and KBOs are thought to have formed from a relatively flat disk that circled the newborn Sun 4.5 billion years ago. Most of them remained in that plane after formation, unless perturbed by something.

"If a star could have affected Buffy so strongly, it should also have disrupted much of the main Kuiper belt as well," write the researchers who found Buffy. "Since astronomers do not detect that strong disruption, a more complex theory is needed to explain Buffy's orbit."

Perhaps, they speculate, the answer lies in some as-yet unknown event early in the solar system’s history. Maybe Neptune's orbit slowly grew bigger, as theorists have previously proposed, pushing some KBOs into tilted circular orbits by means that have yet to be modeled, they said.

Answers await technology that can detect fainter and more distant objects, so researchers can make a fuller inventory of the out solar system. That inventory is likely to include many objects in what is called the Oort Cloud, extending 1.5 light-years away and nearly half the distance to the Alpha Centauri star system.

The whales were being kept damp with buckets of water and wet sheets by about 100 volunteers, Mason said, but the volunteers were to be withdrawn when darkness fell.

"It's really too dangerous to have people in the sea with the whales," Mason said.

Three whales had died by Tuesday evening but it was hoped some would refloat themselves at high tide on Wednesday morning.

There would be a second chance to save some of the animals at the following high tide on Wednesday afternoon.

"We'll be able to try and refloat them with human assistance," Mason said.

The whales were first seen off the beach in the morning, milling around near the shore.

"It wasn't a great surprise to us when they began to strand when the tide turned and began to go out."

The first whale was stranded about 2:00pm (0100 GMT) and the rest of the pod of whales, measuring four to five metres in length (13 to 16 feet), had progressively become stuck on the sand.

"Hopefully in Wyoming, we'll find evidence for that to be a viable tool in water resource management," said Dan Breed, project scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a federally funded research center based in Boulder, Colo.

The state is paying the center $1.9 million to monitor and evaluate the Wyoming project.

"In a lot of the other programs, the evaluation part has been more ad hoc or not planned into it," Breed said. In addition, he said, the Wyoming project will last for five years, while most others are conducted year to year.

"The Wyoming program is very unique with the amount of science that's being employed," said project manager Barry Lawrence of the Wyoming Water Development Commission. "The scientists are involved throughout the process."

Millions of dollars is already being spent, especially in the West, to spew silver iodide into storm clouds in order to coax more rain and snow to fall.

Breed said most of the water in the West comes from mountains, where the snowpack acts essentially like a reservoir. The Colorado River Basin, fed mainly by water from the mountains, is a major water supply for seven states. But increasing demand for water has water managers fearing shortages in the future.

If more snow can be produced in the mountains by cloud seeding, it would mean more water for cities, towns and farms.

However, whether cloud seeding actually works has been the subject of debate among the scientific community. In 2003, the National Academy of Sciences questioned the science behind cloud seeding and called for national research into the practice.

The Wyoming project seeks to determine whether cloud seeding can increase runoff from three mountain ranges — the Wind River, Medicine Bow and Sierra Madre. The project is in its early stages, and no cloud seeding is expected to begin until next year.

Normally, tsunamis are preceded by earthquakes: the deadly Indian Ocean tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia last December, for example, was foreshadowed by a magnitude-9.3 undersea temblor.

Residents nearest a tsunami-causing earthquake sometimes experience both events, and in fact many islanders have known for generations to head for the hills when the ground starts moving.

But in the days leading up to the 1700 tsunami, no earthquakes had been detected. Miho's leader wrote that such a thing was unheard of and wondered what to call the waves.

"It is said that when an earthquake happens, something like large swells result, but there was no earthquake in either the village or nearby," he wrote.

With no parent earthquake to claim it, the tsunami was labeled an "orphan."

An ocean away

Three centuries later, an international team of scientists and scholars has linked the orphan tsunami to a massive earthquake that struck a region in North America called Cascadia.

Cascadia is located in the northwestern United States and is bounded on the east by the Cascades—the mountain range that includes the volcanic Mount St. Helens—and on the west by the Pacific Ocean.

An earthquake-prone fault line, called the Cascadia subduction zone, runs down the length of the region. It begins in Vancouver, Canada, continues down through Washington and Oregon and ends in northern California.

The fault line separates two of the many tectonic plates that make up Earth's surface: the North American Plate and the much smaller Juan de Fuca Plate.

It is now known that the Cascadia subduction zone is active and that the Juan de Fuca Plate is sliding under the North American Plate at an average rate of about 13 feet (4 meters) per century.

Based on geologic evidence, scientists think that a massive magnitude-9.0 earthquake rocked the region sometime between 1680 and 1720. The quake must have lasted for several minutes because it caused parts of coastal Washington to plummet by as much as 5 feet (1.5 meters) relative to coastal waters.

In 1997, analysis of tree-rings from the Cascadia region narrowed the time of the natural disaster to a 10-month window, from August 1699 to May 1700.

The Japanese written accounts of the orphan tsunami allowed the earthquake to be dated even more precisely. Scientists knew that an earthquake as massive as the one that occurred in Cascadia would have spawned an enormous tsunami—one that could easily travel across the Pacific to affect Japan. The two events had to be related, scientists thought.

The researchers knew that a tsunami speeding across the Pacific Ocean travels at jetliner speed—about 500 mph—and it would take about 10 hours for a tsunami originating in Cascadia to reach Japan.

"The travel time is almost what I'd do if I took a plane from Seattle and went to Narita [airport in Japan]," said Brian Atwater, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Atwater is also a co-author of The Orphan Tsunami of 1700, a book that will be published in Jan. 2006 telling the story of how the two natural disasters were linked.

The Japanese written accounts of the tsunami say that the first waves were felt around midnight on Jan. 27 Japan time. Therefore, scientists estimate that the earthquake that generated the tsunami must have struck sometime between 9 and 10 pm Pacific Standard Time on Jan. 26, 1700.

Why it matters

Unraveling the orphan tsunami mystery paid off in two ways, Atwater said. The first was that it allowed scientists to pinpoint the date for the Cascadia earthquake with a precision that would have been impossible if they had relied only on geological and tree-ring evidence.

Secondly, it raises the bar considerably for what the magnitude of an earthquake occurring along the Cascadia subduction zone can be. The tsunami showed that the risk of a major earthquake striking the Cascadia region not only existed but that it had manifested itself at least once in the recent past, Atwater said.

This information is crucial for tsunami and earthquake emergency planners.

"In the case of a tsunami, you need to know how big of an earthquake can happen along a subduction zone to provide the starting point for a tsunami model," Atwater said.

In the late 1980s, scientists began to realize that this kind of thing happens often enough that they had to take precautions, but the question was, what size earthquake should tsunami modelers assume?

"There was plenty of respectable scientific opinion at the time that an earthquake of a magnitude-9 was just ludicrous," Atwater told LiveScience. "A tsunami modeler in the late 1980s could not have assumed an earthquake of that magnitude without being called an alarmist or being laughed at."

Discovering the details of the 1700 earthquake helped change that. If the past is any indication, scientists predict that the Cascadia fault line will produce a strong earthquake every few centuries. The fault line may break piecemeal and cause a series of minor quakes, or it might break along its entire length. If that happened, the region would experience another massive event similar to the one that struck in 1700.

"This is just becoming mantra," Atwater said. "I don't think there's skepticism about that now, especially after what people saw on their television screens a year ago. There's respect now for what nature can do."

The research-and-advocacy organization compiled findings from the states that agreed to provide data they collected from 1998 to 2003. That data comes from nearly 40,000 water utilities, serving 231 million people. The utilities were required by federal law to report that data to consumers.

For the unregulated chemicals, EPA is still identifying and considering the potential risks for possible future regulations. Nineteen of those chemicals exceeded EPA's unenforced safety guidelines for tap water systems serving at least 10,000 people, according to the advocacy group.

The EPA gathers its own water monitoring data, reviews the latest research and looks at treatment methods and technology, an agency spokeswoman said. States also are free to set their own safety standards for contaminants that may not be detected in other states.

Benjamin Grumbles, who heads EPA's Office of Water, said that "for the chemicals the agency regulates, nearly 100 percent of the community water systems that provide drinking water to the majority of Americans are meeting clean drinking water standards. We also have a process to continuously identify new contaminants for which regulation could reduce risks."

Jane Houlihan, EWG's vice president for research, said the group's findings show that the United States allows millions of people to be exposed to some chemicals for which EPA either has never considered the risks or if it has, has no enforceable limits.

"So in many communities the water that comes out of the tap could be contaminated with scores of chemicals. People shouldn't be alarmed, but they should be concerned. Our system of public health protections isn't working in this case," Houlihan said.

The top 10 states, listed in order of the most contaminants in their drinking water, were: California, Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, New York, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Illinois, according to EWG, which listed the biggest sources as agriculture, industry and urban and sprawl developments.

Tom Curtis, a deputy director of the Denver-based American Water Works Association, echoed Grumbles' comments. "That's good news, and it's a reflection of water professionals' ongoing commitment to protecting public health," he said.

Curtis said the EPA has "a systematic approach to determining which substances should be regulated. Those regulations take into account occurrence data and health effects research, and should reflect the best available science."

He also said that "water suppliers support strong regulations that protect public health, and they also support proactive research that identifies and examines new substances found in source waters."

Last week, in setting two new rules to protect public drinking water, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson called clean drinking water "a key ingredient to keeping people healthy and our economy strong." One rule aims to prevent disease-causing microorganisms from entering public water supplies, while the other is intended to limit the amount of potentially harmful disinfection byproducts.

"Beginning tomorrow Bolivia's new history really begins, a history where we will seek equality, justice, equity, peace and social justice," Morales told hundreds of supporters amid chants of "Evo President! Evo President!" at his campaign headquarters in the central city of Cochabamba on Sunday night.

Landlocked Bolivia, South America's poorest and most unstable country, has seen two presidents in three years toppled by large-scale demonstrations led by out-of-work miners, disenfranchised Indians and coca-leaf growers.

The new government will face conflicting demands from Indian groups who want the constitution rewritten to enshrine Indian rights and the country's wealthy eastern provinces where a wealthy elite wants greater power for regional governments.

Morales has pledged to nationalize the natural gas industry -- Bolivia has South America's second-largest reserves of the fuel -- tuning into popular disillusionment with free-market economic policies that many say did little to help the poor.

Morales, a lawmaker who admires Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's drive for regional cooperation to counter U.S. influence, also tapped into frustrations of the Quechua, Aymara and other Indian groups that are a majority in this Andean country.

India, whose laws sharply restrict satellite and aerial photography, has been particularly outspoken. "It could severely compromise a country's security," V. S. Ramamurthy, secretary in India's federal Department of Science and Technology, said of Google Earth. And India's surveyor general, Maj. Gen. M. Gopal Rao, said, "They ought to have asked us."

Similar sentiments have surfaced in news reports from other countries. South Korean officials have said they fear that Google Earth lays bare details of military installations. Thai security officials said they intended to ask Google to block images of vulnerable government buildings. And Lt. Gen. Leonid Sazhin, an analyst for the Federal Security Service, the Russian security agency that succeeded the K.G.B., was quoted by Itar-Tass as saying: "Terrorists don't need to reconnoiter their target. Now an American company is working for them."

But there is little they can do, it seems, but protest.

Google Earth is the most conspicuous recent instance of increased openness in a digitally networked world, where information that was once carefully guarded is now widely available on personal computers. Many security experts agree that such increased transparency - and the discomfort that it produces - is an inevitable byproduct of the Internet's power and reach.

American experts in and outside government generally agree that the focus on Google Earth as a security threat appears misplaced, as the same images that Google acquires from a variety of sources are available directly from the imaging companies, as well as from other sources. Google Earth licenses most of the satellite images, for instance, from DigitalGlobe, an imaging company in Longmont, Colo.

"Google Earth is not acquiring new imagery," said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, which has an online repository of satellite imagery. "They are simply repurposing imagery that somebody else had already acquired. So if there was any harm that was going to be done by the imagery, it would already be done."

Google Earth was developed as a $79-a-year product by a small company called Keyhole that Google bought last year; it was reintroduced as a free downloadable desktop program in June. It consists of software that can be downloaded onto a personal computer and used to "fly over" city streets, landmarks, buildings, mountains, redwood forests and Gulf Stream waters. Type in any street address in the United States, Canada or Britain, or the longitude and latitude for any place - or even terms like "pyramids" or "Taj Mahal" - and the location quickly zooms into focus from outer space.

It was in the 1990's that the federal government started allowing commercial satellite companies to make and sell high-resolution images, to allow American companies to compete in a growing market.

But a number of security restrictions apply to those companies. For instance, United States law requires that images of Israel shot by American-licensed commercial satellites be made available only at a relatively low resolution. Also, the companies' operating licenses allow the United States government to put any area off limits in the interests of national security. A 24-hour delay is mandated for images of especially high resolution.

Vipin Gupta, a security analyst at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, said the time delays were crucial, saying that in the national security sphere much can change between the time an image is taken and when it is used by the public.

"You can get imagery to determine whether there is a military base or airfield, but if you want to count aircraft, or determine whether there are troops there at a particular time, it is very difficult to do," Mr. Gupta said. "It's not video."

Andrew McLaughlin, a senior policy counsel at Google, said the company had entered discussions with several countries over the last few months, including Thailand, South Korea and, most recently, India.

India may be particularly sensitive to security issues because of its long-running border disputes with Pakistan, its rival nuclear power, and recurring episodes of terrorism. Since 1967, it has forbidden aerial photographs of bridges, ports, refineries and military establishments, and outside companies and agencies are required to have those images evaluated by the government. High-resolution satellite photos face similar restrictions in India, which has its own sophisticated satellite imaging program.

Mr. Ramamurthy, the Indian science official, acknowledged that "there is very little we can do to a company based overseas and offering its service over the Internet." But General Rao, the Indian surveyor general, said the Indian government had sent a letter asking Google "to show sensitive sites, which we will list - areas such as the presidential residence and defense installations - in very low-resolution images."

Mr. McLaughlin said he had not yet seen such a letter; he said talks with India had centered specifically on images of the Kashmir border, long disputed by India and Pakistan.

Meetings with Indian officials or those from other nations have yet to result in a request that Google remove or downgrade any information, Mr. McLaughlin said. Nor, he said, has the United States government ever asked Google to remove information.

The same cannot be said for Mr. Pike, whose Web site has images of nuclear test sites and military bases in much sharper focus than can be found on Google Earth.

Last year, Mr. Pike said, he was asked by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, an arm of the Defense Department, to remove from his site some of the maps of cities in Iraq that the Coalition Provisional Authority had created for planning cellphone service.

Mr. Pike said he had complied, but added that the incident was a classic example of the futility of trying to control information. "To think that the same information couldn't be found elsewhere was not a very safe assumption," he said.

Dave Burpee, a spokesman for the agency, said that the incident was relatively isolated, and that Mr. Pike had been asked to remove the maps because they were marked "limited distribution." A service like Google Earth, on the other hand, contains nothing classified or restricted.

An outcry over security was the last thing John Hanke was thinking five years ago when he joined in founding Keyhole with the aim of using satellite and aerial photography to create a three-dimensional world map. The idea, said Mr. Hanke, an entrepreneur who founded two video game companies before starting Keyhole, was to make video games more interesting.

Now Mr. Hanke, as a general manager at Google in charge of Google Earth, finds himself in the thick of frequent discussions at Google and with outsiders about transparency. He speaks enthusiastically of the benefits of openness. "A lot of good things come out of making information available," he said, and proceeded to list a few: "disaster relief, land conservation and forest management for fighting wildfires."

The images, which Google Earth expects to update roughly every 18 months, are a patchwork of aerial and satellite photographs, and their relative sharpness varies. Blurriness is more often than not an indication of the best quality available for a location.

Chuck Herring, a spokesman for DigitalGlobe, said that to the best of his knowledge, the federal government had never asked his company to obscure or blur images. Similarly, Mr. Hanke said no specific areas on Google Earth lacked high-resolution data because of federal restrictions.

For a brief period, photos of the White House and adjacent buildings that the United States Geological Survey provided to Google Earth showed up with certain details obscured, because the government had decided that showing details like rooftop helicopter landing pads was a security risk. Google has since replaced those images with unaltered photographs of the area taken by Sanborn, a mapping and imagery company, further illustrating the difficulty of trying to control such information.

As for security issues raised by other countries, Mr. Hanke said, "When we reach out and engage with knowledgeable people, the concern tends to subside."

Still, imagery is growing harder than ever to control, especially as it makes its way around the Internet. Several countries, notably Nigeria, China and Brazil, have recently launched satellites, making it harder for any one government to impose restrictions.

"When you have multiple eyes in the sky, what you're doing is creating a transparent globe where anyone can get basic information about anyone else," said Mr. Gupta, the Sandia analyst. His recommendation to the Indian government, he said, would be to accept the new reality: "Times are changing, and the best thing to do is adapt to the advances in technology."

Nineteen bodies were recovered after the Chalk's Ocean Airways propeller plane crashed around 2:30 p.m. after takeoff en route to Bimini in the Bahamas, Coast Guard officials said. Two crewmembers were aboard along with 18 passengers, including three infants.

Sandy Rodriguez, 14, said he saw the plane flying low with white smoke trailing from it and flames coming from the bottom. The right wing then fell off as the plane went down, he said.

"It exploded in the air and one of the wings flew out of there. The other part of the plane was on fire and it just went straight down," said Maurice D'Giovianni, 42, a surfer who was in the water at the time.

Coast Guard spokesman Dana Warr also saw the crash from the Coast Guard office on an island in Government Cut, a channel just west of where the plane went down. Cargo and cruise ships use the channel to sail from the Atlantic past the posh South Beach neighborhood into the Port of Miami, which was closed because of the crash.

"Everything looked normal, I saw the aircraft take off like it does every other time. I didn't think anything of it when I saw the black smoke from the pier, until I then heard the Coast Guard alarms go off," he said.

Coast Guard Capt. James Maes said the main part of the plane's fuselage was submerged in about 35 feet of water that is subject to strong tidal currents because of the narrow ship channel. Divers suspended their search Monday night for the final victim.

Ship traffic in and out of the port will be suspended indefinitely, Maes added. That includes three large cruise ships that had been scheduled to depart Monday afternoon.

Mark Rosenker, acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the initial investigation will focus on locating the plane's cockpit voice recorder and on examining maintenance logs, operations records and the like. He said much of the wreckage, including the main fuselage, would likely be raised Tuesday.

"We'll be looking at everything in this investigation. Nothing is off the table," Rosenker said. [...]

Because of the reports that there was an explosion, the FBI sent agents to assist in the investigation but there was no immediate indication of terrorism or criminal intent, said Judy Orihuela, spokeswoman for the FBI's Miami field office. [...]

A train traveling from Rome to Cassino had stopped at the station in Roccasecca, about 80 miles south of the capital, when another train coming from Rome on the same track slammed into it from behind, Trenitalia spokesman Luigi Irdi said.

Ambulances were rushing to the area.

The most recent deadly rail crash was in January, when a passenger train and a freight train collided in northern Italy, killing 17 people.

"I am without doubt the one who has fought the most to recognise the rights that are owed to them," said Sarkozy referring to Muslims in France who have long complained about discrimination and marginalisation in the country.

"I insisted that Muslims pray in mosques instead of clandestine places, basements and garages and that they have imams that speak French and are trained in France."

Asked about his use of the word "scum" to describe the rebellious youth in French ghettos, Sarkozy said he did not normally use such language but that the grave situation at the time demanded "firmness".

"I do not normally use street language, I speak so that everyone would understand me," said the minister, who was on a visit to Qatar. "In the republic where I live, it is the thugs who must explain their actions and not the minister of interior."

Sarkozy's remarks have sparked anger among Arab and Muslim immigrant communities in France with many civic leaders calling for his resignation.

"Let's not mix Islam, which is a religion of peace, with the actions of thugs," said Sarkozy. "Islam has nothing to do with the actions of criminals, assassins and thugs."

Sarkozy said France's position as a beacon for tolerance and defence of human rights has not been shaken after the riots and its crackdown on terror suspects in the aftermath of the London attacks in July.

"Can you name one Arab country, where human rights are better protected than in the French republic," he challenged the journalist interviewing him.

French police investigating the funding of Islamic extremists have arrested a total of 28 people over the past week in the Paris region and uncovered a major arms cache, explosives and paramilitary gear in one northern suburb.

It said Mexico overtook Colombia as the country with the most reported kidnappings in the first six months of 2005 with 194 cases, compared to 172 in Colombia. The group said it used figures provided by governments of both countries and expected the trend would hold for the entire year.

"We are seeing a larger number of victims murdered during kidnappings," said Jose Antonio Ortega, president of the Citizen Council.

While some kidnappers in Mexico may kill their victims to eliminate witnesses or because they have botched a kidnapping, others use violence selectively, Ortega said.

"We have seen cases in which they have sent videos of victims being tortured to their families, to get bigger ransoms," Ortega said. "The gangs are becoming more sophisticated."

Ortega said police or former police officers were involved in many kidnappings.

The report quoted an unnamed senior official with Irkut, the manufacturer of the Sukhoi fighter, as saying that a memorandum of understanding on the purchase was signed during President Vladimir Putin's visit to Malaysia last week to attend an Asian summit.

A spokesman for Irkut contacted by AFP said that Russian and Thai officials discussed Russian military planes in Malaysia last week but declined to comment on the report that a preliminary deal had been reached.

The Moscow Times, an English-language daily aimed primarily at the expatriate community in Moscow, said Thailand had originally agreed to buy the jets last year but the deal was delayed because of the tsunami last December that killed hundreds of thousands of people in the region.

The Irkut official said the deal with Thailand on the jets also included delivery of Russian helicopters to Thailand.

Interfax news agency separately reported that a definitive contract on the sale would be signed toward the middle of next year and that Bangkok would pay part of the bill in kind by delivering various products to Russia for resale on international markets.

Interfax quoted Alexander Klementyev, deputy director of the Sukhoi Aviation firm that is owned by the Irkut group, as saying that Indonesia also planned to buy a dozen Sukhoi planes and their full weapons systems in a deal valued at around 700 million dollars.

A 10 percent-stake in Irkut was bought earlier this month by the European Aeronautic Defence and Space (EADS) company, which makes the Airbus passenger jet and is the major partner in the Eurofighter consortium.

In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a "living war machine". The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.

The Soviet authorities were struggling to rebuild the Red Army after bruising wars.

And there was intense pressure to find a new labour force, particularly one that would not complain, with Russia about to embark on its first Five-Year Plan for fast-track industrialisation.

Mr Ivanov was highly regarded. He had established his reputation under the Tsar when in 1901 he established the world's first centre for the artificial insemination of racehorses.

Mr Ivanov's ideas were music to the ears of Soviet planners and in 1926 he was dispatched to West Africa with $200,000 to conduct his first experiment in impregnating chimpanzees.

Meanwhile, a centre for the experiments was set up in Georgia - Stalin's birthplace - for the apes to be raised.

Mr Ivanov's experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail.

A final attempt to persuade a Cuban heiress to lend some of her monkeys for further experiments reached American ears, with the New York Times reporting on the story, and she dropped the idea amid the uproar.

Mr Ivanov was now in disgrace. His were not the only experiments going wrong: the plan to collectivise farms ended in the 1932 famine in which at least four million died.

For his expensive failure, he was sentenced to five years' jail, which was later commuted to five years' exile in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan in 1931. A year later he died, reportedly after falling sick while standing on a freezing railway platform.

Armed with a gun, a man in a Santa outfit held up a furniture store in the German town of Ludwigshafen Saturday and forced two cashiers to open the safe. He filled his sack with cash, locked the two women in the safe and escaped.

He is still on the loose, but police in Tuebingen were able to nab a bank robber armed with a machine gun in a Santa costume with the aid of an infrared camera and helicopter. They found him hiding in a ditch in a nearby forest.

"The machine gun was fake," a police spokesman said. Dressed in a Santa cap, beard and wearing sun glasses, he was wanted for stealing 500,000 euros in four separate bank robberies.

One Santa was stopped by police for driving 150 kph (90 mph) on a northern German motorway, 50 kph over the speed limit.

"He said he was in a rush because he still had packages to deliver," said a spokesman for the police. They gave Santa a fine and took away his license.

Last week an inebriated half-naked Santa disrupted a Christmas market in Dabringhausen before police intervened.

That incident paled in comparison to what happened in Auckland Saturday when 40 drunken Santas rampaged through the city center, stealing from stores and assaulting security guards in a protest against Christmas becoming too commercial.

In Britain, police said they were looking for a Santa acting suspiciously -- a flasher who exposed himself to women.

Officers in Swanage on the south coast of England said the flasher had struck a number of times since December 6, and a week later exposed himself whilst wearing a Santa Claus outfit.

A British agency recently issued a code of conduct to root out substandard Santas. "Santa is a magical and cuddly man, not a fat, smelly slob," said James Lovell of the Ministry of Fun agency in London. "He must not smell of drink or body odor."

Last Christmas, a shopping center in south Wales installed a webcam dubbed "Santacam" in his grotto to overcome parents' concerns after several high-profile pedophile cases in Britain.