Pew and the Council on Foreign Relations conduct the survey, titled "America and Its Place in the World," every four years. The last survey was conducted in the summer of 2001, just before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, providing a useful gauge of changes in Americans' attitudes after the attacks and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"September 11 is losing its power to shape views on foreign policy," Lee Feinstein, deputy director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a briefing for reporters. "Activism looks much less appealing."

Most striking is the sharp rise in Americans' distaste for the nation's leading position in world affairs, which the survey indicates reflects a deeper distrust of foreign institutions in general.

Four years ago, 30 percent of Americans agreed that the United States should "mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own." In the new survey, which was conducted from Sept. 5 through Oct. 31, that proportion had grown to 42 percent.

Other findings

The survey yielded a variety of other interesting results:

— Most of the public believe there hasn't been another terrorist attack in the United States only because we've been lucky. Just a third say it's because the Bush administration has done a good job protecting the country.

— The general public overwhelmingly believes post-9/11 restrictions on visas for foreign students are worthwhile, but majorities in five of the groups of opinion leaders say they go too far.

— Americans in general say reducing illegal immigration and fighting international drug trafficking are much more important than opinion leaders do.

— The public largely believes U.S. mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was the result of misconduct by U.S. soldiers, while solid majorities in five of the eight groups of opinion leaders say it was the result of official policies. [...]

The Council on Foreign Relations said its analysis found "a striking revival of isolationist sentiment among the general public." In fact, more than a third of Americans (35 percent) said it would be just fine with them if a second superpower were to emerge to challenge U.S. leadership.

At the same time, fewer than half of Americans — 48 percent — have a positive opinion of the United Nations, down from 77 percent just before 9/11.

"Resource constraints have limited the reach of the assistance programs, and social discrimination has aggravated the problems in many situations resulting in poverty clearly seen as a violation of human rights," said Arjun Sengupta, the independent expert on the question of human rights and extreme poverty of UNHCR.

The purpose of the mission was to learn from the U.S. experience in addressing its income poverty, human development poverty and social exclusion.

Sengupta's tour included New York urban areas, immigrant farm workers in Florida and hurricane-devastated New Orleans.

The mission's purpose was to show extreme poverty is a societal problem that occurs irrespective of the level of income of a country. Poverty is not only a problem of poor developing countries but a phenomenon that is found in most countries in the world, including the United States.

With higher per capita income levels than any other country, the United States also has one of the highest incidences of poverty among the rich industrialized nations. Some 37 million Americans, 12.7 percent of the U.S. population, lived in poverty in 2004. Some 45 million people were without health insurance coverage and 38 million households experienced food insecurity. There is a significant disparity in poverty between African-Americans, Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites, said UNHCR.

"If the United States Government designed and implemented the policies according to the human rights standards, much of the problem of poverty could be resolved," said Sengupta in a statement.

Bush's approval rating has been slipping from 50 percent when he was reelected in November 2004, to 45 percent in June to 40 percent in August of this year, according to the New York-based pollster.

In 2001, at the start of his first four-year term, Bush enjoyed a 56 percent approval rating, which shot up to 88 percent after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

In April 2003, as the United States geared up for an invasion of Iraq, 70 percent of Americans approved of the Republican president's job performance, but his approval ratings had been steadily falling for a year.

Compared with other two-term presidents at a similar point in their mandates, Bush is now slightly more popular than
Richard Nixon's 29 percent approval rating.

At the end of their fifth year in office, Lyndon Johnson had a 67 percent rating, Ronald Reagan 66 percent and Bill Clinton 58 percent.

In the latest Harris survey, Vice President Dick Cheney fared even worse than his boss, with just 30 percent of Americans believing he was doing a good job, down from 35 percent in August.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld matched Bush with a 34 percent approval rating, sliding from 40 percent in the previous poll.

Sixty-eight of those polled said the country was on the "wrong track," while 27 percent said it was headed in the "right direction."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice remains the public's favorite in the Bush administration, but her star is also falling, to 52 percent from 57 percent in August.

The telephone survey of 1,011 Americans was conducted between November 8 and 13.

"It's a great sound bite that unfortunately does not hold true in the real world economy," say authors of the report, entitled, "Nothing to Be Thankful For: Tax Cuts and the Deteriorating U.S. Job Market."

Changes in tax policy suggest no evidence of their impact on job creation or destruction, according to the 22-page study released Tuesday by United for a Fair Economy (UFE), an independent group that tracks the growing economic divide between the nation's haves and have-nots.

Since 1950, significant tax increases and decreases have both been followed by job losses and job gains, say the researchers.

Based on statistical analysis of changes in tax polices and rates of job growth in the past 60 years, the report points out that tax reduction does, however, disproportionately lead to economic disparity between the rich and poor.

"No workers have really benefited from President Bush's tax policy," says Gloribell Mota, a bilingual education specialist at UFE. "But Blacks and Latinos have suffered disproportionately."

The study shows that African American unemployment remains about twice as high as that of White workers. Moreover, it indicates no sign of growth in quality jobs (defined as paying at least 16 dollars per hour and including health benefits and a pension plan) for workers from any racial background, including Whites.

Last year, one million people fell below the poverty line, a disproportionate number of them children, while the number of billionaires rose to 374, the study says, adding that the number of people living in poverty rose from 11.3 percent in 2000 to 12.7 percent in 2004.

The study also shows that the percentage of American workers benefiting from employment-based health insurance was down from 63 percent in 2000 to less than 60 percent in 2004. This despite the fact that U.S. workers are spending more than 1800 hours per year at work while their counterparts in other technologically advanced nations work for 1600 hours a year--a difference of five full work weeks.

In June 2003, the Bush administration had claimed that the president's tax cut policy would create more than five million jobs by the end of 2004, but the study shows that only 2.6 million jobs were created--1.6 million less than what would have been expected without any special economic stimulus.

"Contrary to what President Bush and his policy makers are saying, tax cuts do not automatically create jobs," said Liz Stanton, director of research at UFE and co-author of the report.

"Their policy is bankrupt," she added. "It is time to recognize that jobs are both created and destroyed during times of tax decreases." [...]

The administration's overarching premise is beyond dispute: Administration officials, Democratic and Republican lawmakers and even leaders of foreign governments believed intelligence assessments that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. That intelligence turned out to be wrong.

But Bush, Cheney, and other senior officials have added several other arguments in recent days that distort the factual record. Below, Knight Ridder addresses the administration's main assertions:

ASSERTION: In a Veterans Day speech last Friday, Bush said that Iraq war "critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs."

CONTEXT: Bush is correct in saying that a commission he appointed, chaired by Judge Laurence Silberman and former Sen. Charles Robb, D-Va., found no evidence of "politicization" of the intelligence community's assessments concerning Iraq's reported weapons of mass destruction programs.

But neither that report nor others looked at how the White House characterized the intelligence it had when selling its plan for war to the world and whether administration officials exaggerated the threat. That's supposed to be the topic of a second phase of study by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

"Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that was not part of our inquiry," Silberman said when he released the panel's findings in March.

The Senate committee concluded that none of the intelligence analysts it interviewed said they were pressured to change their conclusions on weapons of mass destruction or on Iraq's links to terrorism.

But the committee's findings were hardly bipartisan. Committee Democrats said in additional comments to the panel's July 2004 report that U.S. intelligence agencies produced analyses and the key prewar assessment of Iraq's illicit weapons in "a highly pressurized climate."

And the committee found that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, analysts were under pressure to avoid missing credible threats, and as a result they were "bold and assertive" in making terrorist links.

In a July 2003 report, a CIA review panel found that agency analysts were subjected to "steady and heavy" requests from administration officials for evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaida, which created "significant pressure on the Intelligence Community to find evidence that supported a connection."

ASSERTION: In his speech, Bush noted that "more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate - who had access to the same intelligence - voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power."

CONTEXT: This isn't true.

The Congress didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief, a top-secret compendium of intelligence on the most pressing national security issues that was sent to the president every morning by former CIA Director George Tenet.

As for prewar intelligence on Iraq, senior administration officials had access to other information and sources that weren't available to lawmakers.

Cheney and his aides visited the CIA and other intelligence agencies to view raw intelligence reports, received briefings and engaged in highly unusual give-and-take sessions with analysts.

Moreover, officials in the White House and the Pentagon received information directly from the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group, circumventing U.S. intelligence agencies, which greatly distrusted the organization.

The INC's information came from Iraqi defectors who claimed that Iraq was hiding chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, had mobile biological-warfare facilities and was training Islamic radicals in assassinations, bombings and hijackings.

The White House emphasized these claims in making its case for war, even though the defectors had shown fabrication or deception in lie-detector tests or had been rejected as unreliable by U.S. intelligence professionals.

All of the exiles' claims turned out to be bogus or remain unproven.

War hawks at the Pentagon also created a special unit that produced a prewar report - one not shared with Congress - that alleged that Iraq was in league with al-Qaida. A version of the report, briefed to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and top White House officials, disparaged the CIA for finding there was no cooperation between Iraq and the terrorist group, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence disclosed.

After the report was leaked in November 2003 to a conservative magazine, the Pentagon disowned it.

In fact, a series of secret U.S. intelligence assessments discounted the administration's assertion that Saddam could give banned weapons to al-Qaida.

In other cases, Bush and his top lieutenants relied on partial or uncorroborated intelligence.

For example, Cheney contended in an August 2002 speech that Iraq would develop a nuclear weapon "fairly soon," even though U.S. intelligence agencies and the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency had no evidence to support such a claim.

The following month, Bush, Cheney and then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice asserted that Iraq had sought aluminum tubes for a nuclear-weapons program. At the time, however, U.S. intelligence agencies were deeply divided over the question. The IAEA later determined that the tubes were for ground-to-ground rockets.

A recently declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report from February 2002 said that an al-Qaida detainee was probably lying to U.S. interrogators when he claimed that Iraq had been teaching members of the terrorist network to use chemical and biological weapons.

Yet eight months after the report was published, Bush told the nation that "we've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and gases."

Meanwhile, lawmakers didn't have access to intelligence products that may have been more temperate than what they got, even after they investigated the prewar intelligence assessment. For instance, the Director of Central Intelligence refused to give the Senate committee a copy of a paper drafted by the CIA's Near East and Southeast Asia Office examining Iraq's links to terrorism.

Lawmakers didn't see the main document concerning Iraq and WMD - the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate - until three days before their vote authorizing war. The White House ordered the NIE compiled only after lawmakers, including the then-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., demanded it.

The resolution that authorized use of force against Iraq didn't specifically address removing Saddam. It gave Bush the power to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq" and to "enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq."

ASSERTION: In his Veterans Day address, Bush said that "intelligence agencies around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein."

CONTEXT: Bush is correct in saying that many intelligence agencies, particularly in Europe, believed that Saddam was hiding some weapons of mass destruction capabilities - not necessarily weapons. But they didn't agree with other U.S. assessments about Saddam. Few, with the exception of Great Britain, argued that Iraq was an imminent threat, or that it had any link to Islamic terrorism, much less the Sept. 11 attacks.

France, backed by several other nations, argued that much more time and effort should have been given to weapons inspections in Iraq before war was launched.

ASSERTION: Stephen Hadley, the president's national security adviser, told reporters last Thursday that the Clinton administration and Congress perceived Saddam as a threat based on some of the same intelligence used by the Bush administration.

"Congress, in 1998 authorized, in fact, the use of force based on that intelligence," Hadley said.

And Rumsfeld, in briefing reporters Tuesday, seemed to link President Clinton's signing of the act to his decision to order four days of U.S. bombing of suspected weapons sites and military facilities in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq.

CONTEXT: Congress did pass the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which stated U.S. support for regime change in Iraq and provided up to $97 million in overt military and humanitarian aid to opposition groups in Iraq.

But it didn't authorize the use of U.S. force against Iraq.

Clinton said his bombing order was based on Iraq's refusal to comply with weapons inspections, a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions that ended the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

As the lies become more numerous and blatant, and the flag-draped coffins continue to mount, the question that more and more Americans are going to be asking is: why?

Why did key members of the Bush administration go to such lengths to cobble together what turned out to be a very poorly planned and extremely suspect case for war with Iraq and in doing so risk their political lives? Why even now, as the calls for a troop withdrawal from politicians and civilians alike become increasingly vocal, is the Bush gang refusing to budge?

The answer is an obvious one and also as old as the hills:

Blackmail.

To learn just who it is that is blackmailing the Bush gang and just what it is that has Cheney and Rumsfeld so terrified that that they are willing to risk everything to stay the course, get Laura Knight-Jadczyk's new book 9/11: The Ultimate Truth.

Representative John Murtha's bill, the first to demand an immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, stunned official Washington.

The veteran US lawmaker said that the US military operation in Iraq is a lost cause.

"Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the US cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily," said Murtha, a Vietnam War veteran considered more hawkish than most members of his party.

"It's time to bring them home," Murtha said.

His resolution came two days after the Senate approved a Republican measure requiring the White House provide quarterly updates on the pace of military and policy gains in Iraq, in a signal that anxiety over the Iraq operation was spreading to members of Bush's own party. [...]

The victory on the deficit-control bill came hours after an embarrassing and rare defeat on a $602 billion spending bill for education, health care and job training programs this year. The earlier 224-209 vote halted what had been a steady drive to complete annual appropriations bills freezing many agency budgets.

The broader budget bill would slice almost $50 billion from the deficit by the end of the decade by curbing rapidly growing benefit programs such as Medicaid, food stamps and student loan subsidies. Republicans said reining in such programs whose costs spiral upward each year automatically s the first step to restoring fiscal discipline.

"This unchecked spending is growing faster than our economy, faster than inflation, and far beyond our means to sustain it," said Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle, R-Iowa.

Both bills are part of a campaign by Republican leaders to burnish their party's budget-cutting credentials as they try to reduce a deficit swelled by spending on the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina. [...]

The yen remained on the back foot even after comments from Bank of Japan Governor Toshihiko Fukui, who reiterated on Friday the chance was growing that the central bank would alter policy in the fiscal year from March 2006.

Fukui's comments came after a two-day meeting at which the central bank kept its ultra-loose policy unchanged, as expected, and said it saw consumer prices flatting out or rising by the year end, after around seven years of stubborn deflation.

While many analysts expect the central bank to end its ultra-loose quantitative easing policy next year, most do not see the BOJ raising rates from virtually zero until some time after the policy shift.

In contrast the Federal Reserve is expected to press on with its campaign of 12 straight rate rises in coming months, and many analysts see the European Central Bank raising its target rate in December from an historic low of 2 percent.

"Overall sentiment is still bullish on the dollar due to the whole interest rate differential story," said Noriyuki Kato, treasury manager at State Street Global Markets in Tokyo. [...]

The G7 officials meeting in London next month also think China should move toward a flexible exchange rate regime in the long term, but at this moment there is no pressing argument to pressure Beijing to revalue the yuan given low domestic inflation and the dollar strength.

"The dollar is strengthening but it's not a problem in itself and the financial market is absorbing (the change). As long as it is an orderly adjustment (there is no problem). The global economy is posting trend growth so FX moves are not having a big impact," the source said.

The source added the economic fundamentals in the euro zone remained weak and that the weakness in the euro did not cause any discomfort to the European Central Bank.

Black's prosecution is the highest-profile criminal case against a former CEO since the arrests last year of WorldCom Inc.'s Bernard Ebbers and Enron Corp.'s Kenneth Lay. At his peak, Black controlled Britain's Daily Telegraph, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post and 60 percent of Canada's dailies, drawing comparisons to News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch.

"Insiders at Hollinger -- all the way to the top of the corporate ladder -- whose job it was to safeguard the shareholders, made it their job to steal and conceal," U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, whose office brought the charges, said in a statement.

Five Years, $250,000

Hollinger Inc. ex-chief financial officer John Boultbee, 62; former Hollinger Inc. general counsel Peter Atkinson, 58; and former Hollinger International corporate counsel Mark Kipnis, 58, were also indicted, along with Ravelston, Black's former company. Boultbee was also CFO at Ravelston. Prosecutors said they would seek the forfeiture of $80 million from the four defendants. Boultbee and Atkinson are Canadian citizens; Kipnis is an American.

Black and Boultbee are each charged with eight counts of mail and wire fraud. Atkinson faces six counts of mail and wire fraud. Kipnis is charged with nine counts of mail and wire fraud. Each fraud count carries a prison term of five years and a $250,000 fine. Ravelston faces the same seven counts of mail and wire fraud first brought against it in August.

Fitzgerald offered Black a chance to turn himself in, and said he would seek Black's extradition if he doesn't surrender. A secretary to one of Black's lawyers, Edward Greenspan, said she didn't know Black's whereabouts and that Greenspan was in court the rest of the afternoon.

"Officers and directors of publicly traded companies who steer shareholders' money into their pockets should not lie to the board of directors to get permission to do so," Fitzgerald said in a statement.

An e-mail sent to Black asking for comment wasn't immediately returned.

Schemes Described

The indictments describe two schemes allegedly carried out by the defendants. The first involved the diversion of $51.8 million from Hollinger International's $2.1 billion sale of assets to CanWest Global Communications Corp. in 2000.

The second alleged that Black abused corporate perks provided by Hollinger International, including $40,000 to pay for his wife's surprise birthday party in December 2000. Black also had Hollinger pay for his use of its corporate jet for a personal vacation to Bora Bora in French Polynesia, prosecutors said a statement.

Black's alleged fraud was "the grossest abuse" and "simply unacceptable," Fitzgerald said at a press conference.

Ousted in 2003

Black has fought a two-year effort by Hollinger International to neutralize his voting control and influence over the Chicago-based Sun-Times publisher and its Canadian parent, Hollinger Inc. So far, he's mainly failed.

Hollinger International's board ousted Black as CEO in November 2003, sued him and stripped him of the chairman's title the following January. The company then auctioned off the Telegraph over his objections last June. Hollinger International sued to recover more than $425 million it says Black and associates including former President David Radler stole. [...]

Black has mortgaged his Toronto mansion, sold his seven- bedroom London townhouse and been evicted from Hollinger Inc.'s offices. He's also being sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Hollinger Inc. and his private holding company, Ravelston Corp., are in receivership.

Security cameras at Hollinger Inc. filmed Black on May 20 violating a court order by removing boxes of documents from the company's downtown Toronto headquarters. A judge ordered him to return the boxes. Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel, resigned June 2 from Hollinger International's board. [...]

"The vast majority of successes involved our CTICs," an ex-counterterrorism official said. "The boot that went through the door was foreign."

The CTICs, the daily said, are entirely separate from the covert prisons known as "black sites" the CIA has run at various times in eight countries that The Washington Post reported on recently, unleashing a barrage of criticism.

The CTICs are in countries such as Uzbekistan and Indonesia that have been criticized by the US government for its authoritarian rule or human rights violations.

In Paris, said the daily, despite US-French tension over the Iraq war, CIA and French intelligence services have created the only multinational operations center, which executes worldwide sting operations.

Codenamed Alliance Base, the center in France includes representatives from Britain, France, Germany, Canada and Australia, the sources told the newspapers in interviews.

Former Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet organized the joint operation centers, shifting the agency from its more traditional intelligence gathering activities to the cooperative efforts, known as liaison relationships, which are recasting US dealings abroad, the daily said.

Experts have said the earlier allegations that the CIA ran secret overseas jails for terrorism suspects will further tarnish the image of the US abroad but will not likely lead to a downturn in transatlantic relations. [...]

Shapiro and others said as the scandal develops and the public outcry in European capitals mounts, the onus will be on European leaders, rather than Washington officials, to explain themselves to their constituencies and to the
European Union.

"This is likely to be a test for the EU," Shapiro said. "I don't think it's going to be a huge problem for the US government or for transatlantic relations but it is going to be perhaps a domestic issue in some of these countries and perhaps an intra-European issue in calling into question just what being a member of the EU allows you to do and not do."

David Rothkopf, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said European countries mentioned as having harboured the CIA centers, known as "black sites", will likely face political consequences at home if the allegations prove to be true.

Officials in Washington, meanwhile, have largely kept mum on the issue as have the media.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez lashed out at his US counterpart, George W. Bush, late Thursday, calling him a "killer" and a "madman" after a top US diplomat criticized Caracas.

"The planet's most serious danger is the government of the United States. ... The people of the United States are being governed by a killer, a genocidal murderer and a madman," Chavez said at a meeting of Venezuelan and Brazilian business executives in Caracas.

The Venezuelan president criticized testimony to the US Congress by Washington's top diplomat for Latin America, Thomas Shannon, who said Venezuela was a "threat to regional stability".

Shannon said the administration is "working multilaterally, engaging the OAS (Organization of American States), the EU and the Council of Europe, among others, to support Venezuelan civil society, speak out against abuses of democracy and hold the Venezuelan government accountable to its commitments under the Inter-American Democratic Charter.

The Bush administration is "reaching out, at a bilateral level, to our partners in the hemisphere and in Europe to do the same, and sensitizing them to the threat to regional stability posed by the Venezuelan government's arms shopping spree and its support for radical political movements," Shannon said.

"Within Venezuela, we are working to preserve political and civic space for increasingly at-risk groups," the diplomat told the House of Representatives' subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.

Chavez accused the Bush administration of "assuming the right to grossly intervene in any country". Shannon's remarks, he told the executives, were part of a "new offensive" by the White House, after its "failure" at the Summit of the Americas in Argentina.

Bush left the November 4-5 summit having failed to make progress toward the pan-American free-trade deal he wants.

VATICAN CITY

The Vatican's chief astronomer said Friday that "intelligent design" isn't science and doesn't belong in science classrooms, the latest high-ranking Roman Catholic official to enter the evolution debate in the United States.

The Rev. George Coyne, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, said placing intelligent design theory alongside that of evolution in school programs was "wrong" and was akin to mixing apples with oranges.

"Intelligent design isn't science even though it pretends to be," the ANSA news agency quoted Coyne as saying on the sidelines of a conference in Florence. "If you want to teach it in schools, intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science."

His comments were in line with his previous statements on "intelligent design" _ whose supporters hold that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power.

Proponents of intelligent design are seeking to get public schools in the United States to teach it as part of the science curriculum. Critics say intelligent design is merely creationism _ a literal reading of the Bible's story of creation _ camouflaged in scientific language, and they say it does not belong in science curriculum.

In a June article in the British Catholic magazine The Tablet, Coyne reaffirmed God's role in creation, but said science explains the history of the universe.

"If they respect the results of modern science, and indeed the best of modern biblical research, religious believers must move away from the notion of a dictator God or a designer God, a Newtonian God who made the universe as a watch that ticks along regularly."

Rather, he argued, God should be seen more as an encouraging parent.

"God in his infinite freedom continuously creates a world that reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and greater complexity," he wrote. "He is not continually intervening, but rather allows, participates, loves."

The Vatican Observatory, which Coyne heads, is one of the oldest astronomical research institutions in the world. It is based in the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo south of Rome.

Last week, Pope Benedict XVI waded indirectly into the evolution debate by saying the universe was made by an "intelligent project" and criticizing those who in the name of science say its creation was without direction or order.

Questions about the Vatican's position on evolution were raised in July by Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn.

In a New York Times column, Schoenborn seemed to back intelligent design and dismissed a 1996 statement by Pope John Paul II that evolution was "more than just a hypothesis." Schoenborn said the late pope's statement was "rather vague and unimportant."

“New Orleans is going to be 15 to 18 feet below sea level, sitting off the coast of North America surrounded by a 50 to 100-foot-tall levee system to protect the city,” says Kusky, a professor in the Earth Sciences Department at St. Louis University. He estimates this will happen in 90 years. “That’s the projection, because we are losing land on the Mississippi Delta at a rate of 25 to 30 square miles per year. That’s two acres per hour that are sinking below sea level,” he tells Pelley.

As the city assesses damage and plans to rebuild, Kusky believes there’s a better plan. “We should be thinking about a gradual pullout of New Orleans and starting to rebuild people’s homes, businesses and industry in places that can last more than 80 years,” he says. Instead, the law will allow residents to rebuild if their homes lie at the 100-year flood level, much of which was inundated by Katrina’s waters and would be put underwater again should levees fail.

Many residents and business owners are reluctant to rebuild until the levees are repaired, a task that should be completed by next summer. But the repaired levees will only be able to withstand a category three hurricane; Katrina was a category four when it made landfall. Authorities estimate it would take many billions of dollars and between five and 10 years to create a new levee system able to withstand a category-five storm, which Katrina reached while at sea.

With only half the former population expected to come back to the city, is it too much of a commitment for taxpayers? Is it practical? One resident thinks it’s a matter of pride. “The country has to decide whether it really is what we tell the world what we are,” says New Orleans city employee Greg Meffert, whose job is to assess damage there. “Because if we are that powerful…that focused…that committed to all of our citizens, then there is no decision to make. Of course you rebuild it,” says Meffert.

For older people, the rebuilding makes some sense, admits Kusky, but for the succeeding generations, it does not. “They have to deal with the sinking land. This catastrophe that we’ve seen with Katrina is going to be repeated over and over and over again,” he tells Pelley.

The quake, measuring 6.9 on the Richter Scale, occurred at 16:29 p.m. (1929 GMT) and triggered panic along the border in the Andes mountains, according to Chile's National Emergency Office (ONE).

The epicenter of the quake was 40 kilometers southeast of the northern Chile resort town of San Pedro de Atacama, near the Bolivian border, at a depth of 155.4 kilometers, it said.

In the Pacific coastal city of Antofagasta, 1,100 km north of Chile's capital, hundreds of residents rushed to the streets out of fear of a tsunami.

Despite the subterranean shaking, there were no reports of casualties yet, according to Chilean officials.

Officials in Bolivia also said there were no immediate reports of injury or damage there and that the earthquake zone was sparsely populated.

The University of Chile Seismology Institute put the magnitude at 6.8 on the Richter Scale, still the second most intense quake registered in northern Chile.

A more powerful quake in June left 11 Chileans dead and destroyed hundreds of houses in the Andes mountains along the border with Bolivia.

Officials with the Weston Observatory, which monitors earthquake activity, say the 2.5 registered tremor was centered two miles south of the center of town.

The quake was felt just after 12:30 p.m., according to the observatory's Web site.

A quake of that magnitude is the smallest generally felt by people and not severe enough to cause damage.

"We deal with about half a dozen earthquakes a year felt somewhere in the New England region," said the observatory's director, John Ebel.

In Massachusetts, Ebel said, a majority of the seismic activity happens in the eastern portion of the state, usually concentrated north and northeast of Boston. The third area of activity is from Plymouth to the South Coast.

There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries, according to the Plymouth police and officials at the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.

Peter Judge, a spokesman for MEMA, said the quake caused no problems at Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in the town.

A local cultural institution, Pilgrim Hall Museum which houses many artifacts from the 17th-century, was also safe.

"Pilgrim Hall has not fallen," said Peggy M. Baker, the museum's director.

Responding to a complaint by the Florida Bar, the state's highest court sanctioned a pair of Fort Lauderdale attorneys whose advertisement showed a spike-collared pit bull in the company logo. The bar also objected to the company's telephone number: 1-800-748-2855 or 1-800-PIT BULL.

The advertisements "demean all lawyers and thereby harm both the legal profession and the public's trust and confidence in our system of justice," Chief Justice Barbara Pariente scolded a unanimous decision.

The court said the ads violated a prohibition on legal advertising that suggests behavior, conduct or tactics that are contrary to rules of professional conduct.

Attorneys John Robert Pape and Marc Andrew Chandler were ordered to attend an advertising ethics workshop and receive a public reprimand from the Florida Bar. Pape disagreed with the ruling but stopped short of saying the court was barking up the wrong tree.

"I really can't get into it much," Pape said. "It's a hot-button issue for me."

Both phrases appear on a tongue-in-cheek list released on Thursday of the year's most politically correct words and phrases issued by Global Language Monitor, a nonprofit group that monitors language use.

The phrase that topped this year's list was "misguided criminals," one of several terms the British Broadcasting Corporation used so as not to use the word "terrorist" in describing those who carried out train and bus bombings in London that killed 52 people in July, according to Paul JJ Payack, the head of Global Language Monitor.

He added, "The BBC attempts to strip away all emotion by using what it considers 'neutral' descriptions when describing those who carried out the bombings in the London Tubes."

Second on the list was "Intrinsic Aptitude," a phrase used by Harvard University President Lawrence Summers to explain why women might be underrepresented in engineering and science. The phrase met with "deferred success" and Summers had to fight to keep to his job.

"Thought shower" was third and a French word for riff-raff or scum, "la racaille," was fourth thanks to being used by French Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy to describe rioters of Muslim and North African descent in suburbs outside of Paris.

"Out of the mainstream," which Payack said was used to describe the ideology of any political opponent, was fifth and in sixth place was "deferred success" the euphemism for "fail" that Britain's Professional Association of Teachers considered using to bolster students' "self-esteem." The move met with "deferred success."

Seventh on the list was "womyn" for women in order to distance the word from men and eighth was using C.E. (Common Era) for A.D (Latin for "Year of Our Lord") so as to be more neutral in dates.

Ninth on the top 10 list was words and phrases that either de-Christianize the Christian holidays or neuter their genders. For example "God Rest Ye Merry Persons" replaces "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" and "Seasons Greetings" replaces "Merry Christmas."

In 10th place was a move aimed at the heart of Australian culture when security staff were banned from using the word "mate" to address members of parliament. The MPs rebelled and said not being called "mate" was unpatriotic.

In the years since the 9/11 attacks, dozens of books have sought to explore the truth behind the official version of events that day - yet to date, none of these publications has provided a satisfactory answer as to WHY the attacks occurred and who was ultimately responsible for carrying them out.

Taking a broad, millennia-long perspective, Laura Knight-Jadczyk's 9/11: The Ultimate Truth uncovers the true nature of the ruling elite on our planet and presents new and ground-breaking insights into just how the 9/11 attacks played out.

9/11: The Ultimate Truth makes a strong case for the idea that September 11, 2001 marked the moment when our planet entered the final phase of a diabolical plan that has been many, many years in the making. It is a plan developed and nurtured by successive generations of ruthless individuals who relentlessly exploit the negative aspects of basic human nature to entrap humanity as a whole in endless wars and suffering in order to keep us confused and distracted to the reality of the man behind the curtain.

Drawing on historical and genealogical sources, Knight-Jadczyk eloquently links the 9/11 event to the modern-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She also cites the clear evidence that our planet undergoes periodic natural cataclysms, a cycle that has arguably brought humanity to the brink of destruction in the present day.

For its no nonsense style in cutting to the core of the issue and its sheer audacity in refusing to be swayed or distracted by the morass of disinformation that has been employed by the Powers that Be to cover their tracks, 9/11: The Ultimate Truth can rightly claim to be THE definitive book on 9/11 - and what that fateful day's true implications are for the future of mankind.