Porsche AG said Tuesday that it had put plans to issue shares on the New York Stock Exchange on hold after Washington required senior executives to swear that their financial reports are accurate.

"We're not supposed to talk about how there might have been something leading up to this [9-11 terrorist attack], that it could have been prevented or that our actions have ramifications.
We're living in a lock-down in terms of information and a certain point of view, and if you challenge that point of view, you're anti-American." - Hollywood actress Susan Sarandon

Roundup du Republique:
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said every one of the major post-Waco Bush promotions to cut taxes for economic boosting would do more harm than good. Chang-taker Torricelli - ratings have slipped - says think of the Dems and control of the Senate and not me in the upcoming vote. Touch and go, but not a bad point to make. Deputy State Sec. Armitage has gone to India to sort out Kashmir concerns. The kid's name is Brett Thomas Ferro. His grandpa is House Majority Whip from Texas, and HE said he's calling (kid) whippersnapper. Well, its better than Concrete [ferroconcrete gettit :-)]
ENDS-dickenz-

Polluters Pay on the High Seas and other Lead stories
Australian authorities said on Tuesday they had charged the Japanese owners of a Panama-registered chemical tanker
with causing an oil spill near the Great Barrier Reef and
fleeing without reporting the incident. The charges carry a A$1.1 million (US$600,000) fine.

Democrats first again to announce no ads and political activity on 9/11.
Republicans came in on their matching decision midweek. Both parties have joined a growing number of corporations' not advertising on tv and other media

AND HE SAID:"When we get back to Washington after the ... August break, I look forward to working with the United States Congress to do
everything we can to effect an organizational change, which would then allow me to say more certainly to the American people, 'We're effective at
protecting the homeland.' " - President BUSH.
Get the feeling don't you that here is a man 'making war' home AND away. It might help to know whether he's with Mr Rumsfeld, or agin him or independent and taking all on hisself.? A seige mentality of one is hardly ON.

Science for non-scientists.. (Science-in-the-City) http://jsp.antville.org.

Once Was New York-unforgettable photo-journalism-
http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0111/biggart_intro.htm

A recent survey by the US magazine Advertising Age found more than half of all US consumers did not want to see ads on TV on September 11, with
nearly 40 per cent saying they would take a negative view of any company that did advertise
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article 0,4273,4479106,00.html
An illustration of Walter Lippmann's "The American conscience is a reality."
ENDS-Dickenz

Quite a WOW! to my reading was Richard Perle's Opinion piece in the UK's The Telegraph [www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2002/08/09/do0901.xml].
RP is the chairman of the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon, so RP's opinion is in need of note. As is his position relative to this world's 'big stick' war machine.
The piece strives to justify war for the sake of it. His term pre-emption amounts to no more nor less than that.
And his parallel twixt Saddam Hussein and Hitler that not going to war means appeasement the sad result of which led to a prolonged european war and was "far worse" than an immediate war by pre-emption, is predictable grey grail.
Yet more to the point of now and why should pre-emption be even so much as considered justifiable comes in this passage..
..The decision to use force is most difficult when democratic societies are challenged to act
pre-emptively. That is why the Continental powers waited until Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 *and America waited until after September 11* to go after Osama bin Laden.[** my emphasis]
Clear inference if ever there was one that an attack such as 9/11 WAS ANTICIPATED.
But why? What had been happening to require surveillence and the implied alertness? Is RP telling us that ObL was charged by Saddam Hussein to pursue the atrocity? Or is he leading us to that conclusion and thus a need for pre-emptive action?
It would seem not from the passage immediately following
Hitler's self-declared ambitions and military build-up, like bin Laden's demented agenda, were under constant scrutiny long before the acts of aggression.
Specific to ObL isn't it, yet again emphasising a "constant scrutiny" of the man and his associates.
But why? Constancy sets a tone that bungling detection and prevention of 9/11 was out of the question, and thus the why and answers are more important than ever. Lest folk conclude that some US agenda was being pursued which invoked surveillence and alertness for other reasons than 'alien' attack. Such as results from constant provocation? Could such scrutiny have been utterly counterproductive--directly provoking the 'acts of aggression' by what it has deemed unstable. unacceptable or intolerable people?
War response for deliberate attack on one's people or assets -- the big stick - is historically and perhaps even acceptable to what RP describes as "feckless peace lobbies" - but without full disclosure and the pros and cons of this warmongering protagonist the call for pre-emption can IMHO only be accorded the perverse carrot response.
PS: JUST IN CASE YOU'RE WONDERING WHAT KIND OF culture Richard Perle comes from here's an insight from the wsj's onlinejounal about a Vietnamese refugee who trained in science, moved to Maryland and helped create the thermobaric bomb.
...Duong promised herself she would fight for the principles of her adopted homeland.And now, if all went as planned, the BLU-118/B would slice into a tunnel in the Afghan mountains, unleash the chemically engineered hell that she and the rest of the country's top explosives experts had wrought, and America's enemies would die.
ENDS -dickenz-

Drug discoveries by drugcos are 'dropping'. And, according to 'experts' at the Boston Drug Discovery Technology 2002 Conference, this could spell big trouble for R and D.
Which is an interesting remark given how well the whole industry has done since 1989 for instance. Then only 25 drugs made it to blockbuster status of $500M each. By 2001 this had climbed to 129.
But greed and cashflow (aka payback) has caused faster launching of drugs to help this attainment along. Till now and "sustainability" has entered the industry equation.
Now patent expirations must also be accounted(patents push prices and with patent period lapse and competition high price is hard to maintain let alone justify.)
Pete Tollman, Pres. of a Boston Consulting Group, says that 75 per cent of the cost of bringing a drug to market is spent on failures. So minimizing failures is the name of the game.
A Darwinian 'survival of the fittest' culture to R&D is being advocated rather than the present 'boom and bust'
.
-dickenz--

The Federal Communications Commission's 3-1 decision to require television manufacturers to install digital tuners on all sets 13 inches or larger by July 1, 2007, elicited approval from a key lawmaker and the tv broadcast industry, who argued that it was necessary to move
the transition to digital tv forward. "It simply makes little sense to continue selling consumers an analog, 1950s-era technology" when
government policy is to move tv broadcasts to digital technology, said Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., ranking Democrat on the House Energy
and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.
The move is opposed by the Consumer Electronics Association
(CEA), which represents tv manufacturers, as a costly government mandate. The CEA argues that the price of a television set would increase
by an average of $250 because of the decision.
-dickenz-