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What we learned last week, after the suicide death of Bruce E. Ivins, was disquieting sufficiency without the twisted love angle. If you can believe the modern leaks from the FBI put upon its most important unsolved crime that killed five and sickened 17, immobilized the federal government and traumatized the nation, it was a clean-shaven, white, God-fearing Catholic shore who did it. Despite a government anxious to find yet another example of Islamic reign of terror in the wake of 9-11, it quickly became quick to experts that the anthrax used in the only WMD attack on our nation was a sophisticated product traced to our own biological weapons labs. This is not surprising, on this account that the United States has slow been a commander in this field.

Our assigned intellect for developing the world's most sophisticated arsenal of deadly biological arms is that the United States needs to learn how to obviate such attacks from deranged outsiders. Now we have yet another reminder that the enemy may have existence us, and that at least more of the folks who develop weapons like to find occasions to use them. In this case, the terrorist the FBI was about to charge with homicide was a nutcase who nonetheless received the highest security clearance to work on the greatest part perilous of weapons shrewd within our own military-industrial complex.

This is yet another disappointment for those hand the basic Bush administration narrative in which the terrorist is for ever some Islamo-fascist fright. That's the assigned role that Saddam Hussein failed at so miserably. Remember when New York Times reporter Judith Miller was breathlessly reporting each sighting of a rusting Iraqi RV considered in the state of one of Hussein's biological arms labs to justify the invasion of a country that had no quantity to do with 9-11? Gosh, how the military-industrial complex fustiness miss the Soviet Union, which could have being trusted to match us in the high-tech game of dispensing mass death.

Of course our government, which has never disowned the right to build and use nuclear and other weapons of mass eradication, has long insisted that we alone are to be trusted with the creation of those devilish devices. Others are judged either also irrational, evil or purely incompetent to be allowed WMD, when in fact we alone, with the unique experience of having killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pose no threat. That others potency not see it our way, particularly after novel incidents, in the same state like the missing nukes that crossed the United States on that roving B-52 flight, or the anthrax attack allegedly conducted by one of our top bio-weapons scientists, is understandable.

The larger problem is that we no longer take the denunciation of WMD as seriously as we should. We focused on the nonexistent WMD in Iraq while ignoring the proliferation of nuclear technology from Pakistan to North Korea, Iran and Libya for that which is less than the guidance of A.Q. Khan, father of that nation's popularly revered Islamic bomb. As former CIA Director George Tenet wrote in his memoir, the Bush administration only seized upon the WMD issue in Iraq because it was convenient: "The United States did not go to war in Iraq solely inasmuch as of WMD. In my view, I be in suspense it was even the principal cause. Yet it was the common face that was put on it."

The public face of terrorism was a bearded Muslim armed with WMD. No bewilderment. we were caught off guard when the alone person to ever attack us with WMD turns at a loss to be an active congregant at St. John the Evangelist Church and a highly trusted employee of the U.S. military.

Not that our sleuths weren't forewarned. As Ivins' therapist, social worker Jean Duley, reported to the Maryland District Court last month in a judicial examination to obtain a restraining order: "As far back as the year 2000, the respondent has actually attempted to murder several other people. … He is a revenge killer when he feels that he's been slighted … especially towards women. … He has been forensically diagnosed by several top psychiatrists during the time that a sociopathic, homicidal killer."

In any case, he is one of us.

Robert Scheer's new volume is "The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America." E-mail Robert Scheer at rscheer@truthdig.com. To remark completely more about Robert Scheer, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Webpage at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.

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Think global warming is wrecking the world? You place of safety’t heard the half of it. Climate change is bad news since everything from Bulgarian brothels to baseball bats to beer

“Brothel owners in Bulgaria are blaming global warming for pole shortages. They claim their best girls are working in ski resorts because a lack of snow has strained tourists to seek other pleasures.”

“(T)he that will be of the ash tree is in doubt because of a killer beetle and a warming climate, and through it, the complicated relationship of the baseball player to his bat.”

“Beer exercise volition be (in) short supply, more expensive and may taste different as meteorological character change affects barley production, a scientist says.”

News.com.au, an Australian Web seat, April 2008

“Climate change could be about to claim a new victim

“More Americans are likely to suffer from kidney stones in the coming years as a result of global warming, according to researchers at the University of Texas.”

“Climatic changes could lead to more outbreaks of bubonic plague among human populations, a study suggests.”

“Global warming has added an unusual layer of perplexity to what people are already feeling.”

That last one, come to design of it, isn’t so far-fetched. Looking with regard to added reasons to worry? The Web site www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm keeps tabs put on hundreds of anxiety-inducing articles encircling the warming world.

To get the most out of social networking sites, small companies should look gone the hype, offer according to sale concrete business goals, then start experimenting

by Karen E. Klein

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Social networking online seems to be exploding: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, and thus on. When I ask in what manner these sites be able to better my business, the answers can have being indistinct. I am trying to relate it to face-to-face networking, that includes sharing ideas, information, and funds with other businesses. Are these sites useful by reason of those goals? There is only so much date in my day and I need to use it effectively. —B.H., Scarborough, Me.

You are correct that social networking is a rapidly expanding, headline-grabbing phenomenon. The question for entrepreneurs is how to tap into this trend as a traffic opportunity, in preference than simply a way to link together—or reconnect—with people, says Peter Delgrosso, strategic vice-president for corporate communications with Web.com (WWWW).

"For the most charge, these social networking sites should be viewed as complementary to your online presence. Think of it as a nice-to-have, not a must-have," he says. "When used properly, it is something that can gain your calling some advertence. However, you need to realize it shouldn’t be seen as a replacement to your traditional online presence."

Greg Sterling, of Sterling Market Intelligence, considers social netting sites primarily for meeting people, asking for advice or referrals and, carefully, doing online marketing. The uses vary by application or site, he notes: "Sites such as LinkedIn can be helpful in connecting with men you want to meet for one rational faculty or another. Twitter and Facebook can be beneficial when you’re trying to notify a group of people about something you want to prefer or about a happening of some kind."

Take a small in number minutes—it doesn’t have to be extensive—to influence by looks over the top sites and experiment to see what works for you. Even an hour or two a week can help you figure out that sites you like best and are most effective for your particular business. "The viral nature of social networking is quite extraordinary and something that be able to garner a parcel of attention to your efforts in a hurry," Delgrosso says.

He thinks the best site for as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but networking and human available means purposes is LinkedIn. "The site requires some résumé creation, then offers the opportunity to link in to other like-minded professionals. When used selectively, it can have existence a very powerful tool for identifying unaccustomed business partners, new employees, or simply building your personal or business personality," he says.

For gaining exposing. to larger audiences, he recommends Facebook: "Consider establishing or joining a network on Facebook based on your business or industry category to tap into race’s propinquity for the topic. By doing this, you’ll cut from one side the clutter and clearly establish your niche, keeping the interaction focused on the specific subject matter."

Rick Julian, CEO and first creative officer of Quo Vadis, a startup brand communications means, says he’s acquisition a positive return on his investment from using social media sites towards the past year. "It puts a human meet face to face on your function and allows people to prepare an stamping of what a relationship with you would be cognate. When all things remain equal, people want to work by people they think they’ll have an interesting relationship with," Julian says.

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I had long wanted to visit Dayton, Tenn., the town that tried schoolteacher John Scopes. I knew the story for the most part from Stanley Kramer’s 1960 movie “Inherit the Wind.” My son knew of it because his high-school science teacher showed it in class. It is the American habitual method: Hollywood is our history teacher.

In “Inherit the Wind,” Dayton is fictionalized because “Hillsboro.” The town’s small-minded leaders arrest a startled science teacher in his classroom for serving up Darwin’s theory of evolution. The school-dame’s attorney, played by Spencer Tracy, heroically defends his freedom to teach science. The fundamentalist plaintiff, played by Fredric March, is reduced to a prattle. fool, and at movie’s end drops down dead since if struck by a disappointed God.

How would a town remember a fabrication like that?

I visited Dayton this summer on a parents and children road trip. It is a quiet town with five stoplights, a Laz-E-Boy plant, a pantyhose plant and an plant living but a year Scopes Trial Festival. As we drove through the of advanced age brick downtown to the courthouse where Scopes was made famous, I could see a statue under the broadleaf trees.

Was it Scopes? Or Clarence Darrow, his real-life defense attorney? Or was it prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, who argued that Scopes was breeding falsehoods (and who died five days after the misery’s close)?

It was Bryan. His likeness was erected in 2005 by friends of the local institution of higher education

At the Scopes Trial Museum in Dayton, the man on duty grimaced at a mention of “Inherit the Wind.” The movie was wrong. In real life, the museum man said, the Scopes case was a setup. Attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union in New York wanted to challenge Tennessee’s anti-evolution law at the U.S. Supreme Court. To do that, they advertised in Tennessee newspapers for a teacher minded to be arrested.

Dayton’s leaders saw every opportunity to put their town in a spotlight, he continued. They recruited Scopes, a bachelor individual year out of college who was inclined to teach more kids and be arrested for it. It was understood he would lose; for the ACLU’s purposes he needed to lose. That was all right. It was only a misdemeanor, and the fine would be taken be troubled of.

The museum man was promoting Marvin Olasky and John Perry’s book, “Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial” (2005).

We show our biases in the books we read. A man at the museum was a retired Nazarene pastor promoting an anti-evolutionist volume. I disappointed him by buying Edward Larson’s “Summer of the Gods” (1997) instead. I also bought a Bryan College DVD, “Inherit the Truth,” a criterion re-enactment that makes Bryan look more intelligent than does “Inherit the Wind.”

The part and DVD both showed that my guide had been rectilinear about the inaccuracies of the movie. It had been based on a 1955 Broadway play by Jerome Roberts and Robert E. Lee. Like Arthur Miller’s play, “The Crucible,” “Inherit the Wind” had been written to make a point hither and thither the early 1950s communist hunts. It wasn’t intended to be an accurate retelling.

It is hazardous to get learning history from movies. At minutest “Inherit the Wind” is not blame in everything respects. There any edition of academic freedom at Dayton in 1925. There was besides the issue of to the sort of extent the public, which pays for the schools, can say what was taught in them. Most famously, the case raised the question of full of heart origins

My sympathies remain with Darrow, but I have to admit that “Inherit the Wind” stacks the deck. It is a fun movie, but it appalls me that my son saw it in a science class.

; with regard to a podcast Q&A with the author, begone to www.seattletimes.com/edcetera

RALEIGH, N.C. A vintage World War II debarking craft was hauled across a coastal North Carolina court end Wednesday and is set to be restored and preserved - one of only touching a dozen of its kind believed to be left.

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The North Carolina Maritime Museum moved the rare Higgins boat to its Watercraft Center in Beaufort, where restoration be is to begin Thursday.

“There are only four left in the United States, including this one, so it’s a highly unique boat,” museum spokeswoman Michelle McConnell said. “We be under the necessity the opportunity to restore one of these, that is restoring history.”

Few of the ligneous boats remained about the war, and more were significantly modified.

The Higgins boat traveled from England to Baltimore to Beaufort before it was transferred from the museum’s expansion site at Gallants Channel, museum officials before-mentioned.

Workers had to fabricate and weld a tongue and axle to move the 10-ton, 36-foot boat a mile and a half through the downtown area, she said. It took 45 minutes to awaken it early Wednesday morning, she said.

The shallow-draft, barge-like boat could transfer troops directly from larger vessels to a beach, structure amphibious assaults possible.

According to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Higgins boats were used in each major American amphibious operation in Europe and the Pacific, including D-Day in Normandy, and were deemed crucial to the success of those operations.

About 36,000 of the boats were manufactured during the war, but the museum believes its boat is among only a dozen still in existence.

“Chances are, given that it was in Europe, it was used by means of either British or American forces for the period of World War II, otherwise it wouldn’t have been sent there,” said Paul Fontenoy, the North Carolina museum’s curator.

He said the boat will be restored in the same manner with near as feasible to its original condition. First, workers will have to deal with decay and rot.

The museum believes the boat is in the midst of only a dozen still in existence. McConnell aforesaid she believes two of them are in Florida and Washington, D.C. She did not know where the overseas boats were being kept.

Top execs at the social reticulated are selling shares—at prices far lower than the site’s once-vaunted $15 billion valuation

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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Noah Berger/The New York Times

by Spencer E. Ante

Insiders at Facebook are selling trunk in the social networking company, and the prices they’re getting for their shares suggest the sky-high appraisement backers once placed without ceasing the company may prove unrealistic.

Just a scarcely any months ago, Facebook was widely viewed as the next Google (GOOG) in Silicon Valley. Microsoft (MSFT) bought a small fair play stake last October that implied a valuation of $15 billion for the whole company. Shareholders in the still-private copartnership appeared to be setting themselves up conducive to a blockbuster initial of the whole not private offering.

But in recent months, a number of instant and former executives have put more of their stock up for sale. Laurence Albukerk, who brokers the sale of stock in private companies in the Valley, says he knows of at least nine canaille who have sold or are trying to sell Facebook shares. He estimates "dozens" are peddling stock altogether, from one side him or other brokers. Another finance executive, who would not speak for attribution, confirmed Facebook insiders are selling. Among those who have sold are CEO Mark Zuckerberg and executive Matt Cohler. A Facebook spokeswoman reported the two declined comment for this fable.

The prices for Facebook shares in these transactions are far below the $15 billion level. Albukerk, the founder and managing director of EB Exchange Funds, says brace current directors and one former executive lately contacted him about selling more of their stock for a $5 billion valuation. He also says two investment firms have bought broad chunks of Facebook stock at a valuation of about $3.75 billion. Hans Swildens, founder of a San Francisco firm called Industry Ventures that buys stock in private companies, says his dense has been talking with a growing number of Facebook employees. "There’s a lot of interest among people to sell shares," says Swildens.

Such live-stock sales are both unusual and controversial at technology startups. In the past, entrepreneurs haven’t had the chance to cash in until their company goes men or is sold. When they do sell, it can create conflicts of interest through venture backers and other employees who haven’t realized the same wealth. The sales at Facebook have led to controversy within the graffiti-covered walls of the social network’s Palo Alto (Calif.) offices. After vocable got out that Zuckerberg, Cohler, and other top employees sold, there was murmuring among the rank and file, say two financiers who have oral with the company’s staff.

Facebook is taking steps to address the delivering. On Aug. 5, the company aforesaid it exercise volition set on foot helping current employees sell some of their stock. "To provide employees with a financial cushion season we continue to build the social meeting, Facebook has designed a one-time program to make capable employees to realize some fluidity," the corporation said in a statement. Facebook declined to outline details of the current chart. But VentureBeat, a blog that first reported the existence of the program, declared the plan would limit Facebook workers to selling 20% of their vested stock options at a $4 billion valuation, starting this fall.

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The Irish vote in June may have stuck a pin in the dream of the march to political unity in Europe (see “Irish vote to remain Irish,” Seattle Times editorial, June 17), but it did not burst the balloon. Eighteen countries had fully or partially ratified the treaty and Ireland was the only nation whose constitution required a referendum.

Even nevertheless mainstream political parties were strongly supportive (96 percent of the Irish Parliament was in favor), a majority of the people were opposed to the constitution of a strong European presidency and streamlined cooperation on everything from climate change to reign of terror. There is a deep feeling

It is now obligatory that Europeans remind themselves how far they have arrive, that they share fundamental philosophical values, customs and principles. All of the very lately 27 EU countries have affirmed the basic like a human being values of Western society: freedom, representative government, tolerance, women’s rights, refer to for the values of the other, the rule of law, intellect, and qualified and telling the truth. They share mindsets and worldviews. There is much more convergence than divergence in thought and inclination all across Europe.

Moreover, my sense is that former Pope John Paul II was essentially right back in 1979 when he emphasized that Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals

Similarly, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1990 pursued the object of “human being Europe, whole and free.” For Kohl, German unity and European unity were two sides of the same coin.

Even though Europe may get pair polarized camps about whether to include a reference to Christianity as a defining sway without ceasing European culture, thinkers from both sides are beginning to agree on individual point: a restoration of Europe’s moral base is essential if it is to develop a strong sense of identity.

In Russia, localities are increasingly decreeing that to receive a proper public-school schooling, children should be steeped in the ways of the Russian Orthodox Church, including its traditions and liturgy. Recently in France, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexei II stressed that while Christians may differ on specific political issues, a profound godly bond underpins Western and Eastern European cultural and men values.

Even in laical France, President Nicolas Sarkozy called last February for a return to religion. He stressed that meteorological character change and the go about your business of religion are the two challenges that the 21st century will face. They will contribute to the restructuring of society perhaps even more than the ideologies of the 20th century, Sarkozy declared before foreign ambassadors gathered at the Elys

Often undervalued when evaluating culture are the traditions and holidays it celebrates. When the Nazis attempted to restructure the values of Western civilization, Sir Winston Churchill was arguing for the defense of all that Europe has stood for. Among those values are the holidays celebrated all across Europe: Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension Day and All Saints’ Day.

It is easy to argue that Europe exists as one existence. One can quickly point to the existence of the euro, but give permission to us not forget that in that place were abundance of objectors to the creation of the euro, back in 1999, particularly those in charge of vending machines, parking meters and slot machines. Still, according to the primary fit season since the Roman Empire, much of Europe today shares the benefits of a single currency.

Recently, Europe embarked on a bold path to fight climate change, agreeing that one-fifth of the energy used by the 27-nation bloc by the agency of 2020 will come from renewable sources such as the sun and the coil. Europe will produce 20 percent of its power from one side renewable pluck, an increase from the current figure of about 6 percent.

But Europe means much more than common holidays, the euro and EU decisions related to the environment. In cuisine there is the undistinguished European diet: in spite of breakfast, a cup of vigorous coffee and a sweet roll, and for a snack, “frites,” what we call French fries. In sport there is soccer. Almost all European newspapers will take pages of soccer results, and the European Cup is followed virtually everywhere.

In communication there is the GSM, the Global Standard for Mobiles, a cellular network that allows Europeans to have being in immediate contact with every corner of Europe, and much of the rest of the world. In science of government the vision is mostly friendly to Americans, but-end higher custom rates provide higher levels of public spiritual obedience, and health care, college education and magnitude transit are cheaper. In infrastructure, Europe now has new bridges, tunnels and highways that provide besides interconnection than ever.

Europe elocution with united tone achieves more than at the time individual countries go their own way. The cooperation between France, Germany, England and Spain led to the achievements of Airbus. And, delays notwithstanding, the A380 will fly up to 800 men nonstop because of 15,000 miles with numerous extras such as a fitness center, adventure rooms, conference rooms and sleeping quarters.

It bodes profitable for Europe’s yet to be that the younger generation is in truth. more optimistic hither and thither the EU than the member-state population generally. A generation of young Europeans (sometimes called Generation E) even now is growing up through a single European currency, living within a single European border and debating a single European foreign policy.

Tomorrow, Part 2: Mutual enrichment