Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee acknowledged China's sovereignty over Tibet and pledged not to allow "anti-China political activities in India," a reference to the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, led by the Dalai Lama. And China tacitly recognized India's 1975 annexation of the former mountain monarchy of Sikkim by agreeing to open a trading post along the border with the former kingdom.

"I must say, with great satisfaction, that my meetings with the leadership of China have been excellent," Vajpayee said on the third day of a six-day visit, the first by an Indian prime minister in 10 years. "They have confirmed the desire to build stable, enduring and forward-looking ties of friendships shared by the highest political levels in both countries."

1. [The UN Security Council] Decides that Iraq has been and remains in material breach of its obligations under relevant resolutions, [ . . . ];

2. Decides, while acknowledging paragraph 1 above, to afford Iraq, by this resolution, a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations under relevant resolutions of the Council; and accordingly decides to set up an enhanced inspection regime with the aim of bringing to full and verified completion the disarmament process established by resolution 687 (1991) and subsequent resolutions of the Council;

3. Decides that, in order to begin to comply with its disarmament obligations, in addition to submitting the required biannual declarations, the Government of Iraq shall provide to UNMOVIC, the IAEA, and the Council, not later than 30 days from the date of this resolution, a currently accurate, full, and complete declaration of all aspects of its programmes to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and other delivery systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles and dispersal systems designed for use on aircraft, including any holdings and precise locations of such weapons, components, subcomponents, stocks of agents, and related material and equipment , the locations and work of its research, development and production facilities, as well as all other chemical, biological, and nuclear programmes, including any which it claims are for purposes not related to weapon production or material;


4. Decides that false statements or omissions in the declarations submitted by Iraq pursuant to this resolution and failure by Iraq at any time to comply with, and cooperate fully in the implementation of, this resolution shall constitute a further material breach of Iraq’s obligations and will be reported to the Council for assessment in accordance with paragraphs 11 and 12 below;

[ . . . ]

13. Recalls, in that context, that the Council has repeatedly warned Iraq that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its
obligations[].

[emphasis added]

The CIA has in its hands the critical parts of a key piece of Iraqi nuclear technology -- parts needed to develop a bomb program -- that were dug up in a back yard in Baghdad, CNN has learned.

The parts were unearthed by Iraqi scientist Mahdi Obeidi who had hidden them in his back yard under a rose bush 12 years ago under orders from Qusay Hussein and Saddam Hussein's then son-in-law, Hussein Kamel.

What a . . . barking mad . . . caricature.

As Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer write in "Strange Justice," Mr. Thomas himself complained in a 1987 speech that, to win acceptance in conservative ranks, "a black was required to become a caricature of sorts, providing sideshows of anti-black quips and attacks." (Just as blonde conservative pundettes flash long legs and sneer at feminism.)

Claude, the emcee at the oath ceremony on Nob Hill I attended recently, beseeched my 2,000-odd compatriots and me to join him in a cheer: "Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? INS! INS! INS!"

The request that I sing for membership reinforced a growing resentment I felt toward the United States. The American government, in pursuit of an illegal war and a post-9/11 assault on civil liberties, seemed more a police state than a democracy. Was this the America to which I would swear allegiance?

I was born in India but grew up in a proud New England town where Paul Revere was still a local hero. My childhood feelings of patriotism later gave way to more skepticism about this country. Like many American citizens, I felt entitled to criticize this country, but I also couldn't shed the vulnerability that plagues those who nervously cling to green cards. In pursuit of real security, I finally applied to become an American.

[ . . . ]

The local congressman's office, after my file was lost twice, and my application delayed for four years, implied that some of my own problems should be attributed to my ethnicity. I'm not Muslim or Arab, but in the current climate, any substitute will suffice.

[ . . . ]

I listened incredulously as the judge ignored how the civil liberties I had studied as a fifth grader were now under assault. She delivered a trite homily on the "wonderful freedoms" Americans have "to speak" and "to move." I thought of all of the Pakistani Americans who, unable to live here even in silence, are now moving in droves to Canada.

I was mulling over exercising my freedom "to move" by walking out, but then one participant in the ceremony, a native San Franciscan of Korean descent, delivered a rousing speech. He praised American democracy, but deplored its use of intimidation and violence to fight terrorism. He urged the audience not to fear, not to feel threatened, and to speak openly despite the current atmosphere. Felix and I eagerly joined the crowd in the day's first applause.

[emphasis added]

On Monday, the [Supreme Court] ruled that minority applicants may be given an edge when applying for admissions to universities, but limited how much a factor race can play in the selection of students. A closely divided court upheld the University of Michigan law school program that sought a "critical mass" of minorities by a 5-4 vote. The court split 6-3 in finding the undergraduate program unconstitutional.

The case was a main topic of discussion Sunday at a candidate forum sponsored by Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.

"When I'm president, we'll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day," said Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri.

"[Referring, presumably, to Professors Volokh and Reynolds] The fact that this question comes from libertarian law professors should speak for itself," spokesman Erik Smith wrote in an e-mail. "Dick Gephardt knows the law. The president can not overturn a Supreme Court decision. That's not what he said. He was simply expressing his commitment to diversity and his willingness to use the tools of his office to promote affirmative action programs to the fullest extent possible. It's important to remember that Harry Truman used an executive order to integrate the military."

I guess, then, the Gephardt response translates to "Gephardt's not a constitutional ignoramus, or an incipient dictator. He's just your standard-model lying politician!"

"And I will not have to refer to my French fried potatoes as freedom fries and I will not have to freedom kiss my wife when all I want to do is French kiss her. So let's pull together now," he says.

It was last January, when I was covering the Article 32 hearing then going on at the Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, that my brother wrote me what for my dough still stands as the smartest, and most frank, analysis of the whole sorry mess.

By that, I mean, as did my brother, the entire piece -- the original sin of the accidental bombing in Afghanistan by two American pilots that killed four sterling young Canadian soldiers and injured eight others; the way that the incident had become a sort of them-and-us issue, with the Americans portrayed as cavalier cowboys and the Canucks as hapless victims; and the raw emotional quagmire, with one set of decent families grieving and bitterly anticipating the very result that on the other side had another set of equally good people feeling fearful and betrayed, which had developed.

[ . . . ]

"But do they deserve a court martial and a jail term? Not by me. Check the command and control systems, rejig the communications. Do what needs to be done to improve the odds that this never happens again. And know in your heart that this is the deadliest game that man can play, and that this sort of thing will, nonetheless, happen again. These are fearsome toys in a confusing and hostile environment in the hands of brave, young warriors who are doing their best to do the job they have been trained to do. Shit happens. Mourn, compensate, rethink, reconfigure, re-organize and move on.

"Punishment," he concluded, "has no place here."

That's why the decision, expected to be formally announced today, that there will be no court-martial of Majors Schmidt and Umbach, is the right one. It's painful, especially for the families of Sergeant Marc Léger, Corporal Ainsworth Dyer and Privates Richard Green and Nathan Smith, and for their surviving colleagues. It's not terribly satisfactory, because there can be no satisfactory result when good young men are so cruelly killed. But it's the right one, nonetheless.

Pleas for help, then death for U.N. workers

For six days, two terrified [and unarmed] U.N. military observers phoned their superiors - as many as four times a day - begging to be evacuated from their remote outpost in northeastern Congo.

They were receiving death threats, they said. They were alone and unarmed in Mongbwalu, a town ruled by the Lendu tribal militias, notorious for cannibalism. A U.N. helicopter from the city of Bunia could have retrieved them in 35 minutes.

But the United Nations, handcuffed by rules and bureaucracy, didn't send a chopper. On May 18, 10 days after the two peacekeepers made their first call, the United Nations finally flew armed peacekeepers to Mongbwalu.

They found the mutilated bodies of Maj. Safwat al Oran, 37, of Jordan, and Capt. Siddon Davis Banda, 29, of Malawi.

Their corpses had been tossed into a canal and covered with dirt, according to those who saw the bodies. They were shot in the eyes. Their stomachs were split open and their hearts and livers were missing. One man's brain was gone.

[ . . . ]

Col. Daniel Vollot, the U.N. Congo mission's sector commander in Bunia, said that all U.N. employees here worked in dangerous, unpredictable conditions and that the U.N. mission was not responsible for the deaths of Banda and Oran.

"We can't feel guilty," Vollot said. "Certainly, if we had arrived two or three days before, they would be alive. It's difficult, but I don't feel guilty about that."

[ . . . ]

"Everyone is to blame, starting from the guy who planned the operation," said one of the U.N. military observers.

On Wednesday, the U.N. mission in Congo held a memorial service for Oran and Banda in Kinshasa. Senior representatives of all 15 members of the U.N. Security Council, who are here on a fact-finding mission, attended the ceremony.

[emphasis added]

Los Angeles officials secretly asked the U.S. Department of Transportation in April to block the sale of part of El Toro this fall so the former base could be used to relieve congestion at Los Angeles International Airport.

[ . . . ]

"The benefit of an airport at El Toro is enormous for the entire region," said Matt Middlebrook, a spokesman for Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn.

Originally, LAX was going to absorb most of the growth by increasing its capacity to 98 million passengers annually. Then LAX's neighbors objected, and during his campaign Hahn promised to abandon those plans.

[ . . . ]

Then Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Troy Edwards and Airport Board President Ted Stein, both Hahn appointees, presented a 37-page memo to the Department of Transportation.

They urged the department to stop the sale of El Toro land, to take ownership of the base and to lease it to Los Angeles World Airports. They pointed out that Los Angeles already owns airport property outside the city's limits -- in Ontario and in Palmdale.

[ . . . ]

Los Angeles officials say it would be safe and point out that even the president's plane has landed at El Toro.

Usually I . . . breathily repeat things like, " . . . I'm . . . a haywire robot . . . who . . . produced . . . porn."

[Malkovich] provoked a fury last year when, while addressing students at the Cambridge Union in England, the actor casually mentioned that he would like to shoot independent journalist Robert Fisk and Glasgow Labour MP George Galloway.

Malkovich has also vilely fulminated in support of the death penalty. The Chicago Tribune quoted him as saying: “America’s left wing wants criminals coddled, and no one wants to be punished. I would have no problem pushing the switch while having dinner.”

A new rifle-launched gas grenade, invented by the U.S. Army ostensibly for nonlethal crowd control, has created a stir because the patent filed on the technology claims that it can deliver chemical and biological agents, two payloads forbidden by international treaty and U.S. law.

Greg Aharonian, editor of the Internet Patent News Service in San Francisco, helped stir the tempest last week by e-mailing selected portions of patent number 6,523,478, filed by the Army on Sept. 10, 2001, and granted by the Patent Office in February.

The patent describes how to create a "rifle-launched non-lethal" projectile to release aerosols "selected from the group consisting of smoke, crowd control agents, biological agents, chemical agents, obscurants, marking agents, dyes and inks, chaffs and flakes."

But Edward Hammond, a bioweapons watchdog with the nonprofit Sunshine Project in Austin, Texas, said the wording of the patent represents more than a semantic error.

Hammond said the Sunshine Project Web site lists a series of government- sponsored inventions that outline ways to solve the technical challenges of delivering a gas or aerosol payload in such a way that detonation of the warhead doesn't disperse the active ingredient.

He said that while he isn't sure the new patent contains enough detail to teach a terrorist how to build a biogrenade, he said that the mere use of words like "biological and chemical agents" in the application suggests Army scientists are unaware of treaty obligations.

"What's shocking here is that the claim went through," Hammond said, asking "What does that say to you if you're the Chinese or any of a number of other countries around the world?"

5. The projectile of claim 4, wherein the aerosol composition is further selected from the group consisting of smoke, crowd control agents, biological agents, chemical agents, obscurants, marking agents, dyes and inks, chaffs and flakes.

Aerosols are relatively stable suspensions of liquid or solid particles in gas, especially air. Smoke, fog, and mist are typical examples of aerosols. Aerosols have been used extensively by the military for offensive and defensive purposes in order to incapacitate or confuse enemy troops and/or to protect friendly combat forces. In civilian use, aerosol dispersal is sometimes used mainly for police and firefighting purposes. Such aerosol payloads have included smoke, obscurant, fire retarding agents, crowd control agents, dye indicators, chemical/biological agents, and the like. [emphasis added]

Maureen Dowd . . . let slip . . . a gerbil . . . Twice used . . . ,intent on . . . Love.

Embattled Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa has another believer in his innocence: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Chavez, a left-handed pitcher on the diamond, said during a speech on Venezuela's oil industry Friday that he believed Sosa made an honest mistake when he used a corked bat.

[ . . . ]

"I've been looking into some of the physics behind it ... and some say it's a myth" that a corked bat adds power, Chavez said.

"In reality, the cork makes the bat lighter so you can swing it faster and increase the velocity - but the impact (on the ball) weakens," the president explained.

Chavez cited academic studies saying corked bats only increase the speed of a swing by 1 percent.

"I'm using this thesis, without knowing it in depth, to profess my faith that every one of Sammy Sosa's home runs were good ones," Chavez concluded.

Two frat boys could face felony fish theft and cruelty charges for koi- napping a beloved jumbo goldfish from a pond at UC Santa Cruz -- and reportedly barbecuing and eating it.

[ . . . ]

"I've heard from both students and staff a sense of violation," said David Evan Jones, provost at the university's Porter College, where Goldie was the celebrated big fish -- 18 inches -- in a small courtyard pond.

[ . . . ]

[The alleged theives expressed remorse and paid money toward a new fish] But fish fans want the pair deep-fried -- especially at Porter, home to UCSC arts programs and "arty" students who embrace an "alternative" philosophy, according to residents.

"Porter is anti-MTV and anti-frat generally," said a college resident who only identified himself as Eric. "Combine the two and then steal a fish -- of course people are going to be pissed off."

A mass grave containing the remains of 200 Kurdish children has been discovered in the northern Iraqi province of Kirkuk.

The Kurdish newspaper Taakhi said the communal grave was found close to Debs, in Kirkuk, on May 30.

Suggesting that the United States overreacted to the events of Sept. 11, Levitte said France itself was the victim of Islamic terror in the 1980s and 1990s but that it has opted for a "low intensity" response. He said Europeans have had "some difficulties" in understanding the more muscular U.S. approach.

The first difference is about 9/11. I was the Ambassador of France to the United Nations and I saw from my office the destruction of the Twin Towers. So I feel in my heart and for the rest of my life what the Americans felt: the huge shock of these attacks in the heart of the city which is the symbol of American success, the symbol of New York – the Twin Towers. In Europe, in France, we understand this in a more abstract way because we were not directly involved. Islamist terror for us is quite familiar. We were confronted with Islamist terror in the 80’s and the mid 90’s. In our streets, we had a lot of terrorist attacks, but it has remained a kind of low intensity war. This why we have some difficulties in France, in Europe, to understand that America is at war, at war against Islamic terror. And it’s a real war. That’s the first difference, it seems to me, between the United States and Europe.

Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that al-Qaida was spent. "Al-Qaida is on the run," President Bush said last week. 'That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. . . . They're not a problem anymore.''

Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they're not a problem anymore. And we'll stay on the hunt. To make sure America is a secure country, the al Qaeda terrorists have got to understand it doesn't matter how long it's going to take, they will be brought to justice.
[emphasis on the portion deleted in Dowd's column.]

Probably the youngest instructors ever in an FBI classroom, the girls have become an invaluable help to Operation Innocent Images -- an initiative that tries to stop people from peddling child pornography or otherwise sexually exploiting children, FBI officials said. The Washington Post agreed to withhold the girls' last names to protect them from harassment on the Internet and elsewhere.

Yesterday, at their middle school graduation ceremony, the girls each received a silver-framed letter of commendation signed by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III. In the letter, Mueller thanked them for developing the lessons that have directly helped catch pedophiles, despite their "busy 8th grade schedule."

An official from Hamas, which uses terroristic tactics to protest the existence of an Israeli state, repeated after the press conference that it will not lay down its arms despite appeals from [Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud] Abbas for all terror groups to do so.

Phase I: Ending Terror And Violence, Normalizing Palestinian Life, and Building Palestinian Institutions Present to May 2003

In Phase I, the Palestinians immediately undertake an unconditional cessation of violence according to the steps outlined below; such action should be accompanied by supportive measures undertaken by Israel.

I just hope Bush takes a hard-line, standing up at the beginning and saying, "See my roadmap? Notice how all the roads lead to saturation bombing if you f**k with me."

[The author of a book on Treblinka] tells of stories by Jews he's interviewed, stories of young children being told by their mothers, "If they hit you, lower your head. Do not fight back or they will kill you."

Then [the British police officer, speaking to American exchange students] instructed us on how to properly be a victim. If we were attacked, we were to assume a defensive posture, such as raising our hands to block an attack. The reason was (and she spelled it out in no uncertain terms) that if a witness saw the incident and we were to attempt to defend ourselves by fighting back, the witness would be unable to tell who the agressor was. However, if we rolled up in a ball, it would be quite clear who the victim was.

[The 1910 treaty under which Japan annexed Korea] "concluded amicably and not by force."

[For the full context, see this. Scroll down to the bit about Queen Min. - Tony]

"Many of [the comfort women] went for the money."

"Faced with oil and other embargoes from other countries, Japan had no choice but to venture out southward to secure natural resources.

President Roh Moo-hyun will express regret when he meets Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on Saturday for the recent remark by Taro Aso, the chief policy-maker of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party, which upset many Koreans. Taro said that many Koreans, during the colonial era, voluntarily assumed Japanese names.

"I regret that my remarks were misunderstood because of my poor communications skills while I was trying to explain the matter plainly," Taro Aso, chairman of the Japanese ruling Liberal Democratic Party's policy research council, was quoted as saying at a press conference in Tokyo.