The tape, broadcast on Wednesday night by the ABC affiliate in Minneapolis, appeared to confirm a warning given earlier this month to the agency by Iraqi officials, who said that hundreds of tons of high-grade explosives, powerful enough to bring down buildings or detonate nuclear weapons, had vanished from the site after the invasion of Iraq. - from the NYT

Science and Technology Minister Rashad Omar was responding to an International Atomic Energy Agency report on Monday that neither Baghdad nor Washington appeared to have noticed the disappearance of nuclear equipment and materials once closely monitored by the agency. - from Reuters (NYT reg/req)

The cameras demonstrated that Mr. Bush cannot hear criticism without frowning, blinking and squirming (he even sighed once). They showed that Mr. Kerry can control his anger and stay cool but that he cannot suppress his inner overeager A student, flashing a bleach-white smile and nodding hungrily at each question. - from the NYT (reg/req)

The Ultra Deep Field is a view of one patch of sky built from 800 exposures. The picture shows faint galaxies whose stars were shining just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. But the image's revelation that fewer stars than expected were being born at this time brings into question current ideas on cosmic evolution. - from the BBC

In a highly classified National Intelligence Estimate, the council looked at the political, economic and security situation in the war-torn country and determined that — at best — stability in Iraq would be tenuous, a U.S. official said late Wednesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity. 

At worst, the official said, were "trend lines that would point to a civil war." The official said it "would be fair" to call the document "pessimistic." - from The AP

In this post-ideological age, anti-Americanism fills the void left by defunct belief systems. It has become a powerful trend in international politics today—and perhaps the most dangerous. U.S. hegemony has its problems, but a world that reacts instinctively against the United States will be less peaceful, less cooperative, less prosperous, less open, and less stable. - from Foreign Policy

But when Amr Moussa reprised his statement to a meeting in Cairo this week, there was no dissent. Instead, the former Egyptian foreign minister, an influential figure in the Middle East, got nods when he said "the gates of Hell are open in Iraq, where the situation is becoming more complicated and troubled." - from USA Today

Kidnapping in Iraq has become not only a political tool but big business, with crime gangs often made up of elements from the former intelligence service and military believed to be selling their victims to extremist groups more interested in making an ideological point. - from the Christian Science Monitor

A statement issued by the office of the interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, also accused al-Jazeera of continuing to operate from Iraq despite the ban. - from the BBC

Sixty-two percent say their workload has increased over the last six months; 53 percent say work leaves them "overtired and overwhelmed." 

Even at home, in the soccer bleachers or at the Labor Day picnic, workers are never really off the clock, bound to BlackBerries, cellphones and laptops. Add iffy job security, rising health care costs, ailing pension plans and the fear that a financial setback could put mortgage payments out of reach, and the office has become, for many, an echo chamber of angst. - from the NYT (reg/req)

Back then, in the 1950's and early 1960's, at the height of the cold war, people in Emmett thought what they occasionally saw dusting their fruit orchards and cow pastures was frost - only it was not cold to the touch, several longtime residents said. Others described it as a gray-white powder that seemed to come out of nowhere. - from the NYT (reg/req)

Still the caring "compassionate conservative" voters met and liked four years ago, still the strong steward who has led them through tumultuous times of terrorism and war, still the man they can trust to face the problems of a second term - abroad, and at home.

But he offered few critical details of the second-term domestic agenda he outlined. His big policy ideas - restraining government spending, simplifying the tax code, offering tax credits for health savings accounts, allowing personal investment accounts for Social Security - were vague. And the specific proposals he cited - increasing money for community colleges, opening rural health centers - were mostly small. - from the NYT (reg/req)

Birthrates in developed countries from Italy to Korea have sunk below the levels needed for their populations to replace themselves; the typical age of marriage and pregnancy has risen, and the use of birth control has soared beyond the dreams of Margaret Sanger and the nightmares of the Vatican.

The threat is now more regional than global, explosive only in places like India and Pakistan. Ever since 1968, when the United Nations Population Division predicted that the world population, now 6.3 billion, would grow to at least 12 billion by 2050, the agency has regularly revised its estimates downward. Now it expects population to plateau at nine billion.... 

...Dr. Ehrlich still argues that the earth's "optimal population size" is two billion. That's different from the maximum supportable size, which depends on the consumption of resources. 

"I have severe doubts that we can support even two billion if they all live like citizens of the U.S.," he said. "The world can support a lot more vegetarian saints than Hummer-driving idiots." - from the NYT (reg/req)

A new report reveals that more than 40% of the world's population does not have even the most basic sanitation. 

More than one billion people have no access to clean water sources, the document adds. - from the BBC

The European Environment Agency said much more needs to be done — and fast. Climate change "will considerably affect our societies and environments for decades and centuries to come," its 107-page report said. 

It said rising temperatures could eliminate three-quarters of the Alpine glaciers by 2050 and bring repeats of Europe's mammoth floods two years ago and the heat wave that killed thousands and burned up crops last summer. The rise in sea levels along Europe's coasts is likely to accelerate, it added. - from The AP

Four Afghan men arrested with them in Kabul in early July are also in the dock. 

Even the judge admits he has never tried a case like it. 

But the key question for this next stage is this: Will Mr Idema produce any evidence for the sensational claims he made at the first hearing three weeks ago? 

He said then that he was in Afghanistan on a secret anti-terrorist mission approved at the highest levels of the Pentagon - claims the US military denies. 

"We were in contact directly by fax and e-mail and phone with [Defence Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld's office," Mr Idema said when journalists asked him to name names, "and with the deputy secretary of defence for intelligence." - from the BBC

From Istanbul to Madrid, local jihadists mounted daring and deadly attacks with little apparent support from Osama bin Laden's crippled network. President Bush and other U.S. officials boasted that two-thirds of al Qaeda's senior leadership had been captured or killed and that those who remained, including bin Laden, were desperate and on the run. 

But the wave of arrests and intelligence discoveries in Pakistan in recent weeks that led to a new terrorism alert in the United States caught many U.S. officials and outside experts by surprise. It revealed a network of operatives connected to past al Qaeda operations and aligned with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the imprisoned mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. 

The new evidence suggests that al Qaeda is battered but not beaten, and that a motley collection of old hands and recent recruits has formed a nucleus in Pakistan that is pushing forward with plans for attacks in the United States, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials. - from the Washington Post

The probe, named Messenger, rocketed away in the in the pre-dawn moonlight on what will be a 5 billion-mile, 6½-year journey to Mercury. The trip should have started a day earlier, but clouds from Tropical Storm Alex postponed liftoff. 

Scientists have been yearning to study Mercury up-close ever since Mariner 10 zoomed by three times in the mid-1970s. 

If all goes well, come 2011, Messenger will be the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. 

The spacecraft cannot fly straight to Mercury; it does not carry nearly enough fuel. So it will fly once past Earth, twice past Venus and three times past Mercury — and make 15 loops around the sun — before slowing enough to slip into orbit around the small, hot planet. 

Its seven scientific instruments will collect data for a full year in orbit around Mercury, an average 36 million miles from the sun. That's 2½ times closer to the sun than Earth — it would be as though 11 suns were beating down on Earth. 

Messenger will be blasted by up to 700-degree heat once it reaches Mercury, but its instruments will operate at room temperature, protected by a custom-built ceramic-fabric sunshade just one-quarter of an inch thick. All Mariner 10 had was a quaintly old-fashioned umbrella. 

That's why, in large part, it's taken so long to return to Mercury. Scientists had to figure out how to beat the heat. - from The AP

Even Prime Minister Tony Blair is worried. "There is a clear and growing problem in our town and city centers up and down the country on Friday and Saturday nights," said Mr. Blair, whose son, then 16, was found vomiting and incoherent on a London street four years ago after an evening of drinking. "As a society we have to make sure that this form of what we often call binge drinking doesn't become the new British disease."

By some measures it already has. Cheaper and more readily available alcohol, changing drinking patterns, a steep increase in drinking among young women and a decline in old standards of civility have turned what was once a manageable part of life into a problem that costs society, according to government estimates, $35 billion a year. - from the NYT (reg/req)

White people are inherently racist, tolerate abuses such as racial profiling by police, make up the entire serial-killer population, can't stand to have blacks in positions of authority over them and, in the case of white men, don't know how to make love to women.

These are some of the inner views harbored by two of the characters -- one white, one black -- in "Flag Day," a "play in two plays" about contemporary racial attitudes by Tony Award nominee Lee Blessing.

Presented as a world premiere, it has proven the most provocative entry in this year's Contemporary American Theater Festival, held once again in this historic Potomac River town some 70 miles northwest of Washington. - from the Chicago Tribune (reg/req)

Saying it had been a part of "groupthink," the paper in a highly unusual editorial titled "A Pause for Hindsight" admitted it had not questioned the existence of WMD in Iraq before the war strongly enough, partly because it "did not listen carefully" to those who raised those doubts. And, the editorial added, it "should have been more aggressive in helping our readers understand that there was always a possibility that no large stockpiles existed."

Although the paper did express serious misgivings about the invasion of Iraq, "we regret now that we didn't do more to challenge the president's assumptions. ... Just as we cannot undo the invasion," the editorial continued, "we cannot pretend that it was a good idea -- even if it had been well carried out." - from Editor & Publisher

The officials told The Associated Press the guerrillas can call on loyalists to boost their forces to as high as 20,000 and have enough popular support among nationalist Iraqis angered by the presence of U.S. troops that they cannot be militarily defeated. 

Robert Barrows says people could leave video messages before they died, to be played to friends, loved ones or the just plain curious from the grave side. 

He told the BBC that messages could include telling life stories or having the final say on a disagreement. 

It could also be a money-making enterprise for cemeteries, he added. - from the BBC

Yet talk of reinstating the military draft persists around the country, driven by the Internet, high-profile moves by the military to shore up its forces and fears that all those solid reassurances about no need for conscription could quickly melt away if world events took a turn for the worse. - from the NYT (reg/req)

There were few moments outside the home that were not shared with horses. They provided man with transport (in both love and war) and they were indispensible partners down on the farm, when agriculture accounted for the vast majority of economic output. Even when not actually present, they were rarely far from man's consciousness. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the streets of Europe's and America's fast-growing cities were littered with piles of steaming horse dung. The arrival of the horseless carriage was welcomed on many counts. - from The Economist

The timing of it all meant the pictures aired on American breakfast television, and that spread suspicions here that it was really all about helping US President George W Bush in the opinion polls.

So did the fact that the only reporters in court were from American organisations. - from the BBC

But whether the species Homo erectus, meaning "upright man", should be reclassified into several distinct species remains controversial. - from the New Scientist

Hidden deep inside eastern Utah's nearly inaccessible Book Cliffs region, 130 miles southeast of Salt Lake City, the prehistoric villages run for 12 miles along Range Creek, where Wilcox guarded hundreds of rock art panels, cliffside granaries, pit houses and rock shelters, some exposing mummified remains of long-ago inhabitants.

The sites were occupied for at least 3,000 years until they were abandoned more than 1,000 years ago, when the Fremont people mysteriously vanished. The Fremont, a collection of hunter-gatherers and farmers, preceded more modern American Indian tribes on the Colorado Plateau.

What sets this ancient site apart from other, better-known ones in Utah, Arizona or Colorado is that it's been left virtually untouched, with arrowheads and pottery shards still covering the ground in places.

"I didn't let people go in there to destroy it," said Wilcox, 74, whose parents bought the ranch in 1951 and threw up a gate to the rugged canyon. "The less people know about this, the better."

But the secret is out after federal and state governments paid Wilcox $2.5 million for the 4,200-acre ranch, which is surrounded by wilderness study lands. The state took ownership earlier this year but hasn't decided yet how to control public access, said Kevin Conway, director of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. - from The Associated Press