And now the most arresting two minutes in television, the latest footnotes to America's war on terrorism.
The President's foreign policy advisers have reportedly decided that the next phase in the war on terrorism should not be against Iraq. Officials and diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, have told the Knight-Ridder newspapers that the President's top aides have all but agreed that there is insufficient international support for such a war, and uncertain prospects for military success. The story does not indicate that the President has made a final decision, and it was unclear whether it represented his thinking or just that of advisers opposed to going after Iraq.
The Saudi Arabian interior ministry is saying that there is no proof anyone from his country had any role in the 9/11 atrocities, despite the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers identified by the U.S. were Saudis. Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz told the German week Der Spiegel that "It's true that Saudi citizens were in the planes, but who can be certain whether they were behind the attacks?"
There's a new theory of how those two people who died from anthrax poisoning who had no association with contaminated mail might have caught the disease: from the wind. A California researcher named Martin Furmanski says the two women who died mysteriously from anthrax inhalation, one from the Bronx in New York and the other from Oxford, Conn., both lived on a straight line running 47 degrees north of Trenton, N.J., where those anthrax letters were mailed. And 47 degrees, says Furmanski, exactly matches the wind bearing on the ninth of October, the day the letters were processed.
When Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords quit the Republican Party to line up with the democrats and give them control of the Senate, he listed one issue above all as the reason: funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Jeffords complained that the program would never be fully funded with the republicans in control. But yesterday, he found himself only one of 10 Senators voting against the education reform bill because it didn't fund fully fund the program. What's more, the Northeast Dairy Compact, the price support scheme dear to Vermont farmers which Republican Leader Trent Lott helped Jeffords get renewed in the past, has now been allowed to expire.
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