“I made a really good living, and I liked my job, and what is so bad is that we have come out with nothing after all those years  no pension, no insurance, no nothing,” she says. “The day it closed, our insurance was gone, our pension was gone. It was devastating.”

The shutdown at Pillowtex was the largest single lay-off in North Carolina, with the loss of 4,800 jobs. Since then Ms Armstrong has racked up her share of humiliation: job retraining classes at 52 and, with less than a high school education, having to admit after a lifetime of self-sufficiency that she has no money to get the washing machine repaired, and, on this day, lining up at first light to get a place in line at a food bank run by a local Baptist church.

Life does not promise to get any easier. In the last good years at Pillowtex, before the firm cut overtime and pay scales to try to stay afloat, Ms Armstrong took home $13.50 an hour. She supported a stepdaughter and a grandchild, and helped out her aging mother.

No one is paying those wages now in Eden. In Greensboro, 40 miles away, she was offered $6 an hour for work in a fast food restaurant. “That wouldn’t cover the price of gas,” she says. Her unemployment benefit, which is $165 a week, barely covers her mortgage, and runs out in November. Ms Armstrong hopes something will turn up before that. “The only reason I am surviving is that I have savings,” she says.

Since July 2000 North Carolina has lost 175,900 factory jobs, according to the US bureau of labour. Across the country, America has entered the deepest and longest recession the manufacturing sector has ever known, shedding 2.7 million jobs since early 2001.

Fewer Americans now work in manufacturing than at any time since the second world war. For North Carolina the decline has been especially cruel, with more people out of work proportionally than in the heartland of America’s heavy industrial belt in the mid-west. A quarter of North Carolina’s manufacturing jobs have simply disappeared.

Economists say those jobs are unlikely to return because the industries which were North Carolina’s speciality  apparel and home furnishings  face intense foreign competition.

“It was painfully obvious,” says Gordon Allen, the manager of the local branch of the Employment Security Commission. “We saw companies moving equipment out of their facility and straight to Mexico. Jobs virtually disappeared.”

In his 27 years at the job centre, Mr Allen says these are the hardest times he has ever seen.

There has been no mercy for Eden. The town of 16,000 has lost 6-7,000 jobs over the past decade, says mayor Philip Price. Red brick factories on roads named after well-known brands of sheets and towels sit abandoned, with shattered windows on once proud facades. Shops are closed. The clubs where mill managers used to mix are desperate for new members. Attendance at the town’s 85 churches is dwindling.

And so a town where workers could live well has been relegated to the underclass, where people struggle to find jobs, feed their families and pay for healthcare.

John Edwards, a native son who was raised in a mill town 100 miles south of Eden, describes the divide between the haves and the newly created have-nots as the land of “two Americas”. He has made the gap the central theme of his vice-presidential campaign.

Although George Bush won here by a convincing margin in 2000, the Democrats hope to whittle away his lead with Mr Edwards’s Carolina credentials and his direct appeal to the dispossessed.

In Eden, their ranks are growing. A year ago a retired magistrate, Andrew Collins, set up a food bank at the Hampton Heights church in town. It was a modest undertaking at first; now most weeks he sends 400 people home with cartons of frozen meat, tinned food and bananas.

The people on line are young and old, African-American like Ms Armstrong, and white. All say they could not manage without the handout; none feel confident that they will ever find full-time work again.

For Maria Coleman, 61, it is simply too late, though she goes to the mandatory two job interviews a week. Thirty-four years ago, when she started at Pillowtex, it did not matter that she had not finished high school and had trouble reading. Now that is the only thing potential employers notice.

A few days ago she was offered a place on a course at the local community college  in ice sculpture. Ms Coleman has no illusions it will lead to a job. “How many people do you know in this area who are going to have the kind of party where they are going to need an ice sculpture?” she asks. “The factory got the best years of my life  34 years. All my life is hell now.”

Mr Price insists that Eden is not lost. A boilermaker from Indiana is taking over one of the abandoned factories; an Israeli manufacturer of baby wipes is thinking of moving to town, attracted by the notion of a cheap and willing workforce. But the Edenites who can are leaving. “The young people aren’t staying here,” Mr Price says. “There is a mass exodus of young people with any skills at all.”

Those left behind face diminishing options. After a year or so without work, Jason Anderson has hit the wall. He left school with a ninth grade education to work as a car mechanic. Business fell off when the economy turned, and Mr Anderson lost his job.

At 23 he is raising a three-year-old son, Rod. He is no longer with the child’s mother, and he says his parents are in no position to help financially. He worked for a time as a house painter, leaving home at 4am to get to jobs, or sleeping overnight on building sites. Then he lost his car and now he is stuck in Eden. “It doesn’t seem like most places are hiring,” he says. “It’s really hard without an education. There are lots of office jobs, but they all need computers.”

Behind Mr Anderson in the line, 20-year-old Heather Servin is determined not to fall into that trap. The daughter of tobacco share croppers, she made sure she finished high school and has a line on a job as a nursing assistant.

It won’t pay much at first  less than $8 an hour, though that is more than she earned as a shop assistant. But it is better than her friends are doing, and steadier than her boyfriend’s work in the building trade.

“A lot of my friends are trying to get jobs at the factory, but those jobs are not what they used to be,” she says. In time, she would like to study nursing at the local community college, although there is a two-year waiting list for courses. People are always going to need nurses,” she says.

The demand from the U.S. administration, heavily influenced by the religious right, follows what is known as the “global gag” — a ban on U.S. government funds to any foreign-based organization that has links to abortion. This has resulted in the removal of millions of dollars of funding from family-planning clinics worldwide.

Tuesday Pedro Chequer, the director of Brazil’s HIV/AIDS program, said the government had managed to resist U.S. pressure during negotiations on the AIDS funding to focus on promoting abstinence and fidelity rather than condoms — another ideological battle being waged by the religious right. But the U.S. negotiators insisted that the clause on prostitution had to stay.

“I would like to confirm that Brazil has taken this decision in order to preserve its autonomy on issues related to national policies on HIV/AIDS as well as ethical and human rights principles,” Chequer told the Guardian.

Campaigners congratulated the Brazilian government for its stance, and voiced concerns that the declaration on prostitution could damage efforts to tackle AIDS among sex workers in many countries. Jodi Jacobson of the Center for Health and Gender Equity in the U.S. said that, unlike the global gag, the declaration on prostitution looked likely to be imposed on U.S.-based organizations as well as their subsidiaries abroad. The office of Randall Tobias, the global AIDS coordinator who is responsible for spending the $15 billion President Bush promised for the fight against AIDS, was working on the language to be adopted, she said.

“Any organization receiving U.S. global AIDS funding will have to agree to the policy,” she said. That would include charities as large as Care, Save the Children and World Vision.

“It is a hugely problematic policy from the standpoint of public health alone. It goes against the entire grain of public health principles in not judging the people you are trying to reach.”

But Sam Brownback, a leading Senate conservative, told the Wall Street Journal: “Obviously Brazil has the right to act however it chooses in this regard. We’re talking about promotion of prostitution, which the majority of both the House and the Senate believes is harmful to women.”

Most U.S. AIDS funding goes directly to organizations working in the field, and much will be channeled through faith organizations that back the no-abortion, pro-abstinence and anti-prostitution stance of U.S. conservatives.

But the Brazilian government has strong HIV/AIDS policies and insists that all negotiations go through its own committee. It also has a strong partnership between governmental and nongovernmental organizations, which encouraged a united response to Washington.

“This would be entirely in contradiction with Brazilian guidelines for a program that has been working very well for years. We are providing condoms, and doing a lot of prevention work with sex workers, and the rate of infection has stabilized and dropped since the 1980s,” said Sonia Correa, an AIDS activist in Brazil and co-chairwoman of the International Working Group on Sexuality and Social Policy. “The U.S. is doing the same in other countries — bullying, pushing and forcing — but not every country has the possibility to say no.”

Adrienne Germain, president of the International Women’s Health Coalition, said: “The importance of the Brazilian government’s decision can not be overstated.”

In Moussaoui’s case, delays, legal wrangling and courtroom outbursts turned the test case into a bizarre spectacle punctuated by the suspect’s outbursts and volatile behavior. Moussaoui’s mental state was the prime consideration before the U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who issued her decision after a one-hour private meeting with Moussaoui Wednesday morning.

The meeting was convened two weeks after Moussaoui wrote to the judge indicating that after more than three and a half years in prison he was willing to plead guilty to conspiracy and terrorism, even though these admissions would carry the death penalty.

According to some reports, Moussaoui’s decision arose from his conviction that that would enable him to move immediately toward an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court. However, his court-appointed lawyers argue that he is unfit to stand trial, and they have objected to his decision.

But, two years after stripping Moussaoui of the right to conduct his own defense, Brinkema evidently was persuaded that he was mentally competent. It also appears that Brinkema received assurances that Moussaoui would not reverse his decision, as he did in 2002 when he withdrew a guilty plea after one week.

If he does decide to stick with his decision and plead guilty Thursday, he faces the very real possibility of a death sentence, since it is unlikely that the prosecutors will relent on their demand for the ultimate penalty.

Moussaoui, 36, a French citizen of Moroccan extraction, was arrested a month before the Sept. 11 attacks. U.S. prosecutors believe that he is the so-called 20th man, the missing hijacker who was to have joined the 19 others who commandeered the aircraft that flew into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

Moussaoui admits to membership in al-Qaida, but maintains he was training for a different operation. His trial has been delayed on three occasions and marked by arguments over his demands to interview other al-Qaida members in U.S. custody, who he says could clear him.

In the harsher of two attacks on Putin’s reforms since her appointment, she told reporters Tuesday that “trends [in Russia] have not been positive on the democratic side.” The secretary of state had been expected to water down her past criticism of the Kremlin as the United States attempts to draw Russia closer to the West with trade incentives.

She will meet Putin Wednesday to smooth the way for a summit meeting between him and Bush when the U.S. president attends the 60th anniversary Victory Day celebrations in Moscow on May 9.

Speaking aboard her aircraft as she flew to the Russian capital, she told reporters: “The centralization of state power in the presidency at the expense of countervailing institutions like the Duma [lower house of Parliament] or an independent judiciary is clearly very worrying.”

Rice’s arrival in Moscow Tuesday night was lent added drama when her motorcade was diverted to the U.S. Embassy after a bomb threat at the hotel where she was to stay. It was a false alarm.

The Kremlin has faced criticism since Putin approved plans to replace elected regional governors with his appointees. His allies claim the reforms will strengthen state control in the fight against Chechen terrorism, but the U.S. and Britain have warned that the Russian electorate is being sidelined.

Rice also condemned the growing state manipulation of Russia’s broadcast media, saying: “The absence of an independent media on the electronic side is clearly very worrying.”

The Kremlin and the Foreign Ministry refused to comment on the accusations.

Her comments appeared to be a fresh sign of Washington’s crusading attitude to spreading democracy in all its bilateral relations. Rice signaled a toughened U.S. stance on Russia shortly after her appointment in January, when she called on Moscow to “make clear to the world that it is intent on strengthening the rule of law, strengthening the role of an independent judiciary, [and] permitting a free and independent press.”

In U.S. eyes, the prosecutions of Mikhail Khodorkovsky (a billionaire critic of Putin) and other executives of the Yukos oil company have raised doubts about the Kremlin’s commitment to democracy. Another concern is the state’s increasing domination of television channels. Soon after meeting Rice in Turkey two months ago, Russia’s smooth-talking foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, gave her a CD with a compilation of Russian TV reports. His attempt to prove a plurality of coverage has clearly failed. Rice said Tuesday that the lack of media freedom was her “principal concern.”

Her comments appeared to answer the pleas of Reporters Without Borders, an international media protection organization that had urged her to condemn the narrowing of press freedom in Russia.

Relations between Moscow and Washington have cooled since their high point of cooperation in the “war on terror” after Sept. 11, 2001. At their last summit in Slovakia in February, Putin responded to Bush’s overtures by stressing that Russia would follow its own “history and traditions” in pursuit of democracy.

Despite her harsh comments, Rice admitted after her arrival in Moscow Tuesday night that there was a “considerable amount of individual freedom” in Russia. “One can’t imagine reverting back to Soviet times,” she said.

Mahle’s years at the agency, described in her new book, “Denial and Deception: An Insider’s View of the CIA From Iran-Contra to 9/11,” were full of such what-ifs. Some are deeply personal, involving the choices Mahle made between career and family. Other choices were not of her making, but haunt her just as fiercely — like the bureaucratic wrangling that allowed the escape of al-Qaida leader Khalid Sheikh Muhammad just as Mahle was closing in on him.

Now under interrogation by the CIA at an undisclosed location, Muhammad was the destructive visionary behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The original terror plot called for the simultaneous hijacking of 10 aircraft; Osama bin Laden clipped Muhammad’s wings, telling him his plans were too ambitious.

In 1995, while Mahle was working in the Middle East, a man fitting Muhammad’s description turned up in Qatar. At the time, Muhammad was a shadowy figure, and his exact importance to al-Qaida was relatively unknown — as indeed was bin Laden’s. But the CIA believed Muhammad was involved in a bungled plot in the Philippines and in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. “He wasn’t in the top 10, but he had still killed Americans,” she says.

Mahle was assigned the task of hunting him down, verifying his identity — the CIA had a set of fingerprints — and putting him under the control of the U.S. authorities. In her reports back to CIA headquarters, Mahle was all for a “snatch,” spiriting Muhammad out of the country in secret. She says she feared officials in the Qatari government sympathetic to extremists would tip off Muhammad if a formal request were made for his arrest.

She argued her case to the highest reaches of the National Security Agency, where she was eventually overruled. The United States lodged a request with local authorities for Muhammad’s extradition, and almost immediately the man Mahle had been hunting disappeared. Had she had her way, she believes, the post-Sept. 11 world might have been a very different place. “He had these two ideas in his mind as early as 1994. If he had been removed from the operational environment there might still have been a 9/11, but I doubt it would have [been] multiple airplanes crashing into an iconic building,” she says.

At a time when the CIA has yet to recover from the colossal failure of the World Trade Center attacks, Mahle’s is one of three female spies to come in from the cold with books on the world of espionage. Her book was published at the same time as a novel by Stella Rimington, the first woman to head MI-5, and a critical memoir by another former CIA agent, Lindsay Moran.

The publishing boom comes at a time when the CIA is braced for yet more uncomfortable revelations — this time about discrimination within its ranks. Last week, Janine Brookner, a former station chief in Jamaica, began efforts to file the first class-action suit against the agency on behalf of women agents who say they lost their jobs because of sexism. This has caused a frisson in Washington, which, despite Rimington’s example, does not appear entirely comfortable with the idea of female spies. In a recent TV appearance, Mahle was asked by CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer: “If you’re roaming around Ramallah or Jericho or Nablus on the West Bank, in any of these towns, an attractive American woman, a blonde, all these guys probably think you’re out there, you’re coming on to them.”

Such attitudes have occasionally eclipsed the criticisms Mahle has made of the agency. In her view, the CIA was hobbled over the years by low morale and budget cuts, which made it slow to react and overly bureaucratic. In a changing world, the agency was also fatally blinkered — a last preserve of white, middle-class men.” I can’t tell you how many minority applicants — Arab Americans, Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, Indian Americans — whom I lost to security or suitability,” she writes in her book.

Women who made it past those gates weren’t entirely welcome, either, especially out in the field, where there was a stubborn belief that women were not fit to recruit agents or run spy networks. They would be fatally handicapped by their gender, the old adage went, especially in the Middle East or Latin America, where they would not be granted full respect.

Mahle had a different experience. “I found the Arab male infinitely more predictable and manageable than Near East Division management,” she writes. “With the latter, I always felt that I was walking on eggs. I sensed that at the first mistake, my career would be ended, because I did not have protectors in the old-boy system.”

Her years at the CIA coincided with a period of great upheaval at the agency. She was recruited from university in the mid-’80s, soon after the Iran-Contra affair, a time when public distrust of the spy agency was at its height. Mahle, studying Middle East politics and international relations at graduate school, needed a job; the CIA needed an Arabic speaker.

She fell into the spy game, immersing herself in a shadowy world where lying to friends and relations was routine. In the old days, agents were barred from revealing what they did for a living; nowadays it is compulsory for agents to tell their spouses they work at the CIA. In Mahle’s time, it was discretionary. She told her husband and her father, but did not dare tell her mother until she went abroad, fearful of the anxiety it would cause her.

Soon after Mahle moved to East Jerusalem in the late 1990s, a bomb went off near her house. “My mother was apoplectic,” she says. “I can only imagine what she would have thought if she knew I was chasing terrorists rather than just avoiding them.” But maintaining the deception was exhausting. “I am very close to my mother, and this was a very big piece of my life to keep secret,” she says.

Her departure in 2002, during the aftermath of 9/11, was a forced exit. Mahle is barred from discussing the circumstances beyond the fact that she lost her security clearance for “lack of candor” about her contacts with Palestinians.

Her last posting outside the U.S. for the agency was in Israel and the occupied territories, and much of her job focused on building up the Palestinian security services and keeping tabs on militant groups — although CIA regulations barred her from making direct contact with militants. She was also responsible for broader security arrangements, which meant that in 1998, she found herself making arrangements for a presidential visit from a hospital delivery room. Mahle went into labor six days before President Clinton made his historic visit to Israel and the territories. But there was no question of switching off her duties.

“There were a lot of security details that needed to be nailed down, and it was a high-threat environment,” she says. “I had meetings scheduled. I had places to be. The Secret Service was in town.” Mahle’s daughter was born in the morning. By evening she was back on the job. “I remember thinking it was poor planning on my part,” she says. But she had little choice; the CIA did not have maternity leave.

Other choices she confronted were heartbreaking. Soon after the Palestinian intifada erupted in September 2000, her daughter was just a toddler. Mahle, charged with assessing the dangers posed to U.S. citizens by the rising violence, advised the evacuation of all Americans from East Jerusalem. That included her daughter, but she could not leave her post to bring the child to safety. “Jerusalem was still smoldering from the riots and it was very difficult to navigate. I remember thinking that it was my job to go to my family at this time, and I couldn’t do it. I had to send my [bodyguards] instead,” she says.

She phoned home, and told the nanny to pack the baby photographs. “It was just one of those moments where you have to choose, and I made a decision based on my work. I felt I had failed my family.”

Now, after more than a decade roaming the Middle East, Mahle lives in an affluent suburb of Washington with her husband and daughter. But she retains the habits of her former life, arriving early for meetings to scope out the surroundings, choosing restaurant tables with a clear view of the exit.

She no longer has to worry about swathing herself in dark robes and head scarf — her method for disappearing into the crowd in the Middle East. When we meet at Washington’s Union Station, Mahle, who is tall, carries a bright pink tote and matching handbag.

Even among Indian reservations, Red Lake is a particularly close community, one of only two reservations in America where all lands are held in common. The tribal government has sole jurisdiction over the community’s 850,000 acres, and there are very few non-Indians living among the reserve’s 5,100 members. Located in a secluded area of northern Minnesota, the reservation sits remote and desolate amid vast plains of farmland, on the snow-covered banks of the frozen Lower Red Lake. But Tuesday the isolation was abandoned as police officers, federal investigators, counselors and journalists descended on the reservation in its time of grief.

“There will not be one soul who isn’t touched by this tragedy here in Red Lake,” Floyd Jourdain, chairman of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, told a press conference. “It still hasn’t sunk in.”

At Red Lake High School where the killings took place, Weise was known as a misfit and a loner, the product of a deeply troubled family. His father committed suicide four years ago, and his mother was in a nursing home in Minneapolis more than 200 miles away after suffering brain injuries in a car crash. Classmates described him Tuesday as “weird” and “antisocial.” Relatives said he was regularly teased. But it was unclear what knowledge his classmates or the authorities in Red Lake had about Weise’s inner life, which he pursued on a number of neo-Nazi Web sites, according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

In his postings, Weise showed strong identification with Hitler and ideas of racial supremacy, calling himself Native Nazi as well as Todesengel. “I guess I’ve always carried a natural admiration for Hitler and his ideals, and his courage to take on larger nations,” said one of his postings last year. He vented his impatience with those who did not share his fascination with Hitler, singling out his teachers for rebuke. “The only ones who oppose my views are the teachers at the high school, and a large portion of the student body who think a Nazi is a klansman, or a white supremacist thug.”

On Monday, that frustration with his teachers and classmates came pouring out in a murderous rampage. But he apparently had another score to settle first — with his grandfather, Darryl Lussier, a known figure on the reservation where he had served as a police officer for three decades. After shooting dead his grandfather and the grandfather’s companion, Weise stole his grandfather’s police-issue bulletproof vest and official car, as well as two handguns and a shotgun, and drove toward the red-brick schoolhouse, arriving at about 3 p.m., FBI officials told a press conference Tuesday.

Witnesses said that Weise had a grin on his face and waved to fellow students as he walked along the school corridor, emptying his guns. He was challenged by Derrick Brun, a 28-year-old unarmed security guard, and shot him dead before resuming his rampage. “Mr. Weise continued to roam through the school, firing randomly,” the FBI spokesman, Michael Pabman, told the press conference.

Reggie Graves, 14, told the Associated Press that teachers herded students from one room to another, trying to move away from the sound of the shooting. Some students crouched under desks. Another student, Ashley Morrison, said she heard shots, then saw the gunman peering though a door window of a classroom where she was hiding with several others. “I can’t even count how many gunshots you heard; there [were] over 20 … There were people screaming, and they made us get behind the desk,” she said.

Armed tribal police soon arrived to confront the teenager, forcing his retreat into a classroom, where he shot dead five students and a 52-year-old teacher, Neva Rogers, before turning his gun on himself.

According to the Associated Press, three of the students were shot in the head at close range. “You could hear a girl saying, ‘No, Jeff, quit, quit. Leave me alone. What are you doing?’” one student, Sondra Hegstrom, said.

That remained unclear Tuesday, with the FBI struggling to piece together a motive for what they believed was a premeditated attack. Some of those clues may eventually be provided by Weise himself, from his involvement with neo-Nazi Web sites. In a posting last year, he admitted that he was questioned by police after a threat against the school, in what could have been a possible warning sign.

“By the way, I’m being blamed for a threat on the school I attend, because someone said they were going to shoot up the school on 4/20, Hitler’s birthday, and just because I claim being a National Socialist, guess whom they’ve pinned,” he wrote in comments posted at 11:41 p.m. on April 19, 2004.

The newspaper added that Weise was subsequently cleared, and quoted him as saying: “I’m glad for that. I don’t much care for jail; I’ve never been there and I don’t plan on it.”

For the people on the Red Lake reserve, the killing spree was “the darkest hour in the history of our tribe,” said Jourdain. “Our community is devastated by this. We have never seen anything like this in the history of our tribe.”