The victimized company, Choice Point, is one of the country's largest data-mining firms -- and has been marketing the information gathered for commercial purposes to the federal government to help it monitor the lives of Americans in the fight against terrorism. Choice Point's activities are documented in the recently published book, "No Place to Hide," by Washington Post technology correspondent Robert O'Harrow. The cyber attack against Choice Point comes at a time when the White House is gearing up to renew and possibly expand the USA Patriot Act, and law enforcement is moving forward in its use of outsourcing to private contractors to collect personal information on those under surveillance.

In collaboration with O'Harrow, the Center for Investigative Reporting recently completed a multimedia investigation into ChoicePoint and other companies now providing such information to the U.S. government. For a more in-depth look at Choice Point and its activities, read O'Harrow's late-January profile in the Post here.

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The Maldives' U.N. ambassador, Mohamed Latheef, laments the tragedy and says that it has touched most every person back home. Of the five people working at the Maldives' mission in New York City, he says, three have not yet been able to contact family members, as the nation's communications system has collapsed.

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War Room sought out Matthew Bunn, an expert on nuclear proliferation at Harvard University's John F Kennedy School of Government -- and author of a seminal report on the nuclear black market -- to probe deeper into growing wedge between the world's two major backstops against proliferation. Bunn says that the IAEA's Director General, Mohamed ElBaradei, now appears headed for a showdown with the Bush administration -- a dispute that has its roots in ElBaradei's willingness to challenge the administration's policies in Iraq and Iran.

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The news from Italy, however, in a week saturated with images of the destruction of the world's premier icon of globalization, provided a jolt of recognition of how deeply those events have demarcated our recent history into two parallel realities. On the one side, pre 9-11: a time when abuses from that process of financial, cultural and political integration that has come to be commonly referred to as "globalization" had ignited a worldwide citizens movement. Over the past two years, millions of people have hit the streets in more than a dozen major cities around the world -- including Genoa; Prague, Czech Republic; Ottawa, Ontario; and Seattle -- to protest a global trading system they claim is skewed in favor of the rich. To avoid such demonstrations of public sentiment, the World Trade Organization -- for many, the villainous face of globalization -- opted long before Sept. 11 to hold its annual meeting this weekend as far off the dissident trading routes as possible: in the Persian Gulf principality of Qatar.

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In hiding, facing imminent arrest in Peru, the world famous ex-spy chief reportedly sent a cryptic message Friday asking for the safety of house arrest if he were to turn himself in. This comes after the Peruvian government announced last week that it would launch a probe into allegations that Montesinos laundered more than $48 million through Swiss banks, and that he could face prosecution on illicit enrichment charges.

Just over a month ago Montesinos, the former head of Peru's National Intelligence Service (SIN), notorious for repeated human rights abuses, fled his country after videotapes surfaced showing him bribing an opposition legislator to change sides in favor of his boss, Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori.

When Montesinos took the step taken by so many other fallen villains before him -- taking off for Panama in a private jet -- he expected the same reception they had been given. But Panama's president, Mireya Moscoso, refused him asylum on Oct. 22 -- the first time in Panamanian history that the country refused to serve as the "trash bin for other nation's cast-off leaders," in the words of Miguel Antonio Bernal, a law professor and leader of a popular movement that mobilized to pressure the government into denying Montesinos sanctuary.

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"We do not want to become the next Thailand," says Marco Ameglio, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of Panama's National Assembly. Ameglio, like others in the Panamanian government, fears that the coming U.S.-funded offensive will drag his country into a war in much the same way that Thailand was dragged into the Vietnam War: as a staging area for U.S. troops and a destination for refugees.

The U.S. anti-narcotics offensive, known as Plan Colombia, will provide military training, helicopters and surveillance to the Colombian military as part of an effort to cut off the world's biggest source of illegal drugs into the U.S. While the U.S. insists the anti-drug push is not a military offensive, critics say the line between fighting drugs and fighting leftist guerrillas is dangerously blurred. Many critics also point to troubling human rights records on the part of the Colombian military, which will be receiving the bulk of the U.S. funds.

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The air is thin in the elevated climes inhabited by the diagnosticians of our era. In their protected aeries, far from the grit and grime of everyday life, past events are reflected upon, analyzed, interpreted, spun into miles of column-inches in America's print -- and online -- magazines. For the most part, such ruminations lead to a sort of ricocheting of the common wisdom. Occasionally, they add new insight or fresh perspective, providing new means of understanding the political, cultural and economic realities of our time.

Ron Rosenbaum, a longtime contributor to the higher echelons of American magazines, and whose Edgy Enthusiast column appears in the New York Observer, has been settled on this perch for the bulk of his 25-year career in journalism. "The Secret Parts of Fortune," a new collection of Rosenbaum's magazine writings, displays his mastery of the compact format. His intelligence and wide-ranging curiosity mark him as among the most original in a genre dominated by quick-hit magnifiers of the self-evident.

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In the concert industry, Scher, CEO of Metropolitan Entertainment and the largest independent music promoter on the East Coast, is something of a legend: Along with Ron Delsener in New York, Don Law in Boston and the late Bill Graham in San Francisco, Scher virtually invented the concert business, nurturing it from a helter-skelter operation in the early '60s to the multibillion-dollar business it is today. Scher's office is decorated with Grateful Dead gold records and classic posters from Jefferson Airplane. But this is no nostalgia act: His company owns three amphitheaters on the Eastern Seaboard, produces concerts by the likes of D'Angelo and Brian McKnight and runs a small record label, Hybrid Records.

On this summer day, however, Scher sits in his company's headquarters, a sprawling three-story Victorian in Montclair, N.J., and tries to adjust to the new facts of his business. Or, more precisely, to one new fact: the impending buyout of SFX Entertainment, the largest concert promoter and venue owner in the U.S., by Clear Channel Communications, the country's largest radio station owner.

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Whatever turn the war takes -- toward a peaceful solution, or a ground war -- NATO troops are leaving camp administration and preparing to enter Kosovo, whether as peacekeepers or combat soldiers. At camps like Cigrane, that will leave a vacuum -- to be filled by the some 20 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the camp, and by the refugees themselves. In their first foray outside Germany since the end of World War II, the Germans did a widely admired job of helping build a settlement over the past several weeks for some 31,000 people, with space for another 6,800. Orderly lines of tents march up the hillside, water pipes have been laid in 2-foot-deep trenches by husky Germans in camouflage pants and tank tops, pausing from their digging to bounce balloons and kick soccer balls with the burgeoning population of children.

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Over the past three weeks, a campaign of computer users and Internet providers has sent thousands of young Czechs into the streets to protest an effort by SPT Telecom -- which holds a government-sanctioned phone monopoly in the Czech Republic until 2000 -- to raise its rates for local dial-ups by as much as 62 percent.

"That would just kill Internet users and providers in this country," says Ivo Lukacovic, 24, founder of the country's largest search engine, a sort of Czech Yahoo, and one of the principle organizers of the campaign.

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"Having tried and failed to find him [Castro] in Havana," Hunt writes, "I ... substituted a metaphoric meeting. Following his footsteps from Las Coloradas, where he landed, to the Sierra Maestra, where he plotted the war against Batista, seemed a sensible way to get a sense of the man and his motives. Traveling from Santiago de Cuba to Havana would help me understand the movement that defined the man."

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A co-production of Starwave and Gabriel's own Real World Records, "Eve" provides a gently surrealistic exploration of the romantic, scientific, psychological and genetic nature of love. In February, "Eve" won the Milia D'Or award at the Milia Festival in Cannes. Its arrival in the U.S. was delayed when Starwave pulled out of the CD-ROM business, but its new American distributor, Graphix Zone, has announced an early May release.

Gabriel's own long journey has included a rise to prominence with the band Genesis, a 1978 jump to a flourishing solo career and a longtime commitment to human rights activism. In 1994 his "Xplora" CD-ROM was hailed as one of the first multimedia products to merit the label of art.

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Stossel, working on a special he dubbed "Junk Science," had been hoping to debunk the work of Dr. Grace Ziem, who specializes in treating medical ailments resulting from exposure to environmental toxins. Instead, Ziem, tipped off to the Stossel sting, invited two reporters from the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post to a Baltimore hotel, and accused Stossel and two associates of illegally taping her medical consultations with two of Stossel's ABC colleagues. The two associates had visited her complaining of symptoms which she attributed to "chemical sensitivity" — a reaction to the vast cocktail of synthetics used to produce household paints, cleansers and countless other products that can cause health problems in susceptible individuals.
Stossel planned to use the recordings in the latest of a series of reports that the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has characterized as
"biased against consumers and environmentalists." Instead, he now faces felony charges resulting from Maryland's requirement that both parties involved must assent to a tape recording.

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