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Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers' activities for one year--in case police want to review them in the future--under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today.... A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses, some committee members suggested. By a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.

On two occasions last week my dog was barred from London buses, not because she's particularly fierce or big, but on religious grounds. A friend and I had taken her to the park, and as I went across to the grocer, my friend took Daisy, a Manchester terrier, to the bus stop.

Barack Obama is talking to experts about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill because he wants to know “whose ass to kick”, according to the latest reports. But judging by the US President’s previous remarks, it’s plain he has made his mind up already – step forward (or bend over) Tony Hayward, the smirking, cherub-faced CEO of BP. ... And yet, what can David Cameron – or the Foreign Office – really do about it? We know from Toby Harnden that Barack Obama has recently been deserted by his supporters on the American Left. It is understandable, then, that he...

As the Home Secretary devises emergency laws, E S Turner recalls the rumours and absurdities of Britain's first months in the Second World War WORRIED about receiving white powder in the post? Wondering whether to move away from tall buildings and find a bolt-hole in Devon? Afraid that David Blunkett is introducing a police state? Panicked by fifth-hand rumours about Arab plotters? You should have been around in the Great Flap of 1940. It wasn't white powder that worried us then. Our nostrils were twitching for the scent of pear-drops, geraniums and musty hay - the sign that Hitler was ...

HE'S the coming man, the Afghan they all want to hound. Every EU apparatchik and Washington big-shot is beating a path to his door and emerging enraptured half an hour later, lovingly dropping insider lingo like "loya jirga". "There is an age-old tradition in Afghanistan in which the King calls a 'loya jirga' or 'grand assembly' of leaders from all over the country to address issues of great concern," explained Congressman Joe Pitts, of Pennsylvania. "Zahir Shah is able and ready to call a loya jirga, help set up a transitional government, and bring peace to his country." The loya ...

From the Liberation purges to the Barbie trial, France has struggled with the memory of the Vichy experience: a vivid memory of defeat, occupation, and repression. How has this proud nation dealt with les annees noires? What is the collective memory of those few years: what have the French chosen to remember, what have they chosen to conceal? In this book a French scholar examines France's war and postwar years as cycles of purposeful memory. For ten years after the Allied victory, rival myths were constructed to help France forget the devastating realites of the Nazi Occupation. In the late ...

Nearly 2 million Cook County residents went to the polls this week and gripping a small stylus, punched pinholes in a computer card to vote for president and other offices. But somehow, 120,503 of them either failed to register a choice for president or rendered their choice unusable by piercing holes next to names of two or more candidates. County officials say the same thing happens every election year, yet hardly anyone complains about the punch card apparatus. Now, however, problems with a similar system in Florida have thrown the presidential election into chaos and triggered a wave of national ...

Democrat Al Gore held onto his New Mexico presidential vote lead over Republican George W. Bush early today, but election officials in Bernalillo County continued to count ballots. Nearly 40,000 votes still waited to be incorporated into the final count at 1 a.m. State Republican Party chairman John Dendahl predicted the Bush campaign would seek a recount in New Mexico if Gore's lead looked slim. "We're certainly going to be looking at a recount," Dendahl said early today. "Whether it's statewide or select counties depends on some more analysis." Bush edged closer to Gore with a new absentee vote count ...

Some national television networks and newspapers kept reporting Wednesday that Al Gore won the New Mexico presidential vote, but state election and party officials said the race remained too close to call. With more than 60,000 early and absentee ballots in question in Bernalillo County, it remained unclear whether Democrat Gore or Republican George W. Bush would collect New Mexico's five electoral votes. Gore led Bush in New Mexico by about 10,000 votes Wednesday — 49 percent to 47 percent — according to numbers provided by the secretary of state. But New Mexico's top election official said Gore's lead could ...

Conrad Black says that Britain must reach beyond Europe and embrace its Atlantic vocation THE floundering over Britain’s European policy is the most undignified shambles that has been made of a major foreign-policy issue in this country since the appeasement controversies of the late 1930s. Most people in Britain retain their interest in the European common market that they thought, and were repeatedly assured, was all they were voting for in the referendum of 1975. Today, 70 per cent of the British want to go no further into Europe and about 50 per cent want out of it altogether except ...

Dear Dr. Laura, Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them. a) When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it ...

"If Lee, after his triumphal entry into Washington, had merely been the soldier, his achievements would have ended on the battlefield. It was his August declaration... that opened the high roads along which we are now marching so prosperously." Published in Finest Hour 103 THE quaint conceit of imagining what would have happened if some important or unimportant event had settled itself differently has become so fashionable that I am encouraged to enter upon an absurd speculation. What would have happened if Lee had not won the Battle of Gettysburg? Once a great victory is won it dominates not ...

Warren Beatty, who played a senator crazy enough to speak the truth in "Bulworth," said Wednesday that he was considering running for president in 2000. Beatty, who has been active in the Democratic Party for years, made it clear that he was displeased with Vice President Al Gore and former Sen. Bill Bradley, the current candidates for the party's nomination. "It's no secret that I am a liberal Democrat," Beatty said in a telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles. "I have some very strong feelings, the most important of which at the moment is campaign finance reform because ...

Among the shattered ruins of Marxism, the French are intent on rescuing one of the most extraordinary relics, the 120-year old droit &##224; la paresse , or the right to idleness. Even the austere socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, whose allegiance to Marxism is less than tepid, has seized on this 19th-century philosophy invented by the French leftwing pioneer, Paul Lafargue, Karl's son-in-law. Jospin, who inherited a Calvinist work ethic, pays homage to Lafargue as a justification for introducing the 35-hour working week, confirming France's determination to remain far ahead of its European neighbours in the race for leisure. With ...

Kocani, Macedonia, July 27 (Bloomberg) -- Danica Georgieva's Danitex Factory almost became a war casualty last April when New York-based Liz Claiborne Inc. decided to suspend its contract with the Macedonian textile factory until the fighting stopped in nearby Kosovo.Georgieva was so worried she'd have to lay off scores of workers who make clothes under contract to Liz Claiborne that she jumped at the chance to talk to Hillary Clinton when she saw the U.S. first lady at a reception in Skopje on May 14. ``I told her that she had the opportunity to save the Macedonian textile industry,'' said ...

SOMETHING HAS changed in the last few months in the world's perception of America. Looking out is always different from looking in, but in the case of the United States the contrast is extreme. For the US seems suddenly to be widening its lead over the rest of the world in a number of ways - including the performance of its fast-growing economy, its development of new electronic technologies, its entrepreneurship, its financial service industries, its military competence as demonstrated in the Kosovo air-raids, even its cultural dominance - demonstrated by the still-growing share of Hollywood movies on the world ...

2208 GMT, 990718 Yugoslavia – Italian television RAI UNO reports that four Christian Albanians have been discovered dead and tortured within the Italian peacekeeping sector of Kosovo. The KLA claims the individuals were killed by a group of Serbs. However, the Italian Military Police has contradicted those statements, maintaining those found were casualties of a fight between Muslim and Christian Albanians. 0012 GMT, 990718 Yugoslavia/KFOR – The Yugoslav state news agency Tanjug reported July 17 that the commander of the Italian KFOR sector, Brigadier General Mauro del Vecchio, said July 16 that a mass grave in the village of Ljubenic ...

Robert Skidelsky - From a 'Prospect' lecture by the Conservative peer and Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick One of the oldest divides in politics is between the moralists and the prudentialists. Moralists have a passion to make the crooked path of humanity straight; prudentialists to make the best of an inherently imperfect world. I know that prudence is itself a moral virtue, and moralists are also capable of discarding the sandals of the preacher for the clogs of the politician. But the basic divide goes back at least to biblical times. The New Testament calls the ...