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<p>The threat from long-range missiles continues to grow, but the Pentagon will not set an exact date for when the United States will deploy a missile defense system, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says.</p> <p>"Our position on this is that we're not going to set artificial deadlines," Mr. Rumsfeld said in an interview at the Pentagon last week with reporters and editors of The Washington Times.</p>

WASHINGTON - There are at least 60 ways of spelling the name of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. And you thought you had problems? US intelligence agencies have found 60 different spellings for the name of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. -- REUTERS The variations of an enemy's name are creating a headache for United States intelligence and law-enforcement agencies trying to prevent terrorist attacks. Computers at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, Immigration and Naturalisation Service and other agencies are full of lists of suspected terrorists. Some names identify actual terrorists. Others are aliases, misspellings, alternative spellings or misidentifications...

<p>An Arizona man sought in connection with the brutal killing last year of his family was added yesterday to the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted" fugitives list.</p> <p>Robert William Fisher, 41, is accused in the April 2001 murders of his wife and two children, whose bodies were found in their Scottsdale, Ariz., home. The house exploded and was engulfed in flames. After the fire was extinguished, the bodies were discovered inside the burned residence.</p>

Australian blonde bombshell TV star Charlotte Dawson is denying she had sex with ex-President Bill Clinton after the two were spotted slipping away together at a speaking event for what one New Zealand newspaper described as a "date." "Dawson looked stunning in an outfit flown over from Sydney, (Australia) for her date with former American president Bill Clinton," reported New Zealand's Sunday News. "He was a really nice bloke, and very charming, but nothing went down," insisted the buxom Dawson, after New Zealand's "Women's Day" reported that the couple had a "secret, late-night rendezvous" while Clinton was down under for...

VATICAN CITY (AP) _ The Vatican said Tuesday it has received details of a policy approved by American prelates in Dallas but gave no indication how long it would take to examine the plan, which would bar sexually abusive priests from church work. The bishops need Vatican approval to make the policy binding on every U.S. diocese. Some Vatican officials have expressed concern that the plan is too sweeping _ raising the possibility that the Holy See would reject it. Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, traveled to Rome last week to personally deliver...

The day the sun caught fire by Ed Harris This spectacular eruption of superheated gases, shooting a flame hundreds of thousands of miles long into space from the sun, was captured on film by an orbiting satellite. The solar eruption, which is more than 240,000 miles long, burst from the surface of the sun yesterday as the satellite had its cameras trained on our nearest star. The explosion is what astronomers call an eruptive prominence, a loop of magnetic fields that trap hot gas inside. As the trapped gas becomes unstable it erupts violently into space. If eruptions like these...

July 2, 2002Tuesday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time Psalm: Tuesday Week 30 Reading I Responsorial Psalm Gospel Reading IAm 3:1-8; 4:11-12 Hear this word, O children of Israel, that the Lord pronounces over you,over the whole family that I brought up from the land of Egypt: You alone have I favored, more than all the families of the earth;Therefore I will punish youfor all your crimes. Do two walk togetherunless they have agreed?Does a lion roar in the forestwhen it has no prey?Does a young lion cry out from its denunless it has seized something?Is a bird brought...

<p>Late last week, President Bush once again showed the stuff of which he is made. On the margins of his meeting with other G-8 leaders in Canada, Mr. Bush decided that the United States would exercise its Security Council veto to block U.N. peacekeeping mandates that failed to protect U.S. forces from the predations of an unaccountable International Criminal Court (ICC). To the horror of the State Department, foreign diplomats and other ICC enthusiasts, the first such veto was cast on Sunday, blocking a six-month extension of the U.N. peacekeeping operation in Bosnia.</p>

<p>If WorldCom goes bankrupt, will we have enough telephone companies? Do we have the right number of supermarkets, fast food restaurants and hotels?</p> <p>Neither you, nor I, nor anyone else knows, but the private enterprise market system sorts it out and gives us approximately what we need, where we need it. For each type of business, there is an optimum number of competitors given the size of the market and the economies of scale. A local fast-food outlet may require a few thousand or, perhaps, only a few hundred potential customers, whereas an automobile manufacturer needs tens of millions.</p>

<p>Dear President Bush: You had us worried there for a while. In the wake of your inspiring and brilliant speech this week, one feels a little sheepish to have doubted you. Yet your trumpet on the Middle East had been, let's face it, a little uncertain during the past few months.</p>

Reuters Business Report Layoff Plans Rose 12 Percent in June NEW YORK (Reuters) - Layoff announcements by U.S. firms rose 12 percent in June, led by further job losses in the beleaguered telecommunications industry, said a report on Tuesday that suggested the labor market remains weak. Job cuts announced in June totaled 94,766, up from 84,978 in May, the employment outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas said on Tuesday. But there were 24 percent fewer job cut announcements compared with June 2001, and job cuts during the second quarter fell 34 percent compared with the first quarter. Planned job cuts...

<p>A digital divide separating the computer and Internet haves from the have-nots turns out to be more of a gully or small ditch than a Grand Canyon. The political dividers will have to find another gap to exploit.</p> <p>Survey and related data culled by the Pew Research Center, a team from UCLA and the Commerce Department belies the notion that computers and the Internet have been disproportionately advantageous to a relatively small elite comprised mostly of affluent white Americans with college educations, who live in and around major metropolitan areas. Al Gore and his vice presidential running mate, Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, did their best to make political hay of this issue during the last presidential election — and likely will try again come 2004. Other Democrats, including Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski, continue to issue demands for federal aid and intervention, including funding for the Commerce Department's Technology Opportunity Program, which, along with other federal electronic-age boondoggles, would fritter away more than $110 million annually. Last month, Miss Mikulski, along with the AFL-CIO and the National Education Association, joined up to push for fistfuls of federal funding to erase the divide, even though it appears to be disappearing all by itself.</p>

<p>The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision striking down the Pledge of Allegiance as unconstitutional because it contains the phrase "under God," is an outrageous example of judicial activism and overreaching. It also underscores the importance of our third branch of government — the courts — to our personal rights and freedoms.</p>

Tuesday, 2 July, 2002, 14:35 GMT 15:35 UK P>Mexicans fear that work will head south By David Loyn, in Mexico The Rio Grande which separates Texas from Mexico is capitalism's front line. On the north side is enormous wealth, and on the south a country where $100 a week is a good wage. Why does the Mexican economy have to go down just because America is fighting a war? Ramon Aguilar, unemployed Mexican It is not hard to see what attracted US industry across the border after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) in the mid-1990s....

<p>With nearly 1,000 companies already having restated earnings since 1997, how much impact could two more conceivably have? Well, as it may turn out, an awful lot — with the emphasis on awful.</p> <p>The two latest earnings restatements, which involved WorldCom and Xerox, were blockbusters. Out of the blue last week, WorldCom announced that, since the beginning of 2001, it had "misclassified" nearly $4 billion in operating maintenance expenses as capital expenditures. The immediate effect was three-fold: It turned more than $1.5 billion in previously reported profits into losses of hundreds of millions of dollars (at least); it propelled the beleaguered WorldCom, whose market capitalization once exceeded $115 billion and whose stock was once the fifth-most widely held, toward almost-certain bankruptcy; and it intensified the loss of investor confidence that is currently a drag on the stock market. Then, on Friday, Xerox, which was already expected to reclassify $2 billion of revenue as a result of an earlier agreement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to resolve questionable accounting methods, announced that it would be reclassifying a stunning $6.4 billion in revenues.</p>

Evidence is mounting that sleep – even a nap – appears to enhance information processing and learning. New experiments by NIMH grantee Alan Hobson, M.D., Robert Stickgold, Ph.D., and colleagues at Harvard University show that a midday snooze reverses information overload and that a 20 percent overnight improvement in learning a motor skill is largely traceable to a late stage of sleep that some early risers might be missing. Overall, their studies suggest that the brain uses a night's sleep to consolidate the memories of habits, actions and skills learned during the day. The bottom line: we should stop feeling...

Your at war, the war is going on not just in your country but right around the corner from were you live,

Tuesday, 2 July, 2002, 08:37 GMT 09:37 UK £40 a week to stay in education Ministers want to increase the staying-on rate The government plans to give children in middle and lower-income families up to £40 a week to stay in education after the age of 16. The Chancellor, Gordon Brown, is reported to have signalled that a £600m scheme to extend educational maintenance allowances across the country would be a major feature of his comprehensive spending review later this month. Ministers are concerned at Britain's relatively poor international record of education and training beyond the compulsory age of 16....

By Darryl Fears Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, July 2, 2002; Page A03 Three hundred black farmers took over a U.S. Department of Agriculture regional office in Brownsville, Tenn., yesterday to protest what organizers called the agency's failure to process loan applications from growers who were counting on the money to plant this year's crops. "These farmers are still waiting for word to see if they can get money," said Tom Burrell, a board member of the Tennessee chapter of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, one of several groups that organized the protest. "But now, for all intents and...

Emboldened by the bizarre 9th Circuit Court of Appeals three-judge panel decision that the teacher-led recital of the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional, plaintiff Michael Newdow is seeking other religious dragons to slay. Newdow explained on "Hannity and Colmes" that he brought the lawsuit because, "I'm an atheist, and the government's not supposed to impart its religion on society, and it does, and I tried to change that." He was first upset about God's intrusion into our lives when, during an epiphany while buying soap, he discovered that our currency contained the words "In God We Trust." This non-divine revelation...