Even if U.S. soldiers don’t have to fight a ground war, Americans aren’t likely to forget Germany’s role in arming Saddam Hussein. Last week the news magazine Der Spiegel published its latest bombshell: one firm allegedly violated the U.N. embargo against Iraq some 70 times. Among other recent charges: that German firms supplied Baghdad with sarin, a deadly nerve agent; that they trained Iraqi troops in the use of biological weapons; that they helped upgrade Scud missiles to enable them to hit targets in Israel and Riyadh, and that they built many of the bunkers used by Saddam and his troops....

Eventually the six gunmen were chased into the desert and killed. They called themselves the Battalion of Havoc and Destruction, and one of their stated aims was to win the freedom of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric now serving a life sentence in an American prison for plotting to blow up New York City landmarks. The Luxor killers belong to a new breed of terrorist: religious fanatics who regard the wanton murder of innocent victims as a legitimate form of holy war....

David Walker is getting ready to do just that. The GAO chief, who now says he will sue to get the documents, insists he wasn’t looking for a showdown with Cheney. Last summer two House Democrats asked the GAO to probe whether the energy task force was unfairly influenced by industry lobbyists. Walker complied, sending the White House a sharply worded “demand letter” requesting all notes and minutes of its meetings....

Just about everybody in East Timor lives in such fear. Late last year more than a dozen militia groups sprang up to defend the status quo in the former Portuguese colony occupied by Indonesia since 1975. At first they were enraged by President B. J. Habibie’s plan to give the province its autonomy. Then in January, Habibie further pledged to grant East Timor its full independence if the province rejects autonomy in a U....

“Just finished this new painting,” McNaughton tweeted Tuesday. “Sean Hannity is the Modern-day Paul Revere.” Upon seeing the painting, some Twitter users seemed to think it looked as if Hannity had committed arson. “In Jon McNaughton’s latest painting,” tweeted Roll Call’s Ryan Kelly, “Sean Hannity appears to be escaping on horseback after setting the U.S. Capitol on fire.” “But the Capitol wasn’t built until decades after Paul Rev- never mind,” tweeted BBC’s senior North America reporter Anthony Zurcher....

There were early glimmerings last February, when the Canadian Trucker Convoy pitched working class truck drivers against a “laptop class” demanding ever more restrictive COVID-19 policies. You saw it as well in the victory of Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who ran on parents’ rights in education and went on to win both suburbs and rural areas. You can see it in the growing support of Hispanic voters for a Republican Party, which increasingly identifies as anti-woke, and pro-working class....

STUFFColorful Printer What’s the point of having a snazzy-looking iMac if your printer is still an ugly beige blob? Epson aims to fix your color-coordination problems with its new Stylus Color 740i ink-jet printer ($249 after a $30 mail-in rebate). The hatch door comes in blue, with optional covers in the other iMac colors (lime, tangerine, grape and strawberry) for $14.95 each. Perhaps more important for Apple users, the Stylus 740i supports USB, which is a new type of peripheral jack found on the iMac and Power Macintosh G3 as well as newer PCs....

Just put his year-long suspension aside for a minute and watch this great moment A-Rod had on Friday. After smashing a home run out of Fenway Park in Boston, the Yankees slugger handed off his batting gloves to an unsuspecting fan in the crowd. MORE: A-Rod an All-Star snub | Every team needs a bat dog | Brian Dozier’s walkoff homer Your browser does not support iframes. Do you see the joy on that young man’s face?...

Now a theater ensemble is hoping to repeat that success across the Atlantic, in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachussetts. Shakespeare & Company, a respected troupe founded by expat British actor and director Tina Packer, hopes to break ground soon on a five-year project to reconstruct the Rose theater, an open-air playhouse that stood just across the street from Shakespeare’s Globe and staged the works of the Bard’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe....

Engineer Aldric Saucier, who was fired from the SDI program last month, described in an op-ed piece in The New York Times last week a conspiracy within SDIO worthy of an Oliver Stone movie. He accused SDIO of “systematic illegality, gross mismanagement and waste, abuse of power and the substitution of political science for the scientific method.” He said SDI officials took money allocated by Congress for one program and spent it on another, and falsified data about the efficacy of such marvels as the X-ray laser in order to keep the dollars gushing in....

Let me explain. The AT&T-TCI deal, unveiled with great fanfare last June, featured the creation of a fancy new security to help AT&T’s stock-market value. Staid AT&T was joining the designer-stock crowd. The new AT&T security, called a tracking stock, was to be tied to the performance of AT&T’s consumer long-distance and wireless businesses and to the cable-TV business it was buying from TCI. But there’s nothing about the tracking stock in the mailing, which went to TCI’s holders as well as AT&T’s....

The company that profited from Plachter’s folly: Nu Skin International, a Utah-based multilevel-marketing firm that’s signing on thousands of eager “distributors”–many of them doctors, lawyers, coaches, even former professional football players. Its annual meetings feature such high-profile, high-dollar speakers as Ronald Reagan and Bill Cosby. Apparently, many law-enforcement officials don’t buy the company’s slogan: “All of the good, none of the bad.” The Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission have contacted the company, and the offices of attorneys general in at least seven states are looking at it....

Before Edwards’s strong second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, his honeyed, keep-it-positive approach was considered wildly out of sync with party regulars in a particularly angry time. Eventually, though, Democrats there validated his argument that in essentially optimistic America, mad as hell does not wear well–outrage being cathartic, sure, but as a lifestyle it’s just too exhausting. All along, his mantra has been that Democrats can’t win on Bush-bashing alone, but with a vision of an essentially fairer America in which presidential pals don’t get no-bid contracts, contributors don’t write legislation, elections are publicly financed and women are paid equitably....

Preparing to leave Nashville on his way back to base in Miramar, Calif., Bates got permission to make a “maximum performance” takeoff. The navy is investigating whether he was showing off. Navy pilots are not supposed to take off at an angle greater than 45 degrees, but it appears Bates, his afterburners blazing, went practically straight up – a maneuver performed primarily in air shows. Seconds later his plane crashed to earth....

Even pros like Yaskevich have been blind-sided by the tidal wave of HIV that’s hit Russia over the past two years. “This is a serious threat,” she says, likening it to a “neutron bomb.” That bomb has already exploded among intravenous drug users. The question is when it will go off in the general population. Officially, Russia has diagnosed 129,261 new cases of HIV over the past year and a half, including this July....

The little explorers sit, transfixed, in a nuclear-research lab where ordinary field trips do not tread. Harold Myron, an Argonne National Laboratory physicist, has posed the most crucial of questions: “Did your true love give you gold? Or mere brass?” Twenty-six children record data as an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer - a machine so sophisticated that some physics grad students never encounter it - analyzes the necklace in question. Connie Taylor has spent two months preparing her inner-city Chicago pupils for this moment....

“Our soda was becoming the No. 1 soda in the mom-and-pop stores,” says the bottling company’s owner, Eric Miller. That’s when leaflets started appearing in low-income neighborhoods throughout the Northeast, warning minorities away from the product. The fliers claim that the soft drinks are manufactured by the Ku Klux Klan and “contain stimulants to sterilize the black man.” The Food and Drug Administration, which is investigating the matter, considers the claim “outlandish....