Right Here

Dollars and no sense: The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assistance estimated that the secret, classified US budget for the coming year will amount to $23.2 billion. The Congressional Budget office estimates a $480 billion deficit in the coming fiscal year.

Military madness: ...A survey by the Pentagon's inspector general revealed that 109 of 579 female cadets surveyed reported that they had been sexually asaulted while at the Air Force Academy. (Reuters)

One for Shrub, one for the whales: President Shrub's guardians of the environment (corporate environment, that is) have issued revised rules concerning air quality controls allowing major utilities and industrials to go back to dumping millions of tons of pollutants.

Free Willy! In California, a federal judge ruled against the Navy's use of a new powerful Sonar system which has the potential for endangering whales and other sea creatures by deranging their mechanisms of navigation.

Where's Margaret Mead now that we need her? Presumably NASA may soon be hiring social anthropologists, not for space exploration but as a means of avoiding another major accident. It's all a matter of "changing NASA's culture."

Over There

"Almost impossible to exaggerate"...said colonial administrator L. Paul Bremer calling for at least tens of billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq.

From the "It pays to know someone department":...Halliburton, Vice president Cheyney's former hangout, has received almost $2 billion in contracts in support of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Full budget details: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/

But what shape was the table? The three-day meeting of the nuclear-afflicted -- US, Russia, China, Japan, and the Koreas -- ended on a rhetorical note with the Pyongyang government threatening to test a nuclear weapon. N. Korea is calling for a restatement of the hostile policies of the US, demanding that N. Korea dismantle its nuclear program.

See you in Cancun:...The World Trade Organization agreed to allow poor countries to import inexpensive generic versions of selected drugs especially those dealing with AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. The full details are still being worked out. (Washington Post)

This Week in History

Labor Day: This Labor Day over 10 million Americans are out of work. Three times as many people are working but do not earn enough to escape the official poverty line. Labor Day was begun in the 1880s as a holiday for working people.