The 1935 act was a furious political response to huge shareholder losses when electric-power holding companies collapsed in the Great Depression. While it contains many loopholes, the act was "basically a stay-at-home, stick-to-your knitting statute," said Scott Hempling, a Silver Spring lawyer who specializes in regulatory issues.

Changes in the act made by Congress and regulators in the 1990s opened the way for deregulated energy marketers such as Enron Corp., Dynegy Inc. and Mirant Corp. to buy or build power plants anywhere in the country, trade energy and sell unregulated power. They counted on wresting higher profits than the regulated utilities could make. Instead, too many generating plants were built. When energy prices plunged in mid-2001 and the Enron scandal followed, the stock prices and fortunes of those generators collapsed.

. . . The 1935 act is still needed to prevent the use of regulated assets paid for by utility customers to fund get-rich-quick schemes outside the power business, the act's defenders say. "The utility industry unfortunately has demonstrated it can't always be trusted to do the right thing for shareholders and customers," said Susan C. Cunningham, the Kansas commission's general counsel. "It would be a huge mistake to repeal [the 1935 act] at this time," Cunningham said.

``The rising level of unemployment and sentiment that a turnaround in labor market conditions is not around the corner have contributed to deflating consumers' spirits this month,'' said Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board's Consumer Research Center. ``Expectations are likely to remain weak until the job market becomes more favorable.''

Consumer' assessment of both current conditions and their outlook for six months from now deteriorated from last month's reading. Those rating present business conditions as ``bad'' increased to 30.4 percent from 28.1 percent. However, those holding the oppositie view increased to 16.3 percent from 14.9 percent. Consumers describing jobs currently as ``hard to get'' rose to 33.1 percent from 31.9 percent, while those claiming jobs are ``plentiful'' declined to 10.5 percent from 11.2 percent. Consumers anticipating an improvement in business conditions in the next six months fell to 20.2 percent from 23.5 percent. Consumers anticipating conditions would worsen rose to 11.5 percent from 9.2 percent. The unemployment outlook was also less bullish. Consumers anticipating more jobs to become available over the next six months declined to 16.8 percent from 18.9 percent, while those expecting fewer jobs increased to 19.8 percent from 16.9 percent. The proportion of consumers anticipating an increase in their incomes declined to 15.7 percent from 17.1 percent.

It is clear that both banks knew quite well that they were entering into transactions with Enron that were in reality loans for hundreds of millions, and even billions, of dollars. But they were structured in convoluted ways to allow Enron to report them not as loans — which would have shown the company to be deeper in debt than it wanted to appear — but as other kinds of liabilities related to its trading activities.

In some cases, Enron even found ways to account for borrowed money as providing cash flow from operations, thus making it look like the company was making money that it was not. In one case, it borrowed money from Citigroup and bought Treasury bills, which it immediately sold. It claimed the proceeds of the sale increased operating cash flow by $500 million.

“The U. S. tort system is the most expensive in the industrialized world, equating to a tax of more that $720 on every U.S. citizen in 2003. Barely three years ago the figure was $87,” said Terry E. Tyrpin, NAII senior vice president, insurance and research services. . . . “The U.S. tort system is highly inefficient, returning only 46 cents on the dollar to the people it is designed to help and only 22 cents on the dollar to compensate for actual economic losses to the very people it promised to make whole. . . . The U.S. tort system costs are more than double that of any other industrialized countries. U.S. tort costs are 2.04 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). Tort costs were 1.33 percent of the GDP in 1970 and only 0.61 percent of the GDP in 1950.

The recent wave of sports stadium and arena construction is costing the U.S. Treasury more than $100 million annually because the projects have been financed with tax-exempt bonds, a federally supported method of borrowing money more often used to build roads, schools and other public projects. . . . At least 38 major league sports venues have been built or rebuilt using nearly $7 billion in tax-exempt financing since 1990, according to a Washington Post review of more than 40 professional baseball, football, hockey and basketball projects.

. . . Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) has characterized the use of tax-exempt bonds for sports venues as an entitlement program for the very rich, and he has pushed, unsuccessfully, to prohibit the practice. "In our view, this is a very expensive public housing program for millionaires -- a subsidy for the millionaires who own these teams and the millionaire athletes who play on them," said Barry Piatt, Dorgan's communications director. "When we have a towering and growing deficit and claim that we can't afford to strengthen health care for seniors or adequately fund education for kids, does this make any sense?"

The [National Association of Manufacturers] is one of more than 80 trade groups urging Congress and the Bush administration to press China to revalue its currency so its goods are less competitive in the United States. . . . China's rapid economic growth - a fabulous 8 or 9 percent per year in real terms - has hung to a large degree on its roaring exports. . . . China's export growth has brought howls of protest from the US business community. "In the last 18 months, we have really begun to hear from our members," says Frank Vargo, a NAM economist. . . . Mr. Vargo argues that China would be better off letting the yuan increase in value. Though this would reduce the growth in exports, it also would make imports cheaper and trim the additions to reserves. China's living standards would rise. Extra resources could be invested in China's infrastructure or other domestic needs.

Two-thirds of workers laid off in the last three years received no severance package or other compensation from their employer, according to the survey titled "The Disposable Worker: Living in a Job-Loss Economy." . . . And of those who lost their jobs, only 49 percent of the ones who had earned $40,000 or more annually said they received unemployment insurance. For those who made under $40,000 a year, the number with unemployment insurance shrinks to 35 percent. . . . Barely one-fourth of those surveyed said their employer extended their health benefits after they were laid off, and less than one-fifth said they received help finding a job, career counseling or skills training.

Despite the National Bureau of Economic Research's July 17 proclamation that the recession ended in November 2001 - because gross domestic product began rising then - Van Horn says he and plenty of other economists disagree. "There are still a lot of people unemployed," he said. "If you're a typical person and not an economist, you don't really care about the GDP." Businesses continue to announce thousands of layoffs. The national unemployment rate hit a nine-year high of 6.4 percent in June, and many economists think it could hit 6.6 percent before starting to decline, which probably won't be until at least the end of this year.

In addition, workers are remaining unemployed longer than in previous recessions, write Van Horn and the study's co-author, Kenneth Dautrich, director of Connecticut's Center for Survey Research and Analysis.

The vice president's office was a major force in putting Iraq at the top of the administration's agenda. . . . Cheney laid out a detailed rationale for the war Bush launched on March 20, quoting at length from declassified sections of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq issued in October. . . . Cheney quoted some of the declassified passages, saying that Iraq was "continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs," and that Iraq "could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material." Although Cheney quoted the report as saying that Iraq, if left unchecked, "probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade," he did not read the next sentence, which referred to a dissent from State Department intelligence experts. They agreed in part but called the available evidence "inadequate." Cheney cited a passage that said all key aspects of Iraq's offensive biological weapons program "are active and that most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War." He omitted a qualifier at the start of the passage in which intelligence analysts said they "judge" that to be the case.

The Republican leadership of the House worked vigorously against the bill, as did the drug manufacturers--who stand to lose millions if it becomes law--and the Food and Drug Administration, whose officials argued the measure would jeopardize safety. The vote did not fall along party lines; rather, the debate turned on whether lawmakers were willing to accept the drug makers' argument that the measure would harm patients and defy free trade by allow the importation of not only drugs, but price controls. . . . "The issue is not safety, my friends," said Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut. "The issue is price. It is time that this Congress stop acting as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the pharmaceutical companies and step up to its responsibility to the consumers of this nation."

Abbott Laboratories agreed to pay more than $600 million in fines to settle a lawsuit alleging it encouraged health care providers to overbill Medicare and Medicaid, according to a published report. The North Chicago-based company will also plead guilty to a criminal charge of obstructing a government investigation, the Chicago Tribune reported Wednesday. The charge stemmed from an investigation in which undercover federal agents, posing as buyers of medical devices, videotaped Abbott salespeople urging them to overcharge for the equipment, the Tribune reported.

Freddie Mac, the big mortgage financier, has used a grab bag of accounting techniques to mislead investors about its results since 2000. . . . Freddie Mac, which for most of the last few years has faced the uncommon problem of having profits that substantially exceeded forecasts, did not want to deviate too much from those expectations, the report said. So it used techniques to make its main business of insuring and buying mortgages seem less profitable and to create a reserve of earnings for later years. The 107-page report, prepared by outside investigators for Freddie Mac's board, underscores the complexity of the accounting used by Freddie Mac to present its results. It also underlines how easily financial companies like Freddie Mac can manipulate their reports to investors. . . . The report also offers more evidence of what regulators and many investors say is a culture of earnings management in corporate America. Like many other big publicly traded companies, Freddie Mac put a premium on meeting analysts' forecasts of its profits and providing consistent growth in reported earnings.

The Bush administration initially promised $3.5 billion in new funding for cities and towns to support upgraded security measures, . . . [y]et in the wake of preparations for the Iraqi invasion, only $1 billion was appropriated this fiscal year. . . . The President's proposed 2004 budget continues this trend. While Bechtel is on track to control as much as $100 billion in spending to reconstruct Iraq, the President has proposed cutting $2 billion from crime prevention and public safety programs, such as the COPS, Local Law Enforcement Grant, and Byrne Grant programs. . . . According to the National Priorities Project, the Iraq War cost the taxpayers of the city of Chicago close to $800 million. Yet my city has received only $3 million in federal grant funding for various security initiatives. Over $10.1 million in homeland security needs remain unmet in Chicago. . . . According to statistics compiled by the World Policy Institute, the cost of fighting 15 minutes of war in Iraq would have paid for all $10.1 million of Chicago's homeland security needs. And the cost of six days of war in Iraq would have financed the estimated $6 billion in homeland security costs for every city, town, and village in America. In addition to draining the resources we need to protect our citizens, the war is also depriving us of some of the people we have hired to do the job.

Locally, one factor that seems to play into our high healthcare costs is an oversupply of physicians, specialists and hospital beds. Now, at first glance, that may not make sense. In economics, an oversupply of a good or service tends to drive down prices. But apparently the more doctors there are, the more patients will visit them -- driving up costs. Plus, physicians in Miami are likelier to refer their patients to specialists. And the more doctors a patient sees, the higher the costs.

"Over 90 million Americans volunteer every year with no prodding from Uncle Sam," says James Bovard, author of "Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years." "Politicians like pork barrels, but that doesn't mean [AmeriCorps] is good policy." . . . Dick Armey, former House majority leader, called it "well-paid social activism" in a recent USA Today op-ed piece. It's a program, he wrote, "rooted in the un-American idea that the people of this country have to be enticed into community service with monetary incentive."

Another Republican, Don Nickles of Oklahoma, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said, "The subsidies are so generous that drug utilization will soar, and costs could explode."

What I found, in critically examining Bush's evidence, is not pretty. The African uranium matter is merely indicative of larger problems, and troubling questions of potential and widespread criminality when taking the nation to war. It appears that not only the Niger uranium hoax, but most everything else that Bush said about Saddam Hussein's weapons was false, fabricated, exaggerated, or phony. Bush repeatedly, in his State of the Union, presented beliefs, estimates, and educated guesses as established fact. Genuine facts are truths that can be known or are observable, and the distance between fact and belief is uncertainty, which can be infinite. Authentic facts are not based on hopes or wishes or even probabilities. Now it is little wonder that none of these purported WMDs has been discovered in Iraq. So egregious and serious are Bush's misrepresentations that they appear to be a deliberate effort to mislead Congress and the public. So arrogant and secretive is the Bush White House that only a special prosecutor can effectively answer and address these troubling matters. Since the Independent Counsel statute has expired, the burden is on President Bush to appoint a special prosecutor - and if he fails to do so, he should be held accountable by Congress and the public.

[#1, about the UN's "conclusion" that Iraq has materials for 25K liters of anthrax:] It short, in the State of the Union, the president transformed UNSCOM estimates, guesses, and approximations into a declaration of an exact amounts, which is a deception. He did the same with his statement about Botulinum toxin.

[#2, same, about 38K liters of botulinum toxin] His own State Department more accurately referred to the same information as "belief," not fact: "Iraq declared 19,000 liters (of Botulinum toxin) [but the] UN believes it could have produced more than double that amount." (Emphasis added.)

[#3, US sources that Iraq had materials for 500 tons of sarin] Bush, his speechwriters, and his advisers left all these caveats [qualifications such as "probably" and conclusions based on "gaps" in the record] out. How could they have? Did they not think anyone would notice the deceptions?

[#4, same, that Iraq had 30K munitions for delivering chemical agents] Yet none of its declassified documents support Bush's contention in the State of the Union that 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical weapons remain unaccounted for. Where did Bush's number come from? Was it real - or invented?

[#5, from Iraqi defectors, there were several mobile biological weapons labs] As with his other State of the Union statements, the President presented belief as fact, and projected a certainty that seems to have been entirely unjustified - a certainty on the basis of which many Americans, trusting their President, supported the war.

[#6, from the International Atomic Energy Agency, that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons development program] It is deceptive to report Iraq's 1990's effort at a nuclear program without also reporting that - according to a highly reliable source, the IAEA - that attempt had come to nothing as of 1998. It is even more deceptive to leave this information out and then to go on - as Bush did - to suggest that Iraq's purportedly successful nuclear program was now searching for uranium, implying it was operational when it was not. In making this claim, Bush included his now discredited sixteen word claim.

[#7, from the British, that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa] Either Bush's senior advisers were aware of this hoax, or there was a frightening breakdown at the National Security Council - which is designed to avoid such breakdowns. Neither should be the case. In fact, it is unconscionable, under the circumstances, that the uranium fabrication was included in the State of the Union. And equally weak, if not also fake, was Bush's final point about Saddam's unconventional weapons.

[#8, from US sources, that Iraq was seeking aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons] In short, Bush claimed the tubes were "suitable for nuclear weapons production" when only a week earlier, the IAEA - which had reason to know - plainly said that they were not. Today, of course, with no nuclear facilities found, it is clear that the evidence that the IAEA provided was correct.

. . . Bush is not the first president to make false statements to Congress when taking the nation to war. President Polk lied the nation into war with Mexico so he could acquire California as part of his Manifest Destiny. It was young Illinois Congressman Abraham Lincoln who called for a Congressional investigation of Polk's warmongering.

The recession that began in March 2001 ended eight months later, the National Bureau of Economic Research, an independent group that tracks the business cycle, concluded in a report released yesterday.

. . . "Most households, most individuals, will really not believe that it is a recovery until we see that job growth as part of the picture," said Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Banc of America Capital Management. But she added, "The official declaration of the end should help confidence on the part of businesses, investors and consumers." . . . In its report, the committee cited the real gross domestic product — the value of all goods and services in the economy, adjusted for changes in prices — as the primary indicator of a recovery. Jobs have not followed growth, the committee wrote, because of increases in workers' productivity. In fact, Ms. Reaser said, the unemployment rate is unlikely to fall until the economy expands at an annual rate of 3.5 percent or 4 percent, the sort of pace attained in only two quarters since the recovery supposedly began.

In the past, to tell President Bush — or at least those assigned to read his mail — what was on your mind it was necessary only to sit down at a personal computer connected to the Internet and dash off a note to president@whitehouse.gov. . . . Under a system deployed on the White House Web site for the first time last week, those who want to send a message to President Bush must now navigate as many as nine Web pages and fill out a detailed form that starts by asking whether the message sender supports White House policy or differs with it.

Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain stood shoulder to shoulder with President Bush today in defending the war to depose Saddam Hussein, saying the conflict was justified even if allied forces find no banned weapons in Iraq. . . . On a day when the White House came under increasing political pressure from Democrats to explain more fully how the passage about Iraq's attempts to buy uranium got into the State of the Union address, Mr. Blair's presence here helped the administration's effort to shift attention to the broader question of whether the world is better off with Mr. Hussein gone.

. . . Despite Mr. Blair's suggestion, in a speech to a joint meeting of Congress, that the war in Iraq would have been worth fighting even if no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons are found, Mr. Bush later insisted at a news conference with the British leader that they would be found. The president said that would "end all this speculation" about "whether or not the actions were based on valid information."

. . . With Mr. Blair at his side during the news conference, Mr. Bush turned a question about whether he took personal responsibility for including the disputed information in the State of the Union address into an opportunity to applaud his own performance as commander in chief. "I take responsibility for making the decision, the tough decision to put together a coalition to remove Saddam Hussein, because the intelligence — not only our intelligence but the intelligence of this great country," Mr. Bush said, referring to Mr. Blair's Britain, "made a clear and compelling case that Saddam Hussein was a threat to security and peace."

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's release today of its final count of the number of traffic fatalities for 2002 offers grim evidence that we have a serious safety problem that needs immediate attention. The number of deaths reached the highest level in 12 years. The fact that rollover crashes were responsible for 82 percent of the increase should be a wake-up call to the automobile industry and Congress. Automakers can and should protect motorists from death and serious injuries in rollover crashes.

Even as the negotiations were going on Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee continued to take sworn testimony from interest groups, and the committee's members didn't appear convinced of the severity of the situation that has led to the push for lawsuit reform. Under withering questioning by the committee Monday, a key insurance executive and the head of the state's largest medical association acknowledged that there is no hard evidence of a recent explosion in medical malpractice claims or outrageous jury awards.

. . . Large [the head of a task force appointed by Gov. Bush to justify tort reform] said the task force, which proposed the $250,000 cap, relied on the most definitive study available of the lawsuit problem. However, he acknowledged that the study was sponsored by the Florida Hospital Association, which in turn used its own estimates after it found that records from the state Department of Insurance were incomplete.

The judiciary committee also heard testimony from a former case analyst with St. Paul Insurance Companies, one of the largest medical malpractice insurers in the nation but one which no longer writes policies in Florida. Cindy Harris, who now works for a law firm in Orlando, told the committee if legislators change the "bad faith" laws, it would eliminate the incentive for insurance companies to settle promptly.

. . . "I think what we find in the Senate judiciary hearings is that when we ask people under oath, we are getting a different story," said Senate Democratic Leader Ron Klein of Boca Raton. "We're getting a different story than we did in the last six months, and it's frustrating."

Tort reform legislation that would cap the non-economic damages that can be recovered in a health-care liability suit would have a significant adverse impact on women and the elderly, according to research conducted by a UB law professor. "The proponents of damages caps have given little or no thought to what their effects might be on the ability of injured individuals to find lawyers and gain access to the civil justice system, or on whether certain groups of people will be more or less adversely affected," said Lucinda Finley, Frank G. Raichle Professor of Trial and Appellate Advocacy at UB and an nationally recognized expert on tort reform who has testified several times before Congress on the women's health aspects of product liability reform legislation.

. . . Finley studied how juries from several states allocate their damage awards between economic loss damages and non-economic loss damages, and then compared cases by gender. . . . "While overall, men tend to recover greater total damages, juries consistently award women more in non-economic loss damages than men, and the non-economic portion of women's total damage award is significantly greater than the percentage of men's tort recoveries attributable to non-economic damages," she said. "Any cap on non-economic loss damages will deprive women of a much greater proportion and amount of what a jury awarded than men. Non-economic loss damage caps amount to a form of discrimination against women, and contribute to unequal access to justice and fair compensation for women."

. . . Several types of injuries are disproportionately suffered by women, such as sexual assault; reproductive harm, including pregnancy loss or infertility, and gynecological medical malpractice. The resulting emotional distress and grief, altered sense of self and social adjustment, impaired relationships or impaired physical capacities such as reproduction are not involved directly in market-based wage-earning activity. "Many of these more precious, indeed priceless, aspects of human life are virtually worthless in the market," she said, "and these are compensated through non-economic damages. For example, in cases where women are sexually assaulted, including by health-care providers, more than 90 percent of the average tort award was for non-economic loss. A cap would amount to a ceiling."

. . . Caps on non-economic damages also would make it more difficult for victims to find legal representation for certain types of cases, Finley's research showed. Lawyers are less willing to bring suits acknowledged to be meritorious unless they cross a certain threshold of economic loss damages, she said, no matter how devastating the injury and how compelling the proof of negligence or medical error. For example, Finley said, in California, which has capped non-economic loss damages in medical malpractice since 1976, parents whose babies or children die as a result of obstetrical or medical malpractice have difficulty finding lawyers willing to take their cases since the majority of the compensation will be in non-economic loss damages. . . . "This will lead lawyers to be unwilling to pursue such claims, leaving injured people uncompensated and the underlying harmful conduct undeterred," Finley said.

Republican state attorneys general in at least six states telephoned corporations or trade groups subject to lawsuits or regulations by their state governments to solicit hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions, according to internal fundraising documents obtained by The Washington Post. One of the documents mentions potential state actions against health maintenance organizations and suggests the attorneys general should "start targeting the HMO's" for fundraising. It also cites a news article about consolidation and regulation of insurance firms and states that "this would be a natural area for us to focus on raising money." The attorneys general were all members of the Washington-based Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). The companies they solicited included some of the nation's largest tobacco, pharmaceutical, computer, energy, banking, liquor, insurance and media concerns, many of which have been targeted in product liability lawsuits or regulations by state governments. The documents describe direct calls the attorneys general made, for example, to representatives of Pfizer Inc., MasterCard Inc., Eli Lilly and Co., Anheuser-Busch Cos., Citigroup Inc., Amway Corp., U.S. Steel Corp., Nextel Communications Inc., General Motors Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Shell Oil Co., among other companies. They also make clear that RAGA assigned attorneys general to make calls to companies with business and legal interests in their own states.

One of those soliciting funds between 1999 and 2001, according to the documents, was Alabama Attorney General William Pryor Jr., a pending nominee by President Bush to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. Sources said that a former RAGA employee recently turned some of the fundraising documents over to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which could vote as early as today on his nomination. A source who asked not to be named provided the documents to The Post. . . . RAGA was founded by Pryor and the Republican National Committee with the explicit aim of soliciting funds from the firearms, tobacco and paint industries and other industries facing state lawsuits over cancer deaths, lead poisoning, gunshots and consumer complaints, according to statements by Pryor and other officials. Pryor, who did not return a phone call to his Alabama office seeking comment yesterday, has told reporters that he does "not want corporations to be punished" by trial lawyers and favors a "market-oriented" approach to state law enforcement. He has also said that contributions do not influence legal decisions by RAGA members.

At the top of the list for horsetrading in Africa are oil and military bases or, at the least, troop stations. In return, Bush is offering aid for Aids victims and enhanced access to US markets. This is horsetrading at its best. The fine print on the offer of US market access has some notable features: the benefits for African producers are actually neutralised by the distortions resulting from US government subsidies to its farmers; these subsidies are larger than many African economies, and they are three times as large as total US aid to Africa as a whole.

US investment in oil production is being presented as a tool for development. This is not the first time this has happened, so we have some evidence on the matter. Again, the fine print does not look as good as the headlines. Oil has been a devastating fact for development in Africa: it has concentrated wealth and produced disincentives for any other type of development. Nor has it helped democracy, since entrenched elites lose much more than office if they lose control over the government. The economic shadow effect of oil is largely negative, and it all winds up creating more poverty. Oil-rich Nigeria and its 100m poor are exhibit number one.

*The top 400 income earners in the U.S. had an average income of $174 million each, or a combined income of $69 billion in the year 2000.

*That $69 billion is more than the combined incomes of the 166 million people living in the four countries that George Bush visited last week: Nigeria, Senegal, Uganda, and Botswana.

*In 1995, the top 400 income earners paid almost 30 percent of their income in taxes.

*After the Bush tax cuts and other factors, the proportion will be less than 18 percent.

*Based on their income in the year 2000, that tax savings translates to nearly $7 billion.

*A World Health Organization commission determined that if rich countries contributed a total of $25 billion, the increased investments in disease prevention and treatment could save 8 million people from death each year in poor countries around the globe.

*The U.S. share would be $8 billion, given the size of its economy in relation to other donors.

The streets of the capital are broad and the buildings monumental. Inside the grand state offices, a power struggle rages among the political elite, and the side that seems to have the upper hand is insulated, single-minded, and shamelessly belligerent. This clique supports a military-first policy that doesn't shrink from the first use of nuclear weapons, a stance that strikes fear into allies and adversaries alike. Nor are these fears soothed by the actions or rhetoric of the leader, a former playboy who owes his position to an irregular political process and the legacy of a more statesmanlike father.

Choose your capital: Pyongyang or Washington?

Uninsured persons and many seniors in Florida pay 66 percent more on average for prescription drugs than the federal government pays, according to a survey released Tuesday. A nonprofit consumer group, the National Association of State Public Interest Research Groups, polled 500 pharmacies in 18 states, including Florida, and checked the prices of 10 drugs frequently used by seniors. Those prices were then compared the Federal Supply List, which contains the prices, after mandated discounts, for those who wish to sell drugs to the 200-plus Veteran Administration hospitals, plus federal clinics on Indian reservations and elsewhere.

. . . Sager, the Boston professor, said in a telephone interview that Americans pay the highest drug prices in the world because most other industrialized countries have price controls on pharmaceuticals. Other surveys have shown that in hospitals, the uninsured are frequently the only ones who pay the full rate, because Medicare and private insurers negotiate managed-care discounts. ''Controlling drug prices is a totally realistic target,'' said Sager. ``Of course, [the pharmaceutical companies] are saying they're going to be hurt in research. They don't mention the 30 percent they waste on marketing.''