"Children and students are graded for their performance and behavior. Why should not governments be graded too for their performance? A yearly performance report should be produced by the UN or by an outside organization similar to Amnesty International.
A Performance International can show for example:

• the number of years a country has lived in peace with others,
• violence statistics,
• ratification of international treaties,
• implementation of UN recommendations on a host of subjects (human rights, labor relations, the environment, etc.),
• disarmament, shifting of military expenditures to peaceful, productive and social services,
• demilitarization, etc.

Such a report would lead to a lot of good in the world."

"The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.

The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world’s poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions. But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet."

On flight LH 418 from Frankfurt to Washington, Lufthansa AG today began a three-month trial of a new onboard wireless broadband service that allows travelers to connect to the Internet some 30,000 feet in the sky... Users will be able to download from the Internet at speeds up to 3M bit/sec. and upload, initially, at speeds up to 128K bit/sec., according to Lufthansa. The upload speeds will later increase to 750K bit/sec.... Cisco Systems Inc. is providing technology for the onboard 802.11b-based network, which offers wireless connectivity throughout all cabins, in addition to wireline connectivity via an Ethernet connector in the passenger seats.