In a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the secretive court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, several former judges who served on the panel also voiced skepticism at a Senate hearing about the president's constitutional authority to order wiretapping on Americans without a court order. They also suggested that the program could imperil criminal prosecutions that grew out of the wiretaps.

Judges on Secretive Panel Speak Out on Spy Program

For generations, kids across New England have grown up with the sticky-sweet, snow-white confection known as Marshmallow Fluff. These days, however, there's a hint of sour at the Lynn headquarters of the key ingredient behind the classic peanut butter-and-Fluff concoction known as the Fluffernutter.

Durkee-Mower Inc., longtime maker of Marshmallow Fluff, has sued William-Sonoma Inc., ordering the kitchen-furnishings retailer to stop selling tins of a candy bar called the Fluffernutter, a name 86-year-old Durkee-Mower trademarked in 1961. Williams-Sonoma has until April 14 to respond to the complaint in US District Court in Boston.

''They're trying to trade on the nostalgia for the classic Durkee-Mower product without acknowledging our trademark rights," said Durkee-Mower attorney Peter Sloane, who specializes in intellectual property law at Ostrolenk, Faber, Gerb & Soffen in New York. ''To me, it's a flagrant violation."

Intellectual property law meets Fluff

Much of Lem’s work has roots in earlier Polish writers, now all of them in process of urgent revaluation. They include Cyprian Norwid, the 19th-century poet and thinker who anticipated most of the pressing concerns of the 20th century, and who ought to be as internationally famous as Baudelaire or Carlyle; the mystical Tadeusz Micinsky; and, above all, the incomparable “Witkacy”, Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1885-1939), author of the incomparable novel Insatiability.

It was in this extraordinary tradition that Lem wrote, for all that he chose the science-fiction form — and he was a prime examplar of it. He was a true polymath and at the same time a virtuoso storyteller. He was truly described as “one of the deep spirits of the age”.

Stanislaw Lem

As some have said, "We are operating the Earth like it's a business in liquidation." More mechanisms to incorporate environmental and social externalities will be needed to enable capital markets to achieve their intended purpose--to consistently allocate capital to its highest and best use for the good of the people and the planet.

For People and Planet, By Al Gore and David Blood

What's going down inside Manhattan Trust's Wall Street branch may or may not be the usual bank robbery, but "Inside Man," the crime drama that details those nefarious doings, is careful to keep its distance from your standard heist movie.

Smartly plotted by newcomer Russell Gewirtz and smoothly directed by, of all people, Spike Lee, "Inside Man" is a deft and satisfying entertainment, an elegant, expertly acted puzzler that is just off-base and out-of-the-ordinary enough to keep us consistently involved.

Inside Man

Those not in the diamond trade might find it hard to understand why Emile Chayto, a Geneva dealer with more than 40 years of experience, gave $14 million worth of gems to a stranger who claimed to be the wife of the deceased president of the Congo — before she had paid him one penny.

Unfortunately for Chayto, she was not the widow of Mobutu Sese Seko. And her wire transfer never arrived.

As Scams Go, This Is a Gem

It is sometimes convenient, for purposes of rhetorical effect, for national leaders to talk of a globe neatly divided into good and bad. It is quite another, however, to base the policies of the world's most powerful nation upon that fiction. The administration's penchant for painting its perceived adversaries with the same sweeping brush has led to a series of unintended consequences.

Good versus evil isn't a strategy

Once, great movie houses drew us together. Now they're gone -- and the decline of the big screen diminishes us all.

Moving Away From the Movie Theater

AS THE SONG says, sorry always seems to be the hardest word. It takes courage to admit you got it wrong. So it's tempting to applaud Francis Fukuyama for the bout of self-criticism he is currently engaged in. In his new book, "America at the Crossroads," Fukuyama, who had become famous for declaring the "end of history," has repudiated his support for the invasion of Iraq.

America, right and wrong

Promise theory is a graph theoretical framework for understanding complex relationships in networks, where many constraints have to be met, which we have developed here at Oslo University College, by drawing on ideas from several different lines of research here, including policy based management,graph theory, logic and configuration management. It uses a constructivist approach that builds conventional management structures from graphs of interacting, autonomous agents. Promises can be asserted either from an agent to itself or from one agent to another and each promise implies a constraint on the behaviour of the promising agent. The atomicity of the promises makes them a tool for finding contradictions and inconsistencies.

Introduction to Promise Theory