The business-continuity newsletter Continuity Central and the ecologist EarthTimes.org are among the few media outlets to take note that the long-awaited study of why the World Trade Center collapsed has been released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The report notes that the unusual lack of internal support walls (a measure to increase office space) contributed to the collapse, and that lives were lost due to building occupants scrambling to find seemingly inadequate stairwells. Yet: "The report however did not blame the designers or builders for the WTC collapse..."

The death of Pope John Paul II has occassioned a great deal of speculation in the press about the influence of Opus Dei, the secretive ultra-conservative Catholic organization, in choosing his successor. One of the more strictly factual accounts, "Pope Election: Opus Dei Pulls Strings," is from India's Sify.com:

Pope John Paul II, who died April 2, leaves a mixed legacy. In his native Poland, and elsewhere in the Communist world, he was a catalyst of revolutionary change in the '80s, but this same anti-Communism caused him to ally with Reagan and the U.S. in the Cold War, and move against the Liberation Theology current in Latin America. Few eulogies recall the bitter dispute between the Vatican and Nicaraguan priests serving in the revolutionary Sandinista regime. Recounted the Haitian writer Jean-Pierre Cloutier in a 1987 essay, Theologies: Liberation vs. Submission:

From the LA Times, April 1:

Fred Korematsu, the Japanese-American whose court case over his refusal
to be interned during World War II went to the U.S. Supreme Court and
became synonymous with this nation's agonized debate over civil
liberties during time of war, has died. He was 86.

Reads the latest communique from the Biotic Baking Brigade, dated March 30:

William Kristol, founder of the Project for the New American Century (a leading neo-con think tank) and a key figure in American foreign policy for over 20 years, was hit by what appeared to be a cream pie tonight in Richmond, Indiana. Throughout his speech, given at Earlham College, he defended the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive war and state terror and was in the process of comparing current policy challenges to those of the early Cold War when a young man calmly lifted himself onto the stage and quickly walked to the podium, splattering a delicious dish all over the speaker as well as the college's president (collateral damage, perhaps?).

According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, torture in occupied Iraq has not been confined to Abu Ghraib jail, where abuse and sexual humiliation of inmates caused worldwide outrage last year.

JTA reports that more than 500 scholars have now signed a petition blasting C-Span's decision to air a talk by Holocaust-denier David Irving. JTA reports, "The petition was organized by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in response to the U.S. cable network's decision to broadcast a talk by David Irving alongside a lecture by Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt. Lipstadt later rescinded permission for C-Span to tape her talk. Irving lost a lawsuit against Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, in 2000, after Lipstadt accused Irving of being a Holocaust denier.

President Bush has tapped Defense Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to take over as head of the World Bank. Bush told a news conference March 15 that Wolfowitz, now Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's top deputy, is "a compassionate, decent man who will do a fine job at the World Bank. That's why I put him up." (AP, March 16)