News reports say that federal authorities are confident that a top research scientist charged with creating new defenses against biological agents is responsible for the 2001 mailings of letters containing anthrax spores that kiled 5 people and wounded 17 more. However, in the wake of that scientist's apparent July 29 suicide, friends, colleagues and independent observers are skeptical.

Some interesting bits of news and buzz are streaking around the tech world this week. I keep hearing that the FCC is all set to punish Comcast in some undisclosed and possibly uninforcable way for its attempts to control Internet bandwidth. Common Cause published Comcast Punished by FCC for Violating Net Neutrality. The article says,

Every day, I take a birth control pill (except during the "off" week). In this way, I am no different from a large number of American women. My daily pill is not an abortion under any recognizable definition of the word, but new regulations under consideration by the Department of Health and Human Services say that it is. Further, people who oppose abortions can deny me my right to medication that has been prescribed to me by a doctor.

Remember the book, "The Little Prince" by Antoine de St. Exupery?

A few weeks ago, it occurred to me that reproductive rights were not a priority issue for women this election year. This insight struck me while I was in a writing class with nine other (mostly liberal) women in prime childbearing years (20s and 30s), and I was the only person who mentioned that repro rights were among the three issues I considered most important in this election. I wondered what this meant.

On Tuesday, I urged serious attention to Naomi Wolf's warning that if citizens don't act we could be a facing the End of America. Today, I want to highlight the warnings coming from career government servants who left the US government in protest at the beginning of the Iraq war. Several of those servants contributed to a recent anthology, Dissent: Voices of Conscience, edited by Col. (ret.) Ann Wright and Susan Dixon.