CNN reports: Sources: Congress to hear Iraq had 'active WMD program':

The conclusion that Iraq had an "active WMD program" is based on recent interrogations of Iraqi regime officials, as well as on a series of documents that the United States has seized and now analyzed. Those documents show that Iraq had plans in place to destroy weapons stockpiles quickly; shift dual-use plants from commercial to weapons production as part of a deception effort; and reconstitute its weapons if it had to destroy them in the face of inspections or a U.S. attack.

Good evening. Reports that the former Italian leader Benito Mussolini is "dead" and "hanging" "upside down" at a petrol station were received with scepticism in Rome today. Our "reporter" - whoops, scrub the inverted commas round "reporter", the scare-quotes key on the typewriter's jammed again. Anyway our reporter Andrew "Gilligan" is "on" the scene "in" Milan. Andrew...

Andrew Gilligan: I'm leaning on a lamp post at the corner of the street in case a certain little duce swings by, and I don't see any dead dictators, John. But then the Allies have a history of making these premature announcements...

He's just above your head, Andrew. I know you don't like to do wide shots, but, if the camera pulls back, I think you'll find that's definitely a finger tickling the back of your ear...

AG: Well, there you are. He's not hanging from a petrol station, is he? He's hanging from a rope attached to a girder on the forecourt of a petrol station. We've become all too familiar with the Allies playing fast and loose with the facts.

Yes, indeed, Andrew. And contradictory reports that he was hanging from a lamp-post have led some observers to question the accuracy of the intelligence on which the "liberation" of Milan went ahead.

Read the rest at the UK Telegraph's website.

The current debate raging over whether or not to send U.S. troops to Liberia reveals a lot about leftists and conservatives. While leftists clamor for U.S. military intervention, conservatives oppose it, but only meekly. Why?

Morality, the leftists believe, consists not in defending one's interests but in sacrificing them. Accordingly, they advocate U.S. military intervention only when no U.S. self-interest exists (such as in Somalia, Bosnia and now Liberia).

Conservatives, who generally uphold military intervention when in the interests of the country, are morally disarmed by their own altruistic beliefs. They are unable to resist the leftists' calls to sacrifice for the needy (abroad or at home).

Thus, as long as altruism remains the prevailing morality among our politicians, Americans can't count on either the right or the left to defend their interests. Only when self-interest replaces altruism as a principle of domestic and foreign policy, will Americans be safe in their inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Zimbabwe's banks were fast running out of money yesterday....Tellers have been told to hand out only the equivalent of £3.50 to each customer....[The inflation] rate is estimated to be more than 700 per cent, meaning that many more notes are required to buy the same quantity of goods. Most nations facing economic meltdown opt to print more notes, but the only press producing the highest denomination note, of Z$500 (35p), is already working 24 hours a day. Plans to produce larger notes have had to be abandoned until the country can find the foreign currency to import more ink....

A professional assistant at a clinic run by Harare municipality, who earns Z$70,000 a month, started weeping quietly. "We can't believe things will get worse. But each time they get worse. Will it ever end?"

Governor Pataki would be well advised to reconsider his support for Daniel Libeskind ["Pataki Backs Libeskind on Tower," page 1, July 22]. Mr. Libeskind has actually built few projects, none of them office buildings or in any way comparable to the proposed World Trade Center. A Times of London reviewer called his modernist British Museum "a disaster for the Victoria and Albert in particular and for civilization in general."His WTC design was not overly popular, either. During last year's LMDC survey, more respondents chose "none of the above" than either the Libeskind (25%) or Think (33%) designs.

One might acquire a sense of the man by pondering the following quotation from a collection of poetry that he wrote, Fishing From the Pavement:

"America turns its mass-produced urine antennae toward Caesar's arrogant ganglion, while history is advocated by utopians as a substitute for defecating."

This is not the sort of individual we want associated with what will be a premier American landmark.

Leftist college professors have reached a new high in intellectual absurdity. In a recent study published in the Psychological Bulletin, they claim to have discovered that Reagan, Hitler, Mussolini and Rush Limbaugh have important personality traits in common. They are all right-wing "conservatives," by which the authors mean they "resist change."

Whether such resistance is to freedom or to dictatorship is not mentioned. So as not to sound too obviously left-wing, the professors add that left-wing dictators like Stalin, Castro and Khrushchev (who the leftists have consistently supported or excused) also "resisted change," and thus may also be labeled as right-wing "conservatives."

What could be the motive for lumping together an American President, a talk show host and assorted mass murderers? Obviously to try to "psychologize" away anyone who disagrees with the leftists by evading fundamental differences in the content of their ideas, for example, the fact that conservatives, at least the better ones, support America's founding, and decidedly radical, principles of freedom and individual rights, whereas the mass killers only goal was to obliterate all rights in their mad frenzy to seize power and enslave or exterminate all those who opposed them or anyone they did not happen to like.

With nonsense like this passing for objective scientific inquiry, is it any wonder that the American public is becoming increasingly contemptuous of its intellectuals?

"You paint a much more optimistic picture of the state of play in Iraq than anyone reading the front pages of the newspapers and watching news broadcasts in this country would get. Partially, I suspect, that's because of the trickle of reports of American casualties, but also other reports of resistance, as well. What is the news media, what are the news media in this country missing?"

Wolfowitz replied:

"I think the success stories. It's a country that's not easy to get around in, admittedly, and it's not easy to understand. There's a language problem, to begin with. And I don't want to paint a rosy picture; there are real problems. The security problem is real, and the security problem is making it difficult to solve other problems like getting the power and electricity restored.

"But when we visited Najaf, for example, where a relatively small Marine unit is preserving a quite stable situation, not perfect situation, but quite stable, in a city of half a million Shia, who some people predicted would be a huge problem, you had a cameraman there, and I asked if he'd been here before, and he said no, he hadn't, he'd been up north where the fighting's going on, but he hadn't been in the south. And the Marines told me, yes, there was a CNN cameraman who's come here once in the last month, and that was when a Marine was killed.

"It's a hard story to cover, but frankly, I think, maybe success [...] people think isn't as good news.

"But the south of the country is largely stable. This is the Shia heartland, which some people predicated would be big trouble. The north of the country is largely stable. This is the country where you have a potentially volatile ethnic mixture of Kurds and Turks and Arabs, and some people predicted that would be trouble. Where we're having trouble -- and we're making progress even there -- is in this Baathist, Saddamist heartland, including his hometown of Tikrit, where the killers of the old regime are putting out $100 for someone to attack a power line and $500 for someone to attack an American. And that's where the trouble is coming from."