It was revealed that the National Security Agency, with the assistance of AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth, has secretly stored the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. “It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world” said an anonymous whistleblower. A poll found that 63 percent of Americans feel that it is acceptable for the NSA to build such a database.USA TodayMedia Matters for AmericaABC NewsIt was reported that the United States was analyzing phone call records of reporters from ABC News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post to determine the identities of CIA employees who …

Mahmoud Abbas was elected president of the Palestinian Authority. He dedicated his victory to “the soul of the brother martyr Yasir Arafat and to our people.”New York TimesEarlier in the week, Abbas called Israel the “Zionist Enemy” at an election rally,The Indian Expressthen announced he would pursue peace talks with it.ReutersIsrael shut the border at Gaza,Xinhuathen offered Abbas personal security in Jerusalem, which he refused.Azcentral.comKofi Annan visited the site of the South Asia tsunami disaster and said, “I have never seen such utter destruction.”CBS NewsColin Powell toured Indonesia and called it “amazing” and “heartbreaking.”ABC NewsHe also said providing disaster relief …

David Kay, the outgoing head of the Iraq Survey Group, said that Iraq got rid of its illegal weapons programs years before the United States invaded. New York TimesKay made it clear that the United Nations weapons-inspection process had succeeded in disarming Iraq and said the Iraqis had been reduced to experimenting with ricin, a primitive but deadly poison easily made from fermented castor beans; Kay also said that the CIA had completely misread the situation in Iraq, largely because the agency had no on-the-ground spies after the U.N. inspectors were removed.New York TimesMore than 100,000 Iraqis filled the streets …

At the request of the CIA, the Justice Department began investigating charges that the White House leaked the name of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame to the press in retaliation for remarks by her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, challenging President Bush’sclaim that Iraq tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Africa. An unnamed administration official told the Washington Post that two White House officials had revealed the agent’s identity to at least six journalists. “Clearly,” the official said, “it was meant purely and simply for revenge.” The White House denied that Karl Rove was responsible for the leak, which was …

Attorney General John Ashcroft mocked librarians for their opposition to provisions of the USA Patriot Act that permit federal agents to seize citizens’ library records; Ashcroft said that the librarians were indulging in “baseless hysteria” and wondered why the FBI would care “how far you have gotten on the latest Tom Clancy novel.” He did not make clear why the government needs access to library records, however,New York Timesand later said that no requests for such records had yet been made.New York TimesMembers of the House and Senate appropriations committees agreed to kill funding for the Pentagon’s Terrorist Information Awareness …

Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain testified before the Hutton inquiry and denied the BBC’s claim that his aides had “sexed up” his dossier on Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction; Blair said he would have resigned if the story had been true.Guardian, BBC, New York TimesAlastair Campbell, Blair’s powerful director of communications, announced his resignation but claimed it had nothing to do with the dossier scandal.BBCMurfreesboro, Tennessee, adopted a new policy banning offensive body odor among city employees.Knoxville News SentinelTwo Iranian intelligence officers were charged with “semi-intentionally” causing the death of a Canadian photojournalist.ReutersAmerican soldiers continued to die in …

The United States decided not to sign a new anti-germ-warfare treaty, bringing to at least five the number of international agreements the U.S. has rejected in recent years, including the Kyoto Protocol, the Landmine Convention, the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. President George W. Bush and Russian president Vladimir Putin agreed to work toward a disarmament framework that would reduce nuclear weapons while allowing the U.S. its missile-defense scheme; a few days before their discussion, Putin remarked that Bush was “a fairly good-hearted person, nice to talk to, I …

Serbia‘s prime minister gave Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague to be tried for war crimes even though doing so was technically illegal; the prime minister of Yugoslavia resigned in protest. The International Court of Justice rebuked the United States for executing two German brothers in 1999 without following established international law, which required the German consulate to be notified of the men’s arrest and conviction. American and British warplanes bombed Iraq again, killing three people. Dissidents from the Ivory Coast filed suit against President Laurent Gbagbo in Belgium, whose courts, oddly enough, have universal jurisdiction in crimes against humanity. Ethnic …

Australianresearchers, who were trying to use genetic engineering to sterilize mice, accidentally created a deadly, immune-system-destroying strain of the mousepox virus, a cousin of the human smallpox virus. Two biotechnology companies announced that they had sequenced the rice genome. Uganda’s most recent outbreak of Ebola fever seemed to be over. Someone sent a letter filled with orange powder, which looked like anthrax, to the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, causing the evacuation of a building. E. coli, whose genome was recently sequenced, has a habit, researchers said, of picking up new genes from bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, which …