Homicides are up 67 percent since 1999, worrying voters, but President Hugo Chávez is sailing toward re-election.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 — The White House said Friday that President Bush would meet next week with Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of one of the most powerful Shiite parties in Iraq, the latest step in a burst of new administration attempts to try different approaches to bolstering the fragile Iraqi government.

The effort is part of a White House strategy that calls for reaching out to a wider circle of Iraqi politicians to give greater support to the weak government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and lessen his dependence on Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric.

But it immerses Washington even deeper into Baghdad’s byzantine coalition politics, and it risks being interpreted in Baghdad as a sign that Mr. Bush is hedging his bets.

“If you think Maliki may not survive,” said one senior administration official, “you’d want to make sure that the president is talking to the guy who might well form the next government.”

GSA Chief Seeks Cuts For Contract Oversight

Newly appointed administrator is trying to limit agency's ability to audit contracts for fraud and calls oversight efforts intimidating to workforce.

"She's trying to reduce wasteful spending," said GSA spokesman David Bethel. "Just like any other office within GSA, she has asked the OIG to live within his budget..."

Miller declined to discuss his relationship with Doan.

"Let's keep our eyes on the larger picture, which is that GSA's $60 billion operations need to have objective and independent scrutiny," Miller said. "My office provides that public scrutiny. Not everyone is happy with this level of scrutiny. Nevertheless, my task is to keep our office focused on fulfilling our mission of working with GSA to enhance the quality and effectiveness of the services it provides, protect the integrity of GSA operations, and to keep fraud, waste and abuse away from its doorstep."

The big buzz in the insurance industry today is climate change.

Lloyd's of London's June report is titled: "Climate Change: Adapt or Bust."

The 2005 hurricane season gave the United States supposedly once-in-a-century storms, one right after the other. Katrina, Rita and Wilma were among the seven most expensive hurricanes ever to hit the country. Companies that had to eat too much of the $51.5 billion in insured losses went under.

The big problem with climate change for the insurance companies is not the risk. Their whole business is getting paid to accept risks.

The trouble is that their traditional means of calculating what is an acceptable risk -- and how much to charge for it -- is based on history.

It assumes that tomorrow will pretty much behave like yesterday.

Now they think that when it comes to the weather, the world is moving.

Some of those people facing insurance crises have a hard time understanding why.

"I feel sorry for Katrina victims -- it was a terrible thing," Peg Buchanan says. "But I don't see why the rest of the world should be punished because we like oceanfront."

Bill Hogan, with Twiddy & Co. Realtors in the Outer Banks, explains: "What's happened is that there is a stretch of land north of Corolla with no federally subsidized flood insurance. It's called, locally, the Four Wheel Drive Area. No hard-surface roads. It includes Swan Beach, North Swan Beach and Carova Beach. There are houses up there -- 14-bedroom oceanfronts -- for about $2 million," Hogan says. "Buy a lot for about a million. Build a house for about a million."

But then FEMA redrew the flood map. "All of a sudden, the lenders are requiring flood insurance where they did not in the past." The only source "for the kind of insurance the lender requires is somebody like Lloyd's of London. It might have a $50,000 deductible, and still be prohibitively expensive."

There are 438,000 people living in low-lying Virginia Beach. It is marked by high-rise hotels smack on the water, without even dunes between the boardwalk and the surf.

In early September, when the leaders of the big European reinsurance companies had their annual gathering -- called the Rendez-Vous, in the posh principality of Monte Carlo -- one of the big discussion points was the gap between supply and demand for reinsurance in U.S. wind-affected areas, according to the industry journal, Reactions.

Reinsurers are the big boys who can throw around numbers with nine or 10 zeroes at the end and still sleep at night. They insure the insurers, buying risk beyond the appetite of ordinary companies. The most romanticized is Lloyd's of London. However, when Swiss Re and Munich Re talk, all conversation in the room ends until whatever is on their minds stops reverberating.

Today, what's on their mind is climate change.

"There are horror stories about the frequency and severity of hurricanes increasing," Reactions reported in September. That plus the skyrocketing number and value of properties on the U.S. coastline "has prompted many to question whether it is possible to write catastrophe business profitably."

"Two effects are going on," says Nakada, of the risk modeling firm RMS. "Hurricane activity rates have gone up." But also, "Hurricanes are perceived to be longer-lived. These longer-lived hurricanes have a better chance of sneaking up the coast. The view of vulnerability has changed."

The specter looms of the big hurricanes of 1938 and 1954. Those Category 3 hurricanes devastated New England. Storm surges of 13 and 12 feet, respectively, swept through Providence, R.I. Historic markers demonstrate how high the water rose downtown. They are over your head. Photos show seas crashing over the top of a harbor lighthouse. It is 70 feet tall. Beach homes were swept out to sea.

Since 1971, "Insured U.S. weather-related losses are growing 10 times faster than premiums and the overall economy," reports Ceres.

...

...Allstate has decided not to write new homeowners insurance in the five boroughs of New York City -- Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island -- plus Westchester County, just north of the city, and the counties that make up Long Island -- Nassau and Suffolk. In the most vulnerable parts of that market, they are also not renewing existing insurance.

What does this mean for the future of beautiful areas around Washington near big bad bodies of water, from Duck to Rehoboth and from Alexandria to Annapolis?

"If you have a ton of money and don't mind paying three times the insurance as two years ago, you're probably happy," Nakada says. "There'll be all sorts of property available on the coast in warm weather places if the market gets more efficient."

"In terms of affecting where people live and do business, three things have to happen: The risk has to go up a lot. And it just did. Number two, the market needs to allow that cost to be passed on to customers, or not. In which case, number three, either the price goes up, or the availability goes down in insurance.

ISTANBUL -- Pope Benedict XVI concluded a historic trip to the Muslim world yesterday after soothing an outraged Islamic population with his Christian message of peace and reconciliation.
    The Roman Catholic pontiff wound up his triumphant four-day visit to Turkey with a parting message of good will to Muslims as Turkish clerics and commentators lauded the German-born pope for facing Mecca as he prayed alongside a top Islamic clergyman in Istanbul's Blue Mosque on Thursday.
    "You know well that the church wishes to impose nothing on anyone, and that she merely asks to live in freedom," Benedict said at the Holy Spirit Cathedral in Istanbul.

...for sheer verbal virtuosity, for his dizzy manipulation of language, Perelman deserves a place at the top of the trade. "Westward Ha!" is an account of a trip to the Far East ("The whole business began with an unfavorable astrological conjunction, Virgo being in the house of Alcohol").

1. "You Know Me Al" by Ring Lardner (Scribner's, 1916).

2. "My Life and Hard Times" by James Thurber (Harper, 1933).

3. "The Devil's Dictionary" by Ambrose Bierce (Albert & Charles Boni, 1911).

4. "Westward Ha!" by S.J. Perelman (Simon & Schuster, 1948).

5. "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain (1884).

With a population of 1.3 billion and counting, China is currently importing some 40 percent of its oil -- by 2025, that dependency will reach 75 percent, according to a projection by the U.S. Energy Department. Already the world's fourth-biggest economy, behind America, Japan, and Germany, China could be No. 1 by that time, say some economists. It will almost certainly be the biggest energy importer.

(Yale historian Paul )Kennedy had...in 1987...come out with a fat book called "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers." His argument was that the United States suffered from "imperial overstretch," the classic malady that in past centuries had afflicted such titans as Spain, France, and Great Britain, and thus faced a relative decline in its global power. Kennedy even broached the possibility that the United States might someday no longer be No. 1. Say what? For his heresy, Kennedy was savaged in certain quarters. And then he was ridiculed: With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Uncle Sam never looked more dominant. Its "unipolar moment," in the phrase of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, seemed destined to be a long one.

These days, Kennedy is looking less like a heretic and more like a prophet. He still teaches at Yale, and I recently caught up with him on the telephone. He suggested that I do a Google search on the phrase "imperial overstretch." The search produced 104,000 entries. The first listing was an article from Jane's, the well-respected British-based analyzer of global security trends. The piece asked, "Can the U.S. afford to send its troops here, there, and everywhere?" That was Kennedy's question 19 years ago.

His point made, Kennedy told me that "managing relative decline" remained the task for America. If anything, he added, today's geopolitical climate is even more hazardous for the United States than was the environment of two decades ago. "There are now more players on the globe who can screw us rather more effectively than we can screw them," the historian said.

Recent headlines underscore that observation. Consider those from a single day, October 17. In the Middle East, "The American era in the region has ended," Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a Financial Times op-ed, citing the tide of radicalism that is swamping Washington's efforts to steer events in civil-war-bloodied Iraq, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad-ruled Iran, and Hamas-led Palestine. A nuclear North Korea? "It's China's Problem," was the headline for a Washington Post op-ed by columnist Anne Applebaum.

In his 2005 book "The Case for Goliath," Mandelbaum's core thesis is that America acts not as a kind of empire, bullying lesser subjects purely for its own selfish ends, but as a world government for the society of nations, providing necessary "public goods." The most important such good is security. Mandelbaum is not arguing that America is motivated by altruism -- he is saying that America, in following its own global interests, is benefiting everyone. He offers this analogy:

Mandelbaum does not dwell on what an American withdrawal from this role would mean for the world, except to say, "The world would become a messier, more dangerous, and less prosperous place," perhaps yielding "a repetition of the great global economic failure and the bloody international conflicts the world experienced in the 1930s and 1940s." Whatever the "life span" of America's role as the world's government, he writes in the book's last sentence, other countries "will miss it when it is gone."

Hatred of Bush trumps declared principles. Because Bush made democratization and reform the centerpiece of his Middle East strategy, many Western progressives dismiss them as priorities or even as desirable. After all, in progressive rhetoric how can Bush be both an idiot and correct?

Instead of democracy, many progressives have come to romanticize "resistance." They have become attracted to the same rhetorical motifs projected by liberation movements of a generation past and Islamists today. Embrace of multiculturalism has morphed into a cultural relativism that justifies oppression in the name of culture.

The majority of Arab civil society may celebrate Bush's election rebuke and welcome the end of the Bush years but, as anger fades and Washington re-embraces realism, Arab reformers from Rabat to Riyadh may find they have missed their best opportunity, while dictators and theocrats seize theirs.

Here's a fun little quiz. We'll give you a series of quotes, and you see if you can figure out who said each. This time it's not a trick question; the answer in each case is one of the people listed.

1. "Governments are there to serve their own people. No people wants to side with or support any oppressors. But regrettably, the U.S. administration disregards even its own public opinion and remains in the forefront of supporting the trampling of the rights of the Palestinian people."

    a. Jimmy Carter
    b. Pat Buchanan
    c. John Mearsheimer
    d. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

2. "Since the commencement of the U.S. military presence in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, maimed or displaced. Terrorism in Iraq has grown exponentially. . . . The U.S. Government used the pretext of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but later it became clear that that was just a lie and a deception. Although Saddam was overthrown and people are happy about his departure, the pain and suffering of the Iraqi people has persisted and has even been aggravated."

    a. Howard Dean
    b. Markos "Kos" Moulitsas
    c. Howard Zinn
    d. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

3. "You have certainly heard the sad stories of the Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons. The U.S. administration attempts to justify them through its proclaimed 'war on terror.' But everyone knows that such behavior, in fact, offends global public opinion, exacerbates resentment and thereby spreads terrorism, and tarnishes the U.S. image and its credibility among nations."

    a. Dick Durbin
    b. Andrew Sullivan
    c. Erwin Chemerinsky
    d. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

4. "The legitimacy, power and influence of a government do not emanate from its arsenals of tanks, fighter aircrafts, missiles or nuclear weapons. . . . The global position of the United States is in all probability weakened because the administration has continued to resort to force, to conceal the truth, and to mislead the American people about its policies and practices."

    a. John Kerry
    b. Glenn Greenwald
    c. Michael Moore
    d. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

5. "Undoubtedly, the American people are not satisfied with this behavior and they showed their discontent in the recent elections. I hope that in the wake of the midterm elections, the administration of President Bush will have heard and will heed the message of the American people."

    a. Harry Pelosi
    b. Nancy Reid
    c. Josh Marshall
    d. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

6. "Now that Iraq has a Constitution and an independent Assembly and Government, would it not be more beneficial to bring the U.S. officers and soldiers home, and to spend the astronomical U.S. military expenditures in Iraq for the welfare and prosperity of the American people? As you know very well, many victims of Katrina continue to suffer, and countless Americans continue to live in poverty and homelessness."

    a. John Murtha
    b. Ned Lamont
    c. George McGovern
    d. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Here are the answers: 1. d; 2. d; 3. d; 4. d; 5. d; 6. d.

U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins...two years ago invalidated portions of the Patriot Act.

In 2004, Collins ruled that portions of the Patriot Act were too vague and, even after Congress amended the act in 2005, she ruled the provisions remained too vague to be understood by a person of average intelligence and were therefore unconstitutional.

"The vote is the vote. I voted to authorize. It was the right vote, and the reason I mentioned the threat is that we gave the--we had to give life to the threat. If there wasn't a legitimate threat, Saddam Hussein was not going to allow inspectors in. Now, let me make two points if I may. Ed [Gordon] questioned my answer. The reason I can't tell you to a certainty whether the president misled us is because I don't have any clue what he really knew about it, or whether he was just reading what was put in front of him. And I have no knowledge whether or not this president was in depth--I just don't know that. And that's an honest answer, and there are serious suspicions about the level to which this president really was involved in asking the questions that he should've. With respect to the question of, you know, the vote--let's remember where we were. If there hadn't been a vote, we would never have had inspectors. And if we hadn't voted the way we voted, we would not have been able to have a chance of going to the United Nations and stopping the president, in effect, who already had the votes, and who was obviously asking serious questions about whether or not the Congress was going to be there to enforce the effort to create a threat. So I think we did the right thing. I'm convinced we did."

Jose Carbonell, meanwhile, manages to respond to Rangel and Kerry as well as Webb: "You have to understand Webb's uncomfortable position. A reception with the president and other lawmakers is not the place to admit he has a dumb and uneducated loser of a son (why else would he be in Iraq?)."

Of course this is a joke: Webb does not share Rangel and Kerry's low opinion of American servicemen. Although even Kerry denies that he shares that view, it is said that Webb refused for decades to shake Kerry's hand because of the latter's botched joke in 1971, in which he accused his fellow Vietnam veterans of all manner of atrocities.

A single, gigantic asteroid slammed into Earth 65 million years ago, dooming the dinosaurs and many other species, scientists said on Thursday in a new study rebutting theories that multiple impacts did the deed," Reuters reports from Washington:

An examination of rock sediments drilled from five sites at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean strongly supports the notion that one massive hunk of space rock caused the mass extinction, a research team led by University of Missouri-Columbia geology professor Ken MacLeod found.

"It's a completely straightforward, single-impact scenario," MacLeod, whose findings appear in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, said in an interview. "It was a haymaker that nobody saw coming.