CIA Director George Tenet is making a secrecy-shrouded visit to the Middle East to try to rebuild Palestinian security forces that were badly mauled during Israel's recent anti-terror campaign on the West Bank.

We have just witnessed, in the spectacular growth of U.S. fortunes over the past two decades, a once-in-a-century phenomenon. Puffed up by the boom in high-technology and finance, a select group of Americans has accumulated an even larger boodle in an even shorter period of time than the titans of the Gilded Age amassed 100 years ago. The numbers almost defy belief.

... If the recent accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few resembles the Gilded Age, what about the politics?

... While history often repeats, it usually does so only in outline; ... politics today has a somewhat different cast.

A long time ago, when I was part of the opposition to Communist dictatorship, I thought that if the Iron Curtain ever fell, communism collapsed and the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, NATO would also lose its raison d'etre as a principal tool of the policy of "containment."

To travel with Secretary Powell is to catch a brief glimpse of a parallel universe: the heedless, insular, bellicose, unilateralist America seen by many European eyes.

Russian reporter to Powell: why had the US "finally agreed" to the arms control treaty, "because, as we know, you don't like treaties."

Powell: "We do like this treaty."

"It's difficult to give an answer overall as to how Europe views American policy, because American policy is multi-faceted."

Powell: "We have worked very, very hard to try to erase this view that we are unilateralist, just doing anything we please and we don't talk to our friends about it."

President Bush's top drug policy adviser says the government's anti-drug ads largely are being ignored by teens, and a survey finds no evidence the multimillion-dollar campaign is discouraging drug use.

Li Qinfu races his purple Lamborghini toward what looks like the United States Capitol rising above the canola fields south of Shanghai.

As he turns into the manicured grounds surrounding the domed marble building, there stands an 18-foot, three-ton bronze likeness of himself, right hand raised as if beckoning to the future.

"It would have been too dangerous to cast the hand waving with the palm turned out."

While the Communist Party publicly embraces capitalists these days, inviting them in a controversial decision last July to join the party, it is still trying to restrain the emergence of a wealthy class.

...the super-rich have reached critical mass ... China now has one of the world's greatest wealth gaps, from almost none 20 years ago.

"Engineers and entrepreneurs from India and China who work in Silicon Valley are quietly fueling a high-tech revolution in their native countries in ways that challenge traditional notions of a "brain drain." ... [They are] "agents of global economic change."

"The 'brain drain' from developing countries such as India and China has been transformed into a more complex, two-way process of 'brain circulation' linking Silicon Valley to select urban centers in India and China."

The precocious New America Foundation has just agreed to a deal with Basic Books to publish jointly up to 10 books a year covering public policy and current affairs. Until now, fellows at the three-year-old think tank primarily have relied on op-eds and magazine articles to express their deep thoughts.

"What I like to do is get in the car and drive around and do drive-by shootings. You can haul someone out of their car and beat on them and steal their money and their car. It's kind of amusing that you have that ability."

"The drive-by shootings of innocent pedestrians are always fun. It really does bring out the quote-unquote evil in you."

... Fans are hardly a collection of weirdos and social misfits. An awful lot are professionals with successful careers, wives or girlfriends and, in many cases, children. And to hear a lot of them tell it, well, Grand Theft Auto 3 is just too much fun.

The game's allure comes down to "just going on killing sprees."

... Retail sales of video games totaled $9.4B last year, a 42 percent increase over the $6.6B in sales in 2000, and even more than Hollywood took in at the box office last year.