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• Navy To Defend Sonar In Court (Noah Schachtman, Wired Magazine)

"The Navy says it needs a wide berth to test its controversial, ultra-loud, low-frequency sonar system. The Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, and other green groups counter that the military has to be more mindful of whales and other marine mammals when it runs the tests. Whales depend on their ears to make their way around the oceans, after all. The sonar in question can be as deafening to marine mammals as a Saturn V moon rocket."

• Open Source Solutions (Robert D. Steele, OSS Inc)

"Over 500 international speakers, from the Director General of the International Committee of the Red Cross to former ministers, directors of intelligence, and many global corporate enterprises-and many radical free thinkers including Harold Rheigold, John Perry Barlow, and Alvin Toffler-are represented here in over fifteen volumes of substantive information."

• Humanitarian Intervention: A Forum (The Nation)

"The war in Iraq raised some difficult questions for many thoughtful Americans. Even if Saddam Hussein's regime posed no threat to our security or to the security of its neighbors, couldn't the war be justified on humanitarian grounds, as necessary to free the Iraqi people from a particularly odious dictatorship? And don't we, as a general principle, have a moral obligation to come to the rescue of people living under brutal regimes? Yet in expanding the notion of humanitarian intervention, is there not a danger of creating a rationale for a new form of American imperialism? And in any case, what right does the United States--or for that matter any nation--have to determine when and where to intervene? To promote a more informed debate about the emerging doctrine of humanitarian intervention, we asked twelve leading thinkers from around the world to offer their views on these important questions."

• Spy Games (Roger L. Simon, LA Weekly)

"Back in 1986, I found myself at a midnight meeting in the baronial hall of a Mexican hacienda, ostensibly to form the first writers' organization with members on both sides of the Iron Curtain — the International Association of Crime Writers. Around the table were the Soviet "Robert Ludlum" Julian Semionov (a reputed KGB colonel), Spanish novelist and chief theorist of Euro-communism Vazquez Montalban, and Mexican mystery writer Paco Taibo, himself rumored to have been personal friends with Che Guevara. I was a mere detective novelist/screenwriter from L.A., a bit over my head (maybe a lot over my head), and feeling that, without serious help, I could end up dupe of the year and probably blacklisted in the bargain. So when the assembled group asked me what other American writers should serve on the "Central Committee" (yes, they used that term — later modified to "Executive Committee") of this fledgling organization, my first reaction was to say forget it, until the one obvious name jumped into my head: Ross Thomas. Not only was he one of the best U.S. crime novelists then, he was the only one I knew with what appeared to be the background to handle whatever cloak-and-dagger nefariousness lay before us."

• U.S. Curtails Iraq’s New Media Freedoms (Fariba Nawa, Village Voice)

"The print press is booming here as newspapers rose from five government-run papers during Saddam Hussein's regime to around 150 now. But U.S.-led forces are dampening the mood of the free press by censoring it."

• The Old Media’s Revenge On Dotcom Arrogance (Peter Thal Larsen, Financial Times)

"In the next 12 months four writers will each publish their account of the AOL-Time Warner marriage and its near-collapse in the subsequent three years. The tale has all the necessary ingredients for a good business book: battling egos, clashing cultures, lost fortunes and a strong whiff of fraud. But even the most obsessive observers of the US media scene may struggle to finish four variations of a story to which they already know the ending."

• The Carlyle Group: C Is For Capitalism (The Economist)

"On the day Osama bin Laden's men attacked America, Shafiq bin Laden, described as an estranged brother of the terrorist, was at an investment conference in Washington, DC, along with two people who are close to President George Bush: his father, the first President Bush, and James Baker, the former secretary of state who masterminded the legal campaign that secured Dubya's move to the White House. The conference was hosted by the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm that manages billions of dollars, including, at the time, some bin Laden family wealth. It also employs Messrs Bush and Baker."

The views expressed above represent the writer and not necessarily those of The Disinformation Company Ltd.