UNITED NATIONS (CNN) -- Chief U.N. weapons inspectors told the Security Council on Monday that Iraq was still resisting international efforts to ensure it disarms, but inspectors should have more time to complete their work.

"Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace," said chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Marx's Intellectual Legacy

Marx After Communism

From The Economist print edition, Dec 19th 2002

As a system of government, communism is dead or dying. As a system of ideas, its future looks secure

When Soviet communism fell apart towards the end of the 20th century, nobody could say that it had failed on a technicality. A more comprehensive or ignominious collapse -- moral, material and intellectual -- would be difficult to imagine. Communism had tyrannised and impoverished its subjects, and slaughtered them in the tens of millions. For decades past, in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, any allusion to the avowed aims of communist doctrine -- equality, freedom from exploitation, true justice -- had provoked only bitter laughter. Finally, when the monuments were torn down, statues of Karl Marx were defaced as contemptuously as those of Lenin and Stalin. Communism was repudiated as theory and as practice; its champions were cast aside, intellectual founders and sociopathic rulers alike.

from the London Guardian:

"In Life as in Fiction, Greene's Taunts Left Americans in a Quiet Fury:

US Compiled Secret Reports on Novelist for Years, FBI Files Show"

Rob Evans and David Hencke

The Guardian, Monday December 2, 2002

Graham Greene's classic tale "The Quiet American," released this week in
cinemas starring Michael Caine in a potentially Oscar-winning role, is still
stirring up controversy over its apparent anti-Americanism.

Gore Vidal asks, 'Bush junta' complicit in 9/11?

Sunder Katwala, British Observer, Sunday October 27, 2002

America's most controversial novelist calls for an investigation into whether the Bush administration deliberately allowed the terrorist attacks to happen

Talk: Gore Vidal on Bush

Observer Worldview


Terrorism crisis: Observer special

America's most controversial writer Gore Vidal has launched the most scathing attack to date on George W Bush's Presidency, calling for an investigation into the events of 9/11 to discover whether the Bush administration deliberately chose not to act on warnings of Al-Qaeda's plans.