On 29 July – hours before John Kerry was to speak at the Democratic convention in Boston – the CIA discussed the find at a meeting with FBI and military officials. That led to the capture exactly a month later of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a Pakistani national and relatively low-level al-Qa’ida operative, a computer expert specialising in communications.Finally, on 25 July, came the arrest in the Pakistani city of Gujrat of Ahmad Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian and a top member of Osama bin Laden’s organisation, who is believed to have helped the 1998 bombings of US embassies in east Africa.The new material seized with him was passed to US intelligence. Had the intelligence analysts got it wrong, was the Bush administration again over-reacting, and was the White House using a national security scare to further its election year political goals? At least the origins of this summer drama are reasonably clear.They may be traced to 13 June, and the arrest in Karachi of an al-Qa’ida member named Musaad Aruchi. The next day, the evidence discovered on captured al-Qa’ida computer disks in Pakistan was revealed to be three or four years old, pre-dating the 11 September attacks themselves.By yesterday, the controversy was starting to provoke questions that recalled the great Iraqi WMD debacle. Democrats, however, say that Mr Bush is such a known quantity that whatever happens in New York will change few minds.. To describe America’s latest terror alert as a silly season folly, filling the airwaves and newspaper pages in the usual high summer absence of real news, would be uncharitable. The survey was dismissed by the Kerry campaign as “an aberration”.

But Republicans argued that it showed the limits of the Massachusetts senator’s appeal to ordinary Americans, boasting that their man would do much better when the Republicans hold their own convention in New York in four weeks’ time. The Bill Clinton/Al Gore ticket for instance soared almost 20 per cent after the 1992 Democratic convention in New York, and never fell behind again.But a CNN/Gallup poll at the weekend found that Mr Kerry actually slipped by 1 per cent and Mr Bush advanced slightly during the week in Boston. Polls in Newsweek, and by The Washington Post/ABCNews suggest the Democratic ticket gained a mere three or four points, to lead Mr Bush and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, by 49-42 and 50-44 per cent respectively.Though a more than useful gain in so close fought an election year, the “bounce” is meagre compared with previous elections. Though her frankness appeals to many women and independent-minded voters, it also offers the Republicans bountiful ammunition which might help them in a neck-and-neck race for the White House.Even geography underlines how little there is to choose between the two candidates, as they crisscross the handful of battleground states where the election will be decided. If their schedules hold, both Mr Bush and Mr Kerry will be campaigning today just three blocks apart in Davenport, a river-town in Iowa, a state narrowly carried by Al Gore in 2000, but which the Republicans hope to capture this time.The signs are that in an unusually polarised electorate, most voters have already made up their minds, and the outcome may be decided less by a small pool of undecided voters in the centre, than by the ability of the two parties to get their committed supporters to the polls.Despite what was generally considered a successful gathering in Boston last week, capped by a powerful and well-received acceptance speech, Mr Kerry has failed to secure a candidate’s usual post-convention boost ­ at least so far. “Three more months,” she declared, referring to the 2 November election date.A few moments later, she was even more outspoken, addressing the situation in Iraq and the Bush administration’s refusal to admit even the smallest mistake in the conduct of the war, and seemingly casting an aspersion on the President’s judgement and intellect. There is no argument however about the different kind of bounce his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry is providing to his campaign.
Breaking yet again with the unwritten protocol that actual and potential presidential spouses play a mostly decorative role on the hustings, Mrs Kerry made no bones about what she thought of George Bush and his intelligence, as she introduced her husband at a rally in the key swing state of Wisconsin.”They want four more years of hell,” she replied as a Bush-supporting heckler in the crowd at a park in Milwaukee interrupted her with the traditional incumbent’s refrain of “four more years” Mrs Kerry then gave a time frame of her own.

“It had nothing to do with the beliefs I have, or of any Republican I know – or any Democrat or independent.”. Opinions polls differ over how much “bounce” the Democratic candidate John Kerry has obtained from his convention last week. To achieve his goal of a country populated by “favoured races,” Mr Hart proposes eliminating welfare and immigration.”If an individual demonstrates the ability to produce and contribute to society, he or she would be encouraged to have more children. He says he is running to make sure Mr Hart does not win the Republican Party’s endorsement.”I was appalled by what I’d seen there,” Mr Bertrand said. People on welfare would not,” Mr Hart said.Mr Bertrand said he found out about Mr Hart’s views from the internet, where he went to learn more about the race in Tennessee’s 8th District, which covers the mostly rural counties of north-west Tennessee, stretching from north Memphis to Clarksville. But he insists his beliefs have nothing to do with racism and everything to do with “favoured races” from Europe and Asia and “less-favored races” from Africa. It inspired 33 US states to pass laws that allowed the sterilisation of some 65,000 people, and Nazi Germany used the US examples to justify programs that sterilised and killed millions.Mr Hart, a 60-year-old estate agent, knows his views on eugenics are far from the mainstream and knows he is viewed as racist by most people.

genetically altering the human race in order to build a super race with super intelligence is appalling.”Much of Mr Hart’s platform revolves around eugenics, which developed before the Second World War as a pseudoscientific movement to solve social problems by preventing the “unfit” from having children. John Tanner, a Democrat, has held the seat for 15 years.”I would characterise him as a racist, an elitist,” said Dennis Bertrand, a financial analyst and former military officer who also stood as a candidate “His idea of … His presence in the campaign has embarrassed Republican leaders, who were blind-sided by Mr Hart after they didn’t bother fielding a candidate. He believes that if blacks were integrated centuries ago, the automobile would never have been invented.Mr Hart has been said to turn up at voters’ homes wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a gun, telling them that “white children deserve the same rights as everyone else”.But, despite his radical views, Mr Hart may end up winning the Republican nomination in a north-western Tennessee district because he is the only Republican candidate on the ballot in tomorrow’s primary. The Republican congressional candidate James L Hart has acknowledged that he is an unapologetic supporter of eugenics, the fake science that resulted in thousands of people being sterilised in an attempt to purify the white race.
He believes the country will look “like one big Detroit” – which has a large African-American population – if it doesn’t eliminate welfare payments and immigration. “We have developed a biomolecular platform, that is a series of machines linked to each other, to extract the DNA of the vines,” Mr Labra explained.. A summit of the island’s principal producers and agronomists was recently held at which it was decided to eschew use of any imported vines, the Milan daily reported.”The genesis of cannonau must be preserved,” said the co-operative’s director, Tattanu Piras.