This week's new entries are a fairly disparate bunch, ranging from the 1997 appointment of a new CIA station chief in Germany, David Edger, to Laura Bush's decrying the Taliban's oppression of women, and her husband's perceptive insight that poor people do not always become terrorists.

In homeland security, a 2003 study by Hilary Clinton found that anti-terrorism funds were allocated politically and in early 2004 it was found that 76 percent of US cities had received no federal money for emergency crews and first responders. President Bush played his part in this by vetoing critical national security measures and proposing deep cuts in a firefighting program. A mock terrorist attack on a nuclear plant was unrealistic and inadequate and a stowaway flew from New York to Dallas in 2003. The next year, a House report happily found that no vaccines for bioweapons had been developed since 2001.

Al-Qaeda is said to have shown an interest in Florida flight schools (in addition to the ones attended by the 9/11 hijackers) in 2000, and a computer and documents recovered in Afghanistan in late 2001 provided interesting details about the organization, which also allegedly claimed credit for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

In technology, a 1997 military exercise showed the US could be vulnerable to an "electronic Pearl Harbor", cyber-intruders probed US digital infrastructure in 2001, and evidence indicated al-Qaeda may be planning a cyber-assault the next year. Finally, improvements to GPS technology brought pilotless aviation closer to reality in 2000.