...have been rumored to have had a hand...

When you rumored it with your tongues, and spoke with your mouths what you had no knowledge of, and you considered it trivial but according to God, it is serious.

When you rumored it with your tongues, and spoke with your mouths what you had no knowledge of, and you considered it trivial but according to God, it is serious.

We are moving back to the Sun King s world, in which everything personal is known, rumored, or whispered. But now, with electronic surveillance, personal dependence has never been more extreme, more humiliating, and more depressing.

Today, no such tragedy is likely to help the Congress. Sonia Gandhi is rumored to have cancer, but, rather than capitalizing on it, she has kept the details within the walls of the Gandhi family compound in New Delhi.

None of this is to deny the dark side of the Chinese Internet explosion namely, widespread censorship and constraints on individual freedom of expression. China s SkyNet team (rumored to be greater than 30,000) is the largest cyber police force in the world.

Ben Ali s son in law, Sakhr el Materi, was last year elected to the central committee of the ruling Rassemblement Constitutionnel Démocratique party. In Algeria, Bouteflika s brother, Said, has been linked to a grassroots movement that it is rumored could eventually serve as a basis for his succession bid.

Economic patriotism, the slogan coined by France s Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin following PepsiCo s rumored attempt in July 2005 to takeover Danone, perhaps best encapsulates the political imperative. Although de Villepin s speeches are more flamboyant than those of most political leaders, the underlying sentiment extends far beyond France.

Indeed, today you can fit more books on the hard disk of your laptop computer than in a bookstore carrying 60,000 titles. The number of Web pages on the Internet is rumored to have exceeded 500 billion, enough to fill 10 modern aircraft carriers with the equivalent number of 500 page, one pound books.

Some conductors, not wanting to carry a tin cup as they wave their batons, have rejected important posts in the US for this reason, feeling that it would interfere with their art. Daniel Barenboim is rumored to have left the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in part because he objected to the fundraising demands that were being made of him.

They are probably right, up to a certain point, because the second lesson from the OAS assembly concerns the behavior of the Latin American democracies, mainly Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. They tried to accommodate the US (it is rumored that Obama phoned Lula and asked for his help), but were nonetheless unwilling to break with Cuba and Venezuela to side openly with the US.