False optimism, a dying population and the prospect of war are a few of the issues the world is facing.
United States
There were five of them, or maybe, according to earlier reports, as many as 19. They crossed the border from Canada on Christmas Eve, slipping unseen into the mountainous northern reaches of New York state — or perhaps it was from the south, across the New Mexican desert. They may be Islamic extremists, taking their positions for a coordinated terrorist assault on the US in the coming days, but, then again, they may not, Oliver Burkeman reports from New York.
As FBI agents descended on cities across the US to police New Year celebrations, hundreds of their colleagues continued an ”intense” nationwide manhunt for five Middle Eastern men, believed to have entered the US illegally together.
At some point their photographs had been taken, and so five mugshots glowered from newspapers and television news shows. The FBI knows who it wants, but doesn’t know why it wants them; the surreal combination of specificity and vagueness characterising the terrorist alert has grown commonplace during this jittery and bewildering past year.
It has been a year of such non-specific information: on the precise nature of the threat from Iraq, or on the reasons for the detention last month of 500 Californian Arabs who were complying with a deadline to report to immigration authorities. And, of course, on the scale and character of the continuing terrorist threat at home — from the bewildering variety of claims made for the dangerousness of JosÃ