Jockstrip: The world as we know it

NEWS OF OTHER LIFE FORMS

A group of midlevel operatives has assumed a more prominent role in al Qaida and is working in tandem with Middle Eastern extremists across the Islamic world, according to senior government officials, The New York Times reports.

The alliance, which extends from North Africa to Southeast Asia, now poses the most serious terrorist threat to the United States, The Times says.

This new alliance of terrorists, though loosely knit, is as fully capable of planning and carrying out potent attacks on American targets as the more centralized network once led by Osama bin Laden, the officials say.

Classified investigations of the al Qaida threat now under way at the FBI and CIA have concluded that the war in Afghanistan failed to diminish the threat to the United States, and that the war might have complicated counterterrorism efforts by dispersing potential attackers across a wider geographic area.

Since al Qaida followers fled Afghanistan, the old bin Laden hierarchy has been succeeded by tactical operatives with makeshift alliances with militant groups in countries such as Pakistan, Egypt and Algeria, The Times reports.

TODAY'S SIGN THE WORLD IS ENDING

To live in Alaska where the average temperature has risen about seven degrees over the last 30 years, means learning to cope with a landscape that can sink, catch fire or break apart in the turn of a season, The New York Times reports.

In the village of Shishmaref on the Chukchi Sea just south of the Arctic Circle, it means high water eating away so many houses and buildings that people will vote next month on moving the entire village inland.

From Fairbanks, Alaska, to the north, where wildfires have been burning off and on since mid-May, it means living with hydraulic jacks to keep houses from slouching and buckling on foundations that used to be frozen all year. Permafrost, they say, is no longer permanent.

On the Kenai Peninsula, it means living in a 4-million-acre spruce forest that has been killed by beetles, the largest loss of trees to insects ever recorded in North America, federal officials say. Government scientists tied the event to rising temperatures, which allow the beetles to reproduce at twice their normal rate.

While President Bush was dismissive of a report the government recently released on how global warming will affect the nation, the leading Republican in Alaska, Sen. Ted Stevens, says that no place is experiencing more startling change from rising temperatures than Alaska.

According to Stevens, the warmer temperatures result in sagging roads, crumbling villages, dead forests, catastrophic fires and possible disruption of marine wildlife that will cost Alaska hundreds of millions of dollars.

AND FINALLY, TODAY'S UPLIFTING STORY

An all-night search by 130 volunteers and 10 police officers for a boy who disappeared in Délémont Switzerland ended happily.

The boy was found asleep under a chair in the dining room of his grandmother's house.

The newspaper Le Matin Suisse reports police officer Gilles Bailat says searchers tried to follow the route the boy may have taken when he was last seen the day before.

After questioning, police found out the boy had been spotted looking in a shop window at a toy car. The shop was near his grandmother's house.

After police contacted the grandmother, she searched the house and found him hidden from view under furniture.

The grandmother told police her door had been left unlocked because she had some people working in the house.

The boy says he hid because he knew he shouldn't have left his nursery by himself.