abdoosh1000/training-batch-6 · Datasets at Hugging Face

text stringlengths 12 1k	source stringclasses 2 values
Jeff Greason, a senior manager at Intel, started XCOR Aerospace (in which I’m an investor).	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
In 2005, the last year I held my PC Forum conference for IT entrepreneurs, I started a conference called Flight School for entrepreneurs in space and private aviation.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Meanwhile, in about 2005, I was in South Africa with a small group advising former President Thabo Mbeki and his government about its IT policy.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
One of the group was Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Thawte (sold to VeriSign), who had recently come back from a trip to the space station as the second “space tourist.”	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
One evening, the group sat around a campfire as the sun set, and around 50 African schoolchildren were bussed in.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Altogether, there were about 100 of us, President Mbeki included, around a roaring fire.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Once it was dark, a screen was set up and Mark showed home videos from space.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
He gave a fascinating talk about his adventures, complete with clips of him floating around, catching bubbles in his mouth, and so on.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The kids loved it, and I'm sure some of them decided then and there to study math and science.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Eventually, I invested in Space Adventures, the company that organized Shuttleworth’s trip into space.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Later, I went on a tour that they organized to watch the launch of Charles Simonyi, the fifth (and soon seventh) space tourist, from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
(Simonyi wrote the Microsoft Word program, and now has another start-up, Intentional Software, and a foundation, as well as a Web site, CharlesinSpace.org.)	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Soon after, I started casually discussing the notion of becoming a backup cosmonaut with the Space Adventures team.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Yes, I would love to actually go, but the trip to space costs $35 to $40 million, whereas backup training costs “only” $3 million.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
So I had vague thoughts that I might go into space sometime in 2011 - the year that Google co-founder Sergey Brin is (very) tentatively slated to go.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Space Adventures was pushing for 2009, but I was pretty busy.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Then something happened last spring: my sister Emily discovered that she had cancer and had a double mastectomy.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
(She is doing well now and, in fact, just won a mini-marathon.)	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
A couple of weeks later, I was faced with one of those conflicts: a board meeting here, a conference there, another opportunity at the same time somewhere else.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
“Aaagh,” I thought, “if only I had a double mastectomy: I could cancel all these things and no one would complain!”	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Good grief! I realized my priorities were all out of whack. So in some odd way, this sabbatical in Russia is my alternative to a double mastectomy – a positive one, to be sure, but the same kind of reset-button experience.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
It is also the answer to another question I hear a lot because of my work on human genetics through 23andMe (www.23andme.com) and the Personal Genome Project (www.personalgenome.org): If you learned you had a high chance of developing Alzheimer’s in a few years, what would you do?	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Why, I’d go train to be a cosmonaut, of course! And why wait to find out I may get Alzheimer’s? Next month, I will write about what training to go into space actually involves.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
9/11 and the New Authoritarianism	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Five years after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, “9/11” is no longer a mere date.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
It has entered the history books as the beginning of something new, a new era perhaps, but in any case a time of change.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The terrorist bombings in Madrid and London and elsewhere will also be remembered; but it is “9/11” that has become the catchphrase, almost like “August 1914.”	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
But was it really a war that started on September 11, 2001?	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Not all are happy about this American notion.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
During the heyday of Irish terrorism in the UK, successive British governments went out of their way not to concede to the IRA the notion that a war was being waged.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
“War” would have meant acceptance of the terrorists as legitimate enemies, in a sense as equals in a bloody contest for which there are accepted rules of engagement.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
This is neither a correct description nor a useful terminology for terrorist acts, which are more correctly described as criminal.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
By calling them war – and naming an opponent, usually al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden – the United States government has justified domestic changes that, before the 9/11 attacks, would have been unacceptable in any free country.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Most of these changes were embodied in the so-called “USA Patriot Act.”	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Though some of the changes simply involved administrative regulations, the Patriot Act’s overall effect was to erode the great pillars of liberty, such as habeas corpus , the right to recourse to an independent court whenever the state deprives an individual of his freedom.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
From an early date, the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba became the symbol of something unheard of: the arrest without trial of “illegal combatants” who are deprived of all human rights.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The world now wonders how many more of these non-human humans are there in how many places.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
For everyone else, a kind of state of emergency was proclaimed that has allowed state interference in essential civil rights.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Controls at borders have become an ordeal for many, and police persecution now burdens quite a few.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
A climate of fear has made life hard for anyone who looks suspicious or acts suspiciously, notably for Muslims.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Such restrictions on freedom did not meet with much public opposition when they were adopted.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
On the contrary, by and large it was the critics, not the supporters, of these measures who found themselves in trouble.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
In Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair supported the US attitude entirely, the government introduced similar measures and even offered a new theory.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Blair was the first to argue that security is the first freedom.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
In other words, liberty is not the right of individuals to define their own lives, but the right of the state to restrict individual freedom in the name of a security that only the state can define.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
This is the beginning of a new authoritarianism.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The problem exists in all countries affected by the threat of terrorism, though in many it has not become quite as specific.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
In most countries of continental Europe, “9/11” has remained an American date.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
There is even a debate – and indeed some evidence – concerning the question of whether involvement in the “war against terrorism” has actually increased the threat of terrorist acts.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Germans certainly use this argument to stay out of the action wherever possible.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
This stance, however, has not prevented the spread of something for which a German word is used in other languages, too: Angst .	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
A diffuse anxiety is gaining ground.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
People feel uneasy and worried, especially when traveling.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Any train accident or airplane crash is now at first suspected of being an act of terrorism.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Thus, 9/11 has meant, directly or indirectly, a great shock, both psychologically and to our political systems.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
While terrorism is fought in the name of democracy, the fight has in fact led to a distinct weakening of democracy, owing to official legislation and popular angst.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
One of the worrying features of the 9/11 attacks is that it is hard to see their purpose beyond the perpetrators’ resentment of the West and its ways.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
But the West’s key features, democracy and the rule of law, have taken a far more severe battering at the hands of their defenders than by their attackers.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Two steps, above all, are needed to restore confidence in liberty within the democracies affected by the legacy of 9/11.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
First, we must make certain that the relevant legislation to meet the challenge of terrorism is strictly temporary.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Some of today’s restrictions on habeas corpus and civil liberties have sunset clauses restricting their validity; all such rules should be re-examined by parliaments regularly.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Second, and more importantly, our leaders must seek to calm, rather than exploit, public anxiety.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The terrorists with whom we are currently at “war” cannot win, because their dark vision will never gain broad popular legitimacy.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
That is all the more reason for democrats to stand tall in defending our values – first and foremost by acting in accordance with them.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
9/11 in Perspective	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
NEW YORK – It was a decade ago that 19 terrorists took control of four planes, flew two into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, hit the Pentagon with a third, and crashed the fourth in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers resisted and made it impossible for the terrorists to complete their malevolent mission.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
In a matter of hours, more than 3,000 innocent people, mostly Americans, but also people from 115 other countries, had their lives suddenly and violently taken from them.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
September 11, 2001, was a terrible tragedy by any measure, but it was not a historical turning point.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
It did not herald a new era of international relations in which terrorists with a global agenda prevailed, or in which such spectacular terrorist attacks became commonplace.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
On the contrary, 9/11 has not been replicated.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Despite the attention devoted to the “Global War on Terrorism,” the most important developments of the last ten years have been the introduction and spread of innovative information technologies, globalization, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the political upheavals in the Middle East.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
As for the future, it is much more likely to be defined by the United States’ need to put its economic house in order; China’s trajectory within and beyond its borders; and the ability of the world’s governments to cooperate on restoring economic growth, stemming the spread of nuclear weapons, and meeting energy and environmental challenges.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
It is and would be wrong to make opposition to terrorism the centerpiece of what responsible governments do in the world.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Terrorists continue to be outliers with limited appeal at best.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
They can destroy but not create.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
It is worth noting that the people who went into the streets of Cairo and Damascus calling for change were not shouting the slogans of Al Qaeda or supporting its agenda.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Moreover, measures have been implemented to push back, successfully, against terrorists.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Intelligence assets have been redirected.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Borders have been made more secure and societies more resilient.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
International cooperation has increased markedly, in part because governments that cannot agree on many things can agree on the need to cooperate in this area.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Military force has played a role as well.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Al Qaeda lost its base in Afghanistan when the Taliban government that had provided it sanctuary was ousted from power.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Osama bin-Laden was finally found and killed by US Special Forces in the suburbs of Islamabad.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Drones – unmanned aircraft that are remotely steered – have proven to be effective in killing a significant number of terrorists, including many of the most important leaders.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Weak governments can be made stronger; governments that tolerate or support terrorism must be held accountable.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
But progress is not to be confused with victory.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Terrorists and terrorism cannot be eliminated any more than we can rid the world of disease.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
There will always be those who will resort to force against innocent men, women, and children in pursuit of political goals.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Indeed, terrorists are advancing in some areas.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Pakistan remains a sanctuary for Al Qaeda and some of the world’s other most dangerous terrorists.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
A mixture of instability, government weakness, and ideology in countries such as Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Nigeria are providing fertile territory for terrorists to organize, train, and mount operations – much as they did in Afghanistan did a decade ago.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
New groups constantly emerge from the ruins of old ones.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
There is also a growing danger of homegrown terrorism.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
We have seen it in Great Britain and the US.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The Internet, one of the great inventions of the modern Western world, has shown itself to be a weapon that can be used to incite and train those who wish to cause harm to that world.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
The question raised in October 2003 by then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is no less relevant today: “Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?”	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
All things being equal, we probably are.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
But even small terrorist successes are costly in terms of lives, money, and making open societies less so.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
What is to be done?	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary
Alas, there is no single or silver bullet.	Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Jeff Greason, a senior manager at Intel, started XCOR Aerospace (in which I’m an investor).

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

In 2005, the last year I held my PC Forum conference for IT entrepreneurs, I started a conference called Flight School for entrepreneurs in space and private aviation.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Meanwhile, in about 2005, I was in South Africa with a small group advising former President Thabo Mbeki and his government about its IT policy.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

One of the group was Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Thawte (sold to VeriSign), who had recently come back from a trip to the space station as the second “space tourist.”

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

One evening, the group sat around a campfire as the sun set, and around 50 African schoolchildren were bussed in.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Altogether, there were about 100 of us, President Mbeki included, around a roaring fire.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Once it was dark, a screen was set up and Mark showed home videos from space.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

He gave a fascinating talk about his adventures, complete with clips of him floating around, catching bubbles in his mouth, and so on.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The kids loved it, and I'm sure some of them decided then and there to study math and science.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Eventually, I invested in Space Adventures, the company that organized Shuttleworth’s trip into space.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Later, I went on a tour that they organized to watch the launch of Charles Simonyi, the fifth (and soon seventh) space tourist, from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

(Simonyi wrote the Microsoft Word program, and now has another start-up, Intentional Software, and a foundation, as well as a Web site, CharlesinSpace.org.)

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Soon after, I started casually discussing the notion of becoming a backup cosmonaut with the Space Adventures team.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Yes, I would love to actually go, but the trip to space costs $35 to $40 million, whereas backup training costs “only” $3 million.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

So I had vague thoughts that I might go into space sometime in 2011 - the year that Google co-founder Sergey Brin is (very) tentatively slated to go.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Space Adventures was pushing for 2009, but I was pretty busy.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Then something happened last spring: my sister Emily discovered that she had cancer and had a double mastectomy.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

(She is doing well now and, in fact, just won a mini-marathon.)

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

A couple of weeks later, I was faced with one of those conflicts: a board meeting here, a conference there, another opportunity at the same time somewhere else.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

“Aaagh,” I thought, “if only I had a double mastectomy: I could cancel all these things and no one would complain!”

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Good grief! I realized my priorities were all out of whack. So in some odd way, this sabbatical in Russia is my alternative to a double mastectomy – a positive one, to be sure, but the same kind of reset-button experience.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

It is also the answer to another question I hear a lot because of my work on human genetics through 23andMe (www.23andme.com) and the Personal Genome Project (www.personalgenome.org): If you learned you had a high chance of developing Alzheimer’s in a few years, what would you do?

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Why, I’d go train to be a cosmonaut, of course! And why wait to find out I may get Alzheimer’s? Next month, I will write about what training to go into space actually involves.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

9/11 and the New Authoritarianism

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Five years after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, “9/11” is no longer a mere date.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

It has entered the history books as the beginning of something new, a new era perhaps, but in any case a time of change.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The terrorist bombings in Madrid and London and elsewhere will also be remembered; but it is “9/11” that has become the catchphrase, almost like “August 1914.”

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

But was it really a war that started on September 11, 2001?

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Not all are happy about this American notion.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

During the heyday of Irish terrorism in the UK, successive British governments went out of their way not to concede to the IRA the notion that a war was being waged.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

“War” would have meant acceptance of the terrorists as legitimate enemies, in a sense as equals in a bloody contest for which there are accepted rules of engagement.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

This is neither a correct description nor a useful terminology for terrorist acts, which are more correctly described as criminal.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

By calling them war – and naming an opponent, usually al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden – the United States government has justified domestic changes that, before the 9/11 attacks, would have been unacceptable in any free country.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Most of these changes were embodied in the so-called “USA Patriot Act.”

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Though some of the changes simply involved administrative regulations, the Patriot Act’s overall effect was to erode the great pillars of liberty, such as habeas corpus , the right to recourse to an independent court whenever the state deprives an individual of his freedom.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

From an early date, the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba became the symbol of something unheard of: the arrest without trial of “illegal combatants” who are deprived of all human rights.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The world now wonders how many more of these non-human humans are there in how many places.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

For everyone else, a kind of state of emergency was proclaimed that has allowed state interference in essential civil rights.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Controls at borders have become an ordeal for many, and police persecution now burdens quite a few.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

A climate of fear has made life hard for anyone who looks suspicious or acts suspiciously, notably for Muslims.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Such restrictions on freedom did not meet with much public opposition when they were adopted.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

On the contrary, by and large it was the critics, not the supporters, of these measures who found themselves in trouble.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

In Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair supported the US attitude entirely, the government introduced similar measures and even offered a new theory.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Blair was the first to argue that security is the first freedom.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

In other words, liberty is not the right of individuals to define their own lives, but the right of the state to restrict individual freedom in the name of a security that only the state can define.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

This is the beginning of a new authoritarianism.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The problem exists in all countries affected by the threat of terrorism, though in many it has not become quite as specific.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

In most countries of continental Europe, “9/11” has remained an American date.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

There is even a debate – and indeed some evidence – concerning the question of whether involvement in the “war against terrorism” has actually increased the threat of terrorist acts.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Germans certainly use this argument to stay out of the action wherever possible.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

This stance, however, has not prevented the spread of something for which a German word is used in other languages, too: Angst .

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

A diffuse anxiety is gaining ground.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

People feel uneasy and worried, especially when traveling.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Any train accident or airplane crash is now at first suspected of being an act of terrorism.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Thus, 9/11 has meant, directly or indirectly, a great shock, both psychologically and to our political systems.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

While terrorism is fought in the name of democracy, the fight has in fact led to a distinct weakening of democracy, owing to official legislation and popular angst.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

One of the worrying features of the 9/11 attacks is that it is hard to see their purpose beyond the perpetrators’ resentment of the West and its ways.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

But the West’s key features, democracy and the rule of law, have taken a far more severe battering at the hands of their defenders than by their attackers.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Two steps, above all, are needed to restore confidence in liberty within the democracies affected by the legacy of 9/11.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

First, we must make certain that the relevant legislation to meet the challenge of terrorism is strictly temporary.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Some of today’s restrictions on habeas corpus and civil liberties have sunset clauses restricting their validity; all such rules should be re-examined by parliaments regularly.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Second, and more importantly, our leaders must seek to calm, rather than exploit, public anxiety.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The terrorists with whom we are currently at “war” cannot win, because their dark vision will never gain broad popular legitimacy.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

That is all the more reason for democrats to stand tall in defending our values – first and foremost by acting in accordance with them.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

9/11 in Perspective

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

NEW YORK – It was a decade ago that 19 terrorists took control of four planes, flew two into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, hit the Pentagon with a third, and crashed the fourth in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers resisted and made it impossible for the terrorists to complete their malevolent mission.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

In a matter of hours, more than 3,000 innocent people, mostly Americans, but also people from 115 other countries, had their lives suddenly and violently taken from them.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

September 11, 2001, was a terrible tragedy by any measure, but it was not a historical turning point.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

It did not herald a new era of international relations in which terrorists with a global agenda prevailed, or in which such spectacular terrorist attacks became commonplace.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

On the contrary, 9/11 has not been replicated.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Despite the attention devoted to the “Global War on Terrorism,” the most important developments of the last ten years have been the introduction and spread of innovative information technologies, globalization, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the political upheavals in the Middle East.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

As for the future, it is much more likely to be defined by the United States’ need to put its economic house in order; China’s trajectory within and beyond its borders; and the ability of the world’s governments to cooperate on restoring economic growth, stemming the spread of nuclear weapons, and meeting energy and environmental challenges.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

It is and would be wrong to make opposition to terrorism the centerpiece of what responsible governments do in the world.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Terrorists continue to be outliers with limited appeal at best.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

They can destroy but not create.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

It is worth noting that the people who went into the streets of Cairo and Damascus calling for change were not shouting the slogans of Al Qaeda or supporting its agenda.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Moreover, measures have been implemented to push back, successfully, against terrorists.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Intelligence assets have been redirected.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Borders have been made more secure and societies more resilient.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

International cooperation has increased markedly, in part because governments that cannot agree on many things can agree on the need to cooperate in this area.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Military force has played a role as well.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Al Qaeda lost its base in Afghanistan when the Taliban government that had provided it sanctuary was ousted from power.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Osama bin-Laden was finally found and killed by US Special Forces in the suburbs of Islamabad.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Drones – unmanned aircraft that are remotely steered – have proven to be effective in killing a significant number of terrorists, including many of the most important leaders.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Weak governments can be made stronger; governments that tolerate or support terrorism must be held accountable.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

But progress is not to be confused with victory.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Terrorists and terrorism cannot be eliminated any more than we can rid the world of disease.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

There will always be those who will resort to force against innocent men, women, and children in pursuit of political goals.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Indeed, terrorists are advancing in some areas.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Pakistan remains a sanctuary for Al Qaeda and some of the world’s other most dangerous terrorists.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

A mixture of instability, government weakness, and ideology in countries such as Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Nigeria are providing fertile territory for terrorists to organize, train, and mount operations – much as they did in Afghanistan did a decade ago.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

New groups constantly emerge from the ruins of old ones.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

There is also a growing danger of homegrown terrorism.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

We have seen it in Great Britain and the US.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The Internet, one of the great inventions of the modern Western world, has shown itself to be a weapon that can be used to incite and train those who wish to cause harm to that world.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

The question raised in October 2003 by then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is no less relevant today: “Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?”

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

All things being equal, we probably are.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

But even small terrorist successes are costly in terms of lives, money, and making open societies less so.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

What is to be done?

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary

Alas, there is no single or silver bullet.

Helsinki-NLP/news_commentary