No, that's not the number that's been slaughtered in Darfur, nor the number killed in Iraq. It's a statistic from the good ol' U.S. of A. Take a look at Bob Herbert's column in Tuesday's New York Times (emphasis added):

Murder, that darkest of American pastimes, celebrated in film and song and fostered by the firearms industry and its apologists, continues unabated.

It has been almost six years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when the nation’s consciousness of terror was yanked to new heights. In those six years, nearly 100,000 people — an incredible number — have been murdered in the United States.

No heightening of consciousness has accompanied this slaughter, which had nothing to do with terrorism. The news media and most politicians have hardly bothered to notice.

At the same time that we’re diligently confiscating water and toothpaste from air travelers, we’re handing over guns and bullets by the trainload to yahoos bent on blowing others into eternity in armed robberies, drug-dealing, gang violence, domestic assaults and other criminal acts.

On Monday, dozens of university and law enforcement officials gathered in Richmond, Virginia to discuss how to shore up campus safety in light of the recent massacre at Virginia Tech. A group called Students for Concealed Carry on Campus lobbied to turn over a state law that allows colleges to ban the carrying of firearms on campuses. Will more guns really help?

Need any more proof that markets are value-neutral? 

Take a look at the share price of China Public Security Technology (CPST), which jumped over 20 percent following Sunday's article in the New York Times. In the article, the Times called out the Florida-based company for providing technology that will help the Chinese government monitor its citizens even closer than before:

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

It's not something I'd want to be associated with, but investors who bought shares in CPST today are just behaving rationally. After all, electronic surveillance is a growth market—and nowhere more so than in China.

Editor's note: Heavy traffic has put Passport out of business for most of today. Please bear with us as we fix this problem. And do check out the latest articles on ForeignPolicy.com, which runs on a different server.

Regular readers of FP will no doubt remember a story we published last year in our November/December 2006 issue with the headline, "The Merchant of Death." The profile was of the world's most notorious arms smuggler, Viktor Bout, a 40-year-old Russian national with several passports and several dozen aircraft who's made a fortune by transporting illicit and licit goods all around the world. That article was written by Douglas Farah, a terror finance consultant and former West Africa bureau chief for the Washington Post, and Stephen Braun, a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. 

The FP piece was but a teaser for their newly-released book, also called Merchant of Death. Farah and Braun's 308-page book goes into more detail about the rise of Bout's network in the 1990s, using old Soviet airplanes leftover from the Cold War. They detail how Bout was able to deliver weapons to everyone from FARC in Colombia to child soldiers in Sierra Leone to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Even the U.S. government has unwittingly received supplies transported by Bout. Consider this book full of details that we wanted to print in FP, but didn't have the space for.  

If you're in DC, you can hear Farah and Braun speak at Politics & Prose bookstore on Thursday, Aug. 2 at 7pm, or you can check out their website to see where else you can learn more. 

In March, Mexican police raided a luxurious mansion in Mexico City, finding $207 million in cash stashed in steel cabinets and hidden inside false walls. The house belonged to suspected drug kingpin Zhenli Ye Gon. During the raid, police arrested Ye Gon's wife and six relatives. 

The Chinese-Mexican pharmaceutical bigwig was accused of illegally importing enough chemicals to manufacture nearly 37 metric tons of methamphetamine with a street value of over $700 million. But Ye Gon didn't stick around to find out what the consequences might be, and he went into hiding.

Later, Ye Gon held a secret news conference in which he constructed a defense of thrilling grandiosity. The money was foisted on him by an associate of Mexican President Felipe Calderon under threat of blackmail, he claimed, to fund "terrorist activities" in case Calderon fell to his challenger in the presidential election.

On Monday, U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officers finally arrested Ye Gon in Silver Spring, Maryland. Agents dragged him away from a meal of codfish and baby carrots—humble fare for a man who once boasted his own fleet of luxury cars and mistresses across the globe.

Of course, in the event that said codfish came from Ye Gon's home country of China, his timely arrest may have spared him an even worse fate.

VINCENZO PINTO/AFP/Getty Images

These days, Washington is looking more and more like Rome. Unfortunately, the similarity is not in sunny alleys, cobblestone streets, angel-hair pasta, or renaissance stone angels pouring water from fruit baskets. It's about politics.

The scandal over the firings of U.S. attorneys brought to light a practice that has long been at the heart of Italian political cuisine: "Generously sprinkle every government agency with loyal cronies."

And Vice President Dick Cheney's claim that he is immune from executive orders echoes former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's refusal to appear in court in a process against him because, as prime minister, he had much more compelling things to do.

President Bush's recent decision to commute Scooter Libby's sentence—which lawyers say will have deep implications for the U.S. legal system—is a classic of Italian politics 101: "screw the system, save your men!"

And yet, the Bush team still looks like a bunch of amateurs compared to its Italian counterparts. The latest? An Italian newspaper recently reported that the Italian secret services had been illegally monitoring left-leaning generals, judges, and journalists in order to discredit prominent critics of the former right-of-center government. Hopefully, the CIA has been the subject of too much bad press of late to take inspiration from this.

AFP/Getty Images

If you want to understand Afghanistan's opium problem, put yourself in the shoes of an Afghan farmer. Your country's in turmoil, you're largely disconnected from the rest of the population, and you have few options to earn a living. There's no irrigation infrastructure, and poppies are the only plants tough enough to withstand the environmental conditions. You could plant wheat, but why bother? Poppies will earn you eight times as much money.

So the extent to which Afghanistan has become ground zero for opium, as the latest United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime 2007 World Drug Report makes plain, should be no surprise. Around 92 percent of the world's heroin comes from Afghan poppies, and—thanks to the 49 percent increase in poppy cultivation in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2006—global opium production reached a record high of 6,610 metric tons last year. Opium production and trade accounts for at least a third of all economic activity in Afghanistan.

Nearly 3 million Afghan farmers are involved in poppy cultivation. But most of them are not employed by organized crime groups and have little if any part in refining the drug. They're just trying to earn a living. Yet crop substitution programs aren't working, mainly because the substitutes can't pay the bills. Until that calculus changes, the "war on drugs" in Afghanistan will probably be doomed to failure.

DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP

When Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, many states were thrown into turmoil. Creating functioning markets and an open political system was a tremendous challenge. Often, powerful new actors leaped into the political vacuum left by the Soviet Union and its pliable allies.

In Bulgaria, it was the wrestlers who took charge. Bulgaria, you see, was famous during the Communist era for its Olympic wrestling team. Subsidized by the state, the wrestlers lived high on the hog. So when Communism fell and the spigots turned off, they turned to racketeering to fund their lavish lifestyles. As journalist Robert Kaplan recounts in Eastward to Tartary, they put the commanding heights of Bulgaria's nascent economy and its embryonic democratic politics into a headlock.

And the wrestlers didn't just restrict their activities to Bulgaria. They organized themselves into complex groups, linked up with Russian mobsters, and dabbled in a wide range of criminal activities across the Balkans. Their shadowy, quasi-legal operations are a classic example of the new kind of trade described in Illicit, the recent book by FP editor Moisés Naím.

The wrestlers have been weakened since the 1990s. Ivailo Kalfin, Bulgaria's foreign minister, says his country recently assured U.S. President George W. Bush that they are now "left in the past." But as today's European Commission report on Bulgaria makes clear, corruption and organized crime are still a huge problem in the country, which joined the EU in January. So although the wrestlers may be gone, their legacy assuredly remains. (I'm going to resist a crack about how this report could put EU enlargement into a "sleeper hold".)

After being stopped for drunk-driving ...

After violating her probation on the driving ban ...

After showing up late for her court hearing ...

After obtaining a reduction of her sentence from the original 45 days down to 23 days ...

After managing to get out of prison after only three days for unspecified health reasons ...

After pleading to be allowed to stay at home and listen to the second hearing by phone rather than showing up in court ...  

... a screaming and wailing Paris Hilton is back to prison.

Getty Images

And once again she has taught rival heiress Nichole Richie a PR lesson: Now that Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan have done it, checking yourself into rehab is old news. If you really want to make headline news, shoot for prison.  

The court has reverted to the original sentence, and she's already served three days. So now and for the next 42 days, Paris may get more of a taste of what it's like to be one of the 737 out of every 100,000 U.S. residents that are in jail. (For more on that topic, see "Prison Planet," Roy Walmsley's piece on worldwide prison trends in our May/June issue.)

But in her special unit for celebrities, public officials, police officers, and high-profile inmates, it is doubtful anyone or anything will burst her bubble. She'll be the same old Paris Hilton when she comes out and—with the inevitable book memoirs and exclusive interviews about her dark days in Lynwood Detention Center—even richer than before.

Graphic by McClatchy

I've known about the questions regarding the "supernotes"—brilliant forgeries of U.S. $100 bills—for some time, but until Tuesday's McClatchy story, I considered them to be loony conspiracy theories. But now the Swiss federal police have weighed in:

WASHINGTON - Swiss police who closely monitor the circulation of counterfeit currency have challenged the Bush administration's assertions that North Korea is manufacturing fake American $100 bills. [...]

The Swiss federal criminal police, in a report released Monday, expresses serious doubt that North Korea is capable of manufacturing the fake bills, which it said were superior to real ones.

Until Tuesday, this argument had been advanced by a German journalist named Klaus W. Bender, author of Moneymakers: The Secret World of Banknote Printing. Bender accuses the CIA of producing the bills—which is why I looked upon his tale with a jaundiced eye when I first saw it last year. (The McClatchy story doesn't explore the CIA angle, presumably because it would undermine the story's credibility.)

In any case, the Swiss report as relayed by McClatchy may not be loony, but it's no more convincing than Bender. The U.S. government never accused North Korea of pulling off this counterfeiting scheme all by itself, as you can see from this Congressional Research Service report (pdf). Rather, the allegation was that there was a network, as this LA Times article from 2005 explains:

U.S. authorities have unsealed hundreds of pages of documents in support of the cases in recent months, including an indictment that directly accuses North Korea of making the counterfeit bills ... The documents paint a portrait of an extensive criminal network involving North Korean diplomats and officials, Chinese gangsters and other organized crime syndicates, prominent Asian banks, Irish guerrillas and an alleged ex-KGB agent.

Also worth noting, from the CRS report: The Chinese government and South Korean government, too, believe that North Korea is involved in counterfeiting. Are they, along with the Treasury Department, supposed to be in on the CIA plot? And finally, if North Korea can produce and test a nuclear weapon, why shouldn't they be able to make fake $100 bills? It's not exactly rocket science.

One of the essays in FP's 21 Solutions to Save the World package that has attracted the most attention online is Mikko Hyppönen's solution for preventing the growing problem of online banking fraud, specifically the "phishing" technique of luring trusting users to fake bank websites and then stealing their information. Hyppönen proposes to create a special Web domain just for banks, and make securing such a domain so costly and difficult that only genuine banks would be able to obtain one. I asked Hyppönen, who is chief research officer at F-Secure, to respond to critics of his idea. Here is his response.

Hyppönen: We've been pushing for an initiative to get a secure top-level domain (like ".bank" or ".safe") for some time now. We've received lots of questions and just plain criticism over the whole idea—most notably, from Larry Seltzer in his prominent blog.

So let me collect the most typical challenges to the idea, and answer them in turn. (below the jump)

There was a time in America when riding a motorcycle meant you generally lived on the fringe of decent, legal society. For the most part, those days are gone. Today, motorcycling is mostly a yuppie activity, embraced by guys like professional golfer Davis Love III, whose chief sponsor is Ralph Loren's Polo.

Not so, however, Down Under. In Australia, outlaw biker culture is thriving. A 2006 report by the Australian Crime Commission estimated that there are 35 outlaw motorcycle gangs currently in Australia, with 3,500 members, or "bikies" as the Aussies call them. And their numbers are growing. Ten gangs opened 26 new chapters last year.

In March, one gang known as the Commancheros fired shots into a club called Mr. Goodbar in a hip suburb of Sydney. Their target was the president of a rival club. Last month, the clubhouse of another Sydney gang known as the Nomads was firebombed in a suspected attack by the Commancheros.

Why should FP readers care? Because, interestingly, Australian police blame globalization and immigration for the rise in biker gang violence. According to Reuters, Australian police superintendent Scott Whyte said that:

Australia's multi-cultural population meant the traditional Anglo-Saxon make-up of biker gangs was changing and different ethnic groups were starting to take over and bring a more violent attitude to the gangs."

Australian police are vowing to crackdown on bikies in showdowns reminiscent of 1960s California. Where is Hunter Thompson when we need him?

(Hat tip: Erin Baker)

LUIS ACOSTA/AFP

As noted in this morning's Brief, Colombian President Álvaro Uribe heads to Washington this week to fight for a U.S. aid package and to rebut unsubstantiated charges—apparently deemed credible by no less than former U.S. Vice President Al Gore—that he has had ties to paramilitary death squads.

Back at home, he's got plenty of other worries. Twelve kidnapped Colombian lawmakers recently issued an emotional plea to Uribe to initiate talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The officials, who are being held in the Colombian jungle along with hundreds of other civilian victims, delivered their message by video. It was the first sign they are alive in over a year. Families wept as they watched their loved ones speak directly to the president, urging him to agree to the rebels' conditions for their release. Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos told the press:

If they [the FARC] want an agreement we are willing to do this even by telephone ... But they insist on the demilitarization of [the towns of] Florida and Pradera, which is the bottle neck in all of this."

President Uribe, whose father was killed by the FARC 20 years ago, is in a tight spot. He has achieved considerable economic and security success with a tough, militaristic approach to the FARC. Now his opponents have put him in a position where he must show his humane side. It's a smart move on their part. The FARC have personalized their message, disguising the fact that it's the cocaine trade—in which Florida and Pradera are key locations—that fuels their struggle, not popular support.

Let's hope Uribe shows equal brains when measuring his response, and doesn't let the fate of 12 government officials outweigh the future of 45 million inhabitants.