The Middle East has taught us not to get too excited over a “road map,” but news from South Asia looks encouraging:

Pakistan and India today laid out a timetable for peace talks on a wide range of topics, including the key issues of Kashmir, nuclear safeguards and terrorism.
A series of mid-level meetings will begin directly after the Indian elections in April, culminating in a summit in August between the two nations’ foreign ministers.
“We do have a basic road map for a Pakistan-India peace process to which we have both agreed,” the senior official in Pakistan’s foreign ministry, Riaz Khokhar, told reporters at the conclusion of the talks.
Even before the Indian elections, technical-level talks will be held on transport links and other issues, Mr Khokhar said after a face-to-face meeting with his Indian counterpart, Shashank.
“We feel that the atmosphere is much better,” he said. “There is a realisation on both sides that war is not an option.”

Hopefully a terrorist group won’t pop up and derail things.

Some intriguing books are about to roll off the presses. I’m especially interested in what Richard Clarke has to say.

These allegations, if true, are disturbing:

A federal prosecutor in a major terrorism case in Detroit has taken the rare step of suing Attorney General John Ashcroft, alleging the Justice Department interfered with the case, compromised a confidential informant and exaggerated results in the war on terrorism.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino of Detroit accused the Justice Department of “gross mismanagement” of the war on terrorism in a whistleblower lawsuit filed late Friday in federal court in Washington.

Exaggerating aspects of the war on terrorism–I can’t imagine a government would be compelled to do that. [/sarcasm]
Why might Convertino be ticked?

Convertino came under internal investigation last fall after providing information to a Senate committee about his concerns about the war on terror. His testimony came just months after he helped convict some members of an alleged terrorism cell in Detroit.

People are after him for spilling the beans. It gets even better:

Convertino also accused Justice officials of intentionally divulging the name of one of his confidential terrorism informants (CI) to retaliate against him.
The leak put the informant at grave risk, forced him to flee the United States and “interfered with the ability of the United States to obtain information from the CI about current and future terrorist activities,” the suit alleges.

An intelligence-jeopardizing leak for personal retaliation–where have we heard that one before, Ambassador Wilson?

Looks like N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, is trying to duck following his assertion that U.S. job outsourcing is a “good thing”:

Mankiw, a former Harvard economics professor, said Tuesday he had learned a lesson about the use of language from his missteps last week.
“Economists and noneconomists speak very different languages,” Mankiw said in a speech to an audience of economists.
“Last week, some of the comments I made about the benefits of international trade were far from clear and were misinterpreted,” Mankiw told the National Economists Club.

The problem is that it isn’t merely one of Mankiw’s off-the-cuff comments that’s being “misinterpreted.” The president’s economic report is what’s drawing most fire for the outsourcing commentary.
Note to Mankiw: next time you sign off on a report, make sure it’s written in the correct “language.”

Talk about your weird Google discoveries:

Police in California want to reunite a 17-year-old with his father in Alberta after the teen found on the internet that he’s been missing for 14 years.
The boy was surfing the web at a school in California several months ago when he found his own picture on a site about missing children.
. . .
The boy was apparently abducted from his home in Red Deer where he had been living with his father.
The boy’s mother, 45, has been arrested by police in Los Angeles and is being held without bail. The RCMP want her extradited to Canada so she can face charges of child abduction.