"Canada's military has launched a major effort to help senior officers express empathy during tragedies, avoid nervousness, craft sound bites, avoid gaffes and 'deflect' questions," CanWest News Service's Peter O'Neil reports. A critic of the effort says that the federal government should focus on policy and performance rather than spin, suggesting that the military believes "that we're going to be the author of a lot of bad news over the next while, or associated with a lot of bad news and, therefore, we better figure out how to spin it."

In an effort to "preserve Iraq's oil for the Iraqi people," the Pentagon plans to prevent the destruction of Iraq's oil fields by "securing" them as quickly as possible. "In light of past acts of eco-terrorism by the regime of Saddam Hussein, the Department of Defense has developed plans to extinguish oil well fires and to assess damage to oil facilities that might occur in Iraq in the event of hostilities," a DoD release states.

"The travel industry and civil liberties groups are sharply
objecting to government plans for a new airline passenger
screening program .... . The proposed program ... would involve
electronic checking of the credit
records and criminal histories, along with checking whether
the passenger is on watch lists of suspected terrorists.
The screening would be done by the federal Transportation
Security Administration. ... Based on the results, each traveler would be
assigned a