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Southeast Asia is experiencing a marked rise in Islamic fundamentalism. Among many adherents, the United States and the West are viewed as the enemy, something underscored by the October 12, 2002 bombing of a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali that killed almost 200 people, many of them foreigners. Authorities say the plan to attack so-called soft targets such as tourist destinations was hatched on January 28, 2003 at a meeting of Muslim extremists in Thailand. Especially in the south of the country by the Malaysian border, where Malay-Muslim separatists, divided from their co-religionists in Malaysia by an arbitrary border a century ago, have striven for their own nation. Resentment there has been simmering for years; now, in the wake of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent start of the U.S. campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, as well as the threat of war against Iraq, experts say the situation is coming to a boil.

Dover, Delaware, is home to the Charles C. Carson Center for Mortuary Affairs--the largest U.S. Department of Defense Mortuary. It is where America brings its dead soldiers home. Normally, seven people work at the centre; since March 2003, when the Iraq war began, there have been as many as 200 on staff. On May 1, 2003 George W. Bush declared major combat operations over--but in the mortuary, aluminum cases keep arriving. The networks may be denied access to some of those telling pictures of the dead arriving back in the U.S., but even if they had them, one wonders whether they would give the story of Americans dying in Iraq any more prominence. There seems to be a certain uneasiness about the Iraq issue that may be due to something else. Viewers are shying away from news: it is happening across the continent, across the networks. There has been a certain redefinition of news in the two years since The September 11, 2001 terror attacks: some things don't seem as important as they once did, after witnessing the events and aftermath of that day. These are challenging times for the media: stories are more complex, more international, and more expensive to cover, but the onus remains on reporters to find new ways to tell the ones that are important.

Queen's University professor Douglas Reid is willing to lay odds that Air Canada will seek bankruptcy protection -- at two-to-one. Analyst Cameron Doerksen says the airline will soon face a liquidity crunch -- likely in less than a year. Portfolio manager Andrew Martyn says it's not immediate, but if the company files for protection, it won't be a surprise. Even before September 11 and now the Iraq war, airlines around the world were suffering. Too many airplanes with too few passengers, and only the no frills carriers -- the new kids on the tarmac -- were consistently profitable. In the first week of the war alone, says the Air Transport Association, 10,000 U.S. airline jobs were cut. For Air Canada, international travel had been a bright spot. But in February 2003, its Atlantic flights had seven per cent fewer passengers than a year earlier. And with the 3,800-employee cut, Robert Milton, Air Canada's embattled but determined CEO, has eliminated a total of 8,800 jobs, or 20 per cent of the combined Air Canada-Canadian Airlines workforce, since taking over the competition in 1999. As Andrew Martyn, of money manager Davis-Rea Investment Counsel, says, Air Canada is on a "slow-torture" path to rock bottom.