Amazon.com Inc's list of its best-selling books in the past 24 hours looks like a cross-section of its customers' psyches: the predictions of Nostradamus, photographs of Manhattan skyscrapers and studies of terrorism.
Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies by John Hogue, published in paperback in 1999, topped the list, perhaps because customers wanted to see how closely the 16th-century French astrologer foretold Tuesday's destruction by terrorists of the World Trade Center's twin towers. In all, four Nostradamus books, two on the World Trade Center and one about terrorism dominated the No. 1 online bookseller's top 10 list.
Second on the list was Twin Towers: The Life of New York City's World Trade Center (1999) by Angus Kress Gillespie, with a cover photo of the now-gone buildings.
Simon Reeve's The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama Bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism (1999), an account of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and subsequent attacks by a Bin Laden-funded terrorist, held the No. 3 slot.
Books detailing the prophecies of Nostradamus may have become more popular through the day as many Americans opened their computer in-boxes to find an e-mail purporting to quote the astrologer as saying the collapse of ``twin brothers torn apart by chaos'' would spark World War III.
The e-mail is a hoax, according to experts. "The second quatrain is entirely made-up, and the first quatrain is composed of lines taken from two completely different prophecies of Nostradamus linked together for effect," said snopes.com, a Web site devoted to countering Internet scams and hoaxes.
Americans hungry for more information related to Tuesday's terrorist attacks on New York and Washington jammed the Internet with requests in the past few days. On Yahoo Inc's Web site, the top searches were for World Trade Center, Pentagon, Osama bin Laden, Afghanistan and Nostradamus.
US PUBLICATION: The results indicated a change in attitude after a 2023 survey showed 55 percent supported full-scale war to achieve unification, the report said More than half of Chinese were against the use of force to unify with Taiwan under any circumstances, a survey conducted by the Atlanta, Georgia-based Carter Center and Emory University found. The survey results, which were released on Wednesday in a report titled “Sovereignty, Security, & US-China Relations: Chinese Public Opinion,” showed that 55.1 percent of respondents agreed or somewhat agreed that “the Taiwan problem should not be resolved using force under any circumstances,” while 24.5 percent “strongly” or “somewhat” disagreed with the statement. The results indicated a change in attitude after a survey published in “Assessing Public Support for (Non)Peaceful Unification
The CIA has a message for Chinese government officials worried about their place in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government: Come work with us. The agency released two Mandarin-language videos on social media on Thursday inviting disgruntled officials to contact the CIA. The recruitment videos posted on YouTube and X racked up more than 5 million views combined in their first day. The outreach comes as CIA Director John Ratcliffe has vowed to boost the agency’s use of intelligence from human sources and its focus on China, which has recently targeted US officials with its own espionage operations. The videos are “aimed at
‘MISGUIDED EDICT’: Two US representatives warned that Somalia’s passport move could result in severe retaliatory consequences and urged it to reverse its decision Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) has ordered that a special project be launched to counter China’s “legal warfare” distorting UN Resolution 2758, a foreign affairs official said yesterday. Somalia’s Civil Aviation Authority on Wednesday cited UN Resolution 2758 and Mogadishu’s compliance with the “one China” principle as it banned people from entering or transiting in the African nation using Taiwanese passports or other Taiwanese travel documents. The International Air Transport Association’s system shows that Taiwanese passport holders cannot enter Somalia or transit there. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) protested the move and warned Taiwanese against traveling to Somalia or Somaliland
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