The bright promise of a new century is clouded by unprecedented threats to the stability of the natural world. "In a globally interconnected economy, rapid deforestation, falling water tables, and accelerating climate change could undermine economies around the world in the decades ahead," say Lester Brown and Christopher Flavin, lead authors of the 1999 State of the World report brought out by the premier environmental communications organisation, Worldwatch Institute, says Subir Ghosh

A certain copywriter working on the Parker pens account got a story-idea for his ad after a visit to the factory. While a number of people at the agency had already been to the client's works, there simply could not be a substitute for a personal visit. And it happened that the copywriter saw walnut shells lying around on the floor and asked what they were for. He learnt that they were used to polish the gold in the nib and that nothing did the job better. He could instantly see that this point could be made to shine quite well in his copy, writes S Balakrishnan

The most active people in many development networks are professionals from nongovernmental organisations, international agencies, research institutions and the like. These are not, of course, the ultimate beneficiaries, who are different groups of poor and marginalised people. The need to involve the ultimate beneficiaries or end-users in networks is generally recognised, but this can be hard to achieve in practice. Excertps

Senator Joseph McCarthy is the well-known instigator of the famous purge of the 1950's, The Red Scare. He went on a hunt for "security risks", or people belonging to the Communist party, Communist fronts, or fellow travellers who worked in posts in the American government. Starting in Wheeling, West Virginia, this youngest senator scared the American people by suggesting that President Harry S. Truman was protecting these Communist threats by an executive order which forbade federal employees from testifying about the activities and political leanings of their fellows, writes Cynthia Arbuthnot

In a brief poem written in response to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, W.H. Auden ridiculed the inexpressive nature of tyranny and tyrants: "One prize is beyond his reach, / The Ogre cannot master Speech." Now, it seems, the translator and novelist Richard Lourie has set out to prove Auden wrong. In The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin, he lets that chuckling despot tell his own story, from his obscure origins in the Georgian sticks to his bureaucratic apotheosis as ruler of all Russia. In part Stalin simply wants to get his life down on paper, says Amazon.com