In the 1990s, craft beer sales took off and the industry was filled with optimism. Many breweries aimed for rapid expansion, and the most hopeful thought the industry could claim 10 percent or more of the U.S. beer market.

 

But the market became saturated, growth stalled and craft beer production grew at rates from 0 to 4 percent a year from 1998 through 2003. More than 500 brew pubs and microbreweries closed between 2000 and 2004, outpacing the number of startups, according to the Brewers Association.

 

The business is now on an upswing, with production up by about 7 percent in 2004 and 9 percent last year, according to the association. Overall beer sales in 2005 fell 0.2 percent in volume, according to Beer Marketer's Insights. Sales of wines and spirits last year grew by less than 3 percent in volume, according to industry organizations.

Iran is the test case. It is the most dangerous political entity on the planet, and yet the world response has been catastrophically slow and reluctant. Years of knowingly useless negotiations, followed by hesitant international resolutions, have brought us to only the most tentative of steps--referral to a Security Council that lacks unity and resolve. Iran knows this and therefore defiantly and openly resumes its headlong march to nuclear status. If we fail to prevent an Iranian regime run by apocalyptic fanatics from going nuclear, we will have reached a point of no return. It is not just that Iran might be the source of a great conflagration but that we will have demonstrated to the world that for those similarly inclined there is no serious impediment.

The Constitution and the amendments thereto duly adopted in the future may be changed, modified, amended or added to only by amendment duly adopted as outlined in Article V of the Constitution. Neither the Supreme Court nor the inferior courts will create law, change, modify, amend, or add to the Constitution, but will interpret the Constitution and amendments in accordance with the common understanding of the relevant provision at the time it was adopted. This amendment does not affect the weight to be given prior decisions under the Doctrine of stare decisis.

Plagiarism occurs when a student, with intent to deceive or with reckless disregard for proper scholarly procedures, presents any information, ideas or phrasing of another as if they were his or her own and does not give appropriate credit to the original source. Proper scholarly procedures require that all quoted material be identified by quotation marks or indentation on the page, and the source of information and ideas, if from another, must be identified and be attributed to that source. Students are responsible for learning proper scholarly procedure.

The case of the Afghani morisco Abdul Rahman is being misinterpreted by many as suggesting the hopelessness of attempting to build civil societies in the Muslim world. If Afghanistan, generally seen as the policy's success story (as opposed to Iraq), is still going to execute a man like Rahman after we've kicked out the bad guys, the argument goes, what is the point of it all?

It's a serious argument, and a serious point. But we need to get past it, because, oddly enough, the Rahman case in fact represents progress. It has caused an uproar in the West. It has focused attention on the problem with the radical Islamic law code, shari'a. It has embarrassed moderate Muslims, and widened the gap between them and the radicals in their midst. It makes it more difficult for the moderates to do nothing about the problem.

The problem lies not just with the short-staffed patent office, but also with the courts. The ease with which patent holders can get an injunction to shut down a thriving business means that many companies are quietly paying rather than fighting.

European Leon de Winter draws disturbing conclusions on what Europe's refusal to confront Iran might mean for we Americans: 

Europe could have suppressed the Iranian threat if it had convinced the mullahs two years ago that it was willing to contemplate military options. Only Europe lacks core values that it holds sacrosanct and that it's willing to defend at the highest cost. It will continue to operate on the diplomatic field and cling to soft power even though this is the path of certain defeat when confronted with power players burning with geopolitical and religious ambitions.

Thanks to European illusions about soft power, the free world has two options left on Iran: disaster or catastrophe. America and Israel will bleed for Europe's lack of conviction.

If the intimidators succeed, then the lesson for any group that strongly believes in anything is: shout more loudly, be more extreme, threaten violence, and you will get your way. Frightened firms, newspapers or universities will cave in, as will softbellied democratic states, where politicians scrabble to keep the votes of diverse constituencies. But in our increasingly mixed-up, multicultural world, there are so many groups that care so strongly about so many different things, from fruitarians to anti-abortionists and from Jehovah's Witnesses to Kurdish nationalists. Aggregate all their taboos and you have a vast herd of sacred cows. Let the frightened nanny state enshrine all those taboos in new laws or bureaucratic prohibitions, and you have a drastic loss of freedom. That, I think, is what is happening to us, issue by issue. These days, you can't even read a list of the British war dead in Iraq outside the gates of No 10 Downing Street without getting a criminal record. Inch by inch, paragraph by paragraph, we are becoming less free.