As Al Gore and George W Bush each claimed hoarsely that victory was his, latest polls showed them closer than ever.
The slight edge enjoyed by Mr Bush for the Republicans through last week was reduced by a fraction, and at least one poll – for Newsweek magazine – had him tied with Mr Gore at 43 per cent. The effect, if any, of the “November surprise” – Mr Bush’s drink-driving conviction – had yet to feed into the polls and will not show up until today, but the Bush camp was confident the Republican’s chances were unimpaired.With as many as 15 states classified as “toss-ups”, almost one-third of the electoral college votes that will decide the election are still in contention – a vast sea of uncertainty in an election that was once seen as the Vice-President’s to lose.There were signs, too, that the excitement – hitherto confined to the pundits – might at last be filtering down to the voters. Several state party organisations forecast that turn-out could be higher, perhaps much higher, than expected, adding a further imponderable to the closest of close races. It had been widely assumed that the lacklustre, even boring, nature of the main candidates could presage a record low turn-out this year.In the hours that remain, getting out the vote is the imperative. Mr Gore, sounding more confident than for weeks, did the rounds of black churches in Philadelphia, seeking to galvanise a key section of the Democratic vote in a key marginal state, before flying to Michigan and Missouri where he is also locked in a dead heat.Mr Bush, meanwhile, sped around the periphery of Florida, drawing huge and ebullient crowds as he sought to snatch from Mr Gore the state that would almost guarantee him the White House. In his first national effort on his brother’s behalf, Jeb Bush, Governor of Florida, blanketed the Sunday television talkshows, lauding his brother and talking down the drink-driving revelation as an episode long in the past when George “was another person”.Still relegated to the sidelines of his Vice-President’s campaign, Bill Clinton urged Americans in his weekly radio message to exercise their “fundamental American freedom” to vote tomorrow and plugged his deputy’s credentials. In marginal states and constituencies, the get-out-the-vote drive was in full swing.

Hundreds of thousands of volunteers delivered campaign literature, knocked on doors and manned phone banks, striving – at the breathless climax of an 18-month campaign – to give their man the best chance of victory tomorrow.. Can’t wait until Wednesday to find out who’ll be the next president of the United States? Can’t make head or tail of the opinion polls? Well here’s some good news for you: there are plenty of ways to predict the outcome without listening to the pundits or crunching the contradictory poll numbers. Can’t wait until Wednesday to find out who’ll be the next president of the United States? Can’t make head or tail of the opinion polls? Well here’s some good news for you: there are plenty of ways to predict the outcome without listening to the pundits or crunching the contradictory poll numbers.
You could look at the performance of the Boston Red Sox baseball team, for a start Or wonder whether this has been a good year for Bordeaux. You could abandon psephology as a load of fuzzy science and put your faith in the self-proclaimed sages who claim never to have called a race wrong (most of whom seem to be propping up the bar at Harry’s in Paris).Or, if you really insist on doing it scientifically, you could buy one of the many complicated mathematical formulae on offer, in which everything is factored in from the president’s popularity rating last July, to the percentage increase in Gross National Product from the fourth quarter of last year until the second quarter of this.Curiously, almost all of these superstitious indicators point to the same result: a victory for George W Bush Probably. Give or take a couple of extenuating factors.Take the Red Sox. According to tradition, a victory in the team’s final home game before the election favours the incumbent party, which is to say Al Gore’s Democrats. This year, the Sox lost.Meanwhile, over at Harry’s Bar near the Place de l’Opera in Paris, the punters have been giving their opinion on who will win in a straw poll whose results are on prominent display next to the cocktail shakers Again, Mr Bush is the favourite, by a 55-45 per cent margin.

Harry’s has got it wrong only once since 1924; then again, the ex-pat businessmen who frequent the place are overwhelmingly Republican, and Republicans have dominated the White House since the end of the Second World War. Can they really be trusted? (The one mistake they made, in 1976, was a close race in which the Democrat, Jimmy Carter, sneaked home.)The fool-proof profs with their mathematical models offer even less certainty. Michael Lewis-Beck of the University of Iowa says he predicted Bill Clinton’s margin of victory in 1996 to within one-tenth of a percentage point; this time, he’s bucking the trend of his fellow prognosticators and giving Al Gore 55.4 per cent of the main-party vote.Could he possibly be right? An outfit called the American Enterprise Institute thinks it is wise to look at a wide array of factors: everything from hemlines (rising or falling?) to the quality of this year’s Bordeaux to the latest movements in the stock market. This year, the wine has been good (favours Democrats) but the hemlines have fallen (good for Republicans).

Their survey also gives Mr Bush the edge; as a teetotaller, we know however that if he wins he won’t be uncorking any claret, whatever the vintage.. Palestinian leaders have been shocked to read an American think-tank report which urges them to act “ruthlessly” against opponents of the Oslo agreement – even if this involves “excessive force”, trials without due process of law and “interrogation methods that border on psychological and/or physical torture.”

Palestinian leaders have been shocked to read an American think-tank report which urges them to act “ruthlessly” against opponents of the Oslo agreement – even if this involves “excessive force”, trials without due process of law and “interrogation methods that border on psychological and/or physical torture.”
A draft copy of the report by the influential Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which has close links with the United States government, has been published on the internet and circulated among dozens of members of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, including Yasser Arafat’s most senior intelligence officers.The report says that even if peace follows the “Second Intifada”, “both sides [Palestinian and Israeli] will be forced to conduct aggressive [sic] security operations for years to come” which “can have a high price tag in terms of human rights.” By way of comparison, it adds that British security forces in Northern Ireland “balanced” what it calls “effective security” with human rights – even though “the British used excessive force, abused human rights, and used extreme interrogation methods and torture.”Amnesty International and other human rights groups have frequently condemned the use of arbitrary false arrest, detention and torture by Arafat’s “muhabarrat” security apparatus, pointing out that CIA operatives appear to have been complicit in these abuses. Far from denouncing these practices, however, the draft CSIS report appears to encourage their use, stating that “such measures also tend to work”.The document is dated 18 October and bears the name of Anthony H Cordesman – a former national security assistant to failed Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain – who is now holder of the Arleigh A Burke Chair in Strategy at the CSIS, named after the former Chief of US Naval Operations. His document is heavily referenced to CIA, State Department and Israeli sources and, according to Palestinian officials here, has been circulated within the US and Israeli governments.Entitled “Peace and War: Israel versus the Palestinians”, it recounts the turbulent history of Israeli-Palestinian relations since the 1993 Oslo agreement although its bias is obvious from the frequent use of “terrorist” to describe violent Arab groups and the almost ubiquitous use of “extremist” in reference to their violent Israeli opposite numbers.It excuses the use of Israeli live bullets against stone-throwers, adding that CS gas and rubber bullets are often “not effective in stopping large groups” and that “troops cannot let mobs armed with stones and Molotov cocktails close on their positions, or rely on the riot control gear used in civil disobedience.”In a section headed “The Need for Palestinian Authority Ruthlessness and Efficiency”, it states “there will be no future peace, or stable peace process, if the Palestinian security forces do not act ruthlessly and effectively. They must react very quickly and decisively in dealing with terrorism and violence if they are to preserve the momentum of Israeli withdrawal, the expansion of Palestinian control, and the peace process. They must halt civil violence even if this sometimes means using excessive force by the standards of Western police forces.