Events at a Glance

ANTHRAX

Public health officials have begun changing their approach to treating people at risk of anthrax infection, prescribing a cheaper antibiotic, doxycycline, rather than Cipro, the medicine it dispensed to more than 10,000 people last week.

MILITARY FRONT

U.S. warplanes mounted the heaviest bombardment yet of the Taliban’s forces along the front line as an estimated 8,000 armed Pakistani volunteers massed at their country’s rugged northwest border, ready to join the Taliban inside Afghanistan.

INVESTIGATION

CIA officials, members of congressional oversight committees and others are talking about such covert tactics as kidnapping family members of suspected terrorists, hiring Afghan drug lords and bandits as informants, and possible assassination attempts.

POLITICS

Taking a more confrontational stance, President Bush lavishes praise on a GOP version of an airline security measure that Democrats strongly oppose and steps up pressure on the Senate to follow the House Republicans’ lead and approve a big tax cut to revitalize the economy.

ECONOMY

The war on terrorism has undeniably created new financial opportunities, with federal agencies poised to spend tens of billions of dollars on everything from new research into defenses against agro-terrorism to stockpiling 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine. In the next week or two, Congress is expected to consider providing more money to fight bio-terrorism. In the Senate, Democrats and Republicans are considering spending between $3 billion and $5 billion.

HOME FRONT

The voices of nonviolence are being heard across the United States, but it’s a different kind of antiwar sentiment than in years past, tempered by abhorrence of what happened to this country when hijackers commandeered four jetliners and killed more than 5,000 people.