Periscope

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's decision not to indict deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove last week followed a flurry of last-minute negotiations between the prosecutor and Rove's defense lawyer, Robert Luskin. On Tuesday afternoon, Fitzgerald and the chief FBI agent on the case, Jack Eckenrode, met with Luskin. Two sources close to Rove who asked not to be identified because the probe is ongoing said that Luskin presented evidence that gave the prosecutor "pause." One item was a July 11, 2003, e-mail that Rove sent former White House press aide Adam Levine, saying Levine could come up to his office to discuss personnel. The e-mail was at 11:17 a.m., just minutes after Rove had gotten off the phone with Matt Cooper--the same conversation (in which White House critic Joe Wilson's wife's work for the CIA was discussed) that Rove originally failed to disclose to the grand jury. Levine, with whom Rove often discussed his talks with reporters, did immediately go up to see Rove. But as Levine told the FBI last week, Rove never said anything about Cooper. The Levine talk was arguably helpful to one of Luskin's arguments: that as a senior White House official, Rove dealt with a wide range of matters and could not be expected to remember every conversation he had with journalists.

Another lingering mystery: the role played by newspaper columnist Robert Novak and the original "senior administration official" who first leaked Plame's identity. It was Novak's July 14, 2003, column identifying Plame that touched off the investigation in the first place. One lawyer intimately involved in the case, who declined to be identified because of the confidential nature of the matter, said Novak made a decision "early on" to cooperate with Fitzgerald's probe and identify his source--whom Fitzgerald never charged, apparently because the mystery leaker fessed up and told the truth to the grand jury. It still is not clear if Novak actually testified before the grand jury or simply gave a statement.

Domestic spats in Ecuador, Kuwait and Libya are making foreigners uneasy. But in Japan, an unpopular choice may play well in the region.

Ecuador - President's focus on constitutional reform has irked Congress, slowed bank appointments. The price? A $400 million foreign loan hangs in the balance.

Kuwait - Family squabble over crown prince is delaying reforms to open oil sector to more development. With prices so high, so are the stakes.

Libya - Bulgarian nurses won't face death. But their appeal could be postponed, as Kaddafi angles for lucrative trade-off with anxious Western governments.

Japan + P.M. prospect and media darling Shinzo Abe could be passed over for a candidate better able to cool China tensions. Ignore the press's frosty reaction.

Foreign intelligence chiefs are likely to add a new stop to their itineraries the next time they visit Washington: the office of National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. Traditionally, directors of U.S. intel units like the CIA and the National Security Agency, which operates a worldwide code-breaking and electronic eavesdropping network, have maintained direct contact with the heads of similar foreign spy agencies. The NSA and its British counterpart, known as GCHQ, are so closely aligned they divide up "target" countries between them. But a senior intel official told reporters at a recent background briefing that while the CIA will maintain its traditional role as "coordinator" of U.S. dealings with foreign agencies, this role will now be supervised by the new intel czar. The senior official said that as a matter of practice, when foreign spy bosses come to D.C., "the rounds now include ODNI [Negroponte's office]." An official familiar with the intel czar's operation said that Negroponte had already assigned several staffers to manage foreign visitors. Critics of post-9/11 reforms have repeatedly questioned whether the creation of an intel czar would bloat bureaucracy and make it more difficult for critical intel to reach the right destination quickly. But agencies under Negroponte's aegis say the new arrangements won't disrupt their dealings with foreign partners. A CIA spokesman said: "If anything, the DNI will enhance CIA's already strong and vibrant liaison relationships."

Former child actor Lech Kaczynski, 56, now finds himself on a bigger stage after winning Poland's presidential vote. Euro-skeptic, pro-death penalty and anti-abortion, Kaczynski is already making headlines across Europe. Michael Karnowski and Piotr Zaremba, reporters for NEWSWEEK's Polish edition, spoke to him about his presidential plans:

Are you planning to fight against the euro? Not necessarily. But it's such an enormous limitation of national sovereignty that we couldn't introduce it without first consulting the Polish people. I won't allow such a decision to be made by the Parliament alone.

You will take office at a time when Polish-Russian relations are less than ideal. Do you see any chance for improvement? Life can be unpredictable. Just as in the United States it was the Republicans who achieved a breakthrough in U.S.-Soviet relations, it's possible that in Poland the center-right will turn out to be the better negotiating partner. We are the ones who are most at liberty to enter into compromises. We have already received positive signals [from Moscow].

Sooner or later you will have to make a decision on the Polish military presence in Iraq. The left-wing government said that we would only remain there until December 2005. In January I hope to talk about this with President Bush. My views are clear, but their realization will require us to have a long conversation. All possibilities are open, including extending the Polish peace-building mission in Iraq.

How long could Poland stay in Iraq? Certainly not indefinitely. Each tour lasts six months, and I don't know if any more will be needed.

In science, revolutions almost always take longer than their instigators expect--we still don't have flying cars--so when National Institutes of Health director Dr. Elias Zerhouni says that "over the next five years, we're going to discover the most important genes that are associated with the most important diseases," it's easy to be skeptical. But the project that may make that possible is way ahead of schedule. The HapMap, a database of small but significant points in the human genome called SNPs that vary from person to person, may finally usher in the era of preventive medicine that doctors have been anticipating ever since the discovery of DNA's structure. The SNPs can signal susceptibility to various diseases. They tend to travel in packs, so they're always inherited in tandem.

The HapMap essentially tells scientists which SNPs travel together, reducing the work scientists have to do in order to pin the blame for diseases on particular genes. For a given disease, researchers can compare the SNPs of a group of afflicted patients with the SNPs of a healthy group. Finding a particularly prominent type of SNP in ailing patients would tell a scientist that the SNP was either causing the problem or stuck on the same chunk of DNA as the deleterious gene. In the latter case, scientists would quickly know where to look for the culprit. With the bad genes identified, they could tailor treatments to their patients' genetic profiles--even warding off diseases in advance.

On Saturday, three powerful blasts in two crowded New Delhi markets left roughly 65 shoppers dead and 80 injured. Given the palpable signs of peace emerging between India and Pakistan since the Oct. 8 earthquake, Indians were shocked at what was presumed to be the work of Kashmiri jihadis. But Arun Bhagat, former chief of India's Intelligence Bureau, says the worst terrorist attack in New Delhi's history shows instead "the desperation of the terrorist groups."

Though victorian artist Samuel Palmer found inspiration in the work of poets from Homer to Milton, it was an 1822 meeting with William Blake that transformed his art. A new exhibit at London's British Museum, "Samuel Palmer: Vision and Landscape," traces his development from rare early sketchbooks crammed with picturesque illustrations to his innovative landscapes, with their rich forms and vivid colors animated by Blake's powerful vision of the divine in nature. Living in the fertile south of England with a band of like-minded eccentrics--the Ancients, who sought a purer, more pastoral life--Palmer created some of his best-known, dreamily poetic works, such as "The Magic Apple Tree."

This first full-scale retrospective of his art, however, also highlights a darker side of Palmer's rural idyll. In "The Shearers" he depicts a group of farm laborers struggling with their sheep, touching on a brutal side of country life rarely portrayed by his contemporaries. Determined to show that watercolors could challenge the perceived superiority of oils, Palmer filled his later works with deep tones and striking textures. As the exhibit shows, Palmer's early bucolic landscapes and his benign God are warm and compelling. But by the end of his life, his sorrow was etched in every star and shadow.

It turns out your average Joe isn't so easy to find. Or at least that's what Kevin O'Keefe would tell you. The former magazine writer's book, "The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen," is about finding the most average man, or woman, out of today's 280 million Americans. O'Keefe started by spending two years compiling statistics, crunching numbers and developing "average" criterion that included everything from age (36 years) to whether America's most average person could name all Three Stooges (he can). "There were a lot of surprises along the way," O'Keefe says. "We have this image that the average American lives on a farm in rural America, but the last time farms were in the majority was in the 1910s or 1920s."

The book's image of average is not as plain as you might think. Here's the rundown: Average Joe has nine friends and is within five years of his best friend's age; drinks the milk in the bowl after the cereal is gone; believes in God, and has never doubted his existence; will offer up his seat on public transportation if someone really needs it, and recycles at least occasionally.

He also usually goes to bed before midnight, and to church at least once a month. Of course he is not famous, but more important, he does not want to be. And he eats McDonald's at least once a year.

In the end, O'Keefe picked 140 of the most telling statistics and sought out the person who embodied them all. The man he found is Robert Burns, a custodian from a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut--coincidentally, a janitor who worked at his high school. At 1.8 meters and 84 kilograms, he prefers smooth peanut butter over chunky, and is a father of three. The search for run-of-the-mill has never been so remarkable.

He was the hot elven archer in "The Lord of the Rings," but Orlando Bloom's arrows have been missing the mark lately. He began the summer with a thud in Ridley Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven." Last month Cameron Crowe's "Elizabethtown" gave the actor a second chance to prove himself. He didn't. The movie opened to a dismal $10.6 million, and critics shredded his performance. Hardly anyone in Hollywood thinks Bloom, 28, deserves all the blame for the failures, and almost everyone agrees that he was smart to work with those two directors. But he's not off the hook. "In 'Pirates of the Caribbean' he couldn't even hold his own against Keira Knightley, much less against Johnny Depp," says one indie studio head. "He's more like an ornament than a movie star." Adds a studio exec: "He's like Leif Garrett to me. If somebody says, 'Who do you want in this part?' his name never crosses my mind."

The solution? "Girls love him, but men do not," says a top talent agent. "He's got to make a movie that makes him cool to guys." Brad Pitt had this same problem years ago." Movies like "Snatch" and "Fight Club" solved it. Bloom should follow suit. "He needs to get a little down and dirty," says the indie chief. "I'd make him do a movie with someone like Gus Van Sant."