CYBERWAR? In what appears to be the first ever all-out assault on a nation's Internet, unknown parties launched a distributed-denial-of-service attack on Estonia's digital infrastructure in early May, clogging up and temporarily shutting down many elements. The attacks began following relocation of a Soviet soldier's statue from a park in Tallinn in April and culminated around 9 May, the Victory Day commemorating the defeat of Nazi Germany by Russia. It's taken for granted that members of Estonia's large Russian minority are implicated, but could the Russian government have been involved as well? A spokesman denied it in these threatening words: “The Estonia side has to be extremely careful when making accusations.”

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NYC GOES GREEN New York City's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has announced plans to have all of the city's 13 000 taxicabs replaced by hybrid-electric vehicles over the next five years. The taxi fleet's average fuel efficiency will more than double, and air pollution will be dramatically reduced, along with carbon emissions.

ETHANOL SETBACK Stanford University professor Mark Z. Jacobson has concluded that switching from present-day cars to vehicles powered by an 85 percent ethanol blend could actually worsen air pollution, because of higher ozone. Jacobson's computer simulation compared air-quality scenarios for gasoline and E85 in the year 2020 and found that U.S. deaths would be 4 percent higher using ethanol and Los Angeles deaths 9 percent higher.