Although keeping score is difficult, the State Department's annual report on international terrorism, released last month, provides the best government data to answer this question. The short answer is "No," but that's not the spin the administration is putting on it.

"You will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight," said Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. As evidence, the "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report says that worldwide terrorism dropped by 45 percent between 2001 and 2003. The report even boasts that the number of terrorist acts committed last year "represents the lowest annual total of international terrorist attacks since 1969."

Yet, a careful review of the report and underlying data supports the opposite conclusion: The number of significant terrorist acts increased from 124 in 2001 to 169 in 2003 -- 36 percent -- even using the State Department's official standards. The data that the report highlights are ill-defined and subject to manipulation -- and give disproportionate weight to the least important terrorist acts. The only verifiable information in the annual reports indicates that the number of terrorist events has risen each year since 2001, and in 2003 reached its highest level in more than 20 years.

To be sure, counting terrorist acts is not as straightforward as counting the number of SARS victims. Specialists have not agreed to any test that would unambiguously qualify an act as one of international terrorism. But in the words of the Congressional Research Service, the State Department's annual report is "the most authoritative unclassified U.S. government document that assesses terrorist attacks."

So how did the report conclude that international terrorism is declining?

It accomplishes this sleight of hand by combining significant and nonsignificant acts of terrorism. Significant acts are clearly defined and each event is listed in an appendix, so readers can verify the data. By contrast, no explanation is given for how nonsignificant acts are identified or whether a consistent process is used over time -- and no list is provided describing each event. The data cannot be verified.

International terrorism is defined in the report as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets" involving citizens or property from multiple countries, "usually intended to influence an audience." An event "is judged significant if it results in loss of life or serious injury to persons" or "major property damage."

A panel determines whether an event meets this definition, but the State Department refused to tell us the members of the panel or the practices used to count nonsignificant terrorist acts.

We do know that the definition leaves much room for discretion. Because "significant events" include such things as destroying an ATM in Greece or throwing a molotov cocktail at a McDonald's in Norway without causing much damage, it is easy to imagine that nonsignificant events are counted with a squishy definition that can be manipulated to alter the trend.

The alleged decline in terrorism in 2003 was entirely a result of a decline in nonsignificant events.

Another curious feature of the latest report is that its catalogue of events does not list a single significant terrorist act occurring after Nov. 11, 2003, despite averaging 16 such acts a month in the rest of the year.

The representation that no terrorist events occurred after Nov. 11 is patently false. The bombings of the HSBC Bank, British Consulate, and Beth Israel and Neve Shalom synagogues in Istanbul by individuals associated with al Qaeda occurred on Nov. 20 and Nov. 15, respectively. Additionally, the report mentions the bombing of the Catholic Relief Services in Nasiriyah, Iraq, on Nov. 12 but somehow omits it from the official list of significant events.

So the record number of 169 significant international terrorist events for 2003 is undoubtedly an understatement. It is impossible to know if these and other terrorist events were left out of the State Department's total of events.

Despite the lack of transparency and the rose-colored graphs, the department's data reveal that administration policies in the past year have not turned the terrorist tide. Of course, it is impossible to know how many terrorist acts would have occurred absent the war on terrorism, but it is unambiguous that the number of significant international terrorist acts is on the rise.

The fact that the number of nonsignificant terrorist acts has headed down -- even if true -- is, well, nonsignificant. What matters for security is the number of significant acts. It is regrettable that one casualty in the war against terrorism has been the accurate reporting of statistics. This seems to be another fight we are losing.

After all the fashionable sneering at the United Nations for its lack of effectiveness in our new, dangerous world, what former U.S. chief weapons inspector David Kay's testimony to Congress makes crystal clear is that the U.N. system did work. It worked precisely where the need is greatest today, in finding out weapons of mass destruction and preventing their use. And it worked just as the derided French, despised Germans and chided Russians said it did -- effectively, without the loss of more than 500 Americans and thousands of others, and at a small fraction of the $200 billion cost of the Iraq operation so far.

Kay said that the combination of inspectors on the ground and intelligence assets overhead could not be beat for first detecting and then verifying -- and, if necessary, destroying -- nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. It's just what the U.N.-U.S. combination was providing when the Bush administration decided to disregard all intelligence to that point, which had shown no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and follow its prejudices to war. Saddam, in fact, had nothing, and the U.N. inspectors, assisted by intelligence assets, were on the way to prove it. Kay noted that Iraq was in disarray, with Saddam's key lieutenants disregarding his increasingly fanciful orders. Couldn't or didn't U.S. and British intelligence know that? Disarray at the top is manifested in a thousand ways, both to the educated observer and to the person in the street. Iraq before the war was not a closed country. Not only were hundreds of U.N. inspectors there, but also thousands of people from all walks of life and many Western countries were also in Iraq. Learning that the government was in disarray was not like penetrating the KGB.

Kay was polite in his testimony and pointed only to an intelligence failure. It clearly was a lot more. Both in the United States and Britain, analysts who knew there was no evidence of any weapons capability could not get their message past the lowest levels of the intelligence bureaucracy. The administration, or the dominant players in it, were determined to let no alternative story surface, except the one that would justify war. Under those circumstances, the truth, which is generally a messy thing that doesn't fit well into any story, had no chance of getting a hearing.

The "intelligence failure'' cost the lives and health of thousands of men and women, and left families in America and around the world grieving -- all for nothing. It has cost the American people $200 billion and counting. Saddam is gone, perhaps a few months ahead of when he would have been gone anyway, but the United States is saddled with an Iraq that will take a long time to find its way, assuming the United States does not desert it again. Heads should roll, but not just at the top of the intelligence community. Heads should roll also among those who would not hear the truth; who would not investigate the truth while they could; who preferred, and still prefer, to bad-mouth the U.N., the French, the Germans and many others who had continued to put their faith in the institutions the United States built to maintain world peace and who, sad to say, were entirely right.

The BP Foundation has awarded a three-year, $1.95 million grant to Stanford University for a broad research program on modern energy markets. The foundation is funded by BP, formerly British Petroleum, one of the world's largest energy companies. The gift will support the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at the Stanford Institute for International Studies (SIIS). With the gift, BP joins the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, CA, as one of the program's core sponsors.

"This new partnership with BP will allow the program to accelerate research in several areas, including the design and operation of market-based policies to address the threats of global warming," said program director %people2%. "In addition to BP Foundation support, we look forward to learning more from BP's own experience as an energy company, which touches on every aspect of our program's research."

The agreement reflects a commitment by BP and Stanford to complement technical research with similar work on the legal, political and institutional dimensions of how societies derive value from energy, he added.

"Stanford University is undertaking ground-breaking research with the potential to have a profound impact on the organization of modern energy markets and the conduct of environmental policy," said Greg Coleman, BP's group vice president for environment, health, safety and security. "We hope that this is just the first step in a relationship which will become broader and deeper."

The agreement with Stanford is the latest in a series of BP partnerships with universities in the United Kingdom, the United States and China representing a total commitment of more than $100 million, according to BP officials. The Stanford agreement is expected to complement work under way at Princeton University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University, company officials added.

Founded in 2001, the SIIS Program on Energy and Sustainable Development focuses on the political, legal and institutional aspects of modern energy services, in collaboration with faculty from the Stanford School of Law and several university departments, including political science and economics. About half of the program's resources are devoted to research partnerships in key developing countries, including Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. Program researchers have examined the emergence of a global business in natural gas, reforms of electric power markets and the supply of modern energy services to low-income rural households in developing countries.

The program is housed in the Center for Environmental Science and Policy - one of five major research centers at SIIS, the university's primary forum for interdisciplinary research on international issues and challenges.

Developments in European science and science policy suggest that a new landscape is forming, one over which scientists can move as freely as they already do between Massachusetts and California.

The great scientific traditions of Europe have always had strong national identities. One thinks of Pasteur as French, Newton as British, Planck as German. But in moving towards an economically unified Europe, some national sovereignty had to be given up to serve a more communitarian vision. That same evolution is now taking place in science, as a powerful movement towards unified European research takes shape.

In a recent editorial in Le Monde, several Nobel Prize winners - including Francois Jacob, the French biologist, Bengt Samuelsson, the Swedish biochemist, Aaron Klug, the British biochemist, and Rita Levi Montalcini, the Italian developmental biologist - called for a restructuring of science policy that would double support for science, renew the focus on basic research and fund centres of excellence that would be regional and not national. Soon afterwards, the European Commission pointed out that European countries together produced proportionally more scientists then the US - but that scientists constituted a much smaller proportion of the working population. To help retain scientists, the Commission has advocated increased European Union investment in research and urged European co-operation to stop the "brain drain".

This growth of scientific collaboration in Europe is encouraged by the EU's sixth research framework programme, which provides grants to support work throughout the Union. The trend towards breaking down national borders should also be evident at a new pan-European event - EuroScience 2004 - taking place in Stockholm a year from now.

All this is good news but more work is needed in three areas. The priorities of a future European research entity should be restructured; governments both sides of the Atlantic should co-operate to plug any "brain drain" of talent away from Europe; and science policy needs to follow science along its cross-border course.

Some European scientists are reported to be dissatisfied with the balance of basic and applied research in the EU's framework programmes. They want more of the former and less of the latter. This dissatisfaction is fuelling discussion on the formation of a European research council, which might play a pan-European funding role like that of the National Science Foundation in the US. But if such a council is to develop, there needs to be a careful examination of the weight of different scientific fields in its research portfolio.

The US government should welcome these developments but it must also change its own position to assist the European science union. That means helping to tackle the problem of "brain drain", which received much attention in the 1960s but slipped out of view as European research expenditure increased and laboratories grew stronger. Many European commentators claim it has reappeared.

To slow it, US institutions need to ignore, at least for a time, the temptation to conduct overseas raids on scientists to fill permanent positions. An increased international scientific exchange will support, rather than inhibit, the equitable distribution of talent; and US science and immigration policies should be drawn in ways that ease movement of graduate and post-doctoral scientists in both directions. At the moment, the increasingly delicate visa situation - exacerbated by new interview requirements imposed by the US authorities - and the well publicised political differences between the US and Europe are impairing scientific exchange.

Last, the knowledge needed to construct a European science policy based on regions rather than nations must come from scientists themselves. Regional centres of excellence might provide a structure for policy discussion. But scientists still face the dilemma that while science is increasingly carried out across borders, science policy is still made by nations. The people best placed to construct a European science policy that brings together broad issues (such as the desirable balance between basic and applied projects) and narrower ones (such as stem cell research) are its leading scientists. It is a task worthy of their best efforts. The writer is editor-in-chief of Science, the international journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.