Allan crouched over his desk once more, pen in hand and mind blank. He contemplated a story, an outline he had laboriously constructed some time ago. He had filled his pen and raised it, the nib descending towards the paper, before the sound came: the gentle, persistent tapping of the gnarled, primeval willow touching the window with long, insistent fingers. His eyes awoke with a passionate, determined flame, though the only light came from the glutted moon. Allan filled page after page, the words escaping from his mind onto the paper. Where before they had marched in regiments, practiced in ranks and followed their leaders' commands, the words now escaped in their true forms, unhindered by any stricture. He continued long into the night, until the eldritch orb had sunk into the waiting hands of the willow, raised perpetually skyward. Arthur looked up from the results of a night's frenzied labors and looked Allan in the eye. "What is this?" he queried, indicating the pages he held in his left hand. "I decided that since I wasn't having much success with more traditional stories, I might see what sort of work I produced if I let my imagination go freely," Allan replied, somewhat less self-assured than he had been the previous night. "What in G-d's name could have possessed you to do such a thing," cried Arthur, nearly raising his voice. "After all I said the day before, why have you abandoned centuries of literary progress for some self-indulgent fantasy?" He shook the papers at Allan, raising them like a belt above the head of a disobedient son. "This is nothing but a glorified Grimm's tale, a miscarried child of Stoker, a creation less fit to be published than to be told around an open fire at the hovel of some peasant!" He spoke the last word with such heavy intonation that Allan shrank back before the physical wave of sound emanating from Arthur's throat. "Do you hate the modern system of literature? Do you personally despise the works the Enlightenment or the progress made since Shakespeare?" For a moment, Allan could hardly do more than shake his head. "No, of course not I " "Then why," Arthur barreled on, "do you disregard them all and return to this superstitious babble, this morbid, paganistic drivel?

Question: "What did Arthur ask Allan?"

Response: ""What is this?""

A: yes

After the 1998 embassy bombings, the U.S. government tried to develop a clearer picture of Bin Laden's finances. A U.S. interagency group traveled to Saudi Arabia twice, in 1999 and 2000, to get information from the Saudis about their understanding of those finances. The group eventually concluded that the oft-repeated assertion that Bin Laden was funding al Qaeda from his personal fortune was in fact not true. The officials developed a new theory: al Qaeda was getting its money elsewhere, and the United States needed to focus on other sources of funding, such as charities, wealthy donors, and financial facilitators. Ultimately, although the intelligence community devoted more resources to the issue and produced somewhat more intelligence, it remained difficult to distinguish al Qaeda's financial transactions among the vast sums moving in the international financial system. The CIA was not able to find or disrupt al Qaeda's money flows. The NSC staff thought that one possible solution to these weaknesses in the intelligence community was to create an all-source terrorist-financing intelligence analysis center. Clarke pushed for the funding of such a center at Treasury, but neither Treasury nor the CIA was willing to commit the resources. Within the United States, various FBI field offices gathered intelligence on organizations suspected of raising funds for al Qaeda or other terrorist groups. By 9/11, FBI agents understood that there were extremist organizations operating within the United States supporting a global jihadist movement and with substantial connections to al Qaeda. The FBI operated a web of informants, conducted electronic surveillance, and had opened significant investigations in a number of field offices, including New York, Chicago, Detroit, San Diego, and Minneapolis. On a national level, however, the FBI never used the information to gain a systematic or strategic understanding of the nature and extent of al Qaeda fundraising. Treasury regulators, as well as U.S. financial institutions, were generally focused on finding and deterring or disrupting the vast flows of U.S. currency generated by drug trafficking and high-level international fraud. Large-scale scandals, such as the use of the Bank of New York by Russian money launderers to move millions of dollars out of Russia, captured the attention of the Department of the Treasury and of Congress. Before 9/11, Treasury did not consider terrorist financing important enough to mention in its national strategy for money laundering.

Question: "Why was FBI conducting electronic surveillance and used informants in major US cities?"

Response: "FBI was looking for financial funding of al Qaeda"

A: yes

Also on Feb. 12, a week before the ice dancing finals, Tokhtakhounov told Anissina's mother in a telephone call that the Russian federation official "had called me from America" to assure that "we are going to make" Anissina "an Olympic champion." He told her that the Russian skating federation official "will help -- he has two or three judges." On or about March 7, in a conversation between Tokhtakhounov and Anissina, she said she would have won the event without his assistance because the Russian judge did not vote for her and her partner. She also apologized for not calling to thank him earlier, but that Gailhaguet had forbidden her. She told Tokhtakhounov that she knew the FBI had interviewed Gailhaguet because of information that Tokhtakhounov "was involved with the results" of the ice dancing. He assured her that it was nonsense, but that Gailhaguet "knows my name very well -- he tried to help me, and later he made stuff up to scare you so you would not connect me to him even more." The conversations seem to indicate a familiarity between Tokhtakhounov and Anissina. Tass, the official Russian news agency, reported that Anissina attended a ceremony in 1999 at a Paris hotel honoring Tokhtakhounov for his philanthropy. That Russian organized crime may have infiltrated international sport at the Olympics stunned Phyllis Howard, president of the U.S. Figure Skating Association. "This is a criminal act and it certainly puts things in a different league," Howard said. Lloyd Ward, chief executive officer of the U.S. Olympic Committee, said in a statement, "Competitors from all nations must be assured that they compete on a level playing field."

Question: "Which news agency ran a story that implied Russian organized crime may have infiltrated international sport at the Olympics?"

Response: "Russian Associated Press"

A:
no