The mainland Chinese leadership holds "dangerous misperceptions" about US military power and intentions that could lead to political friction and even military conflict, a report prepared for the Pentagon warns. The study found that the United States was perceived to be weak militarily, in decline as a superpower and yet actively trying to subvert and dismember China.

"We already see evidence that China considers a future war with the US sufficiently plausible to be openly discussed," the report said. "Worse still, Chinese military books and journals in the 1990s have begun to discuss the necessity of taking military action against a more powerful opponent in certain circumstances."

In describing US weakness, Chinese military writers asserted that the US barely won the Gulf War, that it could not "contain" Chinese power and had only a 30 percent chance of winning a war in Asia, the study said.

CONYERS, Ga.  -- A Georgia woman, in an annual message to the faithful who gathered on a farm east of Atlanta, says the Virgin Mary has warned of a "great war."

Nancy Fowler read a message to more than 30,000 people, which she says she received from the Virgin Mary. She said: "I come with a serious warning. A great war will come upon this world, greater than man has ever known. Pray, children, pray. Amend your ways, please."

Fowler says she began getting messages from the Virgin Mary in 1990. The messages were monthly, then came once a year. Fowler now says next year's message will be her last.

"Nuclear weapons are incompatible with peace in the 21st century," said Archbishop Renato Martino, the Vatican's permanent observer to the United Nations. He asked the member-nations to definitively banish those weapons as well as anti-personnel mines, of which there are an estimated 100 million deployed worldwide and which continue to kill "26,000 innocents each year."

Archbishop Martino enumerated the "rising cost" of the "culture of war": "Since the end of the Cold War, the governments of the world have spent 800 billion dollars annually on military concerns and maintained armies of 27 million soldiers."

He said that the only notable recent "decrease" in spending was recorded in the region of the former Warsaw Pact, while the NATO countries have only reduced their levels of military spending by "10 percent" since 1987. In addition, he added that developed countries are responsible for "90 percent of the $22 billion in arm sales generated each year." Archbishop Martino said that even as "developed countries spend $221 billion per year on their armed forces … 60 percent of human beings live on less than $2 per day … and more than 100 countries today are finding themselves in worse circumstances than 10 years ago. In the end, between 12 and 18 million people starve or are undernourished each year."

"Budget priorities," said the archbishop, "should be reviewed so that life is supported and not the funding of death."