The cell phone has now become an authentication device. There is no need for banks to issue their customers with online authentication tokens or smart cards.

The user types the challenge code into the mobile phone, which validates that the challenge code is genuine. After the user has entered their PIN into the phone, it generates a response code. The user types the response code into the Web bank screen, and the transaction is confirmed.

The multiverse, she said, was like an old library whose shelves were packed with books arranged by a cataloguing system that ranked them according to similarity, each book containing within its covers a story that varied only slightly from the stories of its immediate neighbours, but by increasing degrees from those of increasingly distant books.

We have now gone beyond 100 in number, and the desire to join seems rather to increase, though it was thought the foundations would retard it, it seems quite otherwise.

Keeping the human race in check must require a lot of multitasking.

Every U.S. official we speak to agrees the policy makes no sense, but the buck gets passed from State to Justice to Homeland Security, and becomes impossible to tie down. This might make a difference.