Garry Kasparov

It'll be high-level chess in a waterfront setting, bankrolled by a wealthy businessman.A reprise of last year's $5 million match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky that began on an island off the coast of what was once Yugoslavia?Not quite.But what it will be is the U.S. Chess Federation's 1993 National Amateur Team Championship finals, to be held Saturday and Sunday at the HarborView Marina and Yacht Club at 500 HarborView Dr. in Baltimore.The event will bring together four teams, each with four players, who won regional events earlier this month.

Britney Spears leads search engine topics Britney Spears fans searched for her more than any other person, place or thing typed into the Lycos online search engine this year. In Lycos' Top 50 searches of 2000, Spears narrowly beat the popular Japanese cartoon Dragonball Z. The teen singer, whose hits include "Oops! ... I Did It Again," came in second last year. Searches for the music-sharing Web site Napster went up more than 5,400 percent from last year, making it the eighth most-popular topic.

MOSCOW -- Riot police broke up a march against President Vladimir V. Putin in the Russian capital yesterday and arrested former chess champion Garry Kasparov and several other opposition leaders, a clampdown on pro-democracy protesters a week before Russia's pivotal parliamentary election. Police armed with truncheons moved in on marchers as they tried to make their way toward the Central Election Commission building, where they had planned to submit a petition questioning authorities' adherence to democratic principles before legislative elections Dec. 2. The march followed an authorized rally held by Kasparov and fellow opposition activists in downtown Moscow, attended by about 2,000 Russians.

MOSCOW -- A high-profile case in which Russian police, security officers and others were accused of involvement in the killing of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya appeared to be unraveling yesterday, just days after the arrests were announced. Two suspects, identified previously by a Moscow newspaper as former surveillance specialists for the Moscow police, were reported to have been released. Authorities said a third figure named in the case, a Federal Security Service officer, actually had been arrested in an unrelated investigation.

How right were my 2007 predictions? Let's just say they included oil at $100 a barrel, the subprime meltdown and racist outbursts from Don Imus, Bill O'Reilly and, um ... Tom Hanks. For 2008, I see a lot of gloom. But I also see ungloom. And a vague sort of blobby thing that could either be the end of the world or a smallish volcano/earthquake/flood-type thing in some poor country. Visions can be hard to read. Especially when you're drinking a lot, because of the gloomy stuff. So here is my set of predictions for 2008.

Remember that famous line from the movie ``Wall Street'': ``If you want a friend, get a dog.'' Well, take it from me, if you want a chess buddy, buy a chess program for your PC.I'm a ``patzer,'' a chess player who knows how to move the pieces fairly well but is forever doomed to mediocrity. Like all patzers, I play for pure love of the game, knowing that Garry Kasparov - even on his worst day - could play 30 opponents like me at once and crush us all.Still, I've had fun during the 25 years or so that I've played chess.

IBM has built the first supercomputer that, scientists hope, is powerful enough to simulate the explosion of a nuclear weapon. The $110 million machine is a major step toward an era when computers will provide such benefits as vastly improved weather forecasts and individually designed medicines. The new IBM computer, called ASCI White, weighs 106 tons and occupies an area the size of two basketball courts. It would take the next four biggest computers in the world combined to equal its processing power.

Call it the "Nerd Factor." That's the image of chess in the United States: the guy with glasses as thick as Coke bottle bottoms, six pens in his ink-stained pocket, an off-key laugh that seems rather bizarre at best.And that's the good image, considering the past. Consider Paul Morphy, the greatest American chess player of the 19th century. ended up a babbling madman, suffering from paranoid delusions. Consider Bobby Fischer, the greatest American chess player of the 20th century. After he won the world championship in 1972, he went into hiding in Southern California, avoiding all chess competition, surfacing occasionally only in odd rumors that he was spending his days distributing religious pamphlets in mall parking lots.

It was a daunting task, but the more ambitious of the challengers could at least try to take some comfort in the odds: With 60 players arrayed against one former world chess champion, wasn't there the chance that someone among them could pull off an upset? Those kind of thoughts were quickly dispelled for most of the elementary and high school students who turned out last night to try their luck against Russian legend Anatoly Karpov in a "simultaneous" game at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

MOSCOW -- Boris N. Yeltsin triumphed over his Communist opponents to become the first democratically elected national leader in Russian history, leading a sweep by reformist anti-Communists in Wednesday's voting, according to unofficial returns announced yesterday.Mr. Yeltsin, 60, a one-time Communist Party Politburo member whose rebellion against the system captured the popular mood, won about 60 percent of the vote against five opponents to become president of the Russian Federation. About 70 percent of the 104 million voters in the biggest Soviet republic went to the polls.