first one is the standing of the international landscape so that we can warned policy-makers about transcom impending actions that might affect u.s. interests and again. opportunities that might be rising. that can really set the foundation for wise national security policy. we keep an eye and individual countries on the transnational trends. i mentioned the economy is one area and another one that was quite-- the h1n1 virus. as we all know, it popped up fairly quickly and as the director of national intelligence, i thought this was the primary responsibility of health and human services, the cdc, that they were the experts but it turned out there was a pretty strong role for the intelligence community in keeping an eye on that situation as it developed and it is still developing. for one thing, it was up to us to check whether some of the information that was being reported by different countries was in fact a record not and that is a fairly familiar function for the intelligence community. another piece of it was the predictive analysis using epidemiological models, looking at history, tr