1) What is the current international political status?
That's a broad question, its hard to know if I am answering your question without specifics. I'll make a general summary of the last 15 years.
After the collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990's ending the cold war, America was the remaining superpower and the focus was on worldwide trade and democracy. American and U.N. troops were sent to deal with civil wars around the globe. The situation in Israel with the Palestinans is extremely bloody and due to U.S. support for Israel and the presence of U.S. troops in certain Muslim countries, there is Islamic resentment of the U.S. This is personified by Osama Bin Laden who commits a string of terrorists attacks, the worst being on 9/11 in 2001. Due to that the focus of the U.S. has changed tremendously, with the U.S. invading Afghanistan to go after Osama Bin Laden and then in Iraq to deal with Saddam who was not cooperating with U.N. resolutions. The Iraq invasion was very controversial as the U.S. went in alone without a worldwide consensus. The fear of more, worse terrorist attacks are on the minds of many people. There is debate whether if the measures we have taken in the U.S. to be more secure against further terrorist attacks are dangerous to our freedoms.
If you have more specific questions they can be better responded to..
2) How far has this time come in the subject of fission energy?
I hope someone here can better answer this, especially if I say something wrong. I'll generalize in that through fission we do have atomic bombs, including hydrogen bombs, using fission to create a hydrogen fusion reaction. Fission is being used in power plants, but they have not been very popular for the last few decades because of the problem of what to do with the spent fuel and of the catastrophic consequences of allowing a meltdown to happen. Chernobyl in Russia had a pretty bad accident in the late 1980's.
There was a furor in the news about having found "cold fusion" but it was not replicable, and so no success there yet.
3) Black matter? How far along are you?
If anyone knows better than me.. say so. As far as I am aware, "dark matter" which is what I usually hear it being called, not "black matter" is the unaccounted for mass in the universe. There are several theories out trying to guess what it is mostly composed of.. Unfortunately at this time I do not recall so much from what I read a few years ago to feel confident enough to explain it coherently here. Hopefully someone else can go deeper into this. If not, I can look it up on the internet.
If you're waiting you can try looking information yourself up on the internet.
www.google.com is a good site to start. /ttiforum/images/graemlins/smile.gif
