The purpose of these remarks is to report some 
news concerning type $III$ $E_0$-semigroups.   

During the spring of 1998 I worked through Bob Powers' remarkable 
construction of type III E_0-semigroups in a topics course,   
hoping to understand his construction in terms as simple 
as possible and to make connections with other parts
of operator theory - like Wiener-Hopf operators and 
Hankel operators - where that seemed helpful.  
The following discussion summarizes 
what I learned (without full details), and appears  
to clarify things to some extent.