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...show it was combatting terrorism? It's unclear whether anyone could have foreseen the twists and turns, such as Moussaoui becoming his own counsel, that began to unravel the government's case. But the case now is pivotal for another reason: it has become a showdown between the basic right of criminal defendants to prove their innocence and national-security concerns that can affect the lives of many others. Here's how this supposedly open-and-shut case turned into an unruly tangle of conflicting legal principles...
...College Board wants schools to produce better writers, so the New SAT will require an essay. The board thinks grammar is important, so the new test will ask students to fix poorly deployed gerunds and such. To encourage earlier advanced-math instruction, the New SAT will go beyond basic algebra and geometry for the first time to include Algebra II class material (remember negative exponents--q(-3), for instance?). The board, a powerful group of 4,300 educational institutions--including most of America's leading universities--has undertaken an unprecedented effort to push local school districts to alter their curriculums...
...also says that the "SAT has changed remarkably little over the years," which is true only in the most basic sense: it still examines verbal and mathematical skills. Even so, the question types have changed dramatically. The first Scholastic Aptitude Test, which was given on June 23, 1926, included "Artificial Language" and logic sections that would seem bizarre to today's SAT takers. (A practice question asked students to translate a gibberish sentence--"OK entcola kon"--based on a given lexicon.) Similarly, IQ tests look quite different from the SAT. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the most widely used...
...nuclear weapons in Iraq, opponents of U.S. intervention called for idleness in the name of peace. But uninhibited nuclear proliferation is not part of a world peace that favors American security. Furthermore, nuclear proliferation among terrorists and fanatical ideologues who, as the Bush Doctrine states, “reject basic human values and hate the United States,” is conducive not to peace at all, but to continued violence and the endangerment of America and free societies everywhere...
Today, sub-Saharan Africa hemorrhages more money in debt payments each year than it spends on health and education combined. Nations that lack the resources to provide basic services for their citizens—less than one percent of HIV positive Africans have access to treatment—must allocate large portions of their budgets to debt payments. Around the globe, poor nations struggling toward growth are finding their efforts stymied by debilitating debt burdens. Even in those cases where countries incurred debt under legitimate regimes, it hardly seems fair to put the interests of rich creditors before the satisfaction...