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Politicians may flirt with reviving the draft, but they are too late; it's already happened. Some citizens willingly enlisted, some were conscripted, some gathered on Saturday to conscientiously object--but when Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge put the country on heightened alert, he began our basic training. Watch for men with nicks on their faces; they may be freshly shaved jihadists. Report suspicious bags. The soda bottle in the subway could be cyanide. France says it wants more weapons inspectors? We now have millions of them...
...emergency teams to talk with one another and their Canadian counterparts, have been shelved until federal help arrives. Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick says he has pleaded for more money. "It's very frustrating," he says. Smaller cities have fared even worse, with many forced to spend money on basic equipment they expected the feds would pay for. Says Donald L. Plusquellic, mayor of Akron, Ohio: "If you had told me when we met with Bush that it would now be some 500-plus days since Sept. 11 and we would still not have this money, I wouldn't have believed...
WMAP also confirmed what earlier experiments had suggested about a basic characteristic of the universe: the geometry of space-time, in the Einsteinian sense, is flat. That's consistent with a theory called inflation, which posits that the cosmos underwent a period of turbocharged expansion before it was a second old. "I have to admit," says Bahcall, "that I was skeptical of the picture theorists had put together. Inflation, dark matter, dark energy--it's all pretty implausible. But this implausible, crazy universe has now been confirmed with exquisite detail...
...letters taking advantage of the war on terror may be new, but the basic scheme goes back to the early 1980s, when it first started to emerge in Nigeria. Named after this West African country, the “Nigeria scam” presents itself as a way to steal millions of dollars from disorganized, foreign governments. Its myriad permutations all follow a general pattern: an unsolicited e-mail arrives from a stranger claiming to be a government official, usually in Nigeria. He has come across ten to 60 million dollars that are unaccounted for in the government?...
...some basic level these people should be pitied for their gullibility and financial losses, and that’s certainly the tack taken by the Secret Service, which refers to these saps as “victims.” To be sure, there are some victims like the American who was murdered in Lagos, Nigeria in 1995 while pursuing the Nigeria scam. Yet this exception only proves the rule. No one deserves to die for attempting to steal this money, but it seems fair that they lose their money, since they are, after all, attempting to take part...