Word: assessable
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Bush blamed "the system" but he didn't hint that any individuals had done wrong although he allowed "I as president am responsible for the problem." He called on Cabinet agencies to assess themselves but that seemed like a less than rigorous probe. He refused to endorse the establishment of a 9/11-style independent commission just as he resisted the original 9/11 Commission for months and before eventually conceding. Odds are that he will this time, too. He called on every American to participate in the recovery but didn't ask for sacrifice-no talk of deferring his prescription drug benefit...
...veteran funeral director from Eastland, Texas. Although he has volunteered for 11 disasters' aftermaths, including cleaning up the Columbia shuttle crash, he says New Orleans is the worst. In teams of two, Edwards and his comrades open each body bag, inventory the contents, decontaminate for chemical waste, then assess the victim for gunshot wounds or a shattered skull that might indicate murder, not accidental death. Each victim is photographed, with attention given to such identifiers as long-healed scars, birthmarks and tattoos. Fingerprinting and dental imaging follow before the forensic specialists collect samples of DNA, preferably a sliver of bone...
This tragedy, however, should make us take an account of ourselves. We should not allow the mythic significance of this moment to pass without proper consideration. Let us assess the size of this cataclysm in cultural terms, not in dollars and cents or politics. Americans are far less successful at doing that because we have never understood how our core beliefs are manifest in culture--and how culture should guide political and economic realities. That's what the city of New Orleans can now teach the nation again as we are all forced by circumstance to literally come closer...
...crumbled like soup crackers as the levees designed to protect them were now holding the water in. Engineers tried dropping 3,000-lb. sandbags, but the water just swallowed them. As the days passed, the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees the levees, admitted they weren't able to assess what might work. Part of the problem was a lack of heavy helicopters; the choppers were all busy doing search and rescue...
...that the new laws are inefficient because they focus on monitoring anyone who has committed a sex crime rather than those who are most likely to strike again. Those critics say that therapy to break the cycle of behavior, supervision by a parole officer and even polygraph tests to assess whether an offender is lying about his or her activities and urges would be a more effective way to control them. A 2002 survey of nearly 9,500 sex offenders found that those who underwent therapy were 40% less likely to reoffend than those...