Word: conning
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America, a country born with a sense that divine providence was paying close attention from the start, has always had a weakness for prophecy. With its deep religious history but no established church, this country welcomes religious free-lancers and entrepreneurs. Both the visionaries and the con artists have access to the altar. It took the shocking events of the last mid-century to draw apocalyptic thinking off the Fundamentalist margins and into the mainstream. The rise of Hitler, a wicked man who wanted to murder the Jews, read like a Bible story; his utter destruction, and the subsequent return...
Everybody knows that most junk e-mail--or spam, as it's called--is phony. What you may not know is that much of it is sent by con artists--real-life bad guys who are after your money. According to the National Consumers League (NCL), Internet scams cost Americans more than $6 million last year--up from $3 million in 2000. Crooked Web auctions account for much of that, but 15% of online scams come directly via e-mail. How do they work? Susan Grant, director of the NCL's Internet Fraud Watch, has seen them...
...formerly sociable mom become taciturn and isolated? Does Dad suddenly find paying the bills stressful? Does he have trouble seeing when he drives at night? Have there been serious lapses of memory or judgment, a pot left unattended on the stove, a large check written to a con artist...
...radioactive material or any other bomb-making equipment. Nor had he chosen a target, or formulated a plan. And while his connections with al-Qaeda operatives were never in doubt, he suddenly began to look a lot more like the accused shoe-bomber Richard Reid (i.e. another disaffected ex-con from the West desperate to get in with al-Qaeda) than like the sophisticated professionals who put together September...
...past eight years, 175 cases have been recorded worldwide of nuclear materials (not bombs) being smuggled out of former Soviet territories and other countries. Such material could have reached bin Laden through criminals - intelligence officials reportedly believe Al Qaeda operatives have been stung more than once by con men offering them relatively harmless spent fuel disguised as weapons-grade radioactive material - or by sympathizers in Chechnya. Bin Laden operatives reportedly also tried in 1993 to buy enriched uranium produced in South Africa on the black market...