Word: gunness
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...lack of an effective central government have left Somalia splintered into a mosaic of clan-based fiefdoms. Two mini-states in the north have broken away, though no country recognizes their independence. In the Mogadishu suburbs that sprawl around the devastated old quarter, donkey carts and machine gun-fitted pickups compete for passage on sand-swept streets. Militias still clash regularly and murders and kidnappings are common. Public infrastructure is almost nonexistent. Returning Somalia to its prewar status will take billions of dollars, according to Maxwell Gaylard, who heads up the United Nations' Somalia programs. "It's not total destruction...
...doctors pronounced him "the luckiest guy ever," and Patrick Lawler, 23, isn't about to disagree. The construction worker was building a house in Colorado when his nail gun backfired, driving a 4-in. nail through the roof of his mouth and into his skull. Amazingly, Lawler didn't realize anything was amiss until six days later when he went to a dentist with what he thought was a nagging toothache. It took surgeons four hours to extract the nail, which had penetrated his brain. The uninsured Lawler is expected to make a full recovery but now must contend with...
...effort to make the system fairer, Congress passed the Sentencing Reform Act, which established a commission of judges and other legal experts to craft a range of penalties for each crime. Judges could increase or decrease the prescribed sentences because of aggravating or mitigating factors--a gun was used in the crime, for example, or the defendant served in the military--but they didn't have much flexibility. And with prosecutors allowed to present evidence at sentencing that they didn't have to put forward at trial, defendants had even less leverage. It's no wonder 97% of federal cases...
...most opinionated harrumphs, and this year the SED flat-panel technology developed by Toshiba and Canon was at the center of scrutiny. Billed as the technology that could bring down plasma, SED takes the idea of conventional cathode-ray-tube televisions and miniaturizes it: instead of one big electron gun exciting all the phosphors on a screen in sequence, millions of little electrical nodes do the same thing simultaneously. The result is picture contrast and response time that outstrip plasma and LCD with a much lower power drain. Toshiba says that production costs over time could make SED TVs relatively...
...Hanks had star potential when he auditioned for Splash. But is that kind of judgment really analogous to the split-second decision-making process of a Marine in a war game? Or of the New York City policemen who decided, incorrectly, that immigrant Amadou Diallo was holding a gun and not his wallet...