Word: soaps
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...addition, the council unanimously voted to sponsor an end-of-the-year charity drive to collect clothing, soap and toys for a local homeless shelter...
...they find much else. In Kinshasa's fetid slums, there is a new and sinister edge to the desperation. People who cannot afford soap wash their clothes with papaya leaves. Families that cannot pay for funerals bury their dead in rude holes. Single mothers who cannot find jobs feed their babies only once every other day. "Look at me," says Andre Miku, a retired mechanic whose children are hungry because he has sold the television set and the refrigerator and now there is nothing left to hawk. "I've grown so thin. It's not because I'm sick. There...
...potentially on par with the one that killed 168 people in Oklahoma City only two years ago. After catching the men, the armed Federal agents discovered--much to their embarrassment, I would imagine--that the two men were traveling industrial cleaners and that the "ammonium nitrate fertilizer" was only soap. It was soon determined that the two cleaners posed no danger...
Concern No. two, though, is more fundamental. If the Feds are exonerated from any wrongdoing--they were, after all, dealing with a potential threat--then we must turn our attention to the other actors in this saga: the citizens who reported the terrorist industrial cleaners and called in soap "leads" to the Bureau. In a country that is regularly bemoaned for its diminished civic participation, this mass public action seems strangely incongruous. It is a sad state of affairs when it takes a threat to national security to galvanize the citizenry to action. People don't take the time...
Although the images of mistaken identity and overly-armed and misdirected Feds seem rather humorous, the terrorist alert and the national response over soap actually reveal a sad state of affairs in our country. Wouldn't it be nice to open the morning paper and read of community safety or school initiatives garnering similar levels of action...