Word: sweeps
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...Carson's case the title may for once have been apt. What we lost when we became a republic was a sense of the slow sweep of history. Our Presidents serve for four to eight years--even F.D.R. went just over 12. Carson ruled the Tonight Show for nearly 30: enough time for a baby to be born, grow up and have babies of her own; enough time to span a real historical era. He took to the air in 1962, weeks before the Cuban missile crisis. He departed in 1992, just months after the breakup of the Soviet Union...
...night? In the new film, it's a specific group (we won't say which) with a motive familiar to readers of cynical crime fiction. In the original, it's an L.A. street gang, but one that metastasizes into a more generalized and troubling plague: the whole roiling sweep of urban pestilence that seized the U.S. in the '70s. It's the rampaging unknown, voiceless and ruthless--a nightmare that will end only if you can stay awake, and alive, till dawn...
When Michael Kaelberer made his regular trip to the dump on a recent Sunday, a friend going the other way tried to wave him off. "They're down there!" he warned. "Aw, man," Kaelberer said. He had heard about the DNA sweep, and he didn't like it. He had lived in Truro for 33 years precisely because this kind of nonsense didn't happen here. Still, he had decided to surrender. "What are you going to do? You got a truck full of garbage," he says. "This is a small town. It's not worth getting on a list...
Probably not. A better question might be, Do DNA dragnets work? The answer so far is, rarely. The largest sweep in the U.S. took place in Miami, where in 1994 cops sampled 2,300 men in search of a serial killer. The dragnet did not catch the killer. Of the 18 publicized U.S. sweeps, only one--a narrow sampling of 25 workers at a nursing home--has been successful, according to a 2004 study by criminologist Samuel Walker of the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Walker called the sweeps "unproductive" and said that if they are to continue, national guidelines...
...Britain, where the first ever mass DNA sweep took place in 1987 (indirectly leading to the conviction of a rapist and murderer who tried to escape detection by asking a co-worker to take the DNA test for him), the results have been more impressive--and the public far less resistant. The Forensic Science Service of England and Wales has carried out 292 DNA dragnets since it began counting in 1995. So far, 61--about 20% of all sweeps--have produced significant matches, helping push an investigation toward a suspect and, on numerous occasions, a conviction. In 1998 Str??cklingen...