Word: topic
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This morning's topic is suicide bombings. Instructor Ron Haskins, a former Green Beret, warns, "We want to get the terrorists when they're recruiting, planning, training, preparing, because once they start, they're going to blow themselves up in some way." The first responders tour a house set up as a suicide-bomb factory. The kitchen is littered with chemicals, including a jar of yellow liquid simulating human urine, which can be distilled into an ingredient for an explosive called urea nitrate (used in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993). Haskins explains the assault to a visiting...
Although the Catholic priest shortage continues in the U.S., the priest-abuse scandals have not sparked a massive parishioner exodus. (Benedict is expected to address the topic on this trip, but there have been no leaks as to how.) Perhaps out of relief that he has been writing encyclicals about love and charity rather than heresy, U.S. Catholics seem to be treating him a lot like former Pontiffs: handing him a 70% approval rating while continuing to ignore church teaching on birth control and abortion...
...audience last fall at the New York Society for Ethical Culture included the usual collection of cerebral city-dwellers and self-indulgent intellectuals. Yet, for a room populated by the social and academic elite, the topic of debate—“Resolved: the Ivy League should be abolished”—was gratingly ironic...
Harvard Medical School joined the recent parade of good news on the topic of financial aid, announcing a plan to expand aid grants in order to eliminate any expected “family contribution” toward its $65,000 tuition for students whose families have annual incomes under $120,000. According to the medical school, the change will benefit a third of currently enrolled students. While eligible individuals will still be on the hook for $24,500 of the school’s tuition in the form of loans, the initiative represents an admirable step toward ensuring that cost...
...sound like one of the dozens of daily crime reports in South Africa's newspapers, but they're fictional characters in Richard Kunzmann's latest novel, Dead-End Road, one of a score of new South African novels focused on crime. Just as violent crime remains a hot topic of headlines and social conversation, so has it become the hot literary genre in a society plagued by a daily surfeit of true-life horror stories...