Day: November 24, 2006

It was cold, it was dark and in some places it was foggy. None of that would stop millions of bargain-seekers from climbing into their cars for a pre-dawn raid on their local malls, electronics retailers and discounters for the official start to the holiday season. "Great deals. I’m shopping for everybody today. We hit Target. We’re going to Meijer. We hit Sears. We started shopping at 5 a.m.," Joanne Dosant, a 36-year-old legal assistant from Windsor, Ontario, said Friday as she loaded her SUV with two cartloads of items from a Target store in Madison Heights, Mich.

Let’s take a closer look at so-called comedian Michael Richards’ racist outburst that is capturing so much press and airtime. The incident, and what has ensued, tells me more about the overall pathetic moral state of our country than it does about racism.

Richards claims he’s not a racist, despite attacking a black heckler, at a comedy club where he was performing with a string of the most inflammatory, demeaning, and vulgar racial slurs.

Is it possible that he’s not? Maybe. It’s possible that he’s just a moron.

From 1995 to 2001, Bogdan Dzakovic served as a team leader on the Federal Aviation Administration’s Red Team. Set up by Congress to help the FAA think like terrorists, the elite squad tested airport security systems.

Two bombs killed at least 22 people in northern Iraq and scattered violence shook Baghdad on Friday as the government tried to tamp down violence a day after Sunni-Arab insurgents killed 215 people in the capital’s Sadr City Shiite slum, the deadliest attack of the war.

As a class project, producing a documentary about Vermonters killed in Iraq and Afghanistan seemed fitting: the videographers attend a military school and Vermont has lost more citizens per capita than most states.

But "Vermont Fallen" has become much more than an academic exercise for a small group of Norwich University students.

The nearly complete documentary has helped draw together the families of soldiers who died in the streets of Fallujah and Ramadi or on a remote Afghan plain.