Collective Sigh

The U.S. military in Iraq is offering to pay a two-year, $20 million public relations contract "that calls for extensive monitoring of U.S. and Middle Eastern media in an effort to promote more positive coverage of news from Iraq," Walter Pincus revealed in The Washington Post on Thursday.

"The contract calls for assembling a database of selected news stories and assessing their tone as part of a program to provide 'public relations products' that would improve coverage of the military command's performance, according to a statement of work attached to the proposal," Pincus wrote.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist acknowledged Tuesday that he may not have met all the requirements needed to keep his medical license active even though he gave paperwork to Tennessee officials indicating that he had.

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"As a result of a change in Tennessee's regulations several years after Dr. Frist came to the Senate, he may be required to complete additional continuing medical education hours," spokesman Matt Lehigh said in a statement

At least it looks like New Orleans may escape the apocalyptic, doomsday scenario - barely - but the area to the east may not be so lucky. It's going to be a long day.

A key House committee issued a stinging critique of U.S. intelligence on Iran yesterday, charging that the CIA and other agencies lack "the ability to acquire essential information necessary to make judgments" on Tehran's nuclear program, its intentions or even its ties to terrorism.

Outed CIA agent was working on Iran

Customers shop around when they buy an airline ticket or a new car, so why not when they need a hip replacement or treatment for a sore throat? An executive order being signed Tuesday by President Bush is designed to help people make more informed decisions about doctors and hospitals.

Four federal agencies will be required to compile information about the quality and price of care they pay for and share that information with their customers and each other.

"We're all about being cost-conscious," said Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt.

"It's just the American way. We clip coupons. We check for bargain flights on the Web. We carefully research major purchases. But when it comes to health care, we lack the tools to compare either quality or the costs.

Bush will sign the executive order in Minnesota, where he will talk with health care providers about "health transparency."

Ford Motor Co. said Friday it would temporarily halt production at 10 assembly plants between now and the end of the year, blaming high gas prices for pushing many consumers away from its pickups and SUVs and toward higher-mileage models.

Chang-Ran Kim writing for Reuters reported that after a turbo-charged year of bumper sales, a soft yen and hefty cost cuts, Japan's biggest auto makers are set to extend their run of record profits in 2006/07 fueled by even more key product launches.

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Much of their fortune will continue to be made in the United States, where top-ranked Toyota began selling a new generation of the big-volume Camry -- America's best-selling car -- last month.

With the Big Three American auto companies closing factories as they struggle to restructure, the Japanese are among the few carmakers still building factories.

For instance, Honda chose Greenburg, Indiana, as the site for a $550 million assembly plant after state and local governments offered tax and other incentives worth $141 million. More than 100 local residents even donned red shirts and formed a large letter "H" for a photo sent to the Honda headquarters in Tokyo as part of the city's bid. The factory, which starts production in 2008, will join 17 factories already owned by Japanese automakers in the United States, which built 3.4 million vehicles last year, according to the Japanese industry association.

Newton said she was ambushed by a legless female mannequin at the company's Westminster Mall store, a skirmish that left her with a bloodied scalp, a cracked tooth, recurring shoulder pain and numbness in her fingers.

The alleged attack was the latest in a string of mannequin mayhem incidents nationwide.

"There are a slew of lawsuits like this," said mannequin manufacturer Barry Rosenberg, who joked that stores should run background checks on dummies before letting them mingle with shoppers.

Most of the cases involved mannequins toppling over onto customers, but an Indiana woman claimed she caught herpes from the lips of a CPR training dummy. She dropped her lawsuit against the American Red Cross in 2000 after further tests revealed that she didn't have the disease, according to news reports.

The alleged Westminster Mall incident happened nearly a year ago in the women's department at J.C. Penney. Newton said she wanted to buy a certain blouse, but the only one in her size was being worn by a mannequin.

When a salesclerk tried to remove the garment, the dummy's arm flew off and struck Newton's head, according to her lawsuit, which was filed in Orange County Superior Court and seeks unspecified damages.

Mannequin maulings and litigation aren't new. In 1990, a Florida woman collected $175,000 after a faceless Macy's dummy fell onto her neck and reportedly injured a disc.

In 1993, a Minnesota woman was knocked unconscious by a falling mannequin at a Dayton's department store, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She needed five stitches and several chiropractic sessions to recover but didn't sue.

And in 2001, a Canadian shopper in Vancouver won a $330,000 verdict after a Gap store mannequin landed on her head. Elizabeth Ball was apparently jinxed when it came to store displays. A few years earlier, while shopping at a lighting store, she was beaned by a falling chandelier, according to the Canadian Press.

Big Katrina Contractors Win More FEMA Work

The four giant construction firms that received controversial no-bid contracts to house Hurricane Katrina evacuees last September will be earning up to $250 million apiece to do similar work after future disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said yesterday.

Unlike the Katrina deals, the contracts announced yesterday were awarded after a bidding process. But most of them went to the same four firms: Bechtel Corp., CH2M Hill Cos., Fluor Corp. and Shaw Group Inc. Two new consortia of companies were also chosen for a share of the work. Together, the six winners will receive up to $1.5 billion for hauling and installing temporary trailers to house evacuees during future emergencies.

Ultimately, protecting commercial aircraft from terrorism is not the job of airport security, it's a job for police departments, federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The apparent plot at Heathrow Airport was not unraveled by the keen eye of a concourse screener; it was unraveled through careful investigation behind the scenes. By the time any attacker makes it to the metal detector, chances are it's already too late. There are too many ways to outwit that final line of defense.

No matter, here we go initiating yet another absurd crackdown to the detriment of millions of innocent travelers. Just as confiscating corkscrews didn't make us safer after Sept. 11, so banning liquids isn't going to make us safer now. All the while, the true weapon of mass destruction is the imagination and resilience of those who wish to harm us -- a fact we continue to ignore at our own peril.

This country is safer than it was prior to 9/11. We've taken a lot of measures to protect the American people. But obviously, we're still not completely safe, because there are people that still plot and people who want to harm us for what we believe in.

The difference in arrests in the United States and Britain appears to have much more to do with demographics than the relative skills of law enforcement. Most terrorism experts say the most insidious threats from terrorism now come not from organized terror organizations launching attacks that were hatched overseas, but from disenchanted Muslim extremists at home. And Muslim communities in the United States are generally more affluent and less dogmatic than those in Britain, which has a Muslim population of nearly 2 million. O'Hanlon described Muslim communities in Britain as "more cut off and more isolated" than in the United States.

Army officials say they are considering allowing a private developer to build a 125-acre entertainment, hotel and conference center complex next to a national Army museum at Fort Belvoir that could draw more than 1 million people a year to traffic-choked southern Fairfax County.

Heavy rain drenched large parts of South Africa's southern areas on Thursday, flooding roads and damaging houses in devastating storms, while deep snow forced mountain passes to close.

Temperatures dropped to record lows for August as snow fell in industrial hub Johannesburg for the first time in eight years in what residents say is an unusually severe winter.

North and South Korean troops along their heavily fortified border exchanged gunfire Monday night for the first time in nearly a year, a South Korean military official said today.

North Korean troops fired two shots, one of which hit a South Korean guard post near the demilitarized zone, and South Korean troops returned six shots, Maj. Kim Tae-hoon said. No one was hurt, he said.