Here's a stop-smoking aid that might be just a little drastic:
An Iowa woman who smokes two packs of cigarettes a day became so frustrated with her addiction that she called the sheriff's department last week and asked officers to jail her for several days — just to help her kick the nasty habit.
You all knew this, right? It's no big secret:
Meanwhile, if you choose to get your recommended eight glasses a day from bottled water, you could spend up to $1,400 annually. The same amount of tap water would cost about 49 cents.
Thank you, St. Joe, for maintaining your burn center:
U.S. hospitals are increasingly shutting down their burn centers in a trend experts say could leave the nation unable to handle widespread burn casualties from a fiery terrorist attack or other major disaster.
Associated Press interviews and an examination of official figures found that the shrinking number of beds is a growing cause for concern in this post-Sept. 11 world.
Diversity isn't all it's cracked up to be:
IT HAS BECOME increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.
Steven Malanga, senior editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, says the lease of public assets, as in Go. Daniels' toll-road deal, are a way to get much needed infrastructure capital to help avoid more tragedies such as the Minneapolis bridge collapse:
And you thought the smell of tobacco smoke was bad:
The recent passage of a smoking ban throughout Britain has created a new problem for pub-goers, the stale and foul smells the smoke once covered up.
[. . .]
For every story about cities being caught by surprise when disaster strikes, you can always find one about some place that's thinking ahead:
A major hurricane hasn't hit New York City in nearly 70 years, but the city has pumped at least $15 million into stockpiling supplies for hundreds of hurricane shelters for the upcoming storm season.
Hey, they'd be perfect for the homeless.
A lot of people are having fun with the Dateline NBC producer who was so clueless about how to go undercover:
Dateline NBC associate producer Michelle Madigan was heckled and derided as she ran from DefCon, the world's largest computer hackers conference, and raced away in a car.
Newsweek revisits its spectacularly wrong global-cooling warning of 1975:
The point to remember, says Connolley, is that predictions of global cooling never approached the kind of widespread scientific consensus that supports the greenhouse effect today.
We were wrong then. We have often been wrong, because climate change is really hard to predict. But we are right this time. Works for me.
No Republican presidential candidate can be much short of "life begins at conception" and hope to get through the primaries without a lot of finessing. Rudy Giuliani has to say the judges he would appoint would be the sort to have pro-life sensibilities and that we should all be federalists. Mitt Romney has to say he was against abortion after he was for it and hope he is believed:
