The three Elektron units on board the space station are the last of their kind. The company that manufactured them has gone out of business, and the engineer who almost single-handedly made the final adjustments of flight units died several years ago. Reportedly he retained some "trade secret" about the final adjustments of the devices -- and it died with him.

Osama bin Laden gives himself up next month.

Hi. We're Jim Young and James Hong, better known to the users of our website HOT or NOT as just "Jim and James". You may be wondering why the heck we're doing this, so here's our explanation.

We want you, and every person that is eligible, to vote. This is something we feel passionate about. We know we're just 2 guys, but we believe that 2 guys with a good idea who are willing to work hard and put their time and money where their mouths are can make a difference... just like one person's vote - YOUR vote - can make a difference.

In a nutshell, we're doing this because we care, and because we can. We also like the idea of doing this because nobody else has done it before, and we like to do crazy, new things.

So register to vote if you haven't already done so, enter to win our money, and drastically improve your chances of winning by getting your friends to register too. We hope you win. (and if you do, it'd sure be nice if you took us out to dinner with some of that cash).

-- Jim and James

Dava Rogers says she applied at all kinds of jobs for a year, from fast-food restaurants to cleaners, with no success.

On every application, once she checked "yes" to having a criminal record, that was usually the end of it, said Rogers, 42. She served six months at the City Workhouse in St. Louis after being convicted of embezzlement from a former employer. She was released in 2002, but she found work only a year ago as a counselor in transitional housing for the YWCA.

"On the first few applications, I wouldn't check 'yes,' and then they would say if I explained it and didn't lie, they could've hired me," Rogers said. "When I was truthful, there was never a call back."

1. It's important to remember, when someone tells you something, a fact or set of facts is being relayed to you through the prism of the teller's experience and interpretation, and your miles may vary; that is, when someone tells you something happened, remember to seek out other sources for a richer context of any event. Hey, even if you're present. More knowledge will lead to better judgment.
   
   
2. Al Franken is so full of excrement his hair should be brown? It is? My point, exactly!

• Drill in ANWAR, like it or not.
  The nation's parks and preserves have oil. Bush would just have to jail, shoot, or "disappear" hippies and environmentalist types to get to it. That's damn cheap.
  
  
• Depose Chavez and install a protectorate in Venezuela.
  Venezuela's right on the other side of the Caribbean. Nice and close, with a convenient dictator-like president-sort-of to depose. Transporting the oil back to the states would be damn easy, and not subject to expensive cross-Atlantic or whatnot travel. But you know how we could make transportation cheaper? A pipeline!
  
  
• Secure the southern border, by making it narrower--and with Guatamala and Belize.
  Our friends down south have recently discovered new off-shore oil fields which gives Mexico roughly 102 billion barrels, about as much as Iraq or Iran--and they're much closer. We could put a couple battle groups off of either coast and push right down from Texas or do some amphibious landings in Acapulco and Cozumel.
  
  So we seal up the border and take care of cheap foreign labor in our auto plants by making them pay American minimum wage, and Bush gets his precioussss, not to mention retribution for the foosball drubbing Vincente Fox laid on him in early 2001. But why stop there?
  
  
• Invade Canada.
  Those "friends" to the north are sitting on the 22nd largest oil reserve in the world and they want to put all their rocks in the sling in get-tough trade negotiations with the American Goliath. You want to talk tough? We've got your tough right here.
  
  In addition to the oil and the easy pipelines, it's politically expedient. Big Pharma will like the end of the drug reimportation threat, Canadian hockey teams will be saved because they'll get to charge ticket prices in US dollars, and most of Canada will enjoy our one-language policy that we'll enforce in Quebec.
  
  
• Nuke China.
  To preempt that threat, Bush could reduce China to rubble, thus easing other oil supplies from the burden of the Chinese industrialization and stockpiling.

A Wal-Mart-owned discount store rising a half-mile from the ancient temples of Teotihuacan has touched off a fight by a small coalition that doesn't want to see the big, boxy outlet from the top of the Pyramid of the Sun.

But with most people in the area supporting Wal-Mart, the group is waging a lonely battle for what it calls its defense of Mexico's landscape and culture.

The dispute in Teotihuacan - a town built next to the ruins of the 2,000-year-old metropolis - illustrates how the allure of low prices and U.S. lifestyles often wins out in Mexico, leaving traditionalists struggling to draw a line in rapidly shifting cultural sands.

"We'd rather not have Mickey Mouse on top of the Pyramid of the Moon," says Emmanuel D'Herrera, a business owner in Teotihuacan, 30 miles north of Mexico City.

He [D'Herrera] contends a tall sign will loom near the huge twin pyramids that draw hundreds of thousands of tourists annually, although a government-appointed archaeologist disputes that.

And while the store is visible from atop the pyramid, so are many other modern businesses and houses.

Underlining his group's lack of support, D'Herrera said probably 70 percent of the town's mostly poor residents support the new store because it will offer lower prices than the area's small shops.