Lead Story
The federal government recently downgraded its estimate that “top secret,” “secret,” and “confidential” are stamped on 10 million documents a year, claiming that only 6.8 million were so stamped in the last fiscal year.
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In April, California officials declined to spray malathion over a five-square-mile area of Riverside County to kill the Mediterranean fruit flies because an endangered species of rat living there might have been affected.
In a report by the defense select committee to Britain’s House of Commons in May, private security guards at 56 British military installations were criticized as being “hopeless,” “not strong enough to perform . . . heavy lifting,” “often asleep on the job,” and in some cases “afraid of the dark.”
In June, while Trish and Vincent Caminiti were vacationing at Disney World, 20,000 bees, arriving in a dense black three-foot-wide funnel cloud that a neighbor said “sounded like a helicopter,” invaded their home in Bayport, New York, entering a hole between the roof and gutter. They produced two kilograms of honey and 10,000 offspring before technicians removed them with a large vacuum cleaner.
