Halliburton

Can an investor make a buck by investing in the stock of one of the rapidly growing dollar-store chains? My recent visit to one of the more than 16,000 dollar stores that dot our land found many items we've come to expect from these stores that aggressively have picked up where the old F.W. Woolworth & Co. dime stores left off. I carefully examined but did not buy the party cups, clothesline, makeup brushes, laundry detergent, paint scraper set, toy...

It has been 50 years this month since the Cuban missile crisis, but I remember the terror of it. We were hours away from six missiles, each with the strength of eighty Hiroshima bombs, being launched against the eastern seaboard before Nikita Khrushchev called them back to Russia. Jack Kennedy was our President, and we will evermore be grateful for his handling of it. If there were ever again a crisis of such magnitude, which of the two presidential candidates would we want to make decisions: Barack Obama, who seems to carefully deliberate in his decision making ("leading from behind")

THE UNITED STATES has a mess on its hands in Iraq, and the man who may have done more than anyone else to bring that about shot his own country in the foot yet again this week. That was Paul Wolfowitz - the man who conceptualized a visionary mission to recast Middle Eastern paradigms, in the service of a boss who mostly just wanted Saddam Hussein's hide - issuing a Pentagon edict on Tuesday that must have been designed as a sharp stick in the eye for those countries that formed the coalition of the unhelpful during the recent accomplishment in Iraq.

NATIONAL Halliburton contracts probed The FBI has begun investigating whether the Pentagon improperly awarded no-bid contracts to Halliburton Co. The line of inquiry expands an FBI investigation into whether Halliburton overcharged taxpayers for fuel in Iraq. [Page 3a] Seeking flu vaccine imports The Bush administration said yesterday that it is working to buy 5 million doses of flu vaccine from manufacturers in Canada and Germany, mixing the issue of prescription drug imports with the flu shot shortage.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Mahmoud Ali, a gap-toothed 15-year-old, worked steadily under a penetrating sun at his rather monotonous job outside the large Mansur filling station here. Taking turns with his two uncles, Ali waited in line in the family's 1982 Chevrolet to get a tank of cheap gasoline, which the locals call benzene, at the station subsidized by the Iraqi Oil Ministry. After filling up the faded white Chevy, the men pulled the vehicle to a curb. There, they siphoned the fuel into 20-liter plastic jugs to sell at triple the posted price to other drivers too frustrated to wait in lengthy lines.

Special stamp could cement Reagan's legacy "A parting gift" (editorial, June 11) brings up the issue of memorials to Ronald Reagan. The efforts to place his name on more buildings, roads, currency and everything possible border on the absurd. But a memorial that could be the equivalent of one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's most lasting legacies (the March of Dimes and the elimination of polio throughout the world) would be to place Mr. Reagan's portrait on a 45-cent stamp. This stamp would be usable for first-class mail.

WHAT TO DO? And whom to blame? These are the two time-honored questions that Russian revolutionaries used to pose when things went wrong. Now, they weren't thinking of power failures brought on by too much modern air conditioning in a booming city suffering through a 90-degree heat wave in May even though it's farther north than Ketchikan, Alaska - but they would have been no less trenchant if they had. Several million Muscovites lost their electricity Wednesday....

SUNRISE, Fla. -- President Bush and Democratic rival John Kerry directly challenged each other's credibility as they stumped yesterday in the two big swing states that each believes could deliver the election -- Florida, with its trove of 27 electoral votes, and Ohio with 20. Sweeping through South Florida, Bush delivered a blistering -- and familiar -- attack on Kerry's foreign policy, saying he wanted to mark the one-year anniversary of Kerry's "no"...