Other Music from a... Different Kitchen

One of the Chinese citizens sought for questioning in connection with an unspecified, unconfirmed threat against the city of Boston has been in United States custody for more than two months [emphasis added], the F.B.I. said on Saturday.

The F.B.I. said, "It appears at this time that Mei Xia Dong's motives for entering the U.S. may have been for economic reasons," the F.B.I. statement said. "The investigation thus far does not tie her to any terrorist group," it said.

Officials have said they are increasingly skeptical about the validity of an uncorroborated tip from an anonymous source that led to a terror alert in Boston on Wednesday. News media reports spoke of threats to explode a "dirty bomb," which disperses low-level radioactive material, and the F.B.I. announced it was seeking to interview 14 people, most of them Chinese, in connection with the unspecified plot.

But by Friday, Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts said that he was growing less concerned about the situation. Officials began to speculate that the tip was a hoax.

The new supplemental budget request, which would come on top of the $25 billion in emergency spending that had already been approved for the current fiscal year, would push total 2005 funding for military operations and equipment close to a record $105 billion. Since the first money was provided shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the total provided so far for the U.S. efforts against terrorism would reach more than $280 billion.

Districts around the country are pondering whether to inject intelligent design into science classes, and the constitutional problems are underscored by practical issues. There is little enough time to discuss mainstream evolution in most schools; the Dover students get two 90-minute classes devoted to the subject. Before installing intelligent design in the already jam-packed science curriculum, school boards and citizens need to be aware that it is not a recognized field of science. There is no body of research to support its claims nor even a real plan to conduct such research. In 2002, more than a decade after the movement began, a pioneer of intelligent design lamented that the movement had many sympathizers but few research workers, no biology texts and no sustained curriculum to offer educators. Another leading expositor told a Christian magazine last year that the field had no theory of biological design to guide research, just "a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions." If evolution is derided as "only a theory," intelligent design needs to be recognized as "not even a theory" or "not yet a theory." It should not be taught or even described as a scientific alternative to one of the crowning theories of modern science.