The college students return this weekend, high school football teams have been practicing for two weeks. Mornings are cool in New England and summer is nearly over.

The school year begins next week or the week after, depending on where you live, and school officials have been busy hatching plans to improve local education systems. Some ideas are better than others.
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If you can hear me then the world did not come to an end yesterday when the last solar eclipse of the millennium threw a moonshadow across Europe, supposedly conjoining prophecies by Nostradamus and Malachy of Armagh in an event some said would bring the death of the pope or the Mir space station crashing into Paris.

Another apocalyptic prophecy craps out, leaving us stuck here with nothing to look forward to – until next month’s mini-apocalypse. No dead popes or fiery crashes, but some people think we will have our first encounter with the Y2K bug between September ninth and tenth. On the ninth, computers will read the date as 9-9-99. Some computers may interpret this as the end of time and not know what to do next. Other computers may declare September 10th is 1-1-00. Maybe nothing will happen, but you’d be wise to back up your hard drive.
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The news from the war zone is that the Air Force’s F-22 fighter was shot out of the sky over Capitol Hill last week by the House of Representatives. Given the peculiar nature of congressional warfare, a fighter that crashed and burned last week may fly again if the House-Senate conference committee chooses to reverse the law of political gravity.

Even though the outcome is still uncertain, it was an historic moment for the House, a body that almost never says “no” to a new weapon. Even though the Cold War has been over for a decade, the federal government still spends 50 cents of every dollar on the military. This year, that figure equals $266 billion. That’s billion with a “b” as in “bomb” or “bombast.” And it’s almost three billion dollars more than the Pentagon generals asked for. Go figure.
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Much as I hate to admit it, G. Gordon Liddy was right. It was November 1985; Mr. Liddy was in the midst of his endless speaking tour. I was a young reporter. Gordon had dire predictions about everything; most turned out to be paranoid fantasies. When he spoke about the recently-discovered AIDS virus, he said, “This will be the scourge of our time. It will be like the Black Plague.” I rolled my eyes and kept taking notes.

But he was right. Thirty-three million people around the world are infected with HIV or AIDS, 90 percent of them are in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Several weeks ago, I spoke of how drug companies and the federal government, in an effort headed by Al Gore, are trying to keep AIDS drugs out of the hands of South African officials. People are starting to talk about this. AIDS activists are following Al Gore on the campaign trail, trying to hold him accountable.
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