vote of the decade

the global war

128 | The week leading up to the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks can be remembered as a week of narrow escapes. Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, avoided an assassination attempt as he attended a family wedding in Kandahar, just three hours after a powerful bomb exploded inside a taxi parked in downtown Kabul, killing 25. No one was arrested or identified as a suspect, but city police believed the attackers were among remnants of the al-Qaeda movement. President Karzai made it to the United States to be on hand for 9/11 remembrances. In Heidelberg, Germany, authorities responded when 23-year-old American Astrid Eyzaguirre told a fellow store employee at the U.S. Army's European headquarters to stay away from the base on Sept. 11. Ms. Eyzaguirre and her boyfriend, Osman Petmezci, 25, were arrested for plotting a chemical attack on the base, which houses 16,000 military personnel and their families. German police raided the couple's third-floor apartment in a nearby suburb and seized about 290 pounds of chemicals and five shells for pipe bombs.

code orange

125 | The super-surplus of 9/11 anniversary coverage could not be complete without broadcast segments devoted to wondering whether the amount of coverage was excessive. For the first time, the Office of Homeland Security raised its color scale of alarm to code orange, warning of credible reports of terrorist threats as the anniversary approached. President Bush commemorated the ugly beginning to the war on terror by visiting all the sites where hijacked planes were downed. Days earlier, a congressional delegation of more than 300 met at Ground Zero to remember the deadliest attacks on the World Trade Center. In Shanksville, Pa., where the passengers of Flight 93 diverted terrorists from a likely attack on the U.S. Capitol, there is no official government memorial yet. But a makeshift memorial lines the road to the crash site: a row of tiny wooden angels colored red, white, and blue, each labeled with a name of a passenger or crew member.

primary day

59 | "Super Tuesday" usually describes a March day loaded with presidential primaries. But Sept. 10 marked the end of state and local primaries in 12 states and the District of Columbia, many of them in one-party areas where the primary is the real contest. (See "The home stretch," p. 20.) One of the strangest storylines came in Democrat-dominated D.C., where incumbent Mayor Anthony Williams, long praised for bringing professionalism back to the district's government, was forced to run a write-in campaign since his nominating petitions didn't pass muster. The write-in count would take days longer to tabulate than a traditional ballot race, but exit polls showed the mayor was comfortably in the lead.