Weekly News in Review

1. Bush squanders opportunity to attack NAACP.
2. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: "We do seek an end to the current violence, and we seek it urgently. More than that, we also seek to address the root causes of that violence, so that a real and endurable peace can be established."
3. Fox Anchor Steve Doocy: "Shockingly, after they’ve been plucked out of Beirut, a lot of them are whining and complaining that, you know what, I had to sleep on the concrete and they didn’t have any food for me to eat."
4. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK): "[Global warming] is a hoax."
5. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA): "Most scientists unfortunately ..... feel very little moral compulsion."

6. Only 128 of 400,000 frozen embryos have been brought to term.
7. Dr. Kent Hovind, founder of Creation Science Evangelism and Dinosaur Adventure Land has been indicted on 58 federal charges, including falsifying bankruptcy documents, filing a false and frivolous lawsuit and complaints against the IRS, destroying records, threatening to harm IRS investigators; 12 of the charges are for failing to pay employee-related taxes. "Nobody's an employee, and they all know that when they come. They come, they work ..... The laborer is worthy of his hire — we try to take the purely scriptural approach. We do the best we can with helping people with their family needs. There are no employees here." Pleads subornation of false muster.
8. The Department of Education reports that children attending public schools generally do as well as or better than comparable children in private schools. The report, which compared fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores from nearly 7,000 public schools and more than 530 private schools in 2003, also found that conservative Christian schools lagged significantly behind public schools when it came to eighth-grade math.
9. Congressional Republicans propose $100 million on vouchers for low-income students in chronically failing public schools around the country to attend private and religious schools.
10. "The real underlying issue is that fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist form is incompatible with higher education."

11. Lawmakers accused the Bush administration Thursday of rushing a sale of F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan, saying Congress' role in approving arms sales had been compromised. The compressed timetable "represents a deliberate and wholly inappropriate maneuver by the State Department to diminish the Congress' lawful oversight of arms sales," said GOP Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois, chairman of the House International Relations Committee.
12. A study of the Associated Press Newswire for 2004 finds a significant correlation between the likelihood of a death receiving coverage and the nationality of the person killed.
13. A farmer in Russia has asked Vladimir Putin to allow him to marry a cow. Boris Gabov, from Kemerovo, posed the question in a webcast in which people could ask Putin anything. "All the girls have left our small village, so I cannot find a woman to be with. But I love animals very much."
14. Amnesty International accused Yahoo, Microsoft and Google on Thursday of violating human rights principles by cooperating with China's efforts to censor the Web. "The Internet should promote free speech, not restrict it. We have to guard against the creation of two Internets -- one for expression and one for repression," said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty's U.S. branch, in a statement.
15. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has been called in to help solve a cross-burning at the East Tennessee home of a gay man three weeks ago. A cross six to eight feet tall was burned in the front yard of the home Brandon Waters shares with his mother in the Ten Mile community.

16. House of Representatives debate same-sex marriage. "This is probably the best message we can give to the Middle East in regards to the trouble we are having over there right now," said Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.).
17. A 24-year-old Army reservist from Oxford, Michigan gets a gay roommate in San Francisco's Castro district as part of TV reality show 30 Days "I thought that gay people were not the same as me, but I learned that they are exactly like me — nice, friendly and smart people,"Ryan Hickmott says now.
18. Pentagon lets sensitive military gear be sold as surplus.
19. Two years ago, hundreds of residents of rural Idaho, Montana and Oregon were tapped on the shoulder by Uncle Sam and pulled out of their ordinary lives to become full-time soldiers.
20. Alan Dershowitz argues that not all civilian deaths are equal. "There is a vast difference — both moral and legal — between a 2-year-old who is killed by an enemy rocket and a 30-year-old civilian who has allowed his house to be used to store Katyusha rockets ..... the recognition that 'civilianality' is often a matter of degree, rather than a bright line, should still inform the assessment of casualty figures in wars involving terrorists, paramilitary groups and others who fight without uniforms — or help those who fight without uniforms.

21. God's army has plans to run the whole Middle East, according to news fabricator Amir Taheri.
22. Baghdad starts to collapse as its people flee a life of death. A senior nurse at Yarmouk hospital on the fringes of west Baghdad’s war zone said that he was close to being overwhelmed. “On Tuesday we received 35 bodies in one day, 16 from Al-Furat district alone. All of them were killed execution-style,” he said. “I thought it was the end of the city. I packed my bags at once and got ready to leave because they could storm the hospital at any moment.”

23. Democrats surge in Ohio.
24. Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich says America is in World War III and President Bush should say so. "We need to have the militancy that says 'We're not going to lose a city,'" Gingrich said.
25. 'American Idol' finalists headed to the Oval Office for meeting with the President.

Guest Editorial: Brian Brivati, from The Guardian. "Do I want ordinary people to stop dying or not? If I do, how can I make this happen?" Also, two bloggers from the war: one, a Lebanese jazz musician; the other, a Canadian with her family in Northern Israel.