Politicizing terror isn’t working. “White House strategists are disappointed that the arrest of alleged terrorist plotters in the United Kingdom hasn’t increased President Bush’s job-approval ratings very much.” President Bush’s job approval rating stands at 37%, virtually unchanged from July.
77 percent: Number of likely voters who “agree that the government and politicians should stay out of a woman’s personal and private decision whether or not to have an abortion,” according to a new NARAL Pro-Choice America poll.
Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott denied Thursday that he called President Bush a “cowboy with his Stetson hat” whose progress on a Middle East peace plan was “crap.” Meanwhile, members of the Labour Party expressed broad approval with Prescott’s reported sentiments.
“Three NASA advisers who spoke out against budget cuts to the space agency’s science programs turned in their resignations this week.” One scientist said their commitment to NASA’s science program “didn’t comport with the kind of advice that the administrator and the chairman of the committee were looking for.”
Conservative talk radio host Mike Gallagher defends his call for a “Muslims Only” line at security checkpoints in our airports. “We allow pilots and flight attendants to go to the head of the lines in order to make their flights on time. Let’s extend that same convenience to Muslim passengers. After all, percentage-wise, there are fewer Arabs flying than non-Arabs, right? So it stands to reason that a Muslim-only security line would go quickly, even with highly concentrated security efforts.”
President Hamid Karzai condemned a U.S. airstrike Thursday that Afghan officials said killed 10 border policemen. “I have repeatedly asked the coalition forces to take maximum caution while carrying out operations,” he said in a statement, adding that such incidents “must not be repeated.”
“Three months since the signing of a tenuous peace deal, Sudan appears to be preparing a major military offensive in its troubled Darfur region, aid workers are increasingly at risk, and the population ‘may have to relive the horrors of late 2003 and early 2004, and hundreds of thousands of lives will be at risk,’” according to a top U.N. official.
A federal judge ruled yesterday that big tobacco companies have violated civil racketeering laws, by conspiring “for decades to deceive the public about the dangers of their product.”
And finally: Liquid items discarded at an Oregon airport in response to the foiled terror plot “have turned into balm for the city’s homeless.” One volunteer dug through trash bags at the airport and took every bottle of shampoo and shaving cream he could find, but he “didn’t take the can of Easy Cheese, or the minibottle of brandy, or the tube of something called Vampire’s Blood.” “Oh, the things people bring on planes,” the volunteer said, as he considered the item in his hand, a container of lavender body butter.
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