MaxedOutMama

A 20-year-old man showing bird flu symptoms has been hospitalized in Kazakhstan's Pavlodar region, where 600 domestic geese died between July 20 and July 30 as a result of an outbreak of the disease in the area.

The patient, a poultry farm worker from the village of Golubovka, was later diagnosed with double pneumonia and taken to the intensive care unit of Pavlodar's regional infectious diseases hospital in a critical condition, sources in the region's emergency medicine center told Interfax.

Two cases were reported in Hong Kong this week, raising the city's total infections to 11 since May 2004, the territory's Health Department reported Saturday night. But officials have said the cause of the infections was unknown and that the cases don't appear to be linked with the Sichuan outbreak because the patients had not recently travelled outside Hong Kong and had no exposure to pig farms.

The first Hong Kong case this week, reported Thursday, involved a 26-year-old man who fell ill on July 5, the Health Department said.

Hong Kong reported another infection Saturday night: an 84-year-old man who got sick on June 16 and was now in stable condition, a Health Department statement said. The man had helped prepare meals at home but didn't recall handling raw pork before his illness, the statement said.

They're going on symptoms (so they say) and Melioidosis is one of those diseases that can cause purple patches of skin, so it's possible this could be Bird Flu.

Notice the strange pattern of dispersion: 16 people in 4 different places (birds?).

And again, as with Sichuan, we have this strange story of bacteria being untreatable by anti-bacterials.

I don't think I have any good answers. But I doubt that both Strep. Suis and Burkholderia both becamse resistant at the same time in two different places. It's not impossible, but unlikely.

It's much more likely that both diseases and the woman who "turned black" in Singapore were all caused by a virus. A pathogenic virus (like H5N1) causes a collapse of the immune system and the body is susceptible to myriad bacteria. The bacteria eventually overwhelm the body and lead to septic shock. These are bacterial infections which are "secondary" to the virus.

It is important to remember that NOBODY in the favela has any money. If they had money, they wouldn't live in a favela; they would move to some of Brazil's small-yet-copious poor neighborhoods that actually have streets, plumbing, and aren't controlled by criminals and drug-traffickers. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw that there existed a HUGE gap in the standards of living and quality of life even within the favela. You would go into one family's house and they would have a concrete floor, a water tank for "showering" (that is, pouring over yourself with a plastic pitcher), a small stove, and perhaps a few pieces of furniture. Everything would be spotless, and while it isn't like living in Malibu, one can live a healthy, happy existence within those walls.

Then you might walk next door, and be shocked at the sight. The floor would be spotty cardboard and ratty rugs scavenged from a trash heap on top of the mud. The place would be crawling with cockroaches and spiders. The kids would be running around without shoes on top of trash, and whatever furniture was there would be eaten through and unhealthy....

n contrast, those living in the nice homes ALWAYS were intact families, with a mother AND a father (and the kids all belonged to the same father). The home was SPOTLESS. In most of the US, we can be slobs in our homes and not really threaten our health; in many parts of Brazil, the INSTANT you drop food on the floor you are infested with ants and other vermin. If you aren't careful and dilligent with your trash, you inevitably get infected with dengue fever from the mosquitos that breed in trash-water. Therefore, cleanliness is ABSOLUTELY connected with health and the quality of life....

The main thing I found was that the families that functioned were ALWAYS religious, either committed to the Catholic Church or one of the newer Protestant churches that are becoming extremely successful in the favelas. I found that the sense of purpose and the community support received in a religious community gave one the will and the desire to, for example, sweep their homes even though it would just get dirty again later, or work for pennies even though these families, in Brazil's messed-up economic system, will NEVER "get rich." But there were very real and direct benefits to this religious spirit; your family was happier, intact, and healthier. These families, unlike the others I dealt with, were not the ones who would get stinking drunk and then complain to me that the "government" hadn't "given" them a job, as if government officials were supposed to walk through the favelas and entrust public money to any domino-playing drunk they happened to run across.

What is happening to the black family in America is the sociological equivalent of global warming: easier to document than to reverse, inconsistent in its near-term effect -- and disastrous in the long run.

Father absence is the bane of the black community, predisposing its children (boys especially, but increasingly girls as well) to school failure, criminal behavior and economic hardship, and to an intergenerational repetition of the grim cycle. The culprit, the ministers (led by the Rev. Eugene Rivers III of Boston, president of the Seymour Institute) agreed, is the decline of marriage....

As the ministers were at pains to say last week, it isn't the incompetence of mothers that is at issue but the absence of half of the adult support needed for families to be most effective.

Interestingly, they blamed the black church for abetting the decline of the black family -- by moderating virtually out of existence its once stern sanctions against extramarital sex and childbirth and by accepting the present trends as more or less inevitable.

They didn't say -- but might have -- that black America's almost reflexive search for outside explanations for our internal problems delayed the introspective examination that might have slowed the trend. What we have now is a changed culture -- a culture whose worst aspects are reinforced by oversexualized popular entertainment and that places a reduced value on the things that produced nearly a century of socioeconomic improvement. For the first time since slavery, it is no longer possible to say with assurance that things are getting better.

5. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;
6. And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

Yesterday I was angry and ashamed of the behavior of some in this battalion, in this Brigade, in this Division, in this Army. Ironically; John was right, “Yesterday all my troubles seem so far away.” I wanted to detach myself as fast a possible and as far as possible from this unit. I have to say that was yesterday, today I was again in awe of the men here. We were supposed to receive yet another briefing on the “rules”, yet another briefing, on security, yet another briefing on...well you get the idea. Emasculation by power point (the most vile invention ever!) The NCO who was supposed to give said Power Point briefing didn't show up. The soldiers were sitting in the conference room, waiting to patiently sit through yet another brief. As the assistant intelligence officer I said I'd give it. I figured I'd go in spill a few buzz words, and let them go on their way. When I walked into the room I saw a group of soldiers who have had a rough time, they have endured the pains of separation, some have lost the jobs that they thought would be there when they got home. Some have lost friends here, others have lost their girlfriends or wives. The men in that room weren't infantrymen, they were cooks and mechanics, medics, personnel clerks, and drivers. They were admin soldiers. I started the briefing but about half way through mid sentence, I hopped up on a table and looked into their eyes. I just had to smile, and here is why, despite all of the grief that has come our way, and there has been plenty, and more will come. They sat there waiting, some had been up for 2 days with little rest, yet they just sat there solid, like soldiers.

“Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.” T.S Elliot

I don't know much, I haven't been alive long enough to be wise. I have seen more of the world than most, but am not worldly. What I do know it this. Chamberlain was right (more than one hundred years ago, near Gettysburg, we are fighting a new kind of war, with a new Army. We are fighting for an ideal. Freedom, such an intangible notion, such a simple thing, such a complex thing. We can quantify the price in blood, we can quantify the price in dollars. What is so simple here in B'dad, is so lost on so much of America... Freedom.

Mr Lynn found out about the Cisco bugs while working at computer security consultants, Internet Security Systems - a job he left only hours before he presented the information to the conference.

He said it was important to get information about the bugs in to the public domain.

Cisco did not agree and won an injunction that bars Mr Lynn and organisers of the Black Hat conference from ever talking about what they know.

At the conclusion of the Black Hat Briefings yesterday, embattled security researcher Michael Lynn diclosed the agreement he and the conference made with Cisco Systems and Internet Security Systems concerning his presentation on Cisco software vulnerabilities....

Under the terms of a permanent injunction, sought by both Cisco and Lynn's former employer, ISS, Lynn must give the companies all of his research materials, including the presentation slides, his notes, and proof-of-concept software Lynn wrote that he used during his presentation. Black Hat must give Cisco the videotape of the presentation made by the conference's audio-visual contractor. Parts of the presentation have already been posted on security Web sites.

According to people who heard the presentation today, Lynn demonstrated how the flaw could be exploited but obscured much of the technical details that an attacker would need to know to pull it off. The injunctions filed against him state that ISS and Cisco had been working together on the flaw for the past four months, and that up until earlier this week, a Cisco executive was slated to co-present the findings with Lynn at Black Hat. But on Monday, Cisco asked conference organizers to pull Lynn's presentation from the conference materials handed out to attendees.

Long ago, during my unformed youth, I was speaking on a panel as an anti-Communist (having read Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" when I was 15) but wondering about the possibilities of "democratic socialism." A libertarian on the panel asked me how long I thought a free press would flourish under any kind of socialist government. Like a clap of thunder, I was awakened from my fantasy.

Now, under a Republican administration,"public" broadcasting is being investigated as if we were subject to so statist a government that we must be insulated from insufficient appreciation of this administration's virtues. This would be farcical if it weren't actually happening. But I am grateful to Mr. Tomlinson for illuminating the sticky strings that come with government financial support of the press, which must be free to be free.

Investigators have determined that a strain of bird flu virus infecting fowl in Russia is the type that can infect humans, the Agriculture Ministry said Friday.

The virus caused the deaths of hundreds of birds in a section of Siberia this month, but no human infections have been reported.

In a brief statement, the ministry identified the virus as avian flu type A H5N1.

Extensive epidemiological and environmental studies are ongoing around this family cluster. The Minister of Agriculture stated that laboratory results detected H5-infected bird faeces in a bird cage opposite side of the road of the family's house; cloacal and throat swabs of the pet bird inside the cage were negative for H5. This is the first, and, thus far, the only, indication of a possible source of exposure. Other environmental sampling was negative.

The Ministry of Health is continuing to monitor over 300 contacts. None of the contacts have shown any symptoms to date. Seroprevalence results are still pending. Surveillance has been intensified in affected areas and throughout the country. Forty-four referral hospitals have been identified and are being prepared to receive possible cases. Health education campaigns are being conducted nationwide.

The Federal Trade Commission has won a $10.2 million judgment against a debt- collection operation, National Check Control, and its principals – the estimated amount of consumer injury they caused. The amount represents the largest judgment in FTC history for violations of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA). In addition, a federal district court judge has permanently banned the defendants from engaging in debt collection in the future.

In a complaint filed in May 2003, the FTC alleged that the defendants violated the FDCPA by harassing and threatening consumers with claims that they owed money for checks returned for insufficient funds. The defendants made repeated phone calls, sent threatening letters, and falsely threatened that consumers could face civil or criminal charges if they did not pay the debts. The FTC alleged that, in many cases, the consumers did not owe the money, or owed far less than the defendants claimed. At that time, the court entered a temporary restraining order freezing the defendants’ assets.

Mr Burke suffers from cerebellar ataxia, a progressively degenerative brain condition that follows a similar course to multiple sclerosis. (actually, it destroys the brain's motor control centers.)

In an unusual move, Lord Phillips, the Master of the Rolls, issued a press release saying that "the fact that the appeal has been allowed does not mean that Mr Burke has lost".

Mr Burke will need artificial nutrition and hydration - known as ANH - when he loses the ability to swallow.

Lord Phillips explained that Mr Burke appeared to fear that ANH would be withdrawn before the final stages of his disease, when it would not be capable of prolonging his life. "If this is Mr Burke's fear, there is no reason for him to have it," Lord Phillips said.

"There are no grounds for thinking that those caring for such a patient would be entitled to or would take a decision to withdraw ANH in such circumstances."

The judges added that, "where a competent patient indicates his or her wish to be kept alive by the provision of ANH, any doctor who deliberately brings that patient's life to an end by discontinuing the supply of ANH will not merely be in breach of duty but guilty of murder"....

Mr Justice Munby ruled in the High Court that the patient had the right to insist on ANH but the Court of Appeal disagreed.

"A patient cannot demand that a doctor administer a treatment which the doctor considers is adverse to the patient's clinical needs. That said, we consider the scenario that we have just described is extremely unlikely to arise."

A CORONER is demanding a public inquiry into claims that 11 hospital patients were deliberately starved to death. He believes that it could be Britain’s first case of forced “mass euthanasia”.

Peter Ashworth, the coroner for Derby, will open an inquest later this year into the suspicious deaths at the city’s Kingsway hospital....

There is now increasing concern across Britain about the way hospitals appear to be hastening the deaths of elderly patients. Police in Leeds and Hampshire are also looking into similar cases.

The 11 patients, all men aged between 65 and 93, died in the Rowsley ward for the elderly at Kingsway. A review of the cases, ordered by the coroner, found evidence that their deaths may have been speeded up by withholding sufficient food.

This is the first time that the Department of Health has admitted what has long been obvious: that it stops feeding and hydrating patients, not because it is in their "best interests", but because it believes that it costs too much. The idea that it must be in a patient's "best interests" to be starved to death has always been nonsense. That, however, has not stopped health ministers and NHS officials from resolutely maintaining that particular fiction.

The Department of Health and the BMA refuse to recognise Mr Burke's right not to be starved and dehydrated to death because they fear it will create a generalised "right to treatment" - which in turn will mean that doctors will be obliged to provide medical treatment to terminally ill patients who want it, regardless of whether it will have any beneficial effect, and regardless of the cost.

Feeding and providing liquids to a patient too damaged to feed himself is not, however, medical treatment - any more than feeding a baby is medical treatment. It was categorised as such by the Law Lords in 1993, and for the sole purpose of allowing the judges to conclude that, in withdrawing food and liquids from Tony Bland (the Hillsborough victim then in a persistent vegetative state), doctors were not unlawfully killing him: they were merely not treating him. If doctors were not to be seen as licensed killers, those two activities had to be kept separate....

THE National Health Service should not have to give life- prolonging treatment to every patient who demands it because that would mean a crippling waste of resources, the Government said yesterday.

A lawyer for Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, said that a ruling granting a patient the right to request life-prolonging care had serious implications for the NHS.

Doctors’ leaders said the precedent won by Mr Burke had created a minefield of unresolved issues over appropriate treatment and use of NHS resources. The GMC’s arguments — that the ruling is unclear and puts doctors in an “impossibly difficult position” of having to pursue treatments of no clinical benefit — has widespread support within healthcare.

Intensive care beds, where patients can receive lifesaving care such as ANH, cost £1,500 a day to run while high-dependency beds for patients who require close monitoring cost up to £800 a day.

In C.S. Lewis’ novel That Hideous Strength an organization known as “N.I.C.E.” (National Institute for Coordinated Experiments) is empowered in Britain to solve various social problems without the bother of red tape. Unfortunately, N.I.C.E. is a demonic organization, engaged in social engineering, including euthanasia of the disabled, criminals, or simple “trouble makers” that will eventually take the input of beings (angels) from a “non-fallen” world to put right.

I wonder what Lewis would think of the modern day British institute that bears the same acronym (N.I.C.E.) of his fictitious organization?

The newspaper HILL first reported the startling claim on Thursday.

"The day Dick Cheney is going to run for president, I'll kill myself," she told the HILL. "All we need is one more liar."

A new analysis based on animal studies suggests that showering in manganese-contaminated water for a decade or more could have permanent effects on the nervous system. The damage may occur even at levels of manganese considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to researchers from Wake Forest University School of Medicine....

The study is the first to show the potential for permanent brain damage from breathing vaporized manganese during a shower. It was conducted by reviewing the medical literature and calculating, based on animal studies, the amount of manganese people would absorb by showering 10 minutes a day.

Take, for instance, Transportes Guzman in Los Angeles' Pico-Union district. There, boxes pile nearly to the ceiling. For $190, a Guatemalan can ship all sorts of things — clothes, medicines, household supplies and foods — back home. Items that can't be bought there, only here. With CAFTA — which creates duty-free trade with previously high-tariff countries — such businesses will boom.

"CAFTA is a larger U.S. export market than Russia, India and Indonesia, combined," said Ayse Oge, trade consultant with Los Angeles-based Ultimate Trade, who notes that Central American consumers are desperate for U.S. goods.

Called The Spaceship Company, the new entity will manufacture launch aircraft, various spacecraft and support equipment and market those products to spaceliner operators. Clients include launch customer, Virgin Galactic—formed by Branson to handle space tourist flights.

The Spaceship Company is jointly owned by Branson’s Virgin Group and Scaled Composites of Mojave, California. Scaled will be contracted for research and development testing and certification of a 9-person SpaceShipTwo (SS2) design, and a White Knight Two (WK2) mothership to be called Eve. Rutan will head up the technical development team for the SS2/WK2 combination.

U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour said the successful prosecution of Ahmed Ressam should serve not only as a warning to terrorists, but as a statement to the Bush administration about its terrorism-fighting tactics.

"We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant or deny the defendant the right to counsel," he said Wednesday. "The message to the world from today's sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart."

He added that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have made Americans realize they are vulnerable to terrorism and that some believe "this threat renders our Constitution obsolete ... If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won."

Let's bring some focus to this: The students in your classes are bored with Social Studies because the curriculum emphasizes topics and activities that either (a) fail to line-up with your perceptions of what's important, or (b) fail to excite you, personally. So, naturally, your students' lack of enthusiasm for Social Studies is a problem of the curriculum and not your ability, commitment and enthusiasm to teach.

What I'm detecting in your post are the musings of a teacher who's burned out and needs to exit from the classroom.

The territory is in southern Siberia adjacent to Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China. Thus, it has a bird outbreak to the northwest, around the Chany Lake area, and three outbreaks to the south in Xinjiang and Qinghai provinces in China. All outbreaks have been linked to migratory birds, which is consitent with sequence data from H5N1 isolates in Qinghai Lake.

The sequences in these birds have regions in common with isolates in Europe, including H5N2 from birds and various mammalian isolates. One change in particular is striking. The PB2 mutation E627K has never been detected previously in an H5N1 isolate from a bird. However, it is present in all human isolates. This strict species barrier was broken at Qinghai Lake, where all bird isolates have E627E. It has appeared previously in humans infected with bird serotypes H5N1 and H7N7 and in almost all cases the infection has been fatal....

In August and September birds will leave Russia and head for Europe, India, and eastern Asia, raising concerns that the highly lethal H5N1 will spread throughout Asia, much of Europe, and beyond.

The president took some political risk placing the relatively small trade pact at the top of his economic agenda. He and numerous administration officials advertised the agreement as a tool to give fragile Latin American democracies the opportunity for stability and prosperity.

The House vote, supposed to take 15 minutes, dragged on for an hour as negotiations swirled around the floor among GOP leaders and rank-and-file members reluctant to vote for the agreement. In the end, 27 Republicans voted against CAFTA, while 15 Democrats supported it.

"I don't see any benefits for workers, for sugar people," said Democratic Rep. Charlie Melancon, who said his family owed everything to 225 years of sugar production in his home state of Louisiana.

"We've given away textiles. We've given away steel. We've given away fruits and vegetables," Melancon said. "Now let's just go ahead and give away everything and be dependent on every other country for our food and our defense."

Rescuers searched for survivors buried under debris Thursday and rushed aid to villages cut off by record-breaking rains that paralyzed Bombay and its surrounding state, leaving more than 450 dead.

At least 267 people died in Bombay, India's financial hub after being crushed by falling walls, trapped in cars or electrocuted when the heaviest rains on record swept through the city late Tuesday. Phone networks collapsed, highways were blocked and the city's airports, among the nation's busiest, were closed.

Bombay's residents responded by opening up their homes and distributing food to motorists stuck in traffic and people wading through water.

"They were just angels. Women and children were giving food, biscuits to people on the road and even assuring us that it was homecooked," said G. Sawant, a manager at a private infrastructure company.

Residents tied ropes across flooded roads to help people wade through waist-deep water as workers repaired communication networks and towed away abandoned cars and buses to clear the city's gridlocked highways. Train services had resumed and flights were to begin later in the day.

Who knew that Hillary Clinton's call yesterday for party unity within the Democrat party would fracture it even more?

Come on, tell me? Who knew?

It would seem, given the party's almost total ineffectiveness (except in an obstructionist sense) that such a call would be welcomed and considered earnestly.

More food for thought about the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and the future of the Democratic Party...Can you imagine if an organization existed that purported to speak for Republicans, yet whose entire premise undermining the conservative base of the Republican Party? Do you think GOP presidential candidates would be flocking to address that organization's meetings? The answer, of course, is no, they wouldn't - and you can bet the GOP leadership would crush that organization before it ever got off the ground. But on the Democratic side, the story is far different.

Democratic presidential contenders go suck up to the DLC, an organization whose for the last two decades has done everything it can to undermine the Democratic Party - even going to great lengths to attack Democratic presidential candidates it doesn't like.

Long a revered figure by many in the party's liberal wing, Clinton (D-N.Y.) unexpectedly found herself under attack after calling Monday for a cease-fire among the party's quarreling factions and for agreeing to assume the leadership of a DLC-sponsored initiative aimed at developing a more positive policy agenda for the party.

The reaction highlighted the dilemma Democratic politicians face trying to satisfy energized activists on the left -- many of whom are hungering for party leaders to advance a more full-throated agenda and more aggressively confront President Bush -- while also cultivating the moderate Democrats and independents whose support is crucial to winning elections. The challenge has become more acute because of the power and importance grass-roots activists, symbolized by groups such as MoveOn.org and liberal bloggers, have assumed since the 2004 election.

The reason she is losing support (Yes, what you see on this board is she is LOSING support she previously had!) is because people are paying attention to her record and the company she keeps.

Wining and dining with WIPRO (Indian Outsourcers) is *not* populist. Supporting CAFTA (someone here mentioned she did not vote for it, how convenient as everything else she does shows she is big on "Free Trade" repub ideas.

It has become obvious to many that she has a "blood lust" for the presidency. I don't want people who are so intent on their own power. Her actions indicate to me she will sell out to corporate power. Heck she pretty much already is!

I love Hillary
She is very fair, and it's a mistake for the democratic party to move as left as it has.

The Democratic party has not "moved to the left"
Arrg!
So many talking points! The Republicans have been so successful at framing and ostracising words.

Authorities would not confirm BBC and Sky News reports that the Tasered man was Yasin Hassan Omar, a 24-year-old Somali suspected of trying to blow up a subway train near Warren Street station.

At least one witness said the man resembled Omar....

He said the suspect looked like Omar but could not confirm it.

"After 10 or 15 minutes, they brought a guy out. He looked like the darkest-skinned one in the photos of the four suspects released by the police — the one with the curly hair," Wilkinson said. "They had him dressed in one of those white suits. He had plastic cuffs on the front."

A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced Ahmed Ressam, the "millennium bomber" convicted of plotting to blow up Los Angeles' airport, to 22 years in prison for conspiracy to commit an international terrorist act, explosives smuggling and other criminal counts.

U.S. Western District Judge John Coughenour had been expected to sentence Ressam, who stopped cooperating with federal authorities in 2003, to 35 years behind bars. Prosecutors say his failure to work with them further jeopardized cases they were building against other terror suspects.

Ressam, who will get credit for the more than five years he already has spent in jail, did not speak at the hearing but offered a slight smile as he shook hands with his attorneys and interpreter after the sentencing.

To disagree is not to be intolerant. To wave off or dismiss those with differing views is intolerant. It is a sad day when we dismiss those for being different from us. It is even a sadder day when civil discourse is eschewed, because one side or the other characterizes the other as 'less than' or 'evil,' etc.

A wise man once shrewdly observed that at times, we shared very different views than our grandparents. Somehow, we never saw our grandparents as 'evil.' The point was well taken. People can have different views and ideas and not be less than, or 'evil.' With time, we have even found that some of our views, ones we thought inviolate, have been modified. Maybe there was some wisdom there, after all.

All too often, we find ourselves in environments and social milieus that reinforce certain points of view. Sometimes, those environments and relationships make it very difficult to grow and evolve. We may come to understand nuance more clearly or realize that simplistic ideologies and slogans do not fully address an issue. Nevertheless, because we have constructed for ourselves these bullet-proof and cloistered environments, we cannot adapt and evolve without fear of losing our status and relationships within our group.

Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin acknowledged yesterday that he was the source for a newspaper column that reported earlier this week that Judge John G. Roberts Jr. said he could not rule in a Supreme Court case where U.S. law might conflict with Catholic teaching.

But the Illinois Democrat maintains that the column by George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley incorrectly captured the private conversation that the senator had with Judge Roberts in his Capitol office Friday.

Spokesman Joe Shoemaker also said he did not know who Mr. Turley's source was, although only a handful of people were in the room at the time.
"Whoever the source was either got it wrong or Jonathan Turley got it wrong," Mr. Shoemaker said Monday.
Yesterday, Mr. Shoemaker said the source was Mr. Durbin.
"He and Turley were in the green room of the NBC studios," he said. "Turley was getting makeup put on, and Durbin was taking it off.

For a half-century, the left's key victories were gifts from an interventionist Supreme Court. This promoted alarming misunderstandings of the judiciary and fostered dangerous myths about our country and Constitution, many of which have been displayed since the President nominated Judge Roberts. At issue is the democratic process and the meaning of judicial independence.

Without mocking Prof. Turley's concerns, nor his or Judge Roberts' faith, I think this op-ed considerably overstates the potential problem, both in general and specifically with respect to Judge Roberts.

There are certainly non-Roman Catholic judges who are also deeply religious and deeply moral; the Roman Catholic Church does indeed have high profile public positions on some religious/moral issues that also have legal implications, but the sort of potential conflict that Prof. Turley describes could always arise with any potential nominee to any position on any judicial bench.

Mr. Byrd is up for re-election next year in a state that Mr. Bush won last year by 13 percentage points despite heavy campaigning by Democrats.

A poll conducted in May shows Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, West Virginia Republican, three points behind Mr. Byrd even though Mrs. Capito hasn’t announced that she will run against the old-guard senator.

The subject came up after reports about a meeting on Friday at which Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, is said to have asked Judge Roberts whether he had thought about potential conflicts between the imperatives of their shared Catholic faith and of the civil law. The discussion was described by two officials who spoke anonymously because the meeting was confidential and by a Republican senator who was briefed on their conversation.

Judge Roberts responded that his personal views would not color his judicial thinking, all three said, just as he has testified in the past.

A spokesman for Mr. Durbin and Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, who spoke to Judge Roberts on Monday about the meeting, said Professor Turley's account of a recusal statement was inaccurate.

But in an interview last night, Professor Turley said Mr. Durbin himself had described the conversation to him on Sunday morning, including the statement about recusal.

According to two people who attended the meeting, Roberts was asked by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) what he would do if the law required a ruling that his church considers immoral. Roberts is a devout Catholic and is married to an ardent pro-life activist. The Catholic Church considers abortion to be a sin, and various church leaders have stated that government officials supporting abortion should be denied religious rites such as communion. (Pope Benedict XVI is often cited as holding this strict view of the merging of a person's faith and public duties).

Renowned for his unflappable style in oral argument, Roberts appeared nonplused and, according to sources in the meeting, answered after a long pause that he would probably have to recuse himself.

Whatever the conversation in the senator's office on Friday, Mr. Durbin's question hit the fault line between liberal anxiety about theocratic intolerance and conservative fears about hostility to religion....

On Monday, Republicans seized the opportunity for a pre-emptive strike. Mr. Cornyn called Professor Turley's account of the discussion "troubling, if true." In his own meeting with Judge Roberts on Monday, Mr. Cornyn recounted, "I said, 'I hate to see somebody going down this road because it really smacks of a religious test for public service.'

A sculpted and polished phallus found in a German cave is among the earliest representations of male sexuality ever uncovered, researchers say.

The 20cm-long, 3cm-wide stone object, which is dated to be about 28,000 years old, was buried in the famous Hohle Fels Cave near Ulm in the Swabian Jura.

"In addition to being a symbolic representation of male genitalia, it was also at times used for knapping flints," explained Professor Nicholas Conard, from the department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology, at Tübingen University.