New York Times: "Stuff happens. And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens. America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America.
W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives. 'I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees,' he told Diane Sawyer. Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in 'the great city' of N'Awlins. He was clearly moved. 'You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute,' he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, 'but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen.' Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal. Why does this self-styled 'can do' president always lapse into such lame 'who could have known?' excuses. Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs. Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.'s prewar reports. Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl."

NEW YORK (AP) — Scientists have deciphered the DNA of the chimpanzee, the closest living relative of humankind, and made comprehensive comparisons with the human genetic blueprint.
Clint the chimpanzee, whose genome sequence appears in 'Nature,' helped show there's little difference between man and ape.
Yerkes National Primate Research Center, AFP/Getty Images
It's a step toward finding a biological answer to a key question: What makes us human?
There are no firm answers yet about how humans picked up key traits such as walking upright and developing complex language. But the work has produced a long list of DNA differences with the chimp and some hints about which ones might be crucial.
"We've got the catalog, now we just have to figure it out," said Dr. Robert Waterston of the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. "It's not going to be one gene. It's going to be an accumulation of changes."
He is senior author of one of several related papers appearing in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature and being published online Thursday by the journal Science.
In the papers, Waterston presents a draft of the newly deciphered sequence of the chimp genome, in which an international team of researchers identified virtually all the roughly 3 billion building blocks of chimp DNA.
"It's a huge deal," said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, which provided some support for the project. "We now have the instruction book of our closest relative."
He said the work will help scientists analyze human DNA for roots of disease.
While the DNA comparisons don't firmly identify specific differences that played a big role in producing humans, they do indicate promising areas, said Bruce Lahn, who studies human evolution genetics at the University of Chicago but didn't participate in the project. Lahn said the research refutes a few previous ideas while providing new and better evidence for others.
Humans and chimps have evolved separately since splitting from a common ancestor about 6 million years ago, and their DNA remains highly similar — about 96% to almost 99% identical, depending on how the comparison is made.
Still, the number of genetic differences between a human and a chimp is about 10 times more than between any two humans, the federal genome institute says. It's the differences — some 40 million — that attract the attention of scientists.
Waterston and colleagues, for example, looked for genes that apparently have changed more quickly in humans than in chimps or rodents, indicating they might have been particularly important in human evolution. They found evidence of rapid change in some genes that regulate the activity of other genes, telling them when and in what tissues to become active, for example.
It would make sense that changes in these regulatory genes could have a broad impact on how organisms develop, playing a key role in human evolution, Waterston said.
With help from the chimp DNA, his team also uncovered several regions of human DNA that apparently contain beneficial genetic changes that spread rapidly among humans within the past 250,000 years. One area contains a gene called FOXP2, which previous work has suggested is involved in acquiring speech.
Svante Paabo of the Max Planck institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues report in the Science paper that genes active in the brain have changed more in the human lineage than in the chimp lineage. That wasn't the case for genes from other organs such as the heart and liver.
In a telephone interview, Paabo said that in general, "I'm still sort of taken aback by how similar humans and chimps are" in their DNA. "I'm still amazed, when I see how special humans are and how we have taken over this planet, that we don't find stronger evidence for a huge difference in our genomes."
He said he believes the key differences between the species will prove to be subtle things such as patterns of gene activity and how proteins interact.
In fact, Waterston and co-authors said they hoped documenting the overall similarity of chimp and human genomes will encourage action to save chimps and other great apes in the wild:
"We hope that elaborating how few differences separate our species will broaden recognition of our duty to these extraordinary primates that stand as our siblings in the family of life."

New York Times: "PRESIDENT BUSH, announcing this month that he was in favor of teaching about 'intelligent design' in the schools, said, 'I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.' A couple of weeks later, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, made the same point. Teaching both intelligent design and evolution 'doesn't force any particular theory on anyone,' Mr. Frist said. 'I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future.'
Is 'intelligent design' a legitimate school of scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science? Wouldn't such a hoax be impossible? No. Here's how it has been done."

Published: August 29, 2005
Forum: today's editorials
Most of us think of America's national parks as everlasting places, parts of the bedrock of how we know our own country. But they are shaped and protected by an underlying body of legislation, which is distilled into a basic policy document that governs their operation. Over time, that document has slowly evolved, but it has always stayed true to the fundamental principle of leaving the parks unimpaired for future generations. That has meant, in part, sacrificing some of the ways we might use the parks today in order to protect them for tomorrow.
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Recently, a secret draft revision of the national park system's basic management policy document has been circulating within the Interior Department. It was prepared, without consultation within the National Park Service, by Paul Hoffman, a deputy assistant secretary at Interior who once ran the Chamber of Commerce in Cody, Wyo., was a Congressional aide to Dick Cheney and has no park service experience."

HuffPo: "The crux of the debate surrounding Intelligent Design is that some people in our country believe it to be an explanation for the universe and human existence, therefore it should be included in the curriculum of our nation's public schools alongside the study of evolution.
On the scientifically accepted side (evolution), our kids learn that species are perpetually evolving based on mutation and natural selection, and that human beings share common ancestors with modern primates. On the other hand, our kids will be taught that an invisible omniscient being (or a space alien) is somehow guiding the process of the universe.
So my question is this: if we're going to include such curriculum in schools simply because it's the belief of a certain segment of our population, shouldn't we, by rights, include the following topic?
Is our children learning... about the Bumper Angels?"