Think Fast

U.S. officials yesterday displayed bombmaking parts said to have been transported by Iran into Iraq. The cache "included items that appeared to cloud the issue. ... The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran."

The National Wildlife Refuge System provides safe havens for imperiled species. But since 2003, funding has remained flat, "while salaries and other operating costs have risen." Officials expect that they will have to "trim 75 regional and headquarters office jobs and 248 more field jobs."

Prosecutors from the International Criminal Court yesterday "named the first two suspects accused of committing war crimes in Sudan's Darfur region." One of the suspects -- Ahmed Haroun -- "is currently Sudan's state humanitarian affairs minister."

Former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle criticized key Bush aides for having failed the president. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "was in way over her head from the beginning," Perle said, and Colin Powell was a "disaster."

The Office of Women's Health "just had more than one-quarter of this year's $4 million operating budget quietly removed, insiders say." The move will "effectively halt further operations for the rest of the year." Women's health advocates believe it is "a long-anticipated payback for the trouble the office stirred during the prolonged debate over nonprescription sales of Plan B."

Governors "pressed" President Bush yesterday "to provide more money" for the Children's Health Insurance Program, "as many states expect to run out of funding for the program by September. "In response, administration officials said states should make better use of the money they already had."

Starting on Friday, several "House and Senate committees will begin oversight hearings into how Walter Reed Army Medical Center subjected wounded soldiers and Marines to bureaucratic indifference and allowed them to live in squalor."

"Basing their estimates on hotel and restaurant figures, vendor permits and crowd size," New Orleans officials "think the economic impact of the 2007 Mardi Gras celebration was strong, if not quite up to the levels reached before Hurricane Katrina."

And finally: Arnold's solution to America's red-blue divide -- a smoke-filled room. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) "decried the partisan rancor" in D.C. and described the positive effects his smoking tent has had in California: "People come in there, Democrats and Republicans, and they take off their jackets and rip off their ties, and they sit down and smoke a stogie, and they talk, and they schmooze. ... You can't catch a socially transmitted disease by sitting down with people who hold ideas that are different than yours."