I have two sides of the coin of baby news to share

Sadie needs to go for surgery to help with her breathing. Our brave little fighter is having trouble breathing and so the docs have decided to operate on her tomorrow. Make some prayers and light candles for her.

On the other side, my good friends Carlos and Emily finally gave birth to their daughter Glorianna yesterday . She weighs in at 6.6 lbs. Welcome to the world, GLORIANNA

News to Use
I got this from a mailing list I belong to called the Middle East Report. My sentiments exactly:

Saddam Hussein’s horrific legacy of mass torture was one of the arguments
deployed to justify preemptive war against Iraq. On April 30, 2004, George
W. Bush said, “A year ago I [gave a] speech…saying we had achieved an
important objective, accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein. As a result, there are no longer torture chambers or mass graves or rape rooms in Iraq.” Even as Bush spoke those words, he and millions of newspaper readers and television viewers across the world were aware that torture chambers, rape and sexual abuse of detainees in Iraq are not a thing of the past. The shocking revelations and photographs from Abu Ghraib also provided stark proof that the practice of torture is not limited to
"uncivilized" societies.

The Abu Ghraib scandal breaks at a time when some commentators argue that
the "war on terrorism" may require the US government to suspend, in certain
cases, its legal and moral prohibitions on torture. Has the specter of
terrorism rendered torture a "lesser evil"?

Lisa Hajjar, professor in the Law and Society Program at the University of
California-Santa Barbara and an editor of Middle East Report, argues to the
contrary. In "Torture and the Future," now accessible in Middle East Report
Online, she shows that "the one core right that all human beings can claim"
is the right not to be tortured.

Read her essay online at