Verbatim

"The more Yasukuni gets attacked by foreign countries, the more I want to attach importance to it."
YOSHIAKI KIKYO, a visitor at Japan's controversial Yasukuni Shrine, where 14 Class-A war criminals are buried among the war dead, during last week's 60th anniversary of Japan's surrender at the end of World War II

"At the end of 2 1/2 years and $1.5 billion or more, it is not clear what has been accomplished."
REPORT by an independent task force monitoring NASA's improvements in space shuttle safety after the 2003 Columbia disaster; the fleet has been grounded until 2006 following the incident-plagued Discovery mission earlier this month

"The climate was close to impossible to work in, and that was a climate created by the junta."
CHRIS BEYER, AIDS expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, on the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria's decision to cancel its program in Burma due to new travel restrictions on humanitarian workers

"If one wants the youth of America and the world sashaying around in garish sequined costumes, hair dripping with pomade, body shot full of female hormones to prevent voice change, mono-gloved, well, then I suppose 'Michael,' as he is affectionately known in the trade, is a good example."
JOHN ROBERTS, Supreme Court nominee, in a memo he wrote as a young lawyer in the Reagan Administration advising against giving Michael Jackson a presidential award for his work in discouraging teens from drunk driving; Jackson received the award anyway

"I don't know what the milk will be like after this."
A SPOKESWOMAN for the Russian Federal Drugs Control Service, on its gift of 40 tons of confiscated marijuana to a herd of hungry cows after their normal feed crops were destroyed by agents looking for drugs Sources: Los Angeles Times; New York Times; A.P.; Financial Times; Washington Post; Reuters