U.S. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH, in video footage recorded the day before Hurricane Katrina hit and released last week, after a briefing of state and federal officials in which Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, warned of Katrina's disaster potential
"For the sake of our country, please send candidates to this election."
THAKSIN SHINAWATRA, embattled Thai Prime Minister, asking for all political parties to take part in national elections called for April 2. Thaksin's opponents have threatened to boycott the vote
"I have lost everything but my children. We have three bowls of grain left."
ZAHARA ISSAC MAHAMAT, a refugee in Chad, where violence has spilled over from the war-ravaged Darfur region of Sudan, driving some 20,000 residents from their homes
"If there was an extermination program to kill all the Jews, how come so many of them survived?"
DAVID IRVING, British historian, speaking to the BBC from an Austrian prison. Irving is appealing a Vienna court's decision to sentence him to three years in jail for denying the Holocaust
"The contractor is not required to perform perfectly to be entitled to reimbursement."
RHONDA JAMES, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokeswoman, on the Army's reimbursement to a Halliburton subsidiary of nearly $2.41 billion under a no-bid contract for work in Iraq, despite a Pentagon audit that found $263 million in questionable charges. The Army will pay all but $10.1 million of the contested costs
"Ending the cold war was given as a gift to the United States."
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV, former President of the Soviet Union, telling reporters on his 75th birthday that despite the great opportunity that the end of the cold war presented to the U.S. to build a safer and more stable world, it only strengthened America's arrogance and unilateralism
"People should spit into a tissue or a bag, then place it in a dustbin to complete the civilized process of spitting."
ZHANG HUIGANG, director of the Beijing government's Capital Ethic Development Office, which is campaigning to clean up the city and end spitting on the street before the 2008 Olympics