Verbatim

an style='font-weight: bold'>'The President may be content with keeping our troops mired in the middle of an open-ended civil war, but we are not, and neither are most Americans.'
HARRY REID, U.S. Senate majority leader, reacting to President George W. Bush's May 1 veto of a $124 billion Iraq war spending bill that called for all U.S. troops to be out of the country by March 2008. Bush had pledged to veto the bill if it specified a deadline for withdrawal

'I have a little bit of pain around the ears, but I'm O.K.'
MANJIT SINGH, security-company owner and amateur record breaker, after pulling a 7.4-ton, 30-seat passenger plane 3.4 m with his ears. Singh, 57, who lives in the U.K., hopes the feat will be the latest addition to the 30 world records he already holds, including one for pulling a double-decker bus by his hair

'I understand that I set a very poor example for a lot of young people, a lot of people in general.'
JON CORZINE, New Jersey Governor, who wasn't wearing a seat belt when his chauffeured suv crashed on April 12. He was discharged from the hospital on April 30

'This is organic gardening, not rocket science.'
RUSS GEORGE, chief executive of Planktos, a California "ecorestoration" company that plans to plant large fields of carbon dioxide-eating plankton at sea—the first this month near the Galápagos Islands and in the South Pacific—to mitigate global warming. Some scientists question the scheme's efficacy, and believe it may even increase greenhouse gases through the organisms' potential release of methane and nitrous oxide

'The idea that somehow 10 interceptors and a few radars in Eastern Europe are going to threaten the Soviet strategic deterrent is purely ludicrous, and everybody knows it.'
CONDOLEEZZA RICE, U.S. Secretary of State, dismissing Russian concerns that Washington's plans to deploy antimissile defenses in Europe would endanger Moscow's nuclear arsenal

Numbers

AFGHANISTAN 18% Drop in infant mortality in Afghanistan in the five years since the Taliban's fall in 2001, due to wider immunization and improved natal care 85 Number of students and teachers killed last year in attacks on Afghan schools, blamed on Islamic militants who oppose secular schooling for boys and education of any kind for girls

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT 1,010 Approximate number of people executed in China in 2006, according to Amnesty International, which says the actual number could be as high as 8,000 25 Number of countries that carried out executions in 2006. Among the world's top executioners, the U.S. places sixth after China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq and Sudan

WAR ON TERROR 25% Increase in the number of terrorist attacks worldwide from 2005 to 2006. Incidents in Iraq made up nearly half of the 14,000 attacks and about two-thirds of the more than 20,000 fatalities $510 billion Estimated amount approved by the U.S. Congress since the 9/11 attacks for the global war on terror—most of it to fund wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and domestic security

REVIVAL $39 million Cost of restoring the Buddhist Tianning Pagoda in Changzhou, China, which local officials say is the world's tallest 300 million Number of Chinese who practice a religion, according to a survey by Shanghai's East China Normal University