Verbatim

'I think this case was a milestone ruling. I expected the legal system to clear my name.'
MA YING-JEOU, Taiwan presidential candidate and former head of the opposition Kuomintang, after a Taipei court cleared him of corruption charges. The ruling gives Ma a boost going into Taiwan's 2008 presidential race

'We're still playing around with the question, Is he black enough? Stop that nonsense.'
MICHELLE OBAMA, wife of presidential hopeful Barack Obama, on her husband's biracial credentials, at a predominantly black Women for Obama event on Chicago's South Side

'It's Third World. It's just disgraceful.'
CAROLINE O'ROURKE, an Irish tourist stranded along with 20,000 other travelers at Los Angeles International Airport on Aug. 12 because of a computer glitch. Passengers on more than 40 planes spent several hours stuck on the runways

'How many dead Americans is Saddam worth?'
DICK CHENEY, U.S. Vice President, in a recently surfaced 1994 video clip in which he theorized that trying to take over Iraq would lead to a "quagmire"

'We must learn to be good neighbors. And I'm optimistic. People cannot be foolish forever.'
I.A. REHMAN, Pakistani human-rights activist, on the relations between India and Pakistan as his country celebrates its 60th year of independence

'Nobody in Europe likes England. England invented the sport but has never made any impact on world football.'
JACK WARNER, vice president of FIFA, soccer's international governing body, stating that he will block an English bid to host the 2018 World Cup

AGING 114 Age, in years, of Edna Parker, of Shelby County, Indiana — believed to be the world's oldest woman after Yone Minagawa, also 114, died Aug. 13 in Fukuoka, Japan
77.9 Average life expectancy of Americans, 42nd in the world, down from 11th 20 years ago

MEDIA 24 Number of Beijing restaurants investigated following a July 8 TV report alleging that pork buns were being stuffed with cardboard
1 Number of years Zi Beijia — the journalist who made the report — was sentenced to spend in jail, on Aug. 12, after admitting that he falsified the news story

EDUCATION 200,000 Number of American students who study at foreign universities each year — an increase of 150% over the past 10 years
15 Number of students a college official must sign up for study overseas before the official gets a free trip from the American Institute of Foreign Study. Eager for the high fees paid by U.S. students, foreign schools and study-abroad facilitators are dangling perks for administrators to deliver students

NATURE 8 million Age, in years, of a stand of preserved cypress trees discovered in a Hungarian mine
60 Depth of the mine, in meters, which was once an open-air forest. The 6-m-tall trunks are the remains of trees that once stood about 35 m tall. The wood is too brittle to move