Farewell Johnny.


Germany's largest weekly news magazine asks this week if Bush's next war will be vs. Iran.


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WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush's inaugural address, with its emphasis on spreading democracy and eliminating tyranny throughout the world, was not meant to signal a new direction in U.S. foreign policy nor to portray America as arrogant, his father said Saturday.

"People want to read a lot into it - that this means new aggression or newly assertive military forces," former President Bush told reporters during an informal visit to the White House briefing room. "That's not what that speech is about. It's about freedom."

"It doesn't mean instant change in every country - that's not what he intended."


Poor Ellen.
The news is not good.

2005 Week 3 news quiz
Who are these people?
Why did they make news this week?
Answers on Monday.


Susan Bala went on trial Thursday for allegedly running an unlicensed gambling parlor in south Fargo from October 2002 to April 2003. She faces 12 charges related to illegal gambling, money laundering and illegal wire transmission.


Francisco Javier Serrano


Harvard President Larry Summers


"Baby 81" lies in a crib at the hospital in Kalmunai, Sri Lanka, on Jan. 12, 2005. The infant is being claimed by nine different women, who all insist he was taken from them by last month's tsunami. The boy was given the nickname because his real name is not known, and he was the 81st admission that day, officials said Friday. Nurses have put a "mottu" on his forehead -- a black stain to ward off evil.

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Poem: "The Future" by Wesley McNair, from Talking in the Dark © David R. Godine: Boston. Reprinted with permission.

The Future

On the afternoon talk shows of America the guests have suffered life's sorrows long enough.
All they require now is the opportunity for closure, to put the whole thing behind them and get on with their lives.
That their lives, in fact, are getting on with them even as they announce their requirement is written on the faces of the younger ones wrinkling their brows, and the skin of their elders collecting just under their set chins.
It's not easy to escape the past, but who wouldn't want to live in a future where the worst has already happened and Americans can finally relax after daring to demand a different way?
For the rest of us, the future, barring variations, turns out to be not so different from the present where we have always lived - the same struggle of wishes and losses, and hope, that old lieutenant, picking us up every so often to dust us off and adjust our helmets.
Adjustment, for that matter, may be the one lesson hope has to give, serving us best when we begin to find what we didn't know we wanted in what the future brings.
Nobody would have asked for the ice storm that takes down trees and knocks the power out, leaving nothing but two buckets of snow melting on the wood stove and candlelight so weak, the old man sitting at the kitchen table can hardly see to play cards.
Yet how else but by the old woman's laughter when he mistakes a jack for a queen would he look at her face in the half-light as if for the first time while the kitchen around them and the very cards he holds in his hands disappear?
In the deep moment of his looking and her looking back, there is no future,
only right now, all, anyway, each one of us has ever had, and all the two of them, sitting together in the dark among the cracked
notes of the snow thawing beside them on the stove, right now will ever need.