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We know that 96 percent of the Americans killed in Iraq have died since Bush boasted that our mission was accomplished and we know with sickening assurance that we have hit the hideous milestone of 4,000 of our own dead in the Bush administration’s war of choice.

We arrived at that number on Sunday and we’ve seen it replayed in all its sterility throughout the media this entire week.

And to be sure the numbers of dead and wounded while astounding in generalities have sadly begun over the last five years to lose their specificity, to render us unable to grasp the individual stories of lives lost for no reason and so many families left with interminable grief.

But I want to tell you about number 4,000, because he has a name and he had a wonderful life to come.

His name is Christopher M. Hake. He was a U.S. Army Staff Sargent. More importantly, he was a husband to wife Kelli and a father to 1-year-old son, Gage.

He was from Enid, Oklahoma — and he was 26 years old.

We can’t say for sure that Hake was number 4,000 of our Iraq dead because Pvt. George Delgado, 21, of Palmdale, Calif., Pfc. Andrew J. Habsieger, 22, of Festus, Mo. and Spc. Jose A. Rubio Hernandez, 24, of Mission, Texas all died in a horrible blast earlier this week when, according to the Defense Department, “their vehicle encountered an improvised explosive” in Baghdad.

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When Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill endorsed Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, she said she’d found a candidate who “gives us a reason to believe again.”

Obama believed in her, too, donating $10,000 from his political action committee to McCaskill’s 2006 campaign. She received nothing from the PAC of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton.

And when California Rep. Doris Matsui endorsed Clinton, she said the former first lady had been “a consistent champion and friend” of Asian Americans. Clinton’s PAC had also befriended Matsui, giving $5,000 to her campaign. Matsui received nothing from Obama’s PAC.

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King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia — head of one of the most oppressive regimes in the world — has said that atheism is a “frightening phenomenon that must be vanquished”. He made the threat during a speech in which he called for dialogue between all monotheistic religions.

“I ask representatives of all the monotheistic religions to meet with their brothers in faith,” Abdullah told delegates to a seminar on “Dialogue Among Civilizations between Japan and the Islamic World,” according to the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA). “If God wills it, we will then meet with our brothers from other religions, including those of the Torah and the Gospel… to come up with ways to safeguard humanity,” he added.

So it doesn’t really matter what Invisible Sky Wizard you worship, as long as there is exactly one?

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The controversial chief executive who led Northern Rock to the brink of collapse has received a £760,000 payoff.

Adam Applegarth’s bonanza, which will be revealed when the bank publishes its annual accounts tomorrow, comes despite the fact the newly-nationalised bank still owes taxpayers £25billion.

Applegarth, 46, is also entitled to draw on a £2.5million pension pot once he reaches the age of 55 – which could give him retirement benefits of up to £200,000 a year.

I wonder how often the German interior minister will travel through Heathrow Terminal 5.

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Since the release of Windows Vista, Creative has promised their Sound Cards as being ‘Vista Ready’. Unfortunately, as many unlucky customers did discover, this is not true. What the users actually found were buggy, feature crippled drivers. Creative insisted that features such as Decoding of Dolby® Digital and DTS(TM) signals and DVD-Audio which worked fine in WinXP, would not work on windows Vista. With Creative releasing less than one new driver a year, things seemed bleak. Fortunately, a talented user, Daniel_K, was recently able to ‘fix’ many of the drivers, enabling the incompatible features and also fixing many bugs. Just today Creative has decided to put a stop to this. They removed all links to his modified drivers, and banned several users who were posting links to the now banned drivers.”

Creative would rather see you buy a new card instead - so if you feel compelled to do so, make sure the logo on the box doesn’t spell “Creative”.

Thanks, Jim