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Wikis, touted as the next big thing in online content, have become the latest battleground in the presidential election as users of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the best-known wiki, squabble over entries related to President George W. Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry, the junior senator from Massachusetts.

Disputes over content related to Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry have been growing since August, prompting the popular reference site’s administrators to warn users last month that election-related entries may be the focus of “contention and debate – possibly diminishing their neutrality.�?

Wikis like Wikipedia are web sites that encourage users to share information by allowing them to freely write and edit content.

Wikipedia community members held an online town hall meeting last month to try to solve the disputes over the entries, to no avail. Meanwhile, Wikipedia’s administrators are periodically “freezing�? contentious pages – locking out any edits for brief periods of time. Since May, Wikipedia’s Mr. Kerry entry has been frozen at least seven times, while its Mr. Bush page has been locked down almost as often.

Indeed, entries for Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry have become the most contentious in the history of Wikipedia, said Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, president of the Wikipedia Foundation, which is based in St. Petersburg, Florida. Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry have created even more debate than entries for sex and religion. As of October 8, Wikipedia’s President Bush entry had been tweaked 3,953 times. Its entry for Senator Kerry had been modified 3,230 times. By contrast, Wikipedia’s article on Jesus has only been edited 1,855 times since the site’s inception in 2001.

A baboon and its young. A plan by a Helsinki Zoo to put down 14 baboons and replace them with more cold-resistant Japanese snow monkeys has caused such an uproar in Finland that the zoo has been forced to keep the animals(AFP/File/Pedro Armestre)

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The US government is ill-prepared to address allegations of voting fraud should they arise during next month’s presidential and legislative elections, a congressional report concluded.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) Congress’s independent investigative arm, determined in a 106-page report that the US Justice Department has not established procedures for documenting voting irregularities or voter intimidation, and has no clearcut policy for responding to such allegations.

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I am a Christian ethicist, and trained in statistical analysis. I am consistently pro-life. My son David is one witness. For my family, “pro-life” is personal. My wife caught rubella in the eighth week of her pregnancy. We decided not to terminate, to love and raise our baby. David is legally blind and severely handicapped; he also is a blessing to us and to the world.

I look at the fruits of political policies more than words. I analyzed the data on abortion during the George W. Bush presidency. There is no single source for this information – federal reports go only to 2000, and many states do not report – but I found enough data to identify trends. My findings are counterintuitive and disturbing.

Abortion was decreasing. When President Bush took office, the nation’s abortion rates were at a 24-year low, after a 17.4% decline during the 1990s. This was an average decrease of 1.7% per year, mostly during the latter part of the decade. (This data comes from Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life using the Guttmacher Institute’s studies).

Enter George W. Bush in 2001. One would expect the abortion rate to continue its consistent course downward, if not plunge. Instead, the opposite happened.

I found three states that have posted multi-year statistics through 2003, and abortion rates have risen in all three: Kentucky’s increased by 3.2% from 2000 to 2003. Michigan’s increased by 11.3% from 2000 to 2003. Pennsylvania’s increased by 1.9% from 1999 to 2002. I found 13 additional states that reported statistics for 2001 and 2002. Eight states saw an increase in abortion rates (14.6% average increase), and five saw a decrease (4.3% average decrease).

Under President Bush, the decade-long trend of declining abortion rates appears to have reversed. Given the trends of the 1990s, 52,000 more abortions occurred in the United States in 2002 than would have been expected before this change of direction.

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The U.S. budget gap expanded to $412.55 billion in fiscal 2004, marking the Bush administration’s second-straight record deficit, the Treasury Department said on Thursday.

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The U.S. government reached the $7.384 trillion legal limit on how much it can borrow, forcing the Bush administration to shuffle funds among accounts and prompting fresh Democratic criticism of the president’s economic policies.

To avoid exceeding the cap, the Treasury said it would temporarily suspend contributions to a government pension program.

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I understand that George Soros is a rather wealthy man. Perhaps he should announce that he is interested in buying 90 minutes of prime time air time on Sinclair Broadcasting to show either Fahrenheit 9/11 or, even more appropriately, Going Upriver, the new movie out about John Kerry during the Vietnam era.

If Sinclair won’t sell the time, they’re exposed for what they already clearly are. If the FEC won’t allow it, on the premise that it amounts to a de facto campaign contribution to the Democrats or the Kerry campaign, then the folly of our current campaign laws is exposed.

I doubt somehow that Soros would ever end up having to spend the money. But he has a big enough checkbook to force the issue.

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The GOP is asking the Rock the Vote group to “cease and desist” its suggestion that the government may bring back a military draft.

“Your “Draft Your Friends” campaign is being conducted with malicious intent and reckless disregard for the truth,” Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie told the nonpartisan group in a letter Wednesday.

And the reply:

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I am stunned that you would say that the issue of the military draft is an “urban myth”that has been “thoroughly debunked by no less than the President of the United States.”

I have some news for you. Just because President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary Rumsfeld, and for that matter Senator Kerry, say that there is not going to be a draft does not make it so. Just because Congress holds a transparently phony vote against the draft does not mean there isn’t going to be one. Anyone who thinks that the youth of America are going to take a politician’s word on this topic is living on another planet.

By your logic, there should be no debate about anything that you disagree with. There’s a place for that kind of sentiment (and your threats), but its not here in our country.

There are questions that the politicians are running away from. How long can we keep 138,000 U.S. troops or more on the ground in Iraq? What if full-scale civil war erupts there, as the CIA has warned is a realistic possibility? Would the next President be faced with a choice of pulling out of Iraq rather than institute a draft? Would women be drafted? What exactly would the draft-age be?

According to the Pentagon’s own internal assessment, there are “inadequate total numbers” of troops to meet U.S. security interests. The current issue of Time magazine reports that, “General John Keane, who retired last year as the Army’s No. 2 officer, says the continued success of the all-volunteer military is not guaranteed” Keane has told Congress that adding more than 50,000 troops to the Army would require thinking about a return to the draft.”

But you want young people to believe that the draft is just an “urban myth.” I was expecting that you were going to present some facts to back up your assertion. But, instead, you have demanded that we stop talking about it.

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The world’s amphibian species are under unprecedented assault and are experiencing tens of thousands of years’ worth of extinctions in just a century, according to the most comprehensive study ever conducted. More than 500 scientists from over 60 nations contributed to the Global Amphibian Assessment, the key findings of which were published on-line by Science Express this afternoon, and will appear within the next few weeks in the journal Science.

Over the past three years, scientists analyzed the distribution and conservation status of all 5,743 known amphibian species – which include frogs and toads, salamanders, and caecilians. Of these, 1,856 – or 32 percent – are now considered threatened with extinction. In addition, sufficient data are lacking to accurately assess the status of nearly 1,300 other species, most of which scientists believe are also threatened.

Amphibians are widely regarded as “canaries in the coal mine,�? since their highly permeable skin is more immediately sensitive to changes in the environment, including changes to freshwater and air quality.

“Amphibians are one of nature’s best indicators of overall environmental health,�? said Russell A. Mittermeier, president of Conservation International (CI). “Their catastrophic decline serves as a warning that we are in a period of significant environmental degradation.�?

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the first time, researchers say, a vaccine against malaria has shown that it can save children from infection or death.

The vaccine, tested on thousands of children in Mozambique, was hardly perfect: It protected them from catching the disease only about 30 percent of the time and prevented it from becoming life-threatening only about 58 percent of the time.

But because malaria kills more than a million people a year, 700,000 of them children, even partial protection would be a public health victory. The disease, caused by a parasite carried by mosquitoes, is found in 90 countries, and drug-resistant strains are spreading.

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In rural Africa, people can be infected several times a year. Children who survive to adulthood become immune. Newborns inherit some protection from their mothers, but it wears off in a few months. Young children are the hardest hit, and many who survive are brain-damaged.

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The trial was conducted by the biologicals division at Glaxo and the Mozambique Ministry of Health, with financing from the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which was created in 1999 with $50 million from the Gates foundation.

(if you ever wondered wether Bill Gates is doing something useful with his money: YES!)