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Police have charged an Ohio woman in the death, by microwave oven, of her one-month-old daughter, the Associated Press reports.

Mom China Arnold, 26, stands accused of aggravated murder after bringing her dead infant daughter, Paris, to a hospital, with a “high body temperature”. The woman was arrested, and later released.

“We have reason to believe, and scientific evidence to support, that a microwave oven might have been involved in the death of this child,” Montgomery County Coroner’s Office Director Ken Betz is quoted as saying.

It has taken authorities over a year to develop their case. “There is not a lot of scientific research and data on the effect of microwaves on human beings,” Betz explained. (An observation for which we can all be thankful. The Nazis missed out on that opportunity by mere months.)

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Those men among you who indulge in the woman-enraging provocation of not putting the loo seat back down after taking a leak should count yourselves lucky you’re not in Fort Worth, Texas, where some people take the matter of good toilet habits very seriously indeed.

Just ask 25-year-old Morgan Jackson, who was with two drinking buddies in the car park of the Tumbleweeds Sports Bar last Thursday evening when an infuriated toilet user charged them with a knife “because he apparently grew angry that one of the men didn’t wash his hands in the bathroom”, as the Houston Chronicle explains.

Indeed, so pissed off was 27-year-old Eric Jennings Kisiah that he stabbed Jackson three times in his left torso and once in his back with an eight-inch knife which was subsequently recovered close to the scene of the incident.

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He may be a certified lame duck now, but President Bush and his truest believers are about to launch their final campaign – an eye-popping, half-billion-dollar drive for the Bush presidential library.

Eager to begin refurbishing his tattered legacy, the President hopes to raise $500 million to build his library and a think tank at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Bush lived in Dallas until he was elected governor of Texas in 1995.

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The half-billion target is double what Bush raised for his 2004 reelection and dwarfs the funding of other presidential libraries.

How many editions of “My Pet Goat” are there, anyway?

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At hundreds of screenings this year of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the first thing many viewers said after the lights came up was that every student in every school in the United States needed to see this movie.

The producers of former vice president Al Gore’s film about global warming, myself included, certainly agreed. So the company that made the documentary decided to offer 50,000 free DVDs to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) for educators to use in their classrooms. It seemed like a no-brainer.

The teachers had a different idea: Thanks but no thanks, they said.

In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other “special interests” might ask to distribute materials, too; they said they didn’t want to offer “political” endorsement of the film; and they saw “little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members” in accepting the free DVDs.

Gore, however, is not running for office, and the film’s theatrical run is long since over. As for classroom benefits, the movie has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading climate scientists worldwide, and is required viewing for all students in Norway and Sweden.

Still, maybe the NSTA just being extra cautious. But there was one more curious argument in the e-mail: Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place “unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters.” One of those supporters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp.

That’s the same Exxon Mobil that for more than a decade has done everything possible to muddle public understanding of global warming and stifle any serious effort to solve it. It has run ads in leading newspapers (including this one) questioning the role of manmade emissions in global warming, and financed the work of a small band of scientific skeptics who have tried to challenge the consensus that heat-trapping pollution is drastically altering our atmosphere. The company spends millions to support groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute that aggressively pressure lawmakers to oppose emission limits.

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And Exxon Mobil isn’t the only one getting in on the action. Through textbooks, classroom posters and teacher seminars, the oil industry, the coal industry and other corporate interests are exploiting shortfalls in education funding by using a small slice of their record profits to buy themselves a classroom soapbox.

NSTA’s list of corporate donors also includes Shell Oil and the American Petroleum Institute (API), which funds NSTA’s Web site on the science of energy. There, students can find a section called “Running on Oil” and read a page that touts the industry’s environmental track record — citing improvements mostly attributable to laws that the companies fought tooth and nail, by the way — but makes only vague references to spills or pollution. NSTA has distributed a video produced by API called “You Can’t Be Cool Without Fuel,” a shameless pitch for oil dependence.