Official: Saddam to be executed tonight  —  BAGHDAD, Iraq - The official witnesses to Saddam Hussein's impending execution gathered Friday in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone in final preparation for his hanging, as state television broadcast footage of his regime's atrocities.

Ethiopians are split over their foreign invasion  —  The military strike on Somalia's Islamists may backfire, some worry.  —  ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA — The headline in an Ethiopian newspaper drew familiar, if unflattering, comparisons to another nation's faster-thanexpected victory in a war abroad.

Hanging Saddam  —  The NYT opines: … That's certainly true, but hanging Saddam is still the right thing to do.  —  I agree with - or, to put it more precisely, I give religious assent to - Pope John Paul II's teaching in Evangelium vitae that society:

Hezbollah's Christian Allies  —  This is the second installment in a series.  You can read Part One here if you missed it.  —  BEIRUT - While Hezbollah staged a mass protest and sit-in downtown Beirut with the hopes of ousting the elected anti-Syrian "March 14" government, I watched from the patio of a café across the street.

Ann Althouse responds to Ron Bailey here .  —  It is a bizarre response.  Apparently what so offended Althouse is that anyone could possibly believe that a private business owner should be permitted to privately discriminate on the basis of race.  This, to her, isn't a position that's compatible with civil discourse.

CAIR Play?  —  Sen. Barbara Boxer recalled an award she recently gave to an Islamic activist because of his ties to a major American Muslim organization—that critics say has ties to terrorist activities.  —  Dangerous Group?  President Bush met with Muslim-American representatives on Sept. 17, 2001.

BUCKING RUBINOMICS.... Last week, Paul Krugman offered the incoming Democratic majority some advice: do not place deficit reduction at the top of the priority list.  —  As Krugman explained, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin helped convince the party in the 1990s that deficit reduction was key to fiscal and budgetary policy.

Housework cuts breast cancer risk  —  Women who exercise by doing the housework can reduce their risk of breast cancer, a study suggests.  —  The research on more than 200,000 women from nine European countries found doing household chores was far more cancer protective than playing sport.

ScrappleFace Editor Responds to Real Editor  —  Fr: Scott Ott, editor, ScrappleFace.com  —  [You can listen to a portion of this post at ScrappleFace Audio.]  —  In the four and a half years since ScrappleFace began, my little satirical stories have reached millions of people.

Middle School Girls Gone Wild  —  It's hard to write this without sounding like a prig.  But it's just as hard to erase the images that planted the idea for this essay, so here goes.  The scene is a middle school auditorium, where girls in teams of three or four are bopping to pop songs at a student talent show.