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Bush signs Unborn Victims of Violence Act
The president's first bill signing ceremony of the year was for the Unborn Victims of Violence Act.

"Any time an expectant mother is a victim of violence, two lives are in the balance, each deserving protection, and each deserving justice," President Bush said (text | audio | video). "If the crime is murder and the unborn child's life ends, justice demands a full accounting under the law. … With this action, we widen the circle of compassion and inclusion in our society, and we reaffirm that the United States of America is building a culture of life."

"This law does not impinge on abortion rights in any immediate sense," says an editorial in today's Washington Post. "It is, however, part of a long-term pattern in which legal abortion is surrounded by criminal laws and other regulations that protect fetuses and define them in legal terms as separate individuals. This new law will aid criminal enforcement only marginally; it will be another unwarranted step toward making constitutionally protected abortion seem an anomaly in the context of law."

In other words: Gee, it seems a bit incongruous to say that the fetus is "member of the species homo sapiens" while we basically have abortion-on-demand in this country. Anyone disagree?

More news reports on the signing:

• Bush signs anti-violence law that extends into the womb | President Bush on Thursday signed legislation making it a separate crime to harm an embryo or fetus during the commission of a violent federal crime against a pregnant woman. And he declared that, with the new law, the United States was "building a culture of life" (Los Angeles Times)
  
  
• Bush signs unborn victims act | Federal law establishes 2 crimes against pregnant women (The Washington Post)
  
  
• Bush signs fetus-protection bill | President Bush yesterday signed legislation that criminalizes harming a fetus while assaulting a pregnant woman during a federal crime, the first national law granting an unborn child a status separate from the mother (The Washington Times)
  
  
• Bush signs rights-for-fetus law | President George W Bush has signed into law a measure that will expand the rights of the unborn child (BBC)
  
  
• Bush signs fetus rights legislation | President Bush invoked the case of pregnant murder victim Laci Peterson on Thursday as he signed legislation expanding legal rights of the unborn. "The suffering of two victims can never equal only one offense," Bush said (Associated Press)
  
  

Interfaith group gets "scoop" on WMDs
Well, um, you heard it here first. Unless you were at the annual dinner of the Palm Beach (Fla.) Fellowship of Christians and Jews Wednesday night.

John Loftus, the speaker at the interfaith gathering, says he and the U.S. government know the precise location of Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons—and they'll tell the world about them after July 1, when the U.S. turns over control of the country.

Loftus, a former prosecutor for the U.S. Justice Department who claims the Bush family has Nazi connections and that Enron helped the Taliban's 9/11 plans, says weapons stockpiles were moved from Iraq to Lebanon and Syria 10 weeks before the war started.

"These are huge stockpiles, and they are also almost adjacent to Al-Qaeda training camps, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, he said. "They're buried, but they won't stay buried for long."

Uh-huh. Well, thanks for that. As the Palm Beach Daily News dryly notes, "His statements have not been independently confirmed in the mainstream media."

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March (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48