The Senate will hold a politically-charged vote Monday related to a no-confidence resolution in the embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. 

In a statement issued Friday, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, an author of the no-confidence resolution, said if all senators followed their conscience, ‘this vote would be unanimous.’” 

“However, the president will certainly exert pressure to support the attorney general, his longtime friend,” Schumer added. “We will soon see where people’s loyalties lie.” 

The attorney general is under scrutiny by Congress over last year’s dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys. 

Schumer’s statement is in reference to a procedural vote Monday on whether to proceed to a direct “no confidence” resolution. 

Senate Republican leadership aides tell CNN most Republicans will vote against the motion, primarily because they view the resolution as politically motivated. Schumer heads the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee.

Unfortunately, the petty partisanship that characterizes George Bush's Washington is all but certain to take the wind out of Schumer's no-confidence push. The White House is aggressively lobbying against it. And most of the Republicans who have criticized Gonzales -- including Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, who so pointedly told the attorney general to resign -- say they won't support Schumer's efforts to schedule a formal Senate vote on the question of whether the attorney general retains the respect of the chamber that approved his nomination to move from the White House to the Justice Department.  

To schedule the no-confidence vote, Schumer will need the agreement of 60 senators to invoke cloture, which would limit debate and bringing the resolution to a vote. Getting to 60 votes in a Senate with 49 Republicans and a several White House-friendly "Democrats" is unlikely.  

But the cloture vote will show where senators stand at a point when the Justice Department is in disarray. Do they want to fix things, or are they more interested in playing the political games of a White House that could care less about maintaining basic functioning within Justice?  

If Republican senators who admit that Gonzales is a disaster were to do the right thing, this could be a turning point. Though a no-confidence vote carries no official sanction, if the Senate were to simply schedule such a vote, the attorney general would be forced to respond with something more than his usual doubletalk.  . . .  

Unfortunately, the signals at this point suggest that Republicans who have told Gonzales to leave will prevent the "forceful, historical statement" that is needed to prod the attorney general. As a result, the Senate and House Judiciary committees will be forced to continue the painstaking pursuit of the additional evidence – which the White House refuses to hand over – that will end Alberto Gonzales' reign of error. And the crisis at the Department of Justice will continue to metastasize.

A dramatic genetic breakthrough has paved the way for potential new treatments of seven common diseases that could help more than 20 million people.  

The largest ever study of its kind has found 10 new genes linked to seven of the most common ailments: heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, high blood pressure, type 1 and type 2 diabetes, bipolar disorder and Crohn’s disease.  

Some 200 British scientists from 50 research groups collaborated to discover the genes after screening DNA from 17,000 people.  

In two years, the £9 million investigation analysed 10 billion pieces of genetic information.

Together the seven diseases affect more than 20 million people across the UK, with coronary heart disease alone claiming the lives of 105,000 people every year, making it the country’s biggest killer. The study has identified, for the first time, some of the genes that trigger these diseases. 

Professor Peter Weissberg, medical director of the British Heart Foundation, said the new research held out the hope of a new understanding of heart disease and high blood pressure that could ultimately lead to new treatments.

The US Congress has sent another stem cell bill to the White House, in a repeated attempt to gain more federal funding for research on stem cells derived from embryos that are no longer needed for fertility treatments. The revised bill also includes a call for increased funding of research into alternative methods of producing stem cells. This is the second time this year Congress has passed such a bill. President Bush vetoed the first bill and is expected to veto the second also, although the clause to support non-embryonic stem cell research was apparently added to gain more Republican support. 

According to Science Daily, Republican John Boehner (Ohio), the House GOP leader, suggested in a statement to reporters that the Democrats are more motivated by politics than science, sending the second bill only to coax a veto from the president and “score political points”. I realize that this is a topic of hot debate in the US right now, but I have to ask the question, who are they scoring political points with? If it’s with the public, doesn't that indicate that, in general, the majority of people are in favour of the bill? And if that’s the case, isn’t that the point of introducing a bill in the first place – to represent the wishes of the majority of people?

The White House on Wednesday lowered its forecast for economic growth this year even as it slightly upgraded its outlook for unemployment.

Under the administration's new forecast, gross domestic product, or GDP, will grow by 2.3 percent as measured from the fourth quarter of last year to the fourth quarter of this year. That's down from a previous projection of 2.9 percent. 

The main reason for the downgrade: The first three months of 2007 got off to an extremely weak start. Economic growth at that time had skidded to nearly a halt, increasing at a rate of just 0.6 percent, the worst showing in more than four years.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, the administration and private economists expect the economy will rebound in the months ahead. The one wild card, though, is whether the nearly year-long housing slump -- which has been a damper on overall economic activity -- gets worse.

"So it is just not quite clear where we are in terms of the housing market, whether it has bottomed out," Edward Lazear, chairman of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers told reporters.

The economy grew by 3.1 percent in 2006. The persistence of the housing slump is a factor behind the economy's projected loss of momentum this year.                       

Chief financial officers at American companies have turned pessimistic on US economic prospects, a survey released Thursday showed.

The survey, compiled by Duke University, the Netherlands' Erasmus University, the CFO Business Outlook found US finance executives see "slow growth" in corporate earnings and are "very concerned" about rising labor costs and weak consumer demand. . . .

"With pessimists outnumbering optimists, the prospects for the US economy are poor," said John Graham, the survey director and a Duke finance professor.

The survey was released after the world's largest economy slowed to a crawl during the first quarter, or a 0.6 percent annualized pace amid a lingering housing market downturn.

The poll found that only 26 percent of CFOs are more optimistic about the US economy than they were in the first quarter, down from 35 percent in the prior March survey. Thirty percent are more pessimistic.

The survey's CFO optimism index meanwhile neared a five-year low.

"The main reason that CFOs cite for their reduced economic optimism are increased fuel inflation and slowing consumer demand, driven in part by a weak housing market," Graham said of the survey's US results.

Hard-pressed homeowners are also being buffeted by spiking gasoline prices with economists keeping a close watch on retail sales to see if consumer spending takes a hit. . . .  

"The CFOs see a toxic cocktail that includes slashed advertising spending, a sharp slowdown in tech spending and the most lethargic growth in employment in four years," added Duke professor Campbell Harvey, who founded the survey.

My low-point in letting hope get the better of the evidence in the Bush era was my airing of the "flytrap" theory a few years back. The theory posited that chaos in Iraq might give the U.S. a chance to target and kill Jihadist terrorists in the Middle East more efficiently than constantly playing defense. Four years later, and it's clear the reverse is happening. Chaos in Iraq and our presence there is honing Jihadist skills, weaponry and tactics.

The British and American military presence in Iraq is worsening security across the region and should be withdrawn quickly, the UK's former ambassador to Washington warned yesterday.

Sir Christopher Meyer acknowledged that leaving Iraq would be "painful", but said the mission was not worth the death of one more serviceman. "I personally believe that the presence of American and British and coalition forces is making things worse, not only inside Iraq but the wider region around Iraq. The arguments against staying for any greater length of time themselves strengthen with every day that passes," Sir Christopher said. . . .

He acknowledged that foreign policy decisions were always "fraught with risk". But asked about criticisms of withdrawal, he replied: "It always seemed to me this was one of the key moral arguments in Iraq, that however bad things were ... the overriding requirement for us was to be able to say to parents and relatives in Britain, your sons and daughters did not die in vain. I think we have now crossed the line - we now have to say the mission is no longer worth another life of a British or American serviceman."

With few reliable surveys of soldiers’ attitudes, it is impossible to simply extrapolate from the small number of soldiers in Delta Company. But in interviews with more than a dozen soldiers over a one-week period with this 83-man unit, most said they were disillusioned by repeated deployments, by what they saw as the abysmal performance of Iraqi security forces and by a conflict that they considered a civil war, one they had no ability to stop.

They had seen shadowy militia commanders installed as Iraqi Army officers, they said, had come under increasing attack from roadside bombs — planted within sight of Iraqi Army checkpoints — and had fought against Iraqi soldiers whom they thought were their allies.

“In 2003, 2004, 100 percent of the soldiers wanted to be here, to fight this war,” said Sgt. First Class David Moore, a self-described “conservative Texas Republican” and platoon sergeant who strongly advocates an American withdrawal. “Now, 95 percent of my platoon agrees with me.”