In their words …

“I do not know how anyone in the world — whether they believe or do not believe in God — could do something like kill a kid.”

— Iraqi police officer Ali Hussein, following a suicide car bomb attack in Baghdad that killed 27 people, most of them children gathered around U.S. soldiers who stopped to hand out candy.

“We have to face the fact that not very many people go to the polls to vote.”

— Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton, who plans to recommend that county commissioners approve a system in which all voters would vote by mail rather than at traditional polling places.

“There’s only so long you can continue to admit to a significant problem and not take imminent action on it.”

— Tim Profeta, director of Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, reacting to the communiqué in which the world’s top eight industrial nations agreed that humans play an important role in global warming but failed to adopt a specific strategy or timetable for addressing the issue.

“Virtually everyone there knows that they are sitting ducks.”

— British psychology lecturer James Thompson, commenting on the vulnerability of Londoners to terrorist attacks on the city’s highly popular subway system.

“It’s not about the amount of money he took at all. It’s using the gun. These people are terrorized.”

— Assistant U.S. Attorney Tessa Gorman, in justification of the 184-year prison sentence handed out in Seattle to 41-year-old Ivy Byrd Gaines, convicted of 10 bank robberies, eight of them while armed with a firearm.

“It’s really a black box out there.”

— Jim Ames, sockeye program manager for the Washington state Fish and Wildlife Department, describing the mysteriousness of what happened to the hundreds of thousands of salmon which have failed to return to Lake Washington in the past two years to spawn.

“If the rest of the diplomatic missions from Europe and the neighboring countries give in, this means that all the capitals of the world will be subjected to blackmail.”

— Chief Iraqi government spokesman Laith Kubba, urging other nations not to recall their diplomats from Baghdad in response to al Qaeda threats.