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Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has highlighted the dismal state of the California levee system. He's declared a state of emergency and is asking for millions of dollars to repair the system. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff will visit and inspect the levees on Friday as he weighs Schwarzenegger's request for more federal dollars. Tamara Keith of member station KPCC reports.

Japan can call itself the world champion of baseball. The Japanese team captured the inaugural World Baseball Classic by beating Cuba 10-6 in the championship game San Diego.

The opposition leader in Belarus is calling on supporters to stand their ground. The backers of Alexander Milinkevich are camped out in freezing weather to protest results of an election largely seen as a farce by international observers.

Two differing accounts have raised questions about an attack on a house in Balad, Iraq, last Wednesday. An Iraqi police report says U.S. forces executed 11 family members. The U.S. military says that is highly unlikely. Matthew Schofield, of Knight Ridder's European Bureau, talks with Melissa Block about the report.

More than a million students and union members march to fight a law easing hiring and firing of workers. The goverment says it will help cut youth unemployment. Opponents say it erodes job security and other benefits.

Microsoft won't offer the consumer release of its new Windows operating system until January 2007. That's bad news for personal computer makers, retailers and computers, because it means the Windows packages won't be available for the 2006 holiday sale season.

"Happy as a clam" is a shortened form of an old idiom, "happy as a clam at high tide." Just as you might suspect, early Americans decided that clams are happiest when they're undisturbed. It's one of many idioms that have left behind their full phrasing.

Sidney Bechet played soprano saxophone in the early decades of jazz, before John Coltrane popularized the instrument. A new anthology, Mosaic Select: Sidney Bechet, offers listeners a chance to hear Bechet's music, transferred and restored from rare recordings from 1923 to 1947.

A group of senators is in Beijing this week, meeting with top Chinese officials about the value of the Chinese currency, the yuan. Democrats and Republicans have authored a bill threatening China with a huge tariff increase on its exports to the United States unless Beijing allows the yuan to strengthen significantly against the dollar.

Fuel supplies for the Palestinian Authority have nearly been exhausted; its Israeli supplier has cut off deliveries because the authority's account is $80 million in arrears. Gas stations in Ramallah, the Palestinians' political and commercial capital, are closed, and drivers say that once their tanks run dry, they will have to stay home.