...it costs $22,000 so it better come with a lifetime supply of frozen unicorn brisket or someone's gonna get it.

An Associated Press poll has found an impatient nation. It's a nation that gets antsy after five minutes on hold on the phone and 15 minutes max in a line. So say people in the survey.

The Department of Motor Vehicles, the U.S. version of the old Soviet bread line, is among the top spots where Americans hate to wait. But grocery stores are the worst.

Imagine a vaccine that would protect women from a serious gynecological cancer. Wouldn't that be great? Well, both Merck and GlaxoSmithKline recently announced that they have conducted successful trials of vaccines that protect against the human papilloma virus. HPV is not only an incredibly widespread sexually transmitted infection but is responsible for at least 70 percent of cases of cervical cancer, which is diagnosed in 10,000 American women a year and kills 4,000. Wonderful, you are probably thinking, all we need to do is vaccinate girls (and boys too for good measure) before they become sexually active, around puberty, and HPV--and, in thirty or forty years, seven in ten cases of cervical cancer--goes poof. Not so fast: We're living in God's country now. The Christian right doesn't like the sound of this vaccine at all. 'Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful,' Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, 'because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.' Raise your hand if you think that what is keeping girls virgins now is the threat of getting cervical cancer when they are 60 from a disease they've probably never heard of.

The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.

The new findings 'were against our expectations,' said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.

'We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use,' he said. 'What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect.'

Alcoholic drinks mixed with artificial sweeteners get you drunker, new research finds.

It took a group of Australian researchers, lots of orange-flavored vodka and a few tipsy volunteers to reach this scientific conclusion.

They found that artificial sweeteners found in such popular mixers as Diet Coke and sugar-free Red Bull lead to a high rate of alcohol absorption, resulting in a greater blood alcohol peak and concentration than from drinks made with sugar-based mixers.

Federal agents searched the Capitol Hill office of a Louisiana congressman under investigation on bribery charges Sunday, while newly released court papers said agents found $90,000 in cash last year in his Washington home.

In a 95-page affidavit used to obtain a warrant for the office search, investigators stated that an August 2005 search of Democratic Rep. William Jefferson's home turned up the cash sum in a freezer.

The money was divided among various frozen food containers, according to the heavily redacted affidavit.

In a news conference last week, Jefferson said he was innocent and that he would remain in office while he fights any charges.

'I wish to say emphatically that in all of my actions that are here under scrutiny, that I have never intended to dishonor my office, or you, the public, and I certainly did not sell my office,' Jefferson told reporters.

Anheuser-Busch Cos., which brews Budweiser and Bud Light, said Friday it bought the Rolling Rock beer brand from InBev USA, the U.S. subsidiary of Belgian-Brazilian brewer InBev SA, for $82 million.

Samsung today announced that next week at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) it will demonstrate the first commercially available hybrid hard drive. What is a hybrid hard drive? It’s a drive that combines flash memory with a standard hard drive, to speed up booting, improve drive life and reduce the chances of a problem due to dropping the laptop or PC."

A puzzling aspect of Congress's latest tax-cut package is why its overwhelmingly Republican supporters believe that its passage will be a big win for them and their party. There's nothing in it for most Americans, and yet all Americans will pay its cost: $69 billion over the near term. That price tag will be reflected in incessant budget deficits, which will further impair the government's ability to meet Americans' needs, and force the government to borrow more, mostly from abroad, to plug the budget gap.

The bill, which was passed yesterday by the House and is expected to clear the Senate as early as today, has two main provisions. The first, and dearest to the hearts of President Bush and his allies in Congress, is an extension of the temporary low tax rates on investment income. The top 10 percent of income earners will get almost all of the benefits, and everyone else will get crumbs.

Republican lawmakers, facing the prospect that their power to cut taxes may soon be curbed, plan to extend breaks that mostly benefit the wealthy and Wall Street at the expense of reductions for middle-income households.

Torture and inhumane treatment are “widespread” in U.S.-run prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba and elsewhere despite Washington’s denials, Amnesty International said on Wednesday.

In a report for the United Nations’ Committee against Torture, the London-based human rights group also alleged abuses within the U.S. domestic law enforcement system, including use of excessive force by police and degrading conditions of isolation for inmates in high security prisons.

“Evidence continues to emerge of widespread torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees held in U.S. custody,” Amnesty said in its 47-page report.