From the Wire

U.S. may stop seeking U.N. vote: The United States may soon stop pushing for the support of the United Nations Security Council in a proposal on the rebuilding Iraq’s government, senior administration officials said Tuesday. Such a decision would follow continued opposition to the U.S. proposal and a “cool reception” to President Bush’s recent presentation to the Council. According to the New York Times, one such official said, “We don't want to play this game for a long, long time. This is as much a choice for the Council as it is for us. They can be multilateral and be part of it, or they can tell us to do it ourselves.” The administration said they originally sought U.N. support because they thought this backing would encourage other countries to help with either funding or troops. The U.S. proposal would call for America’s continued full control of Iraq during the construction of a new government, and this has been a point of contention among the countries represented on the Council.

Schwarzenegger elected governor: On Tuesday, Californians voters decided to recall Gov. Gray Davis and make Austrian bodybuilder and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger his replacement. The recall ballot passed with a 55.2 percent support, and Schwarzenegger held the majority vote with 48.5 percent of the vote. In news conferences on Wednesday, Schwarzenegger pledged to keep his campaign promises, including a promise that he would not raise taxes in California. Consequently, as one of the first acts of his office he said he would first get the state’s books audited to find out the exact amount of the budget deficit. His next challenge will be preparing California’s operating budget for next year and dealing with the $8 billion shortfall from this year, which means decisions will have to be made about cuts in the budget.

Nobel prizes awarded for innovation in M.R.I.’s:  Recently, two scientists were finally honored for discoveries they made over three decades ago. Paul C. Lauterbur of the University of Illinois and Sir Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham in England are the recipients of this year’s Nobel prize for medicine for their work with magnetic resonance imaging, or M.R.I. Unlike CAT scans, which use radiation, M.R.I. tests visualize body tissues using magnetic fields and the pulse of radio waves. Lauterbur was one of the first to recognize that the magnetic pulse of such waves could be used to determine a spatial arrangement of the molecules they were going through, and in 1971, he realized that this procedure could be used in medical imaging. Mansfield contributed to this study by showing “how to speed the imaging process by developing new mathematical techniques to analyze the information from rapidly varying the magnetic field.”

-Compiled by Paige Wassel with information from the New York Times.