鈥淭his is laughable鈥hey make weapons to kill people and it鈥檚 utterly ridiculous to suggest they are environmentally friendly.鈥
Symon Hill of Campaign Against Arms Trade, on news that BAE Systems is designing a 鈥済reen鈥 range of arms, including lead-free bullets and reduced-toxicity rockets (The Sunday Times, London, 17 September)
鈥淏ecause of a severe psychological problem of the recipient and his wife, the transplanted penis regretfully had to be cut off.鈥
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Weilie Hu of Guangzhou General Hospital, China, on having to remove the first-ever successfully transplanted penis from a man who had lost his in an accident (The Guardian, London, 18 September)
鈥淲e don鈥檛 see this disease in India, Africa, China. We only see it in technologically advanced countries.鈥
Lee Riley, professor of infectious disease and epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley, on how highly centralised food processing in the US led to the outbreak of E. coli in 21 states last week (The San Francisco Chronicle, 19 September)
鈥淭he thing is to stop wasting 120 million tons of sediment [each year].鈥
Denise Reed of the University of New Orleans on the recommendation by scientists that the muddy Mississippi river be diverted away from the Gulf of Mexico towards the sediment-starved marshes of Louisiana (The New York Times, 19 September)
鈥淚鈥檝e got monkeys in my pants.鈥
US Fish and Wildlife Service special agent Ho Truong on what Robert Cusack, a smuggler of endangered animals, said when asked if he had anything to declare. Cusack had flea-scratching pygmy monkeys in his underwear (Los Angeles Times, 19 September)