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Army Spc. Justin Hebert was the 52nd American soldier killed in Iraq since President Bush declared the war over on May 1 and the first combat fatality of this war from the state of Washington. Friends, family and veterans bade him farewell in the quiet valley where he was born and raised, and then he was buried in one of the special caskets reserved just for soldiers. "As they laid Justin Hebert to rest, it was hard to square the death of the 20-year-old with what we know now about the invasion of Iraq," Rick Anderson writes in Seattle Weekly.

Way out in West Texas, near the small town of Iraan, north of the Fourmile Draw and and south of the Texas Pecos Trail, the wind blows mightily. There, at the Desert Sky Wind Farm, 107 turbines jut 328 feet above the mesa and catch the wind as it rolls off the Barilla and Del Norte mountain ranges. The wind belongs to no one, but its power belongs to San Antonio: Desert Sky generates 160 megawatts of electricity and City Public Service buys it -- enough to power about 40,000 homes each year. San Antonio Current News Editor Lisa Sorg looks at the power of the Texas wind.

If you learn one thing from same-sex parents, it’s that gay and straight families are pretty similar, Mairi Hennessy writes in Reno News & Review. The 2000 census tallied more than 600,000 same-sex U.S. households, 55 percent with children. Conservative Nevada now ranks eighth in the nation in the number of households headed by gay or lesbian couples. Hennessy talks to some of those couples about their trials and triumphs, and the simple joys of raising children.

When police raided the Denver offices of trueteenbabes.com last spring, a media circus ensued. The Arapahoe County sheriff went on TV to announce that officers had busted "perhaps the largest pornography ring in Colorado history." Hundreds of thousands of pictures of underage girls had been confiscated, investigators said, and the case could have "national and international implications." The chief suspect, James Grady, was charged with an astounding 886 criminal charges. But the media didn't have much to say a year later, when the case against Grady -- who turned out to know the law and the realities of Web commerce a lot better than the cops who busted him -- fell spectacularly apart. Westword staff writer Eric Dexheimer reveals that some of the same reporters who trumpeted news of Grady's arrest also played a key role in getting him busted in the first place.