by Frank James

A quick guided tour of some of the morning's most important or most interesting (or both) Washington-related stories.

President Bush, in his prime-time Iraq speech tonight, will ask Americans for continued patience as the surge of U.S. troops is scheduled to start winding down later this year along the lines of Gen. David Petraeus's recommendation.

An agreement in Iraq on how to split the nation's oil revenues appeared to be falling apart just as President Bush and congressional supporters of the present strategy were looking to those talks as a sign of progress.

One death and dozen injuries from an attack two days ago at the U.S. military's Iraq headquarters in Baghdad were caused by a sophisticated 240 mm missile from Iran, of the type that Iranian forces have provided to Shi'ite militias, a U.S. general said.

A federal district court in Vermont upheld California regulations being emulated by other states to limit the car and truck greenhouse-gas emissions, the first legal endorsement of such rules.

Congressional Democrats are hoping that by making more modest proposals for troop reductions and for limiting the troops' mission to training, force protection and securing of U.S. facilities, they will gain support from moderate Republicans.

Thousands of women with breast cancer wind up forfeiting their chance to have Medicaid pick up the costs of their treatment because of a loophole in a federal law that allows states to deny coverage based on which center the women's disease was diagnosed at.

The cocaine supply to 26 U.S. cities is down because of more vigorous enforcement by the Mexican government.

The Senate approved a transportation and housing spending bill Wednesday with $2 billion of spending on lawmakers' pet projects or earmarks, the kind of spending that was heavily criticized after the Minneapolis bridge collapse underscored the lack of spending on infrastructure priorities.

Presidential candidates are taking their campaigns overseas in an effort to win the votes and cash of U.S. citizens abroad, with Rudy Giuliani planning to visit next week England, for example, to give a foreign-policy speech to expatriates and other candidates having visited or sending surrogates.

Norman Hsu, the recently captured fugitive and one-time big Democratic campaign fundraiser, sent typed suicide notes to several acquaintances before he disappeared last week only to resurface in a Colorado hospital where he was arrested.