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Speaker Pelosi issued the following statement in response to President Bush's remarks on immigration reform today:

The President should work collaboratively and on a bipartisan basis to pass comprehensive immigration reform. He should embrace proposals such as the STRIVE Act by Congressmen Gutierrez and Flake, which provides an excellent framework and reflects a strong commitment by a bipartisan group of House Members toward realistic and comprehensive immigration reform.

Our priorities on immigration reform are clear. Our first responsibility to the American people is their safety. We must secure our borders and enforce our laws, while also protecting against discrimination and adhering faithfully to the rule of law. At the same time, we must enact immigration reform that is humane and honors our American tradition of being a nation of immigrants.

In the following op-ed, House Foreign Relations Committee Tom Lantos states: "Ms. Pelosi has no illusions about the nature of the regime in Damascus. She delivered tough messages to Mr. Assad regarding Iraq, Lebanon and the Hariri assassination tribunal."

"Ms. Pelosi said that members of Congress had a responsibility to play a role in national security issues and that they needed to be able to gather information on their own, and not be dependent on the White House."

The New York Times reported today that:

A senior official at the federal Education Department sold more than $100,000 in shares in a student loan company even as he was helping oversee lenders in the federal student loan program.

The official, Matteo Fontana, now general manager in a unit of the Office of Federal Student Aid, was identified yesterday from government documents as a stakeholder in the parent company of Student Loan Xpress who sold shares in 2003.

His involvement with the company emerged a day after a widening investigation into the student loan industry revealed that three senior financial aid officials at Columbia University, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Southern California had also sold shares at the same time.

Representative Edward J. Markey (D-MA), Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, reacted to the latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released today saying, "If anyone still harbored doubts that carbon dioxide was a pollutant that affects human welfare after the Supreme Court's ruling on Monday, the second IPCC report of the year released today should put any doubt to rest. In their February report, the world's top scientists provided a scientific smoking gun that human activities were unequivocally responsible for global warming. Now they are telling us what happens when the bullet hits. Their latest report chronicles the already mounting evidence of global warming impacts and forecasts dire consequences for an increasingly hotter world.

"What really sticks in the president's craw is not that Mrs. Pelosi's visit will confuse Syria's hard-liners about Mr. Bush's devotion to isolating Damascus, but that almost anybody else with their eyes open will see, if they haven't already, that diplomacy is a better way to make progress on those concerns common to the Republican White House and the Democratic Congress."