The reason the Palestinians have not adopted these alternatives is because they actually want to win their independence in blood and fire. All they can agree on as a community is what they want to destroy, not what they want to build. Have you ever heard Mr. Arafat talk about what sort of education system or economy he would prefer, what sort of constitution he wants? No, because Mr. Arafat is not interested in the content of a Palestinian state, only the contours.

Let's be very clear: Palestinians have adopted suicide bombing as a strategic choice, not out of desperation. This threatens all civilization because if suicide bombing is allowed to work in Israel, then, like hijacking and airplane bombing, it will be copied and will eventually lead to a bomber strapped with a nuclear device threatening entire nations. That is why the whole world must see this Palestinian suicide strategy defeated.

Gov. Gray Davis received an additional $251,000 from California's prison guards union earlier this month, only weeks after the governor granted the officers a pay hike of as much as $1 billion and fulfilled their wish by proposing to close five private prisons.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Assn.'s donation, dated March 13, is the largest single check Davis has received since taking office in 1999, though three other donors have given lump sums of $250,000.

With the latest check, the union has contributed $306,000 directly to the Democratic governor, plus $356,000 through the union's "Governor's Cup" golf fund-raisers at Pebble Beach.

Union President Don Novey said that despite the donation, the guards haven't decided whether to endorse Davis or Simon in this year's campaign. He would not specify why the union made the latest donation, except to say there was no connection between the money and the governor's recent actions.

"That had nothing to do with it, but I guess it would be good cannon fodder," Novey said, adding that though Davis often inquires about donations, the union's executive board made the decision about the amount and timing.

There was only one man I wanted to meet that night, and he turned out to be, in my eyes, the great man of the evening. I saw him across the room at a round, white table talking to Mel Brooks. During the milling-about time between courses I went over to thank him for his excellence. Soon I was standing near him and seeing him in the bright lights--a smooth, black tuxedo on a not-so-broad back. He turned toward me; I introduced myself and asked if I might shake his hand. He smiled and said sure--I was later to find out this was amazing behavior on his part--and we talked for a few minutes about the party and about politics. I left feeling I'd just met a wonderful American man.

Later I found out that he too had done something interesting at the dinner. He had been assigned by the editor of Time to sit at the table of the president of the United States, Bill Clinton. When he saw where his place card had been put, in this place of honor, he ordered it moved, because he didn't want to sit at a table with a man like that.

And here's to you, Joe DiMaggio. He married a movie star half a century ago but the one thing he seems not to have liked about Marilyn Monroe was that she was a star. And that night he refused to sit with the biggest political star in the room. Joe DiMaggio trumped movie-stardom. But Joltin' Joe has left and gone away.

I'm continually drawn to the similarities between Chamberlain's 20th Maine and Flight 93. Chamberlain was asked to hold Little Round Top against horrible odds; the heroes of Flight 93 were asked to take control of the cockpit from armed, professional killers. When they ran out of ammunition, Chamberlain's men fixed bayonets and charged blindly down the hill; the unarmed heroes of Flight 93 had to storm up a small three-foot-wide aisle. Chamberlain's men held their ground and changed the outcome at Gettysburg; the heroes of Flight 93 succeeded and saved the Capitol.

[I]n a way, it's a shame that so much of David Brock's "Blinded by the Right: The conscience of an ex-conservative" is about the private lives of our self-appointed moral guardians. Those tales will sell books, but they may obscure the important message: that the "vast right-wing conspiracy" is not an overheated metaphor but a straightforward reality, and that it works a lot like a special-interest lobby.

Modern political economy teaches us that small, well-organized groups often prevail over the broader public interest. The steel industry got the tariff it wanted, even though the losses to consumers will greatly exceed the gains of producers, because the typical steel consumer doesn't understand what's happening.

"Blinded by the Right" shows that the same logic applies to non-economic issues. The scandal machine that employed Mr. Brock was, in effect, a special-interest group financed by a handful of wealthy fanatics — men like the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whose cultlike Unification Church owns The Washington Times, and Richard Mellon Scaife, who bankrolled the scandal-mongering American Spectator and many other right-wing enterprises. It was effective because the typical news consumer didn't realize what was going on.

The group's efforts managed to turn Whitewater — a $200,000 money-losing investment — into a byword for scandal, even though an eight-year, $73 million investigation never did find any evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons. Just imagine what the scandal machine could have done with more promising raw material — such as the decidedly unusual business transactions of the young George W. Bush.

But there is, of course, no comparable scandal machine on the left. Why not?

One answer is that for some reason there is a level of anger and hatred on the right that has at best a faint echo in the anti-globalization left, and none at all in mainstream liberalism. Indeed, the liberals I know generally seem unwilling to face up to the nastiness of contemporary politics.

It's also true that in the nature of things, billionaires are more likely to be right-wing than left-wing fanatics. When billionaires do support more or less liberal causes, they usually try to help the world, not take over the U.S. political system. Not to put too fine a point on it: While George Soros was spending lavishly to promote democracy abroad, Mr. Scaife was spending lavishly to undermine it at home.

Regular readers of this column know that not long ago I found myself the target of a minor-league smear campaign. The pattern was typical: right-wing sources insisting that a normal business transaction (in my case consulting for Enron, back when I was a college professor, not an Op-Ed columnist, and in no position to do the company any favors) was somehow corrupt; then legitimate media picking up on the story, assuming that given all the fuss there must be something to the allegations; and no doubt a lingering impression, even though no favors were given or received, that the target must have done something wrong ("Isn't it hypocritical for him to criticize crony capitalism when he himself was on the take?"). Now that I've read Mr. Brock's book I understand what happened.

Paul Scott's complaint, filed last month, alleges discrimination and intolerance of him and his daughter by "not addressing a very clear right of privacy violation that requires my child to share restrooms, dressing rooms and showering facilities with those who by their own, and societies (sic) definition, are attracted to the same gender (homosexual students and staff)."

A FEW WEEKS ago, when the House was voting on campaign finance reform, presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer was ready to give President Bush credit for creating the climate that gave reform its first real chance at passage. But there wasn't any chest-thumping at the White House yesterday when the president signed the landmark measure into law. At least we guess there wasn't, but we couldn't really see, because Mr. Bush chose to act quickly and quietly, in the privacy of the Oval Office. If that meant, for the president's good friend Sen. John McCain and his fellow reformers, no signing ceremony, no souvenir pens and no celebration to mark the culmination of years of dogged pursuit of reform legislation -- well, the president's a busy man.

Who says he's a sore loser? Who says he just couldn't give John McCain his moment in the Rose Garden, a ceremonial signing of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill? Who says he would rather look petty than go through the gripping and grinning and pen-handling that a White House ceremony entails?

[S]uch a coincidence! With the U.S. Senate debating so-called "therapeutic cloning" to produce embryonic stem (ES) cells and other countries, such as Canada, suffering similar political agony, Nature magazine releases letters from two research teams saying that the alternative — so-called adult stem cells — may be worthless.

Nature was so eager to get the news out that it even published the letters online, before the print edition. Both letters attack the "supposed flexibility" of NES cells, as one reporter put it. And the world media swallowed it like a starving mouse downing a chunk of cheddar.

Whether or not we invade Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein, let's go about this the American way. Let's sue him. [I used to think that shooting people was the American way, but now that I'm a New York liberal, I changed my teensy-weensy mind.]

The United States should launch an effort to prosecute Saddam for crimes against humanity. [I was binging on heroin, Johnny Walker and on old The Nation magazines, so no one should be surprised that this idea would come to mind.] This would destabilize his regime at home, encourage more defections of Iraqi officials and military officers, and increase the prospect of a coup that, in the best-case scenario, would render an invasion unnecessary. [You know, nothing is scarier to me than a lawsuit, except maybe a gun. Yeah, a lawsuit about guns. A lawyer with a gun? I just know that if I were the despotic ruler of a middle-eastern country who maintained power for decades through murder, genocide and intimidation, I know a lawsuit would make me lose control of my bowels.]

I came across this idea in references in books by Richard Butler, who led the [failed] United Nations inspection effort in Iraq, and by Kanan Makiya, author of the leading account of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. [I know this because it said so on the bookcover.] It also turns out that a British organization, Indict, is already pursuing an indictment against Saddam for war crimes. [You see, he's already quaking in his boots.]

Mr. Makiya writes that the best way to topple an Iraqi leader is to make him lose face. [Preferably the back of his skull too, from a very large bomb.] As an example, he cites the Ottoman-era practice of the people of Takrit (Saddam's hometown) of seizing the governor for the area, humiliating him (often by sexually abusing his women) and then releasing him unharmed. [Did I just write that? Ooops....I'm going to have NOW after me any second now....must...retract...]

I would not recommend this precise approach. [Whew!] But a drive to indict Saddam for genocide against the Kurds, along with other crimes, suggesting that he will end his days in a prison cell, will humiliate him in a similar way, squeezing him and encouraging those around him to look for an exit while there is still time. [Of course, anyone heading for the exits will probably be shot, but that's OK...death is an exit after all.]

"In Washington, you either have the war hounds who want to bomb Iraq and take Saddam out, or the folks who just want to contain Saddam because at least he keeps Iraq together," said Joost Hiltermann, who has examined 18 tons of Iraqi documents seized in Kurdistan and brought to the United States, and who is now writing a book about Iraq and its use of chemical weapons. "But there is a third option" — a legal case, with or without a military attack. [Of course, if the legal case is delivered by a process server and contains 10 pounds of C-4...]

(Along with those 18 tons of documents were audio tapes of speeches by Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam and his former lieutenant for northern Iraq. In one tape he says of the Kurds: "I will kill them all with chemical weapons!") [Ooohhhh! Irrefutable evidence....now we've got 'em!]

The Bush administration is interested in the idea of prosecuting Saddam, and it has two lawyers sitting in the State Department gathering evidence against him. [The lawyers were working on the Clinton pardons, but I think this is a much better use for your tax dollars.] But the thinking there has been that the prosecution would begin after Saddam is in custody, rather than before. [Of course, they'd never kill Saddam instead, that would be in violation of the Geneva Convention....I think.]

Why? An administration official, acknowledging that there may be advantages to a pre-emptive indictment and adding that no decision has been made, expressed concern that a legal effort might distract from the task of "regime change," a term that means "squash Saddam like a bug." [I wish I could come up with such clever analogies like real writers can.]

It's a fair concern. But in Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic was indicted when he was still in power, in 1999. The indictment was one factor that helped result in his ouster from power in 2000. [Some people say it was the fact that we bombed the crap out of his country, but they'd be wrong.] And in 2001 he was sent to The Hague for trial.

In short, firing lawyers at Saddam would bolster our military options, not weaken them. [I'm serious, we have plenty of lawyers. We could them in some of the big 16-inch guns...a direct hit using a trial lawyer would certainly be deadly.]

One of the constraints that Washington faces in organizing an attack on Iraq is cold feet everywhere else on the planet (except those under Tony Blair). [Tony uses thermal socks.] To forge a coalition against Saddam, we must build a case against him very publicly to demonstrate that he is not just another two-bit tyrant but a monster almost without parallel in recent decades. [We could use the media for this.]

Police in other countries use torture, but there are credible reports that Saddam's police cut out tongues and use electric drills. [Of course, people use them here too.] Other countries gouge out the eyes of dissidents; Saddam's interrogators gouged out the eyes of hundreds of children to get their parents to talk. Plus, he has tons of VX gas and defies the U.N. [That's the most incredible crime in the world, defying the U.N. Anyone who defies the U.N. should be shot, including most Republicans. Actually, maybe we should put Sen. Jesse Helms on trial first, just to get the kinks out.]

There are three ways we can pursue legal action against Saddam:

• An international tribunal can be established, like the one now trying Mr. Milosevic. This would require Security Council approval, which would be difficult.

• Several countries could launch a case before the International Court of Justice, without Security Council agreement. This would be against Iraq as a country, not Saddam as a person.

• An individual country could indict Saddam. This would be a country claiming universal jurisdiction in genocide cases.

Now's the time. Let's throw the book at Saddam. [But first, make sure it's packed with explosives]

Only the Supreme Court can end the charade. When it considers McCain-Feingold, it should declare most campaign finance regulation unconstitutional. The alleged evils of money in politics are now overshadowed by the evils of strangling free speech.

The United States should launch an effort to prosecute Saddam for crimes against humanity. This would destabilize his regime at home, encourage more defections of Iraqi officials and military officers, and increase the prospect of a coup that, in the best-case scenario, would render an invasion unnecessary.

Let me tell you, I fund and work for an adoption agency. And we have many cases, and you can call them and get the statistics, when we have a birth mother who is pregnant and she doesn't know the race of the father, she is using drugs and she is in crisis. Usually we cannot place that baby with a heterosexual family. Almost all of the times when we have a drug-addicted child, we place the baby with a homosexual family.

"These lawyers — and they are some of the finest legal minds in America — know that this is basically a frivolous lawsuit that will not succeed, but to the extent that they can stir the pot and get us to talk about this and maybe create this fund for scholarships and maybe get an apology from Congress, they will have accomplished their purpose," Napolitano said.

"This is asymmetrical warfare, and it would be a prudent force-protection measure," said a U.S. official close to the debate.

The money obtained from Afghanistan's poppy harvest will fuel the guerrilla war that is expected to escalate against U.S. and allied forces in the coming months.

The money from the poppies also will bolster anti-U.S. elements in the Pakistani ISI intelligence service, the officials said.

"If this opium is harvested and permitted to go to market, it will re-empower the negative elements in Pakistan's security service and lead to instability in Pakistan," the official said. "And it will fund a new round of international terrorism."

SANTA CRUZ — Years of latent frustration in the clown community broke through the surface Saturday afternoon as a tide of bulbous noses, tri-colored wigs and oversized pants swept down Pacific Avenue.

Some 80 normally jolly clowns, supported by the buzz of a dozen kazoos, sought to make their plight public and turn the fortunes of clowndom toward a brighter future.

"You are born a clown," said organizer Rico Thunder. "And for those brave enough to be out as clowns, the world can be a cold and unwelcome place."

"As long as one clown is oppressed, no man is free," Thunder continued.

Real terrorists don't want to kill a lot of people. Rather, they use limited, but indiscriminate, violence or hijacking to create noise or fear that draws attention to their cause and ultimately builds political or diplomatic pressure for a specific objective.

That's why Osama bin Laden is not a mere terrorist. He has much larger aspirations. He is a super-empowered angry man who has all the geopolitical objectives and instincts of a nation-state. He has employed violence not to grab headlines but to kill as many Americans as possible to drive them out of the Islamic world and weaken their society. That's why the Sept. 11 hijackers never left a list of demands, as terrorists usually do. Their act was their demand. Their demand is total victory.

Since that is the case, the proper, long-term U.S. strategic response to Sept. 11 should be twofold: First, we must understand exactly who these 19 suicide bombers were and how they were recruited. We need to know how these human guided missiles are assembled. Second, we need to launch an all-out global effort to make sure that all nuclear and biological warfare materials are under as tight a control as possible.

What worries me most for my daughters' future is not Saddam Hussein. He's a homicidal dictator who can be deterred, or eliminated, by conventional means. No, what worries me most is the fact that we still don't understand who those 19 hijackers were. What worries me is that nearly every day for the past six months, Palestinian men and women — many of them secular, not religious — have strapped dynamite around their waists and blown themselves up against Israeli targets. How do you deter young people who hate us, or Israel, more than they love their own families or their own future?

It will take us a long time, and much diplomatic therapy, to cure such intentions.

Nor can Mr. Bush be claimed by the culture warriors of the Christian right, although he gave them John Ashcroft and occasionally throws them a steak. The president is not a bigot, or a pessimist.

EMBARRASSING ADMISSIONS: Officially, University of Michigan Regent Dan Horning supports affirmative action. But at a time when the university's race-based admissions are under two separate court challenges, he confessed in a letter to a fellow regent that he didn't think "our admissions policies will withstand this legal challenge and I certainly don't feel they are based on merit." The Michigan Daily reports that he went on to write that the policies keep qualified students out while letting less qualified minorities in. As per custom on campuses these days, Mr. Horning has now apologized for his outburst of candor.

Walid el-Batouty, the co-pilot's nephew and spokesman for the families of the Egyptian victims, disagreed with the report's conclusion.

``We are not giving this report any consideration as it is not based on fact. The Americans still have to prove the suicide theory,'' he said. ``It was very clear from the beginning that all the Americans cared for was to protect their interests, such as Boeing's interests.''

EgyptAir's chief official investigator objected to the NTSB findings and called for a reopening of the American investigation.

``We want the Americans to reinvestigate the case as they have not considered several points presented by Egyptian investigators'' including proper checks on the plane's tail, cockpit voice recordings and radar and flight control data, Mohsen El-Messiri told reporters in Cairo.

The teen's story began on a Sunday afternoon with him and his father packing linens, books and kitchenware that had belonged to his ailing grandmother. At sunset, Hess and his father delivered a truckload of boxes to Goodwill Super Store in Hurst.

The next morning at school, Hess was removed from class. A school security guard had seen a nonserrated bread knife with a 10-inch blade in the bed of the teen's pickup. It must have fallen out of one of the Goodwill boxes, Hess explained.

But the H-E-B district's Student Code of Conduct - which Hess and his mother, Gay Hess, both signed - prohibits students from bringing weapons onto school grounds. "This is a serious offense," Taylor Hess was told by school officials.

At the end of the three-hour meeting, school officials told Hess that his action posed a threat to his fellow students. Four days after the hearing, he was expelled.

H-E-B district officials maintained throughout the Hess hearing that students' safety must be the overriding factor in any situation where a weapon is found on campus.

"I do feel he [Hess] put students at risk, whether he knowingly did that or not," Dianne Byrnes, H-E-B director of alternative education programs, said at the hearing.

Just before the beginning of this school year, the Bristol Township School Board in Pennsylvania decided that students with asthma must keep their emergency inhalers in the school office, rather than on hand.

On September 7, the board received a letter from Nancy Sander, executive director of the Allergy and Asthma Network/Mothers of Asthmatics (AANMA), a national asthma support and education group based in Fairfax, Virginia. Sander’s letter neatly encapsulated the all-too-common frustration of parents when their doctor’s advice about how to care for an asthmatic child encounters a school with an entrenched hall-monitor mentality. The letter read, in part:

"The decision to accommodate and facilitate a child’s needs with asthma is far easier than pretending their needs do not exist or that restricting student access to medications is for the safety of all students. To do so places your students with asthma at greater risk of death or missed school days, their classmates at risk of witnessing their death, and your school board at risk of lawsuits....

"If a student placed a plastic bag over a teacher’s head for a brief moment, the student would be charged with assault. But a school board voting to restrict a child’s access to his life-saving asthma medication is no less guilty of a crime. Is Bristol Township School Board really ready to accept responsibility for violating a child’s right to breathe? Are you prepared to breach the provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act?"

Three days later, the school board held a hearing and reversed its original decision. Students in Bristol Township are now allowed to retain control of their asthma inhalers.

One day when in the fifth grade, however, she was in tears when I picked her up from school. The teacher had yelled at her when she’d used the inhaler in class, claiming that she didn’t really need it.

I spoke to Ivanhoe’s then-principal, Kevin Baker. He said I’d been "breaking the law" for five years by keeping the inhaler in the backpack instead of in the office, and that he would "confiscate" it if he found it there in the future. If the school had allowed this before, he said, it was an oversight. "So now what we need to do," he explained, in a sing-songy, Romper Room voice, "is set up a series of intervention meetings to help you understand our concerns about you breaking the law." My arguments about doctor’s orders went nowhere. "When your daughter is at school," Principal Baker said, "I am the ultimate authority concerning her health."

That Robert De Niro soundbite from The Untouchables that Howard Stern likes to play -- "I want him dead! I want his family dead!" -- kept echoing in my head as I left the school office. But I’d heard enough misinformed pronouncements over the years from that school -- a jellyfish is a mollusk, "Indian" should be spelled with a small i -- to consider the possibility that the principal didn’t know what he was talking about. So I went home and called the Los Angeles Unified School District’s director of nursing. Within an hour, I had a fax on Principal Baker’s desk saying that district policy (Bulletin Z-19, Attachment F) does allow students to keep medicine on hand with a note from their doctor. I sent a copy to his supervisor, and he backed down quickly.

In her letter to the Bristol Township School Board, Nancy Sander referred to the 1991 death of a New Orleans high school student, Catrina Lewis, who was delayed by security guards before being allowed to get her inhaler from the office. When it didn’t help, she asked school staff to call an ambulance; instead they spent a half-hour trying to call her mother first. Catrina’s sister, another student, finally called 911 herself, but emergency help arrived too late. In 1996, a New Orleans judge ordered Lawless High School’s acting principal, a school counselor, and the school board to pay $1 million in damages to Catrina’s family.

During the hearing, Short, the L.D. Bell principal, described Hess as "an exemplary student" and said the expulsion was a difficult decision.

"Zero tolerance makes you feel you lose your judgment you might otherwise be able to afford," Short said on the tape.

But there's abundant evidence that having more handguns also means more gun thefts, more armed robbery, more suicide and more murder.

Japan, where I used to live, allows only about 50 people (all leading target shooters) to own handguns, and while criminals do smuggle them in, there were only 28 gun deaths (murders and suicides combined) in 1999, the most recent year for which figures are available. By contrast, the United States had 26,800 gun deaths in 2000.

Lott's sources are broad and inclusive, and his evidence the most extensive yet assembled, taking full account of the FBI's massive yearly crime figures for all 3,054 U.S. counties over eighteen years, the largest national surveys on gun ownership, as well as state police documents on illegal gun use. His unexpected findings reveal that many of the most commonly held assumptions about gun control and its crime-fighting efficacy are simply wrong. Waiting periods, gun buybacks, and background checks yield virtually no benefits in crime reduction. Instead, Lott argues, "right to carry" laws and legally concealed handguns currently represent the most cost-effective methods available for reducing violent crime.

In what may be his most controversial conclusion, Lott finds that mass public shootings, such as the infamous examples of the Long Island Railroad by Colin Ferguson or the 1996 Empire State Building shooting, are dramatically reduced once law-abiding citizens in a state are allowed to carry concealed handguns.

Friday June 30, 2000

Japan Suicide Rate Clings Near Record High

TOKYO (Reuters) - In November last year, an unemployed Japanese factory worker drove his car into the sea near Tokyo, taking his life as well as those of his wife and three young children.

This incident was far from isolated. Statistics show that more than 30,000 Japanese killed themselves last year--the second highest figure on record, and a grim sign that social and economic turmoil still rocks a nation once known for stability.

SUQ AL-TALH, Yemen — Want to buy a submachine gun?

This little market town in the wild, wild north of Yemen has more than 50 shops selling all kinds of toys for boys. A used Uzi goes for $170, a machine pistol with silencer is $350, and a brand-new AK-47 assault rifle goes for nearly $400.

Grenades are $4 each. An antitank mine is $22. A rocket-propelled grenade launcher is $500. An arms merchant I met here might even be able to find you an antiaircraft gun or a tank. No sales tax.

This is Yemen, where we're preparing to send American soldiers to open a new front in the war on terrorism. I admire the instinct of trying to boost security here, but the bottom line is that we're going to send our troops on a poorly defined mission into a country where they're not wanted, where grenades cost $4 each

And if you're so bothered by gun registration, and so convinced that guns don't kill people, then consider moving to a nice mud-brick home here in Suq al-Talh. With you and everybody else carrying around an assault rifle, with armor-piercing rounds in your bandolier, with a couple of grenades in your pockets, you'll really feel safe. You'll love the freedom!

But the main criticism is that you panicked and signed long-term contracts at a very high cost.

If I didn't panic, you wouldn't be able to put out your paper. I saved this friggin' paper. I kept the lights on in this state. Do you understand that? I kept the lights on.

President Bush didn't really do anything until his approval rating in California had fallen to 26 percent. Isn't that true?

He appointed (Nora) Brownell and Pat Wood (to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission). They helped save our behinds. He may have taken a while to do it, and I think the world of President Clinton but the Clinton administration didn't give us any help. They were just trying to get us to raise rates 300-400 percent and I wasn't going to do that.

Legally, Bush's attempt to sidestep Congress in effect will reverse the 1973 Supreme Court Roe vs. Wade ruling that a fetus is not a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Regarding public morality and the law, the American Jesuits have stated: "In a pluralistic society, a fundamental assumption of public policy is the recognition that everything immoral need not be declared illegal – social realities as well as religious principles must be taken into account in judging the wisdom of any legislation." Further, "the pro-lifers' branding of alternate viewpoints as immoral suggests a kind of moral fascism."

In re-igniting the abortion controversy while the country is absorbed with far more weighty problems, the Bush administration obviously disagrees with these views.

"The era of Chinese being bullied is long past," Li was quoted as telling Ambassador Clark Randt, adding: "In the world today, it is a very proud thing to be a Chinese."

In fact, it's extremely rare. It didn't happen at all when Republicans controlled the committee during the Clinton years. The sole Clinton nominee to be defeated was Ronnie White--and he at least made it out of committee and onto the floor, where a majority voted against his nomination.

A nominee was last defeated in committee in 1991, when Democrats stopped Kenneth Ryskamp, nominated by the first President Bush for the 11th Circuit, on a 7-7 vote. The time before that was 1988, when Reagan nominee Bernard Siegan never made it out of Judiciary. Again, the Democrats were in control. A third Republican nominee, Jeff Sessions, was defeated in 1986, this time to the federal district court; Mr. Sessions is now a Senator from Alabama and sits on Judiciary himself.

The Democrat-run Judiciary Committee almost managed to kill two other circuit-court nominations during the Reagan years: Daniel Manion, nominee for the Seventh Circuit in 1986, and Susan Liebeler, nominee for the Federal Circuit in 1988. In both cases, the first vote--on whether to send the nomination to the floor with a recommendation--failed. A second vote succeeded, however, and the nominations went to the floor without recommendation. Judge Manion was confirmed; Mr. Reagan's term expired before the Senate voted on Ms. Liebeler.

Senator Leahy used to disavow this kind of brute partisan force. Five years ago he said: "Every Senator can vote against any nominee. Every Senator has that right. . . . They can vote against them [in] this committee and on the floor. But it is the responsibility of the U.S. Senate to at least bring them to a vote." Joe Biden, who also plans to kill Judge Pickering in committee, said in 1997 that "I also respectfully suggest that everyone who is nominated is entitled to have a shot, to have a hearing and to have a shot to be heard on the floor and have a vote on the floor."

And that's the rub for California National Guard Maj. Gen. Paul Monroe and his counterparts in other states.

"I'm worried about these troops," Monroe said.

While he supports National Guard use, Monroe, the state adjutant general, said border duty puts guardsmen in harm's way – both physically and legally.

He is concerned that guardsmen will be working beside armed federal agents who are conducting inspections and doing other potentially hazardous duties, yet the guardsmen have no weapons for their own defense.

District INS director Adele Fasano downplayed the top brass's concerns, saying she is "very comfortable with this arrangement."

She said the guardsmen won't be enforcing laws, but instead will help search vehicles and provide traffic and crowd control. Troops will not be placed in areas where they could be in danger, she said.

Further, Fasano believes it would be unwise to arm guardsmen in this case because they haven't received the months of specialized training given border inspectors.

"We couldn't properly train soldiers in a short period of time," she said.

Saudi Courage
When a gang of Arab terrorists, most of them Saudis, slammed a pair of hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center, New York firemen rushed into the burning towers to save people. By the time the buildings collapsed, 343 firemen had lost their lives, accounting for more than 10% of the deaths in the Sept. 11 atrocities.

When fire broke out at a girls' school in Mecca on Monday, Saudi firemen tried to save the students. Here's what happened, according to CNN:

The al-Eqtisadiah daily said firemen scuffled with members of the religious police, also known as "mutaween," after they tried to keep the girls inside the burning building because they did not wear head scarves and abayas (black robes) as required by the kingdom's strict interpretation of Islam.

The English-language Saudi Gazette, in a front-page report on Thursday, quoted witnesses as saying that members of the police, known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, had stopped men who tried to help the girls warning "it is a sinful to approach them."

One civil defence officer told al-Eqtisadiah he saw three members of the religious police "beating young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya."

Fifteen girls died in the blaze. The official Saudi reaction, reported in the Arab News, sounds like a coverup: "The Civil Defense Department has prepared an official report which casts doubt on whether the members of the Commission for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice who allegedly played a role in hampering rescue operation at the fire-hit Makkah [Mecca] girls' school were really members of the organization."

The appointment of Jewish mogul Richard Blum over Dr. Manuela Sosa is just another example of how Jews dominate not only the media, politics and finance but also academia. This power imbalance must not continue or we might be headed for a situation similar to Palestine. We should not replace the outgoing UC Riverside Chancellor who is Jewish with another Jew. Enough is enough. Ya Basta!

BEIJING, March 14 – A group of 25 North Koreans, threatening suicide and claiming they faced starvation and oppression at home, burst into the grounds of the Spanish Embassy today and demanded political asylum.

A German doctor who helped organize the break-in vowed that it was the beginning of an underground railroad from North Korea to the outside world.

Masquerading as a tour group, the band, all sporting black hats, walked down a side street in one of Beijing's embassy districts, and then rushed through open embassy gates just behind a van, witnesses said. A Chinese policeman tackled one refugee at the gate but the man broke through, leaving the guard with only his hat. Once inside the embassy, the group erupted in a raucous cheer.

China's foreign ministry reacted swiftly to the incident announcing that it did not regard the North Koreans as refugees, and thereby liable to protection under international covenants. However, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said China was "in contact with the relevant parties so as to find a proper solution to the issues" – a remark that led some diplomats to conclude that, like last time, China was willing to let the North Koreans leave China.

Diplomatic sources said the group of 25, including six families plus two orphaned girls, then descended on the kitchen of the Spanish ambassador's residence, also on the grounds, and ate all of the food that was to be served tonight at a banquet for a Chinese minister.

WASHINGTON - A fetus outside a woman's body that has a heartbeat or is breathing on its own would be considered "born alive" and given legal protection under a bill approved by the House.

The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, approved by voice vote Tuesday night, would amend the legal definition of "person," "human being," "child" and "individual" to include a fetus that is either breathing or has a heartbeat once out of the womb as part of an abortion procedure.

Nurse Jill Stanek has testified extensively to what has become known as "live-birth abortion." It isn't really abortion at all, however. She witnessed the brutal practice at Christ Hospital and Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Illinois, where she was employed: Children are delivered and simply purposely left unattended, to die. These are cases where it is clear that the baby is a baby and he is very much alive.

In congressional testimony last year, Stanek said:

One night, a nursing co-worker was taking an aborted Down syndrome baby who was born alive to our soiled utility room because his parents did not want to hold him, and she did not have time to hold him. I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone in a soiled utility room, so I cradled and rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived. He was 21 to 22 weeks old, weighed about half a pound, and was about 10 inches long. He was too weak to move very much, expending any energy he had trying to breathe. Toward the end he was so quiet that I couldn't tell if he was still alive unless I held him up to the light to see if his heart was still beating through his chest wall.

The bill is what its father, NRO contributor Hadley Arkes, calls the "most modest first step imaginable on the issue of abortion." To oppose the bill is to affirm that the right to choose includes the right to have a dead baby-even if that means having it killed. Of course, in the age of "wrongful birth" suits this isn't foreign. In fact, it's almost a surprise that there is still some sense of shock or general disapproval at what Stanek testifies to.

My name is Gianna Jessen. I would like to say thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I count it no small thing to speak the truth. I depend solely on the grace of God to do this. I am 23 years old. I was aborted and I did not die. My biological mother was 7 months pregnant when she went to Planned Parenthood in southern California and they advised her to have a late-term saline abortion.

A saline abortion is a solution of salt saline that is injected into the mothers womb. The baby then gulps the solution, it burns the baby inside and out and then the mother is to deliver a dead baby within 24 hours.

This happened to me! I remained in the solution for approximately 18 hours and was delivered ALIVE on April 6, 1977 at 6:00 am in a California abortion clinic. There were young women in the room who had already been given their injections and were waiting to deliver dead babies. When they saw me they experienced the horror of murder. A nurse called an ambulance, while the abortionist was not yet on duty, and had me transferred to the hospital. I weighed a mere two pounds. I was saved by the sheer power of Jesus Christ.

Ladies and gentleman I should be blind, burned.....I should be dead! And yet, I live! Due to a lack of oxygen supply during the abortion I live with cerebral palsy.

When I was diagnosed with this, all I could do was lie there. "They" said that was all I would ever do! Through prayer and hard work by my foster mother, I was walking at age 3 1/2 with the help of a walker and leg braces. At that time I was also adopted into my wonderful family. Today I am left only with a slight limp. I no longer have need of a walker or leg braces.

The Chinese government says it is "deeply shocked" at reports of U.S. military plans to target seven countries, including China, for the possible future use of nuclear weapons.

Speaking to reporters in Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi called on Washington to explain the reports which first appeared in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times at the weekend.

According to the newspapers, the secret "nuclear posture review" was passed to the U.S. Congress by the Pentagon in January outlining the possible use of nuclear weapons against countries that possess or are developing weapons of mass destruction.

Apart from China the countries listed on the report are Libya, Syria Russia, Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

It is not possible, either, to quibble with his positions regarding race without being accused of Borking him as a racist, which, as a white Mississippian raised on the gruel of Jim Crow, he once was. (As a law school student, he suggested a way to tighten the state's ban on interracial marriages.)

But that was then, we are told, and this is now. Okay. But now -- which is to say the past 20 years or so -- encompasses a political-judicial career that has been so conservative it is downright reactionary. Not racist, mind you, but hostile to the Voting Rights Act. Not racist, but hostile to the concept of one man, one vote. Not racist, but hostile to plaintiffs in employment discrimination cases and a bit too solicitous of a goon who burned a cross on the lawn of an interracial couple. Pickering contorted both the law and himself to get the guy a reduced sentence.

To his opponents on the Senate Judiciary Committee -- Democrats all -- this cross-burning case stands out. It does so because it is an example of Pickering's getting so worked up over something that he busted through ethical barriers to achieve his purpose. With the cross-burner, he contacted the Justice Department and the prosecutors to get a reduced sentence. This, the experts tell us, is highly inappropriate.

It is also somewhat odd. Judges frequently are compelled by federal regulation to issue disparate and sometimes excessive sentences. One defendant pleads and gets a light sentence. Another refuses a plea and gets the book thrown at him. This is what happened in the cross-burning case.

For a conservative, Pickering can be quite unconservative. As a judge he was overruled 15 times without comment by an appeals court that found him so wrong on the law that the matter just wasn't worth discussing.

Pickering is opposed by his state's black law association as well as the state and national NAACP. It's apparently true that in his hometown, the minority community likes him just fine, but they are judging the man and not the jurist. It is the latter who could do real damage to the body of laws that protect civil rights, not because he is a racist but because he is implacably and, sometimes, hyperventally conservative.

In a way that TV emphasizes, he seems smaller than the office he occupies, less the master of his (or our) fate even than he was when he first took office. More and more he reminds me of that old commercial where the actor says, "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on television."

It is the same with Bush. I, for one, don't think Bush is a dope. But he sure plays one on television.

"I was just looking up, thinking: 'How bad is it up there, that the better option is to jump?' "

The United States is "wantonly infringing upon human rights of other countries" with military and political actions.

American mass media are "inundated with violent content," which in turn encourages more violence. "A culture beautifying violence has made young people believe that the gun can `solve' all problems," the report says.

Racism and discrimination continue unabated.

Police brutality, torture and forced confession "are common," and death row is full of "misjudged or wronged" inmates. Prisons are overcrowded and inhumane.

Americans living in poverty are "the forgotten `third world' within this superpower," and the gap between rich and poor is growing.

Violence against women and sexual abuse of children are common. It cited sexual molestations of children by American clergy, calling that "the greatest scandal in the United States following the Enron case."

There's plenty of laughter and a little sadness in the hunting community over an incident involving a deer that collided with an automobile driven by two animal rights campaigners who belong to the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The folks who worship at the altar of animals now want to sue a New Jersey game department over the incident, claiming it's the state's fault that it happened.

No, this is not an April Fool's joke — April is still weeks away. Besides, our newspaper frowns on such things. This is the real deal.

On Feb.14, PETA legal counsel Matthew Penzer sent a letter to Bob McDowell, director of the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife, that said, "Pursuant to New Jersey state law, this will serve as notice that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Dan Shannon and Jay Kelly each reserves the right to bring an action for damages and/or injuries sustained in an automobile crash on November 16, 2001. Shortly before 1 o'clock in the morning on that date, while driving a Honda Civic belonging to PETA and while returning from a PETA [anti-hunt] campaigning tour, southbound on the New Jersey Turnpike, a deer darted out in front of the car and a collision resulted. The collision occurred at or near mile marker 15.4 in Woolwich Township, Gloucester County. Damage to the car was severe, resulting in a repair bill that exceeded $6,000.00 and loss of use of the car for nearly two months. The total amount of damages is, as yet, unknown.

"PETA, Mr. Shannon and Mr. Kelly believe that this collision, which occurred near the start of New Jersey's hunting season, was caused by the state's Department of Environmental Protection Fish and Wildlife Division and the Fish and Game Council as a result of their deer management program, which includes, in certain circumstances, an affirmative effort to increase deer populations. Despite the known dangers an increased deer population poses to motorists in the state, the Division and Council actively assist in increasing the deer population for the purpose of enhancing hunting opportunities and license revenues. The result, as was the case here, is a significant number of auto-deer collisions each year, causing significant injuries and property damage."

Proceeding the Santa Barbara conference in 1969, at Denver, Colorado was the National Chicano Youth Conference that drafted the basic premises for the Chicano and Chicana Movement in El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (EPEDA). A synopsis of El Plan stipulates: 1) We are Chicanos and Chicanas of Aztlán reclaiming the land of out birth (Chicano and Chicana Nation); 2) Aztlán belongs to indigenous people, who are sovereign and not subject to a foreign culture; 3) We are a union of free pueblos forming a bronze nation; 4) Chicano and Chicana nationalism, as the key in mobilization and organization, is the common denominator to bring consensus to the Chicano and Chicana Movement. 5) Cultural values strengthen our identity as La Familia de La Raza; and 6) EPEDA, as a basic plan of Chicano and Chicana liberation, sought the formation of an independent national political party that would represent the sentiments of the Chicano and Chicana community.

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

Q. What is White Nationalism?

A. The idea that Whites may need to create a separate nation as a means of defending themselves.

Q. Do White Nationalists feel they are superior to other races?

A. No. The desire of White Nationalists to form their own nation has nothing to do with superiority or inferiority.

Q. Do White Nationalists seek to dominate other races?

A. Not at all. In fact, formation of a White nation removes any possibility of White dominance of other races, as well as the plausibility of the accusation that Whites wish to dominate others.

As the largest segment of the Alta California population, we are not going to stand by while our university and colleges students are unjustly attacked by Jewish/White racist students. We will hold campus administrators ultimately responsible. Our collective community consisting of countless Mexican-American educators and families have worked very hard, starting at kindergarten, to open the doors of the institutions of higher learning. We will not allow a small group of morons and bigots at our universities to deny equal educational opportunity for our students.

Tom Pitoniak, associate editor at dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster, said "corporate welfare" has been used at least since 1979, when the federal government bailed out Chrysler Corp.

"He may think he was the first, but it sounds like someone has been using this term before," Pitoniak said.

A July 1976 article in The Economist decried Japan's "corporate welfare socialism." David Lewis, father of Canada's New Democratic Party, was railing against "corporate welfare bums" -- big businesses who failed to pay their share of taxes -- in 1972.

Reich's campaign manager, Mark Longabaugh, said liberals and conservatives alike have given Reich credit for the phrase -- even if he didn't "invent" it.

"I'm not going to dispute that somebody might have used the term prior to 1990, but clearly there are a lot of people of various stripes who credit Robert Reich with popularizing the term in a political context," Longabaugh said.

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- The nuns from the School Sisters of St. Francis may have taken a vow of poverty, but that doesn't mean they don't want their full Social Security benefits.

The 21 nuns have been fighting the government to restore their full benefits since 1995, when they were cut from $900 a month to less than $700. Their attorneys asked a federal judge last week to spur their case into federal court.

The Social Security Administration decided seven years ago that because nuns take a vow of poverty, the Roman Catholic church and community should make up the difference.

The nuns, who range in age from 75 to 95, live in a Bellvue nursing home. Their benefits don't cover their living expenses; loans and donations make up the deficit, their attorneys said.

A Navy SEAL who fell from a helicopter during a mountain firefight was captured by Al Qaeda forces as his commanders watched helplessly on a drone's TV screen and later executed, U.S. battle commanders said yesterday.

"We saw him on the Predator being dragged off by three Al Qaeda men," said Maj. Gen. Frank Hagenbeck, who watched the battle in real time by a transmission from a Predator spy drone overhead.

Air Force commandos later recovered the body of Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Neil Roberts, 32, after a fierce 14-hour firefight Monday in which seven Americans were killed and two helicopters were lost.

Maj. Ralph Mills of the U.S. Central Command said Roberts survived the fall and was executed by gunfire.

The revelations come as five British men, detained in connection with anti-western terrorist bombings in the kingdom, await a trial date. Despite spending up to 15 months in solitary confinement they have not yet been charged.

The Guardian has revealed that a number of other men arrested in connection with the bombings and subsequently released were tortured by interior ministry officials seeking confessions. Our investigation also showed that the detained men could not have carried out the attacks as the Saudi authorities allege.

The Filipino torture victims were seized from prayer meetings by the Saudi religious police, the muttawa, who took them to Al Milaz prison.

Drawings smuggled out of the jail depict the Christians being lashed by prison guards, who urged them to confess to being priests and to convert to Islam.

One released prisoner says he was subjected to sleep deprivation techniques similar to those used on the Britons, and another claims that Filipino prisoners have been killed by guards in Al Milaz.

"I never made that statement, but you can tell Gov. Bush to rest assured that I'm not going to leave the country because we have to get him out of office and we have to get his brother out of office in 2004. We're not resting until we get that done."

Even if he had made the statement, Baldwin said there was still no reason to leave.

"Bush wasn't elected, he was selected - selected by five judges up in Washington who voted along party lines," Baldwin said.

It's really a social contract: each generation pays taxes that support the previous generation's retirement, and expects to receive the same treatment from the next generation.

You may believe that Franklin Roosevelt should never have created this system in the first place. I disagree, but in any case Social Security exists, and older Americans have upheld their end of the bargain. In particular, baby boomers have spent their working years paying quite high payroll taxes, which were used mainly to support their elders, and only secondarily to help Social Security build up a financial reserve. And they expect to be supported in their turn.

Mr. Bush proposes to allow younger workers to place their payroll taxes in private accounts — in effect, to break this ongoing contract. But then what happens to older workers, who have already paid their dues?

There are only two possibilities. One is default: make room for the trillions diverted into private accounts by slashing the baby boomers' benefits. The other is to buy the baby boomers out — that is, to use money from other sources to replace the diverted funds.

Private accounts won't "save" Social Security. On the contrary, they will create a financing crisis, requiring sharp benefit cuts, large infusions of money from unspecified outside sources, or both.

If converting Social Security to a system of private retirement accounts is such a good idea, why can't advocates of that conversion try, just once, to make their case without insisting that 1+1=4?

In Dr. Moore's rendition, all recruits for an interstellar odyssey would be guaranteed the opportunity, though not the requirement, to marry and have children. Mate choice would be part of the bargain as well, with the population cannily structured so that each cohort of individuals, on reaching sexual maturity, would have about 10 potential partners of a similar age to select from.

Dr. Moore and his colleagues have developed a computer simulation called Ethnopop, in which they asked how large the crew must be in order to maintain genetic variability over time while still allowing crew members a choice of sex partners. They determined that a founding crew could be as small as 80 to 100 people and stay viable for more than a thousand years, assuming that two rules were followed: women waited until they were in their mid-30's or so before having children, and they had only a couple each. Counterintuitive though it may seem, said Dr. Moore, delayed childbearing and small families are known to help maintain genetic variability in a closed population.

SNOW: Now, a couple of months ago, you gave an economic speech, and you talked about the president's tax plan. Let me read you a quote from that and then a follow-up thing from The Washington Post.

First you said, "Not only did the tax cut fail to prevent a recession, as its supporters said it would, it probably made the recession worse."

Now, The Washington Post had a news article, well, just yesterday. It said, "After-tax or disposable personal income was 1.6 percent in January in part because of the tax-cutting legislation enacted last year."

Do you stand by your earlier remarks?

DASCHLE: Absolutely. Absolutely, Tony. My feeling has always been that we exacerbated, significantly, the long-term interest-rate problem by creating the debt that we're in now.

You both have been very aggressive over the years in saying, you know, that fiscal management, fiscal policy is important. Fiscal policy is important here. The more we compete in the private sector for the available money, for whatever purpose, I think, the higher the interests rates are going to go. And interest rates...

SNOW: But at this point, long-term interest rates are down since the president took office.

DASCHLE: Long-term interest rates have actually gone up slightly last year. I don't know what they are today, but they have actually gone up. All the other interest rates were cut. We didn't see this same corresponding reduction in long-term interest rates that we saw in the short-term rates.

And the only reason for that is because most investors will tell you that they expect the government, once again, as we did in the '80s and early '90s, that once again the government was going to be competing with the private sector for available resources. And that's going to drive up long-term interest rates, and that will have an affect on housing and other long-term investments that we've got to be concerned about.

SNOW: Right now housing is going through the roof, so evidently they haven't gotten the memo yet.

The probe resulted in part from a meeting Babbitt had in July 1995 with an Arizona lawyer who was pressing him to approve the gambling license. Babbitt later acknowledged in Senate testimony that he essentially told a white lie to end the meeting by claiming that Harold Ickes, then White House deputy chief of staff, had told him a decision on the casino needed to be made that day.

In a statement, Bruce said the evidence "would not support a finding of a criminal 'quid pro quo' -- an explicit agreement between any opponent of the casino application and any government official involved in the Hudson decision to perform an official act in exchange for a political contribution."

The report by the Interior Department's inspector general characterized the agency's handling of the Duwamish petition and five others approved at the end of the Clinton administration as "highly unusual." Four were approved by Mr. Anderson's predecessor, Kevin Gover.

In each case, the decision went against recommendations by bureau staff members assigned to determine if the tribes met the criteria for recognition.

The bill would ban soft money--unlimited, loosely regulated contributions to national political parties--from all donors, including Indians. But it eases some restrictions on hard money donations--sums that may be given directly to congressional and presidential candidates, as well as parties.

Indian tribes, though, are part of a small category of donors that would not have to abide by an overall cap on these hard money contributions.

As a result, while the typical individual could give the new maximum donation of $2,000 to a relatively small number of federal candidates, tribes could funnel contributions of this size to as many candidates as they want--potentially hundreds.

The Schumer amendment fixes an anti-fraud provision in the election bill. The provision says that new voters, including those who have moved to a different county, must verify their identity by showing a photo ID, a utility bill or some other official document with their address on it. This provision may have the good effect of preventing some fraud. But it also may disqualify voters with no driver's license and no utility bills in their own name -- and this group of potentially disqualified voters is much bigger than the likely number of fraudulent ballots.

Some 3 million disabled people are thought not to have driver's licenses or other qualifying picture IDs, and many of them may live in homes where the utility bills go to some other member of the household. Poor people without cars and settled homes may be disenfranchised too. The anti-fraud provision also threatens the vote-by-mail systems in Oregon, Washington and Colorado. It would require voters to photocopy proof of identity and send it in along with the ballot. But some voters live out of convenient range of photocopiers. Others may be put off by the sheer hassle.

The Schumer amendment would fix this danger by allowing states to accept other types of proof of identity -- for example, a signature.

Scholars like Mr. Luxenberg and Gerd- R. Puin, who teaches at Saarland University in Germany, have returned to the earliest known copies of the Koran in order to grasp what it says about the document's origins and composition. Mr. Luxenberg explains these copies are written without vowels and diacritical dots that modern Arabic uses to make it clear what letter is intended. In the eighth and ninth centuries, more than a century after the death of Muhammad, Islamic commentators added diacritical marks to clear up the ambiguities of the text, giving precise meanings to passages based on what they considered to be their proper context. Mr. Luxenberg's radical theory is that many of the text's difficulties can be clarified when it is seen as closely related to Aramaic, the language group of most Middle Eastern Jews and Christians at the time.

For example, the famous passage about the virgins is based on the word hur, which is an adjective in the feminine plural meaning simply "white." Islamic tradition insists the term hur stands for "houri," which means virgin, but Mr. Luxenberg insists that this is a forced misreading of the text. In both ancient Aramaic and in at least one respected dictionary of early Arabic, hur means "white raisin."

Mr. Luxenberg has traced the passages dealing with paradise to a Christian text called Hymns of Paradise by a fourth-century author. Mr. Luxenberg said the word paradise was derived from the Aramaic word for garden and all the descriptions of paradise described it as a garden of flowing waters, abundant fruits and white raisins, a prized delicacy in the ancient Near East. In this context, white raisins, mentioned often as hur, Mr. Luxenberg said, makes more sense than a reward of sexual favors.

China cut off power and water on Friday to a group of elderly Christians, detained during U.S. President George W. Bush's recent visit, in an attempt to evict them from an old people's home, its manager said on Friday.

Chen Zhongxin, 63, manager of the home where police picked up 47 Christians when they gathered to pray last week, said local officials had dispatched workers to shut off electricity and water at the home in northern Beijing's Changping district.

Nine elderly Christians, the oldest 98, and two children, one blind and one retarded, live at the makeshift brick facility on the outskirts of the capital, he said.

"Everybody here knows we are just a group of old Christians. We want nothing from society but an explanation why this happened to us," Chen said.

A sudden partisan firefight over a proposal to require proof of identification from first-time voters threatened Wednesday to torpedo a Senate bill to upgrade voting systems across the country.

Democrats, opposing the proposal, say it could depress turnout in areas with large populations of minority or elderly voters, who often do not have identification handy when they go to the polls.

Republicans, decrying lax regulations in some states that allow the names of dogs and dead people onto voter rolls, say a requirement of a photo ID, such as a driver's license, or some other verification of identity and residence, is essential to deter fraud.