As the Bush administration emerges triumphant from a war in Iraq that faced heavy opposition from across the globe, President Bush and his national security advisers are struggling to identify the best mix of confrontation and conciliation to achieve other foreign policy goals that are being expanded and refined in the wake of the collapse of Saddam Hussein's government.

At almost every turn, the administration will face a choice over whether to accommodate its policy to the concerns of others, or whether to push ahead, sure of its own convictions and confident that others will follow.

Of course, Iraq has long been considered the most vulnerable target on the "axis of evil" list. Mr. Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, have made it clear they don't want a military fight with North Korea, a more fearsome adversary. While the world focused on Iraq last week, the administration backed down from insisting that the Security Council condemn the North's nuclear programs.

There is also Iran, racing ahead with its own nuclear program. There, the White House is talking of pressing for inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose work it belittled in Iraq, while hoping that the country's reformers go critical before its weapons project does.

From the start in Iraq, Ms. Rice made it clear that in her view Saddam Hussein would never back down and that, sooner or later, military action would become necessary. Yet she makes the opposite argument about the other "axis of evil" members. Iraq, she insists, was "a unique case."

The big question coming out of the fall of Baghdad is whether America's other enemies, and its potential enemies, will take away the lessons Mr. Bush intends. Perhaps they will live in fear that they are next, and reconsider the wisdom of amassing fearsome arsenals. But they could as easily draw the opposite conclusion: that Saddam Hussein sealed his own fate when he took on the United States before he had nuclear weapons in his closet. That, they could conclude, is the only way to assure that the United States military stays away.

Many of the officials and delegates I spoke with said that the United States could have got its way had it behaved with greater regard for the U.N. and for the niceties of multilateralism. One U.N. political professional said to me that the debate became a referendum not on the means of disarming Iraq but on the American use of power: ''The members ended up feeling that they had to stand up to American unilateralism.'' I tried out this theory on Juan Gabriel Valdes, the ambassador from Chile, a pivotal member of the 10 ''nonpermanent'' members of the council during the Iraq debate. Valdes blamed the French for eliminating the possibility of a common ground, but also the Bush administration for what he called a ''double discourse.'' There was, he said, ''a discourse here that gave a lot of importance to the U.N., and there was a discourse in the papers based on statements from nonidentified authorities in Washington who indicated that the U.N. was just a formal and somewhat cumbersome procedure that had to be followed, but that wouldn't change the fact and the direction of American decisions.'' Valdes did not appreciate being asked to serve as a rubber stamp.

There is a theory that the United States needs the U.N. as much as the other way around. As the one global actor, the U.S. has the greatest possible stake in the solution of global problems like AIDS, refugees and of course terrorism -- problems that require the mobilization of the whole world, and thus the engagement of the U.N. Ambassador Valdes of Chile says that he recites this mantra to himself all the time, even as he sees the U.S. drifting further from the U.N. Certainly the U.S. will continue to find the U.N. a useful forum for the solution, or at least the discussion, of all sorts of problems. The big question is whether these problems include first-order issues of peace and security.

The new assaults on the conventional wisdom frame themselves, without exception, as scientific theories, no less deserving of a hearing than any other. Proponents of [Intelligent Design] - using a strategy previously unheard of among anti-Darwinists - grant almost all the premises of evolution (the idea that species develop; that the world wasn't necessarily created in seven days) in order to better attack it.

``I am concerned that right off the bat, USAID is limiting competition,'' said Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins, a Maine Republican. ``Fair and full competition would ensure the best value for American taxpayers.''

Collins was joined in introducing the legislation -- the ``Sunshine in Iraq Reconstruction Contracting Act of 2003'' -- by [Sens. Lieberman, Clinton, Wyden, and Byrd]...Their measure would require that specific justifying documents for any noncompetitive bidding process be made public no later than 30 days after a contract is signed. Failure to comply could allow another company to challenge the process...

Indian defence minister joins Pakistan pre-emptive strike chorus

JODHPUR, India (AFP) - Defence Minister George Fernandes reiterated Indian warnings that Pakistan was a prime case for pre-emptive strikes.

"There are enough reasons to launch such strikes against Pakistan, but I cannot make public statements on whatever action that may be taken," Fernandes told a meeting of ex-soldiers in this northern Indian desert city on Friday.

The Pentagon contract given without competition to a Halliburton subsidiary to fight oil well fires in Iraq is worth as much as $7 billion over two years, according to a letter from the Army Corps of Engineers that was released today.

Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive from 1995 until 2000. When he left the company to run for vice president, Mr. Cheney received over $30 million in compensation.

So, we've got a crook, a Zionist and an old spy who thinks this is the beginning of WWIV set to run Iraq. How lucky can the Iraqis get? Is this what we thought we were fighting for?

British forces shot and killed five men trying to rob a bank who opened fire on them in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, the scene of looting over the past week, a U.S. military spokesman said on Friday.

"In the last Gulf War, as troops, we were ordered to murder from a safe distance. We remember the road to Basra-the Highway of Death-where we were ordered to kill fleeing Iraqis. We bulldozed trenches, burying people alive. The use of depleted uranium weapons left the battlefields radioactive. One in four Gulf War veterans is disabled. There must come a time when being a citizen of the world takes precedence over being a soldier of a nation. Now is that time."

How far we have come from the days when the bombing of Guernica was universally denounced as a war crime. That which was outrageous for our parents becomes-in the 16-day bombing of Baghdad, where women and children huddled in closets and cellars-a mere TV documentary on the triumph of technology.

"this legislation, if enacted, would do serious harm to the basic structure of the sentencing guideline system and would seriously impair the ability of courts to impose just and responsible sentences."

April 11, 2003 | WASHINGTON (AP) -- When war ends in Iraq, President Bush will quickly shift focus to his 2004 re-election campaign and the issue that kept his father from winning a second term: a weak economy. The money, message and much of Bush's political machine are already in place. After weeks of careful planning, the White House hopes to convert postwar political momentum into a string of successes for Bush's domestic agenda and ammunition for re-election. The elder Bush failed to capitalize on his popularity after Operation Desert Storm in early 1991, a mistake no Republicans want to see happen again.

"I believe the president will emerge from the war with enhanced ability to stimulate the economy," said House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., a close ally of the White House. "And that's not only the right thing to do but, obviously, it's the element that has the most potential to have an impact between now and 2004," Blunt said.

The images of the Iraq war being shown by media beyond the U.S. are more graphic and violent than most of what American viewers have seen on their TV channels and in their newspapers and magazines. Whether as a matter of politics or taste, U.S. media outlets traditionally do not present audiences with viscerally troubling visual evidence of war's insults to the human body.

As a service to our readers, Salon has assembled several links to photos of the Iraq war's carnage that have not been widely distributed offline in the U.S.

The photographs -- mostly from Al-Jazeera or from international press agencies reproduced in the Arab press -- are appearing on third-party sites (Al-Jazeera's own Web sites have been subject to technical problems throughout the war), and we cannot vouch for their authenticity or the accuracy of the information provided about them. Also please keep in mind that the images in many cases display a level of gore substantially greater than what the American media typically offers. Many readers may find them disturbing. Click at your own risk.

PRESIDENT BUSH must have worked hard to dream up an escalation of the judicial nomination wars as dramatic as his decision this week to nominate Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. A protege of Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, Mr. Pryor is a parody of what Democrats imagine Mr. Bush to be plotting for the federal courts. We have argued strongly in favor of several of Mr. Bush's nominees -- and urged fair and swift consideration of all. And we have criticized Democratic attacks on nominees of substance and quality. But we have also urged Mr. Bush to look for common ground on judicial nominations, to address legitimate Democratic grievances and to seek nominees of such stature as defies political objection. The Pryor nomination shows that Mr. Bush has other ideas.

Asleep and unable to hear the frantic shouts of adults, 28 deaf boys perished early today after fire consumed their boarding school in the Caspian Sea city of Makhachkala, in Russia's Dagestan province. At least 106 others were injured, 22 of them critically.

Dagestan officials said the fire, which may have stemmed from electrical problems, broke out about 2:20 a.m. in the two-story school, which housed 159 boys between ages seven or eight and 14 in a dormitory on its second floor.
Only about 25 children escaped unscathed, some by jumping out second-story windows, the RTR television network reported.

Teachers struggled for several minutes to awaken children from slumber before giving up and summoning firemen, who were unable to control a fire that was whipped by gale-force winds. Within two and one-half hours, the building had burned virtually to the ground, the Interfax news service reported.

Is there a connection between Iraq and the perpetrators of 9/11? Is that connection really bigger than that of all the countries we're not invading? Does Iraq really have or almost have weapons of mass destruction that threaten the United States? What will toppling Saddam ultimately cost in dollars and in lives (American, Iraqi, others)? Will the result be a stable Iraq and a blossoming of democracy in the Middle East or something less attractive? How many young Muslims and others will be turned against the United States, and what will they do about it? Should we be doing this despite the opposition of most of our traditional allies? Without the approval of the United Nations? Is it justified to make "pre-emptive" war on nations that may threaten us in the future? When do internal human rights, or the lack of them, justify a war? Is there a policy about pre-emption and human rights that we are prepared to apply consistently? Does consistency matter?

"The Democrats were on the wrong side of the Civil War, the Cold War and now the Iraq War," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and an all-purpose chest-thumper on matters Right Wing. "Their batting average on these things is right up there with France."

"This is going to be George Bush's day for a while," [Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist] said. "Anyone who feels inclined to criticize him should shut up and sit down. He was right, they were wrong. Never kick a man when he's up."

In 2001, Mr. Murdoch lost a bidding contest for control of Hughes to EchoStar Communications, the nation's second-largest satellite operator. That deal was rejected by regulators late last year after Mr. Murdoch waged a behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign — circulating a 123-page volume opposing the deal called "The Essential Guide to the EchoStar/DirecTV Deal" around Washington — to block the agreement, giving him a second chance.

Of course, the News Corporation's deal for Hughes will also require the approval of regulators, including the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission, and some consumer groups are already calling for this deal to be blocked as well. But unlike the deal with EchoStar, which would have combined the nation's two largest satellite television companies, legal experts suggest that the deal with the News Corporation will be approved because the company does not already compete in the satellite distribution business in the United States.

Peter Arnett was fired from NBC for pinch-hitting for Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's minister of information.

Leading cleric hacked to death in mosque

A leading Iraqi cleric and a member of President Saddam Hussein's Ministry of Religion were hacked to death by a crowd at a mosque, at Najaf, in southern Iraq today.

The killings occurred at the shrine of Imam Ali, one of the holiest sites of Shiite Islam, practised by the majority of Iraqis. ...

Both men were then rushed by the crowd and hacked to death with swords and knives, witnesses said. An unknown number of people were injured."Al Kadar was an animal," said Adil Adnan al–Moussawi, aged 25, who witnessed the confrontation.

"The people were shouting they hate him, he should not be here."

Mr Khoei is among the most prominent of Iraq's returned exiles. His father was the revered Shiite cleric Ayatollah Abul–Qassim al–Khoi, who was the religion's spiritual leader during a Shiite uprising against Saddam in 1991.

Still another fear looms over Christian communities in Iraq, one that involves a threat posed by fellow Christians rather than by Muslims, say religious leaders and officials from faith-based humanitarian organizations in the area.

"There's concern that Christian [aid] organizations, many of them gathering on the border in Amman, [Jordan], will descend like a flock of vultures" in an effort to convert Muslims to Christianity, said Jim Jennings, founder of Conscience International, an independent humanitarian group specializing in medical care that has worked in Iraq for more than a decade.

Franklin Graham and the Southern Baptist Convention are only the most well-known voices in a growing effort by American Christians to convert Muslims. Since 1990, the number of missionaries in Islamic countries has quadrupled, according to researchers for the evangelical missions.

Five years ago, the Southern Baptists reorganized their International Missions Board to focus on the part of the world where Muslims live. Two years ago, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas created a master's degree program for missionaries ministering to Muslims.

The linchpin in most of these efforts is the "Jesus Film," which was made by the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ in 1979 and has been translated into 811 languages.

"I humbly propose the "Corporate Patriot Act," which would require all corporations financially benefiting directly or indirectly from the Iraq war to donate all profits to the families of the brave American troops who've made the supreme sacrifice, those troops injured or disabled as a result of the war, and lastly, the American taxpayers who've financed the war from our national treasury."

During the Second World War... the government investigated [Bush's] grandfather, Prescott Bush, and his maternal great-grandfather, Bert Walker. Under the Trading With the Enemy Act, officials seized Bush stockholdings, charging that "huge sections of Prescott Bush's empire had been operated on behalf of Nazi Germany and had greatly assisted the German war effort."

Rick Schmidt, founder of I.H.O.G., the International Hummer Owners Group, said: "In my humble opinion, the H2 is an American icon. Not the military version by any means, but it's a symbol of what we all hold so dearly above all else, the fact we have the freedom of choice, the freedom of happiness, the freedom of adventure and discovery, and the ultimate freedom of expression."

"Those who deface a Hummer in words or deed," he added, "deface the American flag and what it stands for."

-- On the day after I criticized Bush and the war at the Academy Awards, attendance at "Bowling for Columbine" in theaters around the country went up 110% (source: Daily Variety/BoxOfficeMojo.com). The following weekend, the box office gross was up a whopping 73% (Variety). It is now the longest-running consecutive commercial release in America, 26 weeks in a row and still thriving. The number of theaters showing the film since the Oscars has INCREASED, and it has now bested the previous box office record for a documentary by nearly 300%.

-- Yesterday (April 6), "Stupid White Men" shot back to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. This is my book's 50th week on the list, 8 of them at number one, and this marks its fourth return to the top position, something that virtually never happens.

-- In the week after the Oscars, my website was getting 10-20 million hits A DAY (one day we even got more hits than the White House!). The mail has been overwhelmingly positive and supportive (and the hate mail has been hilarious!).

-- In the two days following the Oscars, more people pre-ordered the video for "Bowling for Columbine" on Amazon.com than the video for the Oscar winner for Best Picture, "Chicago."

-- In the past week, I have obtained funding for my next documentary, and I have been offered a slot back on television to do an updated version of "TV Nation"/ "The Awful Truth."

God has chosen, through his son Jesus Christ, this time and this place for all Christians ... to save our country and save our courts.

The federalism decisions of the Rehnquist Court are Madison's "double security" in operation: the States and the people, through litigation, control the unauthorized use of federal power, and the Court performs its role in the control of the federal government itself...

I only hope I can participate in this next phase of the operation of James Madison's "double security."

The American Center for Law & Justice
The American Center for Law & Justice for Alabama
The American Enterprise Institute
American Legislative Exchange Council
The Heritage Foundation
The Federalist Society
Family Research Council
Institute for Justice
Justice Fellowship
National Rifle Association
National Right to Life
Of the People
The Rutherford Institute
Washington Legal Foundation

Despite the importance of this ruling, there is, of course, much work to be done. People of faith must work to restore respect for life, especially at its beginning and end. We must reduce crime by advancing the Biblical notion of justice that emphasizes reconciliation and restoration of offenders and victims of crime. We must curb juvenile crime by reducing illegitimacy and drug use. We must advance respect for women and children by reducing their exploitation through pornography.

The greatest threat to the future of our republic is the rise of moral relativism -- the notion that there are no universal moral standards. This perspective is fueled by an assault of religion and the exclusion of religious expression. This perspective is fundamentally at odds with the founding principle of this Nation. On July 4, 1776, our Founding Fathers declared to the world that this Nation is based on a Judeo-Christian perspective of the nature of government and the nature of man. They declared, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. . . ." To advance the causes of protecting those unalienable rights of life and liberty, we must first restore the Founders' vision of the special protection that must be afforded to the free exercise of religion. The two greatest moral problems in our history, slavery and segregation, were resolved when people of faith entered the public square and demanded justice. If we hope to build on that legacy, our public square must welcome and protect the prayers and voices of people of faith.

He has a national reputation as a conservative leader for the cause of limited government, judicial restraint, and free enterprise. He has received the Guardian of Religious Freedom Award from Justice Fellowship and Prison Fellowship Ministries, the Civil Justice Achievement Award from the American Tort Reform Association, the Friend of the Taxpayer Award from the Alabama Citizens for a Sound Economy, and the Harlon B. Carter Award from the National Rifle Association's Institute for Legislative Action.

A frequent lecturer on law and public policy, Attorney General Pryor has given addresses at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Federalist Society. He has written op-ed articles in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and USA Today, and scholarly articles in several law reviews. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and its subcommittee on the Constitution, Federalism, and Property Rights, and the U.S. Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee.

Pryor is a member of the American Law Institute, the Legal Policy Advisory Board of the Washington Legal Foundation, and the Federalist Society. He is the Chairman-Elect of the Federalism and Separation of Powers Practice Group of the Federalist Society. In 2001, Pryor served as Chairman of the Republican Attorneys General Association, and in 2000 Pryor served as Alabama Co-Chairman of the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign.

Your challenge will be to preserve and expand free enterprise. You must demand that our laws continue to protect private property and freedom of contract and reject abuses of high taxation, burdensome regulation, and unfair litigation. You must insist that more markets -- from education to electricity - be opened to the forces of competition and consumer choice.

As leaders of our moral and cultural communities, you will have the responsibility of contributing to the health of the American soul, in arts, literature, and entertainment. What will your contribution be? Hopefully you will, at least, patronize the entertainers, artists, and writers who nourish our cultural life. And shun the purveyors of violence, hate, and decadence who have polluted our land from the obscenity and vulgarity of the Brooklyn museum, in the East, to the death and destruction of Columbine High School, in the West.

The greatest threat to the American principle of liberty in law is the politicization of our legal system. In the last few decades our courts have created constitutional rights that do not appear in the Constitution. Governments are filing lawsuits against industries that sell potentially dangerous products, such as tobacco and guns, in an effort to use the court system to impose taxation and regulation that our elected representatives will not support. This use of law for political ends shifts important decision-making out of the hands of the people and into the hands of lawyers and judges. One of the tasks of the next century will be to restore lawmaking and policymaking to the democratic process, not the legal process.

"The American experiment is not a theocracy and does not establish an official religion, but the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are rooted in a Christian perspective of the nature of government and the nature of man. The challenge of the next millennium will be to preserve the American experiment by restoring its Christian perspective"

"The second and closely related crisis created by our Supreme Court involves the erosion of self-government. On January 22, 1973, seven members of that court swept aside the laws of the fifty states and created -- out of thin air -- a constitutional right to murder an unborn child. Last year, the Court swept aside the vote of a majority of the people of Colorado to end any preferences or special privileges for homosexuals in their state. Recently, lower federal courts struck down laws that prohibit assisted suicide.
The most important decisions of our time and our country are not being made by the people or their elected representatives. The Supreme Court has restructured our political community without the consent of our people, in my judgment, and has violated the Christian understanding of tranquillitas ordinis.

I submit that a government that does not allow its people, by a majority vote, to restrict the murder of innocent life or the assisted suicide of some of our most vulnerable citizens is not a rightly ordered political community, and that the same government should restructure itself first by restoring its perspective of the nature of government and the nature of man."

"To meet the challenge, we must have, among others, the leadership of the graduates of Catholic schools, who follow in the footsteps of Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court Justices who do understand [the challenges that must be met]."

A flurry of e-mails and a possible about-face followed the US Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) announcement last week that it would issue a classified report on an unclassified brainstorming session about scientific openness.

"In the future, if we want to deal with BW [biological warfare] defense, we cannot move forward in the same time-worn ways as we have with nuclear weapons," said Steven Block of Stanford University's departments of biological sciences and applied physics. "It's simply not possible to control the information in the same way, and the kinds of control we use for nuclear weapons do not work against biological weapons."

"For good or ill, there is very little about biology that, if you could keep it secret, would give you any measure of protection," Brent said.

It seemed to those present that the CIA listened.

U.S. officials said the dispatch of "free Iraqis" from the north to the south -- including Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi -- was designed to prevent chaos as looting was reported in southern Iraq....But Chalabi's associates believe his arrival could also bolster his position in the scramble for leadership in the post-Hussein period, a goal long sought by his supporters in the Pentagon. "The forces advocating working with him got a huge shot in the arm over the weekend," said Randy Scheunemann, executive director of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. "It changes the complexion of the exile leader debate pretty dramatically."

Conservatives within the Bush Administration would like to see a change in government in Syria but want it to happen through peaceful means rather than U.S. military action, according to current and former senior U.S. officials. On Sunday, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said, "There's got to be a change in Syria," which has been accused by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld of allowing war materials and Islamic fighters to cross its border to help the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. "The Syrians need to know...they'll be held accountable."

Why does our culture tolerate this 60's free-sex ideal? I would argue, beyond the obvious fact that being Bond will always be a male fantasy, that our culture's desire to separate sex from reproduction is the constant here. Within our culture people will differ on their views of STD's and how to handle the AIDS epidemic. The "Right" will promote abstinence policies, the "Left" will uphold sex education and free access to contraception, but both sides will quietly assent to the slow inexorable separation of sexuality and reproduction. As we perhaps near the birth of the first human clone, the separation of sex and reproduction begun in 1960 is approaching its startling completion. [Chair of The President’s Council on Bioethics Leon] Kass notes, "For this new dispensation [the culture upholding such a separation], the clone is the ideal emblem...."

"The Blount County [TN] Board of Education denied the adoption of three new biology textbooks because they teach evolution but do not cover creationism."

* Arthur D. Broom and Tarek Aboul-Fadl's work to create new HIV drugs has come to a halt, with no chance of resuming, because Mr. Aboul-Fadl is stuck in his native Egypt. The associate professor of pharmaceutical medicinal chemistry at Asyut University was on sabbatical, working in Mr. Broom's laboratory at the University of Utah, when he flew home last May. He was never denied a visa to return to Utah. "He was just told to wait," says Mr. Broom.

The two medicinal chemists were closing in on creating a compound they hoped to license to the pharmaceutical industry. But now, Mr. Broom tells The Chronicle, "it won't get finished." Mr. Broom is retiring, and Mr. Aboul-Fadl lacks the resources in Egypt to complete the project. "It's terribly frustrating," Mr. Broom says.

* Work on a vaccine for West Nile virus has been postponed by more than six months because of the visa difficulties encountered by two Russian research assistants of Vladimir F. Yamshchikov's. When Margarita Mishina took a vacation to Russia last year, her return was delayed by three months. A new postdoctoral associate, Elena Chaporgina, was supposed to begin work in January, but she was also delayed, and will not arrive until this month.

Mr. Yamshchikov, an associate professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Kansas, is in a difficult position, he says, because American virologists are in short supply. When he advertised the post Ms. Chaporgina will fill, he received 20 applicants, none American. But if he hires foreign scientists, he fears he will lose more time on research. "It's a ridiculous situation," he says.

* Uvais A. Qidwai, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Tulane University, lost six months of work when he took a trip to his native Pakistan last summer and ran into delays in receiving his return visa. He says that the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad approved his application in the first six weeks of his stay, but that officials there had to await an FBI background check before they could issue his visa. During that time, his research -- on sharpening the images captured by infrared surveillance cameras -- came to a halt. Because he is now doubling his teaching load to make up for his lost semester, he says his research has been set back by a full year.

* Jane Zhang's research on leukemia has also come to a standstill. The graduate student in microbiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham expected to visit her parents in China for a month, but she has been forced to stay there since early December. Her adviser, Christopher A. Klug, an assistant professor, says that when he called the State Department last month, he was assured that her visa would be issued.

* Work on sensors that could detect biowarfare agents came to a complete stop while Huimin Ouyang, a graduate student at the University of Rochester, was forced to spend six months in China after returning there to visit her family.

On Sunday, though, the group's hopes were dashed when Israel's Supreme Court dealt the women what may have been the final legal rebuff in a 15-year battle to pray aloud, with the same ritual accouterments as men, at the Western Wall, revered by Jews as a remnant of the biblical Second Temple.

In a 5-4 ruling, the high court ordered the state of Israel to provide the women with facilities to pray at a site near -- but not in -- the broad plaza that fronts the towering, ancient yellow stones of the wall. The court-endorsed site for their prayers, known as Robinson's Arch, lies in a dusty archeological dig just to the south and east of the plaza.

Women are allowed to pray at the Western Wall, but in a separate section from the men. And they are expected to pray silently or inaudibly, lest the sound of their voices prove a lewd distraction to male worshipers nearby.

Over the years, efforts to change the status quo led not only to legal battles but also to ugly confrontations in the shadow of the wall. Women who prayed aloud together faced a barrage of catcalls from fellow worshipers, and sometimes a hail of hurled objects. Perhaps with such scenes in mind, the court accepted the government's argument that the women's prayers posed a threat to public safety.

The women had sought the right to pray aloud for only an hour on the first day of each new month of the Hebrew calendar, and on the Jewish New Year. But tradition-minded Jews -- including the rabbi who oversees the wall, which is considered an open-air synagogue -- defended the requirement that female worshipers' activities strictly conform to Halakha, or Jewish law, at all times.

In its ruling Sunday, the high court left open a possible avenue of appeal for the women, saying they can again seek permission to pray aloud in the plaza if the government has not prepared the Robinson's Arch site within a year. But it did not specify what those preparations should entail.

''It's simple. They want water. I have it, as long as they agree to get baptized,'' he said.

And agree they do. Every day, soldiers take the plunge for the Lord and come up clean for the first time in weeks.

''They do appear physically and spiritually cleansed,'' Llano said.

First, though, the soldiers have to go to one of Llano's hour-and-a-half sermons in his dirt-floor tent. Then the baptism takes an hour of quoting from the Bible. ...

''You have to be aggressive to help people find themselves in God,'' he said.

"According to materials promoting the Ft. Bragg event, Southern Baptist pastors will be given unprecedented access to the military base while being recruited for the denomination’s “Super FAITH Force Multiplier” evangelism program.

A March 3 letter to clergy from the Rev. Bobby H. Welch, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Daytona Beach, Fla., says, “I am writing to you about a once in a lifetime opportunity to join a group of warriors at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, NC. Major General William G. ‘Jerry’ Boykin has personally invited you and a select group of other FAITH Pastors to join him April 22nd and 23rd…. You can be absolutely guaranteed you will never, ever have this type of opportunity again! You will go with General Boykin and Green Beret instructors to places where no civilians and few soldiers ever go.

“THE PURPOSE OF THE GATHERING? It is believed by you, me and others that we must find a group of men who are warriors of FAITH, pastors who have the guts to lead this nation to Christ and revival!,” continued Welch, whose church is the birthplace of the FAITH program, an “evangelism strategy” now widely used by Southern Baptists in the United States and overseas. ...

According to the flier, Boykin has told FAITH participants that “the way they are trained is like the concept of Special Forces training – one person trains 100, who in turn can train 10,000. It’s a forced multiplier training.”

I and the producers and Warner Brothers were given an award by the largest Arab organization in the United States for our humane portrayal of Arabs. And my phone is tapped. I'm not sure by whom, but I know it's tapped and I've had experts confirm it. You can hear them click on to every phone call.

"We saw that a truck was delivering dozens of totally dismembered dead bodies of [Iraqi] women and children. It was an awful sight. It was really very difficult to believe this was happening. There has been an incredible number of casualties with very, very serious wounds in the region of Hilla...[E]verybody had very serious wounds and many, many of them small kids and women. We had small toddlers of two or three years of age who had lost their legs, their arms. We have called this a horror."

The soldiers were there for a reason.

The logical, rational explanation is that they were there because their tank caught fire and had to be destroyed. So, without a ride, they jumped onto the armored personnel carrier with me.

I prefer to believe it was the hand of God that put them there, one behind me, one to my left. They were there to protect me.

Had they not been there, I most likely would not be now typing this.

Less than 30 minutes after the two soldiers joined me, both were wounded by bullets that could have hit me.

FBI suspects `hero' guard may have planted bomb

Kathy Scruggs and Ron Martz STAFF WRITERS;
Staff writer Kent E. Walker contributed to this article.
405 words
30 July 1996
(Copyright 1996 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

The security guard who first alerted police to the pipe bomb that exploded in Centennial Olympic Park is the focus of the federal investigation into the incident that resulted in two deaths and injured more than 100.

Richard Jewell, 33, a former law enforcement officer, fits the profile of the lone bomber. This profile generally includes a frustrated white man who is a former police officer, member of the military or police "wannabe" who seeks to become a hero.

Jewell has become a celebrity in the wake of the bombing, making an appearance this morning at the reopened park with Katie Couric on the Today Show. He also has approached newspapers, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, seeking publicity for his actions.

He has told members of the media that he spotted a suspicious knapsack near the tower that was damaged in the blast. He said he reported the find to the GBI agent and helped move people from the area.

FBI agents are reviewing hours of professional and amateur video tape to see if Jewell is spotted setting down the military-issue backpack that contained the bomb. Acquaintances have told agents that he owned a similar knapsack. Agents have not seen Jewell in NBC tape of the 20 minutes following the blast.

Three undercover law enforcement cars were parked outside his mother's apartment on Buford Highway this afternoon. He refused to open the door when a reporter from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution knocked.

Jewell resigned two former law enforcement jobs in north Georgia, the latest at Piedmont College on May 21. He also was a deputy sheriff at the Habersham County Sheriff's Department, where he received bomb training.

Just before the Olympics Jewell got a job with Anthony Davis Associates, a Los Angeles security firm hired by AT&T after the company dismissed Borg-Warner Security Corp. after allegations of theft by employees.

Investigators are checking to see if his voice matches that of a 911 caller who phoned in a warning of the park bomb. The call was placed from a phone a few minutes' walk from the park.

Agents also are checking an earlier report from a plumber that pipes were stolen from his construction area near the park.




posted by Eugene Oregon at 1:02 PM

"The Anglo-American alliance, based on principles, political will, and a mutual loyalty and trust unique among nations, has once more proved its value...The Anglo-American principles are too proven in their success to be compromised for any passing diplomatic comfort or advantage...And yet so many of the beneficiaries of the Anglo-American principles that defined, protected and enriched the West after 1945 evidently resent their benefactors. Throughout the grim diplomatic weeks before the Iraqi war began, the U.N. became a conspiracy of anti-Anglophones, conspiring to frustrate the best efforts of Washington and London to make U.N. resolutions actually mean something."

"Iraq, the Middle East and - if they so choose - a new world order is now for Bush and Blair to define. The world's enduring and only reliable military alliance has done it again. Or rather, the world's two best militaries delivered the outcome their political masters ordained, and did so with minimal friendly and civilian casualties."

According to Human Rights Watch, "senior Arab diplomats told the London-based Arabic daily newspaper al-Hayat in October [1991] that Iraqi leaders were privately acknowledging that 250,000 people were killed during the uprisings, with most of the casualties in the south."

[W]e think that the Bush Administration deserves criticism because the conflicting signals that it gave probably contributed greatly to the tragedy that took place in Iraq when Saddam Hussein's forces massacred thousands in putting down the revolts and when nearly two million were forced to flee their homes. In part, the Bush Administration's actions may have reflected a lack of sufficient concern for the consequences of the signals it gave; in part it may be due to miscalculation; and in part it may be attributed to primary concern with political considerations unrelated to the well-being of the residents of Iraq. Whatever the reasons, the Administration contributed to the making of a tremendous human rights tragedy.

"We can't back down now, where you hand over the whole of the Middle East to Saddam," Mr. Murdoch told the Bulletin, an Australian magazine, in February. "Bush is acting very morally, very correctly," he said. "The greatest thing to come of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That's bigger than any tax cut in any country."