At Amazon.com alone, more than 53,000 people had donated more than $3 million by yesterday evening after the company made an urgent appeal on its home page. Catholic Relief Services was so overwhelmed with Web traffic that its site crashed. Online donations to the Red Cross outstripped traditional phone banks by more than 2 to 1.

In photographs, the children have dark, messy hair and they are draped in blankets. Their infant arms and legs are soft or -- if they are older -- long and spindly. Too weak to hold on.

The waters rushed in and the waters retreated and at least a third of the bodies left behind were those of children.

*An applicant who has used any illegal drug while employed in any law enforcement or prosecutorial position, or while employed in a position which carries a high level of responsibility or public trust, will be found unsuitable for employment.

*An applicant who is discovered to have misrepresented his/her drug history in completing the application will be found unsuitable for employment.

*An applicant who has sold any illegal drug for profit at any time will be found unsuitable for employment.

*An applicant who has used any illegal drug (including anabolic steroids after February 27, 1991), other than marijuana, within the last ten years or more than five times in one's life will be found unsuitable for employment.

* An applicant who has used marijuana within the past three years or more than a total of 15 times in one's life will be found unsuitable for employment.

If you are a recent or frequent user of illegal drugs, including marijuana, you need to know that CIA is a drug-free workplace. Drug abuse is one of the common reasons a security clearance is denied to applicants.

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Many applicants wonder if they can pass such scrutiny. The Agency recognizes that no one is perfect. Agency security officials consider the nature, extent, seriousness, and recency of past behavior. They weigh the potential risk and benefit of each individual - the whole person - with utmost care. Although national security is always the paramount consideration, our security experts work hard to ensure that the Agency does not turn away unnecessarily someone who could make important contributions to the nation's intelligence effort.

Today, according to the UN's conservative statistics, 2.2 million people are affected by the conflict, including 1.6 million displaced and 200,000 refugees in Chad. Sudan analyst Eric Reeves, one of the few to attempt a serious analysis of mortality in Darfur, estimates that approximately 370,000 people have died since the rebels of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) came to international attention in February 2003. Reeves puts the current mortality rate at approximately 35,000 per month and warns that this figure is likely to grow rapidly in light of food deficits forecast for early 2005, increasingly weakened populations that are only very partially served by current humanitarian operations, and accelerating violence that is severely curtailing humanitarian access and transport capacity.

The African Union (AU), which has provided the only international protection force in Darfur, has deployed fewer than 1,000 of a proposed force of 3,500 troops, police and logistical officers, and is up to full strength in only one sector of this vast region, Kapkabiya. It is poorly equipped to challenge what a confidential AU report obtained by this newspaper calls "a massive build-up of forces and logistics in Darfur" by the Khartoum government and, subsequently, by the rebels too. "The quantity of arms and ammunition brought into Darfur to meet the present build-up of troops in the region is so astronomical," the report says, "that the issue is no longer whether there will be fighting or not but when will the fighting start."

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The statistics show the appalling futility of the international response to the Darfur conflict - not a conflict that ranges Arab against African, as journalistic shorthand would have it, but one that pits the government of Sudan and allied militias and mercenaries against the vast majority of Darfurians - African and Arab. (It cannot be stated too often that the majority of Arab tribes in Darfur have refused to join the government war in Darfur, despite blandishments, threats and inducements that range from sacks filled with cash to cars to development programs and homes in the capital, Khartoum.)

So what has gone wrong, after so many fine words comparing Darfur to Rwanda and promising, so meaninglessly, "never again?"

The most censored speech in America today is not flag-burning, pornography, or the press. The worst censors are those prohibiting criticism of the theory of evolution in the classroom.

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If Darwinians want to teach that whales, which are mammals, evolved from black bears swimming with their mouths open, we should surely be entitled to criticize that. Yet school libraries have refused to accept books critical of evolution, even when written by college professors.

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Darwinians know they cannot persuade skeptical adults, so they try to capture impressionable schoolchildren. At our expense and against our wishes, children are taught that the world exists only for what is useful, not by design.

To typical schoolchildren full of wonder, we live in a world best described as a marvelous work of art. The snowflakes that grace us at Christmastime typify the artistic beauty that bestows joy on all ages but, like an acid, evolution corrodes this inborn appreciation of beauty and falsely trains children to view themselves as mere animals no more worthy than dogs or cats.

There is a strong correlation between belief in evolution and liberal views on government control, pornography, prayer in schools, abortion, gun control, economic freedom, and even animal rights. For the most part, the schools in the blue Kerry states are strongly pro-evolution, while the red Bush states allow debate and dissent.

It should surprise no one that the United States, land of the free and home of the brave, has the lowest percentage of evolution believers in the world. The highest percentage lived in Communist East Germany.

Years from now, Lipstadt said, when history books refer to the genocide in the African country of Sudan, students will again want to know what Americans did to stop it. That made her decide that she would be among those who tried to help.

"I realized that I was sounding more like an apologist for America. And when the day comes that students ask about Sudan, I feared that I would again not have an adequate answer," said Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies and director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory in Atlanta. "How can I teach about genocide and live though another genocide without doing anything?"

Last fall, Lipstadt called a colleague in the African-American studies department and another in the religion department. Word quickly spread across campus, as one person called another. Before long, more than 100 students and faculty members had come together to form an organization called the Sudan Crisis Working Group. Their mission was to raise money and spread the word about atrocities in Sudan.

"When you look at the black race, black people are very gifted in what we call worship and celebration. A lot of us like to dance, and if you go to black churches, you see people jumping up and down, because they really get into it."

"White people were blessed with the gift of structure and organization. You guys do a good job of building businesses and things of that nature and you know how to tap into money pretty much better than a lot of people do around the world."

"You can see a Hispanic person and they can put 20 or 30 people in one home. They were gifted in the family structure."

"... the Asian is very gifted in creation, creativity and inventions. If you go to Japan or any Asian country, they can turn a television into a watch."

"I believe the reason we're pushing God out is because (if) God is in, it will affect the economy .... There will be no condoms that will be sold to our children because we will be teaching chastity. There will be no more cigarettes sold to our people because they won't do things to hurt their bodies. There will be no more drugs distributed ... It will shut down industry in America."

"... we allow rampant sin including homosexuality and lying, and to me lying is just as bad as homosexuality .... I'm offended that homosexuals will say that homosexuals deserve rights."

One reason for the downfall of Rome was that "[w]omen demanded more rights ..."

"I'm not going to back off what I know God has put in my heart to share."

"I have one enemy and one critic. His name is Satan."
Reggie White, June 1998

The fact that (Reggie) White espouses religious beliefs -- even absurd ones such as God healing him to help one team beat another team -- constitutes character in the simplistic view of the media. Sportswriters and their clichés create whole new worlds that have never existed.