Supreme Justice

...Kremlin Confusion Russian President Vladimir V Putin learned during his recent European travels that the mailed fist in Chechnya that works so well for him in elections at home does not necessarily work internationally...

...But if this Supreme Court term has shown anything, it is that neither the President nor the public should make any assumptions about how a jurist will act once wrapped in the precedents and practices of the highest Court in the land...

...In the current crisis of ballooning gas prices, especially in the Midwest, Americans are not sure where to direct their anger and the issue has already spilled over into the political campaign...

...The vozhd could be the tsar or Lenin or Stalin or Khrushchev, until he lost his grip on power and was unseated...

...It's like nuclear fission all over again...

...At their concluding news conference, Putin made a point of referring to Clinton as the leader of "one of the most powerful countries in the world...

...Security Conflict There is a paranoid streak running through our country that is occasionally exploited by politicians to launch Red hunts, spy hunts, and hunts for people with slanty eyes...

...German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder gave Putin a warm reception in Berlin, but admonished him about his brutal war in Chechnya...

...Russia, he indicated, would pursue peace talks and try to come to terms with Akmad Kadyrov, the unelected Chechen Putin installed to govern the province...

...Before this latest security flap, there was the case of Dr...

...Do these chairmen, with all their access to secret briefings, really believe Richardson's resignation would improve anything...

...One cannot exaggerate the sensitivity of a Russian leader to signs of American regard or disregard...

...I thought it was nice, without understanding it very well, when James Watson and Francis Crick told us some 50 years ago about the structure of DNA...

...A Kremlin spokesman said that General Troshev had been "misinterpreted" and that there was every intention of continuing offensive actions, albeit perhaps on a reduced scale...

...He recently said the Kremlin had offered him a multimillion-dollar bribe to support Putin's election campaign...

...The State Department says the United States supports dialogue with Khatami's government...

...Fueling Anger When the gas lines stretched out in the 1970s and President Jimmy Carter talked of "the moral equivalent of war," Americans at least knew the oil sheiks who were to blame...

...He said Iran could make one contribution by helping in the search for the terrorists responsible for the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers military complex in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 Americans...

...The late Justice Harry A. Blackmun, a Richard M. Nixon appointee who became a liberal voice on everything from flag burning to abortion, used to say that no one, not even an appointee, can predict how he or she will perform under the influence of the Court's tradition...

...Then Steven Younger, head of the Los Alamos nuclear weapons program, who was instrumental in Lee's arrest, was himself placed on leave in the investigation of the hard drives episode...

...There is a real problem here that requires sensitive consideration because the computer age will generate more, not fewer, problems of security and privacy...

...In addition, on June 28, as it wound up its unpredictable term, the Court, by a vote of 5-to-4, struck down a law banning so-called partial-birth abortions and gave the states greater leeway to restrict demonstrations outside health clinics that perform abortions...

...Wen Ho Lee, indicted last December and held, often in shackles, for downloading secret information—although no evidence that he did anything wrong with it has as yet been produced...

...There may be another side—you decide if it's a downside...

...I haven't yet come to terms in my own mind with the splitting of the atom...

...It has upheld restrictions on outdoor advertising of cigarettes...

...But what Putin wanted most he mainly got— a prestige boost resulting from being able to display on his home turf the head of the great superpower most Russians hold in awe...

...Subsequently, a Council of Europe delegation, led by Italian Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini, visited Moscow to warn that the war in Chechnya was endangering Russia's position in the council...

...Science gives us great tools, then leaves it to us to use them wisely...

...But someone else in perhaps greater authority obviously had other ideas...

...After a storm of protest in Russia and abroad, Gusinsky was released—under indictment...

...Indeed, we are just beginning to learn what KGB alumnus Putin meant by a "dictatorship of the law...

...Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama and Representative Porter J. Goss of Florida, chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, have called for Richardson's resignation...

...But what if employers use that information to reject those with health risks...

...Now they have announced the next big breakthrough, called the "human blueprint," the "library of life," the "Holy Grail of biology...

...But he says it is difficult to change the culture of scientists whose very creativity tends to resist secrecy...

...In the letter, Clinton looked toward better relations between the United States and Iran...

...After an informal in-house review, the FTC began issuing subpoenas to oil companies...

...Well, they're talking about someday being able to repair disease-causing genes or stimulate the activity of beneficial genes...

...it gave us some wonderful things, and some not wonderful things, like Hiroshima and Chernobyl...

...That was before lobbies got to be so adept at doing their own deflection...

...In place of a moral equivalent of war there is just a cry from people gasping at the pump wanting to know whodunit...

...It has acknowledged the fundamental right of parents to care for their children...

...The coded instructions tell a cell, say, how to make a hormone and how to replicate itself...

...So now Putin is trying to consolidate power by naming seven hand-picked commissars to ride herd on elected governors...

...That's the genome upside...

...In 1959,1 saw Nikita S. Khrushchev blow up during his United States tour when he thought that he was being baited by American officials...

...In 1974, Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, through a series of televised hearings, succeeded in deflecting a lot of popular anger from the Administration to the oil companies...

...intelligence believes it had a hand in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, working in concert with Libya...

...It may become possible to improve newborns or even to improve the genetic health of babies in the womb...

...You can guess which another one is...

...I'm still working on becoming lunar literate and computer literate...

...A look at the Declaration of Warsaw suggests one reason...

...Governor George W. Bush was equally quick to charge the Administration with lacking a coherent energy policy...

...On June 5, the media tycoon Vladimir A. Gusinsky, whose NTV network has reported fearlessly on the war in Chechnya, was summoned to the prosecutor's office to be questioned about material seized in a police raid on his headquarters...

...In the electronic age it has assumed new dimensions...

...The zigzagging left an impression of disarray in the Kremlin, and of a military command fighting a war it no longer believes in...

...Oil companies have blamed high demand and the environmental requirement for cleaner-burning gasoline...

...It is the world where a political fortune can hang on who gets blamed for expensive gas...

...In 1997,Energy Secretary HazelO'Leary proposed tighter security in what was called a "High Fences" initiative...

...The Pan Am bombing came just five months after an Iranian airliner was shot down by the U.S.S...

...Reaching for Power The Moscow meeting did not change the deep division over missile defense, as Washington had hoped it might...

...Last August, President Clinton sent a private letter to President Mohammad Khatami of Iran...

...Life's Library Every few years or so there is a great scientific breakthrough, and I'm not ready for it...

...The recent report of the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorism criticized the Administration for not pressing harder on Iran, which it called "the most active" state sponsor of anti-American actions...

...If you understand this, please explain it to me...

...And by an astonishing 7-to-2 vote, it has endorsed the Miranda decision requiring that criminal suspects be informed of their rights...

...The mapping of the human genome, our genetic code, is what they are talking about—a sequence of 3 billion bits that hold the secret of life, the secret of how you will live and, other things being equal, how long you will live...

...Butplayingpolitics will not bring us closer to a solution...

...Dictatorship of the Law' You might think Russia would leap at the chance to celebrate its inclusion in the "Community of Democracies," formed by more than a hundred governments at a June conference in Warsaw that the United States and Poland sponsored...

...It has ruled that public schools cannot let students lead stadium crowds in prayer...

...Tehran has made it clear that it never believed the American explanation that the missile attack was an accident...

...That was a most peculiar request, something like asking for a confession, since the Clinton Administration has long suspected that Iran not only had a hand in the bombing but exerted tremendous pressure on the Saudi government not to cooperate with the FBI investigation...

...Well, you wouldn't know that from some of the decisions handed down in the term just concluded: It has ruled that police cannot squeeze a passenger's luggage in looking for drugs without a court order...

...At his news conference on June 28, President Clinton said the fate of the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion may depend on the next two to four Court appointments...

...What if insurance companies factor it into their premiums...

...It has held that Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr should not have used the records of Webster Hubbell, the former Justice Department official, against him...

...But the promise of a cessation of hostilities was belied within 24 hours by several dozen air strikes...

...The nonpartisan Federal Trade Commission (FTC) decided to get into the act with two low-profile investigations— one in the Midwest, one on the West Coast...

...The Pentagon has worked for years to guard against an attack on the computer systems that will manage the next war...

...The media mogul is a leader of the Russian Jewish community, whose chief rabbi the government has been trying to unseat...

...It concluded that a regulatory investigation was unavoidable because it could find no plausible explanation for the price increases...

...But Russia sent only a lower-ranking official to what was billed as a conclave of foreign ministers...

...Last March, Republicans seized on the case of Dr...

...Deep in the collective Russian psyche lies the idea of the vozhd, the ruler, the big boss in charge of everything...

...Most of it was knocked down by the Pentagon as too expensive...

...Putin, traveling in Spain, said he was shocked by all that and would "look into it...

...The reference was to Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice William J. Brennan, both of whom apparently established a much more liberal record than Eisenhower would have preferred...

...But about past acts of terror it says, "We will follow the evidence wherever it leads...

...On his visit to Moscow in early June, President Clinton appeared on Gusinsky's radio station, perhaps as a token of support...

...What a term...

...Mikhail S. Gorbachev never made it to vozhd, and Yeltsin became a national joke...

...But reformulation costs less than 10 cents a gallon at the pump and cannot account for hikes of 50 cents or more...

...Vincennes...

...Now Governor Bush says the Administration is to blame for "chaos and confusion" at Los Alamos...

...The hard drives that were missing at the Los Alamos National Laboratory contained material that would have filled many thousands of paper pages...

...Putin, on the other hand, discloses in his autobiography how moved he was at the Asian-Pacific Summit in New Zealand last September when Clinton came over and escorted him from the conference room to applause from the other chiefs of state...

...A Peculiar Request Unresolved past acts of terrorism linger in our national consciousness...

...I wasn'treadyforthecloning of that sheep in Scotland, and I'll tell you here and now that I will never be ready for the cloning of a human being...

...On a trip to Saudi Arabia in 1998, Vice President Gore expressed America's frustration after what he called a "long and penetrating" talk about terrorism with Crown Prince Abdullah...

...It has affirmed Federal rules on livestock grazing...

...Which we don't always do...

...From both sides came that most characteristic political demand—for a highprofile investigation...

...Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Supreme Justice Dwight D. Eisenhower, when asked to recall his biggest mistake while he was President, is supposed to have said, "I made two, and they're both sitting on the Supreme Court...

...Nuclear scientists and even a former CIA director (John Deutch) have had to be reminded about the no-nos of downloading classified information into unclassified computers...

...What also has been missing this time is any significant discussion of smaller cars, carpooling, mass transit, synthetic fuel, or even OPEC...

...Lee to suggest a Chinese espionage conspiracy that had been ignored by the Clinton Administration...

...It should be possible to learn a person's susceptibility to various afflictions, even to various environmental factors...

...Local or regional short-term price increases because of a refinery fire or a pipeline break are familiar, but sources say we are experiencing, without an obvious cause, the sharpest rise in memory...

...The next day Colonel General Gennadi N. Troshev, the senior commander in the region, announced that "the war, as such, is over" and air and artillery attacks were being suspended...

...Then something unusual happened: Russian generals told the European delegation the fighting was winding down...

...Their strange disappearance and reappearance should not be a partisan matter...

...On the other hand, it also upheld the right of the Boy Scouts to exclude gays...

...Vice President Al Gore was quick to charge the oil companies with "possible collusion, price gouging and antitrust violations...

...The current Court has seven justices named by Republican Presidents Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush, and only two named by Democratic President Bill Clinton...

...Long a thorn in the side of Putin and his predecessor, Boris N. Yeltsin, Gusinsky also had his Media-Most organization raided in the early '90s...

...It has become conventional political wisdom to say that, as important as anything else about November's Presidential election is the fact that our next Chief Executive may name several justices...

...Because the two countries do not have diplomatic relations, an official of the Sultanate of Oman agreed to act as courier...

...Schröder let it be known thataslongas the war raged, Russia could not expect significant action on loan forgiveness...

...Certainly it has become a wonderful tool for clearing the innocent of crimes and establishing paternity...

...What are the practical applications...

...Her successor, Bill Richardson, has done some upgrading of security at Los Alamos, adopting 48 recommendations of a counterintelligence expert...

...Clearly, someone with the authority to issue orders to the military had thought a cessation of attacks would help placate the European Council and bolster Kadyrov's position...

...In the best of all possible worlds, people would wait for the FTC findings and go on from there, but this is not the best of all possible worlds...

...It emphasizes such staples of democracy as the rule of law, freedom of the press and freedom from arbitrary arrest—principles Russia has yet to embrace fully...

...Once there —without access to a lawyer, or anyone reading him any rights—he was arrested and locked up in one of Moscow's toughestjails...

...It may be just too tempting in an election year to have a security scandal to lay on President Clinton and, by implication, Vice President Gore...