Activists

Arthur C. Fatt, 94, one of the founders of Grey Advertising and a former chief executive of the company, died Tuesday at his winter home in Delray Beach, Fla.With Lawrence Valenstein, he started Grey in 1925 with a handful of employees in New York. When they retired, Grey had become one of the nation's leading advertising agencies.Among the accounts that he brought to the company were Ford Motor Co., Procter & Gamble and Chock Full o' Nuts. He wrote the well-known line for the Greyhound Lines bus company, "Leave the driving to us."

LONDON -- McDonald's claimed the verdict. The environmental activists claimed the streets.That's how England's longest trial ended yesterday when McDonald's won a libel suit over a pair of activists who distributed pamphlets that charged the company with promoting unhealthy food, environmental destruction, worker exploitation and animal suffering.But after spending a reported $16 million on the case that consumed 314 court days over 2 1/2 years, McDonald's emerged with a bit of McEgg on its face.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The word "squaw," long the stuff of TV westerns and American vernacular, is so offensive to many American Indians that a national activist group is launching a campaign to remove it from more than 100 places throughout California, including the most famous of all: Squaw Valley.These activists, leaders of the American Indian Movement, say the word is the white man's pejorative slang for "vagina," and they consider it among "the worst of the worst."The group's crusade has already met with success in Minnesota, where activists persuaded the state Legislature to pass a law decreeing that 19 places containing the word "squaw" be changed.

Moving to assure the public that they are safeguarding the state's environment, Maryland officials said this week that they would tighten wetlands protections while adhering to their policy of working with polluters before penalizing them.Meanwhile, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency levied a $35,000 penalty yesterday against Somerset County for water pollution violations, prompting activists to question why the state had not acted instead."Where was the state on this?" asked Tom Grasso, Maryland director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

Almost as much as he loved nature, John V. Kabler enjoyed a good fight. He reveled in organizing people to advocate environmental causes and in working behind the scenes in political campaigns and lobbying drives.Mr. Kabler, regional director of Clean Water Action, battled prostate cancer even as he continued to fight for protection of Chesapeake Bay and Florida's Everglades. He died Thursday at his Annapolis home. He was 53.Mr. Kabler was one of Maryland's leading environmental activists, credited by friends and associates with helping to build the state's loosely organized community of conservation groups into a powerful force.

Women's and gay rights activists held several small protests during Pope John Paul II's visit yesterday, handing out condoms and waving signs opposing his stands against abortion and birth control.But with their planned parade to Camden Yards blocked by city police for lack of a permit, the protesters apparently didn't make much of an impression on either the pope or the multitudes who had come to see him.The four dozen or so protesters did rally for about 90 minutes at the Washington Monument and then split up to try to gain attention along the papal parade and other stops of his visit.

Also, a photo caption accompanying an article Sunday on the first black fire captain in Baltimore County contained incorrect information. Activists in the Fire Department praised Acting Chief James H. Barnes for racial progress in the department but criticized actions of previous fire chiefs.The Sun regrets the errors.

One day soon, before she is too arthritic, Elizabeth McWethy says she wants to turn the poetry she has written by hand into a single-volume anthology illustrated by her grandchildren because it is "more fun than worrying whether the developers are ruining your creek."At 74, the Annapolis woman who has been an activist as long as she can remember wants to step down as chairwoman of the Weems Creek Conservancy. She is not alone among Anne Arundel's "greenies," who are going gray and hoping to cut back on their activities.

About 100 activists and other members of the AIDS community marched through downtown Baltimore last night and placed an empty coffin on the steps of City Hall to memorialize John Stuban, a leader of the AIDS movement who died of the disease on Aug. 15.Mr. Stuban was the founder of ACT UP/Baltimore, part of a national network that uses civil disobedience to press for greater efforts to combat acquired immune deficiency syndrome.Before the march, nearly 200 people, including City Council members, health professionals and activists attended a memorial service for Mr. Stuban at Emmanuel Episcopal Church on Cathedral Street.

As researchers gather in Berlin for the Ninth International Conference on AIDS, many see growing evidence that once-promising approaches to fighting the disease may be useless or even harmful.Emerging new knowledge about the AIDS virus is making it harder to decide how to treat infected people, they say, and raising fears that use of AZT and other anti-viral drugs may be promoting more virulent strains of the virus."I'm not at all sure what to give my patients, when to give it, how to combine drugs, or which patients are most likely to benefit from what treatments," Dr. Paul Volberding, a leading U.S. AIDS physician, told colleagues last month at a Harvard AIDS Institute gathering.

Documents released yesterday show that state police spying of nonviolent protest groups took place in 2007, more than a year after law enforcement officials said much-criticized surveillance of death-penalty activists had ended. The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the spying to light this year, also determined that some political activists who appear never to have set foot in Maryland were included in databases that list them as potential terrorists. Activists say they still aren't getting complete information from state police about 53 people identified as possible terrorists during a covert operation in 2005 and 2006, despite pledges of cooperation from the O'Malley administration.

The community activists who forced a luxury homebuilder to stop offering rooftop "penthouses" with wet bars at his latest waterfront project will face off against HarborView today at a hearing that could determine what kind of rooftop treats the developer can offer his well-heeled buyers . If the activists have their way, it will be none at all, other than plain roofs with their obvious expensive views. If HarborView prevails, it will be scaled-down penthouses that continue to offer elevator landings and enclosed stairways.

CHICAGO -- Hundreds of thousands of Latinos turned out for protest rallies across the country yesterday, sending a message to lawmakers as Congress continues to wrestle with overhauling the nation's immigration laws. In Chicago, the estimated 400,000 demonstrators included hundreds of people from Asia, Europe and Central America. "This is not just about Mexicans," said Jose Delgado, 43, a construction worker from the Mexico City area who took the day off. "It doesn't matter what color your skin is or what language you speak.

ARLINGTON, VA. -- The death of "peace activist" Tom Fox, and the threatened execution of the three others held with him in Iraq, is doubly tragic. It is tragic whenever an innocent person is murdered. It is also tragic because the likelihood that the presence of Mr. Fox and his colleagues would change the attitude or behavior of their captors was zero to none. That the "peace activists" believed their brand of Christianity would trump the fanatical Muslims who regarded them as infidels and worthy of death meant that Mr. Fox and the others would either be used for propaganda purposes by the enemies of freedom or made to sacrifice their lives like animals on an ancient altar in the furtherance of the fanatics' dream of a theocratic state.

PINELLAS PARK, Fla. - The Rev. Ed Martin does not want to squander the attention that the Terri Schiavo case has given his cause. In the month the anti-abortion activist spent outside the hospice housing the severely brain-damaged woman, he has given his business card - emblazoned with a logo of an adult hand protectively holding a baby - to every reporter who has approached him. In the wake of Schiavo's death, protesters like Martin are trying to...

WASHINGTON - The extraordinary steps taken to save the life of Terri Schiavo have won plaudits from evangelical Christians and other conservative activists, but some Republicans worry about a potential backlash among others who view the intervention as an overbearing use of government power. As Congress passed legislation allowing federal courts to review whether Schiavo's feeding tube should be withdrawn, a poll by ABC News found that 70 percent of those surveyed believed that congressional intervention was inappropriate.

The term "anti-adoption" sounds ludicrous. Who could oppose placing an unwanted child into a loving home? An entire movement, it turns out - fighting with a primal passion to expose what activists insist is adoption's darker side: the lifelong trauma of women coerced into surrendering babies. Adoptees denied their heritage. And, they say, a billion-dollar industry that focuses more on money than youngsters' welfare. Some leave careers to write letters, track legislation, research articles and books.

MIAMI - With cruise ships diverted up the coast, storefronts sheathed in plywood and blocks of downtown barricaded, an uneasy calm enveloped Miami yesterday as residents and police on horseback, bicycle and foot readied for a rally over free trade that could amass 35,000 protesters this week. Tens of thousands of activists - from union workers who fear the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs abroad to social activists who contend that health and environmental laws will be overridden - are descending on the city to oppose free trade talks scheduled to begin here tomorrow.

The weather was warm, but the reception at Baltimore's Inner Harbor was chilly yesterday for two dozen peace activists who turned out to distribute leaflets urging an end to the United States' involvement in Iraq. Sharon Kangas, 57, of Bel Air angrily took one of the group's leaflets and tore it up. "I support [President] Bush; I think he's doing a fabulous job," she said. Describing Bush as "a Christian who listens to God," she said that if he hadn't gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, "10 years from now my daughter would be fighting them in our country."

Having launched a movement to try to keep the nation from going to war, peace activists in Maryland and across America are now asking: Where do we go from here? Unlike the Vietnam era, when protests grew louder as the war dragged on, most activists today said they have no illusions that continued demonstrations might help end the war. Instead, they said their goals are to press the Bush administration on critical issues of how the war is waged, whether the nation will continue a policy of pre-emptive strikes and what the costs are to cities.