Defiance

In our collective consciousness, most of the smaller acts of defiance and protest in the civil rights movement have been overshadowed by the waves of humanity that have taken to the streets to demand change. The movement is symbolized by marches.But as crucial as the marches were, it would be foolish to construe them as the sole catalyst for change. Equally foolish would be to dismiss the significance of the smaller acts.One of those acts involved 24 black and white protesters who walked onto the segregated clay tennis courts at Druid Hill Park 44 years ago and proceeded to play tennis -- together.

It was shortly after 10 p.m. on a Friday night when a Harford County sheriff's deputy arrived at residence in Fallston responding to an anonymous parent's complaint that alcohol and pot were being served to minors. Fifty or more cars filled the nearby streets. Alerted to the event by social media, high school students had come from as far away as Lutherville and Columbia to be there. In and around the home was a crowd of 70-100 kids, tables in the basement were covered with cans of beer and liquor bottles, and a strong smell of marijuana wafted through the air. When the deputy approached the homeowner, Frederick Durst, 54, he told them "everything was fine.

SLOBODAN Milosevic's contemptuous defiance of the United Nations tribunal at his arraignment for crimes against humanity was effective theater. It will play well with some Serbs back home, notably Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica, who echoed him. It will find sympathy from some American apologists for his policies and critics of the NATO bombing of Serbia. Mr. Milosevic claims that the tribunal has no legitimacy and that its only purpose is to justify the war crime of NATO bombing.

With the possible exception of Valkyrie, no recent movie has gotten less out of a mind-boggling piece of history than Defiance. The director, Edward Zwick (Glory, The Last Samurai), who co-wrote the script, wants to honor the harrowing and inspiring story of the Bielski brothers, who, in the midst of the Holocaust, founded a small civilization in the forests of Belarus. They not only escaped the Nazis and harassed them, but also helped others to escape and elude them. They created a community that would enable them to survive as self-respecting human beings, not animals.

ON OCT. 25 in Cheyenne, Wyo., after much criticism for his conduct during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings involving Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, Sen. Al Simpson confessed to being "a bit too cocky, and arrogant, yeah, too smart by half, too thin-skinned."He implied he agreed at least to a degree with those who "equated [me] with [Joe] McCarthy, sleaze, slime, smarmy, evil, ugly, mean-spirited, vindictive, the slasher, menacing and much, much more." He said it was time he made "an honest reassessment" of his political style.

Fishing and boats go together -- but not all boats go with all kinds of fishing, and finding the perfect match can be an interminable struggle or a life-long passion.The United States Powerboat Show in Annapolis Oct. 14-17 is a great place to ease the struggle or refuel the passion.Whether your plans include bottom fishing for perch in a tidal creek or heading offshore to the canyons for billfish, there will be scads of suitable boats on display.Boston Whaler, Pursuit, Grady-White and Legacy Yachts are among the seasoned manufacturers who have new models that should be of interest to inshore and offshore fishermen with upper-middle incomes and too few hours in the day for fishing.

In a prudent mid-course correction of policy, the Western democracies now perceive the avoidance of all-out civil war as more important than preserving the Yugoslav federation in its present form. It took bloody fighting in Slovenia, with provocations on both sides, and clear defiance of civilian control by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army to force this reassessment. And it comes just in time, or perhaps too late.There is a real danger that full-scale battles, in Slovenia and Croatia, could break out as early as today as federal tanks move jTC into crack-down positions.

They marched for integration.They marched to ban the bomb.They marched for voters' rights.They marched for Vietnam.That's how the march beganHere, where the marching's free,A new-to-this-place planBut old in history.And all around the worldThey marched and made protest.A hundred injuriesAnd a thousand hearts oppressed.One day they marched for food,Another day, for peace.Good jobs! New government,A prisoner's release.And still they march, as then,With slogans and with songs.Bring back the sun againAnd right the people's wrongs.

Ah, the suppleness,the flexibility of those dazzling arms & legsthat reached out to the world,an incredibly vivacious body, a Shiva incarnate,a goof-eyed diva who lived to hearthe joyful response of laughter.A brilliant defiance . . .that even though you were viewedas the world's wishbone,you would not allow them their smugnessand be pulled apart by the sheer brutalityof their ignorant & mindless fears.Your smooth color was amber poured into honeyover a most delicate flesh glaze.You were blessed with the sublime presenceand nearly irresponsible graceto sing to the concentration camp survivorsof Buchenwald.

VIENNA, Austria -- Iran defied a United Nations deadline for suspending uranium enrichment and has not cooperated with inspectors trying to assess whether its program is for peaceful purposes, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog reported yesterday. Iran's defiance of yesterday's deadline, while hardly unexpected, officially marks the start of the Security Council debate over international sanctions against the Islamic Republic; the United States has taken the lead in the campaign to penalize Iran.

On a recent chilly morning, Liev Schreiber was eating breakfast in a downtown Manhattan restaurant while a swarm of shutterbugs hovered outside on the corner near his apartment. However, Schreiber wasn't exactly the one whom the photographers were after. "It's her," he said, with a weary grin. He's referring to his partner, Oscar-nominated actress Naomi Watts, with whom he has one son, and at this point, another on the way (Watts gave birth to their second son two weeks after this interview)

FORT SCOTT, Kan. -- The young Kansas women have become known as the "rescuers of the rescuer." It started out simply enough: Four high school students collaborated to write a short play as a National History Day project. What they accomplished has been stunning: They discovered, researched and introduced to the world an unsung Polish heroine of the Holocaust, a woman who saved some 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto yet remained virtually unknown to historians and the public for more than 60 years.

VIENNA, Austria -- Iran defied a United Nations deadline for suspending uranium enrichment and has not cooperated with inspectors trying to assess whether its program is for peaceful purposes, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog reported yesterday. Iran's defiance of yesterday's deadline, while hardly unexpected, officially marks the start of the Security Council debate over international sanctions against the Islamic Republic; the United States has taken the lead in the campaign to penalize Iran.

TEHRAN, Iran -- Just days before it is supposed to suspend enrichment of uranium or face the prospect of sanctions, Iran continues to project an image of defiance and confidence. Its position regarding the demand that it suspend enrichment remains a determined "No." Yesterday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a provocative, if symbolic, gesture by formally inaugurating a heavy-water plant. The plant, which Iranians say is intended for peaceful purposes, would also produce plutonium, which could be used in building nuclear warheads.

GANIM, West Bank - Some Jewish settlers have vowed to barricade their families inside their homes, block roads with their bodies or take even more extreme action when Israeli police order them to leave their settlements in the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank next month. But Israeli authorities won't have any trouble from Anita Kobi or her neighbors in Ganim. They'll already be gone. In this West Bank settlement shaded by pine trees, residents say they remain opposed to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's withdrawal plan, but they have chosen to accept their fate instead of joining what they consider a hopeless struggle against it. "What am I going to do?

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran's hard-liner-dominated parliament passed a nonbinding resolution yesterday insisting that the government resume developing nuclear fuel, defying the U.S. and European demand for a halt in all nuclear activity. The resolution, which seeks production of enough nuclear fuel to produce a substantial amount of electricity, increased the pressure on Iran not to compromise in talks on the issue scheduled for next week with the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany.

DEATH, Redd Foxx sagely joked, is nature's way of telling you to slow down. A poet suggested defiance -- "Death, be not proud" -- and another noted that death is the "great leveler."We all share natural, common reactions and responses to death, but each of us also has our own personal coping mechanisms.When artists of note die, I console myself by reminiscing about good old times. If they are performers, as was jazz singer Joe Williams, who died two weeks ago, I think back to the last time I saw them in person, or I drown myself in their recordings.

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. - Sitting on the other side of a smoked-glass window a few feet from Timothy J. McVeigh's lifeless body, Sue Ashford heard the prison warden pronounce the Oklahoma City bomber dead. She promptly burst into applause. "He doesn't deserve to live," Ashford, a survivor of the blast, said shortly after the execution as she walked across the damp grass of the federal prison in this western Indiana city. "I waited six years for him to die, and he did that. Finally." Shortly after the sun came up yesterday, those whose lives were scarred by the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City marked what for some was a final somber chapter in the deadly terrorist episode.

Courage" -- that was Dan Rather's final word to viewers last night after 24 years at the anchor desk of the CBS Evening News. After moving through the majority of his final newscast with an air of professionalism and surprising control, Rather returned to using the single-word sign-off that had become emblematic of his sometimes eccentric and overly emotional anchor desk demeanor. Last night, he seemed to be speaking in defiance of the many critics this week who denied him the accolades and kind words typically accorded departing anchormen such as NBC's Tom Brokaw in November -- or Walter Cronkite, whom Rather succeeded in 1981.

WASHINGTON - U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales indicated yesterday that the Justice Department might still file criminal charges against U.S.-born "enemy combatant" Jose Padilla, even if the courts order his release. The Justice Department is appealing last week's decision by a federal judge that the nearly three-year detention of Padilla without charges or access to a lawyer violated the law. Padilla has been in a military brig almost continuously since his May 2002 arrest in Chicago in a suspected plot to launch a radioactive "dirty bomb" attack on the United States.