Destiny

The current revolutionary mood sweeping the Middle East is looking very much like another real-life example of philosopher Auguste Comte's observation, "Demography is destiny. " At the turn of the 19th century, Westerners made up roughly 30 percent of the people on this planet. By the middle of this century, extrapolating present trends, Muslims will be about 30 percent of a much more crowded human population and Westerners reduced to less than 10 percent. This has all sorts of implications, laid out thoroughly by Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin in their book, "Financial Reckoning Day. " But I want to focus on just one: how a population explosion in the Arab world, stretching from Morocco through the Levant, has set the stage for the revolutionary fervor we've seen on the streets of Tunis, Cairo, Amman and elsewhere in the last couple of weeks.

Regarding Marta Mossburg's column "Biology really is destiny" (April 25), biology really is not destiny in any meaningful sense. Is a woman who chooses not to have children willfully - or stupidly - defying her destiny? Would that make her a failure as a woman? Are birth control pills thus evil? It's a shame Ms. Mossburg got so caught up in the media frenzy that she couldn't usefully reflect on Hillary Rosen's comment about Ann Romney. As a single father who raised three teenage boys while working 50 hours a week, I can certainly attest to the difficulties of parenthood.

We live in fascinating times. On the one hand, it is OK to detail the most intimate aspects of a woman's reproductive health in congressional testimony and to demand "free" birth control pills from employers and/or the government. It is also OK to label those who object to such public displays of personal choice and state-sponsored free love as leading a "war on women. " On the other hand, it is also OK for those who hew to the same ideology as that above to condemn a woman who chooses to raise her children for a living as someone who "never worked a day in her life.

We live in fascinating times. On the one hand, it is OK to detail the most intimate aspects of a woman's reproductive health in congressional testimony and to demand "free" birth control pills from employers and/or the government. It is also OK to label those who object to such public displays of personal choice and state-sponsored free love as leading a "war on women. " On the other hand, it is also OK for those who hew to the same ideology as that above to condemn a woman who chooses to raise her children for a living as someone who "never worked a day in her life.

"I gather you had a bit of trouble getting through to Mr. Beers," laughs INXS bassist Garry Gary Beers as he comes on the line.Trouble? Well, there was a bit of confusion when the interviewer, calling the designated number at the designated time, was told, "There's no one by that name registered at the hotel." But that was mainly the fault of the band's New York hotel, which didn't quite grasp the fact that big-time rock acts never register under their real names."You'd think they'd be used to that by now," Beers says.

Surely one of the most ambitious, provocative and strangely poignant projects in all of documentary filmmaking is the "7 Up" series, begun in 1964 by Britain's Grenada TV and continued every seven years since then. The new installment, "35 Up," opens today at the Charles, and it is by far the most compelling.For those unfamiliar with the concept, the "Up" series is an examination of class, heredity and destiny, played out in real time. It began in 1964, when the British commercial network Grenada did a soporific profile on 14 "typical" British TC schoolchildren, then all 7 years old. The kids were drawn from all classes, meant to provide a "cross-section" of the future of society, as the narrator grandly put it.Somewhere along the line, somebody got the bright idea of revisiting the children every seven years to gauge their progress: "35 Up" is the fifth such enterprise, using footage from the four previous visits.

Garage rock meets garage moviemaking: that should have been the mandate of Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny, featuring Kyle Gass and Jack Black as the amateur-hour power-guitar duo Tenacious D, who believe they're God's (or Satan's) gift to rock 'n' roll. Instead, with the collusion of director and co-writer Liam Lynch, Gass and Black make a spectacle of themselves. They create a joke-ridden fantasy complete with tarot card chapter breaks boasting titles like "Destiny" and "The Quest."

St. Louis-- --When you're a team of destiny, the ground does not come apart under your feet, as it did under Detroit Tigers outfielder Curtis Granderson at a pivotal moment of last night's pivotal Game 4 of the 102nd World Series. When you're a team of destiny, the guy throwing 100 mph strikes everybody out at the end. The little leadoff hitter on the other team doesn't turn your velocity against you and drive the ball over the center fielder's head to bring home the winning run in the eighth inning.

PHOENIX -- The Phoenix Suns talked of destiny throughout this season, and then throughout these playoffs as they held off final defeat in five different games. But destiny is something to be achieved, and so it finally, inevitably, belonged to the Chicago Bulls here last night in the NBA Finals.And the victory for the so-called threepeat was symbolically earned with John Paxson's three, a three-point field goal that left a city and a team stunned and gasping."For it to be over so quickly, that's the thing," said Charles Barkley, sitting still stunned in his locker stall some 30 minutes after the game, a towel draped over his shoulder and beads of sweat rolling down his thick neck.

BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- The man who led the Serbs into Bosnia's heart of darkness now resides in his own shadowland, holed up in a glum mountain resort while the world waits to arrest him for genocide.But Radovan Karadzic is still the dominant ruler in Bosnia's Serbian Republic, and the longer he remains in power, the more deeply he entrenches his policies of ethnic intolerance, opponents say.More than six months after the November signing of the Bosnian peace accord in Dayton, Ohio, Muslims in Bosnian Serb territory are still being forced from their homes and jobs.

Growing up in a Baltimore row house, Elaine Northrop had a happy, if somewhat unconventional, childhood. Her father was a dreamer and a gambler, recalls Northrop, who grew up to build one of the most successful real estate companies in Howard County from the ground up. Her mother was the family's breadwinner and dealt with their money woes, but her father was an eternal optimist who taught her to believe in herself. At age 23, such life lessons would be called into play when she agreed to marry her first husband on their second date.

Baltimore County has had two murder-suicides, homicides within families and among longtime friends, and an increase in suicides in the past few months. And on Tuesday evening, officers defused a hostage situation on the 12th floor of a high rise. The recent spate of violence prompted health officials and police to organize a news conference Wednesday that addressed holiday stress and the tragedies that can occur when family, friends and neighbors miss the signs of emotional, economic or physical troubles in others.

As a member of the hit girl-group Destiny's Child, Michelle Williams had a backup role to frontwoman Beyonce. But as an actress, Williams has found herself playing the leading lady. With stints in Broadway plays such as "Aida," "The Color Purple" and "Chicago," Williams is quickly establishing herself as a seasoned thespian. Williams' latest role, in the play "What My Husband Doesn't Know," is Lena Summer, a married woman who struggles with fidelity. Williams talked about her longtime love of acting, her future projects in music and on stage, and about Beyonce's pregnancy.

Courtney Senini knew something was amiss when aides started dashing in and out of the classroom, passing messages to the admirals and generals who taught her leadership seminar at the U.S. Naval Academy. Finally, one of the aides stood before the room of seniors and in a big, puffy voice, said the words that would change their lives: "Ladies and gentlemen, the United States is under attack. " The room fell silent. An attack on American soil seemed inconceivable when Senini and her classmates entered the academy in 1998.

Concert The Columbia Jewish Congregation Cultural Arts Committee presents Girls in Trouble, a folk-indie band featuring singer-songwriter Alicia Jo Rabins, at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 4, at the Oakland Mills Interfaith Center, 5885 Robert Oliver Place. The program will highlight songs written by Rabins and based on the lives of women in the Bible. Admission is $10-$18. Information: 410-730-0687. Meeting The Howard County Citizens Association will hold its annual meeting at 7 p.m. Monday, May 9, at the Hawthorne Center, 6175 Sunny Spring.

"Winston Churchill: Walking With Destiny" would make a perfectly good PBS or History Channel documentary — Episode 4, say, in an exhaustive, 15-part miniseries about World War II. Sober, thorough and uplifting, it focuses on a very thin slice of historical pie: the career of the celebrated British prime minister from his ascension to the job in May 1940 to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and America's entry into World War...

Two guys from Bawlmer did a little bit of weekend construction yesterday, adding a 28-foot room to the International Space Station. In a spacewalk lasting more than 7 1/2 hours, Baltimore-born astronauts Tom Jones and Robert Curbeam stepped outside the shuttle Atlantis and successfully attached the $1.4 billion U.S.-built Destiny science laboratory to the station as it orbited more than 200 miles above Earth. They were assisted by a third city native, Marsha Ivins. She lifted the 15-ton lab out of the shuttle's payload bay with a Canadian robotic arm, then eased it into its berth on the station's Unity module.

WASHINGTON -- Yesterday was one of those occasions White House image-makers love.They gave their boss the hated task of reading a prepared speech from TelePrompTers but put him into one of his favorite places to do it -- a small classroom.Walking casually around the room as he spoke, President Bush gently exhorted 27 rapt eighth-graders -- and pupils watching his televised performance throughout the nation -- to take control of their own destinies by making sure they get the most out of school.

If you thought Kelly Rowland's career was relegated to waiting by the phone, waiting for Beyonce's call to get Destiny's Child back together (or collecting royalties for that sappy Nelly duet ), "Motivation" offers evidence of the contrary. On Monday, she debuted the video to the Jim Jonsin/Rico Love-produced single on BET's "106 & Park," and the damp, sweaty video matches the song's intense sexuality. If this isn't the year's hands-down sexiest song thus far, it has to be in the discussion.