Images

"I am here to receive the Chairman of the PLO, Yasser Arafat," I told the guard at Andrews Air Force Base.The words seemed strange to my ears. In 1989, I had interviewed Mr. Arafat in Tunis and as I flew back to the United States, I was worried about the repercussions that this visit might have on the future of my career in this country. After all, Mr. Arafat was considered by many as the leader of a terrorist organization.The guard at the gate at Andrews showed respect as he directed me. His attitude formed a stark contrast, in my mind, with all the negative cartoon images that I had seen in this country over the years depicting Mr. Arafat as a terrorist, a murderer and so on.The same contrast emerged again as I heard one senator say after meeting Mr. Arafat, "He is up on the issues, and his English is excellent."

A 32-year-old Baltimore attorney pleaded guilty Tuesday to possessing child pornography, according to the Maryland U.S. Attorney's Office. Patrick Joseph Redd, who was disbarred "by consent" in March, will be sentenced to 24 to 37 months in federal prison if the court accepts his plea deal. Sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 20 in Baltimore U.S. District Court. Federal agents raided Redd's Rodgers Forge home two years ago, seizing a computer that was later found to have 11 images of minors engaged in sexual activity, according to court records, which claim Redd purposely searched for and downloaded the images.

Deidre Scherer employs the traditions of drawing, painting and fiber art to create her own art form: pictures of people made entirely of pieces of patterned cloth sewn together.Her method of working requires creativity and a high degree of technical skill. And in choosing the aged as her subject matter, she works with great sincerity to foster appreciation of old age and its accumulated knowledge of life. So one can certainly admire her current show at the Baltimore Museum of Art, but not without reservation, for these images suffer from a communication problem: They try too hard.

A maintenance help-desk employee at the Naval Academy has been charged with possessing child pornography and posing as a 12-year-old on the Internet to solicit photographs of nude children, state prosecutors said yesterday. David N. Sprachner, 44, of Glen Burnie apologized at a bail hearing in Annapolis yesterday for what he said was a "stupid, sick mistake." But his request to be set free until trial was rejected by District Judge Vincent A. Mulieri after prosecutors warned that Sprachner shares a small apartment with a couple and their four children.

The model is shown rising out of a bubble bath, suds dripping from her body. Her tight panties and skimpy top are soaked and revealing. She gazes at the viewer, her face showing a wisp of a smile that seems to have been coaxed from off-camera. In just over seven months, the model has become an online phenomenon. She has thousands of fans from around the world who pay as much as $30 a month to see images of her. New photographs of her -- many clearly intended to be erotic, all supposedly taken that week -- are posted online every Friday for her growing legions of admirers.

At 25 1/2 weeks along, Tanya Mundo feels as if she has been pregnant forever. It was time, she thought, to meet her twins. So last week, Mundo and her two children, Angelica Davila, 12, and Cristian Ruiz, 14, traveled from Frederick to Columbia to visit Baby to Be Images, a business that offers highly detailed ultrasound pictures. "It's just exciting because you can see the babies a little more," Mundo said. Babies to Be is owned by Linda Rihani, who opened the business about four months ago in a new office building on Columbia 100 Parkway.

The first pictures of Saturn's moon Titan returned by NASA's Cassini spacecraft after its initial fly-by were not nearly as good as researchers had hoped, but they were good enough to overturn several theories about the moon, scientists said yesterday. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory team's efforts to peer through the dense, smoggy haze that surrounds Saturn's largest moon revealed only fuzzy details of the surface, but those details left team members puzzled and confused. The images, surprisingly, did not show the large bodies of liquid on the surface that astronomers had expected to find.

When Robert Creamer looks at a wilted iris blossom, he thinks not of decline but of the melancholy beauty that can be found in the process of aging. When he examines the firework pattern of a dried peony or the skeletal remains of a tree frog, he is not saddened but inspired by the loveliness of a once-living thing and the magical transformations wrought by the passage of time. Now the Baltimore artist's stunning, large-scale color photographs of flowers, plants and zoological specimens in various stages of transition are the subject of a revelatory exhibition that goes on view tomorrow at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to rule on the constitutionality of a 1996 law that bans computer-generated images of "virtual" children in sexually explicit poses, the latest law passed by Congress in its 24-year war against child pornography. Since 1977, Congress has passed seven laws criminalizing the manufacturing and distribution of "visual depictions" of children engaging in sex acts. All but the latest of those was designed to protect real children from being used by pornographers.

Television news is gearing down from its fever-pitch coverage of the war in Iraq, but it's having a hard time finding a voice in which to tell the equally important continuing story of life after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The made-for-TV-movie story line of a blitzkrieg-like assault across the desert to Baghdad came to climax with the picture-perfect image of the giant bronze statue of Hussein being toppled in the capital city on Wednesday. There was no doubt within network and cable newsrooms as to how the war should be covered from the time U.S. troops reached the outskirts of Baghdad last weekend through the fall of the statue.