Party Members

U.S. AUTHORITIES recently appointed former Baath Party leaders to help rebuild Iraq. Shortly afterward, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld announced that senior Baath Party members would not be allowed to retain positions of authority in the new Iraqi administration. The assumption is that, in time, people will step forward, identify appointees who were Baath Party members and those appointees will be removed. There are risks in such assumptions. At the end of World War II, in a similar effort to rebuild a defeated enemy country, U.S. officials released Nazi Party members from prison.

WASHINGTON - U.S. Marines advancing on the final Iraqi stronghold of Tikrit yesterday rescued seven bedraggled but healthy American prisoners of war, flying them to safety more than three weeks after they were captured by enemy forces. The Marines found the POWs about five miles south of Tikrit, after Iraqi soldiers who had been guarding the prisoners surrendered and led them to the prisoners. The POWs included two helicopter crewmen and five members of an Army maintenance company that had been ambushed near the city of Nasiriyah.

JERUSALEM - Israel's beleaguered Labor Party chose as its new leader last night Amram Mitzna, a retired army general who has pledged to restart peace negotiations with the Palestinians and dismantle Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He will be the party's candidate for prime minister in elections scheduled for Jan. 28. Mitzna, the 57-year-old mayor of Haifa, was selected by party members over two other candidates, current party chairman and former Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and parliament member Haim Ramon.

Momentous events etch history. Midmorning, a year minus three days ago, the newsroom of The Sun jangled with a combination of horror, disbelief and intensity of purpose unlike any I had ever known. We watched a dozen television monitors, adding pages to the newspaper and calling in every member of the news staff. We knew we faced weeks of working on the most important story of our lives. We didn't know much else -- or what might happen next. Television and news wires rattled out wild speculations about the number of victims of the devastation.

William H. Jensen, 87, owns something rare -- white tennis duck pants --which he just might wear to the Clifton Tennis Club's 100th birthday party Sept. 14, celebrating a century in Baltimore as Maryland's oldest municipal tennis club. But partygoers won't have to worry about the brick red clay dust that used to mark shoes, shirts and shorts so clearly that people knew you had just come from Clifton Park. The clay courts were replaced years ago with a hard surface. Jensen's long white pants recall the genteel look of the 1930s.

NEW YORK - The man standing behind the bulletproof glass at the U.S. consulate in Chengdu was the first American I had seen since arriving in China a month before. "It was the scariest week of my life," he said, recalling the riots that spring of 1999 after the United States accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. "We were trapped in here for five days." I'd come to the consulate to drop off copies of my passport and work visa. I was taken aback to see its windows still cracked and surrounding trees charred from the five days of stone throwing and flag burning that I had watched on the news.

MAYBE WE OUGHT to start calling him Landslide George. President Bush, having lost the popular vote and captured the presidency only through a narrowly decided Supreme Court ruling, hardly seems to acknowledge his tenuous claim to a mandate or earlier pledge to reach out to detractors. Instead of broadening his appeal, he's ignoring the opposition -- on everything from his proposed tax cut to the environment -- as if there were no doubts about what the country wants or needs, no lingering questions about how far he ought to push his agenda.

IF YOU'RE a registered Democrat who votes regularly, chances are you have gotten a recorded phone message in the past week from the state party. The message is simple: Support the Democratic team on Election Day. Curiously, the calls have not been coming from veteran Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes, who is on the ballot next week, or Gov. Parris N. Glendening, the titular head of the Maryland Democratic Party. Rather, the first round of calls came from Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend - who is not on the ballot this year but is almost sure to be a candidate for governor in 2002.

WASHINGTON -- Trouble may be brewing for Pat Buchanan in his drive for the presidential nomination of the Reform Party, with old party members growing increasingly resentful about his tactics in attempting to take control of the party and, they charge, revamp its focus and purpose. An effort at last weekend's California Reform Party convention to tie Mr. Buchanan's hands on the vice-presidential nominee and on the party's agenda, under the threat of disaffiliation from the national party, fell short.

WASHINGTON -- Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that, if correctly decided, will strengthen First Amendment freedoms of speech and association, and demonstrate that much of John McCain's strength in the primaries resulted from state election laws inimical to those freedoms. The question at issue is whether California's "blanket" primary abridges the freedom of individuals to associate in political parties that serve as their right to express their chosen philosophies.