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BEIJING -- In the largest protest Beijing has seen since the ill-fated occupation of Tiananmen Square 10 years ago, more than 10,000 followers of a quasi-religious sect surrounded the Chinese leadership compound yesterday demanding freedom to practice their beliefs.The quiet and peaceful demonstration, which broke up late last night, caught China's security apparatus flat-footed at a time when it is on heightened alert to head off just such public protests.In the past six months, the government has cracked down on democracy advocates and closed or suspended various intellectual journals and publishing houses.

TODAY, THE U.S. Postal Service officially issues its Malcolm X stamp. You have to figure the X-man is twirling in his grave.Just who is being honored here? The Malcolm who excoriated America for its anti-black racism, who frequently opposed his federal government's policies in Third World countries, who was the most powerful black nationalist spokesman since Marcus Garvey and who, even a month before he died, continued to wear that label.Or is it the watered-down Malcolm X portrayed by the 1990s media?

BEIJING -- It was a stunning moment for the Chinese leadership.Dressed in drab provincial clothes and carrying copies of their leader's manifesto, about 10,000 members of the Falun Gong meditation sect slipped into the capital in April and staged the biggest anti-government demonstration in a decade.In an act that no one seemed to have anticipated, the crowd of mostly middle-aged disciples sat cross-legged in lotus positions outside the vermilion walls of the Zhongnanhai leadership compound, silently protesting the detention of fellow members and asking for official recognition.

Oh, just call it the Ravens Nest at Camden Yards. Or the Megacorp Ravens Nest at Camden Yards.Weld is a four-letter word. Some people are surprised to learn that Helms is not.You are meant to think of the Buddhist sect contributions as witness to Bill's spiritual side.OAWelcome back, Harold Baines! Enjoy your stay and come again.Pub Date: 8/01/97

NEW YORK -- To tens of thousands of Lubavitcher Jews around the world, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson was more than their "rebbe," their teacher. They believed he could be the messiah.They believed he had all the characteristics of the messiah as described in Jewish law: a living, breathing person who toils over his learning of the Torah; who strives to perform good deeds; someone who leads people to glorify and recommit themselves to Jewish traditions."The more you knew him, the more respect you had, the more in awe you were, the more you realize that there is so much there that you will never understand," says Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, a spokesman at the Lubavitcher headquarters, in Brooklyn.

In Pakistan, where he was born 64 years ago, Muhammad Bashir Shad says, he could not greet another Muslim with the traditional Islamic greeting: "Salaam aleikum" or "peace be unto you." If he had, he says, he would have been imprisoned -- or even killed."I can't talk about my religion," said the Ellicott City man, a member of the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, a Pakistani sect whose members were declared non-Muslims by Pakistan's Parliament in 1974. "I'd be afraid someone will attack me and nobody will stop them."

TOKYO -- A top official of the religious sect suspected in last month's subway nerve gas attack was fatally stabbed in the stomach last night as he walked through a phalanx of television cameras outside the sect's offices.The victim, Hideo Murai, chief of the sect's "Science and Technology Agency," collapsed and was taken to a hospital. The doctors who operated on Mr. Murai, 36, had told reporters that he lost large amounts of blood and suffered damage to his liver and kidneys. He died early today, several hours after surgery, officials said.

TOKYO -- The police search of a religious sect's properties focused yesterday on a three-story building that believers say is one of the organization's most holy sites but that authorities say contains a sophisticated chemical laboratory capable of producing large quantities of nerve gas.As snow fell on the placid village where the sect had its main complex, near the foot of Mount Fuji, about 1,000 police officers conducted their search and carted off...

TOKYO -- In an effort to explain itself to the world, the religious organization suspected of releasing a deadly nerve agent into the Tokyo subways last month held a news conference here yesterday and acknowledged that some of its actions could appear "peculiar."For instance, the Aum Shinri Kyo sect did indeed provide a special "energy" drink for followers made from the blood of the sect's spiritual leader. In other cases, it supplied the bathwater of senior disciples, said Fumihiro Joyu, an articulate former rocket scientist who has emerged as the religion's spokesman.

Paris. -- The influence in Moscow of Japan's Aum Shinrikyo sect, thought responsible for loosing poison gas in Tokyo's subway system, is disquieting. European reports say that Aum Shinrikyo's sizable Moscow implantation is due in part to support from within Boris Yeltsin's presidential entourage.If this is so, it is easy to imagine a banal explanation, linked to money. Russia today is wide open to clandestine trading in anything anyone thinks he can make a profit on, and this sect has plenty of money, as well as its apocalyptic doctrines and ambitions.

ELDORADO, Texas - Six men from a West Texas polygamist community - including incarcerated sect leader Warren Jeffs - have been indicted by a grand jury on charges including felony sexual assault of a child. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott announced the charges against members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints yesterday evening. He said he hopes to extradite Jeffs, 52, who is now in an Arizona jail awaiting trial on other charges, "as quickly as possible."

DENVER - A Texas judge allowed parents yesterday to begin retrieving more than 400 children taken by the state during a raid on a polygamist sect's compound in April. District Judge Barbara Walther issued the order after the state Supreme Court ruling last week that found Texas authorities had overreached when they moved the children into protective custody. On Friday, Walther refused to sign an agreement between the state and lawyers for the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that would have provided for the children's release.

Commentary from Texas newspapers about the polygamist roundup: Most who remember the conflagration in Waco 15 years ago this month probably are thinking the same thing. The drama on a West Texas polygamous sect's compound sounds David Koresh-ish. And the last thing anyone needs is a repeat of the fiasco at the cult leader's Mount Carmel compound. Fair enough. The authorities investigating the ranch of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-day Saints in Eldorado should not overstep their authority.

SAN ANGELO, Texas -- A judge ruled yesterday that 416 children seized by authorities during a raid on a polygamous sect's compound are at risk of sexual abuse if they stay with the group and must be placed into foster care. Texas District Judge Barbara L. Walther's ruling came after a chaotic, two-day hearing that involved several hundred attorneys and two buildings filled with witnesses, reporters and members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a breakaway Mormon sect that believes in divinely inspired, under-age polygamous marriage.

Dec. 27 2002 Clonaid, a company founded by a religious sect that believes in space aliens, announced the world's first cloned baby, a claim subsequently dismissed by scientists for lack of proof.

BAGHDAD -- The death toll from five synchronized suicide bombings in a remote northern border area rose above 250 yesterday, making the attack on the reclusive Yazidi religious sect the deadliest single act of terrorism in Iraq since the war began more than four years ago. Rescuers, police and townspeople pulled scores of bodies from the rubble of three villages destroyed by the Tuesday night blasts in Nineveh province. The attack occurred in an impoverished region where Yazidis have taken refuge from hostile neighbors who consider them heretics or devil worshipers.

BAGHDAD -- Four suicide bombers drove trucks packed with explosives into a complex housing members of a small religious sect in northwestern Iraq yesterday, killing at least 175 in the deadliest attack on civilians in the country in nearly a year. The simultaneous blasts targeting the Yazidi community in Qahataniya, about 70 miles west of Mosul, also injured 200 and inflicted fresh damage on ethnic cohesion in a country beset by sectarian conflict. Earlier yesterday, another suicide bomber drove a truck laden with explosives onto a key bridge linking Baghdad with vital northern oil fields.

Phil Walden, 66, the Capricorn Records founder who launched the careers of Otis Redding and the Allman Brothers Band, died Sunday in Atlanta after a long battle with cancer, his family said yesterday. The Macon, Ga.-based record label, founded in 1969, was influential in bringing together rock, country and blues artists who crafted a new style exemplified by groups like the Allmans and the Charlie Daniels Band, another act discovered by Mr. Walden. "Phil was a visionary," said Chuck Leavell, who joined the Allman Brothers on keyboards in 1972 and now plays with the Rolling Stones.

Elsewhere Robert Morrisey, 78, whose love of wine was initiated by his doctor's advice and grew into a passion that inspired him to create The Wine Spectator publication, died March 26 of congestive heart failure in San Diego. He was also a former Marine Corps major and one-time wine columnist for the San Diego Evening Tribune. He was a casual drinker of martinis in the late 1960s when his doctor suggested he switch to wine for health reasons. The popular response to his newspaper columns of the early 1970s led him to create a 12-page tabloid newsletter in 1976, The Wine Spectator, which went on to become America's top-selling wine publication.

It's either a spectacular hoax or scientific landmark. But a religious sect that believes humans descended from aliens claimed yesterday that it had created the world's first human clone, a baby called Eve who is a genetic carbon copy of her mother. "The baby is very healthy. The parents are happy," said Brigitte Boisselier, a former university chemist who directs Clonaid, a company founded by the Raelians to create human clones. Though offering no evidence to back up her claim, Boisselier said the baby was born by Caesarean section at 11:55 a.m. Thursday and weighed 7 pounds.