Surrender

DENVER, Colo. - The last two of seven fugitives from Texas were apprehended early yesterday in Colorado Springs, ending an exhaustive 42-day search for men the authorities believe killed a police officer 11 days after they escaped from a maximum-security prison. Tracked down at a Holiday Inn where they negotiated the terms of their surrender with law enforcement officials for more than five hours, the men - Patrick Murphy Jr. and Donald Newbury - walked out of a room they had occupied for two days and were taken to the El Paso County jail.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Backed by helicopter gunships and Harrier jets, a convoy carrying about 200 U.S. Marines rumbled out of Kandahar before dawn yesterday to secure an abandoned Taliban compound in what amounted to the most extensive U.S. ground operation in the war. The Marines headed west of Kandahar, the former Taliban stronghold, into neighboring Helmand province, which has become the focus of U.S. military activity in recent days. Until now, the Marines had been largely restricted to Kandahar's airport and a desert base southwest of here, reflecting U.S. concerns that ground operations would increase the possibility of casualties.

At last, it had come. Sixty years ago today, the news the world had waited to hear for five years, eight months and six days - ever since Hitler's army invaded Poland - came from a schoolhouse in Reims, France. Edward Kennedy, the Associated Press chief on the Western front, was first to flash the word of Germany's surrender to a war-weary world. "Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Western Allies and Russia at 0241 (French time) today in the big Reims red schoolhouse which is the headquarters of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower," Kennedy wrote.

SHU AIBA, Iraq - The confused scene yesterday on the outskirts of Basra, the largest town in southern Iraq, typified the allied campaign so far: general retreat by the Iraqis with groups of fierce holdouts. On the one hand, there was surrender. Across the southern desert yesterday, so many Iraqi soldiers gave up so quickly that U.S. Marines hardly knew what to do with them. The surrender Friday of the Iraqi army's 51st Mechanized Division, coupled with similar capitulations across the plains yesterday, combined to form the sort of problem that a general might dream about: What to do with all these fighters who are throwing down their guns?

Thousands of fugitives being sought on minor warrants for crimes committed in Baltimore and Baltimore County are being urged to turn themselves in this month and expedite their cases at a makeshift court set up in a West Baltimore church and outreach center. The Fugitive Safe Surrender program will run June 16-19 and is aimed at offenders being sought on nonviolent felony or misdemeanor warrants. The warrant backlog is at more than 40,000, and Mayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake said tens of thousands of people live in fear or are unable to get jobs because they are unwilling to get the warrants cleared.

TORA BORA, Afghanistan - American bombers laid a heavy barrage across the snowcapped mountains here early today as efforts to arrange a surrender of embattled Osama bin Laden fighters broke down. Although a turnover of weapons had been scheduled for 8 a.m., the morning began in confusion as mujahedeen, at first resting on the hillsides, began racing up and down the dirt tracks in pickup trucks stuffed with weapons. Commander Hajji Mohammad Zaman frantically waved back international journalists who had gathered near forward positions to witness the supposed surrender.

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton faces a deadline this week on how to handle a potentially embarrassing ethics investigation in Arkansas: begin a fight to keep his lawyer's license or give it up voluntarily? The president has given no reliable sign of how he will respond to the state supreme court ethics committee's inquiry into his denial under oath that he had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. There are indications that he does not plan to surrender his license without a fight.

DENVER --Bernard J. Ebbers of WorldCom had to do it. so did Enron's Kenneth L. Lay. Tyco's L. Dennis Kozlowski, too. But former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, indicted in Denver Tuesday on 42 counts of illegal insider trading, was not paraded in handcuffs before photographers and TV camera crews in a ritual that's known as the "perp walk." Prosecutors allowed Nacchio to travel to Denver from his New Jersey home Monday night on a commercial flight and surrender to the FBI the next morning. Agents fingerprinted him, then drove him across the street in a car with tinted windows into the garage of the federal courthouse.

Several readers wrote me about last week's column that told the story of federal Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes, a Baltimorean who swore in Lyndon B. Johnson as president aboard Air Force One after the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. They pointed out that Hughes' Maryland lineage included Tench Tilghman, who, like Hughes, had been at the center of one of history's most momentous events. Tilghman, Revolutionary War aide-de-camp to Gen. George Washington and one of Maryland's most famous patriots, carried the news of the British surrender in 1781 at Yorktown, Va., to the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, in a ride that has been compared as being second only to that of Paul Revere.

FORT DAVIS, Texas -- The seven-day standoff between Texas authorities and an armed separatist group ended yesterday afternoon when the group's leader, who had vowed to wage an Alamo-style fight to the death, walked out of his trailer with three other members and surrendered in the high desert of West Texas.The leader, Richard McLaren, gave himself up after a "military-style ceremony," at which he and his followers laid down their arms, said Mike Cox, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety.