The $3-billion measure puts California in the forefront of an ongoing national debate.

An initiative that would have state taxpayers underwrite $3 billion worth of research into using embryonic stem cells to develop cures for Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases qualified for the Nov. 2 ballot Thursday, propelling California to the forefront of a national battle at the intersection of science and morality.

Two scientists from Poland claim to have found a solution to the problem of voting in the newly enlarged European Union. The current voting system, which is based on guidelines set by the Treaty of Nice, and the new system proposed in the draft EU Constitution both lead to inequalities between the different member states. The new system, proposed by Karol Życzkowski and Wojciech Slomczyński of Jagiellonian University in Kraków, is based on a square-root formula and would ensure that all European citizens had equal voting powers.

The law happens chiefly in black and white: black robes in white courtrooms, black letters on white pages. One reason legal dramas are so popular in literature is the contrast between this world of cold absolutes and the blurry, colorful world of human conflict. But if you've experienced the indignity of watching your own wrenching dispute compressed into the stark black-and-white lines of the legal system, you'll appreciate the project undertaken by Thane Rosenbaum in ''The Myth of Moral Justice.'' Rosenbaum, a lawyer, essayist and novelist, seeks to reshape the bloodless American legal system into a ''moral'' one -- responsive to the nuance of human sensibility and spirit.

He thus argues for courtrooms reconfigured as places of elaborate storytelling; lawyers who are ''healers'' rather than pit bulls; judges who emote from the bench; and laws that redress harms to the spirit, not just the body. Rosenbaum often relies on cinematic and literary renderings of the cruelty of the legal system, which bolster his arguments about the emotional limitations of the law but misrepresent the reality of what most attorneys do all day; no one makes a film about Mortie, the Above-Average Tax Attorney.

The Pentagon's New Map
By Thomas P. M. Barnett
Copyright 2004

Law & government

The events and aftermath of September 11, 2001, have underscored the need for the nation to strengthen and enhance American knowledge of international relations, world regions, and foreign languages. Homeland security and effective United States engagement abroad depend upon an increased number of Americans who have received such training and are willing to serve their nation.'

'To provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes.'

'To provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes.'

"...all authoritarian regimes are inherently inefficient and doomed to failure because they lack the essential processes of feedback and self-correction provided by the institutions and traditions of democracy."
- Karl Popper

Christopher Diuri's temper was smoldering as he sat on the witness stand, enduring a prosecutor's withering cross-examination.

The 27-year-old mechanic's memory was challenged. His motives for coming forward as a witness were questioned. Even a past run-in with the law — a DUI arrest — was brought out.

Diuri, a plain-spoken man with a closely shaved head, finally snapped. "This case tore my whole family apart when I was a kid," he spat at Deputy Dist. Atty. Lisa Green. "And it's still doing it now."

Diuri's experience was repeated again and again last week as four former witnesses in one of the nation's biggest child molestation cases from the 1980s took the stand to say they had never been molested as children. They had only said they were, they now confessed, because law enforcement had hounded and threatened them.

The witnesses wanted to set the record straight, they said, because their false testimony had sent four innocent people to prison, including John Stoll, who is still there 19 years later. In wrenching testimony, one of the former child victims, a burly sign painter named Edward Sampley, tearfully addressed the bald, 60-year-old inmate in jailhouse brown. "I'm sorry," Sampley said, as both he and Stoll wiped away tears.

A touching scene of reconciliation? Hardly. If these young men, all in their mid-20s, thought Kern County authorities would welcome their heartfelt confessions, they were mistaken. Green hammered away at them, questioning whether they might be planning to file suit against the county and raising the prospect that they had formed some sort of conspiracy to free the very man who molested them.

Am I to be called a bigot for saying that only the sighted should be given the responsibility of leading the blind?
- Rick

A joint panel of outside experts strongly recommended Tuesday that the Food and Drug Administration make the so-called morning-after birth control pill available over the counter, saying that unhindered access to emergency contraception would dramatically reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and the demand for abortion.

"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other forms that have been tried."
- Winston Churchill

"It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge."
- Lord Acton

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an
idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it
to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the
possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of
it."
- Thomas Jefferson