The Vanity Fair story said Felt had admitted his "historic, anonymous role" following years of denial.

In a statement today, Woodward and Bernstein said, "W. Mark Felt was 'Deep Throat' and helped us immeasurably in our Watergate coverage. However, as the record shows, many other sources and officials assisted us and other reporters for the hundreds of stories that were written in The Washington Post about Watergate."

Felt's guidance to Woodward -- provided on "deep background" in secret meetings -- helped keep public attention focused on the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington's Watergate office and apartment complex, and on a subsequent cover-up effort. This ultimately led to a congressional investigation that revealed the role of Nixon and a number of his top aides. Under threat of impeachment, Nixon resigned in 1974.

Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee had kept the identity of "Deep Throat" secret at the source's request, saying his name would be revealed upon his death. "We've kept that secret because we keep our word," Woodward said.

But with the Vanity Fair article and the family's statement, the three decided today to break their silence. Bradlee said today, "The thing that stuns me is that the goddamn secret has lasted this long." He was the Post's executive editor during Watergate and now is a vice president of the newspaper.

Vice-president Dick Cheney stepped up America's war of words with North Korea yesterday by calling it a police state run by an irresponsible leader indifferent to the fate of his malnourished people.

His words came just 48 hours after the Pentagon announced that it was sending 15 F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter-bombers to South Korea, a US ally, for an undetermined period. The aircraft crews, trained to seek out targets with precision weapons, needed to familiarise themselves with the Korean terrain, the air force said.

Speaking to CNN in an interview broadcast last night, Mr. Cheney described North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, as "one of the world's more irresponsible leaders."

Mr. Cheney went on to accuse Kim of running "a police state" and of maintaining one of the most heavily militarised societies in the world. He said most North Koreans lived "in abject poverty and stages of malnutrition". The statement appeared to be a reference to the North Korean famine, widely blamed on the country's communist elite, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

The vice-president continued: "He doesn't take care of his people at all, and he obviously wants to throw his weight around and become a nuclear power."

The vote, 238 to 194 with 50 Republicans in favor, fell far short of the two-thirds majority required to overturn a presidential veto, setting up a possible showdown between Congress and Mr. Bush, who has never exercised his veto power. An identical bill has broad bipartisan support in the Senate; moments after the House vote, the Senate sponsors wrote to the Republican leader, Bill Frist, urging him to put it on the agenda.

The House action is the first vote on embryonic stem cell research since August 2001, when Mr. Bush opened the door to taxpayer financing for the studies, but only with strict limits. The new bill permits the government to pay for studies involving human embryos that are in frozen storage at fertility clinics, so long as couples conceiving the embryos certified that they had made a decision to discard them.

Under a compromise reached by an assortment of moderates, mavericks and senior statesmen just as the Senate was headed into its climactic overnight debate over the filibuster, three previously blocked appeals court nominees, Janice Rogers Brown, William Pryor and Priscilla R. Owen - will get floor votes. No commitment was made on the fate of two others, William Myers and Henry Saad.

In addition, the seven Democrats in the deal said they were committed to filibuster future judicial nominees only under "extraordinary" circumstances, while their Republican counterparts promised to support no changes in Senate rules that would alter the filibuster rule, effectively denying the 50 votes it would take to enact such a rules change.

"I am a strong supporter of stem cell research, but I've made very clear to Congress that the use of federal taxpayer money to promote science that destroys life in order to save life, I am against this," said Mr. Bush, speaking in the Oval Office during a brief joint appearance with the Danish prime minister, Anders Rasmussen. "Therefore, if the bill does that, I will veto it."

The president also expressed grave concerns about a report that South Korean researchers have perfected a method of cloning human embryos to extract their stem cells that could, theoretically, be used to develop treatments and cures that would be exact genetic matches to patients.

"I'm very concerned about cloning," Mr. Bush said. "I worry about a world in which cloning becomes acceptable."

"The United States is being left farther behind every day, this morning by South Korea," said [Republican Senator Arlen] Specter. He added, "I don't like veto threats and I don't like comments about overriding the veto, but this issue is going to be the focal point of my subcommittee."

The Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid of Nevada, said in a statement: "Embryonic stem cell research provides us the hope of new cures and therapies and we should embrace this research opportunity and not allow radical ideology to stand in the way. President Bush has made the wrong choice, putting politics ahead of safe, responsible science."

The survey, which polled 1,005 adults from May 12-16 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, also has some troubling findings for President Bush. Just 20 percent of those polled say the economy has gotten better over the past 12 months, an 11- point decline since January; 51 percent believe that removing Saddam Hussein from power was not worth the cost and casualties of that war; and only 36 percent support Bush’s plan to allow workers to invest their Social Security contributions in the stock market.

Most don't support blanket approval for judges That Social Security figure, which is virtually unchanged from April, is significant because it suggests that Bush hasn’t moved the country any closer to supporting private accounts despite his months-long campaign for them.

Regarding the contentious debate over Bush’s judicial nominees, just 34 percent say the Senate should generally confirm the president’s judicial picks as long as they are honest and competent, while 56 percent argue that the Senate should make its own decision about the fitness of each nominee to serve.

Overall, according to the NBC/Journal poll, 52 percent believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction, while 35 percent think it’s on the right track.

All of these findings, Hart says, are signs of an angry electorate. "If you are a member of Congress and you got the poll back, you better be looking over your shoulder," he said. "The masses are not happy."

Some Quranic etiquette is intellectual: One should pronounce each word correctly; one should seek to discover what difficult words mean. There are also prestige issues. For instance, one should not place any other book on top of the Quran. This last was a violation that my Cairo doorman Muhammad was ever concerned to root out. Once he had satisfied himself that I had not put the Quran under any other book or item in my apartment, he would instruct me to pour us both a glass of whiskey, after which he would not touch the Quran again until he was sober and had somewhat repented for a clear transgression.

Once, Muhammad discovered in my garbage an exam I had taken that tested knowledge of certain ayat (or verses) from the Quran, and he reproached me for putting the holy book in the trash. I said that it was not the Quran itself, but only words taken from it. His response was astonishing: "You can either burn your exam," he explained, "or do this...." At which point, he tore off a verse, rolled it up, put it into his mouth, and swallowed it. I note that Muhammad was a doorman and not a scholar, but apparently in this particular instance, there was no problem if the Quran was to wind up in the toilet presently.....

At any rate, it is dangerous to invest artifacts with too much metaphysical significance. The fact that many Muslims regard the Quran as the literal word of God, as we have frequently been reminded over the last week, poses an enormous problem. Without reinterpreting or recontextualizing a sacred text that suited the exigencies of an ancient Arabian community, it is going to be difficult for 21st-century believers to get along with non-Muslims on a very small planet.

By a 5-to-4 vote, the court overturned state liquor laws in New York and Michigan that gave preferential treatment to in-state wineries. Both states permit in-state wineries to ship directly to consumers, bypassing both retailers and wholesalers.

Michigan prohibited direct shipment by out-of-state wineries while New York nominally permitted it for out-of-state wineries that maintain a New York office, a requirement that no out-of-state winery has met and that the majority on Monday found so financially burdensome for small wineries as to amount to a prohibition.

In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said both states were engaging in the kind of protectionism that the Commerce Clause of the Constitution forbids and that the 21st Amendment does not excuse. The 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition and granted the states much leeway in regulating alcohol. But "state regulation of alcohol is limited by the nondiscrimination principle of the Commerce Clause," Justice Kennedy said.

By the end of the week, the rioting had spread from Afghanistan throughout much of the Muslim world, from Gaza to Indonesia. Mobs shouting "Protect our Holy Book!" burned down government buildings and ransacked the offices of relief organizations in several Afghan provinces. The violence cost at least 15 lives, injured scores of people and sent a shudder through Washington, where officials worried about the stability of moderate regimes in the region.

The spark was apparently lit at a press conference held on Friday, May 6, by Imran Khan, a Pakistani cricket legend and strident critic of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Brandishing a copy of that week's Newsweek (dated May 9), Khan read a report that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo prison had placed the Qur'an on toilet seats and even flushed one. "This is what the U.S. is doing," exclaimed Khan, "desecrating the Qur'an." His remarks, as well as the outraged comments of Muslim clerics and Pakistani government officials, were picked up on local radio and played throughout neighboring Afghanistan. Radical Islamic foes of the U.S.-friendly regime of Hamid Karzai quickly exploited local discontent with a poor economy and the continued presence of U.S. forces, and riots began breaking out last week.

Unsettled by a series of dry winters in this normally wet city, Mayor Greg Nickels has begun a nationwide effort to do something the Bush administration will not: carry out the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

Mayor Greg Nickels of Seattle formed a bipartisan coalition of mayors to adopt the Kyoto Protocol on global warming on the local level.

Mr. Nickels, a Democrat, says 131 other likeminded mayors have joined a bipartisan coalition to fight global warming on the local level, in an implicit rejection of the administration's policy.

The mayors, from cities as liberal as Los Angeles and as conservative as Hurst, Tex., represent nearly 29 million citizens in 35 states, according to Mayor Nickels's office. They are pledging to have their cities meet what would have been a binding requirement for the nation had the Bush administration not rejected the Kyoto Protocol: a reduction in heat-trapping gas emissions to levels 7 percent below those of 1990, by 2012.

On Thursday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg brought New York City into the coalition, the latest Republican mayor to join.

The coalition is not the first effort by local leaders to take up the initiative on climate change. California, under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, is moving to limit carbon dioxide emissions, and Gov. George A. Pataki of New York, also a Republican, has led efforts to reduce power plant emissions in the Northeast. But the coalition is unusual in its open embrace of an international agreement that the Bush administration has spurned, Mayor Nickels's office said, and is significant because cities are huge contributors to the nation's emission of heat-trapping gases.

In clear daylight, the White House is intimidating Richard Lugar, Chuck Hagel, poor Lincoln Chafee, Lamar Alexander and Lisa Murkowski -- the moderates on the Republican side of the Committee -- much like Bolton intimidated the national intelligence bureaucracy of the U.S. government. In the case of the intel analysts, their bosses saved them from Bolton. But no one is saving these senators from Cheneyesque efforts to completely subordinate the Senate to the whims of the White House.

George Voinovich saved himself by indicating he would not support Bolton's nomination. Despite voting in favor of moving Bolton's nomination to the floor of the Senate without recommendation, Voinovich has assured weeks more of pain for the White House on Bolton and has shored up some Democrats who were beginning to wilt under the pressure of a convincing psy-ops campaign by the White House last weekend claiming the Republicans had assembled a party-line vote "in favor" of Bolton's confirmation -- which was false. And Voinovich has created space for principled internationalists in his own party to defect from the Cheney-Bolton pressure cooker.

When one considers the losses suffered by Britain and France -- hundreds of thousands dead, destitution, bankruptcy, the end of the empires -- was World War II worth it, considering that Poland and all the other nations east of the Elbe were lost anyway?

If the objective of the West was the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was a "smashing" success. But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in.

If it was to keep Hitler out of Western Europe, why declare war on him and draw him into Western Europe? If it was to keep Hitler out of Central and Eastern Europe, then, inevitably, Stalin would inherit Central and Eastern Europe.

Was that worth fighting a world war – with 50 million dead?

When this city recently doubled the number of garbage categories to 10, it handed residents a 27-page booklet on how to sort their trash. Highlights included detailed instructions on 518 items. In Yokohama, trash that escapes recycling is put in transparent bags and loaded into trucks for incineration. Lipstick goes into burnables; lipstick tubes, "after the contents have been used up," into "small metals" or plastics. Take out your tape measure before tossing a kettle: under 12 inches, it goes into small metals, but over that it goes into bulky refuse.

Socks? If only one, it is burnable; a pair goes into used cloth, though only if the socks "are not torn, and the left and right sock match." Throw neckties into used cloth, but only after they have been "washed and dried."

"It was so hard at first," said Sumie Uchiki, 65, whose ward began wrestling with the 10 categories last October as part of an early trial. "We were just not used to it. I even needed to wear my reading glasses to sort out things correctly."

To Americans struggling with sorting trash into a few categories, Japan may provide a foretaste of daily life to come. In a national drive to reduce waste and increase recycling, neighborhoods, office buildings, towns and megalopolises are raising the number of trash categories - sometimes to dizzying heights.

Indeed, Yokohama, with 3.5 million people, appears slack compared with Kamikatsu, a town of 2,200 in the mountains of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands. Not content with the 34 trash categories it defined four years ago as part of a major push to reduce waste, Kamikatsu has gradually raised the number to 44.

One of the most successful products recently to tap into that individualism has been Apple Computer Inc.'s digital music player iPod. Apple set out to market the portable device, which can hold thousands of songs, to people of all ages.

Last fall, its TV commercials featured a silhouette of a dancing Bono of the Irish rock band U2 singing "Vertigo." Apple was confident that younger consumers would see Bono -- who turned 45 today -- as the ultimate in cool: a hardened rocker who crusades for social and environmental causes. Apple was also betting that older consumers, whose fear of technology might have made them anxious, would feel reassured. If Bono, whom they'd listened to for more than two decades, could handle an iPod, so could they.

"We have huge youth appeal," said Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of iPod marketing. "With this campaign, we tried to reach across several generations."

According to the book, which will be released to the public on May 17, based on National Security Agency electronic intercepts, the Saudi Arabian government has in place a nationwide, self-destruction explosive system composed of conventional explosives and dirty bombs strategically placed at the Kingdom's key oil ports, pipelines, pumping stations, storage tanks, offshore platforms, and backup facilities. If activated, the bombs would destroy the infrastructure of the world's largest oil supplier, and leave the country a contaminated nuclear wasteland ensuring that the Kingdom's oil would be unusable to anyone. The NSA file is dubbed internally Petro SE, for petroleum scorched earth.

To make certain that the damaged facilities cannot be rebuilt, the Saudis have deployed crude Radioactive Dispersal Devices (RDDs) throughout the Kingdom. Built covertly over several years, these dirty bombs are in place at -- among other locations -- all eight of the Kingdom's refineries, sections of the world's largest oil field at Ghawar, and at three of the ten indispensable processing towers at the largest-ever processing complex at Abqaiq.

Tony Blair promised today to pursue the people's priorities in Labour's unprecedented third term and issued a veiled apology for the shortcomings of the past eight years, as he returned to Downing Street with a much-reduced majority. Standing in front of No 10, Mr Blair acknowledged that Iraq had been a "deeply divisive issue", but said he believed the country was now ready to move on.

He also drew a sharp contrast between the mobbed scenes of triumph in his 1997 victory and today's humble acceptance.

The Freedom Tower will remain in the same northwest corner of the World Trade Center site overlooking West Street, but it will be moved slightly away from the street to better protect it from potential car bombs. Another expected design change involves the lower 150 to 200 feet of the tower, now largely glass, that will have to be better protected.

Libeskind yesterday seemed resigned to the changes. "Security is clearly the paramount concern," he said. "While the shape and details of buildings may change, the intent, spirit and direction of the master plan remains intact." Any tension between City Hall and Albany about improved security was downplayed. At a town a town-hall meeting in Brooklyn last night, Bloomberg said, "We made some major progress today in terms of satisfying the demands of the Police Department that this building be really safe."

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, whose district includes Ground Zero, blasted both Pataki and Bloomberg. "The lack of coordination and cooperation by the governor and the mayor has cost us months of delay and resulted in the decision by Goldman Sachs to consider other locations for their headquarters," he fumed. Goldman Sachs had proposed a massive headquarters across West Street from the Freedom Tower site, but pulled out recently over concerns about security.

President Bush called Premier Silvio Berlusconi on Wednesday to express his regret for the March killing of an Italian agent by U.S. troops in Iraq. The call came days after Washington and Rome issued rival reports about the shooting death.

Berlusconi's office described the conversation as "long and cordial" and said the two countries reaffirmed their commitment in Iraq. Berlusconi, a staunch ally of the United States, sent about 3,000 troops in Iraq after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

But the March 4 death of Nicola Calipari, hailed as a hero in Italy, has caused friction between Washington and Rome, and Berlusconi's government has come under pressure to reevaluate the Italian troop deployment in Iraq.

Italian government:
-No warning signs to motorists about impending checkpoint
-Car not speeding and did not accelerate after warning shots
-Proper inquiry impossible because vehicles removed and army logs destroyed just after shooting

Fifty-seven percent of those polled said they did not believe it was worth going to war, versus 41 percent who said it was, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll of 1,006 adults.

That was a drop in support from February, when 48 percent said it was worth going to war and half said it was not. It's also the highest percentage of respondents who have expressed those feelings and triple the percentage of Americans who said that it was not worth the cost shortly after the war began about two years ago.

Asked how things are going for the United States in Iraq, 56 percent said "badly" or "very badly," up from 45 percent in March. Forty-two percent said "well" or "very well," down from 52 percent in March.

The concentration of American troops and weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan limits the Pentagon's ability to deal with other potential armed conflicts, the military's highest ranking officer reported to Congress on Monday.

The officer, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed Congress in a classified report that major combat operations elsewhere in the world, should they be necessary, would probably be more protracted and produce higher American and foreign civilian casualties because of the commitment of Pentagon resources in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ladies and gentlemen, I've been attending these dinners for years and just quietly sitting there. Well, I've got a few things I want to say for a change.

This is going to be fun because he really doesn't have a clue about what I'm gonna' to say next. George always says he's delighted to come to these press dinners. Baloney. He's usually in bed by now.

I'm not kidding.

I said to him the other day, "George, if you really want to end tyranny in the world, you're going to have to stay up later."

I am married to the president of the United States, and here's our typical evening: Nine o'clock, Mr. Excitement here is sound asleep, and I'm watching Desperate Housewives— with Lynne Cheney. Ladies and gentlemen, I am a desperate housewife. I mean, if those women on that show think they're desperate, they oughta be with George.

One night, after George went to bed, Lynne Cheney, Condi Rice, Karen Hughes and I went to Chippendale's. I wouldn't even mention it except Ruth Ginsberg and Sandra Day O'Connor saw us there. I won't tell you what happened, but Lynne's Secret Service codename is now "Dollar Bill."

But George and I are complete opposites — I'm quiet, he's talkative, I'm introverted, he's extroverted, I can pronounce nuclear —