A surveillance camera caught a group entering the museum, located on the Left Bank of the French capital along the Seine River and housing a major collection of Impressionist artists like Monet. An alarm sounded and the group left, but not before damaging the painting, an aide to Culture Minister Christine Albanel said by telephone. No arrests were immediately made.

Albanel told France-Info radio that the painting could be restored, but she deplored what she said was an attack on "our memory, our heritage." "This splendid Monet painting (was) punched right in the middle," the minister said with emotion. According to the aide, a 10-centimetre tear was made in the Monet, perhaps with a fist. The official, not authorized to speak publicly of the matter, asked not to be named.

*****

The break-in occurred as Paris held its annual all-night festival, which brings thousands of people into the streets for music, exhibits and fun.

The five-year limit was set in place to purge the list of Americans who invariably move or change numbers. But for telemarketers, a lack of awareness about the expiration date signals new opportunity. "Will we attempt to touch people no longer on the list? Of course." says Tim Searcy, CEO of the American Teleservices Association. The "mass expiration," he argues, will also let customers decide whether they want to opt out. "New offers might be compelling after five years," he says. Most households probably don't see things that way. "I bet 99.9 percent of people who swear off calls never want to get them again," says Baicker from Pennsylvania.

[C]learly I was not alone in noticing this double standard. The designer Cynthia Rowley had been reading a report from The Associated Press that day that advised women to prepare for the heat wave by wearing dresses, but offered no guidance for men. "I should go down to Wall Street and set up a little booth where I could cut off their pants legs and hem them into shorts," she said. "But they would have to throw away their socks." There was a short-lived shorts moment in the 1950's, abbreviated for that reason.

*****

I wore a dressy pair of low-waisted, narrow knee-length navy twill shorts from Joseph, a white dress shirt, brown loafers (no socks) and a tightly tailored gray jacket from Thom Browne, another designer who put shorts suits in his fall collection. I found myself cooler, strangely confident and, because of that, walking more gaily than usual. But on the street, people stared. Some took pictures. "What country are you from?" asked Joe Gianotti, an insurance executive, who was eating lunch with Jim Silverberg, a manager at the New York Public Library, in Bryant Park, where the temperature approached 100 degrees. Mr. Silverberg wore long sleeves and a tie. Mr. Gianotti had taken his tie off and described himself as something unprintable for wearing it at all. "It is unfair," he said. "Women wear flip-flops and miniskirts, and some of them even have their stomachs out. But if I wore shorts, they'd make a big deal of it in the office. You look around, and all the men have long pants on, so it's obvious that you have to wear them. We're not in Bermuda."

Still, it struck me as defeatist that Mayor Bloomberg would not take his own advice and lighten up. "There are red lines that men won't cross," said Michael Anton, a former speechwriter for President Bush who now works for Rupert Murdoch at News Corp. Under the pseudonym Nicholas Antongiavanni, Mr. Anton wrote The Suit, a book on corporate style.

"Shorts, for the immediate future, are a step too far," he said. "If we ended up dressing identically for work and for leisure pursuits, men would feel intuitively that something has been lost." Comfort, for one thing. But on Friday I wore pants.

"The government will not let corporate leaders violate their trust and get away with it," said Sean Berkowitz, head of the Justice Department's Enron Task Force, which conducted the prosecution. "You can't lie to shareholders and put yourself in front of your employees' interests."

Lay, 64, and Skilling, 52, face at least 25 years each in prison after being convicted of using off-the-books partnerships to disguise Enron's debts. Skilling faces additional jail time over his conviction for using inside information to sell Enron stock. Lay was also convicted on bank fraud charges after a trial that U.S. District Judge Sim Lake held without a jury while the panel in the main case deliberated.

"Obviously I'm not real happy with this," Skilling said in the courtroom after the verdict. "It is what it is." Skilling maintained his innocence and his lawyer, Daniel Petrocelli, said he would appeal. Lake said he would sentence the defendants on Sept. 11. Skilling is allowed to remain free on $5 million bond and doesn't have to be put in "home confinement" as prosecutors sought, Lake said.

Lay surrendered his passport after the judge said he wasn't allowed to leave the courthouse until he did so. Lay posted a $5 million bond, co-signed by his wife and children. He's restricted to living in Colorado and the southern district of Texas, and the routes to and from those places. "I firmly believe I'm innocent of the charges against me," Lay said outside the courtroom. "We believe God in fact is in control and he does indeed work all things for the good." Both men face spending the rest of their lives in prison if they are given maximum sentences. After the verdict was announced, the color drained from Lay's face and his wife and daughter burst into tears. Skilling's wife wasn't in the courtroom. "We've had a trial, and obviously it did not come out the way we hoped," Petrocelli said. "It doesn't change our view of what happened at Enron. And it certainly doesn't change our view of Jeff Skilling's innocence."

In the telephone survey of 1200 individuals, just 47% agreed that "the 9/11 attacks were thoroughly investigated and that any speculation about US government involvement is nonsense." Almost as many, 45%, indicated they were more likely to agree "that so many unanswered questions about 9/11 remain that Congress or an International Tribunal should re-investigate the attacks, including whether any US government officials consciously allowed or helped facilitate their success."

The poll is the first survey that has attempted to gauge the level of Americans' doubts about 9/11 and was carried out for the "9/11: Revealing the Truth, Reclaiming Our Future" conference to be held in Chicago in June. Not surprisingly, Republicans as a group were the most supportive of existing investigations, with 70% expressing their satisfaction -- about the same percentage that has expressed approval of Bush's performance in recent polls. Sixty-four percent of those earning over $75,000 were also skeptical of doubts about 9/11. The groups most likely to want the attacks re-investigated were Hispanics at 67% and African-Americans at 64%.

*****

When asked specificially if they thought there had been a government coverup of evidence that contradicts the official story, the results were again not far from an even split, with 48% rejecting the idea of a deliberate coverup and 42% supporting it. Belief in a coverup was the majority position among Democrats, 18-29 year olds, and a few other groups.

In an attempt to focus more specifically on the attitudes of those who were best informed about the events of 9/11, the poll asked its responders if they were aware of WTC Building 7, whose collapse on September 11 for no obvious reason was not investigated by the 9/11 Commission. Only 52% answered that they were aware of the collapse of Building 7, but out of that subgroup, 73% believed it should have been investigated.

[T]he per-person amounts approved for possession by anyone 18 or older could easily turn any college party into an all-nighter: half a gram of coke, a couple of Ecstasy pills, several doses of LSD, a few marijuana joints, a spoonful of heroin, 5 grams of opium and more than 2 pounds of peyote, the hallucinogenic cactus. The law would be among the most permissive in the world, putting Mexico in the company of the Netherlands. Critics, including U.S. drug policy officials, already are worrying that it will spur a domestic addiction problem and make Mexico a narco-tourism destination. Even the Netherlands, famous for coffeehouses that sell small quantities of potent marijuana and hashish, forbids the possession and sale of narcotics. Colombia allows personal use of marijuana, cocaine and heroin, but not LSD or PCP.

Selling drugs or using them in public still would be a crime in Mexico. Anyone possessing drugs still could be held for questioning by police, and each state could impose fines even on the permitted quantities, the bill stipulates. But it includes no imprisonment penalties. Lawmakers who voted for decriminalization, some of whom have expressed surprise over the details of the bill, said it would for the first time empower local police to make drug arrests and allow law enforcement in general to focus on intercepting large drug shipments and major traffickers. The bill also would stiffen penalties for selling drugs near schools and authorize state and local police to detain users to check whether amounts were over the legal limit.

"The law constitutes an important step forward by the Mexican state in its battle against drug dealing," said Eduardo Medina Mora, secretary of public security and Mexico's top law enforcement officer. Presidential spokesman Ruben Aguilar said Tuesday that Fox would sign the measure, calling it an important tool in the fight against drug trafficking. Fox has avoided public comments on the bill and did not attend a news conference about it Tuesday.

Since the vote by Congress last week, lawmakers have said they are unsure who amended the bill, originally aimed at legalizing possession of small quantities of drugs among addicts, to make it apply to all "consumers." The Bush administration is refraining from public criticism of Mexico. But in private meetings Monday with Mexican officials in Washington, U.S. officials tried to discourage passage of the law, U.S. Embassy officials here said.

Rioters could soon be in for a slippery surprise. Researchers at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, US, are working on a new non-lethal weapon that could quite literally bring them to their knees – by sliming them. The institute has developed a super-slimy substance. When fired at an unruly mob it causes rioters to simply slip over.

Riot police or troops would wear a back pack with three cylinders – one containing compressed air, another filled with plain water and a third containing a supply of very dry, finely ground, polyacrylamide powder. A nozzle, resembling a shower head, would blasts two separate jets, containing the water and the polymer powder, in the general direction of an ugly crowd.

As the two jets mix in the air, after clearing the nozzle, they create a slimy mixture that covers the ground and causes everyone in the area to fall down. Even vehicles should be unable to get a grip on the goo, the patent says. And because the gel is non-toxic, it should cause no permanent harm, besides a few bruised bottoms, that is.

"I don't want to sound glib here but it is the first time in Nevada that you'll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons," said James Tegnelia, head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Tegnelia said the test was part of a U.S. effort to develop weapons capable of destroying deeply-buried bunkers housing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

"We have several very large penetrators we're developing," he told defense reporters. "We also have - are you ready for this - a 700-ton explosively formed charge that we're going to be putting in a tunnel in Nevada," he said. "And that represents to U.S. the largest single explosive that we could imagine doing conventionally to solve that problem," he said. The aim is to measure the effect of the blast on hard granite structures, he said.

*****

He said the Russians have been notified of the test, which is scheduled for the first week of June at the Nevada test range. "We're also making sure that Las Vegas understands," Tegnelia said.

The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn't going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right. Similar conclusions a few years ago from another academic saw him excoriated on right-wing blogs, and even led to a Congressional investigation into his research funding. But the new results are worth a look. In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids' personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There's no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it's unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings.

A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity. The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.

Block admits in his paper that liberal Berkeley is not representative of the whole country. But within his sample, he says, the results hold. He reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial. In a society that values self-confidence and out-goingness, it's a mostly flattering picture for liberals. It also runs contrary to the American stereotype of wimpy liberals and strong conservatives.

Of course, if you're studying the psychology of politics, you shouldn't be surprised to get a political reaction. Similar work by John T. Jost of Stanford and colleagues in 2003 drew a political backlash. The researchers reviewed 44 years worth of studies into the psychology of conservatism, and concluded that people who are dogmatic, fearful, intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty, and who crave order and structure are more likely to gravitate to conservatism. Critics branded it the "conservatives are crazy" study and accused the authors of a political bias. Jost welcomed the new study, saying it lends support to his conclusions.

At Least They Saved the Bubbly

When a disaster like Hurricane Katrina hits, it's often the little things people miss most once reality sinks in. Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott knows. His 154-year-old house was demolished, but Lott reveals that he and his wife found a few trinkets to keep the memories alive. As Lott and his wife, Tricia, walked through their Pascagoula neighborhood, they found their refrigerator--three blocks from the house. "The pictures that my wife had put on there with those magnetic things? Intact. It was so amazing," he says. "I opened it, and two bottles of champagne that we had saved from my daughter's wedding a few years earlier were just sitting there pretty as you please."

The indictment, returned by a grand jury in Fort Lauderdale, charges that Abramoff and an associate, 36-year-old New York businessman Adam Kidan, used a fake wire transfer to defraud two lenders out of some $60 million to finance the deal for SunCruz Casinos.

Abramoff and Kidan are charged with five counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and mail fraud. Each count carries a penalty of up to 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. U.S. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta said Abramoff was in FBI custody in Los Angeles. Kidan's attorney in Florida, Martin Jaffe, said his client would surrender to authorities in Fort Lauderdale on Friday.

The partners bought SunCruz, which runs a fleet of gambling boats, from entrepreneur Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis for $147 million in 2000, but the deal soon fell apart. Amid bitter legal fighting over the sale, Boulis was shot to death five months later in 2001 what police called a hit. The Fort Lauderdale killing has never been solved. The indictment against Abramoff charges that he used income from SunCruz to finance political fund-raising activities, including events at private boxes at Washington-area sports venues such as the MCI Center and Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

The two lenders who were allegedly defrauded in the SunCruz deal were Foothill Capital Inc., a subsidiary of Wells Fargo, and Citadel Equity Fund Ltd., based in the Cayman Islands, according to court documents in a civil lawsuit. Abramoff is also under federal investigation in Washington by a grand jury investigating whether he and a lobbying partner overcharged Indian tribes by millions of dollars for their work.

When they were covered up, officials working for Ashcroft -- a devout Christian -- said the move to spend about $8,000 for curtains to cover the figures were made for "TV aesthetics."

"The assistant attorney general for administration, Paul Corts, made a recommendation to remove the drapes from the Great Hall and the attorney general agreed with the recommendation," Madden said.

The decision to install the curtains sparked a myriad of jokes and Ashcroft became fodder for late-night comedians.

After he took office in February, Gonzales was asked frequently when and if he would remove the drapes. His answer was usually that he had more important issues to deal with than the statues.

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.

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 —

One of the entomologists said he admired all three men for "having the courage of their convictions" and standing up for freedom and democracy.

Alan Greenspan doesn't turn to his wife, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell, when he needs inspiration for a speech. Instead, GQ reports, the tight-lipped Fed chairman "heads straight to the bathroom, turns on a large fan to create a blast of white noise that blocks out sound, draws a hot bath, strips off his clothes and settles into the water for at least an hour and sometimes two."