A Clackamas County prosecutor and decorated Vietnam veteran who appears in an ad attacking Democratic presidential contender John F. Kerry's war record said he did not witness the events in question and is relying on the accounts of his friends who served with the senator.

MERRIMACK, N.H. -- A decorated member of the New Hampshire Air National Guard killed himself at his home Wednesday, just a day after returning from a six-month tour of duty in Iraq.

Tech. Sgt. Dave Guindon, 48, of Merrimack, was a member of the 157th Air Refueling Wing based in Newington. In Iraq, he and four other members of the unit provided security to Army convoys. They returned Tuesday.

The state medical examiner's office told The Telegraph of Nashua that Guindon died Wednesday afternoon after shooting himself in the head. Air Force officials were investigating the death.

Guard officials praised Guindon's service, saying his mission marked the first time Air National Guard members from New Hampshire participated in Army combat missions.

Last month Guindon and his team were awarded Army combat honors after carrying out more than 100 missions.

"Dave was an outstanding airman and a good friend to many in our wing family," said Col. Richard Martell, the unit's commander. "He continually demonstrated a willingness to embrace new challenges and always performed to the best of his abilities. We are all deeply saddened by his sudden death. Our hearts and prayers are with his wife and daughter during this very difficult time. We have lost a good man and a true patriot."

Guindon joined the unit's logistics readiness squadron in 1997 after having served 23 years in the Navy, Naval Reserve, Marine Corps Reserve, Air Force Reserve and New Hampshire Army National Guard.

"Trained by the Air Force as a vehicle operator, he was called upon to perform an Army combat mission in Iraq," said Maj. Chris Hurley, the squadron's commander. "In the face of these extraordinary circumstances, Dave displayed the courage and dedication of a true professional. His actions are a testament to his character and his love for his country."

Another prominent Democratic member of Congress, Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, said Friday the same thing has happened to him for months. Lewis said he can't get an electronic ticket, must show extra identification and has his luggage combed through by hand.

``I said, 'I'm the most nonviolent person to get on this plane and the most peaceful person to get on this plane,''' said Lewis, a pioneer of the civil rights movement.

Lewis said one airline representative in Atlanta told him, ``Once you're on the list, there's no way to get off it.'' Lewis said he filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security and even considered a lawsuit.

This week, Lewis got a call from another John Lewis - a faculty member at the University of Houston - who told him he also was on a no-fly list.

``It's weird,'' he said. ``But I like being classed with Ted Kennedy and the congressman. It makes me feel more important.''

Q There's a new ad by MoveOn.org that talks about — that criticizes Bush's record in the National Guard. What's your response to that, and what do you say to Harkin, who called Cheney a coward for not serving?

MR. McCLELLAN: We have been on the receiving end of more than $62 million in negative political attacks from these shadowy groups that are funded by unregulated soft money. And the President has condemned all of the ads and activity going on by these shadowy groups. We've called on Senator Kerry to join us and call for an end to all of this unregulated soft money activity. And so we continue to call on him to join us in condemning all these ads and calling for an end to all of this activity. . . .

The authors' study of legislative decision-making accords with the extensive social science literature which concludes that legislators' voting is almost entirely a function of their own beliefs and the preferences of their voters and their party. The authors say that ``after controlling adequately for legislator ideology, (interest group) contributions have no detectable effects on legislative behavior.''

The Supreme Court should consider this when assessing the constitutionality of a law based on the bald assertion of ``corruption'' resulting from ``too much'' money in politics, a law that suppresses political participation.

Between March 1 and April 6, airline agents tried to block Mr. Kennedy from boarding airplanes on five occasions because his name resembled an alias used by a suspected terrorist who had been barred from flying on airlines in the United States, his aides and government officials said.

Instead of acknowledging the craggy-faced, silver-haired septuagenarian as the Congressional leader whose face has flashed across the nation's television sets for decades, the airline agents acted as if they had stumbled across a fanatic who might blow up an American airplane. Mr. Kennedy said they refused to give him his ticket.

"He said, 'We can't give it to you'," Mr. Kennedy said, describing an encounter with an airline agent to the rapt audience. " 'You can't buy a ticket to go on the airline to Boston.' I said, 'Well, why not?' He said, 'We can't tell you.' "

A series of interviews and a review of documents show a web of connections to the Bush family, high-profile Texas political figures and President Bush's chief political aide, Karl Rove.

Records show that the group received the bulk of its initial financing from two men with ties to the president and his family - one a longtime political associate of Mr. Rove's, the other a trustee of the foundation for Mr. Bush's father's presidential library. A Texas publicist who once helped prepare Mr. Bush's father for his debate when he was running for vice president provided them with strategic advice. And the group's television commercial was produced by the same team that made the devastating ad mocking Michael S. Dukakis in an oversized tank helmet when he and Mr. Bush's father faced off in the 1988 presidential election.

The strategy the veterans devised would ultimately paint John Kerry the war hero as John Kerry the "baby killer" and the fabricator of the events that resulted in his war medals. But on close examination, the accounts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth' prove to be riddled with inconsistencies. In many cases, material offered as proof by these veterans is undercut by official Navy records and the men's own statements.

Deal W. Hudson, the publisher of the conservative Roman Catholic journal Crisis and the architect of a Republican effort to court Catholic voters, said he is resigning as an adviser to the Bush campaign because of a Catholic newspaper's investigation into accusations of sexual misconduct. The accusations involve a student at a college where he once taught.

"No one regrets my past mistakes more than I do," Hudson wrote in a column posted Wednesday on the online edition of National Review announcing his resignation. "At the time, I dealt with this in an upright manner and the matter was satisfactorily resolved long ago," he wrote, without specifying the accusations. Hudson, 54, said he had been happily married to his current wife for 17 years. Called for comment, he declined.

At Fordham University, a Jesuit school in New York where Hudson taught from 1989 to 1995, a university spokeswoman confirmed that the episode had led to Hudson's resignation. The spokeswoman, Elizabeth Schmalz, said: "Fordham followed its policy rigorously in this matter and initiated an investigation upon receipt of the student complaint. The professor later surrendered his tenure at Fordham." Schmalz added, "Something inappropriate was done."

A person involved with the university's investigation said that a female undergraduate in one of Hudson's classes reported to the university that, after she had become drunk at a bar, Hudson made sexual advances toward her. After several weeks, she charged him with sexual harassment. The accusations were made near the end of a school year, and Hudson left academia.

Hudson, a former Southern Baptist who converted to Catholicism at the age of 34, has been an influential adviser to President Bush and a close friend of White House political strategist Karl Rove since the late 1990s. Hudson first caught Rove's attention by publishing a study in Crisis in 1998 arguing that Republican candidates could make inroads among traditionally Democratic-leaning Catholic voters by focusing on regular churchgoers, a strategy that dove-tailed with Bush's emphasis on "compassionate conservatism."

The referendum was carried out on touch-screen voting machines, which produced a paper receipt of each vote, much like an ATM. Voters then deposited the receipts into a ballot box. Amid charges that the electronic machines were rigged, the monitors will be checking the results from the machines against the paper ballots to make sure there are no major discrepancies. The paper ballots will be checked at election offices while votes recorded in the machines will be examined at an army base.

AMENDMENT I. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, already under fire for his tough stance against anti-GOP protest groups, yesterday suggested that First Amendment rights of free speech and free assembly are "privileges" that could be lost if abused.

Bloomberg, speaking to Republican National Convention volunteers in Manhattan, was trying to downplay concerns that protesters will disrupt this month's convention - when he began articulating a broader constitutional vision.

"People who avail themselves of the opportunity to express themselves ... they will not abuse that privilege," he said at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "Because if we start to abuse our privileges, then we lose them, and nobody wants that."

"I believe Jim Rassmann when he says that Kerry saved his life by pulling him out of a Vietnam river while under fire. Rassmann is a former Green Beret, a former police officer and a long time registered Republican until earlier this year. If he says John Kerry is a hero, nobody should doubt it. Rassmann has earned the right to be trusted and insulting his testimony is way out of line …

"It is absolutely wrong for Americans to condemn Kerry's war record because he demonstrated provable valor. However, those who distrust him do deserve to be heard although facts not emotion should be demanded.

"I think the Swift Boat political advertisement calling Kerry a charlatan is in poor taste, and if this kind of thing continues it might well backfire on the Kerry haters. Most Americans are fair minded, and bitter personal attacks do not go down well with folks who are not driven by partisanship."

I hear that when Kerry was in Portland, Ore., last weekend preparing to windsurf on the Columbia River Gorge, he flew his Washington-based hairstylist, Isabelle Goetz, across the country to give him a camera-ready trim.

A knowledgeable source told me that the French-born Goetz - who tends the Massachusetts senator's mane while also caring for Sen. Hillary Clinton's coiffure - caught up with the candidate in Portland on Friday (after flying commercial, I'm told), trimmed his luxuriant salt-and-pepper locks and then returned to Washington the same night.

But because of light breezes on Saturday, Kerry's windsurfing photo op never came off.

It was unclear yesterday how much the haircut cost, or who paid: the husband of Heinz ketchup heiress Teresa Heinz Kerry or the Kerry campaign. Kerry communications director Stephanie Cutter didn't respond to my detailed E-mail and voice-mail messages.

Goetz - who's a popular and busy woman in the Washington salon of celebrity-stylist Cristophe - told The Washington Post three years ago that she typically charged Kerry $75 for a haircut. But that 2001 fee would not have included a last-minute round-trip plane ticket (today around $1,450 for a coach seat on American Airlines) or a whole day of Goetz's valuable time.

Goetz didn't respond to detailed messages left on her home and cell phones. Cristophe - who also operates a high-end salon in Beverly Hills and recently opened another one in Las Vegas - likewise didn't return phone calls.

In May 1993, the Belgian-born Cristophe was caught in a messy political tangle when The Washington Post reported that he had boarded Air Force One, which was parked at Los Angeles International Airport, to give President Bill Clinton a trim.

Back then, there were reports that the notorious haircut-on-the-tarmac caused delays in commercial air traffic.

But yesterday there was no evidence that Kerry's haircut made anyone late.

After U.S. military personnel pelted American Wiccan servicemen and servicewomen in Iraq with bottles and rocks as they worshiped in a sacred circle, the Pentagon turned to Patrick McCollum of Moraga, Calif.

[snip]

An advisory team became a Pentagon priority when Wiccan military personnel reported problems while conducting rites and religious activities.

The Wiccans said that some chaplains were trying to convert them and that commanding officers made it difficult to practice, McCollum said.

It's hard for white separatists to get a date. And not just for the reasons that you think. Part of the problem is that there are no whites-only dating services, says William Regnery, publisher of The Occidental Quarterly, a magazine that espouses white nationalism and whose statement of principles calls for limiting immigration to "selected people of European ancestry."

Regnery's now preparing to enter the market -- he recently announced the idea of a racially exclusive dating Web site in a letter to subscribers. He says he's worried about the declining percentage of whites in the population and hopes a dating site would increase the number of white families, "since the survival of our race depends upon our people marrying, reproducing and parenting."

Such fears tap into the "common paranoid fantasy" of white separatists, says Mark Potok of the watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center.

But Regnery defends the whites-only matchmaking idea, insisting that it is no different from sites run for Jewish singles. "I'm sure you're familiar with JDate," he says, naming one Jewish-dating site. "It's huge, and there are a variety of other ones for ethnic, religious [and] special-interest groups." For now, Regnery's project has no domain name and no start date. "This is still a gleam in the eye of the beholder," he says.

Everyone knows it, but NOT MANY politicians or mainstream journalists are WILLING to talk about it, for fear of sounding conspiracy-minded: there is a substantial chance that the result of the 2004 presidential election will be suspect.

When I say that the result will be suspect, I don't mean that the election will, in fact, have been stolen. (We may never know.) I mean that there will be sufficient uncertainty about the honesty of the vote count that much of the world and many Americans will have serious doubts.

How might the election result be suspect? Well, to take only one of several possibilities, suppose that Florida - where recent polls give John Kerry the lead - once again swings the election to George Bush.

Much of Florida's vote will be counted by electronic voting machines with no paper trails. Independent computer scientists who have examined some of these machines' programming code are appalled at the security flaws. So there will be reasonable doubts about whether Florida's votes were properly counted, and no paper ballots to recount. The public will have to take the result on faith.

Yet the behavior of Gov. Jeb Bush's officials with regard to other election-related matters offers no justification for such faith. First there was the affair of the felon list. Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. But in 2000 many innocent people, a great number of them black, couldn't vote because they were erroneously put on a list of felons; these wrongful exclusions may have put Governor Bush's brother in the White House.

State police officers have gone into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando and interrogated them as part of an odd "investigation" that has frightened many voters, intimidated elderly volunteers and thrown a chill over efforts to get out the black vote in November.

The officers, from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which reports to Gov. Jeb Bush, say they are investigating allegations of voter fraud that came up during the Orlando mayoral election in March.

Officials refused to discuss details of the investigation, other than to say that absentee ballots are involved. They said they had no idea when the investigation might end, and acknowledged that it may continue right through the presidential election.

"We did a preliminary inquiry into those allegations and then we concluded that there was enough evidence to follow through with a full criminal investigation," said Geo Morales, a spokesman for the Department of Law Enforcement.

The state police officers, armed and in plain clothes, have questioned dozens of voters in their homes. Some of those questioned have been volunteers in get-out-the-vote campaigns.

I asked Mr. Morales in a telephone conversation to tell me what criminal activity had taken place.

"I can't talk about that," he said.

I asked if all the people interrogated were black.

"Well, mainly it was a black neighborhood we were looking at - yes,'' he said.

If it does nothing else, the McGreevey marriage highlights the chief absurdity of the anti-gay-marriage argument: Gay men can, in point of fact, get married -- provided we marry women, duped or otherwise. The porousness of the sacred institution is remarkable: Gay people are a threat to marriage, but gay people are encouraged to marry -- indeed, we have married, under duress, for centuries, and the religious right would like us to continue to do so today -- as long as our marriages are a sham. As long as we're willing to lie to ourselves, our wives, our communities, our children, and for someone like McGreevey, our constituents. A closeted gay man like McGreevey can even marry twice and have both his marriages regarded as legitimate. Even as an openly gay man, McGreevey can remain married to his wife and smoke all the pole he likes on the side. There ain't no law agin' it, Sen. Santorum. But how does this state of affairs protect marriage from the homos, I wonder? If an openly gay man can get married as long as his marriage makes a mockery of what is the defining characteristic of modern marriage -- romantic love -- or if he marries simply because he despairs of finding a same-sex partner, what harm could possibly be done by opening marriage to the gay men who don't want to make a mockery of marriage or who can find a same-sex partner?

Relatives of the U.S. soldier who sounded the alarm about abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison said on Monday the family was living in protective custody because of death threats against them.

Reservist military police officer Staff Sgt. Joseph Darby alerted U.S. Army investigators about the abuse by fellow soldiers of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, a move his wife says has angered people in their community in western Maryland.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been questioning political demonstrators across the country, and in rare cases even subpoenaing them, in an aggressive effort to forestall what officials say could be violent and disruptive protests at the Republican National Convention in New York.

The unusual initiative comes after the Justice Department, in a previously undisclosed legal opinion, gave its blessing to controversial tactics used last year by the F.B.I in urging local police departments to report suspicious activity at political and antiwar demonstrations to counterterrorism squads. The F.B.I. bulletins that relayed the request for help detailed tactics used by demonstrators - everything from violent resistance to Internet fund-raising and recruitment.

In an internal complaint, an F.B.I. employee charged that the bulletins improperly blurred the line between lawfully protected speech and illegal activity. But the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, in a five-page internal analysis obtained by The New York Times, disagreed.

[snip]

The office, which also made headlines in June in an opinion - since disavowed - that authorized the use of torture against terrorism suspects in some circumstances, said any First Amendment impact posed by the F.B.I.'s monitoring of the political protests was negligible and constitutional.

[snip]

The opinion said: "Given the limited nature of such public monitoring, any possible 'chilling' effect caused by the bulletins would be quite minimal and substantially outweighed by the public interest in maintaining safety and order during large-scale demonstrations."

"Protesters arrested at the upcoming Republican National Convention could face harsher penalties than in the past.

"That's because of a little-noticed court ruling that allowed the Manhattan district attorney's office to introduce previously sealed records of prior arrests for civil disobedience."

Two weeks ago, when Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge warned of possible al-Qaida attacks, the "where" was very specific: financial institutions in New York City, Washington and Newark, N.J. The "when," however, was a mystery. And since Ridge's announcement, the Bush administration has discovered no evidence of imminent plans by terrorists to attack U.S. buildings, a White House official acknowledged Thursday.

Some documents and computer files seized in al-Qaida raids included surveillance reports of the financial buildings during 2000 and 2001, which prompted warnings Aug. 1 from the White House about possible threats. But nothing in the documents themselves has suggested any attack was planned soon, the official said.

"I have not seen an indication of an imminent operation," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity with reporters from nearly a dozen news organizations. Investigators are still poring over volumes of the seized information.

There may be a few problems with Dr. Jack Shepard's Republican candidacy for Congress in the St. Paul area, if he's the Jack Shepard authorities think he is:

1) He isn't a licensed doctor, his Minnesota dental license having been revoked in 1983 on grounds his untreated manic depression posed a threat to patients.

2) He apparently is living in Italy and shows little willingness to meet state and federal residency requirements for election, perhaps because doing so could get him arrested as a fugitive from justice.

3) He is a convicted sex and drug offender who spent time in prison before fleeing the country in 1982 while facing felony arson charges connected with a fire that heavily damaged his Minneapolis home and dental office. He has been charged with making terroristic threats, and a firearms violation.

Despite all this, Shepard, 57, garnered 11,678 votes in Minnesota's 2002 Republican U.S. Senate primary election against Norm Coleman, the eventual winner. This year, Shepard is running just as hard, with an extensive Web site (www.shepardusgov.com) that solicits campaign donations via Western Union and details his "global peace initiatives."

Hennepin County authorities are convinced that the fugitive and the candidate are one and the same based on information on the Web site, including pictures of his old Air Force ID card with fingerprints included and his canceled passport. They share the same full name and date of birth, and old police mug shots of the criminal resemble those of the candidate on the Web site.