But Gratz, who was 17 at the time, plugged away. She finished 13th in a class of 298, and was the vice-president of her student council and Southgate's homecoming queen. "Jennifer did everything we asked her to do, and more," her former assistant principal, Ron Dittmer, told the Washington Post. "I wouldn't ask any more of my own daughter."

Under pressure to show results, with neither Saddam nor his sons captured and no weapons of mass destruction found, Abed Hamid Mahmoud's arrest signals one of the few significant signs of progress for the Bush administration. Third in power only to Saddam and his younger son Qusay, Mahmoud controlled access to the dictator and is reputed to be one of the few people he trusted completely.

He was arrested on Monday after the investigation of a hit-and-run-incident which killed Jim Reed, 43, led the police to the bishop's car, which had its windscreen caved in and the bumper dented.

More than 20 civil liberties and other groups had invoked the US Freedom of Information Act, a law that allows the disclosure of certain government records, to challenge the secret arrests.

Five years ago a seal broke in a third-floor window of the Milton hospital near Boston. A chemical deposit trapped in the window pane started to turn the glass a blotchy white. Last week the blotches came together in the shape of the Virgin Mary and have now become a religious shrine to which more than 25,000 people have flocked.

The court ruled by six votes to three that anti-psychotic drugs may be used only if the treatment is medically appropriate, and substantially unlikely to have side effects that may undermine the trial's fairness.

The Bushes have never had much problem raising money. They are well connected in politics and deeply embedded into the corporate world over generations, and money sticks to them like scandal stuck to the Clintons - partly because of what they do but largely because of who they are.

"This is the beginning of people expressing themselves toward a free Iran which I think is positive," said the US leader during a weekend visit to Kennebunkport, in Maine. "I think that freedom is a powerful incentive. I believe that some day freedom will prevail everywhere because freedom is a powerful drive."

The same can not be said for lesbians and gay men. Six months after senator Trent Lott was forced to resign after suggesting that America would have been a better place if a segregationist had won the presidency in the 40s, his colleagues appear free to spout homophobia at will and whim.

Stephen Christian, the singer in the American rock group, Anberlin, was wandering around the Gospel Music Association's annual convention in Nashville in April pondering both his music and his mission. "I thought, 'I wonder if Jesus would be in any of these bands? Why would he be here?' God said, 'Why send a doctor to those who are well; I'm going to send a doctor to the sick.' I guarantee you he would have been opening up for the Sex Pistols back in those days."

In the end it was Patrick Daly's murder that did it. With its history of drug-related crime, robberies, murders and prostitution, the Red Hook area had long been the talk, if not the target, of urban renewal.

Just when the New York Times thought things could not get any worse - having lost two senior editors, one star writer and its good name in the recent Jayson Blair scandal - the paper is in danger of having one of its coveted Pulitzer prizes revoked.

The Bush administration has accused the EU of "actively undermining" American efforts to protect its peacekeepers from prosecution by the international criminal court, which was set up to try cases of genocide, war crimes and systematic human rights abuses.

Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman, personal and professional partners for 25 years, won a Tony, the Oscar of the theatre world, for the score of "Hairspray", which features Harvey Fierstein in drag playing a woman.

At least 28 people have been infected with "monkeypox", a disease related to smallpox and usually found in central and west African rain forests, although none of the American patients has died.

The Arts and Entertainment cable channel is developing a film on the New York senator which it hopes will be ready to air in 2004 - year of the next presidential election.

The editor of America's most venerated newspaper, the New York Times, resigned yesterday after one of the most embarrassing journalistic scandals in American history prompted severe criticism of his managerial competence and abrasive style.

In remarkably candid quotes from her soon-to-be-published memoir, she reveals how a pale-faced president paced the White House bedroom before confessing "the situation was much more serious than he had previously acknowledged".

The CIA report gave President George Bush his last overview of Iraq's weapons programme, according to the New York Times.

Some of you, many of you, are not going to like what you hear tonight," said Ted Koppel, the senior American news anchor as he introduced Arundhati Roy, the Indian novelist, activist and critic of US foreign policy, to his show shortly after September 11. "You don't have to listen. But if you do, you should know that dissent sometimes comes in strange packages..."