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ANILA — Public health officials say they are stumped by a paradox in the Philippines, where a very low rate of condom use and a very low rate of H.I.V. infection seem to be going hand in hand. AIDS-prevention efforts often focus on the use of condoms, but they are not widely available here — and are mostly shunned — in this conservative Roman Catholic country. Without that first line of defense, experts can only guess at the reasons for the low infection rate. No more than about 10,000 people are believed to be infected with H.I.V., the virus that...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Saddam Hussein's regime had fallen, and the people of Iraq had access to anything in his opulent home -- furniture, food, water and gold. But looters wanted his cars. U.S. troops manning Hussein's main palace complex said they have had to begin destroying the cars because so many people have tried to take them. They fear that the cars could be used as suicide bombs or to create dangerous roadblocks. Destroying the cars, some of them classic American creations, has proved more painful for the American troops than for the people who wanted to take them. Hussein's...

<p>LOS ANGELES — She's publishing a series of kiddie storybooks.</p> <p>She's working with scientists who have discovered how to neutralize radiation.</p> <p>She's plotting to make a documentary about Kabbalah, a religious philosophy based on Jewish mysticism.</p> <p>Who's that girl?</p> <p>These days, Madonna strives to be neither material nor immaterial. After straddling the heights of wealth and celebrity for two decades, the pop diva is on a quest for meaning. And in American Life, due Tuesday, that means questioning the impulses behind her own rise to riches.</p>

<p>Baghdad, Iraq - Some people are surrendering the booty they took in the Dura district of Baghdad, perhaps in response to a rumored edict by a Muslim cleric forbidding Iraqi wives from having sex with looter husbands.</p> <p>Muslim clerics have been demanding that ill-gotten goods be surrendered, though none here could confirm the sex-ban order, said to have been issued in Najaf.</p>

Maybe Bill O'Reilly should declare a "No-Quip Zone." Emceeing Saturday night's Best Friends rock-and-roll gala at the Marriott Wardman Park -- which raised $800,000 for the 15-year-old charity benefiting inner-city schoolchildren -- the Fox News Channel star was trying to fill dead air during a lull in the entertainment. Members of the "Best Men," as the sixth-to-eighth-grade boys in the program are called, were delayed getting onstage to perform a lip-synced rendition of the Four Tops standard "Reach Out (I'll Be There)." O'Reilly ad-libbed: "Does anyone know where the Best Men are? I hope they're not in the parking lot...

Last month, in "Heather Has 3 Parents," I wrote about a Canadian law suit that clearly reveals the slippery slope on which we shall surely be set by legalized same-sex marriage. A court in London, Ontario has been asked to declare three people the legal parents of a single child (the biological mother and father, and the lesbian partner of the natural mother). Since conception, the sexual relationship appears to have been confined to the lesbian partners, both of whom live with the child. Yet the biological father, a close friend of the biological mother and her partner, frequently visits...

<p>On his way to get a soda, he stopped in the men's room. He opened his pants and then ran smack into a shocked female janitor.</p> <p>At that moment, Atleson and his lawyers say, the 34-year-old lawyer became ensnared in a swirl of powerful forces - sexual politics, labor strife, and greed - that would change his life.</p>

In a recent column, TAP Online Editor Richard Just and TomPaine.com Executive Editor Nick Penniman prescribed "the only moral and practical option" for liberals quavering over the war. It is, they wrote, "to begin immediately campaigning for a more ambitious, comprehensive and compassionate reconstruction of Iraq . . . while supporting the war effort that will lay the groundwork for such plans to be enacted." Just and Penniman state two grounds for their claim to have identified the "only moral and practical option." The first is a call to consistency. Now that the war has started, they write, the liberation...

About two weeks ago, George Will called this "Conservatism's Moment of Truth." In the immediate sense, the "this" he had in mind was primarily the war — which, for about three or four days, had slowed down enough to cause a firestorm of second-guessing and "What if?" scenarios. But Will was also referring to the entire operation in Iraq. Toppling a regime and trying to set up a lasting democracy in historically infertile soil is no small endeavor, and to believe — let alone to declare — that this can happen without terrible setbacks and unforeseen problems turns all of...

The former madam of a Dutch escort agency has opened a "Hanky Panky School" for prostitutes to teach the world's oldest profession how to make more money. Elene Vis - whose frank autobiography, Escort Queen with Turbopower, made her a Dutch tabloid darling - opened the school last week in a luxury Amsterdam canal house to offer prostitutes "exclusive sales training" to boost their business. "You could call it sales techniques. You have to sell yourself and it doesn't matter if you sell your body or you sell vacuum cleaners. The principle is exactly the same," Vis, 43, said today....

In Al-Mussayib, central Iraq — The road to the front in central Iraq is a place of fast-moving vehicles, blazing Iraqi anti-aircraft guns, tanks and trucks hidden in palm groves, a train of armored vehicles bombed from the air and hundreds of artillery positions dug into revetments to defend the capital. Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi Army is prepared to defend its capital should take the highway south of Baghdad. How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defenses? For mile after mile they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves...

We've all heard this foolish position articulated over and over again by the likes of Mario Cuomo, Paul Begala, and most recently Jennifer Granholm, Governor of Michigan. I'll be brief. The idea here is that while the person making this statement regards abortion as morally wrong, they regard imposing their view on this issue as just as morally wrong as abortion itself. So they "personally" oppose abortion, while letting abortion itself go unchallenged. This position reaches its most baroque apex when it's articulated by a man. (It's very comforting to know that neither Mario Cuomo nor Paul Begala will have...

For someone who did not exactly treat his body like a temple and who spent quite a lot of his adult life behind bars, the country singer Johnny Paycheck had a fine sense of timing. Just as his version of David Allan Coe's great blue-collar anthem "Take This Job and Shove It" caught the mood of industrial rebellion in the mid-1970s, so his death last week provided a tiny, distant echo to the great moral debate thundering across the world from Washington to Rome and London concerning whether God and moral virtue are on the side of the hawks or...

Lance and Kristin Armstrong, one of the highest-profile couples in international sports, said Friday that they have separated after 4 1/2 years of marriage. Lance Armstrong, the Austin-based cyclist and four-time defending Tour de France champion, will leave for Spain on Monday to prepare for the European cycling season. Kristin Armstrong and the couple's three young children will remain in Austin. The Armstrongs, both 31, provided a statement to the American-Statesman on Friday that they were having unspecified marital difficulties. "We are working through these sensitive issues in the same way we have met other challenges in our life --...

To the editors: I, Amy Elise Keel, proudly own up to the fact that it was indeed me—with my roommate—who dismantled the obscene snow penis “sculpture” in Tercentenary Theater. To call this a “cowardly act of vandalism,” as does Jonathan H. Esensten ’04 in his opinion piece, is absurd (Comment, “The Broken Phallus of Harvard Yard,” Feb. 19). The penis “sculpture” was not an official Harvard installation, and the men who put it up had no permission to do so. It was perfectly within my rights to take down this object which was incredibly offensive to me. As a student...

In March, the Supreme Court will hear arguments regarding a Texas law that prohibits (and imposes fines for) "homosexual conduct." The last time the Court heard such a case, in 1986, it ruled such laws to be constitutional. The fact that the Court decided to hear the case suggests that it may be ready to overturn that precedent and find that the Constitution protects the right to same-sex sodomy. As one would expect, libertarians and traditionalists are having different reactions to the case. The Institute for Justice, representing the former, has filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the invalidation of the...

he Cardinal Newman Society recently published a list of 42 Catholic colleges that are allowing the performance this year of The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler's infamous play. By now, few who follow trends in higher education will be surprised to find America's leading Catholic universities on this list. It's no longer news when the likes of Georgetown, Notre Dame, Boston College, and Fordham thumb their noses at the official teachings of the Church. After all, these schools were eager to shed much of their Catholic identity as early as 1967, when representatives from each signed the "Land O' Lakes Statement...

Why did I do it? The answer is easy: our current system is wrong. We have rules, and we’re supposed to abide by them, but we haven’t been abiding by them at all in the arena of the relationship between government and citizens. We’ve taken a purely religious ideal—one that millions of Americans expressly deny—and incorporated it into our government. Such activity is expressly prohibited by our Constitution. This is my country just as much as it is anyone else’s, and I demand from my government the same respect for my views regarding religion that is given to those with...

Paul Wellstone was my friend and mentor, but he was not my candidate in Minnesota's 2002 senatorial campaign that brought about his tragic death. I supported Norm Coleman, an erstwhile Democrat who had been driven out of the party because he's prolife. Coleman ultimately was elected in a close race with Wellstone's successor, former Vice President Walter Mondale. Mondale aggressively championed abortion rights, and Coleman won with heavy and highly visible Catholic support. "Catholics for Coleman" signs were prominently featured in the campaign. In recent election cycles, polls have shown Catholic voters frequently migrating from their traditional Democratic allegiance to...