Editorials
A breakdown in the justice system
They talked about salad. Or cocaine. Or hurting the baby. Or something. The tapes of conversations between Steve and Marlene Aisenberg, caught by a government bug, are too garbled to determine with any degree of certainty what the couple discussed following the disappearance of their baby, Sabrina.

Capitol offenses
Muzzling citizens, endangering patients, harassing public employees and sponsoring sneaky gambling bills -- all in a day's work for your lawmakers.

Letters
Cloning denies life's impermanence
Re: How many lives now, Feb. 24.

Martin Dyckman
Bills jeopardize workers' compensation law
TALLAHASSEE -- A New York judge once wrote that "No man's life, liberty or property are safe when the legislature is in session." Here, at the moment, everyone's property is perfectly safe and few new criminal laws are hatching. It's your life that's in danger, if you work for the sort of employer who wouldn't mind taking his chances with it.

Robyn E. Blumner
The collision course of civil rights activists and civil libertarians
Civil rights activists and civil libertarians are locked in a battle that neither side wants to acknowledge. The problem begins with their fundamentally incompatible view of the role of government. Proponents of broad, far-reaching civil rights laws look to the government as a source for good and rely on its overarching enforcement powers to keep businesses and institutions free from discrimination. Civil libertarians see government power as the enemy of individual freedom. Their goal is to diminish the role of government and prevent it from interfering in people's private lives.

Don Addis
Olympic amateur judging
But first, the news:

Bill Maxwell
The white women who risked it all for civil rights
A dear friend telephoned a few days ago and reminded me that I was letting another Black History Month pass without writing about one of the unsung groups of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. My friend is white. Although born financially well off, she has taught journalism at the same traditionally black college in Mississippi since 1972.

Philip Gailey
Let's have more substance and less rhetoric
Where's the beef?