Debates

Crowds of Lincoln High School students flooded the sidewalks along Broadway recently as another school day came to an end. But 16-year-old Tania Navarro wasn't in the crowd. She sat inside one of the school's bungalow classrooms, tapping her pencil against the sheet of paper in front of her. "I love to argue," she said. But her penchant for verbal confrontation hadn't landed her in detention hall.

The Supreme Court debated today whether the government can maintain a cross in a national preserve to honor fallen soldiers or whether an official display of this Christian symbol violates the 1st Amendment's ban on an establishment of religion. But the justices spent most of the hour mired in a side dispute over whether Congress solved the constitutional problem by transferring the land under the cross to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. At issue was cross that sits atop Sunrise Rock in a remote part of the Mojave National Preserve in California, not far from the border with Nevada.

Their critiques crackling with animosity, Republican presidential candidates took turns Saturday upbraiding one another -- and, much of the time, former New Hampshire front-runner Mitt Romney -- in a debate whose tension illustrated the grave stakes in Tuesday's primary for many of the men on the stage. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, came under sequential fire from Arizona Sen. John McCain on his campaign ads, New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani on immigration, former Arkansas Gov.

A Nevada judge said Monday that Democratic presidential candidate Dennis J. Kucinich must be included in today's candidate debate in Nevada. Senior Clark County District Judge Charles Thompson said if Kucinich was excluded, he would issue an injunction stopping the televised debate. The judge sided with a lawyer for the Ohio congressman, who said MSNBC invited Kucinich to take part and then told him that he couldn't.

Since 1823, it has been a chamber of civilized, if sometimes outrageous, debate. In the shelter of the Oxford Union's weathered mahogany wainscoting, long oak benches and high, leaded glass windows, Malcolm X called for black empowerment "by any means necessary."

Republican presidential hopefuls jousted over taxes and the nation's economic slowdown Thursday in a tranquil debate that belied their fierce rivalry five days before a Florida primary that will mark a major turning point in the race. The five candidates touched on religion, natural disasters and war, but nothing aroused their passion quite so much as their mutual distaste for the prospect of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Clinton returning to the White House.

America's sometimes-freewheeling ambassador to the United Nations ran afoul of his superiors by taking part in unauthorized debate with two high-ranking Iranian officials during a conference of world leaders last week in the luxury Alpine resort of Davos, Switzerland.

John McCain and Mitt Romney carried their bitter Florida clash into California on Wednesday, each impugning the other's honesty in a hot-tempered debate as they sought to attract voters casting ballots in five days in a coast-to-coast array of primaries and caucuses. McCain, caustic for much of the debate, castigated Romney for what he said was a past insinuation that America should withdraw from Iraq.

Tonight's presidential debate in Hollywood between the two remaining major Democratic contenders, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, will mark their first one-on-one faceoff of the 2008 campaign. With the debate participants reduced to two, the dynamics have changed. For one thing, the exchanges can take on a more personal edge.

Angered by an MSNBC correspondent's demeaning comment about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's daughter, aides to her presidential campaign said Friday that she might pull out of a debate planned by the cable network this month in Cleveland. Howard Wolfson, Clinton's communications director, cast as "beneath contempt" an on-air comment Thursday by MSNBC's David Shuster, who said Chelsea Clinton is "sort of being pimped out" as she intensifies her campaigning for her mother.