Political Activism

Arnie Pike's never met a curb he didn't want to have cut. Pike, 68, began using a wheelchair after suffering a stroke 12 years ago. The Placentia resident has become a voice for disabled people, arguing before city councils and transit authorities throughout Orange County for smoother sidewalks, wheelchair ramps and better access. "We never ask for more than any other person, just what is fair," he said during a recent interview with his service dog, Fort, at his side.

Many years ago, when she was still a tiny girl in braids, and not the professional she is today, Eufrosina Cruz heard the story of how her father married off her sister to a stranger at age 12: She wondered if a man might come to claim her too. Being a girl isn't easy in Santa Maria Quiegolani, a poor rural village where Zapotec is the native language and most girls are lucky to complete grade school. Cruz left to eventually become a college-educated accountant.

Masahisa Tsujitani is getting a lot of attention these days for a man who has spent much of the last 40 years bent over a lathe in a garage workshop, where amid the sharp smell of burnt oil and iron he grinds out some of the finest 16-pound shots ever tossed by Olympic athletes. But Tsujitani's cheerful face is showing up on Japanese television and in newspapers not because of what he does, but because of what he is refusing to do.

BEIJING -- Crisis. Disarray. Sadness. Four months before the opening of what was supposed to be the grandest Olympics in history, the head of the International Olympic Committee was using words Thursday that convey anything but a sense of joyous enthusiasm.

An icy wind whips by as Cindy McCain tramps across hillsides still slick from snow on the Albanian border, wearing well-worn hiking boots and carrying her Prada purse. She's looking out at minefields and visiting schools where children must thread their way around leftover munitions. One headmaster told her he had uncovered a cluster bomb when he went out to plant a tree.

Democrats have tried to heal their party's angry passions ever since violent protesters disrupted the Democratic National Convention here in 1968, a shock to America's collective psyche that helped Republican Richard Nixon capture the White House. But some of the old fault lines were visible again Thursday as Sen.

A sense of new possibilities courses through the crowd even before "the bishop of the poor" shows up in the plaza of this sugar-cane farming center. "I'm not here to hand out beer, liquor, sausages," Fernando Lugo advises, alluding to the traditional giveaways of Paraguayan pols on the stump. "I'm here to share the hope of change with the people." Tiny, landlocked Paraguay, still recovering from the stultifying legacy of the 35-year dictatorship of Gen.

For Sterling "Ernie" Norris, Special Order 40 is a barrier to effective policing in Los Angeles. Modifying the rules is not enough, he argues. Special Order 40 must be killed. Norris, an attorney for Washington, D.C.-based Judicial Watch, a nonprofit government watchdog group, said his organization is seeking to give street cops "the total freedom" to contact federal immigration agents when they come across illegal immigrants.

When Richard Nixon made San Clemente his western White House, the late satirist Art Hoppe described the population as "15,000 conservative Republicans, 2,000 surfers, five poor people [and] roughly the same number of liberal Democrats." That was in 1972; today the population is 65,000 or so and it's possible they've chased off the last of the poor people and the liberals. As a matter of politics and philosophy, San Clemente has long been friendly to business, to growth, to builders.

Kamal Abbas is a compact man with a wry smile who has become a major annoyance to the troubled regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. From an office near the steel mill where he led his first uprising years ago amid the sting of rubber bullets, Abbas has helped organize nationwide strikes that have exposed a widening anger over rising food prices, low salaries, political repression and a government that often appears detached from the concerns of its people.