The online edition of the former official Soviet Communist Party paper Pravda ran an opinion piece by Patrick Buchanan. *  A Pew Center poll found that 47 percent of women and 53 percent of men favor higher military spending, and that 64 percent of women and 65 percent of men favor a missile-defense system....A Harvard University poll found that 75 percent of Harvard undergraduates trust the military, and that 71 percent of male students would serve if the draft were reinstated.  *  “Terrorists target not only our freedom of democracy but also freedom of trade,” said Bolivian president Jorge Quiroga. “The more products, the more freedom of trade, the more globalization, the better.”  *  Trevor Harvey, head of the “anti-violence group” MAD DADS, was arrested for battery after he allegedly punched a referee at his seven-year-old son’s flag football game.

At a speech at Princeton University, actor Danny Glover described America as “one of the main purveyors of violence in the world” and warned Americans that “we must stand vigilant against Bush in these times and work with the abolitionists.”....Peter Boyer of The New Yorker describes Jesse Jackson as “an admirer of Karl Marx.” When Jackson visited Marx’s grave “he realized that Marx was not the evil force that ‘brainwashed’ Americans were taught to believe but, rather, was driven by an Old Testament-style system of social justice.”...Harold Doley, Jr., one of the 100 wealthiest blacks in America, worked with Jesse Jackson’s Wall Street Project and now describes Jackson’s tactics as “a kind of RICO operation, both criminal and civil. It was racketeering.”  *  Over half of Americans feel that the National Rifle Association speaks for them at least some of the time, according to a recent Zogby poll. Sixty-six percent feel that people who passed a background check and took a safety course should be allowed to carry a gun on their persons or in their cars....Forty-five percent of Americans value their Second Amendment rights “much more” or “somewhat more” since September 11, according to The Polling Company. 

Only 43 percent of Americans approve of the media’s coverage of the War on Terror, according to a Gallup poll....Three out of four Americans prefer George W. Bush to Al Gore as the leader of the War on Terror, according to Andres McKenna Research. The same research showed that more Americans fear getting an IRS audit notice in the mail than fear receiving an anthrax-tainted item.  *  Research by the European Commission found that the European Union’s gross domestic product is less than two-thirds that of the U.S....The EU is threatening Irish farmers with severe fines for producing too much milk....The European Court of Justice has banned British shops from selling designer goods at reduced prices.  *  Italians face a birth-control crisis with the introduction of the euro, because the nation’s 6,500 condom vending machines don’t accept the new money.   

Italy’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Toruato Cardilli, shocked his overwhelmingly Catholic countrymen by converting to Islam.  *  Atheist Mike Newdow is trying to sue President George W. Bush for allowing Reverend Franklin Graham to refer to Jesus Christ in the President’s inaugural prayer, claiming it violated the First Amendment....Newdow had previously launched a failed suit to have the words “under God” removed from the Pledge of Allegiance, arguing, “if it said ‘One nation under white people,’ people would be offended. That’s how I feel about the phrase ‘under God.’ ”   *  The Girl and Boy Scouts of Greater New York, the sole beneficiaries of royalties to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” can expect to benefit from the song’s newfound popularity. “This year, we expect royalties to triple,” said Irving Berlin Music Company spokesman Bert Fink, “generating well over $600,000 for the Scouts.”   *  Nine women in Eureka, California staged a “Strip-Tease for Trees” and distributed “goddess-based, nude Buddhist guerilla poetry” to lumberjacks in an attempt to halt a logging project.

—BB