Prime Minister Helen Clark is supporting her British counterpart, Tony Blair, in his credibility battle over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In an off-the-cuff interview on BBC radio's Talking Point show, Helen Clark said she believed Blair was sincere in the run-up to the war.

In London for a gathering of world leaders of centre-left parties, she responded to questions phoned in and emailed from around the world.

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On prostitution

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"So, Are You Experienced? Have You Ever Been Experienced? Well I Have."

- -Jimi Hendrix, "Are You Experienced"

Karl Ferris is fussing with his computer. A trim, friendly man just over 60, he wants to show a visitor to his tidy West End apartment a slide presentation of his photos. But he can't get the sound accompanying the presentation to work, and he's not happy about it.

Why the fuss? The photos are shots of Jimi Hendrix that Ferris took in London in the late '60s, and the soundtrack is made up of Hendrix songs. Ferris knows them well-he was there when they were first performed.

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As part of an ongoing effort to raise the profile of drug legalization as a sensible policy response to drug prohibition and its attendant "war on drugs" within the drug reform movement and among the public at large, the International Antiprohibitionist League (http://www.antiprohibitionist.org), an affiliate of the Transnational Radical Party, hosted a Washington, DC, press conference last Tuesday (4/29) featuring Sen. Pierre Claude Nolin, chairman of the Canadian Senate committee that recently called for marijuana legalization. The event, organized by IAL president and professor emeritus of American University Arnold Trebach, also featured Member of the European Parliament Marco Cappato, the founder and coordinator of Parliamentarians for Antiprohibitionist Action, and was held under the banner of the ongoing global campaign, "Out from the Shadows: Ending Drug Prohibition in the 21st Century" (http://www.stopthedrugwar.org/shadows/).

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FIRST LATIN AMERICAN ANTI-PROHIBITION SUMMIT CONVENES IN MERIDA, YUCATAN, MEXICO

The first hemispheric conference organized to call for an end to prohibition and the drug war took place in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, Wednesday, February 12 through Saturday, February 15. Some 300 academics, activists, government officials, journalists and legislators from the United States, Latin America and Europe gathered at the Out from the Shadows: Ending Drug Prohibition in the 21st Century conference to seek new approaches to drug policy centered on regulation and legalization of drug consumption and the drug trade.

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The river in ''Down by the River'' is the Rio Grande, a sewage-laden stream that, like the border itself, serves as much to join the two nations of Mexico and the United States as to divide them. In El Paso, where the river first becomes the international boundary, the pollution is so severe, so out of control, that it is essentially ignored.

There is no mystery about the Source: the waste comes almost entirely from the river's south side, from Ciudad Juarez, a typical Mexican border city that over the past decade has swollen with several million of the desperately poor, drawn north to answer some of the baser needs of the United States markets.

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Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family.

By Charles Bowden.

433 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $27.

The river in "Down by the River" is the Rio Grande, a sewage-laden stream that, like the border itself, serves as much to join the two nations of Mexico and the United States as to divide them. In El Paso, where the river first becomes the international boundary, the pollution is so severe, so out of control, that it is essentially ignored. There is no mystery about the source: the waste comes almost entirely from the river's south side, from Ciudad Juarez, a typical Mexican border city that over the past decade has swollen with several million of the desperately poor, drawn north to answer some of the baser needs of the United States markets.

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Nearly one out of six Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are now calling for an end to drug prohibition and the revision of United Nations (UN) treaties that block the way. Some 108 MEPs (out of 624) from seven political parties or groups and 13 European Union countries have agreed on a draft resolution urging the UN and its member states to establish a "system for the legal control and regulation of the production, sale and consumption of substances which are currently illegal."

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Student Life

The first time he tried it, he was bitterly disappointed.

"Anyone up close to it for the first time would be surprised by how tame it is," he said. "The first time you do it you'll be so underwhelmed, you won't know what the big deal was."

But after trying it once, something about the thrill of "doing something that most people aren't doing and really shouldn't be doing" led him to do it again-- and again-- and again.

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For Some Religious Groups, Drug Laws Do More Harm Than Drugs Themselves

June 20 -- For Jennifer Wallace, the revelation came four years ago, after she found out that a friend of hers who she knew came from a devout Christian family smoked marijuana, and she became worried about the young woman.

Wallace, a devout Christian herself, started looking into the research on marijuana and what she found surprised her. She said she found no evidence to back up the horrible things she had heard about the drug, and when she searched the Bible for any reference to it she found nothing at all. So she began to wonder why some religious leaders seemed to favor stiff penalties for marijuana users.

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It was almost time for his big speech, and Ed Thompson sat at a table, plucking ice cubes from a drained water pitcher and popping them into his mouth. "We don't have too many people here," Thompson said, scanning the sparsely filled convention hall. "I'd hoped the turnout would be better."

One of Thompson's supporters approached and grabbed his arm. "Here's some trivia about Ed," he announced. "Did you know he has the same birthday as Isaac Newton and Jesus?"

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