July 16, 2005

Victor Conte Jr., the central figure in the steroids scandal that linked the use of performance-enhancing drugs to some of the country's top professional baseball, football and track and field athletes, pleaded guilty yesterday in a deal with federal prosecutors that was strongly criticized by anti-doping experts. Conte, the founder of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative who faced a 42-count federal indictment, pleaded guilty to one count of distributing steroids and one count of money laundering before United States District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco.

At Beeston's Cross Flats Park, in the center of this now embattled town, Sanjay Dutt and his friends grappled Friday with why their friend Kakey, better known to the world as Shehzad Tanweer, had decided to become a suicide bomber. ''He was sick of it all, all the injustice and the way the world is going about it,'' Mr. Dutt, 22, said. ''Why, for example, don't they ever take a moment of silence for all the Iraqi kids who die?''

A federal appeals court ruled unanimously on Friday that the military could resume war crimes trials of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which were suspended last year. The decision, by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, reversed a lower court's ruling that abruptly halted the first war crimes trials conducted by the United States since the aftermath of World War II. The appeals judges said the Bush administration's plan to try some detainees before military commissions did not violate the Constitution, international law or American military law.

Last month, officials from Vietnam called on David L. Calhoun, who runs General Electric's brand new infrastructure unit. They huddled in a room at the Waldorf-Astoria to go over a fairly formidable shopping list. The delegation left without placing an order, but Mr. Calhoun said, ''I'm pretty sure we're going to get a near-term hit in airplanes, and a longer-term hit in energy.'' Jeffrey R. Immelt, G.E.'s chief executive, is clearly counting on him to get multiple hits, and from multiple countries. For the first time, G.E. has rolled aircraft engines, rail products, water, energy, oil and gas equipment, and even some finance units, into one all-encompassing collection of businesses, aimed at helping developing countries come of age.

For 8, 10, sometimes 14 hours a day, they wipe apple juice off sticky chins, chide wobbly toddlers lurching toward a staircase, snuggle dusty 2-year-olds as they make their way from the playground. It bewildered some rescue workers on Thursday to realize that the tiny child buried beneath the rubble of a building that had just collapsed on Broadway, the one Brunilda Tirado had been calling for desperately -- ''My baby! My baby!'' -- was not Ms. Tirado's child at all. But scores of her fellow nannies, who spend their days caring for other people's children, were surprised by the surprise.