September 15, 2005

ONE day in August Charles Birnbaum, a landscape architect and tireless preservationist, walked among the silent fountains and broken pavers of the Nations Bank Park Plaza, which molders alongside the Hillsborough River here like some kind of ruined paradise garden. Designed only 17 years earlier by Dan Kiley, a renowned modernist landscape architect, this grid of grassy squares, water and palms was built to echo the window patterns and proportions of a neighboring tower designed by Harry Wolf. ''It is one of Kiley's greatest works,'' Mr. Birnbaum said, ''and one of the great public modernist landscapes of its time.''

Investigators appointed by the Vatican have been instructed to review each of the 229 Roman Catholic seminaries in the United States for ''evidence of homosexuality'' and for faculty members who dissent from church teaching, according to a document prepared to guide the process. The Vatican document, given to The New York Times yesterday by a priest, surfaces as Catholics await a Vatican ruling on whether homosexuals should be barred from the priesthood.

Senator Arlen Specter's testy interrogation of Judge John G. Roberts Jr. on the Supreme Court's treatment of Congress may well have left viewers scratching their heads on Wednesday morning, with cryptic references to the ''congruence and proportionality test'' and to unfamiliar case names like ''Lane and Hibbs.'' But the line of questioning that Mr. Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is Judiciary Committee chairman, chose to pursue offered a window on the increasingly troubled relationship between the court and Congress, as well as on one of the most consequential developments of the Rehnquist court's later years.

Merck's potentially long legal struggle over its painkiller Vioxx edged forward on Wednesday as lawyers presented opening arguments in the second personal injury suit against the drug to reach a jury. The case, Humeston v. Merck, comes to trial almost one month after a jury in Angleton, Tex., ordered Merck to pay $253 million in damages to Carol Ernst, whose husband died after taking Vioxx for eight months. That devastating defeat caused Merck stock to fall 8 percent in an afternoon and it has yet to recover.

Insurgents staged at least a dozen suicide bombings that ripped through Baghdad in rapid succession on Wednesday, killing almost 150 people and wounding more than 500 in a coordinated assault that left much of the capital paralyzed. Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia claimed responsibility for the assault, which inflicted the biggest death toll in Baghdad since the American-led invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam Hussein more than two years ago.