Chad

It ain't over. It's not even close. We're facing days, maybe weeks, of excruciating election coverage - which, like every other competition, has its own jargon. Since we might as well understand what the pundits are saying, here's some help: Butterfly ballot. More like an ugly caterpillar, it's got the candidates' names printed on the right and the left with punch-holes down the middle - apparently making it way too easy to vote for the wrong guy. Faithless elector. Not the last person you dated.

Lawyers can't litigate it, politicians can't compromise it. Who you gonna call? Chad! That's right - Chad. Not the lanky half of '60s duo Chad and Jeremy. He might be as trustworthy as the lawyers and party stalwarts jockeying for position in this longest-running post-election limbo of the new millennium. This chad is the partially punched pip that hangs by a paper shard from the ballots of those Floridians who failed to achieve full penetration on Election Day. We hate it when that happens, especially when it leaves us unsure who the leader of the free world will be. Will it be Al Gore or George W. Bush?

David Lee, a high school senior, doesn't trust the outcome of a Florida vote recount to determine his next president. "The Bush family's got more [political] juice than Minute Maid down there. No way it's going to come out fair. " The ongoing political and legal battle over the Florida recount and those hitherto unsung pieces of chad that seem to fly like confetti every time you touch a pile of those confusing Florida butterfly ballots were the talk of Frank Coppola's 12th-grade history class yesterday.

Seven Americans are believed dead in the suspected bombing of a French DC- 10 over the Sahara desert on Tuesday. As rescue workers began sifting through the wreckage, UTA (Union des Transports Aeriens) airline said it suspected flight UT 772, which exploded shortly after taking off from Chad to Paris, had been destroyed by a bomb and all 171 people aboard were dead. The flight had originated in Brazzaville, the Congo. A dawn air search yesterday discovered the plane's wreckage scattered over 40 square miles of desert deep in the central African state of Niger.

"Come on, I'll read you a story," Jessica will say to her brother, Chad, and he'll trot off to get a book. "Why are the trolls going to eat the billy goat?" he'll ask in amazement. "Well," she'll reply, "that's their dinner!" And Chad will then soon wander off in pursuit of a livelier activity. Jessica, 7, and Chad, 5, enjoy each other's company, though sometimes she gets on his nerves with her protective fussing over him. As she buttons his jacket and ties his shoes, he'll be protesting every step of the way that he wants to do it himself.

My neighbor Chad and I don't talk much. Mostly, we exchange greetings. "Hi, how's it going?" "Good. How 'bout you?" That sort of thing. Now and then, we swap small talk - that, too, in the form of questions. "How 'bout this weather?" "Great, but when we gonna get some rain?" "You watchin' the Eagles Sunday?" "Yeah. You?" That has been the pattern for years, so it came as a surprise the other day when Chad departed from the script. "What d'ya you make of this election business?"

A U.S. covert operation to destabilize Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi ended in failure in December when 600 guerrillas involved in the operation were forced to flee their host country, Chad, after a coup there, news reports said yesterday. The guerrillas were former Libyan soldiers captured by Chad during its wars with Libya in the 1980s. They volunteered to join the U.S.-trained guerrilla force in exchange for their freedom from prisoner-of-war camps. The group was formed at a time when the Reagan administration had accused Gadhafi of sponsoring terrorist attacks against Americans around the world.

When Chad Hopkins wasn't volunteering at the local home for senior citizens, counseling children at summer camp, working at his part-time job, or participating in the Air Force Junior ROTC program at Cherry Hill West, his parents always knew they could find him somewhere in their house taking apart a radio or computer. "If something was broken - or even if it wasn't - he would be sitting there taking it apart, fixing it, and then putting it back together again," said his mother, Rozz Hopkins.

Tuesday, 20 students sat in a small classroom for an hour and listened to other people talk. Although it was sunny and 70 degrees outside and lunch wasn't for another couple of hours, they didn't fidget. They didn't take notes, either. Some hardly moved. The two speakers were close to their own age, and they talked about various aspects of their lives. Aspects such as family, friends, school, sports and drug addiction. "The first time I smoked pot, I fell in love with it," said Chad, an 18- year-old from Gettysburg who now lives at Today Inc., a recovery facility in Middletown.

A third-grade student at Coopertown Elementary School in Haverford Township has contracted Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, a rare and dangerous disease carried by ticks. Dana Fairbank of Bryn Mawr said that her son Chad, 8, was bitten by a tick while he was romping through the fields and brush on a visit earlier this month to her parents' farm in Maryland. Chad's father, Charles R. Fairbank, is president of the Haverford Township school board. "I knew he had the bite. He was down with my parents for his vacation and we went to pick him up. . . . He had like a zit on his shoulder, and my mother said a tick had bit him," Fairbank said this week.

ATLANTIC CITY - Maybe Bernard Hopkins didn't get old all at once. Maybe his boxing mortality crept up on him, on little cat's feet, the gradual erosion of his marvelous skills taking place over years, sliver by sliver, tiny piece by tiny piece. But, at 47, all those missing pebbles tend to add up. And Saturday night, against a talented and committed opponent 18 years his junior, the aging master finally found out what it was like to peer into the future and see . . . well, maybe the retirement that should have awaited him years ago. Dawson wrested the WBC and The Ring magazine light-heavyweight championships from Hopkins here Saturday night in Boardwalk Hall, by scores of 117-111 (judges Steve Weisfeld and Kevin Flaherty)

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Lawyers for Belgium urged the United Nations' highest court Monday to order Senegal to prosecute former Chad dictator Hissene Habre or extradite him for trial for allegedly masterminding atrocities during his brutal eight-year rule. Habre has lived in a luxury villa in Senegal's capital, Dakar, since rebels ousted him in 1990 and has become a symbol of Africa's inability to try leaders from the continent accused of rights abuses. The case at the International Court of Justice is about "taking a stand against impunity in the most serious crimes in international law," Belgian representative Paul Rietjens told judges in the wood-paneled Great Hall of Justice.

The calendar has flipped to February, the month when spring training begins, and it appears as if Phillies general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. has found the final piece for his bullpen. Amaro said the Phillies had expressed interest in reliever Chad Qualls the minute free agency opened in November, but the price wasn't right until Tuesday, when the veteran righthander agreed to a one-year deal worth $1.15 million. The deal also includes performance and awards bonuses. "We've always liked him," Amaro said.

NEW YORK - Bernard Hopkins is moving as fast as ever. The 46-year-old light-heavyweight champ won a big bout in late May, will defend his title in October, and wants to fight again in January. Hopkins will face 29-year-old Chad Dawson in Los Angeles on Oct. 15 with his WBC belt on the line. The bout will be televised by HBO pay per view ($49.95) with tickets at Staples Center ranging from $25 to $300. "I didn't want to sit," Hopkins said Tuesday after a news conference in New York.

RANDY MOSS and Corey Dillon were malcontents when they joined the New England Patriots. Rodney Harrison arrived with a reputation as a dirty, washed-up player. All of them fit in very well with their new team. Now it seems Albert Haynesworth and Chad Ochocinco are coming and "The Patriot Way" will be tested once again. After a seasonlong feud with Washington coach Mike Shanahan, Haynesworth, a 335-pound defensive tackle, was traded by the Redskins yesterday for a fifth-round draft choice in 2013, a source confirmed to the Associated Press . Later yesterday, a source confirmed that the Patriots had obtained Ochocinco, the colorful receiver from Cincinnati, and that he agreed to a new 3-year contract.

HERE'S MY response to black community at large on the spate of youth-mob violence and the recent rash of shootings and killings: Stop the violence? They can't. They are morally and spiritually bankrupt. The poison is too deeply rooted. They hate themselves and they hate you. They are extremely dangerous and will attack you at any moment, unprovoked, and even videotape their acts of violence against you. They get a pass because some of their people do not want to admit that there are some among the ranks who just flat out hate one another.

WHEN ANDY REID said yesterday that, "You want to make sure that you're right" about roster selections, he was not speaking in the theoretical. Just last summer the St. Louis Rams plucked Danny Amendola from the Eagles' practice squad and turned him into a valuable NFL player, a slot receiver with 43 catches and the sixth-best punt-return average in the NFL. When Chad Hall comes into the locker room late and out of breath from running extra routes,...

DEAR ABBY: When my two boys were young, I agreed to a reduction in child support payments with the understanding that my ex would help later with their college tuition. This was not put in writing. Now both my boys are in college and their father is refusing to help. When I asked him to at least help with the costs of their books, he said, "That's what child support was for. " I guess I should have seen this coming, as he has been cruel and unreasonable toward me for the past 22 years.

While urging his employees to consider furloughs, early retirements, and downsizing to part-time status, Gloucester County Administrator Chad Bruner is drawing a salary that exceeds that of his counterparts in much larger New Jersey counties. The all-Democratic Board of Chosen Freeholders this month approved a five-year contract worth nearly $1 million - or $193,169 annually - for Bruner to oversee government operations for a largely rural county of 284,886 people. The same position in neighboring Camden County, population 516,994, pays $169,008.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Britt Parvus, a 33-year-old ophthalmology fellow at Wills Eye Institute, was headed to the elevator with her boss, Carol Shields, Friday morning and decided to hint, none too subtly, about the need for donations to a small health clinic in Haiti. The two-year-old nonprofit project called, straightforwardly, Haiti Clinic normally provides basic first aid and primary care to the residents of Cite Soleil, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. But after Tuesday's devastating earthquake, no one knew whether the clinic, operated out of a school building, had survived.