Intervention

If the nutty set of circumstances police allege are true, Nicole Hathcock is a real ball breaker. When Hathcock, 36, staged an intervention for her brother earlier this month on High Street in Upper Providence, Montgomery County, things went "very wrong" and she ended up slicing his testicle with her fingernail, causing a gash that required seven stitches, police said. Hathcock had staged the intervention at her parents' house on Aug. 11 to address Robert Rosenberger's alleged rampant drug use, according to court documents.

As I began writing this column about developing a better strategy for U.S. military intervention, two of the "outposts of tyranny" - North Korea and Iran - spoke threateningly. The North Korean message, in particular, had ominous implications. Pyongyang's public admission of acquiring nuclear weapons poses the more dramatic and immediate challenge, although Tehran's continuing pursuit of nuclear technology is nothing to ignore. How should Americans respond? Several weeks ago, I asked readers to give me some feedback on the issue of whether or not to intervene, and 1,326 of them have to date.

A Pennsylvania judge rejected a bid Friday from gas drillers and legislators to intervene in a legal challenge to the state's recently passed gas-drilling law. Senior Commonwealth Court Judge Keith Quigley ruled that both the industry and the legislators were already being adequately represented by the state attorney general and by documents pertaining to the passage of Act 13. The law, signed by Gov. Corbett in February, was enacted to collect...

A friend of mine, appalled that the United States may be about to invade Haiti and unable to come up with a reasonable alternative to military action, called me for help. What, he demanded, is the right thing to do about Haiti? I wasn't able to give him the moral guidance he sought, which was bad enough. Far more disturbing, I found myself impelled toward the amoral conclusion that "right" has nothing to do with it. This is strange territory for me. My touchstone for weighing everything from health care reform to race relations, from criminal justice to public education is morality.

As the sun faded behind a row of weather-beaten roofs in the Ellis Manor housing project, Mary Allen lovingly held her daughter Lacreshia, wiping dinner from the 2-year-old's tiny face. Allen spoke wearily, mirroring the frustrations and fears many Ellis Manor residents have faced since the 60-unit development became a lightning rod for drug activity and violence in recent years. But in the face of trials, Allen and other residents have been optimistic about the future.

Roseanne Hines of Norristown recalled a time when her son Ryan didn't look at her. His premature birth, she explained, was followed by the emergence of autistic tendencies. Now he is a child "who takes your hand, and likes to play around other children," said Hines, her eyes following Ryan, who wanted to explore the room. Hines attributes his progress to government-funded early intervention. And as a single parent, she couldn't afford anything else. She was one of many parents yesterday who sang the praises of early intervention, a program they fear may suffer under Gov. Ridge's proposed 1996-97 budget.

As thoughtful people sort out the lessons of the ongoing Iraq tragedy, some look for seeds of hope. Tom Fox and his fellow hostages from Christian Peacemaker Teams represent one of those seeds. Three of those captives were freed last week. The body of Virginia Quaker Tom Fox was found on March 9. The day before the abduction, Fox wrote an entry titled "Why are we here?" in his online journal (http://electroniciraq.net/news/2212.shtml). They went to Iraq, in Fox's words, "to stand with those being dehumanized by oppressors and stand firm against that dehumanization.

Two stories out of Africa beg for attention. The first is Liberia, a nation founded by freed slaves who left America in the early 1800s, and whose descendants have been embroiled in a brutal civil war for six years that has killed 150,000 people. The tragedy of that story was captured in the heartbreaking journey of a leaking ship filled with 3,000 Liberian civilians that searched desperately for shelter in neighboring coastal waters last week. The second is Burundi. The central African country appears poised for a wave of Hutu-Tutsi slaughter parallel to the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda that killed 500,000.

The well-intentioned but shortsighted Clinton administration is set to exacerbate a precarious situation by backing the Australian-led rescue of a United Nations effort to separate Catholic East Timor from Muslim Indonesia. National security adviser Samuel R. Berger has said the American contribution to this peacekeeping force will be "small. " Here's a vote for none at all. U.S. involvement is a bad idea on practical grounds alone. But other arguments are even more cogent.

A group of developers seeking to build a harness racing track in Chester says Gov. Schweiker's office overstepped its authority last week when it told a state commission not to consider the group's application for a license. Now the group, Chester Downs & Marina L.L.C., and the Delaware County Redevelopment Authority, which owns the projected site of the track, want answers - and another chance. The state Harness Racing Commission decided Thursday not to consider the license for Chester Downs after the chief counsel for the state Department of Agriculture, Gerald T. Osburn, wrote the commission that it "must" remove the item from the agenda.