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Mayoral hopeful's rise highlights dispute over NYC St. Pat's parade policy toward gay marchers
• NEW YORK (AP) -- She's a leading candidate to be New York's next mayor. She's already one of its top Irish-American officials.
• Christine Quinn is also a lesbian and proud of it. And that's why the City Council speaker won't be marching in Saturday's St. Patrick's Day Parade, an event so entrenched in New York tradition that it's older than the United States.
• Quinn's rising political prominence is bringing a decades-long dispute between parade organizers and gay activists back into sharp relief. And it's raising the prospect of an unprecedented standoff next year if she wins November's election and becomes the city's first openly gay and first female mayor.
• Quinn, a granddaughter of Irish immigrants, says she's both saddened and mystified that the parade continues to bar marchers from displaying any gay-pride messages, a policy that has spurred protests and litigation going back to the 1990s. It has even prompted the launch of an alternative, gay-friendly St. Patrick's parade.
• "I've marched in Dublin (in its St. Patrick's Day parade) with visibly identifiable stickers and buttons that made clear we were both Irish and LGBT," she said this week, using an acronym for lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual. "If you can do that in Dublin, in God's name, why can't you do it on Fifth Avenue?"
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Chavista government grinds down Venezuela's opposition, circumventing constitution
• CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- The people tapped by Hugo Chavez to carry on his socialist revolution seem to be improvising the rules of governing as they march toward what most Venezuelans consider certain victory in a mid-April vote to replace the late president.
• Chavez's designated successor, Nicolas Maduro, and his ruling clique have repeatedly circumvented the constitution and exploited their monopoly on power to all but crush an opposition already crippled by years of government intimidation.
• The odds are so stacked against opposition candidate Henrique Capriles that he has compared his run to being "led to a slaughterhouse and dropped into a meat grinder."
• Long before Chavez succumbed to cancer, Capriles and his supporters were al (Continued on page 45)
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