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• TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) -- Having just turned 90, Uri Avnery still finds himself firmly outside Israel's national consensus.
• For more than six decades, the tabloid publisher, member of parliament, author and peace activist has lobbied for establishing a Palestinian state as the only way to secure peace for a democratic Israel with a Jewish majority.
• Avnery was perhaps the first prominent Israeli to promote the idea, taking on successive Israeli governments and once, in 1982, sneaking across four battle lines in Israeli-besieged Beirut to talk to Israel's then-nemesis, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat.
• Avnery's views are a measure of how far Israeli public opinion has come: Palestinian statehood was a fringe idea as recently as a generation ago, but is now a principle accepted by a majority.
• Yet the nonagenarian renegade with the white beard and full head of white hair still finds himself in a minority because, he says, most Israelis believe reaching a deal with the Palestinians is impossible -- in his view, a dangerously complacent and self-serving attitude.
• ___

• "Miss America is evolving. And she's not going to look the same anymore."
• So predicted Nina Davuluri during her quest to become the first Indian-American winner of the quintessential American beauty pageant. Then Davuluri backed it up by whirling through a Bollywood dance in a sari, baring her nut-brown skin in a bikini, and championing the kind of diversity that made her milestone seem inevitable.
• So why did her victory make such a splash among those who rarely pay attention to the contest, when America already has its fair share of Indian-American governors, CEOs, scientists, actors and other high achievers?
• For many Americans of Indian heritage, it showed the unique promise of America, the way the nation and its new immigrants are responding to each other -- and the challenges that remain as America changes in deeper ways than black and white.

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