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year-old McCullen and all other abortion protesters and supporters must stay under a Massachusetts law that is being challenged at the U.S. Supreme Court as an unconstitutional infringement on free speech. Arguments are set for Wednesday.
• Outside the line, McCullen and others are free to approach anyone with any message they wish. They risk arrest if they get closer to the door.
• With her pleasant demeanor and grandmotherly mien, McCullen has become the new face of a decades-old fight between abortion opponents asserting their right to try to change the minds of women seeking abortions and abortion providers claiming that patients should be able to enter their facilities without being impeded or harassed.
• In 2000, the Supreme Court upheld a different buffer zone in Colorado in a decision that some free speech advocates, who also support abortion rights, heavily criticized. Noted First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams recently called the decision in Hill v. Colorado "what may well be the most indefensible First Amendment ruling so far this century."
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AP Enterprise: Brawls, murky finances push reborn Berlin Jewish community to point of collapse
• BERLIN (AP) -- Under the golden dome of the Berlin synagogue, elderly worshippers traded shoves and obscenities flew. A man held up his phone to film the ruckus; the leader of the city's Jews snatched it away. Then punches began to land in a chaotic scrum, a man rammed a table into another's stomach, and demurely clad women put each other in chokeholds. Police had to be called to restore calm.
• The ugly scene, described in interviews with witnesses and seen on an Internet video, is indicative of a Berlin Jewish community in crisis -- riven by cultural rivalries, its finances under official scrutiny. It's hard to say who is at fault, but the feuding is fed at least in part by a clash between an old guard of German Jews dating to before World War II, and a growing presence of relative newcomers from the former Soviet Union.
• What is clear is that the 10,000-member Jewish Community of Berlin, having experienced a stirring post-Holocaust rebirth, now fears it's in danger of falling apart. And Berlin authorities are so alarmed by alleged financial irregularities that they have suspended millions of euros (dollars) in subsidies the community has enjoyed for decades.
• "The quarrels highlight the demoralization that has been taking place in this com (Continued on page 21)
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