HOMICIDE: LIFE ON DVD There has only been one truly great dramatic television series that managed to make me late for a Breadwinner and Sliang Laos concert, and that was Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana's "Homicide." The first two seasons are out on DVD.

Miracles are scarce on Homicide; crimes go unpunished, relationships sour, and even the bad guys tend to be pathetic. Fontana, Levinson, and company sometimes succumb to conventional television tropes, including big, summarizing speeches, and they occasionally let character quirks like Jon Polito's Lincoln-assassination theories overrun the drama. But the flaws also feed Homicide's greatest strength: its use of the commonplace to get at the big question of what it means to sort through the debris of murder. The series' first high point arrives in its sixth episode, "Three Men And Adena," in which Braugher and Secor grill murder suspect Moses Gunn for the entire episode, Braugher using cold calculation and charm to "sell a long prison term to a client who has no use for the product," Secor restraining his desperate need for revenge, and a dim Gunn acting confused as to why he's there. It's as darkly riveting an examination of the elusiveness of justice as has ever aired on broadcast television, before or since.

HAIL TO THE THIEF Radiohead hits another homerun.

I WANNA BE A ROCKSTAR (OR, WHY WE LOVE THE ONION) The head of the U.S. Army's Central Command is leaving the military to go solo, or as Phil Collins told Genesis, "Later." Apparently, General Franks wants to stretch his individual, creative talents and pursue solo bombing projects.

"The years I've spent with the Army have been amazing, and we did some fantastic bombing," said Franks at a Pentagon press conference. "But at this point, I feel like I've taken it as far as I can. It's time for me to move on and see what I can destroy on my own."

"Obviously, the U.S. Army is a first-rate organization," Franks said. "I mean, when we were on, no one could touch us. The '91 Gulf tour, the '95 Bosnia campaign... we kicked some serious ass. But it's precisely because I love it so much that I want to leave before it starts to get stale."

"When you're in an army, you pretty much have to bomb the countries they tell you to bomb," Franks said. "Which is fine for a while. But eventually, you get tired of bombing the same old places again and again. The last thing I want is to be 70 years old, still bombing Iraq. It's important to keep things fresh."

WORLD LEADER PRETEND A President who can't ride a Segway? For shame, America.

LIFE AFTER BUFFY AfterEllen.com takes a look at how "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" managed to make lesbians visible on Prime Time without choking on too many stereotypes, courtesy of the wiccan Willow and her increasingly direct relationships with Tara and junior Slayer Kennedy.

IRANIAN STORM CLOUDS As Reuters reports, the three nights of protests in the heart of Tehran may be a sign of a larger storm brewing in Iran, as the anniversary of the violent July 1999 student protest looms, patience with the reformist President Mohammad Khatami wanes and frustration with the conservative clerics running the government rises.

"In the past the demonstrations were more disciplined and had specific demands. This time is more dangerous because it seems to be a reflection of pent-up anger," said a local analyst who declined to be named. The protests also come amid heightened pressure on Iran from Washington over its alleged secret nuclear weapons programme and support for "terrorist" groups. Some U.S. officials have openly called on Iranians to rise up against their leaders -- raising questions on a possible U.S. influence on the demonstrations especially after calls for protests came from U.S.-based Iranian exile satellite stations.

REMEMBERING, ONE FACE AT A TIME After the September 11 attacks, the NYTimes began running brief capsule biographies of the victims of the terrorist attacks, creating a powerful emotional outlet for its readers and putting human faces to the tragedy. The Guardian newspaper in the UK is doing something similar after the war with Iraq, opening its online pages to the victims -- Iraqi, British, American -- of the conflict.

Nadia Khalaf, who died on April 5, was one of two sisters from a working-class family who had become academics. Nadia had recently completed a PhD in psychology and was looking for a job. Her sister Alia, 35, is a lecturer in English at Baghdad University who specialises in Shakespeare. The sisters lived with their father Najem, a lorry driver, and their mother Fawzia in a flat on Palestine Street, Baghdad.

Nadia "was very clever", said her father Najem. "Everyone said I have a fabulous daughter. She spent all her time studying, her head buried in books. She didn't have a care about going out enjoying herself. My other daughter is the same."

On the morning of April 5, the daughters had risen late after a night of heavy shelling. Nadia was on her way to the shower, and Alia joked that it would take three hours for the water to come. Then the building was hit, probably by an anti-aircraft shell. "The missile, something big and unexploded, had come through her chest and her heart," Alia said. "She was covered in blood, unconscious. I ran down to the street, mummy and daddy behind me, screaming for an ambulance. There weren't any. A neighbour said he would drive us to the hospital."

Nadia died on her way to Kindhi hospital in northeast Baghdad. She was laid to rest in a wooden coffin that was strapped on to the roof of the family car and taken to be buried.

FINALLY COUNTING The numbers are trickling in, much slower than the war itself. And as in war, nothing about the numbers is certain, but the first independent accounting of civilian casualties from the war in Iraq estimates that between 5,000 and 7,000 civilians died.

Iraq Body Count (IBC), a volunteer group of British and US academics and researchers, compiled statistics on civilian casualties from media reports and estimated that between 5,000 and 7,000 civilians died in the conflict.

Its latest report compares those figures with 14 other counts, most of them taken in Iraq, which, it says, bear out its findings.

Researchers from several groups have visited hospitals and mortuaries in Iraq and interviewed relatives of the dead; some are conducting surveys in the main cities.

Three completed studies suggest that between 1,700 and 2,356 civilians died in the battle for Baghdad alone.

A WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN The Guardian's Euan Ferguson pens a lengthy look at Baghdad, which reeks of dust, and remains topsy-turvy, a city where the patients at the state-run mental hospital decided freedom was more dangerous than their cells, where visitors attend art openings armed, and where people continue to wait for equilibrium and the hottest months of the year.

A MOCKINGBIRD The greatest movie hero of all time has died, but the legacy he leaves behind ensures his place in American cultural history. Actor Gregory Peck only had a handful of breakout films, but what films they were -- "To Kill A Mockingbird," "Roman Holiday, "Twelve O'Clock High." He won an Oscar for his leading role in "To Kill A Mockingbird," and both the book and the movie have been impactful beyond measure for generations of Americans.

"I was 46. I had a lot of pic tures behind me and some Academy nominations. A good career. And then Alan Pakula [the pro ducer] and Bob Mulligan [the director] sent me the book. They had bought the film rights.

"I read it in one night, and I thought, 'This is the one.' Thank God they thought that I was the fellow. I called them the next morning and said, 'Yeah, I'm ready to go.' I did feel a sense of identifying with the character. He fit me. And I was very much taken with what it had to say about racial intolerance and justice.

"It's been a gift. And a gift that hasn't stopped, because they play it to the kids in junior high school, and I'm constantly hearing about it. I can't walk down a street without people coming up to me to talk about that movie. Lawyers tell me Atticus Finch is the reason they went into law, that sort of thing. That's been a great stroke of luck, or a blessing, that I have at least one picture that is seemingly as much alive now as when we made it."

GOOD NIGHT, DAVID There have been few television journalists that have managed to capture my imagination, much less make me pause and reflect on the world. David Brinkley, who died this week, was one of them. His no-nonsense, simple delivery belied a perceptiveness about news and politics that was unrivaled by his peers.

"David Brinkley was an icon of modern broadcast journalism, a brilliant writer who could say in a few words what the country needed to hear during times of crisis, tragedy and triumph," NBC News' Tom Brokaw said.

The man was a wordsmith who more or less established today's template for TV newswriting. He also had a keen reportorial eye. He spoke only when it improved the silence yet always seemed to have a wry comment or simple straight-on observation at the ready.

Mr. Brinkley did not seem to suffer fools gladly, except insofar as he could have fun with them. He would reduce big, pompous things to little things, and little things entertained him to no end. A regular source of amusement, for instance, was the traditional balloon drop that marked the end of every political convention.

Late on Election Night in 1996, in his waning days at ABC, he called President Bill Clinton "a bore," which, while perhaps a fair assessment of Clinton's speaking style, was an unusual breach of decorum for the normally genteel Mr. Brinkley. Undaunted, Clinton would join him later that month on the final edition of "This Week With David Brinkley," where Mr. Brinkley--who had covered every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, as NBC's first White House correspondent--apologized for his bluntness.

IRANIAN PROTESTS CONTINUE For a third night, thousands of students took to the streets of Tehran as protests against the conservative, cleric-led government mount.

Hundreds of protesters called for the death of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei early today as thousands looked on in a third night of demonstrations despite threats by the hard-line regime to crack down to end the disturbances.

The three nights of demonstrations, involving hundreds of young Iranians, have produced the largest outpouring of public opposition against Iran's leadership in months.

The protesters' chants included "Khamenei the traitor must be hanged," "Guns and tanks and fireworks, the mullahs must be killed" and "Student prisoners must be freed," witnesses said.

THE STREETS OF BUNIA As a French-led, UN force begins to arrive in the Congo's northeastern town of Bunia, a team of Security Council envoys got a firsthand look at life in the beseiged town. Armed attacks, rapes and the impressment of children into armed militia groups have become the norm in the Democratic Republic of Congo, splintered by civil war.

"Life is reduced to waiting for the next attack and something to eat," one woman who lives in Bunia told a visiting ambassador. The woman said she had been gang-raped by armed and drugged militia fighters. "It was rape or die. What could I do? I had five children back in the camp depending on me," she said, letting it be known that such ordeals were commonplace here.

The UN emmissaries were driven under heavily armed escort through streets dotted with child soldiers with AK47s slung over their over-sized uniforms.

"They are in training. Non-operational cadets," older fighters insisted, when visitors tried to talk to the children, who included a giggly pretty young girl.

"This is war - a question of survival. We have no choice if we want to avoid being killed by the Lendu," said one fighter from the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), an armed faction drawn from the region's Hema minority.

The Hema and the majority Lendu have for years been engaged in a bitter feud, one that grew all the more deadly when the onset of DRC's wider civil war in 1998 brought with it a flood of weapons into the region and spawned a plethora of politico-military groups hungry for soldiers.

REPORT ON HUMAN TRAFFICKING The State Department has released a new report outlining successes and failures in an international effort to reduce human trafficking. It's a squishy term -- trafficking -- but there is nothing vague about the hundreds of thousands of human lives that it impacts and ruins. Dozens of countries passively support it, or look the other way, and it runs the gamut from young boys in Africa impressed into brutal military service to young women in Eastern Europe held against their wills as sex slaves or prostitutes. It touches children kidnapped and sold, and workers smuggled into the United States and elsewhere and then held against their will. John Miller provides an overview of the report contents (and a link to the report) as part of his briefing at the Department of State on June 11.

TAKING IT TO THE STREETS Students in Tehran are renewing their protests against clerical rule in Iran. The series of protests that rival those launched in 1999 coincides with mounting pressure from the Bush administration for Iran to stop sponsoring terrorism, open its facilities to nuclear inspections, and refrain from actively meddling in the internal affairs of neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq. Hopefully, the Bush administration won't do anything to make the situation worse for the pro-reform movement.

Thousands of Iranians protested against their Muslim clerical rulers for a second night as the biggest anti-establishment demonstrations for months appeared to gather momentum.

Voicing anger at moderate President Mohammad Khatami as well as the hardline clerics who have blocked his attempts at reform, some 3,000 people gathered around a central Tehran University dormitory early on Thursday chanting "Death to dictators."

Police and Islamic militia prevented demonstrators from reaching the campus, the scene of violent unrest four years ago, and peacefully dispersed the main crowd in the early hours.

AUSTIN IN AUGUST September, actually. The Austin City Limits Music Festival is much better than your mother's music festival. The three-day blowout features REM, Ween, Lucinda Williams, Liz Phair, Yo La Tengo, Old 97s, Rosanne Cash, Nickel Creek, Beth Orton, Jay Farrar and about 300 other bands.

FORT RENO A-GO-GO One of the East Coast's best (read: free, funky, hip and fun) outdoor music series has posted their summer schedule. Fort Reno is a park in northwest Washington, DC, and free concerts will be held every Monday and Thursday starting June 21. Best bets include Bob Mould, Cigarbox Planetarium, The Dismemberment Plan (who fold as a band later this summer), Q and Not U.

WINNING THE WHITE HOUSE Lawrence Haas and Richard Klein present a roadmap to national security confidence for the Democrats in this LATimes commentary. The key challenges in 2004 for whoever runs for the White House on the Democratic ticket will be convincing Americans that the Democrats can play smart and tough on national security and foreign policy, and that when Bush says he's cutting taxes he really means cutting services. Haas and Klein deal with the first issue, and point to three issues the Dems will need to tackle:

National Security: ...the Bush administration has replaced the policy of containment with one of preemption — the theory that the nation should use military force not in response to actual hostilities but in anticipation of them. If preemption makes sense in a world of terrorist networks operating independently of nation-states and with growing access to chemical, biological and radiological weapons, we need to develop standards by which to apply it. Why Iraq? Why not Syria, or Iran, or North Korea? If, by contrast, Democrats reject preemption, the party and its candidates must explain how containment can work in the new world of cross-national terror — or provide an alternative.

Use of force abroad: Surely Democrats believe that force is justified in self defense, and that military action was necessary in Afghanistan to decapitate Al Qaeda. But what else would justify force? Humanitarianism? Most Democrats stood behind President Clinton when he intervened in the Balkans to save perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. Yet, today, many leading Democrats scoff at President Bush's liberationist rhetoric on Iraq. (Republicans were no better, opposing humanitarianism in the Balkans but supporting it in Iraq.) What's the difference? And if humanitarian concerns don't meet the test, does anything else?

The role of the United Nations: The Bush administration sowed seeds of discord around the world by dismissing the Kyoto Protocol, the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, the International Criminal Court and other global agreements. But in a backlash against U.S. unilateral military, economic and political might, any administration could face the prospect of a French, Russian or Chinese Security Council veto of proposed military action against a hostile nation. Indeed, as the world's preeminent power, the U.S. will face entrenched opposition — even from allies — simply as a matter of principle or national pride. What should a president do in that situation, and how would Democrats work through the U.N. while preserving the notion of U.S. security interests?

ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE The Richmond Shakespeare Festival returns to Agecroft Hall this summer with performances of "Much Ado About Nothing" and "Richard III." The troupe has consistently gained stature in its six years of bardic romping, and the 16th Century Agecroft Hall is one of the better venues for their productions.

QUEEN OF TRASH I knew NPR had done a piece on the team in charge of coordinating garbage collection in Baghdad, but I didn't realize that the star of the show was my friend Jenny and her boss Franz. So, I happily turned up the radio yesterday evening when I heard Ivan Watson launch his piece on what has to be Iraq's most eclectic team of reconstructionists.

NPR's Ivan Watson in Baghdad reports on American efforts to deal with the mound of trash that has accumulated in the Iraqi capital since the end of the war in April. An American from the U.S. Corps of Engineers is in charge of waste disposal now, and he's dubbed himself "Mr. Garbage."

BABY, YOU CAN DRIVE MY CAR Coming soon to a theater near you -- Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films." Seriously.

WAT YOU DON'T KNOW MAY BLURT YOU Sure, you knew that Mimi was a tool-using primate, but did you know her parents are criminals?

Recently LT, my sister, and I saw this Finding Nemo animated-fish movie. I liked it---I laughed often and teared up occasionally, because I am a sucker for fish love and fish triumph and fish sentimentality in general. I also may have been slightly closer to the edge of the Emotional Crevasse than normal because of sugar overload, since I ate an entire package of gummi worms while watching the movie. It is not unusual for me to eat a lot of gummi worms, but that was one severely compressed worm-eating schedule. I was in charge of snacks for this film outing. For LT I brought his favorite, Lemonheads, and my sister got a box of Sour Patch Kids. My family has a long history of smuggling food into the movies, and I think my parents may have built up its illicit nature so we got more thrill out of the practice than it actually deserved. I mean, it's not like the Loews staff x-rays your purse on the way in or anything (although with Ashcroft around, that is probably next. If we bring our own candy, the terrorists win!)

PLAYING FAVES Kate Sullivan's favorite post (or one of her faves) begins with Taylor Hanson and introduces the rock world to Clara Schumann.

It is with a (slightly) heavy heart I report that Taylor Hanson, 19, just got married. Taylor is extremely smart and cool and of course his cheeks are of the god-kissed peach variety that make you feel like a lecherous Greek philosopher of ancient times just looking at him.

(All my Hanson interviews got lost when I killed my laptop with whiskey. Dang. Otherwise I could prove to you how smart he is.)

(Except he's apparently dumb. You just don't get married at 19 unless it's 1834 and it's the only way you're going to make it to the New World. Or maybe you're facing a stone mob in the street, holding tiki torches and rocks and David Hasselhoff CDs, and they all really want you to get married. Or maybe aliens come down with some hippies and they're going to read Noam Chomsky out loud and make you wear Guatemalan stuff until you get married.)

MARK SHIELDS PUTS UP HIS DUKES Columnist Mark Shields is ripping off his bow-tie and taking an editorial swing at NYTimes columnist Thomas Friedman. Friedman recently wrote that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq shouldn't be of great concern -- and in the context of not allowing concern over WMDs to interrupt the rebuilding slowly beginning in Iraq, he's right. Shields says there's a more important point that makes him hot under the collar.

Unlike Bush, Friedman had never argued that Saddam posed a grave threat to America. He wrote this week that the "real reason" for the war was "that after 9-11, America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world ... because a terrorism bubble had built up over there -- a bubble that posed a real threat to the open societies of the West and needed to be punctured."

... According to Friedman, "The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world ... and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble."

Tell me, Tom, exactly whom do you know professionally or socially in Washington who was urging his or her children to leave their "hardship duty" on Ivy League campuses "to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world" to "make clear that we were ready to kill and to die?"

It was not anybody in the civilian leadership on the Bush war councils or Cabinet. Of the 535 tigers on Capitol Hill who voted fearlessly to go to war, exactly one -- South Dakota Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson -- had a son in the enlisted ranks of the U.S. military at war.

Did I miss the nation's leadership summoning all of us to collective sacrifice for the common good? Patriotism in 2003 did not demand that we use less, or pay more for, gasoline. Just put an Old Glory decal on your SUV and a flag pin in your lapel while pushing for a bigger tax-cut.

As of this writing, 177 U.S. service members have died in the Iraqi operation. According to the Pentagon, 12 of them -- 11 Marines and one soldier -- were among the 37,000 non-citizens in military service from nations such as Mexico, Guatemala and the Philippines... To pretend that the rest of us were also "ready to kill and to die" dishonors their courage and their sacrifice.

WORLD VIEW FOR LEASE Fred Hiatt offers up a balanced look at what precisely is going on in the world of international relations, at least as far as the conservatives and liberals see it. The September 11 attacks shoved most Americans into one corner, and some people are beginning to timidly work their way back into the world.

Until now, most Americans, including even President Bush's political opposition, have accepted his basic vision of a reordered post-9/11 world -- a world fundamentally changed in almost every aspect.

The critics have nibbled at the edges of the vision, for example by questioning the extent of the tilt toward government power and away from personal liberty. They have tried to use the vision to further preexisting goals, for example by proposing AIDS treatment for Africans or schooling for Third World children as the best means to "drain the swamp" of terrorism. And they have launched oblique attacks by targeting, often in stinging and personal terms, those perceived as its chief theorists, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

But the organizing principles accepted in the shocked aftermath of the assaults on the World Trade Center and Pentagon for the most part have not been challenged...

This context helps explain some of the emotion infusing the debate over the failure to discover chemical or biological weapons in Iraq. The controversy both reflects and feeds doubts and frustrations that had begun to build among Bush opponents with respect to his larger orthodoxy.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE PRESIDENT... Tom Shales was not impressed with the Hilary Clinton Book Launch Party on ABC this week.

Two first ladies got together for a chat on national network television last night, one of them the former first lady of the land and the other the reigning first lady of network news. It was by no means a contest, but Barbara Walters came away from it looking better than Hillary Rodham Clinton, the celebrated interviewee.

By "better," I think what I mean is "more recognizably human."

... Despite obvious attempts to do otherwise -- and Walters giving her the benefit of the doubt -- Clinton still comes across as almost chillingly chilly. She may have emotions like normal people, but she doesn't like to admit it and she's scarily proficient at suppressing them.

... Walters generously characterized the "health care fiasco" of President Clinton's first term as something Mrs. Clinton "had to cope with," rather than a mess she helped perpetrate. Clinton chuckled and, attempting a just-folks demeanor, told Walters, "Oh, my goodness, what I got myself into I never could have predicted!" Lordy, Lordy!

WILL SLOW AND UNSTEADY WIN THIS RACE? Peter Maass presents a compelling portrait of two men working together to rebuild Iraq -- oil refinery director Dathar Khashab and 82nd Airborne Division captain Tom Hough. How their relationship -- an educated, middle-aged former Baathist and a savvy, aw-shucks 28-year-old -- is evolving reveals the difference between issuing policy statements on how Iraq should be run, and actually beginning to run Iraq. (The NYTimes requires registration, but you can log-in as "buttermilk.com" with the password "buttermilk")

ANOTHER IRAQI VOICE G. In Baghdad is another web logger providing updates on the Iraq situation from a local perspective. He's only posted once so far (this past Sunday), but gives an interesting account of how the 82nd Airborne apparently is going about their weapons searches in Baghdad neighborhoods (regular weapons, not those of the mass destruction caliber).