FORBIDDEN BARBIE (AND WE DON'T MEAN KLAUS)
First it was author-in-hiding Salman Rushdie. Now, in Kuwait, a Muslim leader has issued a fatwa (death decree or ban) against a doll: those 12 inches of child-corrupting Western plastic known as Barbie. In Saturday's Al-Qabas newspaper, the president of the country's high committee on Islamic law said Barbie "strongly resembles a mature woman," and that her curvaceous-yet-impossibly-thin frame "has nothing to do with childhood." Maybe so, but many Kuwaiti children fail to see the point. "Barbie is always successful in her life and studies," one five-year-old tyke told the paper. "I want to be like her."
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RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
