IT'S (ONLY) A GIRL!
"I feel like any father." That's all a stolidYasser Arafathad to say before departing today for Paris, where his 33-year-old wife waited with their two-day-old, firstborn child. The PLO leader,who's nigh on 66,missed the birth Monday after a deadly bus bombing in Tel Aviv threatened a crucial agreement with Israel. Surprisingly, neither Arafat, who rebuffed aides when they offered congratulations, nor Palestinians in Gaza, have staged any celebrations. The problem, apparently, is that the baby, named Zahwa after Arafat's mother, is a girl. (The Palestinian news agency Wafa reportedly has been told not to publish an item.) Suha Arafat, for her part, has said her husband, "like all Middle Eastern men," would prefer a boy.
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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.
