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If you don’t have weights of your own, you can make your own set at home.

The plans for European unity are embodied in the Maastricht Treaty, which calls for monetary union by 1999 and closer cooperation on defense and foreign policy. Danish voters have already rejected the treaty. If the French follow suit, in a referendum on Sept. 20, Maastricht is as good as dead. Existing European Community institutions would survive; the 12-nation internal market would come into effect, as scheduled, next Jan. 1. But French rejection of the treaty would stop progress toward further integration, postponing the creation of a single European currency and the establishment of a powerful European central bank....

Welcome to reality. Stocks really do go down as well as up. Yes, stocks have made about 10.5 percent a year, compounded, since 1926, according to Ibbotson Associates, almost double what long-term bonds have made. But stocks don’t rise in a straight line. Think of the market as a roller coaster in which highs are higher than previous highs, and lows are higher than previous lows. That still leaves plenty of disturbing dips that can make you lose your cookies....

In other words, things are returning to normal. Uncertainty is in the stock market, layoffs are in the Zeitgeist. Welcome to the real world. This is the way things used to be until around 1996, when the economy and the stock market took off in tandem. You can’t have all boom all the time. Life doesn’t work that way. But don’t go from irrational exuberance to irrational depression without at least a brief stay in the middle....

This spring Olson will relive her past in a Los Angeles courtroom, where she is set to go on trial for attempted murder. When Olson was nabbed last summer, many observers assumed that the old case, based on a relatively minor incident (the bombs never went off), would be settled and never reach a courtroom. But Olson, who insists she is innocent and says she never participated in the SLA’s violent activities, demanded a plea agreement without jail time, a condition the district attorney refused....

Brown says he never solicited or received any money from Vietnam. But money need not have changed hands to violate the Hobbs Act-the most expansive federal corruption statute. The Feds “clearly think they have a case to make,” says a Washington criminal-defense attorney with close ties to the Democrats. He has advised friends in the administration that Brown should be encouraged to take a leave of absence, or quit, to clear his name....

Just kidding, of course. But the less-than-imposing convention site seemed yet another indication that the 1996 Republican presidential campaign remains, well, less than imposing. Even in a week when Bill Clinton appeared to stumble a bit – the Whitewater verdicts, the Israeli election returns, assorted personal gaffelets – the Dole effort bumped along, unable to gain any sort of traction or even a vague sense of purpose. He visited California, generally assumed to be Clinton country....

You don’t toss an ““egregious’’ in the face of Broadway’s precious Tonys every day. Andrews was fuming because no one else from her hit show had gotten a nod from the Tony committee. But lots of lesser stars were furious, too. It was the first time in memory that the Tony express had passed by every Broadway-born production in the glamour category of best musical, nominating instead four shows that had originated in nonprofit theaters: ““Rent,’’ ““Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk,’’ ““Chronicle of a Death Foretold’’ and ““Swinging on a Star....

There are more than 20,000 medications available by prescription, and still more available over the counter. Some can be used to treat several different health conditions. Aspirin, for example, can be used to treat pain, inflammation, and fever. In addition, aspirin can prevent heart attacks if taken on a regular basis. The following information is a basic overview of how some drugs work to improve your health. Fighting Infections An infection occurs when microorganisms, such as bacteria or viruses, invade your body....

The romance ended for Hinton when the United States dropped the atomic bomb. In December 1948 she joined the communist Chinese cause, inspired by accounts of the communist struggle from her brother, author William Hinton, who was accused by McCarthyites of propagandizing “for the brain-washing, soul-killing Red Chinese.” She surfaced four years later at a Beijing peace conference to express “a deep sense of guilt and shame” for Hiroshima and to denounce the bomb as “a crime against humanity....

As it stands, the Kabul government and its security forces are crumbling due to motivational mismatch—not a withdrawal of American soldiers. Afghan soldiers and police primarily fight for pay, while the Taliban claim to fight for national liberation, and the warlords’ militiamen purportedly defend their ethnic enclaves. Facing an uncertain future, coupled with the collapsing and kleptocratic Kabul government’s inability to consistently pay its troops, some Afghan army units are simply evaporating....

By last week health officials had documented 18 cases of this strange affliction, 11 of them fatal. The cause is still unknown, but officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have found evidence of an exotic, rodent-borne virus in some victims’ tissues. The bug, known as a Hantaan virus, spreads through the air after rats or mice shed it in their urine. It has never been linked to a disease outbreak in this country....

In Japan, serious crime is at a 23-year high, and criminologists warn that the young generation will be the most violent ever. Last week experts crowded onto talk shows to blame Japan’s woes on the Internet, a pressure-cooker school system, violent TV shows and videogames, and the collapse of traditional families. For millions, the debate dominated – and ruined – the holiday. “This was a dark week, not Golden Week,” lamented housewife Yoshie Abe, 65....

That background made Tuesday’s events all the more surprising, as Gulati announced the hiring of Arena to take on his old job a decade after leaving it. Arena returns to his old post with more experience, and a better understanding of the demands of the position. He also admits now that Gulati’s decision to let him go a decade ago was the right one. “Whether I like to say this or not, it probably was the right time to make a change, and as you get a little older you look back at those things and you see it makes sense,” Arena told Goal USA on Tuesday, shortly after being introduced as the new U....

Insofar as it represents anything more than a post hoc rationalization for President Donald Trump’s caprice, the postmortem for the pre-2015 Republican Party reads as follows. By the 1980s, a set of serious problems had arrived in the United States. Thankfully, President Ronald Reagan and his fellow travelers had good answers to these problems and, by and large, they managed to solve them. But, having done so, the Republican Party and its friends within the institutionalized conservative movement failed to move on....

Her allegation is that former President Donald Trump demanded to be taken to the Capitol on that day, against Secret Service advisement and, when his request was denied, tried to grab the steering wheel of the Beast (the presidential limo), while cursing and then lunging toward his Secret Service detail leader, Robert Engel. Upon hearing her testimony, my first question was, “Did she personally witness the event?” She subsequently testified she did not, that her claim was hearsay, a description of events told to her by another individual....