Last week a prominent Manhattan law firm agreed to pay a galling $41 million to settle a federal suit arising from its defense of Charles Keating and his Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. The government’s claim? The firm, Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler–and three partners, including former managing partner Peter Fishbein–deceived federal banking regulators by withholding damning information about its client. Kaye Scholer’s response? It was being treated like Malesherbes, the counselor guillotined for representing Louis XVI before the revolutionary assembly....

Whether Smith & Wesson can survive the pounding is an open question. Smith has been signaling that it may try to back out if no other gunmaker signs on to the pact. But Shultz remains convinced that he is leading the industry where it has to go. In a reflective, three-hour interview at a corporate office in Nashville, Shultz offered an impassioned defense of the decision that blew a hole in the gun world....

It would be an appropriate metaphor. Twenty years after he faced down the Communist Party in the Gdansk shipyard, and a decade after he helped to engineer Poland’s epic transition to democracy, Walesa’s bid for a political comeback is sinking into oblivion. His campaign appearances, held in near-empty meeting halls, are greeted with apathy and sometimes even ridicule. Other candidates ignore him. Recent newspaper polls show that Walesa will attract just 1 percent of the vote in the Oct....

No one fought harder against that than Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish journalist turned literary superstar who died last January at age 74. And nowhere is this more explicit than in his last book, “Travels with Herodotus.” Like many of his works, this is a collage of sorts, part travel writing, part self-reflection. But as befits a work that feels almost like a last testament, it’s far more of the latter....

CONTRERAS: Where is your support strongest? FUJIMORI: A large majority of the neediest sectors give me a high rating. The better-off sectors are supporting other candidates. Recently a Lima newspaper said government officials helped forge 1 million signatures, enabling a new pro-Fujimori political faction to register in time for the April 9 vote. Has this expose hurt you? It has produced a certain decline [in support] among the higher-income sectors, but not in the lower-income groups… If signatures were falsified, those responsible must submit themselves to the appropriate [judicial] process....

But that is the point: reading what must have been his personally painful and humiliating public account of his crashed sexual relationship with his wife, I was affirmed in my larger reading of this extraordinary man. There is nothing, I concluded-nothing-that can diminish his elemental dignity… not even this. Nelson Mandela is about many things, but to my mind he is above all about dignity. And for this reason he repays reflection, especially now when we are bogged down in our familiar quadrennial mud wrestle about leadership, vision, character, depth of conviction and the rest as they pertain or don’t pertain to the contenders for the presidency....

My Five Most Important Books “Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings” by Abolqasem Ferdowsi. This 11th-century epic is the jewel of Persian literature. The Qur’an. Hypnotically poetic, the Qur’an is the central text of divine guidance for a billion people. The Bible. The Christian holy text through which God reveals himself to man. Even “Harry Potter” can’t compete with its sales. “The Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin. The basis of modern biology, the primary model for the diversity of life on earth....

“The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.” The most romantic movie ever made. “Dr. Strangelove.” The most relevant movie ever made because it’s turning out to be a documentary. Jack D. Ripper seems positively benign compared with some of the political characters around right now. Say, Dick Cheney. “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” The most powerful antiwar movie ever made. Plus: Eli Wallach didn’t know he was cast as “the ugly” until the premiere....

The boxes on which I perform my magic are not cardboard. I’m talking about corrugated board-single and double wall. To confuse board of that sturdiness with the stuff of pastry boxes is a horrid blunder. As with most things, there is a culture behind box making. It is the corrugated industry that I know, and in my memory it includes the deep scent of steamed paper, a vending machine stocked with orange Dreamsicles and my father’s slide rule....

Suicide by stabbing is rare–1 or 2 percent of the annual U.S. total. But ““executive suicide’’ seems to be growing more common in the 1990s. ““Nobody’s guarding the guardian,’’ says Ron Maris, head of the Center for the Study of Suicide at the University of South Carolina. Maris coined the term ES for the still largely uncharted phenomenon in the 1970s. But interest in it has been rising in the wake of two prominent victims from the Clinton administration: White House lawyer Vincent Foster and Adm....

Now down to just three men, Adams is about to enter her fantasy-suite dates. The overnight time, with no cameras, provides Adams a chance to get to know the men better without the pressure of filming the television show. But will Smith, somehow, get a rose? A press release for Monday night’s episode teases that one man is “anxious” about his future with Adams, but the main drama appears to be Smith’s return....

Meanwhile, David Trimble–leader of the Ulster Unionists, Northern Ireland’s largest political party, and first minister in the suspended government–braved the Irish-American precincts of Boston to make the unionist case. While there, he spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Stryker McGuire:

Fakhouri wound up on the operating table of Dr. Eyal Gur, a plastic surgeon and head of the Microsurgery Unit at the Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv. Sourasky is one of the leading centers for treatment of patients suffering paralysis of the face as a result of neurological disorders, which often leave the corners of the mouth frozen. After complicated surgery, Fakhouri regained enough control over his facial muscles to do something he hadn’t done since the accident: crack a smile....

He just might. It is important to point out straight off the bat that Aguero is not in the same boat as Joe Hart, Yaya Toure and, to a lesser extent, Vincent Kompany. Messi sets new Champions League record Guardiola decided before he had even left Bayern Munich that he wanted rid of Hart and Toure, and City was open to the idea of selling Kompany this summer before those plans were changed when he suffered a long-term thigh injury in May....

TONY PUPKEWITZ WINDHOEK, NAMIBIA

Did we mention this is a musical? You might not have figured that out from the “Sweeney Todd” trailers, which feature nary a sung note. That seems like an especially strange choice given that “Sweeney” is practically an opera—a good 75 percent of the film is sung. Then again, neither Johnny Depp nor Helena Bonham Carter has ever warbled a note professionally, so maybe there’s a reason for the nonmusical commercials....

There is no question that many U.S. military personnel have fallen sick since returning from the Persian Gulf in 1991. An estimated 10,000 Desert Storm veterans have reported unusual health problems–the complaints include joint pain, tremors, fatigue, memory loss and intermittent diarrhea–and 80,000 have been concerned enough to seek special government health screenings. Studies comparing gulf warriors with veterans who were stationed elsewhere at the time have found no significant health differences....

But last week an array of numbers-in his new budget and in a study of his healthcare plan-underscored something more important about his generational role. He needs to talk bluntly to the American family about its finances: to tell seniors – and his fellow boomers – that they must stop shifting fiscal burdens onto children and the unborn. Ending generational selfishness would redeem a watchword of his administration: responsibility. But it’s not an agenda that presidents (or Congress) have seriously pursued....

The new IIHS rating system will measure the quality of safeguards in place that help drivers stay focused on the road when those systems are engaged. “Partial automation systems may make long drives seem like less of a burden, but there is no evidence that they make driving safer,” IIHS President David Harkey said in a press release. “In fact, the opposite may be the case if systems lack adequate safeguards....

he has emerged again today in the incarnation of Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Many have walked this dangerous path: Gamal Abdel Nasser in the late ’50s and ’60s, Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian guerrillas in the ’60s and ’70s, Muammar Kad-dafi of Libya and Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and Saddam Hussein in the ’90s. All failed to alter history. Yet the Middle East seems to have a perpetual reservoir of contenders for this elusive and often fatal mantle....