Five U.S. Soldiers Killed During Iraqi Vote & DeLay Aide Helped Scuttle Anti-Gambling Bill in Today's Details 10/16/05

- Five U.S. Army soldiers participating in a combat operation were killed by a roadside bomb west of Baghdad during Iraq's constitutional referendum, the military said Sunday. Saturday's explosion hit the soldiers' vehicle in the mostly Sunni Arab city of Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad, where few Iraqis were believed to have voted in the referendum, the military said.

- Iraq's constitution seemed assured of passage Sunday despite strong opposition from Sunni Arabs, who turned out in surprisingly high numbers in an effort to reject it.

- Get ready for a whole new Harriet. After a disastrous two weeks, White House officials say they hope to relaunch the nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court by moving from what they call a "biographical phase" to an "accomplishment phase." In other words, stop debating her religion and personality and start focusing on her resume as a pioneering female lawyer of the Southwest. "We got a little wrapped around the axle," an exhausted White House official said. "As the focus becomes less on who she's not and more on who she is, that's a better place to be."

- On today's "Meet The Press" Secretary of State Condi Rice refused to say whether she had testified under oath in the Plamegate Investigation.

- Protesters at a white supremacists' march threw rocks at police, vandalized vehicles and stores and cursed the mayor for allowing the event. Mayor Jack Ford said when he and a local minister tried to calm the rioters Saturday, they were cursed and a masked gang member threatened to shoot him. At one point, the crowd reached 600 people, officials said.

- A federal prosecutor questioned New York Times reporter Judith Miller about whether Vice President Dick Cheney himself was aware or authorized her discussions with his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, about a covert CIA operative, Miller said on Saturday.

- Lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his team were beginning to panic. An anti-gambling bill had cleared the Senate and appeared on its way to passage by an overwhelming margin in the House of Representatives. If that happened, Abramoff's client, a company that wanted to sell state lottery tickets online, would be out of business. But on July 17, 2000, the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act went down to defeat, to the astonishment of supporters who included many anti-gambling groups and Christian conservatives. A senior aide to then-Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) helped scuttle the bill in the House. The aide, Tony C. Rudy, 39, e-mailed Abramoff internal congressional communications and advice, according to documents and the lobbyist's former associates.

- Taxpayer support for public universities, measured per student, has plunged more precipitously since 2001 than at any time in two decades, and several university presidents are calling the decline a de facto privatization of the institutions that played a crucial role in the creation of the American middle class. Graham Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University, said this year that skyrocketing tuition was a result of what he called "public higher education's slow slide toward privatization." Other educators have made similar assertions, some avoiding the term "privatization" but nonetheless describing a crisis that they say is transforming public universities. At an academic forum last month, John D. Wiley, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that during the years after World War II, America built the world's greatest system of public higher education."We're now in the process of dismantling all that," Dr. Wiley said.

- From ground beef to gas, New Yorkers paid vastly higher prices in September - as inflation grew at a pace not seen in 14 years.For the year ending in September, New York-area consumer prices rose 4.8% over the previous 12 months. Higher gas prices are mostly to blame; the cost of gas rose 22.8% in September - its biggest monthly jump in nearly three decades, a Bureau of Labor Statistics report showed. The region's inflation reflected the national scene, where a record 12% jump in energy costs pushed consumer prices up 1.2%, the nation's largest monthly rise in 25 years.