By DENNIS B. RODDY, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

ABILENE, Kan. - The 1909 edition of the Abilene High School yearbook included a tradition of the age -- a class "prophecy," in which a member travels in time and writes of his classmates in years to come.

One classmate, in this prophecy, has made it to the very top.

"If Eisenhower is elected president this year, it will make his third term," the time traveler relates.

Mary Travers, whose bell-clear alto defined songs of the folk era, stayed a true believer well into an age when true belief was enough to reduce many to the status of quaint oddity, like some lost soldier found on a South Pacific island, fighting on long past the truce.

About 300 people slunk into this town to bid on the earthly goods of the late Betty James, a woman whose life required as much flexibility and rebound as the spring-steel coil she sprung on a toy-hungry world: the Slinky.

On the lawn of her sprawling Tudor home were nine televisions, three refrigerators, nine mink coats and enough Sinatra-era furniture for a rat pack reunion.

Accused cop-killer Richard Poplawski spent hours posting racist messages on an extremist right-wing Web site, decrying blacks and Latinos and warning of forthcoming economic collapse fueled by the "Zionist occupation" of America, an expert in political extremism has determined. Earlier, he had praised the "AK" rifle as his ideal weapon.

This city once had a steel-based economy and critics now say it has a John Murtha-based economy but, in what used to be the 11-inch rolling mill of Bethlehem Steel, nobody's apologizing.
"You ask where the earmarks go?" said Bill Polacek.

A dead baby, wrapped in a flannel shirt and plastic bag, then stuffed into a knapsack, had been abandoned in the woods in North Union, Pa., sometime in 2000. As police tell it, the dozen or so girls questioned were perfectly willing to allow a trooper to take a saliva swab from their mouths so a lab could trace the DNA.

"Mayflower Madam" Sydney Biddle Barrows has quit the call-girl business and says the prosecutors investigating the ring that ensnared New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer should do the same.

CLAWSON, Mich. -- The law of unintended consequences has thrown the book at Dennis Kucinich and sentenced him to 15 minutes of fame.

PITTSBURGH -- A pharmacist put the old axiom about it being better to give than to receive to the ultimate Christmas test.