by JAMES TARANTO
Wednesday, October 17, 2001 1:23 P.M. EDT

The Spores
The anthrax attack on the Capitol looks scarier than it did yesterday. Thirty-one people in the office of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle have tested positive for exposure to anthrax, though there's no report yet of anyone being infected. In addition, test results indicate anthrax spores have been found in the New York City office of Gov. George Pataki.

The FBI has released photos (link in PDF format) of the envelopes sent to Daschle and NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw. Both are postmarked Trenton, N.J., and the addresses on both are written in childlike block letters. The Brokaw letter has no return address; the Daschle letter has a phony one: 4TH GRADE, GREENDALE SCHOOL, FRANKLIN PARK, NJ 08852. President Bush said yesterday the White House has received 90,000 letters in response to his appeal last week for children to donate money for Afghan humanitarian relief. We trust this mail is being carefully screened.

A "government source," meanwhile, tells CNN that the Daschle anthrax is "high grade, very virulent and sophisticated"--bolstering the theory that a government was the source of the spores. The Iraqi National Congress, an anti-Saddam group, has a report from inside Iraq on its Web site. With the obvious caveats that the English is choppy and the information hasn't been independently confirmed, here's an item titled "The Regime & International Terrorism":

Our resources displayed that at the end of last July, the regime sent four intelligence officers to Afghanistan with three from the Arab-Afghanees, and our resource put the possibility of sending chemical & biological substances to Afghanistan. Those four officers came back from their mission after one month .The resource; who's a friend to one of those four officers displayed that; those four officers disappeared after Sept.11th.2001.

Assassination in Jerusalem
Israel's Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi has been assassinated at Jerusalem's Hyatt Hotel. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (whose Web site has a nifty Flash intro) says it did it. Zeevi had announced Monday that he intended to quit the Israeli government to protest a decision to withdraw Israeli troops from areas in the West Bank city of Hebron.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declares: "The full responsibility falls squarely on [Yasser] Arafat, as someone who has controlled, and continues to control, terrorism, and as one who has not--to this day--taken even one serious step to prevent terrorism."

Ananova.com, meanwhile, reports supporters of the PFLP whooped it up in a refugee camp after receiving word of the assassination. "Some of the 40 men who gathered around midmorning performed the Dabkeh, the traditional Arabic foot stomping dance, as they waved AK-47 assault rifles, pictures of Abu Ali Mustafa and PFLP flags." Mustafa, a PFLP leader, died in August in an Israeli missile attack.

Our Friends the Saudis
U.S officials have concluded that "some of the recruiting and planning" for Sept. 11 took place in Saudi Arabia, the Washington Post reports. The Post's Howard Schneider reports from Abha, Saudi Arabia, that "foreign journalists arriving here have been refused permission to conduct interviews and have been told to leave. " The Post report also notes a statement made Sunday by the Saudi interior minister, Prince Nayef, who said with respect to the Sept. 11 attacks, "There were 400 people aboard the four planes and we find it strange that the focus is on Arabs, and Saudis in particular."

Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article "King's Ransom: How vulnerable are the Saudi royals," which we noted Monday, is now online in its entirety

Our Friends the Syrians
"In just the past two days, 14 Syrian men entered the U.S. through Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport on student visas to attend flight schools at Fort Worth Meacham International Airport," WorldNetDaily reports. The Syrians told immigration inspectors they came here to train to be pilots for their country's national airline. Syria is on the U.S. government's list of state sponsors of terrorism. And, as WND notes, as recently as Sunday, al Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Ghaith told Arab television that "thousands of young Muslims want to die [as martyrs], and the storm of airplanes will not stop."

Contemplating Our Naval Bases
"The Navy is investigating 11 incidents in which 'Arab' or 'Middle Eastern' males appeared to be conducting surveillance of naval bases, and, on one occasion, a truck loaded with munitions," the Washington Times reports. Examples:

Three Arabic males were reported acting in a suspicious manner and possibly surveying [Naval Air Station] Whidbey Island [in Washington].

The individuals were on the beach with fishing gear; however, [they] did not do any fishing and their gear was not appropriate. The same individuals had been ordered out of a restricted area of the park by park rangers earlier in the day where they were observed videotaping the Deception Pass Bridge.

In another case, a Middle Eastern man approached a truck driver carrying ammunition and explosives from a naval weapons center at a Kentucky truck stop. "Subject was observed looking the truck over, then asked the driver where he was heading," according to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. "The truck driver did not answer, and a white vehicle bearing Florida license plates followed his truck for the remainder of the trip" to Hanover, Pa.

Zero-Tolerance Watch
Nylajean McDaniel, superintendent of Ohio's Fairview Park Schools, has canceled 16-year-old Aaron Petitt's suspension for hanging patriotic posters on his locker. (We noted the case last week.) But the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports McDaniel asked Petitt not to hang a poster depicting U.S. planes bombing Afghanistan "in deference to the Arab-American students."

No dice, says Petitt's lawyer, Avery Friedman: "The idea that Arab-Americans would be opposed to Aaron's posters is just outrageous. They are Arab-Americans, they are not pro-Taliban." Perhaps McDaniel could use a refresher course in geography. Afghanistan isn't even an Arab country.

Correction
We erred yesterday in an item on a dustup between Hillary Clinton's Secret Service bodyguards and Westchester County police. Although the New York Legislature has passed a law making it illegal to talk on a cellular phone while driving, it doesn't take effect until Nov. 1.

A Second Amendment Victory
The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has held that the Second Amendment does protect an individual right to bear arms. In the case, U.S. v. Emerson, the court reinstated the indictment of Timothy Joe Emerson, the husband in a Texas divorce case, who was under a restraining order not to own firearms. But while the court held that the order was not a violation of the Second Amendment, it clearly rejected the notion that the Second Amendment is a "collective right":

We reject the collective rights and sophisticated collective rights models for interpreting the Second Amendment. We hold, consistent with Miller, that it protects the right of individuals, including those not then actually a member of any militia or engaged in active military service or training, to privately possess and bear their own firearms, such as the pistol involved here, that are suitable as personal, individual weapons and are not of the general kind or type excluded by Miller.

Miller refers to the 1939 U.S. Supreme Court case of U.S. v. Miller, which held that possession of a "shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length" is not protected by the Second Amendment because it lacks a "reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia."

Glenn Reynolds catches the New York Times in a bit of biased reporting. The Times' William Glaberson, addressing the individual vs. collective rights argument, writes:

Recent scholarship, some of it sponsored by the National Rifle Association, has suggested that those earlier readings got history wrong. The newer research, cited by the court yesterday, argued that at the time the Second Amendment was written there was great interest in giving individuals access to firearms.

As Reynolds notes:

Only a tiny fraction of scholarship supporting an individual right to arms was "sponsored by the National Rifle Association." However, most pro-individual right writings were written by people like me (full disclosure!), Sanford Levinson and Scot Powe of the University of Texas, William Van Alstyne of Duke, Laurence Tribe of Harvard, Eugene Volokh of UCLA, Akhil Amar of Yale, Daniel Polsby of Northwestern and George Mason University, etc., etc. I rather doubt that any of these people got any money from the NRA for writing their articles--God knows I didn't.

Meanwhile, if you look at footnote 9 in the opinion, you see the court cite numerous articles from the Chicago-Kent Law Review's symposium on the Second Amendment (including one by debunked historian Michael Bellesiles)--which was funded by the anti-gun Joyce Foundation and which paid the authors of these articles, which all oppose an individual right, a whopping $5000 honorarium for writing their pieces. This is an enormous honorarium (I got $500 for speaking at a Stanford symposium on the Second Amendment last year--that's more typical) and you can bet that anti-gun groups would be howling if the NRA paid anyone anything like that. But Glaberson--who knows this, or should--doesn't mention that.

(Ira Stoll helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to C.E. Dobkin, Raghu Desikan, David Arredondo, Michael Hatzimichalis, John Podhoretz, Steven Getman, Christopher Contard, Thomas Sullivan, Matthew Colpoys, Jim Twu and Jim Orheim. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)