On Tuesday voters in Columbia, Mo., rejected a decriminalization measure on marijuana by roughly 60 percent to 40 percent. The fact that the statute failed was hardly surprising; voters in other states defeated similar measures last year. What was unusual was the appearance of a high-ranking White House official in Columbia before the vote on the initiative, which would have allowed patients using medical marijuana to carry up to 35 grams of the drug with no penalty and make others caught carrying the same amount pay a municipal fine.

JERUSALEM -- As checkpoint experiences go, the one at Beit Hanina in East Jerusalem is an easy one. Relatively speaking, anyway. For 45 minutes one recent morning, I breathed the gas fumes as the line of vehicles inched forward. Aside from an Arab selling coffee in plastic cups to the drivers, there was little action. The school children in uniforms in the car behind me fidgeted; their parents looked exhausted. I watched some Israeli soldiers take the keys from a few drivers of the omnipresent white van-taxis. (One soldier kept calling a particular driver a "liar" in Hebrew, but I couldn't make out what the driver was or was not lying about.) Muddy taxis streamed in, dropping off workers who travel daily to Tel Aviv for coveted jobs with Israeli employers.