The chaotic scene marked the most violent demonstrations since protests by Buddhist monks began in Lhasa on Monday, the anniversary of a failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule in 1959. The protests have been the largest in Tibet since the late 1980s, when Chinese security forces repeatedly used lethal force to restore order in the region.

The developments prompted the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, to issue a statement, saying he was concerned about the situation and appealing to the Chinese leadership to “stop using force and address the long-simmering resentment of the Tibetan people”.

By Friday night, Chinese authorities had placed much of the central part of the city under a curfew, including neighborhoods around different Buddhist monasteries, according to two Lhasa residents reached by telephone. Military police were blocking roads in some ethnic Tibetan neighborhoods, several Lhasa residents said.

Meanwhile, the United States Embassy in Beijing warned American citizens to stay away from Lhasa. The embassy said it had “received firsthand reports from American citizens in the city who report gunfire and other indications of violence.”

The Chinese government’s official news agency, Xinhua, issued a two-sentence bulletin, in English, confirming that shops in Lhasa had been set on fire and that other stores had closed because of violence on the streets. But the Chinese news media otherwise carried no news about the protests. The White House responded with expressions of concern, but not direct criticism, although it urged the Chinese authorities to use restraint.

“We believe Beijing needs to respect Tibetan culture, needs to respect multi-ethnicity in their society,” a spokesman, Tony Fratto, said while traveling with President Bush to New York. “We regret the tensions between ethnic groups and Beijing.”

The White House says that the American ambassador in Beijing, Clark T. Randt Jr., had urged restraint in his contacts with the Chinese authorities.

The disturbances appear to be becoming a major problem for the ruling Communist Party, which is holding its annual meeting of the National People’s Congress this week in Beijing. China is eager to present a harmonious image to the rest of the world as Beijing prepares to play host to the Olympic Games in August.

On Thursday, attorneys for Lisa Miller-Jenkins asked the court to revisit the issue, which was decided in favor of Janet Miller-Jenkins in 2006.

The two Virginia residents were joined in a Vermont civil union in 2000, but later split up. Lisa had a child in 2002 and a Vermont family court awarded Janet visitation rights.

Lisa argues that since Virginia law doesn’t recognize civil unions her former partner shouldn’t have parental rights.

Janet says the case has already been decided in her favor by a family court.

A federal advisory panel, in response to mounting safety concerns, called on Thursday for additional restrictions on the use of anemia drugs by cancer patients.

The recommendation by a committee that advises the Food and Drug Administration could lead to an additional decline in sales for the drugs: Aranesp, made by Amgen, and Procrit by Johnson & Johnson.

But the two companies avoided the outcome they most feared: a recommendation that the drugs not be used by any cancer patients. That probably would have meant the loss of at least $1 billion in sales for each company.

“They dodged the really big bullet, but they still took some damage,” said Geoffrey C. Porges, a biotechnology analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.

Yaron Werber, an analyst with Citigroup, estimated that Amgen would lose about $125 million in Aranesp sales if the recommendations were enacted. That would be about 25 percent of Mr. Werber’s already reduced projections for 2008 sales to cancer patients in the United States. The meeting was held because eight clinical trials suggested that the drugs might make cancer worse for some patients or even shorten their lives. Cancer patients take Aranesp or Procrit to counter the anemia caused by chemotherapy.

The difficulty for the committee was that those eight studies involved high doses of the drugs. There was very little solid information on whether the drugs were dangerous at doses typically used by cancer doctors.

Faced with that information, the panel voted 13 to 1 in favor of recommending that the drugs remain available for use by many cancer patients.

But the committee then voted 9 to 5 in favor of recommending that the drugs not be used by patients with either breast cancer or head and neck cancer because the evidence of a risk was strongest for those types of tumors.

The committee also voted 11 to 2, with 1 abstention, to recommend that the drug not be used by patients being treated with the intent of curing their cancers. The definition of that category is vague, but it generally refers to patients with early-stage cancer who are undergoing chemotherapy after surgical removal of a tumor, in which the doctors hope the cancer has been eliminated. F.D.A. officials said after the meeting that most use of the anemia drugs was for patients with more advanced cancers.

The panel members also recommended that patients be made to sign consents in order to obtain the drugs. But the panel voted against carefully controlling distribution of the drugs.

The White House announced Thursday that Bush had nominated G. Steven Agee to the Richmond, Va.-based appeals court, which has handled some of the country's biggest terrorism cases.

If confirmed by the Senate, Agee would fill the seat of J. Michael Luttig, who resigned in 2006.

"Justice Agee is an experienced attorney, dedicated public servant and respected judge," White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore said.

Bush wants the Senate to consider Agee's nomination swiftly because heavy caseloads and the duration of vacancies have created a "judicial emergency" at the 4th Circuit, she said.

Five of the 15 seats on the court are vacant. Agee was one of several people that Sens. John Warner, R-Va., and Jim Webb, D-Va., recommended to Bush after conducting a search of their own.

Confirmation of Bush's judicial nominees has caused friction between the Senate and the White House for years.

"Bush has a history of not consulting home-state senators or seeking consensus nominees, so Agee's nomination is a healthy sign," said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. "Bush should consult more often and select consensus nominees."

Tobias said it's unclear, however, whether there will be time for Bush's nominee to be confirmed. Judicial nominees must go through security checks, American Bar Association evaluations and Senate hearings and votes.

Typically, "appointments slow down in an election year and stop after the (political) conventions," Tobias said. "If the Virginia senators push, Agee could be confirmed, though he would have to move ahead of a number in the queue."

Bush has accused the Senate of dragging its feet on his judicial nominees.

The White House says there are 11 circuit court nominees awaiting Senate confirmation. The current Congress has confirmed only six circuit court judges while the Senate has confirmed an average of 17 circuit court judges in the final two years of the past three administrations, according to the White House.

Agee, 55, a native of Roanoke, Va., was an associate and partner in several private law firms before becoming a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, a position he held from 1982 to 1994. From 2001 to 2003, he was a judge on the Virginia Court of Appeals and since 2003 has been a justice on the Virginia Supreme Court.

Agee, who is married with one child, is a graduate of the University of Virginia and New York University schools of law.

The high court wrote, "we can conceive of no way to draw a principled line permitting drug testing only student athletes."

"If we were to allow random drug testing here, what prevents school districts from either later drug testing students participating in any extracurricular activities, as federal courts now allow, or testing the entire student population?" Justice Richard Sanders wrote for the court's plurality. Joining him were Chief Justice Gerry Alexander and Justices Susan Owens and Tom Chambers.

Two families with high school students sued the district. Wahkiakum County Superior Court Judge Douglas Goelz ruled in 2006 that testing students was reasonable after less-intrusive methods failed to address the drug threat. The case was appealed directly to the state Supreme Court.

Messages left with the school district and with the lawyer for the school district were not immediately returned.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington represented the parents. ACLU spokesman Doug Honig said the case was precedent-setting for the state, and "as a result of this ruling we don't expect to see other districts pursuing suspicionless testing programs."

However, the nine-member court was split on whether the plurality ruling was too sweeping. There were three separate concurrences, and at least one justice said random suspicionless drug testing would be OK under "carefully defined circumstances."

The sticking point between the ruling by Sanders and a concurrence written by Justice Barbara Madsen was over a "special needs exception" as in federal law, which would allow random searches in some circumstances.

Sanders' ruling says there is no need to create that type of exception in Washington law.

"Simply passing muster under the federal constitution does not ensure the survival of the school district's policy under our state constitution," Sanders wrote.

"In the context of randomly drug testing student athletes, we see no reason to invent such a broad exception to the warrant requirement as such an alleged exception cannot be found in the common law," he wrote.

The move takes the offer directly to Take-Two's shareholders after Take-Two rejected the offer late last month.

At the time, Take Two had said it was open to talks with Electronic Arts but wanted to wait until April 30, the day after the latest version of Grand Theft Auto hits store shelves.

The $26 per share cash tender offer from an Electronic Arts' subsidiary represents a 4 percent premium to Take-Two's closing stock price of $24.91 on Wednesday and a 64 percent premium to the company's Feb. 15 closing stock price, which was the last trading day prior to Electronic Arts' revised offer.

The tender offer, which is not contingent on financing, is set to expire at midnight on April 11, unless extended. Take-Two's annual shareholders' meeting is expected to take place on April 10.

Take-Two shares rose 53 cents, or 2.1 percent, to $25.44 in midday traduing, while Electronic Arts shares dropped 69 cents, or 1.5 percent, to $46.54.

Consequently, a Republican administration finds itself aligned against the most popular tenet of social conservatism: gun rights, which enjoy much wider agreement than do opposition to abortion or gay marriage. Promises in two presidential campaigns are being abandoned, and Bush finds himself to the left of even Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.

The 1976 D.C. statute prohibiting ownership of all functional firearms was called unconstitutional a year ago in an opinion by Senior Judge Laurence Silberman, a conservative who has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for 22 years. It was assumed that Bush would fight Mayor Adrian Fenty's appeal.

The president and his senior staff were stunned to learn, on the day it was issued, that Clement's petition called on the high court to return the case to the appeals court. The solicitor general argued that Silberman's opinion supporting individual gun rights was so broad that it would endanger federal gun control laws such as the bar on owning machine guns. The president could have ordered a revised brief by Clement.

But facing congressional Democratic pressure to keep his hands off the Justice Department, Bush did not act.

Cheney did join 55 senators and 250 House members in signing a brief supporting the Silberman ruling. Although this unprecedented vice presidential intervention was widely interpreted as a dramatic breakaway from the White House, longtime associates could not believe that Cheney would defy the president. In fact, he did not. Bush approved what Cheney did in his constitutional role as president of the Senate.

That has not lessened puzzlement over Clement, a 41-year-old conservative Washington lawyer who clerked for Silberman and later for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Clement has tried to explain his course to the White House by claiming that he feared Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court's current swing vote, would join a liberal majority on gun rights if forced to rule on Silberman's opinion.

The more plausible explanation for Clement's stance is that he could not resist opposition to individual gun rights by career lawyers in the Justice Department's Criminal Division (who clashed with the Office of Legal Counsel in a heated internal struggle). Newly installed Attorney General Michael Mukasey, a neophyte at Justice, was unaware of the conflict and learned about Clement's position only after it had been locked in.

A majority of both houses in the Democratic-controlled Congress are on record as being against the District's gun prohibition. So are 31 states, with only five (New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey and Hawaii) in support. Sen. Barack Obama has weighed in against the D.C. law, asserting that the Constitution confers an individual right to bear arms -- not just collective authority to form militias.

This popular support for gun rights is not reflected by an advantage in the oral arguments to take place Tuesday. Former solicitor general Walter Dellinger, an old hand at arguing before the Supreme Court, will make the case for the gun prohibition. Opposing counsel Alan Gura, making his first appearance before the high court, does not have the confidence of gun-ownership advocates (who tried to replace him with former solicitor general Ted Olson).

The cause needs help from Clement during his 15-minute oral argument, but it won't get it if he reiterates his written brief. The word was passed in government circles this week that Clement would amend his position when he actually faces the justices -- which would be an odd ending to bizarre behavior by the Justice Department.