The Week April 21-27

22.Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice delivered a surprise yesterday, stopping in Iraq on her way to Bahrain for today's meeting of foreign ministers of the Gulf Cooperation Council. But when she gets to Kuwait for the Expanded Neighbors of Iraq ministerial conference on Tuesday, she said, she will stick to the script and avoid talks with her Iranian counterpart.

"I don't intend to meet the Iranians, that is not in the plan," Rice told reporters last week in Washington. "The Iranians will be at the meeting . . . but, no, I don't have any plans to meet them."

The conference will be one of the highest-profile international gatherings to be held in Kuwait since the Persian Gulf War. The United States will probably urge Arab nations to open agreed-upon embassies in Baghdad, as well as greater involvement in stabilizing Iraq. Border security and cooperation issues will also be on the table.

Expected attendees include Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, and Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem, as well as senior figures from other Middle Eastern nations, France and Britain.

22."Pennsylvania is the new Iowa," quipped Doug Hattaway, an adviser to Sen. Hillary Clinton, in early March. He meant that the contest would become a Democratic primary focal point, in which the ground game would be as important as the television advertising air war.

After vigorous efforts by the campaigns of both Clinton (N.Y.) and Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), nearly 172,000 voters have newly registered as Democrats in order to vote in Pennsylvania's closed primary, leading to a record-breaking total of more than 4 million registered Democrats statewide.

On Tuesday, the Keystone State finally goes to the polls, ending the protracted Battle of Verdun stage of the Democratic primary, in which the candidates seemed caught in endless loops of charges and countercharges with no sign of whether they had lost or gained ground.

Polls show Clinton heading into the vote with a narrow lead in the state. The Obama campaign has signaled that it intends to interpret a single-digit win by Clinton -- who has had leads in the state of up to 20 points as recently as March -- as a victory.

The results from Pennsylvania will also hint at how much Obama has been diminished in the minds of white, working-class Democratic voters by recent controversies involving his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and Obama's own remarks that small-town voters are "bitter" and "cling" to guns and religion because of economic dislocation.

23.Just more than a year ago, the Justice Department inspector general reviewed Federal Bureau of Investigation practices under the U.S. Patriot Act and found, as The Washington Post reported, "pervasive errors in the FBI's use of its power to secretly demand telephone, e-mail and financial records in national security cases." Possible breaches of protocol were found in 22 of 293 national security letter requests reviewed, according to the audit, which sparked a storm of outrage.

"National security letters are a powerful tool, and when they are misused, they can do great harm to innocent people," Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) noted at the time. On Wednesday, Leahy will pick up the theme as he presides over a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on "National Security Letters: The Need for Greater Accountability and Oversight."

Witnesses scheduled to testify at the Senate's Dirksen Office Building include: James A. Baker, a former Justice Department counsel for intelligence policy; Gregory T. Nojeim of the Center for Democracy & Technology; and Michael J. Woods, the former chief of the FBI's National Security Law Unit.

By Garance Franke-Ruta