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37 Years Ago in TIME
Today we chuckle at dotcom millionaires gone bust, even as we become ever more attached to our laptops and favorite websites. But in the early days of computers, TIME was simply trying to introduce readers to the new gizmos--and to the strange people who had mastered them.

The computer already has been put to work at more than 700 specific tasks, both mundane and exotic, from bookkeeping to monitoring underground nuclear explosions. Computers control the flow of electric current for much of the nation, route long-distance telephone calls, set newspaper type, even dictate just how sausage is made...Because computer technology is so new and computers require such sensitive handling, a new breed of specialists have grown up to tend the machines. They are young, bright, well-paid (up to $30,000) and in short supply. With brand-new titles and responsibilities, they have formed themselves into a sort of solemn priesthood of the computer, purposely separated from ordinary laymen. Lovers of problem solving, they are apt to play chess at lunch or doodle in algebra over cocktails, speak an esoteric language that some suspect is just their way of mystifying outsiders. Deeply concerned about logic and sensitive to its breakdown in everyday life, they often annoy friends by asking them to rephrase their questions more logically. --TIME, April 2, 1965

For The Record
1.6 MILLION Tons of material removed from the site of the World Trade Center collapse, whose excavation will end this month

105,000 Truckloads that have been emptied at the Fresh Kills Landfill

6% Rate of U.S. unemployment last month, the highest since August 1994

$100 BILLION Projected U.S. budget deficit for 2002, down from a $236 billion surplus in 2000

77% Percentage of American Roman Catholics who think priests who have sexually abused a minor should be barred from the priesthood

64% Percentage of Catholics who believe homosexuality has no bearing on the likelihood that priests will abuse minors

25% Average amount of annual income poor families spent to send their children to four-year public colleges in 2000

13% Average amount of income poor families spent on tuition in 1980

Sources: New York Times (2), U.S. Labor Department, N.Y. Times (3), National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (2)

Arafat Is Freed. Now What?
With Yasser Arafat re-leased from his month-long confinement in Ramallah and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon set to visit Washington for talks this week with President Bush, the Middle East crisis is on the verge of a new round of diplomatic struggle. Israeli officials tell TIME that Sharon, hoping to pre-empt U.S. and Saudi initiatives, will make a new concession on Palestinian statehood, conditioned on "serious, concrete and continued steps against terrorism" by Arafat. Israeli officials say the concession will involve a new map for a potential Palestinian state. U.S. officials say they won't know the details until they meet Sharon face to face, but they expect much. Says a senior U.S. official close to the talks: "He's got to be willing to say that the [Palestinian] state will come in a reasonable time frame; it has to be viable [that is, territorially contiguous], and even if it's established on an interim basis, it's got to be linked to a final settlement." Whatever his proposal turns out to be, Sharon is not expected to back down on his feelings about Arafat. Israeli officials say Sharon will come armed with new, hard evidence of the Palestinian leader's continuing complicity in terrorism.

For his part, Arafat is enjoying the freedom he gained when the Israelis ended their siege of his Ramallah compound. His supporters are enjoying it too. In Bethlehem, where Palestinian gunmen, civilian officials and priests at the Church of the Nativity have been under siege almost as long as Arafat, gunmen in the church thought Arafat's freedom would lead to their own release and started firing their rifles into the air in glee, sources inside the church tell TIME. Israeli soldiers outside thought the shooting was directed at them and launched flares, which set fire to the roof of the church compound and damaged rooms in its Franciscan and Dominican areas but left the Byzantine basilica itself intact.

His confinement over, Arafat wasted little time reasserting his authority. On Thursday, he contacted his chiefs inside the church and told them he would handle all further negotiations over the siege, canceling a planned meeting between Israeli officials and leaders inside. Palestinian sources say Arafat wants to make political capital out of his control over the situation and make it appear that he is the only one who can come to the rescue of the site where Jesus is believed to have been born. BY MATT REES/JERUSALEM AND MASSIMO CALABRESI/WASHINGTON

Carol Looks Back, Again
It's one thing to host a TV special filled with outtakes from your old CBS comedy series and knock 'em dead in the ratings. It's quite another to try a new career as a playwright. But that's what Carol Burnett has done. She and daughter Carrie Hamilton (who died of lung cancer in January) collaborated on Hollywood Arms, a play based on Burnett's memoir, One More Time. Hamilton worked nearly till the end; she was viewing actors' audition tapes until just weeks before her death. But Mom had to finish alone. The play opened in Chicago last week to mixed reviews. To be sure, the string of incidents--young Carol (here called Helen) lives in a one-room Hollywood apartment with her cranky Christian Scientist grandmother (Linda Lavin) and her alcoholic, divorced mother--is overlong and shapeless. But the play's very artlessness makes it more affecting than many slicker stage memoirs. Its portrayal of how a dysfunctional upbringing can look absolutely normal to the child caught up in it rings true. BY RICHARD ZOGLIN

Dear Bill Clinton,
Your Middle East peace efforts crumbled. Your health-care plan vanished with grunge rock. But now you can build on your most lasting legacy: obliterating the line between politics and entertainment. Last week you met with NBC to discuss hosting a daytime talk show to the reported tune of $50 million a year. Respectable commentators urged you to pass. Now even your own people are knocking down the idea. But don't listen to the naysayers.

Their first objection is the silliest--that the demands of taping a show are too great. Right, pulling all-nighters over a budget impasse is a cakewalk. But interviewing "teens who are too young to dress so sexy"? Now that's work!

Their idea that you would sacrifice your remaining dignity misses the central lesson of your presidency: dignity is overrated. Serenading us on Arsenio, talking underwear on MTV, emoting at town meetings--your entire national career was a talk show. You won two terms because you knew that in America power flows through the barrel of a video camera.

That infidelity-and-impeachment hiccup might seem to be a handicap--but only to someone who has never watched daytime TV. From Oprah to Rosie, America likes its talk-show hosts flawed and challenged. Personal woes? You got 'em. Troubled childhood? Check. Weight problem? You'll have fries with that! And the daytime-talk audience, heavily female and black, is the closest thing to your natural power base outside Chappaqua. You were already, in Toni Morrison's words, "America's first black President." Isn't America ready for its first black female ex-President?

The critics will laugh, but in an era when national security requires that we pretend our President is a sage who would never say nuke-yoo-ler, we could use a national leader we're allowed to laugh at. And when you're running your book club and reaping the profits from B Magazine, you'll be laughing back. BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK

Hey! It's That '70s Shoe!
There's nothing as good for the sole as a comeback classic. When Dr. Scholl's Exercise Sandals debuted in 1948, the wooden slip-ons were promoted as a means to flex the foot, strengthen the arch and tone leg muscles. In the 1970s they peaked in popularity, not as an orthopedic shoe but as inexpensive hippie footwear. Today the sandals with the trademark gold buckle and unmistakable staccato ticking sound are back. "Sales are up 630% from last year," says Alan Johnson, a buyer for Shoes.com. "It started in January as a very metropolitan craze. Now they've spread to every corner." Their resurgence was probably boosted by Carrie Bradshaw, Sarah Jessica Parker's Sex in the City character, who clops around Manhattan in them. They also complement this season's '70s-inspired bohemian chic, marked by peasant blouses and worn-out denim. This year there's a sexy high-heeled variation named the Sassy joining the sleek Original and 1998's chunkier Super. In addition to the old primary colors, straps come in hot pink, turquoise and silver. And the sandals are still affordable: all three models range from $30 to $40. BY HEATHER WON TESORIERO

Keep Your Plutonium; Get Me Karl Rove!
Could $100 million, six tons of plutonium and a single phone call from Karl Rove help Republicans win back the Senate this fall? To Rove, the President's top political aide, it might just turn out to be the deal of the year. The story begins in Colorado, where Republican Senator Wayne Allard, who is running for re-election, got the Bush Administration to jump-start a plan to remove plutonium from a federal facility there and ship it to South Carolina, starting this month. That's good politics for Allard--but bad for Representative Lindsey Graham, who is running for the Senate in South Carolina. When Graham asked Washington to pay a fine of $1 million for every day the plutonium remains unprocessed in the state after a specified date, White House budget chief Mitch Daniels refused to go along, sources tell TIME.

That's when Graham went nuclear himself, publicly threatening to join a campaign by local Democrats to block the shipments with armed troopers. That, plus Graham's reputation as a maverick, got the White House's attention. Rove stepped in, calling Graham two weeks ago and okaying a deal that would cap any fines at $100 million a year, sources say. Graham is now working with Daniels' aides to codify the deal into law. Then the plutonium will move, two Republican Senate candidates will get what they want and so will Rove. BY MICHAEL WEISSKOPF

Verbatim
"My parents are very principled Democrats. Every now and then the President will say, 'Do I have your mother yet?' and I say, 'No, sir, not yet.'" ARI FLEISCHER, White House press secretary, interviewed by Jay Leno on the Tonight Show

"There's one person who outranks me as [Nixon's] worst enemy, and that's Deep Throat." JOHN DEAN, Nixon White House counsel, on his new book that he says will identify Deep Throat

"We have to give Tom Ridge a real job." JANE HARMAN, U.S. Congresswoman, who wants to expand the Office of Homeland Security

"You people have been missing how things are, for very long. I'm obtaining your attention in the only way I can." SOMEONE WHO CARES, anonymous author of notes left with pipe bombs found in Midwestern mailboxes

"This is my chance to fight, and I can't do it from that cement room with thousands of pages I can't read." ROBERT BLAKE, charged with killing his wife, at a hearing in which he unsuccessfully sought bail, arguing that his dyslexia requires that legal documents be read to him

Sources: AP, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, AP (2)

Priests: To Pay Or Not to Pay?
Boston parishioners' search for justice took one step forward and one big step back last week. In California authorities arrested Father Paul Shanley, 71, the notorious advocate of sex between men and boys, after his alleged victim told police about abuse he says occurred in Massachusetts between 1983 and 1989. Authorities were able to overcome the state's 10-year statute of limitations fairly simply: the clock for the 10-year period does not start ticking until the victim turns 16. The former catechism student is now 24. The scandal may have loosened these time restrictions; in Connecticut on the day of Shanley's arrest, the state house approved a bill that would extend its statute of limitations for child sexual abuse to 30 years after the victim turns 18--up from two years.

The setback for victims came on Friday when the Boston Archdiocese rejected a $20 million to $30 million settlement it had reached in March with victims of defrocked priest John Geoghan. Courts had not yet approved the deal, which would have awarded 86 victims up to $300,000 each. This marked the first time the archdiocese's finance council had gone against the professed wishes of Bernard Cardinal Law. Even if the plaintiffs go on to sue and win in civil court, Massachusetts law restricts the maximum payout from a nonprofit organization to $20,000 per victim. If the archdiocese had stuck with the settlement, the councilors said, it would have been unable to provide for other victims--including possibly Shanley's, who have begun filing their own civil suits. BY AMANDA BOWER With reporting by Matt Kelly/Boston

That Yes Man in The White House
The presidential veto is like a nuclear weapon: no one will be afraid of it unless he thinks it might actually be used. Ronald Reagan, who used to invite Congress to "make my day" by passing bills he didn't like, killed nearly 70 of them. The first President Bush, battling a Democratic Congress, racked up 44 vetoes, only one of them overridden.

But conservatives on Capitol Hill are becoming frustrated by President George W. Bush's reluctance to follow in Dad's footsteps. After nearly 16 months in office, Bush has not exercised a single veto. He has occasionally threatened one (on a post-Sept. 11 spending bill, for example) and got changes as a result. But more often he has, in the view of conservatives, caved in too early. On campaign-finance reform, he made it clear from the outset that he would probably sign whatever bill was sent to him, and he did.

White House legislative-affairs director Nick Calio says conservatives are simply disappointed over losing battles that were never winnable in the first place. To use the veto effectively, "you've got to find the right form and the right bill," he says. At a private strategy session in West Virginia last February, Bush told Republican Senators he would welcome a chance to wield his veto power. The chance may come soon, on a $27 billion emergency bill for the war on terrorism. If Congress loads it up with additional spending, as expected, conservatives are counting on Bush to finally put down the pen and say no. BY KAREN TUMULTY