Ny Safidinao

WASHINGTON — To jeers and boos that showcased deep party divisions, Democratic party officials approved a deal Saturday to seat delegates from the disputed Florida and Michigan primaries with half a vote each, dealing a blow to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. The deal, reached behind closed doors and voted on publicly in a raucous meeting of the Democratic National Committee’s rules panel, would give Mrs. Clinton a net gain of 24 delegates over Senator Barack Obama — but fell far short of her hopes of winning the full votes of both delegations. The decision left Mrs. Clinton lagging behind Mr. Obama in delegates in the final weekend of campaigning before the last of the nominating contests — Puerto Rico on Sunday and Montana and South Dakota on Tuesday — are held. Under the compromise, Mrs. Clinton, who won the Michigan and Florida contests that were held in defiance of party rules, picked up 19 delegates in Florida and 5 delegates in Michigan. The deep wounds among Democratic partisan...

6:50 p.m. | Florida Divided By Two: A proposal to seat all of Florida’s delegates but give each one only half a vote passed the committee by a vote of 27-to-0 with one abstention. Clinton stalwart Harold Ickes, said he was “disappointed” that the delegates from the Sunshine States did not receive full voting rights, but supported the motion. This will change the delegate allocation, because of the way delegates are apportioned from one congressional district to the next. “We will leave here more united than we came,” committee member Alice Huffman said of the decision. Mr. Ickes is now expressing his disappointment. He said that a motion to restore all of the state’s pledged delegates, but only give each half a vote would “hijack” the democratic process. The proposal would remove four delegates from Mrs. Clinton. “This body of 30 individuals has decided that they’re going to substitute their judgment for 600,00 voters,” Mr. Ickes said. “Now that’s what I call democracy,” he added sarca...

Mildred Loving, a black woman whose anger over being banished from Virginia for marrying a white man led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling overturning state miscegenation laws, died on May 2 at her home in Central Point, Va. She was 68. Peggy Fortune, her daughter, said the cause was pneumonia. The Supreme Court ruling, in 1967, struck down the last group of segregation laws to remain on the books — those requiring separation of the races in marriage. The ruling was unanimous, its opinion written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, who in 1954 wrote the court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring segregated public schools unconstitutional. In Loving v. Virginia, Warren wrote that miscegenation laws violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. “We have consistently denied the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race,” he said. By their own widely reported accounts, Mrs. Loving and her husband, Richard, were in bed in their m...