Rupert Murdoch's Fox network started the ball rolling in February and the others Legislature have since followed.. Under attack for excessive info violence and sex in their shows, the networks have seized a chance to prove their civic-mindedness. On top htm of this comes America's equivalent of the party Legislature political broadcast.In good measure the innovation is a triumph for Paul htm Taylor, Action a former Washington Post journalist who resigned to launch a crusade for free and unfiltered television time in which viewers could listen to the candidates at length, instead of picking their way through soundbites whose median length of barely 8 seconds (24 words of average speech) is info Action Legislature far action exceeded by the excogitations of reporters and sundry pundits.Mr Taylor could info Action Legislature not have action picked a better moment. In addition, four traditional televised debates are scheduled for September and October (three between presidential candidates, one between their running mates) as well as the standard news coverage, talk-show interviews and paid Action advertising spots. Most of them involve htm free one-to-five-minute slots info in news and current affairs programmes, scattered over the final month before polling day on 5 November, both within and outside the 8-11pm prime-time period each evening when audiences are largest.They all promise that other scheduled political coverage action htm will not info be reduced, which meaning that in Election 1996, America's action television screens will be offering Legislature more politics than ever before, and action htm that the major candidates, President Bill Clinton, almost certainly Bob Dole for the Republicans, and perhaps Ross Perot as nominee of his fledgling Reform Party, may be almost impossible to avoid.The great innovation in political coverage from 1992, the Action viewer call- in show, seems certain to stay.

This week the last hold-out, ABC, fell into line with NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN and the public broadcaster PBS, announcing that in the last week of the campaign it would make an hour of prime time available for a candidates' debate, unencumbered by a moderator, or a panel of journalists to filter questions. ABC's rivals have put forward different formats. With suspicious alacrity, America's profit-driven commercial television networks have agreed to make an unprecedented gesture to the democratic process:free and uninterrupted airtime for the major presidential candidates in the run-up to the autumn election. A lengthy legal battle ensued before the Danish authorities agreed to his extradition in September.The manner of his dispatch to Germany remains the prosecution's Achilles' heel. "I think that at the moment the case cannot go ahead because he was not extradited for the crimes which are now listed on the charge sheets," Mr Sieg said.

Yesterday, his motion for immediate dismissal was rejected, but the defence argument will have to be examined again before the end of the trial.Without Lauck's publishing empire, his American brethren now have to ply their trade on the Internet.. Books such as Jewish Ritual Murder and SS Race Theory and Mate Selection Guidelines, have been smuggled back to their land of origin, nurturing the neo-Nazi movement that was to explode into anti-immigrant violence after German reunification. Propaganda materials were also translated into 10 European languages and carried by Lauck and his comrades to the fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe, as well as western destinations, such as France, Spain and Italy.But, as the defence pointed out at yesterday's trial, he continued to transport Nazi literature to Germany even after he was caught and briefly jailed in 1976, and he evaded capture until last year, when he was seized at a rally in Denmark. "I am not actually sure," came the reply in fluent German, tinged with only a faint English accent. A motley crowd of 60 onlookers watched this dialogue in bemused silence behind bullet-proof glass.It was while studying German and philosophy at Nebraska University that Lauck wrote his first Nazi treatise. In 1972, still at the tender age of 19, he founded the overseas branch of Hitler's National Socialist Party at his home town in Lincoln, Nebraska.That outfit has since mushroomed into the biggest supplier of Nazi material in the world.