Their hopes fading and legal options exhausted, Terri Schiavo’s parents appeared quietly resigned to watching her die, but could claim one Easter victory: The severely brain-damaged woman received a drop of communion wine on her tongue – her only sustenance in nine days – after her husband allowed her to receive the sacrament.

Abortion-rights supporters in the US marched in huge numbers, roused in this election year by what they see as an erosion of reproductive freedoms under President George Bush, and foreign policies they say hurt women worldwide.

LAWYERS seeking removal of a Ten Commandments monument from a judicial building’s rotunda told a federal judge yesterday they would not press to have the state’s chief justice held in contempt for refusing to move it.