Across the Nation

SELMA, Ala. - Thirty-five years after America's Bloody Sunday, when police beat and bloodied voting rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, modern-day civil rights figures traced the same path yesterday with Bill Clinton - a white Southerner who credited the march with his rise to be president.

''I am a son of the South, the old segregated South. Those of you who marched on Bloody Sunday set me free, too,'' Clinton said before walking across the bridge arm-in-arm with Coretta Scott King, widow of Rev. Martin Luther King, and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) who was badly injured in the 1965 march.

Lewis, who marches every year to mark the anniversary, invited Clinton to join him this year, Clinton's last in office.

Brutal images of the ugly violence on the bridge galvanized many far outside the South to the civil rights movement, and helped win support for the Voting Rights Act.

On March 7 that year, Alabama state troopers and sheriff's deputies used tear gas, nightsticks and whips to break up an attempt by blacks and white integrationists to march 50 miles to the state Capitol in Montgomery to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks in Selma.

Some marchers retaliated with bricks and bottles. Lewis, then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was among 17 blacks who were hospitalized.

Two weeks later, under the protection of a federal court, King led hundreds of people on the long walk to the capital.

The march helped launch the careers of black leaders including Lewis, but it also helped make way for a new kind of white Southern politician - moderate, attuned to civil rights issues and appealing to both black and white voters.

Without the changes set in motion in 1965, Clinton said, ''Atlanta never would have had the Super Bowl or the Olympics, and Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton would never have been elected president of the United States.''

While applauding the advances in black political participation and other hopeful markers, Clinton said America still has many bridges to cross. He took direct aim at two issues that still cause friction: The Confederate flag and mistrust between minorities and the police.

''As long as the waving symbol of one American's pride is the shameful symbol of another American's pain, we have another bridge to cross,'' Clinton said.

Later he added: ''As long as African-Americans and Latinos anywhere in America believe they are unfairly targeted by police because of the color of their skin, and the police believe they are unfairly judged by their communities because of the color of their uniforms, we have another bridge to cross.''

Thousands followed Clinton over the bridge. The crowd was so thick that the march came to a standstill.

Earlier, Clinton toured the Voting Rights Museum and with Rev. Jesse Jackson stopped on the side of the bridge where a memorial park is planned - right at the city limits. The two stood silently for a few minutes before two large rocks that have served as an informal monument for years.

In 1965, Clinton watched the events in Selma from Washington, where he was then a student at Georgetown University.

In 1965, only 2.1 percent of blacks of voting age in Selma were registered to vote. They were shut out by strict rules, such as one that allowed blacks to register only on the first and third Mondays of each month - only to encounter police who would beat them if they attempted to register.

They also were subjected to literacy tests and made to answer irrelevant questions. One such question, Lewis has said, was to identify the number of bubbles in a bar of soap.

Ariz. to offer online voting for primary

Tomorrow, Arizona Democrats will become the nation's first to cast votes online in a legally binding public election.

But many say Arizona and other states still have issues of security, identity and access to resolve.

E-lection Day continues all week, until the Democratic presidential primary on Saturday, March 11. Republicans offered no e-lection option during their Feb. 22 primary.

Mark Fleisher, the state Democratic chairman, dismisses criticisms about readiness.

"Somebody has to be first," he said. ''If you want to see elections on the Internet, you have to jump in.''

He hopes to engage younger voters, predicting the Internet ''will do more to increase voter turnout than anything since the repeal of the poll tax.''

A week ago, Washington state's Thurston County tested Internet voting. Voters in the presidential primary cast mock votes on terminals at polling sites and real votes using regular paper ballots. That followed a similar trial in two Iowa counties during November's general election.

In January, Republicans in Alaska used the Internet for a straw poll. Of 4,330 votes cast, only 35 came through the Internet. But those 35 would have needed a dogsled or aircraft to get to the polls, according to election vendor VoteHere.net of Bellevue, Wash.

Florida, South Carolina, Texas and Utah will let about 250 absentee voters go online this fall as part of a Pentagon pilot program for U.S. military and civilian citizens living abroad. Those votes will count. Concerns over security delayed the effort in 1998.

Conference held for infectious diseases

ATLANTA - Infections contracted in hospitals kill as many as 88,000 people each year, a number that could be reduced with increased use of technology and simple measures such as more frequent hand washing, a researcher said yesterday at a conference on the problem.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control opened a five-day conference on preventing and reducing healthcare-associated infections in Atlanta.

Richard P. Wenzel, M.D. and chairman of the internal medicine department at the Medical College of Virginia, said new devices such as catheters coated with antibiotics have proven effective against infection spread at health facilities.