The Florida Supreme Court this week disciplined 19 attorneys, including two in Central Florida.

Norman Sanders Moss, 813 E. Michigan St., Orlando, was suspended until further order of the court following a Feb. 27 court order, and was ordered to stop acting as a personal representative for any estate, as guardian for any ward and as trustee for any trust.

The Florida Bar's petition for emergency suspension says Moss misappropriated $107,000 held in trust for clients. Moss, who retired from The Florida Bar Jan. 14, 2008, is currently the subject of five other Florida Bar disciplinary matters.

In addition, Paulette Deloise Singleton, 499 N. State Road 434, Suite 2019, Altamonte Springs, was disbarred for five years effective 30 days from a Feb. 14 court order.

The Bar says beginning in early 2006, Singleton began not adequately communicating with clients and failed to diligently pursue their cases. Clients attempting to reach her would find her phone disconnected, and one found mail piled outside her office door.

In one case, the Bar says she took a fee and did no work and then only partially refunded the fee. In another case, she was late for a final hearing with no evidence of preparation.

As an official agency of the Florida Supreme Court, The Florida Bar and its Department of Lawyer Regulation are charged with administering a statewide disciplinary system to enforce Supreme Court rules of professional conduct for the 80,000-plus lawyers admitted to practice law in Florida.

The chaotic scene marked the most violent demonstrations since protests by Buddhist monks began in Lhasa on Monday, the anniversary of a failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule in 1959. The protests have been the largest in Tibet since the late 1980s, when Chinese security forces repeatedly used lethal force to restore order in the region.

The developments prompted the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, to issue a statement, saying he was concerned about the situation and appealing to the Chinese leadership to “stop using force and address the long-simmering resentment of the Tibetan people”.

By Friday night, Chinese authorities had placed much of the central part of the city under a curfew, including neighborhoods around different Buddhist monasteries, according to two Lhasa residents reached by telephone. Military police were blocking roads in some ethnic Tibetan neighborhoods, several Lhasa residents said.

Meanwhile, the United States Embassy in Beijing warned American citizens to stay away from Lhasa. The embassy said it had “received firsthand reports from American citizens in the city who report gunfire and other indications of violence.”

The Chinese government’s official news agency, Xinhua, issued a two-sentence bulletin, in English, confirming that shops in Lhasa had been set on fire and that other stores had closed because of violence on the streets. But the Chinese news media otherwise carried no news about the protests. The White House responded with expressions of concern, but not direct criticism, although it urged the Chinese authorities to use restraint.

“We believe Beijing needs to respect Tibetan culture, needs to respect multi-ethnicity in their society,” a spokesman, Tony Fratto, said while traveling with President Bush to New York. “We regret the tensions between ethnic groups and Beijing.”

The White House says that the American ambassador in Beijing, Clark T. Randt Jr., had urged restraint in his contacts with the Chinese authorities.

The disturbances appear to be becoming a major problem for the ruling Communist Party, which is holding its annual meeting of the National People’s Congress this week in Beijing. China is eager to present a harmonious image to the rest of the world as Beijing prepares to play host to the Olympic Games in August.

On Thursday, attorneys for Lisa Miller-Jenkins asked the court to revisit the issue, which was decided in favor of Janet Miller-Jenkins in 2006.

The two Virginia residents were joined in a Vermont civil union in 2000, but later split up. Lisa had a child in 2002 and a Vermont family court awarded Janet visitation rights.

Lisa argues that since Virginia law doesn’t recognize civil unions her former partner shouldn’t have parental rights.

Janet says the case has already been decided in her favor by a family court.

The high court wrote, "we can conceive of no way to draw a principled line permitting drug testing only student athletes."

"If we were to allow random drug testing here, what prevents school districts from either later drug testing students participating in any extracurricular activities, as federal courts now allow, or testing the entire student population?" Justice Richard Sanders wrote for the court's plurality. Joining him were Chief Justice Gerry Alexander and Justices Susan Owens and Tom Chambers.

Two families with high school students sued the district. Wahkiakum County Superior Court Judge Douglas Goelz ruled in 2006 that testing students was reasonable after less-intrusive methods failed to address the drug threat. The case was appealed directly to the state Supreme Court.

Messages left with the school district and with the lawyer for the school district were not immediately returned.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington represented the parents. ACLU spokesman Doug Honig said the case was precedent-setting for the state, and "as a result of this ruling we don't expect to see other districts pursuing suspicionless testing programs."

However, the nine-member court was split on whether the plurality ruling was too sweeping. There were three separate concurrences, and at least one justice said random suspicionless drug testing would be OK under "carefully defined circumstances."

The sticking point between the ruling by Sanders and a concurrence written by Justice Barbara Madsen was over a "special needs exception" as in federal law, which would allow random searches in some circumstances.

Sanders' ruling says there is no need to create that type of exception in Washington law.

"Simply passing muster under the federal constitution does not ensure the survival of the school district's policy under our state constitution," Sanders wrote.

"In the context of randomly drug testing student athletes, we see no reason to invent such a broad exception to the warrant requirement as such an alleged exception cannot be found in the common law," he wrote.

Consequently, a Republican administration finds itself aligned against the most popular tenet of social conservatism: gun rights, which enjoy much wider agreement than do opposition to abortion or gay marriage. Promises in two presidential campaigns are being abandoned, and Bush finds himself to the left of even Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.

The 1976 D.C. statute prohibiting ownership of all functional firearms was called unconstitutional a year ago in an opinion by Senior Judge Laurence Silberman, a conservative who has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for 22 years. It was assumed that Bush would fight Mayor Adrian Fenty's appeal.

The president and his senior staff were stunned to learn, on the day it was issued, that Clement's petition called on the high court to return the case to the appeals court. The solicitor general argued that Silberman's opinion supporting individual gun rights was so broad that it would endanger federal gun control laws such as the bar on owning machine guns. The president could have ordered a revised brief by Clement.

But facing congressional Democratic pressure to keep his hands off the Justice Department, Bush did not act.

Cheney did join 55 senators and 250 House members in signing a brief supporting the Silberman ruling. Although this unprecedented vice presidential intervention was widely interpreted as a dramatic breakaway from the White House, longtime associates could not believe that Cheney would defy the president. In fact, he did not. Bush approved what Cheney did in his constitutional role as president of the Senate.

That has not lessened puzzlement over Clement, a 41-year-old conservative Washington lawyer who clerked for Silberman and later for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Clement has tried to explain his course to the White House by claiming that he feared Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court's current swing vote, would join a liberal majority on gun rights if forced to rule on Silberman's opinion.

The more plausible explanation for Clement's stance is that he could not resist opposition to individual gun rights by career lawyers in the Justice Department's Criminal Division (who clashed with the Office of Legal Counsel in a heated internal struggle). Newly installed Attorney General Michael Mukasey, a neophyte at Justice, was unaware of the conflict and learned about Clement's position only after it had been locked in.

A majority of both houses in the Democratic-controlled Congress are on record as being against the District's gun prohibition. So are 31 states, with only five (New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey and Hawaii) in support. Sen. Barack Obama has weighed in against the D.C. law, asserting that the Constitution confers an individual right to bear arms -- not just collective authority to form militias.

This popular support for gun rights is not reflected by an advantage in the oral arguments to take place Tuesday. Former solicitor general Walter Dellinger, an old hand at arguing before the Supreme Court, will make the case for the gun prohibition. Opposing counsel Alan Gura, making his first appearance before the high court, does not have the confidence of gun-ownership advocates (who tried to replace him with former solicitor general Ted Olson).

The cause needs help from Clement during his 15-minute oral argument, but it won't get it if he reiterates his written brief. The word was passed in government circles this week that Clement would amend his position when he actually faces the justices -- which would be an odd ending to bizarre behavior by the Justice Department.

Mukasey will ask the justices on March 25 to reinstate the conviction of would-be millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam on a charge that an appeals court threw out, Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr said.

The 66-year-old Mukasey is a former federal judge who presided over high-profile terrorism trials in New York.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned just one of the nine counts on which Ressam was convicted for plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport around Jan. 1, 2000. The charge in question is carrying explosives during the commission of another serious crime.

The appeals court said the law required prosecutors to show the explosives were carried "in relation to" the felony, which in this case was lying on a Customs form.

Mukasey will urge the justices to reverse the appeals court, in part because the ruling could make it harder to prosecute terrorists. The government argues that the law means a defendant must be carrying the explosives at the same time as he commits another crime.

Ressam's lawyer, Tom Hillier, said Mukasey's involvement "doesn't change the question before the court."

"Same case, same facts," said Hillier, the federal public defender in Seattle. "Attorney General Mukasey has had a distinguished career as a federal judge and before that as a prosecutor. He'll do a great job. He knows his stuff."

Reno was on the winning end of the case in which she argued, in support of Maryland, that police can order passengers and drivers to get out of vehicles during traffic stops.

Griffin Bell did not fare as well when he took on a controversial case in the Carter administration. Bell argued unsuccessfully against letting an endangered fish, the tiny snail darter, stop a federal dam project.

Only about one-third of the court's cases this term have been decided. The most important cases often are announced in the final days in late June.

But of the 18 majority opinions handed down so far, eight justices have written at least two each; Justice Samuel Alito has written none.

Newer justices often take a little longer to churn out their work, but Alito's first opinion last term came in December for a unanimous court.

Alito's paltry output could be a result of nothing more than the wait for dissenters to file their opinions.

The more contentious rulings typically come later. Justices need time to read drafts of their colleagues' work and make changes based on the input. It is not known what opinions Alito is writing, but most of the easy cases from the term's early days have been decided.

This all could change next week when the justices return to the bench and are likely to issue decisions.

Alito has not been completely silent. He wrote dissenting opinions in two cases involving a judge's discretion to be lenient toward defendants in drug cases.