Representing yourself in court can be a tricky endeavor. There are confusing legal terms to learn, strict procedures to follow and volumes of case law that often need to be understood to prepare a case. Lake County officials and a private agency that assists indigent litigants in Illinois want to make the practice easier by creating a self-help center for people who choose to represent themselves in legal matters. The center, which will be housed in the law library at the main courthouse in Waukegan, could open later this summer. "I think it's going to be extremely helpful," Court Administrator Bob Zastany said. "There is a population out there that will take advantage of this resource." The self-help center will be the only one of its kind in the county. Only a few operate nationwide, officials said. The project is the work of Lake County circuit court officials and Prairie State Legal Services, a statewide agency with an office in Waukegan that provides information and legal assistance to poor and elderly Illinois residents. The organization has received a $25,000 grant from the Illinois Equal Justice Foundation, a nonprofit group that funds programs designed to increase access to legal information and assistance, to help pay for the effort. Prairie State will share the money with the county. The county's law library is on the first floor of the governmental center at 18 N. County St. The new self-help center will be designed to help litigants find the information they need to properly represent themselves in court, an undertaking that can be complicated and confusing. "Some people can do OK on their own, and some people can do OK with some help," said Linda Rothnagel, the managing attorney for Prairie State Legal Services. "But other people can't do it. It's not always easy." Self-representation is a right affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The practice is far more common in civil matters than in criminal cases. In fact, self-represented litigants - formally called "pro se" in Latin, or "for oneself" - in criminal defenses are so rare that statistics about the practice generally are not kept, legal experts say.

Question: "Why can representing yourself in court be "a tricky endeavor"?"

Response: "Confusing legal terms"
OPTIONS:
- no
- yes

A: yes

Relying on an animal to come by is risky. A flower may have to wait a long time for the right animals to come by. What if one never passes close enough to the flower? Hoping the wind will blow is also risky for a plant. What if the wind does not blow? What if the blowing pollen does not land on another flower? The wind could even blow the pollen over the ocean where it is wasted. Giving free nectar is costly. It is not a good use of the plants energy. A plant uses a lot of energy to produce nectar. Some animals may just drink the nectar. They may not carry off any pollen in return. To improve their chances, plants evolved special traits. For example, they developed ways to hide their nectar. Only certain animals were able to get at the plants hidden nectar. These specific animals might be more likely to visit only flowers of the same species. This was also a benefit for some animals. Animals also evolved special traits to get to the nectar.

Question: "Why is giving free nectar costly?"

Response: "The pollen won't land where they want"
OPTIONS:
- no
- yes

A: no

The new administration had already begun exploring possible diplomatic options, retracing many of the paths traveled by its predecessors.U.S. envoys again pressed the Taliban to turn Bin Laden "over to a country where he could face justice" and repeated, yet again, the warning that the Taliban would be held responsible for any al Qaeda attacks on U.S. interests. The Taliban's representatives repeated their old arguments. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told us that while U.S. diplomats were becoming more active on Afghanistan through the spring and summer of 2001, "it would be wrong for anyone to characterize this as a dramatic shift from the previous administration." In deputies meetings at the end of June, Tenet was tasked to assess the prospects forTaliban cooperation with the United States on al Qaeda. The NSC staff was tasked to flesh out options for dealing with the Taliban. Revisiting these issues tried the patience of some of the officials who felt they had already been down these roads and who found the NSC's procedures slow." We weren't going fast enough,"Armitage told us. Clarke kept arguing that moves against the Taliban and al Qaeda should not have to wait months for a larger review of U.S. policy in South Asia." For the government," Hadley said to us,"we moved it along as fast as we could move it along." As all hope in moving the Taliban faded, debate revived about giving covert assistance to the regime's opponents. Clarke and the CIA's Cofer Black renewed the push to aid the Northern Alliance. Clarke suggested starting with modest aid, just enough to keep the Northern Alliance in the fight and tie down al Qaeda terrorists, without aiming to overthrow the Taliban. Rice, Hadley, and the NSC staff member for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, told us they opposed giving aid to the Northern Alliance alone. They argued that the program needed to have a big part for Pashtun opponents of theTaliban. They also thought the program should be conducted on a larger scale than had been suggested. Clarke concurred with the idea of a larger program, but he warned that delay risked the Northern Alliance's final defeat at the hands of the Taliban. During the spring, the CIA, at the NSC's request, had developed draft legal authorities-a presidential finding-to undertake a large-scale program of covert assistance to the Taliban's foes.

Question: "Who pushed for support of the Northern Alliance?"

Response: "Cofer Black"
OPTIONS:
- no
- yes

A:
yes