But that plan overlooks the importance of the mayor's national popularity at a moment of economic peril.

It built its arguments on a pluralist perspective that combines several social, economic and political perils together with classical military perils.

His first argument is that current litigation over sexual abuse by the clergy, besides posing economic peril for religious institutions, is rife with implications for religious freedom.

Many museums continue to plow blithely ahead with less popular exhibitions anyway, but they may come to find that they do so at their economic peril.

Are the politicians and policy makers who see economic peril in continuing immigration correct?

Those dependent on coal - the United States, for example - see mainly economic peril in a binding treaty.

Today, it embodies the economic perils and promise that confronts this new Eastern European nation as it tries to weather the transition to a free market economy.

One key tactic for surviving economic peril is outsourcing, the practice of buying parts or materials from others when it is cheaper than producing them.

But in these times of economic peril, it is not easy for politicians to deliver.

And Bob Herbert's Dec. 29 column correctly identified the growing economic peril in the surge of pink slips driven by cost-cutting corporate machismo.