Outlaws on The Left and Right

Urban, leftist, academic Berkeley, California, and remote northern Idaho don't share a lot. But both places have become havens for Americans who have dropped out of the workaday culture, who have a paranoid streak, and who view the very concept of government as oppressive.

--In Berkeley police said Rosebud Abigail Denovo, 19, broke into the mansion of University of California chancellor Chang-Lin Tien intending to kill him. Part of a self-styled "People's Will Direct Action Committee," Denovo took part in protests over plans by the university and the city of Berkeley to build volleyball courts at People's Park, long a refuge of the homeless. She had a history of psychiatric treatment and was arrested last year for stashing explosives at a bivouac in the Berkeley hills.

Denovo was shot dead by an officer who said she lunged at him with a machete when she was cornered in the chancellor's residence. A note found inside her duffel bag bore the message, "We are willing to die for this land. Are you?"

-- In Idaho white separatist Randy Weaver seemed willing to die for his piece of land too, as he holed up in his cabin near the hamlet of Naples, surrounded by FBI agents, federal marshals and local police officers. Authorities put his mountaintop redoubt under surveillance after he failed to appear for a February 1991 trial on charges of selling two sawed-off shotguns to an undercover agent. Two weeks ago, Weaver's 13-year-old son Samuel and federal marshal William Degan were killed in a gun battle as lawmen approached the cabin. Prosecutors charged Weaver's comrade Kevin Harris, 24, with murdering Degan. Weaver's wife Vicki was killed in a second gunfight.

Weaver, 44, has ties to the racist Aryan Nations sect based in Hayden Lake, 60 miles to the south. Some neighbors, saying Weaver simply wants the government to leave him alone, brought food and mail to the cabin after Weaver retreated there last year. After the shoot-out, as officers cordoned off the mountain, local sympathizers shouted obscenities at police manning the roadblock and vowed, "We'll get you!" At week's end Weaver, his remaining three children and Harris continued to hunker down as lawmen used loudspeakers to broadcast appeals from family members and friends urging the outlaw to surrender.