Ms Whitlock said that she wished to thank staff at the restaurant who she believed helped save her left eye from being more severely injured.
While he voted against confirmation, Mr. Biden made decisions during the hearings, including not allowing testimony about pornography rentals, that many critics believed helped Justice Thomas weather the confirmation process.
When an American armored vehicle killed two schoolgirls in a traffic accident in 2002, it led to large anti-American protests that political commentators believed helped pave the way for Roh Moo-hyun's victory in the presidential election that year.
Around the same time the British literary intelligentsia waxed lyrical on the benefits of rounding an evening off with a few pipes of opium, something they believed helped digestion, fortified against fever and improved performance in the bedroom.
The questions were things like: ■ Why does the church always portray Joseph Smith translating the Book of Mormon from golden plates, when witnesses described him looking down into a hat at a "peep stone," a rock that he believed helped him find buried treasure?
In April 1966, Mr. Davis left the Raiders to become the commissioner of the A.F.L., vowing to wage war against the N.F.L. for top players, a move that many observers at the time believed helped push the N.F.L. owners to agree, only two months later, to a merger of the two leagues.
