US: President George Bush has delighted Republicans and angered Democrats by nominating Samuel Alito (55), a conservative appeals court judge, to the US Supreme Court.
As a judge in Philadelphia, Mr Alito has backed restrictions on abortion rights, opposed limits on gun rights, taken the side of religious groups on church and state issues and argued that it was too easy for women to go to court over sex discrimination.
Mr Alito's nomination follows last week's withdrawal of Mr Bush's previous nominee, Harriet Miers, who faced a vigorous campaign of opposition from conservative groups.
Yesterday, the conservatives were jubilant, welcoming Mr Alito as a soulmate of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the supreme court's most conservative judges. In legal circles, Mr Alito's conservative approach has won him the nicknames "Scalia lite" and "Scalito".
Unlike Ms Miers, Mr Alito has argued before the supreme court as a lawyer and has served as a federal judge, leading Mr Bush to describe him as the most experienced supreme court nominee for 70 years.
"As a Justice Department official, federal prosecutor and judge on the United States Court of Appeals, Sam Alito has shown a mastery of the law, a deep commitment of justice . . . and he is a man of enormous character. He's scholarly, fair-minded and principled, and these qualities will serve our nation well on the highest court of the land," the president said.
Senate majority leader Bill Frist welcomed the nomination, which is likely to have broad support among Republicans, who account for 55 of the 100 senators.
"Judge Alito is unquestionably qualified to serve on our nation's highest court. And he has displayed a judicial philosophy marked by judicial restraint and respect for the limited role of the judiciary to interpret the law and not legislate from the bench," Mr Frist said.
Democrats criticised the nomination as a sign that Mr Bush was more concerned with consolidating his conservative political base than with achieving consensus. Senator Patrick Leahy, the most senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, described Mr Alito as a "needlessly provocative" choice.
The son of Italian immigrants, Mr Alito was born in Trenton, New Jersey, and studied at Princeton and Yale before serving as assistant US attorney and assistant to the solicitor general, arguing 12 cases before the supreme court on behalf of the federal government. He was a legal adviser to the Reagan government and became US attorney in New Jersey, prosecuting white-collar crime, organised crime and drug-trafficking.
President Bush senior nominated Mr Alito to the Philadelphia-based Third Circuit of the US Court of Appeals in 1990 and the judge soon earned a reputation as a strong conservative.
In 1991, his was the only dissenting voice in the case of Planned Parenthood v Casey, when the court struck down a Pennsylvania law which would have required women seeking abortions to notify their spouses.
In 1996, he was the only appeals judge to vote against upholding the authority of Congress to ban fully-automatic machineguns, and in the same year he argued that the court had made it too easy for sex discrimination complaints to reach a jury trial.
He has consistently supported the conservative stance that the courts should take a more relaxed view of the separation of church and state. He wrote the majority opinion in a case about a city's Christmas display, holding that including a crib and a menorah did not violate the constitution because the display also included secular symbols such as "Frosty the Snowman".
The Democrats' Senate leader, Harry Reid, said that his party would look very closely at Mr Alito's record before voting to confirm him. "The nomination of Judge Alito requires an especially long, hard look by the Senate because of what happened last week to Harriet Miers. Conservative activists forced Miers to withdraw from consideration for this same supreme court seat because she was not radical enough for them. Now the Senate needs to find out if the man replacing Miers is too radical for the American people," he said.
An ideological battle over the supreme court may be just what Mr Bush needs to divert public attention from last week's indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, for perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the leaking of a CIA agent's identity.