pausing or killing a process

[David Martens]

Is there a reasonable way of pausing a process
within Python?  This could be a process created by
a Python os.fork() call or some other Unix process.
Since I have no solution at this time, I'll take
almost anything I can get.  This is run in an
environment where threads and forked processes
exist BTW (if that matters).

Additionally, a process can be killed by doing a 
os.system("kill -9 %i" % pid) but that falls short
of elegant.  Can it be done better?

thanks
Dave