Border death soldier hooked on Web war games

SEOUL (Reuters) - A South Korean conscript accused of killing eight soldiers near the border with North Korea was so engrossed in online war games he could not distinguish between fantasy and reality, the Defense Ministry said on Thursday.

In a detailed report on Sunday's incident in which a soldier tossed a grenade among barrack comrades and then opened fire, the ministry said the private -- officially identified only as "Kim" -- had planned the crime for at least a week because of bullying.

"He was so hooked on online war games he could master most of them," said a ministry statement. "He was daydreaming so much he couldn't tell the real world from the imaginary world."

Some of those who survived the early-hours assault said on television and in the statement they thought North Korean troops were attacking through the fortified Demilitarised Zone border the South Korean troops were guarding.

"When I heard the shooting, I thought war had broken out," said one sergeant on television.

The Demilitarised Zone is one of the world's most sensitive military regions; a tense border dividing 1.1 million North Korean troops from 690,000 South Korean troops -- many of them conscripts. Some 30,000 U.S. forces are also based in the South.

Seven corporals and one first lieutenant died on Sunday, the worst such incident in the army in 20 years, according to the ministry. Four other soldiers were wounded.

The ministry said the investigation and questioning had shown the soldier had used a corporal's weapon and then picked up his own rifle and returned to his guardpost. Two of those shot were not in the sleeping quarters.

The incident has prompted much debate among South Koreans about conditions in military service for a new generation that has never experienced war or privation.

The accused soldier, who had been on guard duty at the frontier, faces a possible court martial for murder. He confessed soon after the incident and was arrested, Thursday's 18-page statement said. It said 44 shots had been fired.

Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-ung offered to resign on Wednesday over the killings, but President Roh Moo-hyun has not decided yet whether to accept the resignation.

The accused soldier re-enacted the incident at the scene for investigators on Wednesday. Relatives of the dead also watched.

The soldier -- described in the statement as a loner and introvert -- was assigned to the border in January after basic training. South Korean men are generally conscripted for two years, although some serve longer. The Demilitarised Zone is one of the toughest assignments for conscripts or professional soldiers because of the constant tension and remoteness.

The statement said a corporal had chastised the soldier on May 11 with the words: "You are annoying me. Go away to another unit."

One sergeant was quoted in the statement as saying the soldier had repeatedly said he would "do his best."

"Therefore I did not mark him down as someone who needed to be watched," the sergeant was quoted as saying.

< Is there noone willing to stand up and say bullying is the problem, bullies deserve whatever they get anyway!? When you push someone over the edge, it's the push that's the problem, not the landing. Cause & effect, look it up. >

Some Politics May Be Etched in the Genes

Political scientists have long held that people's upbringing and experience determine their political views. A child raised on peace protests and Bush-loathing generally tracks left as an adult, unless derailed by some powerful life experience. One reared on tax protests and a hatred of Kennedys usually lists to the right.

But on the basis of a new study, a team of political scientists is arguing that people's gut-level reaction to issues like the death penalty, taxes and abortion is strongly influenced by genetic inheritance. The new research builds on a series of studies that indicate that people's general approach to social issues - more conservative or more progressive - is influenced by genes.

Environmental influences like upbringing, the study suggests, play a more central role in party affiliation as a Democrat or Republican, much as they do in affiliation with a sports team.

The report, which appears in the current issue of The American Political Science Review, the profession's premier journal, uses genetics to help answer several open questions in political science.

They include why some people defect from the party in which they were raised and why some political campaigns, like the 2004 presidential election, turn into verbal blood sport, though polls find little disparity in most Americans' views on specific issues like gun control and affirmative action.

The study is the first on genetics to appear in the journal. "I thought here's something new and different by respected political scholars that many political scientists never saw before in their lives," said Dr. Lee Sigelman, editor of the journal and a professor of political science at George Washington University.

Dr. Sigelman said that in many fields the findings "would create nothing more than a large yawn," but that "in ours, maybe people will storm the barricades."

Geneticists who study behavior and personality have known for 30 years that genes play a large role in people's instinctive emotional responses to certain issues, their social temperament.

It is not that opinions on specific issues are written into a person's DNA. Rather, genes prime people to respond cautiously or openly to the mores of a social group.

Only recently have researchers begun to examine how these predispositions, in combination with childhood and later life experiences, shape political behavior.

Dr. Lindon J. Eaves, a professor of human genetics and psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the new research did not add much to this. Dr. Eaves was not involved in the study but allowed the researchers to analyze data from a study of twins that he is leading.

Still, he said the findings were plausible, "and the real significance here is that this paper brings genetics to the attention to a whole new field and gives it a new way of thinking about social, cultural and political questions."

In the study, three political scientists - Dr. John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska, Dr. John R. Alford of Rice University and Dr. Carolyn L. Funk of Virginia Commonwealth - combed survey data from two large continuing studies including more than 8,000 sets of twins.

From an extensive battery of surveys on personality traits, religious beliefs and other psychological factors, the researchers selected 28 questions most relevant to political behavior. The questions asked people "to please indicate whether or not you agree with each topic," or are uncertain on issues like property taxes, capitalism, unions and X-rated movies. Most of the twins had a mixture of conservative and progressive views. But over all, they leaned slightly one way or the other.

The researchers then compared dizygotic or fraternal twins, who, like any biological siblings, share 50 percent of their genes, with monozygotic, or identical, twins, who share 100 percent of their genes.

Calculating how often identical twins agree on an issue and subtracting the rate at which fraternal twins agree on the same item provides a rough measure of genes' influence on that attitude. A shared family environment for twins reared together is assumed.

On school prayer, for example, the identical twins' opinions correlated at a rate of 0.66, a measure of how often they agreed. The correlation rate for fraternal twins was 0.46. This translated into a 41 percent contribution from inheritance.

As found in previous studies, attitudes about issues like school prayer, property taxes and the draft were among the most influenced by inheritance, the researchers found. Others like modern art and divorce were less so. And in the twins' overall score, derived from 28 questions, genes accounted for 53 percent of the differences.

But after correcting for the tendency of politically like-minded men and women to marry each other, the researchers also found that the twins' self-identification as Republican or Democrat was far more dependent on environmental factors like upbringing and life experience than was their social orientation, which the researchers call ideology. Inheritance accounted for 14 percent of the difference in party, the researchers found.

"We are measuring two separate things here, ideology and party affiliation," Dr. Hibbing, the senior author, said.

He added that his research team found the large difference in heritability between the two "very hard to believe," but that it held up.

The implications of this difference may be far-reaching, the authors argue. For years, political scientists tried in vain to learn how family dynamics like closeness between parents and children or the importance of politics in a household influenced political ideology. But the study suggests that an inherited social orientation may overwhelm the more subtle effects of family dynamics.

A mismatch between an inherited social orientation and a given party may also explain why some people defect from a party. Many people who are genetically conservative may be brought up as Democrats, and some who are genetically more progressive may be raised as Republicans, the researchers say.

In tracking attitudes over the years, geneticists have found that social attitudes tend to stabilize in the late teens and early 20's, when young people begin to fend for themselves.

Some "mismatched" people remain loyal to their family's political party. But circumstances can override inherited bent. The draft may look like a good idea until your number is up. The death penalty may seem barbaric until a loved one is murdered.

Other people whose social orientations are out of line with their given parties may feel a discomfort that can turn them into opponents of their former party, Dr. Alford said.

"Zell Miller would be a good example of this," Dr. Alford said, referring to the former Democratic governor and senator from Georgia who gave an impassioned speech at the Republican National Convention last year against the Democrats' nominee, John Kerry.

Support for Democrats among white men has been eroding for years in the South, Dr. Alford said, and Mr. Miller is remarkable for remaining nominally a Democrat despite his divergence from the party line on many issues.

Reached by telephone, Mr. Miller said he did not see it quite that way. He said that his views had not changed much since his days as a marine, but that the Democratic Party had moved.

"And I'm not talking about inch by inch, like a glacier," said Mr. Miller, who makes the case in a new book, "A Deficit of Decency." "I'm saying the thing got up and flew away."

The idea that certain social issues produce immediate unthinking reactions comes through in other political research as well. In several recent studies, Dr. Milton Lodge of the State University of New York at Stony Brook has shown that certain names and political concepts - "taxes" or "Clinton," for example - produce almost instantaneous positive or negative reactions.

These intensely charged political reflexes are shaped partly by inheritance, Dr. Lodge said.

It may be the clash of visceral, genetically primed social orientations that gives political debate its current malice and fire, the study suggests.

Although the two broad genetic types, more conservative and more progressive, may find some common ground on specific issues, they represent fundamental differences that go deeper than many people assume, the new research suggests.

"When people talk about the political debate becoming increasingly ugly, they often blame talk radio or the people doing the debating, but they've got it backward," Dr. Alford said. "These genetically predisposed ideologies are polarized, and that's what makes the debate so nasty.

"You see it in people's eyes when they talk politics. You can hear it their voices. After about the third response, we all start sounding like talk radio on some issues."

The researchers are not optimistic about the future of bipartisan cooperation or national unity. Because men and women tend to seek mates with a similar ideology, they say, the two gene pools are becoming, if anything, more concentrated, not less.

Scientists Studying Gulf's 'Dead Zone'

PASCAGOULA, Miss. Jun 24, 2005 ? Through mid-July, scientists from NOAA's National Coast Data Development Center and the agency's Fisheries Service at Stennis Space Center will look at data about dissolved oxygen from the "dead zone" areas in the Gulf of Mexico.

The scientists believe the zone forms in June and stretches 5,000-square-miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River toward the Texas coast.

The condition, known as hypoxia, occurs when the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water is too low to support most marine life. The scientists say the trend has increased dramatically since studies first began in the early 1980s.

Researchers believe the dead zone is caused by an influx of polluted freshwater from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers. Freshwater floats over salt water and acts as a barrier to oxygen. Meanwhile, pollution flows from the rivers into the Gulf, creating algae plumes that further choke off the oxygen.

"The science community is determined to find the causes and impacts of hypoxia to marine life in the Gulf," said Gregory W. Withee, assistant administrator for NOAA Satellite and Information Service, NCDDC's lead agency.

The scientists, aboard the NOAA vessel, Oregon II, will study the Gulf waters from Brownsville, Texas, to the mouth of the Mississippi River. The team will measure seawater temperatures, salinity, chlorophyll and dissolved oxygen levels at more than 200 locations.

During its four-week study, the scientists will continually generate new maps and provide that data on the Internet. The first map will look at the continental shelf from Brownsville to Corpus Christi, Texas and the final maps will look at the Texas-Louisiana coast.

*Electing to Leave*

So the wrong candidate has won, and you want to leave the country. Let us consider your options.

Renouncing your citizenship

Given how much the United States as a nation professes to value freedom, your freedom to opt out of the nation itself is surprisingly limited. The State Department does not record the annual number of Americans renouncing their citizenship??renunciants,? as they are officially termed?but the Internal Revenue Service publishes their names on a quarterly basis in the Federal Register. The IRS?s interest in the subject is, of course, purely financial; since 1996, the agency has tracked ex-Americans in the hopes of recouping tax revenue, which in some cases may be owed for up to ten years after a person leaves the country. In any event, the number of renunciants is small. In 2002, for example, the Register recorded only 403 departures, of which many (if not most) were merely longtime resident aliens returning home.

The most serious barrier to renouncing your citizenship is that the State Department, which oversees expatriation, is reluctant to allow citizens to go ?stateless.? Before allowing expatriation, the department will want you to have obtained citizenship or legal asylum in another country?usually a complicated and expensive process, if it can be done at all. Would-be renunciants must also prove that they do not intend to live in the United States afterward. Furthermore, you cannot renounce inside U.S. borders; the declaration must be made at a consul?s office abroad.

Those who imagine that exile will be easily won would do well to consider the travails of Kenneth Nichols O?Keefe. An ex-Marine who was discharged, according to his website, under ?other than honorable conditions,? O?Keefe has tried officially to renounce his citizenship twice without success, first in Vancouver and then in the Netherlands. His initial bid was rejected after the State Department concluded that he would return to the United States?a credible inference, as O?Keefe in fact had returned immediately. After his second attempt, O?Keefe waited seven months with no response before he tried a more sensational approach. He went back to the consulate at The Hague, retrieved his passport, walked outside, and lit it on fire. Seventeen days later, he received a letter from the State Department informing him that he was still an American, because he had not obtained the right to reside elsewhere. He had succeeded only in breaking the law, since mutilating a passport is illegal. It says so right on the passport.

Heading to Canada or Mexico

In your search for alternate citizenship, you might naturally think first of Canada and Mexico. But despite the generous terms of NAFTA, our neighbors to the north and south are, like us, far more interested in the flow of money than of persons. Canada, in particular, is no longer a paradise awaiting American dissidents: whereas in 1970 roughly 20,000 Americans became permanent residents of Canada, that number has dropped over the last decade to an average of just about 5,000. Today it takes an average of twenty-five months to be accepted as a permanent resident, and this is only the first step in what is likely to be a five-year process of becoming a citizen. At that point the gesture of expatriation may already be moot, particularly if a sympathetic political party has since resumed power.

Mexico?s citizenship program is equally complicated. Seniors should know that the country does offer a lenient program for retirees, who may essentially stay as long as they want. But you will not be able to work or to vote, and, more important, you must remain an American for at least five years.

France

Should one candidate win, those who opposed the Iraq war might hope to find refuge in France, where a very select few are allowed to ?assimilate? each year. Assimilation is reserved for persons of non-French descent who are able to prove that they are more French than American, having mastered the language as well as the philosophy of the French way of life. Each case is determined on its own merit, and decisions are made by the Ministère de l?Emploi, du Travail, et de la Cohésion Social. When your name is published in the Journal Officiel de la République Français, you are officially a citizen, and may thereafter heckle the United States with authentic Gallic zeal.

The coalition of the willing

Should the other candidate win, war supporters might naturally look to join the coalition of the willing. But you may find a willing and developing nation as difficult to join as an unwilling and developed one. It takes at least five years to become a citizen of Pakistan, for instance, unless one marries into a family, and each applicant for residency in Pakistan is judged on a case-by-case basis. Uzbekistan imposes a five-year wait as well, with an additional twist: the nation does not recognize dual citizenship, and so you will be required to renounce your U.S. citizenship first. Given Uzbekistan?s standard of living (low), unemployment (high), and human-rights record (poor), this would be something of a leap of faith.

The Caribbean

A more pleasant solution might be found in the Caribbean. Take, for example, the twin-island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis, which Frommer?s guide praises for its ?average year-round temperature of 79°F (26°C), low humidity, white-sand beaches, and unspoiled natural beauty.? Citizenship in this paradise can be purchased outright. Prices start at around $125,000, which includes a $25,000 application fee and a minimum purchase of $100,000 in bonds. Processing time, which includes checks for criminal records and HIV, can take up to three months, but with luck you could be renouncing by Inauguration Day. The island of Dominica likewise offers a program of ?economic citizenship,? though it should be noted that Frommer?s describes the beaches as ?not worth the effort to get there.?

Speed is of the essence, however, because your choice of tropical paradises is fast dwindling: similar passport-vending programs in Belize and Grenada have been shut down since 2001 under pressure from the State Department, which does not approve. In any case, it should be noted that under the aforementioned IRS rules, you might well be forced to continue subsidizing needless invasions?or, to be evenhanded, needless afterschool programs.

Indian reservations

Our Native American reservations, which enjoy freedom from state taxation and law enforcement, might seem an ideal home for the political exile. But becoming a citizen of a reservation is difficult?one must prove that one is a descendant of a member of the original tribal base roll?and moreover would be, as a gesture of political disaffection, largely symbolic. Reservations remain subject to federal law; furthermore, citizens of a reservation hold dual citizenships, and as such are expected to vote in U.S. elections and to live with the results.

The high seas

You might consider moving yourself offshore. At a price of $1.3 million you can purchase an apartment on The World, a residential cruise ship that moves continuously, stopping at ports from Venice to Zanzibar to Palm Beach. Again, however, your expatriation would be only partial: The World flies the flag of the Bahamas, but its homeowners, who hail from all over Europe, Asia, and the United States, retain citizenship in their home nations.

To obtain a similar result more cheaply, you can simply register your own boat under a flag of convenience and float it outside the United States? 230-mile zone of economic control. There, on your Liberian tanker, you will essentially be an extension of that African nation, subject only to its laws, and may imagine yourself free of oppressive government.

Micronations

The boldest approach is to start a nation of your own. Sadly, these days it is essentially impossible to buy an uninhabited island and declare it a sovereign nation: virtually every rock above the waterline is now under the jurisdiction of one principality or another. But efforts have been made to build nations on man-made structures or on reefs lying just below the waterline. Among the more successful of these is the famous Principality of Sealand, which was founded in 1967 on an abandoned military platform off the coast of Britain. The following year a British judge ruled that the principality lay outside the nation?s territorial waters. New citizenships in Sealand, however, are not being granted or sold at present.

A less fortunate attempt was made in 1972, when Michael Oliver, a Nevada businessman, built an island on a reef 260 miles southwest of Tonga. Hiring a dredger, he piled up sand and mud until he had enough landmass to declare independence for his ?Republic of Minerva.? Unfortunately, the Republic of Minerva was soon invaded by a Tongan force, whose number is said to have included a work detail of prisoners, a brass band, and Tonga?s 350-pound king himself. The reef was later officially annexed by the kingdom.

More recently, John J. Prisco III, of the Philippines, has declared himself the prince of the Principality of New Pacific, and announced that he has discovered a suitable atoll in the international waters of the Central Pacific. As of publication, the principality has yet to begin the first phase of construction, but it is already accepting applications for citizenship.

Imaginary nations

Perhaps the most elegant solution is to join a country that exists only in one?s own?or someone else?s?imagination. Many such virtual nations can be found on the Internet, and citizenships in them are easy to acquire. This, in fact, was the route most recently attempted by Kenneth Nichols O?Keefe, the unfortunate ex-Marine. In February 2003,

O?Keefe went to Baghdad to serve as a human shield, traveling with a passport issued to him by the ?World Service Authority,? an outfit based in Washington, D.C., that has dubbed more than 1.2 million people ?world citizens.? While laying over in Turkey, however, he was detained; Turkey, as it turns out, does not recognize the World Service Authority. O?Keefe was forced to apply for a replacement U.S. passport from the State Department, which rather graciously complied.

Upon his arrival in Baghdad, O?Keefe promptly set the replacement passport on fire. But he remains, to his dismay, an American.

Some Politics May Be Etched in the Genes

Political scientists have long held that people's upbringing and experience determine their political views. A child raised on peace protests and Bush-loathing generally tracks left as an adult, unless derailed by some powerful life experience. One reared on tax protests and a hatred of Kennedys usually lists to the right.

But on the basis of a new study, a team of political scientists is arguing that people's gut-level reaction to issues like the death penalty, taxes and abortion is strongly influenced by genetic inheritance. The new research builds on a series of studies that indicate that people's general approach to social issues - more conservative or more progressive - is influenced by genes.

Environmental influences like upbringing, the study suggests, play a more central role in party affiliation as a Democrat or Republican, much as they do in affiliation with a sports team.

The report, which appears in the current issue of The American Political Science Review, the profession's premier journal, uses genetics to help answer several open questions in political science.

They include why some people defect from the party in which they were raised and why some political campaigns, like the 2004 presidential election, turn into verbal blood sport, though polls find little disparity in most Americans' views on specific issues like gun control and affirmative action.

The study is the first on genetics to appear in the journal. "I thought here's something new and different by respected political scholars that many political scientists never saw before in their lives," said Dr. Lee Sigelman, editor of the journal and a professor of political science at George Washington University.

Dr. Sigelman said that in many fields the findings "would create nothing more than a large yawn," but that "in ours, maybe people will storm the barricades."

Geneticists who study behavior and personality have known for 30 years that genes play a large role in people's instinctive emotional responses to certain issues, their social temperament.

It is not that opinions on specific issues are written into a person's DNA. Rather, genes prime people to respond cautiously or openly to the mores of a social group.

Only recently have researchers begun to examine how these predispositions, in combination with childhood and later life experiences, shape political behavior.

Dr. Lindon J. Eaves, a professor of human genetics and psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the new research did not add much to this. Dr. Eaves was not involved in the study but allowed the researchers to analyze data from a study of twins that he is leading.

Still, he said the findings were plausible, "and the real significance here is that this paper brings genetics to the attention to a whole new field and gives it a new way of thinking about social, cultural and political questions."

In the study, three political scientists - Dr. John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska, Dr. John R. Alford of Rice University and Dr. Carolyn L. Funk of Virginia Commonwealth - combed survey data from two large continuing studies including more than 8,000 sets of twins.

From an extensive battery of surveys on personality traits, religious beliefs and other psychological factors, the researchers selected 28 questions most relevant to political behavior. The questions asked people "to please indicate whether or not you agree with each topic," or are uncertain on issues like property taxes, capitalism, unions and X-rated movies. Most of the twins had a mixture of conservative and progressive views. But over all, they leaned slightly one way or the other.

The researchers then compared dizygotic or fraternal twins, who, like any biological siblings, share 50 percent of their genes, with monozygotic, or identical, twins, who share 100 percent of their genes.

Calculating how often identical twins agree on an issue and subtracting the rate at which fraternal twins agree on the same item provides a rough measure of genes' influence on that attitude. A shared family environment for twins reared together is assumed.

On school prayer, for example, the identical twins' opinions correlated at a rate of 0.66, a measure of how often they agreed. The correlation rate for fraternal twins was 0.46. This translated into a 41 percent contribution from inheritance.

As found in previous studies, attitudes about issues like school prayer, property taxes and the draft were among the most influenced by inheritance, the researchers found. Others like modern art and divorce were less so. And in the twins' overall score, derived from 28 questions, genes accounted for 53 percent of the differences.

But after correcting for the tendency of politically like-minded men and women to marry each other, the researchers also found that the twins' self-identification as Republican or Democrat was far more dependent on environmental factors like upbringing and life experience than was their social orientation, which the researchers call ideology. Inheritance accounted for 14 percent of the difference in party, the researchers found.

"We are measuring two separate things here, ideology and party affiliation," Dr. Hibbing, the senior author, said.

He added that his research team found the large difference in heritability between the two "very hard to believe," but that it held up.

The implications of this difference may be far-reaching, the authors argue. For years, political scientists tried in vain to learn how family dynamics like closeness between parents and children or the importance of politics in a household influenced political ideology. But the study suggests that an inherited social orientation may overwhelm the more subtle effects of family dynamics.

A mismatch between an inherited social orientation and a given party may also explain why some people defect from a party. Many people who are genetically conservative may be brought up as Democrats, and some who are genetically more progressive may be raised as Republicans, the researchers say.

In tracking attitudes over the years, geneticists have found that social attitudes tend to stabilize in the late teens and early 20's, when young people begin to fend for themselves.

Some "mismatched" people remain loyal to their family's political party. But circumstances can override inherited bent. The draft may look like a good idea until your number is up. The death penalty may seem barbaric until a loved one is murdered.

Other people whose social orientations are out of line with their given parties may feel a discomfort that can turn them into opponents of their former party, Dr. Alford said.

"Zell Miller would be a good example of this," Dr. Alford said, referring to the former Democratic governor and senator from Georgia who gave an impassioned speech at the Republican National Convention last year against the Democrats' nominee, John Kerry.

Support for Democrats among white men has been eroding for years in the South, Dr. Alford said, and Mr. Miller is remarkable for remaining nominally a Democrat despite his divergence from the party line on many issues.

Reached by telephone, Mr. Miller said he did not see it quite that way. He said that his views had not changed much since his days as a marine, but that the Democratic Party had moved.

"And I'm not talking about inch by inch, like a glacier," said Mr. Miller, who makes the case in a new book, "A Deficit of Decency." "I'm saying the thing got up and flew away."

The idea that certain social issues produce immediate unthinking reactions comes through in other political research as well. In several recent studies, Dr. Milton Lodge of the State University of New York at Stony Brook has shown that certain names and political concepts - "taxes" or "Clinton," for example - produce almost instantaneous positive or negative reactions.

These intensely charged political reflexes are shaped partly by inheritance, Dr. Lodge said.

It may be the clash of visceral, genetically primed social orientations that gives political debate its current malice and fire, the study suggests.

Although the two broad genetic types, more conservative and more progressive, may find some common ground on specific issues, they represent fundamental differences that go deeper than many people assume, the new research suggests.

"When people talk about the political debate becoming increasingly ugly, they often blame talk radio or the people doing the debating, but they've got it backward," Dr. Alford said. "These genetically predisposed ideologies are polarized, and that's what makes the debate so nasty.

"You see it in people's eyes when they talk politics. You can hear it their voices. After about the third response, we all start sounding like talk radio on some issues."

The researchers are not optimistic about the future of bipartisan cooperation or national unity. Because men and women tend to seek mates with a similar ideology, they say, the two gene pools are becoming, if anything, more concentrated, not less.

Driving Big Brother

The government plans to release new rules for controversial car black boxes this summer, according to a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Contrary to expectations, the rules don't require automakers to install the boxes in every car, but they do require the boxes to record a minimum of 29 pieces of data, more than most black boxes currently record.

In a nod to privacy concerns, the rules require automakers to disclose in the owner's manual when a car has a black box and why it's there. But privacy advocates say they're disappointed that the rules don't limit the amount of data the boxes can record or address concerns about how recorded data can be collected or used.

In New York this year, a defense attorney challenged the admissibility of information gleaned after police removed data from a defendant's black box before obtaining a search warrant.

A judge ruled, however, that the seizure was legal and that the driver had no reasonable expectation of privacy since he'd been on a public highway and exposed his driving behavior to anyone watching.

"Essentially what (the NHTSA) has done is encourage more data collection without a corresponding increase or concern for privacy protection," said Chris Hoofnagle, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center's West Coast office.

Car black boxes, also called electronic data recorders, or EDRs, have a computer chip that records data about a car and driver's actions before and during a crash. EDRs generally begin recording when the device detects an abrupt deceleration in the car, signaling that a crash may occur. Currently, the data captured varies among EDRs. Some record only vehicle speed and data about air bag deployment. Others also log whether the driver braked before impact, used turn signals or was buckled in.

EDRs were designed to help automakers build safer vehicles. But manufacturers have used the data to defend against product liability claims. Police investigators have also increasingly been using the data to charge drivers with speeding violations and serious crimes. And insurance companies want the data to dispute unwarranted claims and tie policy rates to driving behavior.

Privacy advocates and consumer groups oppose allowing data collected for safety purposes to be used for other purposes, especially when most drivers are unaware that their cars have boxes that can be used as evidence against them. They also question whether the data is accurate, since few tests have been conducted to establish its reliability.

EDRs use proprietary technology, so car owners can't see the software code to determine if the devices are doing more than manufacturers say they're doing. Automobile owners can't access the recorded data without a $2,500 software kit.

Black boxes have been in cars since 1974, when General Motors installed them to help deploy air bags. In 1994, GM began installing more sophisticated EDRs to record data. Now 15 percent of light cars and trucks have EDRs, including 65 percent to 90 percent of 2004-model light vehicles, according to the NHTSA. But not all automakers disclose the presence of EDRs in their cars.

Researchers and automakers say EDRs are invaluable for improving the safety of cars, roadways, bridges and guardrails.

About 6 million crashes occur annually in the United States, according to the NHTSA. The leading cause of death in children and young adults, they cost the country an estimated $230.6 billion a year.

"From a research point of view, there is absolutely no question in my mind that (the data) will lead to safer air bags and cars," said Clay Gabler, professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech's Center for Injury Biomechanics, which began examining car black box data in 2001. Gabler said the data has already helped engineers rethink how highway guardrails are constructed to protect people who crash into them.

But Eric Skrum, spokesman for the National Motorists Association, questions the safety justifications for EDRs.

"If they really were doing this for safety research, they wouldn't have to have it in every vehicle or in vehicles where the owner isn't even aware it's in the car," Skrum said.

EDR proponents also say the devices help victims' families seek restitution against reckless drivers, especially when there are no witnesses to a crash.

When a 77-year-old woman in Texas drove her Cadillac through a post office's plate-glass window and killed an occupant inside, she claimed the car accelerated on its own. Her car's black box belied her story and helped the victim's family win a wrongful-death suit. Similarly, when two cars collided in Montreal in 2001, killing one driver, the surviving driver blamed the deceased driver for speeding. But data from the survivor's black box revealed that he'd been the one driving 80 mph in a 50-mph zone.

Despite the value of EDRs, few tests have been conducted to establish the accuracy of the data. In at least one case, an EDR seems to have recorded faulty information.

Maine Gov. John Baldacci was involved in an accident in his state-owned SUV when the car, driven by a state police detective, hit an ice patch while passing a slower car and caused both vehicles to spin off the highway.

Although the EDR indicated the SUV was traveling 71 mph before the air bag deployed, the detective driving the car claimed the speedometer showed 55 mph, a number that was closer to the 55-65 mph that police investigators estimated based on physical evidence at the scene.

The EDR also indicated that the governor wasn't buckled in, although Baldacci and his driver disputed this. Medical personnel who treated the governor also said his injuries, which included a broken rib, were consistent with someone wearing a seat belt.

Limited tests of EDRs have indicated that if power to an EDR is lost during a crash the device may not record all data or could falsely record seat belt data. The vehicle's speed can also be recorded inaccurately if the car is airborne during an accident, rolls over or loses a wheel from the drive axle. And in at least one case, researchers discovered a programming bug that caused an EDR to falsely record brake information in a particular car model. EDR download reports now include a warning about the glitch for crash inspectors.

Robert Breitenbach -- director of the transportation safety training center at Virginia Commonwealth University, which conducted a study of EDRs -- said investigators should never rely solely on EDR data.

"You really need to do a thorough investigation of the physical evidence and just use it as another tool," Breitenbach said.

He added that people who argue against using EDR data for privacy reasons forget that a lot of information they record can already be gleaned from a car without the driver's permission.

"I can look at your headlights and taillights if you're involved in a crash," he said. "Those lights will tell me whether your lights were on or off in a crash. If they were off and it was dark, that could lead you to a conviction of reckless driving."

Regardless, last July, California became the first state to address questions about access to EDR data when it passed a law that prohibits anyone from accessing EDR data without a car owner's permission or a subpoena. The law contains a loophole, however. If an insurance company assumes ownership of a car wrecked in an accident, the company gets possession of the EDR data as well.

About a dozen other states have introduced similar legislation regulating how EDR data is used or requiring car makers to disclose the presence of EDRs.

Rae Tyson, spokesman for the NHTSA, said his agency recognized the privacy concerns over EDRs, but said the agency didn't have the authority to rule on them and that Congress or the courts would have to resolve them.

Opting Out in the Debate on Evolution

When the Kansas State Board of Education decided to hold hearings this spring on what the state's schoolchildren should be taught about evolution, Dr. Kenneth R. Miller was invited to testify. Lots of people thought he was a good choice to speak for science.

Dr. Miller is a professor of biology at Brown University, a co-author of widely used high school and college biology texts, an ardent advocate of the teaching of evolution - and a person of faith. In another of his books, "Finding Darwin's God," he not only outlines the scientific failings of creationism and its doctrinal cousin, "intelligent design," but also tells how he reconciles his faith in God with his faith in science.

But Dr. Miller declined to testify. And he was not alone. Mainstream scientists, even those who have long urged researchers to speak with a louder voice in public debates, stayed away from Kansas.

In general, they offered two reasons for the decision: that the outcome of the hearings was a foregone conclusion, and that participating in them would only strengthen the idea in some minds that there was a serious debate in science about the power of the theory of evolution.

"We on the science side of things strong-armed the Kansas hearings because we realized this was not a scientific exchange, it was a political show trial," said Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, which promotes the teaching of evolution. "We are never going to solve it by throwing science at it."

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, a large organization of researchers and teachers, and the publisher of the journal Science, also declined to participate.

"If the evidence for modern Darwinian theory is so overwhelming, they should have called the bluff on the other side and come and made their arguments," said John West, a political scientist and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a research organization that supports work challenging the theory of evolution. "They should have put up or shut up."

Dr. West said that although most of the institute's resources support research on intelligent design, the theory that life on earth is far too complex to have evolved without the guidance of an intelligent agent, the organization does not advocate that students be required to learn it. Nor does it object to the teaching of evolution, he said.

"The majority of biologists obviously support Darwinian evolution in its full-fledged view," he said. "The question is, are there legitimate, peer-reviewed criticisms? If there are, students should know about them."

In theory, this position - "teach the controversy" - is one any scientist should support. But mainstream scientists say alternatives to evolution have repeatedly failed the tests of science, and the criticisms have been answered again and again. For scientists, there is no controversy.

Dr. Miller said he decided to stay away from the hearings because he was convinced that the panel would recommend a "teach the controversy" approach regardless of the testimony presented. "The people running things were people whose minds were already made up," Dr. Miller said in an interview in May, before the panel's recommendations were announced.

He said he had anticipated that "they would say, 'This is such a fascinating controversy that what we need to do is let the children of Kansas have the same benefit' " of learning about it.

When the hearings ended, the subcommittee running them concluded just that. The hearings had produced "credible scientific testimony that indeed there are significant debates about the evidence for key aspects of chemical and biological theory," the panel said, and it is "important and appropriate for students to know about these scientific debates."

Still, scientists who stayed away say they did the right thing.

Declining to testify "can be made to look as if you do not want to defend science in public, or you are too afraid to face the intelligent design people in public," Dr. Miller said.

But, he said, taking part in this kind of argument only contributes to the idea that there is something worth arguing about, and "I wasn't interested in playing a role in that."

Dr. Alan I. Leshner, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said that when the association was invited to present its views at the hearings he raised the issue with his board. Although some members said "go straighten them out," he recalled, the consensus was that the association should stay away.

"We were invited to debate one supposed theory against another," Dr. Leshner said, when in fact there was no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution.

Dr. Scott said that until recently she believed scientists should seize opportunities to debate the opponents of evolution. "I was one of the holdouts, saying yes, appear with these guys, yes, tell them what is wrong with their ideas, go to their conferences, treat them like scholars," she said.

Like other scientists, she said that if someone identified a flaw in evolutionary theory that could not be dealt with, science would have to modify the theory or even scrap it. But the criticisms raised have fallen in the face of scientific scrutiny, she and others say, yet opponents of evolution raise them again and again.

So a few years ago, she said, "even I threw in the towel."

"Our willingness to engage their ideas," she went on, "was not being reciprocated."

Dr. West, of the Discovery Institute, argues that scientists have shown the same unwillingness to engage when they talk about evolution. In Kansas, he said, "there was a sort of arrogance - claiming that 'since we are the majority scientific view we don't owe an explanation to anyone, especially these public officials we think are stupid.'

"Well, they can have that attitude, but whether they like it or not we have public officials who are charged with making decisions," he said. "They seem to think the A.A.A.S. should just appoint a panel and replace every elected school board."

Despite their decision to stay away from Kansas, scientists continue to make the case for evolution.

For example, a number of scientists, including Dr. Miller, plan to testify in a case in Dover, Pa., where teachers were directed to instruct that intelligent design was a scientific alternative to evolution. "In a court of law, you have standards, rules and laws you are interpreting," Dr. Scott said, in explaining why scientists are taking part in this case. "In Kansas, it was a free-for-all."

Earlier this month, the National Academy of Sciences started a Web site (nationalacademies.org/evolution) with information about evolution and assurances that no credible scientific challenge to evolutionary theory has been raised. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (aaas.org, click on "evolution resources") and other organizations maintain similar sites.

Dr. Leshner wrote an opinion article about the evolution issue that ran in The Kansas City Star before the hearings were held this spring. The essay dealt with one of the powerful issues underlying the debate about evolution: whether science and religious faith can coexist.

It is not surprising that defenders of evolution are staying away from the hearings, he wrote, "since it's a debate that can't be won."

"After all, interpretations of Genesis are a matter of faith, not facts," he wrote. But faith and facts "should not be pitted against each other; the theory of evolution does not, in fact, conflict with the religious views of most Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu followers."

But some scientists have made the point that it is difficult to make the case for evolution at a time when many Americans view it as an assault by the secular elite on the values of God-fearing people.

"The creation and evolution issue is not just about science," Dr. Scott said. "The science is necessary but not sufficient. It is ultimately and predominantly a political and cultural kind of issue rather than a scientific issue."

Now that the panel that conducted the hearings has recommended that challenges to evolution be taught in Kansas, "we may appear to have at least temporarily lost the battle," Dr. Leshner said. "But we have not fallen prey to allowing them to redefine science, and that's the core issue."

He added: "Evolution is not the only issue at stake. The very definition of science is at stake."

Grocer fights 105 costly traffic fines

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese vegetable peddler has asked a Beijing court to overturn police fines totaling more than a year's pay after he made the exact same illegal turn 105 times, state media said Sunday.

Du Baoliang was captured making the illegal turn past a no-entry sign on his way from home to his vegetable stall by a hidden camera, part of a network set up to automatically record traffic violations, reports said.

Du, 40, was unaware of the violations until he went to the traffic management office and was told he owed 10,500 yuan ($1,270) -- more than the 9,422 yuan average annual per capita income for urban residents, reports said.

Du paid the fines, but then sued to get his money back and a further 3,000 yuan in compensation for lost vegetable sales while fighting the case, the Xinhua Daily Telegraph said.

He argues that traffic officials hold some responsibility for failing to notify him that he had broken the law early on.

"Of course I do want to win the case even though I was cited 105 times. If I had received any advice at an early date I would not have done it 105 times," the Beijing News quoted Du as saying.

"The traffic management office is also responsible for their mistake," Du said.

Beijing's Xicheng District People's Court agreed to hear the case, the Xinhua Daily Telegraph said.

The hidden camera system, which requires drivers to check their own records at the traffic management office or by a toll call, has become the subject of media scorn and a target of complaints from drivers.

Another repeat offender, surnamed Tian, has been fined more than 20,000 yuan for 97 speeding tickets in less than one year, but has yet to be notified, the Legal Daily said.

US expected to abandon Biometric passport plan

Rules requiring Irish citizens to carry high-tech passports when visiting the US are to be dropped because the technology behind the scheme is seen as unreliable. The US Department of Homeland Security had previously set an October 2005 deadline for the inclusion of biometric information chips in the passports of European citizens who avail themselves of the Visa Waiver programme. This programme allows people to make short-term visits to the US without a visa. The chips would have included a variety of biological information about the passport holder, such as their fingerprints and retina scans.

But according to a report in the Sunday Times, Ireland has shelved plans to include biometric chips in passports amid expectations that the US is to abandon its biometric passport requirements.

"Biometrics are just a tool, the real concern is that the information would be used for more than immigration control," said Aisling Reidy, director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, speaking to ElectricNews.net. "There is also a significant risk of false positives, that people could be wrongly identified, because the technology is not reliable."

The Sunday Times, meanwhile, quoted a spokesperson from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, who said that the US has now recognised the technical challenges involved in implementing biometric information.

Trials carried out in the UK last year, for the purposes of introducing a biometrics-based UK national identity card, showed significant levels of failure in the registration and verification of iris, fingerprint and facial recognition trials involving 10,000 British citizens.

Under a new arrangement, holders of passports that include digital photographs could continue to avail of the visa waiver programme. The latest Irish passports include a secure digital photograph, but do not include biometrical information.

The new arrangement is understood to have been devised following discussions between the US and the European Commission. European officials believe the Americans have taken on board concerns that the move would reduce the number of people traveling to the US for business and leisure purposes.

Biometric passports have been under consideration since 2002, when US legislators passed a law requiring the 27 countries in the Visa Waiver programme to start issuing high-tech passports by October 2004. The deadline was subsequently extended to October 2005.

Tennis players should be dis-gruntled?

LONDON (Reuters) - Wimbledon referee Alan Mills has had enough of noise pollution -- he wants to crack down on grunting tennis players.

Defending women's champion Maria Sharapova was recorded by a tabloid newspaper's unofficial "gruntometer" at 101.2 decibels on Center Court Tuesday.

The noise, almost as loud as a police siren, was said to have broken her previous record.

"It is something I would like to see stopped," Mills told Reuters Wednesday.

But the big noises of tennis are unrepentant.

After the Sun newspaper labeled the Russian teen-ager "Bawl-Breaker," Sharapova was asked at her first post-match press conference if she felt she was being particularly loud.

"You always ask me the same questions," she said. "I don't pay any attention to that and I never have and I never probably will."

A defiant Serena Williams, whose first-round match with compatriot Angela Haynes featured much noise from both sides, said: "I am going to carry on grunting. It's not my business to control what people think."

Mills, who retires this summer after more than two decades in charge at the tournament, said the two single biggest complaints the All England Club gets in letters from Wimbledon spectators were about players grunting and spitting.

Notices about spitting have been put up in four languages in the Wimbledon locker rooms and Mills said they were having some effects.

"I think the message is getting through," Mills added. "But the grunting has got progressively worse over the years. I would really like it curbed. I am sure coaches can play their part."

So how can the grunters be toned down at Wimbledon?

"Opponents have to complain first for the chair umpire to do something. We have to monitor the situation carefully," Mills said.

Higher Speed Limits Don't Cause More Deaths, Study Finds

A new study of changing speed limits in the United States finds no evidence that higher limits fuel more deaths.

Political scientist Robert Yowell of the Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas examined shifts in speed limit laws over the past few decades.

Highway speed limits were initially throttled in the 1970s in response to the gas shortage. In the 1980s the focus shifted to public safety. Yet in 1995, Congress returned all speed limit authority back to the states, and many states raised their top highway speeds.

While limits ranged from 75 mph to 55 and back again, no significant increase in fatalities per mile driven are evident.

In fact, from 1968 to 1991, the fatality rate per 100 million miles declined by 63.2 percent.

Yowell attributes the decrease to safer cars, increased use of seat belts, an increase in the minimum legal drinking age, and better road maintenance.

"Automobile safety features and enforcement emerge as important factors in increasing highway safety," Yowell contends in the July issue of Review of Policy Research. "Speed limits are far less important."

Research from Kansas State University earlier this year would seem to support Yowell's claim. Civil engineer Sunanda Dissanayake found four factors that were consistently most significant in contributing to fatalities in rural highway crashes:

* Driving under the influence
* Driving at higher than the posted speed limit
* Not using a seat belt
* Being ejected from the vehicle

Dissanayake also found that 75 percent of highway accidents occur in rural areas, largely because laws are more stringently enforced on urban highways.

Bootleg DVDs, CDs found in traffic stop

The Force wasn't with Charles Wade Tuesday.
State police charged the 35-year-old Monticello man after, police said, they found scores of bootleg music CDs and movies, including the latest installment in the "Star Wars" saga, "Episode III ? Revenge of the Sith," which is playing in theaters.
Police said Wade had 130 bootleg DVDs of such hits as "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," "The Longest Yard," "The Honeymooners," and "Batman Begins," which opened in theaters just a week ago.
State police in Monroe received a cellular 911 call about an erratic driver on Route 17. Troopers Joe Mitchell and Dan Smith stopped a 2000 GMC Jimmy that matched a description of the erratic car, police said. Wade was driving.
The troopers found, in addition to the movies, nearly three dozen bootleg music CDs, mostly rap and hip-hop recordings, state police said.
Wade was arrested and charged with first-degree manufacturing or sale of an unauthorized recording of a performance, first-degree failure to disclose the origin of a recording, both felonies; and failure to use a designated lane, a traffic violation, police said.
He was sent to Orange County Jail, where he was being held in lieu of $3,500 cash bail.

< first-degree failure to disclose the origin of a recording... I guess telling the cops anything they want to know trumps the first and fifth ammendments. >

Man Must Travel to Mars, Garn and Astronauts Say

Man Must Travel to Mars, Garn and Astronauts Say

Click to enlarge

Human beings have yet to walk on Mars' face, and it isn't for lack of smarts.

"It is not the technology to go to Mars or other planets or back to the moon," former Utah senator and space traveler Jake Garn said Saturday. "The problem is funding. I am convinced we could be on Mars now, be there sometime from 2005-2010, if the funding had been approved by Congress."

Garn and about a half-dozen astronauts and cosmonauts are in the middle of a five-day meeting in Salt Lake City to prepare for the Association of Space Explorers' annual Planetary Congress, to be held here in October.

Garn said the U.S. funding for food stamps last year was more than double NASA's budget.

Were that not the case, manned trips to Mars would be a reality, Garn said. His fellow space travelers agreed, convinced that the milestone is in mankind's near future.

"I think it's about time to get bold support behind President Bush's goal to go back to the moon and Mars," Austrian Franz Viehbok said. He said that once, when asked whether humans will have been to Mars by century's end, he replied, "What an embarrassment if we have not."

Russia's Alexei Leonov, who became the first person to leave a spacecraft and "walk" in space on March 18, 1965, agreed that the time is now.

"In 1987, in the (Planetary) Congress, we discussed the question of flight to Mars," Leonov said through an interpreter Saturday. "This was so long ago. There was lots of interesting reports, but it was very early for this discussion. The people weren't ripened to talk about this. Now we see a different situation. All continents are discussing the possibility of flights to Mars."

Leonov credits the Mars exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which he said "have gotten us another step closer.

"This woke up everyone on Earth about the possibility of Mars exploration. Somehow Mars has become closer, closer for the leaders of countries who help finance this possibility. You can see now that this is a realistic discussion."

Leonov said space experts now have experience with long space flights and the technology for long-term life support in space.

Space travel does more than fulfill mankind's curiosity about space, the group agreed, making moot the question, "Why would we waste so much money in space?"

"We have never wasted a dime in space. There are no stores in space. All the money has been spent on Earth," Garn said. The result, he said, benefits business, creates jobs and spawns technology that can be used for health, travel and a host of other everyday benefits.

When the Planetary Congress convenes in October, they plan to pool their knowledge through a series of technical sessions and seminars. They also want to spread the excitement to Utahns with a community outreach day that they hope will see an astronaut or cosmonaut visit every school district in the state.

Educating kids about space flight will instill "a wonder of the greatness of engineering and science," said American Bo Bobko, who has been on three space flights and commanded the flight that took Garn to space. "They will look at technology in a different way."

The eye-opening effect of space travel alone is a tremendous benefit to mankind, he said.

"We'll get a lot of questions if we go to Mars. And our society does not progress without questions."

Governments across the country should be looking, right now, for the team of young people who will one day visit Mars, Leonov said.

"This needs to be special people. . . . They need to be aware of all corners of our Earth," he said.

It is this international awareness that the Association of Space Explorers' astronauts and cosmonauts touted not only as an important trait for would-be space travelers but also an invaluable benefit of space travel itself.

"The relationships, the friendships that are built up, we don't have problems with each other," Garn said of his international friends in the field of space. "Politicians need to start understanding that. We're all human beings traveling on Spaceship Earth together. . . . How much we admire each other, that spreads" to the general public, fostering international understanding and peace.

From space, there are no borders. The space travelers on Saturday said they wish more people on Earth could see it that way.

They said a climate exists on Earth where cooperative, multinational space exploration can be a reality.

"Thirty years ago, the situation in the world, there was a lot of tension. Then there appeared some very smart people. . . . They were the first to understand the catastrophe that was happening in the world. We need to show everybody in the world that we have a bigger task at hand," Leonov said through his translator.

Then, in English: "Together, we are better."

< Several things to point out here. First of all, of all the places you could get the money from, things that help people's basic human rights and dignity, like food, are most certainly not the place. The cause is of course completely worth-while and there are many places we can get the money from that won't flat out hurt people. Finally, This cuts at the heart of how capitalism is wrong. It puts money on a pedastal above and beyond anything which is actually good for humanity like food or curiosity. Of course this also means business is made more important than individuals, using two imaginary concepts against one real one. An individual's life is important, money and business are constructs designed to help that, and now they hurt it instead. Also Big Business, which is by far the farthest from helping people, has the most power. >

Steve Case's New Act: You've Got Revolution!

WITHOUT a trace of self-consciousness, Stephen M. Case calls his new company Revolution. "It struck me that Revolution might be a good name," he said, "because it does sort of summarize the approach we're trying to bring to bear, which is not an incremental, tweaking kind of thing, but really to take some risks and swing for the fences and to have a transformative impact on society, as well as to build significant businesses in the process."

Stephen M. Case, co-founder of AOL, wants to use his new venture, Revolution, to improve health care. He sees the current health care system as reminiscent of the early Internet: confusing and intimidating to consumers.

Mr. Case, 46, started Revolution, a private holding company, in April, two years after quitting as chairman of AOL Time Warner (now simply Time Warner). With at least $500 million of his own money committed to this venture, he is determined to shake up a lucrative sliver of the health care industry by buying and building companies that help people take care of themselves.

Outlining Revolution's business model, Mr. Case uses the rhetoric of what was once called the new economy, circa 1999: Revolution will have "transformative impacts," "transformative disruptive impacts" and "accelerating impacts." It will also "accelerate tipping points."

Once you translate all that into plain English, one thing becomes clear: Mr. Case wants to create another AOL. Revolution's Web site puts it this way: "We don't just aim for a return - we seek to make history."

The idea for Revolution came to him slowly, Mr. Case said in an interview. During his first few months of unemployment in 2003, he considered devoting himself to philanthropy. But that was not really his calling, he realized, though he was happy to make charitable contributions through the Case Foundation.

"To me," he said, "the biggest take-away of the AOL experience is that if, instead of founding AOL 20 years ago with Jim Kimsey and Marc Seriff, I had instead set up a foundation or a kind of society-for-a-more-interactive world, and was kind of a think tank on the notion of interactivity, we'd still be having annual fund-raising dinners and probably wouldn't have much of an impact."

That's how Mr. Case talks, in streams of long-winded, complex sentences. He rushed ahead: "Instead, I put a team together that actually built a business that happened to be a significant, valuable business that at one point was worth over $100 billion, but also happened to have as much of an impact as any company in really ushering in a more, you know, electronic frontier."

Finally, he got to the point: "So, I said, maybe, you know, I should keep doing that. Instead of taking some other path, maybe I should go back in the garage, if you will, and focus my time and attention on the thing I think I do well and that I love, which is building businesses. But not just building any business: if it's not a business that really touches consumers and really improves their lives, and if it's not a business that has the potential for significant potential - meaning multibillion-dollar potential - I don't want to do it."

So far, in its brief history, Revolution has bought majority stakes in three companies that touch or are intended to touch consumers: Wisdom Media, whose cable and radio networks are devoted to, in the words of the company's Web site, "personal growth, spirituality and purposeful living, health and wellness and sustainability of the earth"; Miraval, a spa and resort north of Tucson that Mr. Case believes could one day be the " Nike of wellness" (the brand, not the goddess of victory); and Exclusive Resorts, a sort of time-share business that calls itself a "luxury residence club."

Any day now, Revolution will announce six health care deals. Mr. Case won't reveal the specifics, but here are some of the areas he is interested in:

? Online reviews and rankings of doctors and hospitals.

? Information and breaking news about medical ailments and treatments.

? Software and tools that let people manage their medical records online.

? Health "concierges" or "coaches" who help patients navigate the medical system.

? Walk-in medical clinics where, say, in 15 minutes and for $39, you can discover whether your child has an ear infection.

At first glance, health care may not have a lot in common with the Internet. From Mr. Case's point of view, however, health care in 2005 reminds him of the early years of the Internet: chaotic and disorganized and, most of all, intimidating to the average consumer.

"I realized when I was reflecting both on what I had done and what I was doing that there were more similarities than differences," he said, drawing a parallel between AOL and Revolution. "I like building businesses that empower consumers by giving them more choice and control and convenience and have the power to have a transformative, disruptive impact on large, traditional, often-slow-moving industries."

In other words, as he proved at AOL, Mr. Case is good at simplifying and demystifying things that improve people's lives. It's hard to remember now, but America Online was once a great company. Inspired by "The Third Wave," Alvin Toffler's futuristic book from 1980, and fueled by the belief that he was building something that would absolutely change the world, Mr. Case buried the competition - powerful opponents like CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie and The Source - by promoting America Online as a simple online service for the masses.

By 1999, AOL, which Mr. Case had built in just 15 years, was worth twice as much as Berkshire Hathaway, and more than McDonald's, Philip Morris and PepsiCo combined. Mr. Case himself, then 40 and worth $1.5 billion, was an American icon.

Of course, that was before the disastrous AOL Time Warner deal of 2001, the one in which $200 billion of shareholder value evaporated. Angry employees and shareholders blamed Mr. Case personally for the mess at AOL Time Warner. But, so what?

Undeterred by his setback, he stood up, brushed the dust off his pleated khakis and eventually started again with Revolution. "I don't spend a lot of time reflecting on the woulda-shoulda-coulda stuff," he said. "My view is that AOL was a wonderful journey and we built a significant company and strategically it was logical to merge with Time Warner. And it hasn't worked out, you know, the way any of us would have hoped. But my time and attention and energy is, I think, best focused on the future and on building new businesses that can have the kind of impact in these new markets, like health care, that AOL had in the media and communications sector."

In the revised history of Steve Case, chairman and C.E.O. of Revolution, the AOL Time Warner deal was a blip. Now, using the first 10 years of AOL as his backdrop, Mr. Case presents himself as a frontiersman and a missionary committed to improving the lot of consumers. "I've always been, because of the nature of AOL in its early days, an insurgent at the gates trying to have disruptive impact," he said, carefully distancing himself from the bureaucrats at Time Warner.

So, was the AOL Time Warner deal a mistake? There was a long pause. "I'm not going to comment on that," Mr. Case said.

I took another tack: If Time Warner made a decision to sell AOL, would he consider buying it?

"I have no comment on anything related to Time Warner," he said firmly. "I'm focused on the future, not the past. Now, I'm going to have to run here, because I've got someone waiting."

< Wow, this one's tough. On one hand big business is stupid and hurts everyone, on the other hand health-care is so fampantly out of control that a health Wal-Mart may be the only way some people will be able to get taken care of. >l

Teen Charged With Vomiting On Teacher

OLATHE, Kan. -- A Kansas high school student who vomited on his Spanish teacher has been charged with battery against a school official.

The misdemeanor charge was filed Monday against the Olathe Northwest High School student. The 17-year-old was charged as a juvenile and his name was not released.

Prosecutors said the vomiting was intentional. The teacher, David Young, called the act "outrageous."

The student's father said his son told him he did not mean to throw up on the teacher, but had been made uncontrollably ill by the stress of final exams.

The father said the district expelled his son and recommended he enroll in an alternative school in the fall.

Grand Theft Auto Meets Robocop

Grand Theft Auto Meets Robocop

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By Cyrus Farivar | Also by this reporter

02:00 AM Jun. 17, 2005 PT

An automatic license-plate reader that can scan 500 license plates an hour looking for stolen vehicles underwent its first field tests by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department last week.

Using character-recognition technology developed for the Italian Post Office to read postal addresses, four robot eyes in the course of one night queried more than 12,000 license plates, recovered seven stolen cars and resulted in three arrests.
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Two of the arrests and one of the recovered stolen autos came about when a police cruiser with a plate scanner pulled up outside an L.A. parole office. A pair of parolees rolled up in a vehicle that was immediately -- and automatically -- identified as stolen.

"Criminals are not real smart," said Cmdr. Sid Heal in a report. "Their P.O. (parole officer) came out and saw all the commotion and told us the parolees were his. After relaying the fact they were in a stolen car, the P.O. -- on the spot -- said, 'They're violated.'"

The Mobile Plate Hunter 900 is a new product from Remington-Elsag Law Enforcement Systems, a partnership between U.S. gun manufacturer Remington and Italian postal-technology company Elsag.

Looking like a foot-long, aluminum teardrop bolted to a patrol car's light bar, the Mobile Plate Hunter contains two infrared cameras that can read between 500 and 800 plates an hour, the manufacturer said.

The system works at "patrol car speeds," optimally at about 35 mph. It can scan the plates of vehicles almost anywhere on the road.

"We read them coming at us. We read them going by us. We read them parked," said Mark Windover, president of Remington-Elsag.

The Mobile Plate Hunter is currently being evaluated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and several other law enforcement agencies nationwide, but Remington-Elsag declined to say which ones.

In 2004, there were 253,041 stolen vehicles in California and 67,722 stolen vehicles in Los Angeles County, according to the California Highway Patrol.

In the L.A. test, scanned plates were checked against a list of vehicles reported stolen in the California Stolen Vehicle System.

The Plate Hunter is based on optical character-recognition technology originally developed in Italy for sorting letters and parcels.

"Five to six years ago (Elsag) had really perfected postal sorting and realized that if they could read a postcard handwritten at 90 miles per hour, they could read license plates," said Windover.

A similar system has been used by the Italian carabinieri for the last three years, and is mounted on 3,000 Italian law enforcement vehicles.

Remington-Elsag has also developed a fixed system. Mounted on the side of the road, the reader can scan vehicles moving at up to 75 mph, with recognition rate in tests exceeding 95 percent, the company claimed.

Windover said false positives are "virtually nonexistent."

"In California, where we have the most experience, false positives are rare, occurring less than 1 in 100,000 reads," he said. "Importantly, 100 percent of all alarms from any read are verified by the operating law enforcement officer prior to a traffic stop or other action."

The L.A. County Sheriff Department's Heal said that the license plate reader improved spotting stolen cars by "an order of magnitude."

"This makes us more efficient than we've been in the past," he said. "We would never check 12,000 license plates the conventional way."

Currently, officers have to read plates and call them in to a communications center to verify if the car is stolen. Because it is so cumbersome, officers tend only to check vehicles they are already suspicious of.

By contrast, the Mobile Plate Hunter requires no attention from officers in the patrol car.

"It doesn't require the driver to do anything," Heal said.

< Of course it won't be long before they're on every corner, part of the video-system. and of course when there's more than one, they'll get linked together, and will be able to follow you wherever you may go. and of course because it's pubically available information, there's no "invasion of privacy" right? >

Blue Law Makes Webmasters See Red

SAN DIEGO -- An adult industry trade association plans to head to court this week to fight new federal enforcement efforts that could catch thousands of online porn sites with their pants down.

Under penalty of federal prison terms, new interpretations of existing regulations would require sites that feature photographs or videos of sexual activity to keep records confirming that performers are of legal age.

In an industry that's faced little oversight, the change in policy will spawn mountains of paperwork. But that's not all: Sites may be forced to remove some or all of their racy content because the original records belong to someone else or never existed. Those who can't comply -- including many free sites that rely on stolen content -- will have to shut down or risk a visit from federal investigators.

"People are pretty freaked out," said porn webmaster Jim McAnally, who estimates that more than half of hard-core websites, including some of his, will have to dump significant numbers of photos and videos. "This will affect people from top to bottom."

The new regulations are scheduled to go into effect June 23. The Free Speech Coalition, which represents the adult industry, announced Tuesday that it will file a request for an injunction later this week to prevent the regulation's enforcement. But the details are hush-hush.

"Exactly what day it is we're not at liberty to say, nor what district we will file in or who the plaintiffs are," said spokesman Tom Hymes on Tuesday at the Cybernet Expo, an annual meeting of porn webmasters in San Diego.

Age records in the porn industry are nothing new: Since federal law 18 U.S.C. 2257 went into effect 15 years ago, everyone who produces porn has been required to prove that performers are over 18. (According to adult industry attorney J.D. Obenberger, the regulations were inspired by congressional outrage at a hard-core video performance by 15-year-old Traci Lords.)

Now, the law is getting stricter. The new enforcement regulations would require webmasters that don't produce material to keep age records for every image that shows or implies sexual activity on their sites. (Sites that simply feature straightforward nudity are exempt.)

"If the original content producer can't be found or went out of business or is unwilling to release information, that causes this content to become criminal overnight," said adult industry attorney Lawrence Walters. "These webmasters are facing felony charges if they continue distributing images they've been distributing for the last five to 10 years."

The maximum penalty is 10 years in prison per violation.

According to the Department of Justice, it's time to update the federal law with the internet in mind. The new regulations "merely" improve record-keeping rules, federal lawyers wrote in a defense (.pdf) of their proposal.

The adult industry isn't so sanguine. The government "is passing these burdensome regulations to try to cause people to shut down or move out of the United States," Walters said.

Another adult industry attorney, Eric Bernstein, said he's advising his clients to get their records in order and prepare for the worst. "Everybody needs to assume that they're going to get a knock on the door," he said. "They can't say, 'Well, there are a million adult sites and only 20 investigators, what are the chances I'll get visited?' If they do that, they do so at a very significant risk."

The countless porn sites that steal content from others will be in jeopardy as well, potentially to a much greater extent than they face on the copyright-violation front, Bernstein said. He predicts that the number of free porn sites, which often rely on swiped photos and videos, will drop.

What else will happen if the new enforcement guidelines survive legal challenges? Attorneys and industry insiders expect a major shakeout. "There are going to be a lot of people who go out of business, and a lot of people who fill the gap and go into business," Bernstein said. "You'll see fewer and fewer people buying content from others unless they literally get the records. You'll see new production and new content coming out of this."

In addition, he said, "vintage" porn -- produced before July 3, 1995 -- may become more popular because the new enforcement regulations don't require age records for older content.

The new regulations raise other issues, too. Some adult performers are afraid their personal information -- including their real names and addresses -- will land in the hands of countless webmasters who now need to keep age records for every image on their sites. On the other hand, performers should expect this sort of thing, said William Margold, an industry activist and former porn actor. "When your privates become public, you lose all your privacy," he said.

For now, porn site owners are hoping for a legal victory. That may seem to be a long shot considering the U.S. government's hard-right turn in recent years, but the industry is crossing its fingers.

In the end, said Margold, American citizens will be the ultimate arbiters of their rights to access porn: "Until the public admits it watches this and allows itself to be counted, it deserves to have the stuff taken away."

House Votes to Limit Patriot Act

In a slap at President Bush, lawmakers voted Wednesday to block the Justice Department and the FBI from using the Patriot Act to peek at library records and bookstore sales slips.

Despite a veto threat from President Bush, lawmakers voted 238-187 to block the part of the antiterrorism law that allows the government to investigate the reading habits of terror suspects.

The vote reversed a narrow loss last year by lawmakers complaining about threats to privacy rights. They narrowed the proposal this year to permit the government to continue to seek out records of internet use at libraries.

The vote came as the House debated a $57.5 billion bill covering the departments of Commerce, Justice and State. The Senate has yet to act on the measure, and GOP leaders often drop provisions offensive to Bush during final negotiations.

"This is a tremendous victory that restores important constitutional rights to the American people," said Rep. Bernard Sanders (I-Vermont), the sponsor of the measure. He said the vote would help "rein in an administration intent on chipping away at the very civil liberties that define us as a nation."

Congress is preparing to extend the Patriot Act, which was passed quickly in the emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Then, Congress included a sunset provision under which 15 of the law's provisions are to expire at the end of this year.

Supporters of rolling back the library and bookstore provision said that the law gives the FBI too much leeway to go on fishing expeditions on people's reading habits and that innocent people could get tagged as potential terrorists based on what they check out from a library.

"If the government suspects someone is looking up how to make atom bombs, go to a court and get a search warrant," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-New York).

Supporters of the Patriot Act countered that the rules on reading records are a potentially useful tool in finding terrorists and argued that the House was voting to make libraries safe havens for them.

"If there are terrorists in libraries studying how to fly planes, how to put together biological weapons, how to put together chemical weapons, nuclear weapons ... we have to have an avenue through the federal court system so that we can stop the attack before it occurs," said Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Florida).

Last year, a similar provision was derailed by a 210-210 tie after several Republicans were pressured to switch votes.

In the meantime, a number of libraries have begun disposing of patrons' records quickly so they won't be available if sought under the law.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told Congress in April that the government has never used the provision to obtain library, bookstore, medical or gun-sale records.

But when asked whether the administration would agree to exclude library and medical records from the law, Gonzales demurred. "It should not be held against us that we have exercised restraint," he said.

Authorities have gained access to records through voluntary cooperation from librarians, Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller said.

Lawmaker Revs Up Fair-Use Crusade

Rep. Rick Boucher is a rarity in Congress when it comes to digital media. He's taken the side of consumers -- not Hollywood and the music industry -- in the sundry controversies surrounding digital entertainment.

When it comes to file sharing, Boucher says he'll fight attempts to stifle it.

He thinks tech companies shouldn't be held liable for products that can be used for unlawful purposes, like pirating media.

He says the balance of copyright law has tipped too far toward the entertainment companies' interests, hampering consumers' rights to use digital media.

And he wants government sponsorship of universal broadband.

While other lawmakers have long-standing relationships with the entertainment industry, whose chief concern is piracy, Boucher sees his pro-technology policies as a way to further education, communication and job creation.

Boucher, a Democrat representing the rural 9th District of Virginia, has introduced a bill to restore some of the fair-use rights taken away by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Boucher was also one of only six candidates supported by IPac, a new, nonpartisan political action committee concerned with intellectual property. IPac favors candidates working for a better balance in copyright law between the rights of creators and those of consumers.

Boucher recently stopped by the Wired News office for a chat about broadband, copyright and the continued clashes between the entertainment and technology industries over peer-to-peer networks.

Wired News: The MGM v. Grokster case now before the Supreme Court has put file sharing in the spotlight. What are your thoughts on peer-to-peer file sharing?

Rick Boucher: First of all I am going to fight, tooth and nail, any effort to hobble file sharing. I mean, if the attack that the industry makes is against file sharing per se, I'm going to fight that, because there are very legitimate uses of file sharing.

Skype is a file-sharing application and that's used by millions of people. (Universities) are using file sharing as a way to disseminate research papers and other legitimate items. Getting away from centralized servers and going to peer-to-peer communications all across the map means the communications are faster and much more user-friendly. I will predict that within a number of years, most of the uses of file sharing are going to be legitimate.

WN: Fair use is all well and good, but isn't the entertainment industry saying, "You can use this stuff, but we are not obligated to present it to you in a form that is easy to copy?"

Boucher: But ... what they are able to do ... is prevent you from using it altogether. All that a creator of digital content has to do is guard it with a very simple technical measure and ... then you may not circumvent that for any purpose. And so the creator of content can take everything to a pay-per-use (format) and that means nothing is free on the library shelf anymore.

This is why librarians so strongly support my bill, they see that coming. History teaches us that when industry has a particular power, if they can make money using that power, that's what they'll do. And in this instance, the content industry has the power to prevent any fair use of their material and I have no doubt that's exactly where they'll go.

WN: Do you feel any sympathy for the entertainment industry? If an individual gets hold of just one copy of a work, it can be distributed widely. Take Revenge of the Sith -- thousands of people had it even before it debuted in the theater. This is an unprecedented kind of access to artistic works.

Boucher: First of all, while the arrival of the internet creates a potential hazard and peril for content creators, it also invests in them broadening abilities. It becomes another distribution medium that they can use and they need to do that. I have been saying (that) to the recording industry every time they have come crying to us (saying), "Oh piracy is costing us this, that and the other and we need to do something about it."

I would spend my time as a committee member when I was addressing them saying, "OK, why don't you do something about it yourself? Why don't you put your entire inventory up on the web and make it available in a user-friendly format for a reasonable price per track and get away from clinging to this old, outdated business model of selling the whole CD?"

Do I have sympathy for them? Not when they're clinging to a relic and when that's getting in the way of making good current business decisions.... They can make a fortune if they do that.

The other point to make is, they are asking us to do something that not only is it unwise from a policy standpoint for us to do, and that is inhibit file sharing, which has legitimate uses. But even if we thought it was wise from a policy standpoint, they are asking us to do something that we really can't.

We don't have -- within the reach of American law -- control over these networks. I mean, if we control one who happens to be a resident of the U.S., or people who generate the software ... it won't be a matter of weeks until a network like that would arise in some island nation where we don't even have commercial relations, much less extradition treaties.

And so we can't at the end of the day do anything that's really meaningful to help. We can make ridiculous laws but we are not going to be able to stop the problem....

The other thing that makes sense is for the industry actually to consider some kind of compulsory license.... If I were the recording industry I'd think seriously about doing that. People are going to be engaged in file sharing anyway: They may as well get some compensation for it. It's not a perfect solution to their problem, but then there isn't one at this point.

WN: What do you think of the state of copyright law right now? There are alternatives like Larry Lessig's Creative Commons option, which gives authors the option of choosing a more flexible copyright license. Do you think there will be a makeover of copyright, or is that off the table?

Boucher: I happen to think Larry is right. In the main I agree with what he is saying. And if you go back and you look at the history of how innovation occurs in creativity, it is an incremental process of people building on other people's innovations. Disney, which is probably the most aggressive of all the studios in terms of copyright protection, owes its major intellectual properties to the works of others.

And because of the falling of (such works) into the public domain, Disney was able to take it and essentially use it as the foundation for Mickey Mouse, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.... Mickey Mouse was an iteration of somebody named Steamboat Willie that came before. (Disney) didn't create it. Somebody else did.

I think Larry Lessig has performed a very useful function of pointing out how creativity will continue to advance our community and it depends on building on the success of others, and you can't do that if people lock up this property.

WN: How do you rank the current administration in terms of handling broadband policy? There is a lot of criticism about where we are right now.

Boucher: Well-justified criticism. We rank 13th in the world in terms of percent of the population that uses broadband. This is the country that invented the internet. We still create most of the popular internet applications in the U.S. And to be 13th in terms of broadband deployment is not a noble status.

And I fault this administration for not having been more aggressive in finding ways to stimulate broadband deployment more deeply into the population.... Most other countries in the developed world have made it a national priority to deploy broadband and they are putting public resources behind the effort. I think we should.

WN: How will you accomplish this?

Boucher: Two things in particular. One of those is to redefine universal service so as to make broadband an eligible subject for universal service support. Where at the moment it just makes telephone service affordable and that's something that it needs to continue to do ... we should add broadband deployment (to that mission).

(Secondly), I think the time has come for us to set national rules that will clearly get local governments to get involved in providing broadband services.... In some communities in my district, the populations are so small that we don't even have cable systems. And telephone companies haven't seen it as economically advantageous to offer DSL and so there is no broadband at all.

And I think where that happens, the local government has a legitimate role to play in providing the services, exactly analogous to what happened 100 years ago with municipal electric utilities. Where the investor-owned utilities didn't want to provide the service, the local government stepped in, and today, 100 years later, we still have municipal electric utilities. And this is a service every bit as essential in this century as electricity was in the early days.

WN: In the last session of Congress, the technology industry really came together and successfully blocked the Induce Act legislation, which would have held tech companies responsible for creating devices that could be used to pirate digital content. How unusual is that? Is the tech industry finally building more of a presence in Washington? Typically, the entertainment industry has been considered much more savvy and connected.

Boucher: Until about 2000, many of the technology companies had a real hands-off approach toward lawmaking. I think they perhaps somewhat naively thought that at the end of the day, Congress or the president would do what was right. And they either had total faith in the system or they had no faith in it.

I think some probably had one view and some the other. But whichever view they had they weren't dealing with us. They just were not in Washington defending their interests. And then they got mashed with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The tech industry was not involved in that.

I was making the same arguments in 1998 that I'm making today, which is that we shouldn't eliminate fair use for digital media, and we shouldn't say that developing technology that has substantial legitimate uses is wrong just because somebody can misuse it. You know, you don't punish a hammer manufacturer because somebody uses a hammer to break into a house....

Make no mistake about it, this is a war between content and technology, and you don't win a war over the long term just playing defense. And so it's time to go on offense and the way to go on offense is to enact HR 1201 (the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, HR 1201) and that's why you see such a large collection of technology companies supporting this bill.

WN: What's your perspective on the broadcast flag? (The broadcast flag, now moribund, would have protected content from "unauthorized" redistribution, and may yet be resurrected in a different form).

Boucher: The circuit court for D.C. has invalidated broadcast flag rulemaking, saying that the FCC lacked statutory authority (to create the broadcast flag). Not surprisingly, the MPAA has now come to us and said, "We want you to legislate."

I don't think we are going to do that. I have been waiting for a long time for Hollywood to come to us and say, "Here's something we want" because there is something I want. And it's called the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act.

It would do two things. It would codify the Betamax decision of the Supreme Court that says that if you manufacture technology that is capable of substantial non-infringing use -- then if it is put to an infringement purpose somewhere down the road -- then the manufacturer has no responsibility for the copyright infringement....

The other thing that it does is say that if you circumvent a technical protection measure in order to perform a legitimate act such as exercising a fair-use right, you are not guilty of a crime.

Now, I have great support for this measure from the technology industry, which has proudly endorsed it. The public-use community, universities, consumer organizations, EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and others have endorsed it.

But the motion picture industry strongly opposes it. So here is an opportunity to have a conversation with them and say, "All right, we understand the importance of the broadcast flag," and you know my normal position is to oppose any kind of technology mandate.

This one is a little bit different in that the only way that I think we are going to have high-value television programming delivered over the air in digital format is if the motion picture industry has some level of confidence that it's not going to get recorded and uploaded to the internet.

We need to make sure if we are going to do the broadcast flag that fair-use rights are preserved. So, for example, people when they record a television program off the internet should be able to move it around inside the home environment from digital device to digital device.