The Master of His Domain....

OTTAWA (Reuters) - A Canadian who masturbated at a window in his house won his appeal against a conviction for indecency on Thursday after Canada's top court ruled there was no evidence of intent to commit an indecent act, and a home was not a public place.

The Supreme Court of Canada noted that British Columbian, Daryl Clark, had agreed it was an indecent act to have masturbated "in an illuminated room near an uncovered window visible to neighbors."

But Justice Morris Fish, writing the 9-0 decision, said such acts have to be done in public places to be a crime -- and a home was not a public place. The law also says indecent acts are only crimes in every location if the person intends to give offense.

Clark was convicted of an indecent act in a public place and given a four-month sentence after a prosecution that followed complaints from his neighbor, named in court documents only as Mrs. S.

The woman said she spotted Clark while she was watching television with her two young daughters in their family room.

She alerted her husband, and the couple observed Clark from their darkened bedroom for 10 or 15 minutes -- also using binoculars and a telescope -- before summoning the police, who said the upper part of Clark's body was visible from just below the navel.

"In my respectful view, the trial judge ... erred in concluding that the appellant's living room had been converted by him into a public place simply because he could be seen through his living room window and, though he did not know this, was being watched by Mr. and Mrs. S. from the privacy of their own bedroom 90 to 150 feet away," Fish wrote.

American Nazi Party adopts Salem road

Marion County has allowed a Portland-area skinhead group to adopt a rural Salem road as part of a volunteer litter clean-up program.

The signs proclaiming that Sunnyview Road NE between Cordon Road and 82nd Avenue is sponsored by the American Nazi Party NSM were installed Monday.

County officials say they were legally advised that excluding the organization would violate a constitutional right to free speech. Their choices, they said, were: allow the group to join the program, remove all of the signs from the program or refuse the group and risk a lawsuit.

Commissioner Sam Brentano said he wanted to turn the organization down anyway and face whatever lawsuits came.


He was outnumbered by commissioners Patti Milne and Janet Carlson. The commissioners did not vote on the issue, but gave staff direction by consensus.

Milne said she considers it strictly a constitutional issue that goes to the core of being American.

Carlson said she didn't want to end a good program for many volunteers as a way to keep this group from joining.

Several local residents, some of them who live on Sunnyview Road, said they are upset that the county would allow the signs or attach its own name to that of a hate group.

"To me, it just screams hate," said Jacque Bryant of Salem. "It screams doesn't belong here."

Bryant heard about the sign from her grandmother and had a strong emotional reaction to it when she saw it for herself. She hopes enough community outrage will force the county to remove the sign.

Salem resident Mike Navarro, whose mother lives near the area, also was stunned by the sign.

Navarro said that the group has a right to its own opinions but that it's poor judgment for a county to put itself in the position of appearing to endorse a hate group. There should be some level of sensitivity in these kinds of decisions, Navarro said.

"To me, that's kind of cowardly. 'We don't want to get sued,' " Navarro said. "You're probably offending the majority of the people in your county just to pacify the needs of a very select group of people who thrive on hating."

Marion County Assistant Legal Counsel Scott Norris regards the signs as a form of speech.

The cases Norris studied were out of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. One in particular involved a long-running dispute between the Ku Klux Klan and the state of Missouri involving a similar adopt-a-highway program.

The appeals court ruled that Missouri could not keep the Ku Klux Klan out of the program based on who they are and what they believe. Missouri appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided Jan. 10 not to consider the appeal.

In an apparent coincidence, Marion County Public Works Director Jim Sears signed the approval for the American Nazi Party's application that same day.

A Web site listed on the group's application is for the Tualatin Valley Skins. The group's Web site calls it a sister organization of the National Socialist Movement.

The application lists the contact person as C. Marchand. He declined to comment, referring all questions to the group's media spokesman, who could not be reached for comment.

Although the application lists C. Marchand, the county sent a letter accepting the Adopt-A-Road application to a Dylan Marchand.

It was not clear whether the two Marchands were the same or separate people. Both the letter and the application reference the same Keizer post-office box.

Mark Potok, director of the intelligence project that monitors hate groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said hate-group involvement in adopt-a-road programs has been going on since the early 1990s.

It was started by the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke with a sign in Harrison, Ark., as an attempt to construct an image of a "kinder, gentler Klan," Potok said.

The courts have ruled both ways, he said.

To bar a group, Potok said, officials need to be able to show that they're applying the rule in a viewpoint-neutral way, that the program isn't a public forum and that barring a hate group is reasonable.

It is wise, he said, to create such guidelines before starting an adopt-a-road program.

"The unfortunate effect of these signs is that you become a participant in a hate group's propaganda campaign," Potok said.

Brentano said too much sacrifice already has been made to this kind of organization, referring to Nazi Germany in World War II.

He doesn't want to be cornered into publicizing it.

"They have a right to free speech. I don't have a problem with it," Brentano said. "But don't ask me to promote it."

Milne called the decision gut-wrenching and her most difficult as a county commissioner.

"We can't choose who we're going to give access to or to what extent," Milne said. "If we do that, we're going down a slippery slope."

Carlson said other jurisdictions in the United States already have tested the legal issues.

"It's important to take a stand on things like that," Carlson said. "It's also important to follow the law."

The few-mile stretch of road that the American Nazi Party is sponsoring is just east of Salem, in a rural area. Houses are separated by acres, and some spreads have spent generations in the possession of one family.

One neighbor complained to the county soon after the signs went up. Many others from the community have complained since then.

Although one sign was vandalized sometime Monday night, neighbors at the other end of the road and in between hadn't noticed the signs.

Deborah McDowell said she was not concerned about the sponsorship as long as the group does actually clean the road.

"We wouldn't view it any different than having criminals on the roadside doing cleanup," McDowell said.

Mary Fordyce, who described herself as a Mexican-American, said the sign and the adoption made her uncomfortable.

"That's not my family's -- or our neighbors' for that matter -- frame of mind," Fordyce said. "It's very disturbing to me."

Boys arrested for stick figure drawings

OCALA, Florida (AP) -- Two boys were arrested for making pencil-and-crayon stick figure drawings depicting a 10-year-old classmate being stabbed and hung, police said. The children, charged with a felony, were taken from school in handcuffs.

The 9- and 10-year-old boys were arrested Monday and charged with making a written threat to kill or harm another person. They were also suspended from school.

One drawing showed the two boys standing on either side of the other boy and "holding knives pointed through" his body, according to a police report. The figures were identified by written names or initials.

Another drawing showed a stick figure hanging, tears falling from his eyes, with two other stick figures standing below him. Other pieces of scrap paper listed misspelled profanities and the initials of the boy who was allegedly threatened.

The boys' parents said they thought the children should be punished by the school and families, not the legal system.

State bill could cripple P2P

A bill introduced in California's Legislature last week has raised the possibility of jail time for developers of file-swapping software who don't stop trades of copyrighted movies and songs online.

The proposal, introduced by Los Angeles Sen. Kevin Murray, takes direct aim at companies that distribute software such as Kazaa, eDonkey or Morpheus. If passed and signed into law, it could expose file-swapping software developers to fines of up to $2,500 per charge, or a year in jail, if they don't take "reasonable care" in preventing the use of their software to swap copyrighted music or movies--or child pornography.

Peer-to-peer software companies and their allies immediately criticized the bill as a danger to technological innovation, and as potentially unconstitutional.

"State Sen. Murray did not choose to seek out the facts before introducing misguided legislation that effectively would make criminals out of many companies that bring jobs and economic growth to California," Mike Weiss, CEO of Morpheus parent StreamCast Networks, said in a statement. "This bill is an attack on innovation itself and tax-paying California-based businesses like StreamCast depend on that freedom to innovate."

The bill comes as much of the technology world is waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the legal status of file-swapping technology.

Federal courts have twice ruled that peer-to-peer software companies are not legally responsible for the illegal actions of people using their products. Hollywood studios and record companies appealed those decisions to the nation's top court, which is expected to rule on the issue this summer.

In the meantime, entertainment companies' push for federal legislation on file-swapping issue has been put temporarily on the back burner. A controversial bill that would have put more legal responsibility on the peer-to-peer developers failed to pass at the end of last year's congressional session.

California has taken a lead among states in putting pressure on the file-swapping world. Attorney General Bill Lockyer was a key figure last year in pushing for more state-level legal scrutiny of the companies' actions, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has sought to ban illegal downloading on any state computers, including those owned by the state university systems.

Murray himself sponsored a bill last year--later signed by the governor--that requires file sharers who send a copyrighted work to at least 10 people to provide a valid e-mail address or risk jail time. He has also authored bills on spyware and spam.

The senator said his bill was intended only to encourage companies to take advantage of existing technology for filtering networks, not to impose requirements impossible to meet.

"To the extent that they agree that they can filter, we think it's reasonable to require filters for peer to peer activity," Murray said. "We're only asking for reasonable controls. We're not asking for people to create new technology or recreate the wheel."

Several companies, including Audible Magic and Shawn Fanning's Snocap , have demonstrated technology that could be used to block trades of copyrighted music, although no such tool has yet been publicly shown for Hollywood movies. Some file-swapping companies say these tools would be impractical to use on a widespread basis.

Murray has worked closely with the entertainment companies on this type of issue, but has also been a staunch critic of record labels' accounting practices and the way they treat their artists. He said he did not work with the MPAA or other groups in drafting the new bill.

How copyright could be killing culture

As Americans commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy today, no television channel will be broadcasting the documentary series Eyes on the Prize. Produced in the 1980s and widely considered the most important encapsulation of the American civil-rights movement on video, the documentary series can no longer be broadcast or sold anywhere.

Why?

The makers of the series no longer have permission for the archival footage they previously used of such key events as the historic protest marches or the confrontations with Southern police. Given Eyes on the Prize's tight budget, typical of any documentary, its filmmakers could barely afford the minimum five-year rights for use of the clips. That permission has long since expired, and the $250,000 to $500,000 needed to clear the numerous copyrights involved is proving too expensive.

This is particularly dire now, because VHS copies of the series used in countless school curriculums are deteriorating beyond rehabilitation. With no new copies allowed to go on sale, "the whole thing, for all practical purposes, no longer exists," says Jon Else, a California-based filmmaker who helped produce and shoot the series and who also teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California, Berkeley.

Securing copyright clearances isn't just a problem for the makers of Eyes on the Prize. It's a constant, often insurmountable hurdle for documentary filmmakers and even for writers wanting to reproduce, say, copyrighted pictures or song lyrics in their work.

But it's particularly difficult for any documentary-makers relying on old news footage, snippets of Hollywood movies or popular music -- the very essence of contemporary culture -- to tell their stories. Each minute of copyrighted film can cost thousands of dollars. Each still photo, which might appear in a documentary for mere seconds, can run into the hundreds of dollars. And costs have been rising steeply, as film archives, stock photo houses and music publishers realize they are sitting on a treasure trove, Else and other filmmakers say.

"The owners of the libraries, which are now increasingly under corporate consolidation, see this as a ready source of income," Else says. "It has turned our history into a commodity. They might as well be selling underwear or gasoline."

And there's another catch: tighter legal restrictions.

Copyright legislation has grown stricter in recent years to protect media owners from digital piracy.

Broadcasters and film distributors, in turn, have become more stringent in making sure they are legally covered, too. As illustrated in a recent study by the American University in Washington, which interviewed dozens of documentary-makers on the myriad problems of getting copyright clearances, broadcasters and film distributors insist that a documentary have what is known as errors and omissions insurance, to protect against copyright infringement. Of course to get it, all copyrights in the documentary have to be cleared anyway.

It's enough of a legal rigmarole to make underfunded filmmakers simply avoid using archival clips altogether or to remove footage that they shot themselves that might include someone singing a popular hit or even Happy Birthday to You (a copyrighted song).

It also means that films like Eyes on the Prize, made in a less restrictive era of copyright rules, can simply fade away if the task of renewing copyrights becomes too difficult or costly.

"What seems on the face of it a very arcane, bureaucratic piece of copyright law, and the arcane part of insurance practice, suddenly results in the disappearance of the only video history of the American civil-rights movement . . . slowly and without anyone noticing it," says Else.

Ironically, the growing popularity of documentary films these days is only making things worse.

The explosion of digital channels, the DVD market and even the use of documentary footage on the Internet have created a new level of success for documentaries, explains veteran National Film Board producer Gerry Flahive. But "suddenly for people who have companies that own stock-footage collections, the material is more valuable. So it has become more expensive."

Before the digital and documentary explosion, a clip of President Nixon speaking, for instance, usually could be licensed "in perpetuity," meaning that the film could continue to use the footage indefinitely. Now the incentive is for copyright owners to grant only limited permission. "Increasingly, it's harder and harder to get 'in perpetuity,' because rights-holders realize that somebody will have to come back in five years or 10 years and pay more money," Flahive says.

Some are calling this the new "clearance culture," in which access to copyrights affects the creation of new art as much as, if not more than, actual artistic and journalistic decisions. It also means that access to copyrighted footage is only open to those filmmakers with the deepest pockets (or many lawyers on their side).

"You can afford it if the broadcasters pay you a significant amount of money to do the film. If they don't, and they aren't, the issue facing all documentary filmmakers in Canada . . . is that it is getting harder and harder to get a reasonable budget together," Ottawa-based filmmaker Michael Ostroff says. "It's a serious, serious problem."

The American University study (at http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/rock/index.htm) is a fascinating, if dispiriting, look at the tricks documentary-makers have to pull to get around copyright restrictions, from turning off all TVs and radios when filming a subject indoors to replacing a clip of people watching the World Series with a shot of professional basketball on the TV set instead because that's what the filmmaker had rights for.

But at a time when documentaries are probing the U.S. war on terrorism or globalization, for instance, in ways that are more in-depth than typical mainstream news media, the question of whether copyright restrictions are creating a blinkered view of the world is a serious one.

"Why do you think the History Channel is what it is? Why do you think it's all World War II documentaries? It's because it's public-domain footage. So the history we're seeing is being skewed towards what's fallen into public domain," says filmmaker Robert Stone in the American University study.

Flahive at the NFB said that this pushes filmmakers to tell stories in more innovative ways. Animation, for example, is becoming a new vehicle for documentary-makers.

Else of Eyes on the Prize isn't as giving. "Would you rather see the footage of the actual attack on the [civil-rights] marchers at the bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965, or would you rather see a re-enactment of that? There is no creative substitute for the real thing," he says.

"In a culture that increasingly has trouble separating the real thing from something that's made up, I think that having the real photographic record of real events on television screens in our living rooms is priceless. It's invaluable. And it's becoming increasingly difficult," he says, adding that he doesn't feel comfortable with the idea that creative decisions should have to be based purely on the basis of copyright rules.

There are ways around the rules, though. The legal defence in the United States of "fair use" means that footage can be used if the documentary is specifically critiquing that footage. So, a documentary-maker could use a clip of Gene Kelly splashing around in Singing in the Rain, if the documentary is commenting on Hollywood musicals and that one in particular, Else says. A documentary on rain, however, couldn't use the clip. But having to use "fair use" as a legal defence means that the documentary-maker is coming under legal pressure. Many simply can't afford the legal fees to get out of that kind of situation.

Documentary-makers typically say they want copyright controls maintained, as the American University study found. They just want the costs and restrictions on copyrighted material to be made more rational. A music publisher should allow more concessions for a documentary-maker using a song for a film airing on public television, as opposed to someone using a song for a Nike commercial.

But with the possibility that copyright rules could easily tighten further, there's growing concern about the impact this could have on documentaries, as it has on Eyes on the Prize. As the award-winning filmmaker Katy Chevigny says in the American University report: "The only film you can make for cheap and not have to worry about rights clearance is about your grandma, yourself or your dog."

Report: World can end poverty by 2025

Updated: 11:05 p.m. ET Jan. 17, 2005
UNITED NATIONS - Global poverty can be cut in half by 2015 and eliminated by 2025 if the world?s richest countries including the United States, Japan and Germany more than double aid to the poorest countries, hundreds of development experts concluded in a report Monday.

At stake is life or death for tens of millions of impoverished people, it said.

The report spells out the investments needed to meet the U.N. goals adopted by world leaders at the Millennium Summit in 2000 to tackle poverty, hunger and disease and promote education and development, mainly in African and Asian countries.

?What we?re proposing is a strategy of investment to help empower the lives of very poor people that lack the tools and sometimes even the basic means to stay alive, much less be productive members of a fast-paced world economy,? said Professor Jeffrey Sachs, head of the U.N. anti-poverty effort and lead author of the report.

The investments range from schools, clinics, safe water and sanitation to fertilizer, roads, electricity and transport to get goods to market.

?Tremendous imbalance?
?The system is not working right now ? let?s be clear,? he said. ?There?s a tremendous imbalance of focus on the issues of war and peace, and less on the dying and suffering of the poor who have no voice.?

According to the report, 1 billion people live on a dollar a day or less, many of them going to bed hungry every night; life expectancy in the poorest countries is half that of people in high-income countries. And every month, for example, 150,000 African children die of malaria because they don?t have bed nets to keep out mosquitoes, a tragedy Sachs called the ?silent tsunami.?

In 1970, the world?s nations agreed to provide 0.7 percent of their gross national income for development assistance, and that figure was reaffirmed by the U.N. conference on financing development in Monterey, Mexico, in 2002.

So far, only five countries have met or surpassed the target: Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Six others have made commitments to reach the target by 2015: Belgium, Finland, France, Ireland, Spain and Britain.

Nations including U.S. far from target
But 11 of the 22 richest donors according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are far from the target and have not set timetables to reach it ? including the United States, Japan and Germany.

If all 22 rich countries come up with the money, more than 500 million people can escape poverty and tens of millions can avoid certain death in the next decade, the report said.

If the countries kept up the 0.7 percent level of aid-giving for another decade, it said, ?by 2025 extreme poverty can be substantially eliminated? for the remaining 500 million people surviving on a dollar a day.

?Our generation for the first time in human history really could see to it that extreme poverty on the planet is ended, not just by half but ended by the year 2025,? Sachs said.

?We are not asking for one new promise from any country in the world, only the follow-through on what has already been committed,? he stressed.

But trying to get the United States and the other rich nations to double or triple the amount of development assistance they give is expected to be an uphill struggle ? and the target of a major lobbying effort.

Far less than world?s military spending
The resources to meet the U.N. goals are definitely within the means of the world?s 22 richest nations, Sachs said.

?The required doubling of annual official development assistance to $135 billion in 2006, rising to $195 billion by 2015, pales beside the wealth of high income countries ? and the world?s military budget of $900 billion a year,? the report said.

The United States now spends only about 0.15 percent of its GDP on development aid, well below the 0.7 percent figure, Sachs said.

President Bush?s administration has pledged $22.3 billion in aid for 2006, or 0.18 percent of gross national income. If it were to meet the report?s target for 2006, Washington would have to contribute more than double ? $54.5 billion.

Unless rich countries come up with the money, the report warned that the ?already dwindling faith in international commitments to reduce poverty will likely vanish.?

Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, who led the project?s task force on trade, said ?it is in the self-interest of rich countries to support poor countries? development? for their own security and for economic growth because new markets will open up.

Sachs presented Annan with the report, a 13-volume work totaling 3,000 pages. Annan called it an important contribution to the debate on meeting the U.N. goals, which he said ?are eminently achievable.? Annan said he will use the report to help prepare his own recommendations in March for world leaders who will attend a follow-up summit in September that will also tackle U.N. reform.

Playing with video game laws

Gov. Rod Blagojevich wants it to be illegal for businesses to sell violent or sexually explicit video games to anyone under 18. It's an idea that probably has appeal for many people who have seen the graphic nature of some of these games.

The governor's proposal, though, is certain to run into fatal problems of legality and practicality. He would be wise to direct his energies to other efforts.

According to the governor's office, his proposal would make Illinois the first state to prohibit the sale or distribution of such games to minors. The bill also would require retailers to place parental-advisory warnings on video games, comparable to those used on music CDs. A violation would be a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in prison or a $5,000 fine.

Let's take the legal issue first.

Fact is, a few other jurisdictions have attempted variants of such restrictions, and they have rightly been rebuffed by the courts.

A few years ago, Indianapolis officials sought to regulate access by minors to certain games in video arcades that were deemed "harmful."

But children have 1st Amendment rights. "People are unlikely to become well-functioning, independent-minded adults and responsible citizens if they are raised in an intellectual bubble," Judge Richard Posner wrote in 2001 for the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, in a challenge to the Indianapolis ordinance.

No doubt, Posner wrote, Indianapolis would concede that point if the material in question were "The Divine Comedy," or the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, or "The Odyssey," "with its graphic descriptions of Odysseus's grinding out the eye of Polyphemus with a heated, sharpened stick, killing the suitors, and hanging the treacherous maidservants ..."

Surely many parents will draw a distinction between the content of "The Odyssey" and that of "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," one of the gorier video games to hit the market recently. But that's a distinction for parents to make, not for government to make.

Then there is the question of practicality. Blagojevich said he was prodded to propose this law by his outrage over the release of "JFK Reloaded," a game that re-creates the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

"JFK Reloaded" is truly repugnant--and available by download over the Internet. The Blagojevich law targeting retailers would have no impact on its availability to children or adults. Indeed, virtually all video games can be purchased online, shielding them from this proposed law.

There are two far less onerous ways to deal with the problem of minors' access to violent video games--self-regulation by retailers and more attentive parental control.

The Entertainment Software Association, an industry group, says that 90 percent of all video games are purchased by adults and that the average age of buyers is 36. The industry already rates video games, and in a most straightforward manner: "E" as suitable for everyone; "T" for teens; "M" for mature and "A" for adults only.

Before he left office, former Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan worked out an agreement with large retailers in Illinois to establish policies to prevent the sale of violent or sexually explicit videos to minors. Self-regulation appears to be working, at least at the larger video sale and rental shops.

Finally, there's the question of whether Blagojevich is manufacturing an issue for himself. As a congressman, he voted in 1999 against a proposal to prohibit the sale or rental of violent or sexually explicit video games, movies, books and recordings to minors.

Who's clamoring for such a law now? Harvey Grossman, director of the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, notes that for 40 years the state has had a prohibition on the sale of "harmful materials" to minors. Yet none of the state's attorneys in Illinois' 102 counties has made much, if any, use of the statute in recent memory.

Parents form the most effective line of defense to protect their kids from graphic video games. Some parents say they are not aware of the video-game industry's rating system. They should be. The industry needs to bring more attention to its video-game rating system and press the smaller retailers to abide by it. But vigilance by parents is the surest and most practical way to protect children in this case.

Shows start and end just off the half-hour

Inveterate time-shifters ? including owners of digital video recorders such as TiVo, as well as some VCR owners ? are getting ticked off by the minutes lost when broadcasters shift their schedules so some shows start and end just slightly off the hour or half-hour.

More hit series are running a little longer to hook viewers and rake in ad dollars, but the practice causes trouble for users of TiVo and other recorders. Shows running a minute or more over their scheduled time period for the week ending Nov. 21:

Users of Internet message boards lately have gone so far as to accuse ABC of conspiracy for extending episodes of hits Lost and Desperate Housewives by a minute or two.

Not only can such padding cause recorders to clip off the start or end of an episode, it also can create overlaps ("conflicts," in TiVo parlance) with later shows on other channels so viewers can't record them. And, in doing so, it keeps viewers from skipping through those lucrative commercials.

But the motive is nothing so sinister. The networks are simply capitalizing on hit shows by moving a minute or two of ad or promo time from a lower-rated show into a more popular one that precedes it. They can then charge more for the ad and reach more viewers with a plug for another show.

The padding also discourages viewers from clicking their remotes, under the theory they'll be less likely to switch channels if they've already missed the start of a competing program.

ABC is unapologetic. "It's not my job to make it easy for people to leave our network," says ABC scheduling chief Jeff Bader. "Our whole goal is to get people to stay with us from 8 to 11."

The network is hardly alone. Among shows that recently have been padded on major networks are CBS hits Everybody Loves Raymond and CSI, Fox's The O.C. and NBC's ER, which has started early ? 9:59 ET/PT ? since last season.

The practice dates to NBC's 40-minute "supersized" episodes of Friends a few years back. But while NBC has scaled back, the practice has increased sharply elsewhere this season, with more subtle one- and two-minute extensions.

Viewer sniping escalated after TiVo began sending messages to its 2 million-plus subscribers this season, warning of conflicts on Lost and Housewives, among the most recorded shows, and advising them to adjust their settings.

"We really don't believe they're doing this to mess up" TiVo users, says Brodie Keast, executive VP and general manager of the TiVo service, which has fielded complaints from a "small number" of users. "We can't control what the networks are doing with their business or programming decisions, so we just notified our customers."

VHS tapers may have learned long ago to add a few extra minutes to the end of every session. But many users of the latest digital video recorders depend on the advanced technology and precise automatic settings, which can miss minute-changes not reflected in onscreen listings or shows that shift as the season progresses. Though only 5% of households have a digital video recorder, a Magna Global USA analysis of Nielsen data shows 60% of longtime DVR users automatically record their favorite shows each week.

When does the movie really start?

If you're like me, you're always torn between showing up for a movie early, and getting the best seat possible, or showing up 15 minutes after start time, and skipping the commercials. Some theatres are worse than others when it comes to actually showing movies "on time." My local "megaplex" is eerily timed to start movies 17-20 minutes after their start time. If it's not a new release, and it's a matinee, I'll show up at 4:20 for that 4:05 film, and have plenty of time to find a seat and maybe catch the last preview.

When I was a kid, I saw maybe two trailers, a commercial for concessions, and then *boom* the movie starts. Now there are ads running 30 minutes before the show starts, and there are even 15 minutes of ads after the lights are dimmed. You get all of the trailers, of course, but then there's advertisements for local business, some kind of soda drink, online ticketing, a charity or two, and then a long and boring reminder not to smoke, throw your trash on the floor, and shut up.

Now a Connecticut State Representative has said "enough's enough," and is proposing legislation that would require movie theatres in the state to post the actual starting time of a movie. Saying that the incessant advertising has "robbed us of our freedom of choice because we're not told when the actual movie will begin," Rep. Andrew Fleischmann believes that movie-goers have the right to know when a movie will actually start, since they are paying to see it. The complaint comes at a time when movie theatres are tapping into the lucrative captive audience advertising format. The Cinema Advertising Council reports that on-screen advertising grew from an already impressive US $191 million in 2002 to $315 million in 2003, up 45%. You can expect the theatres to respond to such proposals with a now-familiar rejoinder: publishing movie starting times will reduce people watching ads, which means that the theaters "will have to" raise ticket and food prices.

?Ali G? character causes near riot at rodeo

LONDON - British comedian Sasha Baron Cohen escaped a near-riot at an American rodeo while filming his satirical ?Da Ali G Show.?

According to a report in the Roanoke (Virginia) Times, a man who was introduced as Boraq Sagdiyev from Kazakhstan ? in reality a Cohen character named Borat ? appeared at the rodeo over the weekend after organizers agreed to have him sing the national anthem.

After telling the crowd he supported America?s war on terrorism, he said, ?I hope you kill every man, woman and child in Iraq, down to the lizards ... And may George W. Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq.? He then sang a garbled version of ?The Star-Spangled Banner.?

The Roanoke Times reported that the crowd turned ?downright nasty.? One observer said ?If he had been out there a minute longer, I think somebody would have shot him.?

Cohen and his film crew were escorted out of the Salem Civic Center and told to leave the premises.

?Had we not gotten them out of there, there would have been a riot,? rodeo producer Bobby Rowe told the paper. ?They loaded up the van and they screeched out of there.?

It is not the first time Cohen has wooed controversy with his show, which airs on HBO. In one episode last year, Borat sang an anti-Semitic song called ?Throw the Jew Down the Well? at a country music bar, prompting protests from the Anti-Defamation League.

Producers of the Ali G show, Talkback Thames, were unavailable for comment.

Monsanto Suing Farmers Over Piracy Issues

SAN FRANCISCO - Monsanto Co.'s "seed police" snared soy farmer Homan McFarling in 1999, and the company is demanding he pay it hundreds of thousands of dollars for alleged technology piracy. McFarling's sin? He saved seed from one harvest and replanted it the following season, a revered and ancient agricultural practice.

"My daddy saved seed. I saved seed," said McFarling, 62, who still grows soy on the 5,000 acre family farm in Shannon, Miss. and is fighting the agribusiness giant in court.


Saving Monsanto's seeds, genetically engineered to kill bugs and resist weed sprays, violates provisions of the company's contracts with farmers.


Since 1997, Monsanto has filed similar lawsuits 90 times in 25 states against 147 farmers and 39 agriculture companies, according to a report issued Thursday by The Center for Food Safety, a biotechnology foe.


In a similar case a year ago, Tennessee farmer Kem Ralph was sued by Monsanto and sentenced to eight months in prison after he was caught lying about a truckload of cotton seed he hid for a friend.


Ralph's prison term is believed to be the first criminal prosecution linked to Monsanto's crackdown. Ralph has also been ordered to pay Monsanto more than $1.7 million.


The company itself says it annually investigates about 500 "tips" that farmers are illegally using its seeds and settles many of those cases before a lawsuit is filed.


In this way, Monsanto is attempting to protect its business from pirates in much the same way the entertainment industry does when it sues underground digital distributors exploiting music, movies and video games.


In the process, it has turned farmer on farmer and sent private investigators into small towns to ask prying questions of friends and business acquaintances.


Monsanto's licensing contracts and litigation tactics are coming under increased scrutiny as more of the planet's farmland comes under genetically engineered cultivation.


Some 200 million acres of the world's farms grew biotech crops last year, an increase of 20 percent from 2003, according to a separate report released Wednesday.


Many of the farmers Monsanto has sued say, as McFarling claims, that they didn't read the company's technology agreement close enough. Others say they never received an agreement in the first place.


The company counters that it sues only the most egregious violations and is protecting the 300,000 law-abiding U.S. farmers who annually pay a premium for its technology. Soy farmers, for instance, pay a "technology fee" of about $6.50 an acre each year.


Some 85 percent of the nation's soy crop is genetically engineered to resist Monsanto's herbicide Roundup, a trait many farmers say makes it easier to weed their fields and ultimately cheaper to grow their crops.


"It's a very efficient and cost-effective way to raise soy beans and that's why the market has embraced it," said Ron Heck, who grows 900 acres of genetically engineered soy beans in Perry, Iowa.


Heck, who is also chairman of the American Soybean Association, said he doesn't mind buying new seed each year and appreciates Monsanto's crackdown on competitors who don't pay for their seed.


"You can save seed if you want to use the old technology," Heck said.

The company said the licensing agreement protects its more than 600 biotech-related patents and ensures a return on its research and development expenses, which amount to more than $400 million annually.

"We have to balance our obligations and our responsibilities to our customers, to our employees and to our shareholders," said Scott Baucum, Monsanto's chief intellectual property protector.

Still, Monsanto's investigative tactics are sewing seeds of fear and mistrust in some farming communities, company critics say.

Monsanto encourages farmers to call a company hot line with piracy tips, and private investigators in its employ act on leads with visits to the associates of suspect farmers.

Baucum acknowledged that the company walks a fine line when it sues farmers.

"It is very uncomfortable for us," Baucum said. "They are our customers and they are important to us."

The Center for Food Safety established its own hot line Thursday where farmers getting sued can receive aid. It also said it hopes to convene a meeting among defense lawyers to develop legal strategies to fight Monsanto.

The company said it has gone to trial five times and has never lost a legal fight against an accused pirate. The U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) in 1980 allowed for the patenting of genetically engineered life forms and extended the same protections to altered plants in 2001. Earlier this year, a Washington D.C. federal appeals court specifically upheld Monsanto's license.

"It's sad. It's sickening. I'm disillusioned," said Rodney Nelson, a North Dakota farmer who settled a Monsanto suit in 2001 that he said was unfairly filed. "We have a heck of an uphill battle that I don't think can be won."

Pentagon reveals rejected chemical weapons

THE Pentagon considered developing a host of non-lethal chemical weapons that would disrupt discipline and morale among enemy troops, newly declassified documents reveal.

Most bizarre among the plans was one for the development of an "aphrodisiac" chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. Provoking widespread homosexual behaviour among troops would cause a "distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale, the proposal says.

Other ideas included chemical weapons that attract swarms of enraged wasps or angry rats to troop positions, making them uninhabitable. Another was to develop a chemical that caused "severe and lasting halitosis", making it easy to identify guerrillas trying to blend in with civilians. There was also the idea of making troops' skin unbearably sensitive to sunlight.

The proposals, from the US Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, date from 1994. The lab sought Pentagon funding for research into what it called "harassing, annoying and 'bad guy'-identifying chemicals". The plans have been posted online by the Sunshine Project, an organisation that exposes research into chemical and biological weapons.

Spokesman Edward Hammond says it was not known if the proposed $7.5 million, six-year research plan was ever pursued.

They're Not Worthy

This New Year's Day, a wonderful thing will happen in Europe that won't occur again in the US until 2019: Copyrights on music and television recordings will expire. After a half century of monopoly protection granted artists in exchange for their creative work, the public will get its justly earned free access to an extraordinary range of both famous and forgotten creativity. Libraries, archives, and even other creators can spread and build upon this creativity without asking permission first. Songs from 1953 that seniors across Europe wooed their first loves to can be streamed across the Net for free.

Such a yearly event doesn't happen in the US anymore because Congress repeatedly extends the term of existing copyrights. The last extension in 1998 - the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act - was the 11th for existing works in 40 years, delaying any copyrighted song from entering the public domain for another 20 years. This practice is now inspiring copycats in Europe to similar plunder. Sir Cliff Richard - the most successful singles artist in British history - has launched a campaign in the EU to extend the term of copyright for sound recordings from 50 years to 95. Billions will be wiped from the books of European record companies, Richard warns, if governments don't act immediately.

If you know anything about this debate, you might wonder why this question has come up again. (And, for that matter, if you know anything about accounting, you might be puzzled why EU record labels get to book value for assets set by law to expire.) When Congress passed the Sonny Bono Act, we were told its purpose was to "harmonize" US law with European law. Turns out - surprise! - that in the most important categories of copyright, the act made US terms longer than those of the EU. Thus the pirates of the public domain are back, arguing that the EU must lengthen its copyrights to harmonize with those of the US. And as Mexico is about to extend its terms beyond those in Europe and the US, no doubt soon we'll be hearing calls to extend our terms to match those of Mexico.

This spiral will not end until governments recall a simple lesson: Monopolies are evil, even if they are a necessary evil. We rightfully grant the monopoly called copyright to inspire new creative work. But once that work has been created, there is no public justification for extending its term. The public has already paid. Term extension is just double billing. Any wealth it creates for copyright holders is swamped by the wealth the public loses in lower costs and wider access.

The urge to extend terms for commercially valuable work is understandable, albeit from the public's perspective, senseless. But the way that governments extend these terms is even more senseless. Rather than limiting this corporate welfare to those works that are commercially exploited (leaving the forgotten to pass into the public domain so libraries and archives can make them available cheaply), governments uniformly extend the duration of copyrights indiscriminately. The Sonny Bono Act, for example, extended terms for works from as far back as 1923, even though, as Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer estimated in Eldred v. Ashcroft, 98 percent of the oldest works are no longer commercially available.

It would be easy for governments to narrow term extension to those who want it by requiring copyright holders to pay a small fee. Even a very small fee would filter out the vast majority of works from automatic term extension. Most would enter the public domain immediately. Yet even this idea is ignored. Who can hear reason when billions are about to be wiped from the books?

Governments should end this game by tinkering with copyright terms for future works only. But if they're not strong enough to stick to this simple principle, they should at least limit their damage by restricting extensions to those works from which someone might actually benefit. That someone, no doubt, won't be the public. But there's no reason to extend terms when no one - not even record companies - could possibly benefit. Filter the forgotten from term extension, and we might forgive the senselessness that inspires Sir Cliff to sing again.

Judge nixes evolution textbook stickers

The Cobb County Board of Education required these stickers to be pasted into biology textbooks, saying that evolution "is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. The material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."
The Associated Press
Updated: 7:27 p.m. ET Jan. 13, 2005ATLANTA - A federal judge Thursday ordered a suburban Atlanta school system to remove stickers from its high school biology textbooks that call evolution ?a theory, not a fact,? saying the disclaimers are an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.

?By denigrating evolution, the school board appears to be endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism or variations thereof, even though the sticker does not specifically reference any alternative theories,? U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper said.

The stickers were put inside the books? front covers by public school officials in Cobb County in 2002. They read: ?This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.?

?This is a great day for Cobb County students,? said Michael Manely, an attorney for the parents who sued over the stickers. ?They?re going to be permitted to learn science unadulterated by religious dogma.?

In a statement, the school board said it was disappointed by the ruling and will decide whether to appeal. A board spokesman said no decision had been made on when, or if, the stickers would be removed.

?The textbook stickers are a reasonable and evenhanded guide to science instruction and encouraging students to be critical thinkers,? the board said.

2,000 complaints from parents
The stickers were added after more than 2,000 parents complained that the textbooks presented evolution as fact, without mentioning rival ideas about the beginnings of life, such as the biblical story of creation.

Six parents and the American Civil Liberties Union then sued, contending the disclaimers violated the separation of church and state and unfairly singled out evolution from thousands of other scientific theories as suspect.

At a trial in federal court in November, the school system defended the stickers as a show of tolerance, not religious activism.

?Science and religion are related and they?re not mutually exclusive,? school district attorney Linwood Gunn said. ?This sticker was an effort to get past that conflict and to teach good science.?

But the judge disagreed: ?While evolution is subject to criticism, particularly with respect to the mechanism by which it occurred, the sticker misleads students regarding the significance and value of evolution in the scientific community.?

Battles around the country
The case is one of several battles waged around the country in recent years over what role evolution should play in the teaching of science.

Last year, Georgia?s education chief proposed a science curriculum that dropped the word ?evolution? in favor of ?changes over time.? The idea was dropped amid protests from teachers.

A school district in Dover, Pa., has been locked in a dispute over a requirement that science students be told about ?intelligent design? ? the concept that the universe is so complex it must have been created by some higher power.

Who owns your e-mails?

When L/Cpl Justin Ellsworth was killed in Iraq, his father decided to create a memorial to his dead son using the e-mails he wrote and received while in the Middle East. But Yahoo! is refusing to release the messages. Who owns your e-mail after you die?
Police sergeant John Ellsworth has sparked a privacy debate in the US that has prompted many to reconsider who can access their e-mail.

Mr Ellsworth is locked in a legal fight with Yahoo! after his son, L/Cpl Justin Ellsworth, a US marine serving in Falluja, was killed by a roadside bomb.

L/Cpl Ellsworth was 20 when he died at the beginning of November, less than two months after arriving in Iraq. During that short spell of duty, the young soldier had spent much of his spare time e-mailing his folks back home through Yahoo! webmail.

"He was keeping a journal of sorts to put together for future history," John Ellsworth told BBC News. "He wanted to make sure that his generation, as well as following generations, have actual words from somebody who was there."

They are attempting, in effect, by contract, to extinguish a property right to the contents in the account

But Mr Ellsworth Snr was shocked when Yahoo! turned down a request to release his dead son's e-mails, on the basis of privacy.

Recognising the emotions involved, Yahoo! says it must nevertheless honour the terms of service which all 40 million US Yahoo! account holders must agree to. These state that survivors have no rights to the e-mail accounts of the deceased. Yahoo! accounts are deactivated after 90 days if they have not been used.

Other big players in the webmail market, such as AOL and Hotmail, have procedures for transferring e-mail accounts of the deceased to next of kin. Yahoo! UK, meanwhile, has less strict privacy terms than its US counterpart.

But Mr Ellsworth is not about to give up. Having spent weeks trying, unsuccessfully, to crack the password to his son's account, he has taken his story to the media, appearing on US network TV. He has also enlisted lawyers to fight his corner.

The case has split public opinion, with some urging Yahoo! to make a compassionate exception, while privacy activists believe there should be no exceptions.

A debate hosted by the website ZDnet illustrates the broad spectrum of feeling.


Yahoo's terms: The source of the debate
"The man is devastated at the prospect of his son's memories, what essentially could be his son's last written words, being obliterated forever. Just let him see it," writes one contributor.

Another talks of a family member who committed suicide: "There are many questions that remain unanswered for us and yet, I know that she would not have wanted us to access her e-mail account after her death."

So who does own your e-mail after you die?

Solicitor and technology expert Leigh Ellis, of Kaltons Technology Specialists, says in English law at least, the copyright vesting in e-mails, like other possessions, is included in the estate of the deceased. In which case the copyright as property, would pass to the executor.

The fact that this is webmail, and so is contained on disks owned by Yahoo!, makes no difference. The contents of the e-mails remain the property of those who wrote them.

But the nub of the Ellsworth case appears to rest on Yahoo's clause which states "You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your... contents... terminate upon your death."

"They are attempting, in effect, by contract, to extinguish a property right to the contents in the account," says Mr Ellis.

Police access

However, another clause in the same Yahoo! terms appears to give some room for manoeuvre. It states that "Yahoo! may... disclose your... content if required to do so by law or in a good faith..."

The term is clearly drafted to give the police rights to access an account.

"Strictly speaking, anyone trying to access the e-mails of the deceased is fighting an uphill struggle against these clauses," says Mr Ellis. But given the emotions of a case such as Mr Ellsworth's, "Yahoo! may in the end relent to the adverse publicity arising from their resistance and the particular circumstances of the case.

"Defending non-disclosure of information after a person has passed away on the basis of privacy would present some difficulty in the UK as the Data Protection Act would not apply to the information."

In future, however, many webmailers may choose to side-step this process by entrusting their passwords to a loved one.

District sued over suspension

A Circleville family has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the authority of a school district to discipline students for incidents occurring off school grounds.
Back in June, a Valley Central High School student froze an egg, stuffed it into a high-powered "potato launcher," then shot it at a passing school bus, shattering the bus window and spraying glass into a child's eyes, neck and shoulder. This week, the egg shooter's father sued the school district for punishing his son.
According to the lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court by parent Steve Valastro, the Valley Central school district and its superintendent, Richard Hooley, violated his 17-year-old son's civil rights by suspending him from school for five months, from September 2004 until the end of this month. Valastro is seeking unspecified damages plus attorney fees and court costs.
This marks the fifth case that attorney Michael H. Sussman of Goshen has filed in the past year against local school districts for disciplining students. He won the first four cases, he said, and expects to win this one as well.
Valley Central's disciplinary code addresses only student acts performed on school grounds, Sussman said. Since the teen stood on his own property when he shot the spud gun, the school district had no right to discipline him, he said.
"School districts do not have responsibility outside their own parameters to regulate children's conduct," Sussman said. Because of the suspension, he added, the teen, a champion wrestler in his senior year of high school, could lose out on college scholarships because he was not allowed to compete in matches.
"It's possible the family could make money because their rights were violated," the attorney said. "That's how the system works."
Hooley declined to comment. But parents of children who were on the attacked bus had plenty to say.
"The nerve to do something like that!" shouted Jay Buchalski, a state police trooper whose daughter sat two seats back from the shattered windows. "Parents should get together and sue the kid's parents."
Terry Marotta, whose 16-year-old daughter was covered with shattered glass, agreed. The frozen egg went in one window and out another on the other side of the bus, she said.
"If it had hit someone directly, the person could have been blinded, handicapped or killed," Marotta said. "If I were the parent, I wouldn't brush it under the rug as if it were some kind of high school prank."
Valastro refused to comment for this story. Speaking on his behalf, Sussman said the criminal justice system has already disciplined the teen, whose name is not being used because of his age and the low level of the charge. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and will likely be sentenced next month to three years' probation and 50 hours of community service.
"Due process requires notice of what behaviors can be punished," Sussman said. "Without that notice, you can't exercise that authority."
Court judges have sided with Sussman in similar cases. In May, Orange County Judge Stewart Rosenwasser ruled that Newburgh Free Academy could not continue suspending Elzie Coleman, an 18-year-old student and Olympic-caliber sprinter who had been involved in a series of fistfights outside school. In September, Stephen Robinson, a federal judge in White Plains, ruled that Yonkers high school students who had been suspended for protesting budget cuts should be allowed to return to their classes.
The following month, another federal court judge, Colleen McMahon, ordered the Warwick School District to reinstate Brook Banker, a suspended high school volleyball star. The district failed to allow Banker to dispute the charges of having alcohol at school before punishing her, the judge ruled. And last month, the court ruled that a 16-year-old boy from Minisink should be returned to school because the girls he's accused of sexually abusing had gone unpunished in connection with the boy's countercharge that their behavior was consensual, violating the boy's right of equal protection under the law.
"Everything is going haywire," Buchalski said. "It is a strange world anymore."

< The important point here is that what the kid did has nothing to do with the school as far as punishment. Look at it this way: the school gets hurt, the school decides the punishment. See a problem yet? >

Auto Makers Forced To Unbundle Stereo from Vehicles

Detroit, MI ? A ruling today by the Michigan Supreme Court will force Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota and Volkswagen to stop installing stereos in vehicles sold in the US by the end of January 2005.

The antitrust suit filed by Sony against the automakers claimed the manufacturers use their monopoly in the automobile market to lock out third-party suppliers of car stereos. The suit also claimed that automakers engineered their cars to make use of alternate stereos difficult or impractical. The sole reason for this is to prevent users from switching to an aftermarket stereo.

John McNeal lead counsel for the automakers had this to say about the ruling and possible appeals. "There are still several arguments in this case that will need to be weighed seriously and we feel that our odds in the appeals process look good. For the sake of the consumer we can only hope that this decision is reversed quickly."

Many in the industry feel the biggest winners are the makers of aftermarket car audio equipment and companies specializing in installing stereos. New cars will no longer be able to play any form of media as shipped, so consumers wishing to listen to the radio or CD's will be forced to have a stereo installed.

"This is a great decision for the industry and the consumer. No longer will consumers be forced to use the inadequate and seamlessly integrated stereos provided by the automakers," said Michel Tso representative for Sony. "The consumer will only see benefits from this. They will now have limitless options for a stereo and will not be forced to pay for a stereo they don't want."

McNeal counters that this ruling will result in an increase in the base price of all cars of about $1000 for the next five years. "While our cost for the stereo itself is only $15 the cost of retooling production facilities to meet the requirements of this ruling will be staggering. We have no choice but to pass these costs onto the consumer."

N Korea wages war on long hair

Men's hairstyles reflect their 'ideological spirit'
North Korea has launched an intensive media assault on its latest arch enemy - the wrong haircut.

A campaign exhorting men to get a proper short-back-and-sides has been aired by state-run Pyongyang television.

The series is entitled Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle.

While the campaign has been carried out primarily on television, reports have appeared in North Korean press and radio, urging tidy hairstyles and proper attire.

It is the strongest media campaign against men's sloppy appearances mounted in the reclusive and impoverished Communist state in recent years.

The propaganda drive on grooming standards has gone a stage further than previous attempts. This time television identifies specific individuals deemed too shoddy.

Crew cut

Pyongyang television started the campaign last autumn with a five-part series in its regular TV Common Sense programme.


How the propaganda campaign looks on Pyongyang television

Stressing hygiene and health, it showed various state-approved short hairstyles including the "flat-top crew cut," "middle hairstyle," "low hairstyle," and "high hairstyle" - variations from one to five centimetres in length.

The programme allowed men aged over 50 seven centimetres of upper hair to cover balding.

It stressed the "negative effects" of long hair on "human intelligence development", noting that long hair "consumes a great deal of nutrition" and could thus rob the brain of energy.

Men should get a haircut every 15 days, it recommended.

Named and shamed

A second, and unprecedented, TV series this winter showed hidden-camera style video of "long-haired" men in various locations throughout Pyongyang.

Hair is a very important issue that shows the people's cultural standards and mental and moral state

Minju Choson newspaper
In a break with North Korean TV's usual approach, the programme gave their names and addresses, and challenged the fashion victims directly over their appearance.

The North Korean media normally reserves the reporting of names of its citizens to exemplary individuals who show high communist virtues.

The series was shot at various public locations - on the street, at a sports stadium, a barbershop, a bus stop, a restaurant, a department store.

Some unruly-haired pedestrians or customers captured on camera "meanly ran away", the programme said, while others made excuses about being too busy to get a trim.

Television newsreels such as "Employees of Pyongyang Textile Plant keep their hairstyle and dressing neat and tidy" and "Hairdressers at Ch'anggwangwo'n manage men's hair according to the demands of the military-first era" have also aired.

What not to wear

State radio programmes such as "Dressing in accordance with our people's emotion and taste" link clothes and appearance with the wearer's "ideological and mental state".

Nodong Sinmun newspaper
Tidy attire "is important in repelling the enemies' manoeuvres to infiltrate corrupt capitalist ideas and lifestyle and establishing the socialist lifestyle of the military-first era," the radio says.

Newspapers too highlight the civic advantages of short hair and smart shoes.

Hair is a "very important issue that shows the people's cultural standards and mental and moral state", argues Minju Choson, a government daily.

"No matter how good the clothes, if one does not wear tidy shoes, one's personality will be downgraded."

For party papers such as Nodong Sinmun, the struggle against foreign and anti-communist influence is being fought out in the arena of personal appearance.

"People who wear other's style of dress and live in other's style will become fools and that nation will come to ruin," it says.

Student sues over suspension for wearing anti-gay shirt

LOS ANGELES ? A San Diego County school district was sued this week for allegedly violating the civil rights of a student who was suspended for wearing a T-shirt reading ?Homosexuality is Shameful.?

A federal lawsuit filed June 2 against the Poway Unified School District says Tyler Chase Harper was suspended for expressing his ?sincerely held religious beliefs? during and after an April 21 ?Day of Silence.? During the national event, high school and college students remain silent to show support for homosexuals, bisexuals and trans-gender students.

The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

?Because it?s a legal matter, the district is unable to comment,? said Sharon Raffer, spokeswoman for the 32,000-student school district.

Harper, 16, of Poway, is a sophomore at Poway High School. According to the suit, he is a Christian who believes that ?homosexual behavior is immoral, damaging to the practitioners and to human society in general, and is demonstrably contrary to the teachings of the Bible.?

According to the suit, on April 21 he wore a T-shirt hand-lettered with the words ?I Will Not Accept What God Has Condemned? on the front, and on the back it read ?Homosexuality is Shameful? and ?Romans 1:27,? a reference to a Bible passage.

When he wore a similar shirt the next day, a classroom teacher told him that he was violating the school dress code and must remove the T-shirt or go to the office, according to the lawsuit.

The suit claims that the school?s assistant principal said the shirt violated the code because it had homemade printing and was ?inflammatory,? and that the teenager was suspended by the principal when he refused to remove it.

The lawsuit also contends that a sheriff?s deputy whom it did not identify told the student that the shirt ?could encourage uprising and violence against homosexuals? and that a school vice principal said he must ?leave his faith in the car.?

According to the lawsuit, Poway High School?s student policy handbook states that the dress code forbids ?violence or hate behavior, including derogatory connotations directed toward sexual identity.? It alleges the policy is too broad and vague.

The school district policy forbids expressions of ?racial, ethnic, or religious prejudice? that might create a ?clear and present danger? of unlawful acts or disruption of school operations, the suit said.

But the lawsuit argues that Harper?s messages did neither.

?When are public school officials going to learn they are not allowed to silence constitutionally protected student speech just because they disagree with the student?? said a statement by Robert Tyler, a lawyer with the Alliance Defense Fund, which filed the suit.

The group is asking the court to bar the district and school from ?selectively banning religious expression? and to grant at least $25,000 in damages.

The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based defense fund provides funding, training and legal aid to lawyers and others to defend what it defines as ?the legal battle for religious freedom, sanctity of life, and the preservation of marriage and the family.?

The suit, which names the district and high school and various officials as defendants, alleges violation of the student?s rights of freedom of speech, freedom of religion and equal protection of the law.

Man Wants $1,000 To Return Soldier's Camera

PHILADELPHIA -- Many NBC 10 News viewers have responded with offers of help for a local soldier who lost his camera at an Eagles game. They wrote with outrage after hearing about a man in Syracuse who offered to return the camera -- for $1,000.

But NBC 10 heard from a lot of good-hearted people, too-- many offering help to the soldier.

Roger Schreiner understands why Army Spc. Elwood Wrigley's missing holiday photos mean so much to him. Schreiner is a former Army ranger who still keeps pictures of his bootcamp buddies at his Internet office in Fishtown. He said that those photos helped him get through the 1991 Gulf War in Kuwait.

"If you look in the footlockers of these soldiers, what do you see? You see photos of the people that they care about, photos that get them through every day," Schreiner said.

Schreiner, like many others who e-mailed NBC 10, were upset at Michael Crook. Crook said that he had found Wrigley's camera at last Sunday's.Eagles/Bengals game. He sent NBC 10 some e-mails and pictures as proof and he directed us to his Web site. He offered to return the photos for $1,000.

In a phone interview he made no apologies for asking for a finders' fee.

"To be perfectly honest, I have absolutely no remorse," Crook told reporter Vince DeMentri.

In turned out the photos weren't Wrigley's. The soldier's disappointment, though, turned into anger after learning of Crook's offer.

Wrigley was touched, though, by Schreiner's offer to pay a $500 reward for the return of his camera.

"Thanks Roger, from the bottom of my heart. Thank you. It's good to see there are good people out there. Especially being a veteran himself, he understands. He understands what is the value of it. It's irreplaceable, honestly," Wrigley said.

Wrigley has volunteered to go back to Afghanistan for a second tour and he leaves next Tuesday.

Schreiner wasn't the only one to express his disgust at Crook asking for money to return Wrigley's photos. Here are several e-mails received by NBC 10:

"It makes me sick to know that people would do that to someone, especially with pictures that are so precious," said Erika, of Hamilton, N.J.

"It's such a shame that someone would do that to another person, let alone a person who is fighting to keep our freedom," said Melissa Whittington.

"Although I don't have the camera, my wife and I would be happy to get a replacement one for him, if it would help," said William Callahan.

Wrigley told NBC 10 that he doesn't care about the camera. He just wants the memory stick. He was sitting in section 228, row 15, seats 8 and 9 of Lincoln Financial Field. He lost a Sony Cyber-shot digital camera.

With Cameras on the Corner, Your Ticket Is in the Mail

IN a perfectly clear day in October, Carla Correa, a confessed neurotic when it comes to getting a ticket, powered her Honda Civic toward an intersection in Baltimore on her way to visit her boyfriend in Washington. When the light turned yellow, she did not simply cruise through, but instead slammed on the brakes.

Seconds later, a truck rammed her from behind, and her car was wrecked.

Why would she do such a thing? The answer could be found in a box mounted on a nearby post, with a lens pointed at her license plate.

"It's an intersection that I've been through a million times before, and I knew that it was a quick yellow light," Ms. Correa, 25, said in a telephone interview. She also knew that the intersection was equipped with a camera. "And when I saw the yellow, I freaked out."

Though unhurt, Ms. Correa has made a resolution: from now on, if it seems the light is about to turn red, she is going to run it. "If I hadn't known there was a red-light camera there, I would have gone through," she said. "Every time I see the red-light camera, I'm terrified by it. It's a $70 ticket." (Actually, it's $75.)

Her experience is not an anomaly. Cameras like the one she spotted are now in use in more than 100 American cities. Activated by road sensors when a car enters an intersection belatedly, the systems provide evidence of a violation, including photos of the license plate and in some cases, the driver.

While Baltimore reports that violations for running red lights have gone down 60 percent at the 47 intersections with such cameras, several studies in recent years - in places like San Diego, Charlotte, N.C., and Australia - have offered a fuzzier picture. The studies have shown that the reduction in side-angle collisions at the intersections has been wholly or largely offset by an increase in rear-end accidents like Ms. Correa's.

In addition, there has been criticism of the cameras' use to generate revenue from fines - in some cases exceeding $300 per violation, with points on a driver's record - and of revenue-sharing arrangements with providers of the technology. Those arrangements, critics contend, have led to the placement of cameras not necessarily where they would best promote safety, but where they will rack up the most violations.

Those questions, along with malfunctions and legal challenges, have led some local governments to remove the cameras. Virginia's legislature is considering whether to renew a law, expiring in July, that permits the cameras, used in six Virginia cities.

Despite the problems, many cities, including Philadelphia and Cincinnati, are moving forward in installing automated red-light cameras. Many others couldn't be happier with the technology. "We think it's doing a wonderful job," said Steve Galgano, executive director for engineering in the traffic division of the Department of Transportation in New York City, where 50 such cameras are in operation - along with 200 decoys - at periodically changing locations.

The story of the red-light camera is one of technology, safety, politics, behavior modification - and unintended consequences.

And some contend that revenue has trumped safety.

"I disapprove of the privatization of a police function," said Mark Kleinschmidt, a city councilman in Chapel Hill, N.C., where a private contractor not only installed the camera system but also carried out the initial screening of potential violations. Last year Mr. Kleinschmidt persuaded a slim majority of his colleagues to end the program after four months.

"I don't think we should bid it out to a corporation; it's strictly a police function," he said. "Then there's this distaste in the minds of many, that the whole concept is a corporate moneymaking scheme."

For their part, camera-equipped cities and the private companies that contract with them dismiss such claims, saying the cameras have reduced violations. The largest provider in the country, Affiliated Computer Services, has 55 clients in the United States and Canada, including Washington and San Diego. It provides camera systems and in some cases administers the processing of citations. The cameras first made their appearance in Europe and Australia in the 1970's, but came to the United States only in 1993, when, with little fanfare or warning, New York City started installing them.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which endorses the camera systems' use, 1,000 people are killed each year in red-light violations. Advocates of the cameras have championed them as effective tools in reducing accidents and deaths, freeing officers to perform other crime-fighting duties, and as an efficient way to raise revenue in the process.

When Mayor Anthony A. Williams of Washington acknowledged that twofold aim in 2002 ("The cameras are about safety and revenue," he said), his comments outraged AAA, which withdrew its support for the camera program there. About 120 cities in 18 states and the District of Columbia now use the cameras, according to statistics from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an enthusiastic backer of the cameras that receives all of its financing from insurers.

"We've been able to document clearly that red-light running is a problem," said Richard Retting, a senior transportation engineer at the institute and an author of several studies on the subject. The cameras "are very effective tools for enhancing safety consistently," he said, adding: "Drivers know what to expect. They know if they break a law there'll be a consequence."

That consequence is a ticket in the mail. Here is the chain of events before that happens: In most cases, a magnetic coil is embedded in the pavement just before an intersection. When the light turns red, this activates the coil, which helps the system record any vehicle that rolls over the coil, and its speed. A photo is snapped of the license plate, sometimes from both the front and the back (in California the driver's face is photographed), and the company or local officials, or both, review the image, and the ticket is sent out.

Officials at Affiliated Computer Services say they are developing laser technology that would be aimed at cars. If effective, it could replace the coil system. A pilot program in several cities will be introduced in the next few months, but officials declined to name the cities.

Some drivers have escalated the technological arms race by using simple sprays and shields that they believe obscure the license plates when photographed. The sprays, called PhotoBlocker and Photo Fog, cost $20 to $30. The drivers who swear by them claim that they have run red lights and not received tickets. Officials at Affiliated say that studies conducted by the company show the sprays to be ineffective. Nonetheless, many states, like Maryland, now specifically outlaw the use of them.

The resistance to the cameras is not just at the individual level, however.

Organizations like the National Motorists Association, a drivers' advocacy group based in Wisconsin, denounce the use of cameras. "It violates due process," said Greg Mauz, a truck driver from Florida and researcher for the association, "because it assumes you're guilty until proven innocent." Roger Hedgecock, a former mayor of San Diego who is now a radio talk show host there, called the cameras an old-fashioned shakedown.

In a court case that resulted in the dismissal of nearly 300 tickets in 2001, a former employee testified that Lockheed Martin IMS, which operated the San Diego system, regularly scouted intersections in some cities based on high traffic volume, not locations that were most accident-prone. Documents revealed that officials sought locations with steep gradients and short yellow-light times.

A California Department of Transportation auditor's report in 2002 concluded that the yellow-light duration at two camera-equipped intersections in San Diego had been shortened, but said this had been a mistake. Thousands of drivers were ticketed, though a handful won dismissals. The city's camera program was suspended in 2001, but has since resumed.

Today, officials at Affiliated Computer Services, which purchased Lockheed Martin IMS in August 2001 for $825 million, acknowledge the past troubles in San Diego. "It was a breakdown in communication with us - the vendor - and the department of transportation," said Maurice J. Hannigan, a vice president at the company.

To reverse some of the ill will, the company says it has restructured its contracts with cities to avoid any perception that it would benefit from maximizing the number of citations. Instead of receiving a share of the fines, Mr. Hannigan said, the company is now typically paid a flat monthly fee.

Even when the fines go solely to the public coffers, the tickets can be costly. In Sacramento, the maximum penalty for running a red light is $351. Those numbers add up. Even in Washington, where the fine is $75, the city has collected $28.9 million since installing the cameras in 1999, according to the city's Web site. (In some jurisdictions, violators also have points added to their record, which can increase their insurance rates.)

Until recently, findings on the effectiveness of cameras have been mixed at best. One of the most-cited studies, performed by Mr. Retting of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, found that crashes decreased at all intersections in Oxnard, Calif., by 5.4 percent after cameras were installed at some locations. Mr. Retting did not look specifically at intersections with the cameras, arguing that a spillover effect from the camera intersections would affect the data at all intersections.

Studies elsewhere, however, made a striking finding: rear-end accidents have shot up at intersections with cameras. In 2002 a consultant's study in San Diego reported that the number of crashes at camera intersections had increased by 3 percent after the cameras were installed, almost all of it a result of a 37 percent increase in rear-endings. "This finding is not consistent with the program's overall objective of improving traffic safety," the report's authors concluded.

But studies to be presented at a transportation conference next week in Washington by two researchers, Forrest M. Council and Bhagwant Persaud, reach a more nuanced conclusion. They found that rear-endings had gone up nearly 15 percent after cameras were installed in seven cities, with injuries from such accidents up 24 percent. Right-angle crashes declined by 24 percent, with injuries down nearly 16 percent. Weighing the economic impact and severity of injuries, they found the overall effect positive.

Or as Mr. Hannigan of Affiliated put it: "Would you rather have someone coming at you at 40 miles an hour, going through your window, or rear-ending you at 10?"

Toilet Brush Warning Wins Consumer Award

DETROIT - The sign on the toilet brush says it best: "Do not use for personal hygiene."

That admonition was the winner of an anti-lawsuit group's contest for the wackiest consumer warning label of the year.

The sponsor, Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch, says the goal is "to reveal how lawsuits, and concern about lawsuits, have created a need for common sense warnings on products."

The $500 first prize went to Ed Gyetvai, of Oldcastle, Ontario, who submitted the toilet-brush label. A $250 second prize went to Matt Johnson, of Naperville, Ill., for a label on a children's scooter that said, "This product moves when used."

A $100 third prize went to Ann Marie Taylor, of Camden, S.C., who submitted a warning from a digital thermometer that said, "Once used rectally, the thermometer should not be used orally."

This year's contest coincides with a drive by President Bush (news - web sites) and congressional Republicans to put caps and other limits on jury awards in liability cases.

"Warning labels are a sign of our lawsuit-plagued times," said group President Robert Dorigo Jones. "From the moment we raise our head in the morning off pillows that bear those famous Do Not Remove warnings, to when we drop back in bed at night, we are overwhelmed with warnings."

The leader of a group that opposes the campaign to limit lawsuits admits that while some warning labels may seem stupid, even dumb warnings can do good.

"There are many cases of warning labels saving lives," said Joanne Doroshow, executive director of the Center for Justice and Democracy in New York. "It's much better to be very cautious ... than to be afraid of being made fun of by a tort reform group."

The Wacky Warning Label Contest is in its eighth year.

Judge orders drug addict to stop having children

ROCHESTER, New York (AP) -- A Family Court judge who last year stirred debate about parental responsibilities ordered a second drug-addicted woman to have no more children until she proves she can look after the seven she already has.

The 31-year-old mother, identified in court papers only as Judgette W., lost custody of her children, ranging in age from eight months to 12 years, in child-neglect hearings dating back to 2000. Six are in foster care at state expense and one lives with an aunt.

The youngest child and two others tested positive for cocaine at birth and all seven "were removed from her care and custody because she could not and did not take care of them," Judge Marilyn O'Connor said in a December 22 decision made public Tuesday.

"Because every child born deserves a mother and a father, or at the very least a mother or a father, this court is once again taking this unusual step of ordering this biological mother to conceive no more children until she reclaims her children from foster care or other caretakers," O'Connor wrote.

In a similar ruling last March, O'Connor ordered a drug-addicted, homeless mother of four to refrain from bearing children until she won back care of her children. The decision, the first of its kind in New York, is being appealed.

Wisconsin and Ohio have upheld similar rulings involving "deadbeat dads" who failed to pay child support. But in other states, judges have turned back attempts to interfere with a person's right to procreate.

O'Connor said she was not forcing contraception or sterilization on the mother, who had children with seven different men, nor requiring her to get an abortion should she become pregnant. But she warned that the woman could be jailed for contempt if she has another child.

The New York Civil Liberties Union maintained that the opinion cannot be enforced because it "tramples on a fundamental right -- the right to procreate."

"There is no question the circumstances of this case are deeply troubling," said the group's executive director, Donna Lieberman. "But ordering a woman under threat of jail not to have any more babies ... puts the court squarely in the bedroom. And that's no place for the government."

Ready, Aim, ID Check: In Wrong Hands, Gun Won't Fire

THE computer circuits that control hand-held music players, cellphones and organizers may soon be in a new location: inside electronically controlled guns.

Researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark are building a handgun designed to fire only when its circuitry and software recognize the grip of an authorized shooter.

Sensors in the handle measure the pressure the hand exerts as it squeezes the trigger. Then algorithms check the shooter's grip with stored, authorized patterns to give the go-ahead.

"We can build a brain inside the gun," said Timothy N. Chang, a professor of electrical engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who devised the hardware for the grip-recognition system. "The technology is becoming so cheap that we can have not just a computer in every home, but a computer in every gun."

The main function of the system is to distinguish a legitimate shooter from, for example, a child who comes upon a handgun in a drawer. Electronics within the gun could one day include Global Positioning System receivers, accelerometers and other devices that could record the time and direction of gunfire and help reconstruct events in a crime investigation.

For a decade, researchers at many labs have been working on so-called smart or personalized handguns designed to prevent accidents. These use fingerprint scanners to recognize authorized shooters, or require the shooter to wear a small token on the hand that wirelessly transmits an unlocking code to the weapon.

At the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Michael L. Recce, an associate professor in the department of information systems, decided instead to concentrate on the shooter's characteristic grip. Dr. Recce created the software that does the pattern recognition for the gun.

Typically, it takes one-tenth of a second to pull a trigger, Dr. Recce said. While that is a short period, it is long enough for a computer to match the patterns and process the authorization.

To bring Dr. Recce's recognition software to life, Dr. Chang created several generations of circuits using off-the-shelf electronic components. He equipped the grips of real and fake handguns with sensors that could generate a charge proportional to the pressure put on them.

The pressure on the grip and trigger are read during the beginning of the trigger pull. The signals are sent to an analog-to-digital converter so that they can be handled by the digital signal processor. Patterns of different users can be stored, and the gun programmed to allow one or more shooters.

At first the group worked mainly with a simulated shooting range designed for police training. "You can't have guns in a university lab," Dr. Recce said.

The computer analysis of hand-pressure patterns showed that one person's grip could be distinguished from another's. "A person grasps a tennis racket or a pen or golf club in an individual, consistent way," he said. "That's what we're counting on."

During the past year, the team has moved from simulators to tests with live ammunition and real semiautomatic handguns fitted with pressure sensors in the grip. For five months, five officers from the institute's campus police force have been trying out the weaponry at a Bayonne firing range. "We've been going once a month since June," said Mark J. Cyr, a sergeant in the campus police. "I use a regular 9-millimeter Beretta weapon that fires like any other weapon; it doesn't feel any different."

For now, a computer cord tethers the gun to a laptop that houses the circuitry and pattern-recognition software. In the next three months, though, Dr. Chang said, the circuits would move from the laptop into the magazine of the gun. "All the digital signal processing will be built right in," he said.

Michael Tocci, a captain in the Bayonne Police Department, recently saw a demonstration of the technology. One shooter was authorized, Captain Tocci said. When this person pulled the trigger, a green light flashed. "But when other officers picked up the gun to fire, the computer flashed red to register that they weren't authorized," he said.

The system had a 90 percent recognition rate, said Donald H. Sebastian, senior vice president for research and development at the institute. "That's better fidelity than we expected with 16 sensors in the grip," Dr. Sebastian said. "But we'll be adding more sensors, and that rate will improve."

Dr. Chang said the grip for the wireless system would have 32 pressure sensors. "Now, in the worst case, the system fails in one out of 10 cases," he said. "But we've already seen that with the new sensor array, the recognition is much higher."

Dr. Sebastian said the team was considering adding palm recognition as a backup.

To develop a future weapon, the university is working with a ballistics research and development company, Metal Storm, of Arlington, Va. "We'll use our recognition system on their weapons platform," Dr. Sebastian said.

The Metal Storm gun has plenty of room for the pattern-recognition circuitry. Rounds are kept in the gun's barrel, not in a magazine in the grip. There is a small amount of the gun's own electronic circuitry in the handle to control the firing, said Arthur Schatz, senior vice president for operations at the company. "Otherwise it's pretty much empty, allowing the grip system to be housed within the handle," he said.

Captain Tocci of the Bayonne Police Department said the pattern-recognition technology was promising, particularly because accidental deaths occur when guns are not safely stored. "If a child picks up a gun that is not secured, this way it can't be fired," he said. Guns taken from a home during a robbery would be rendered useless, too.

"The premise the gun is based on has credibility," he said. When people see a live demonstration of the pattern-recognition system working, he said, "you think, yes, this is possible."

Does History Repeat Itself?

< Idiot Alert >
Something terrible is happening in the land of wooden shoes, windmills, Rembrandt (search) and wonderful breakfasts.

A Dutch hospital is euthanizing ? killing ? newborn babies who don't measure up to an arbitrary standard set by the hospital. The hospital at first requested guidelines for so-called "mercy killings" of newborns. It then revealed it has been engaging in the practice without any guidelines at all. Three years after the Dutch parliament passed a law allowing doctors to actively kill patients they deemed terminally ill, in great pain and with no prospects for recovery, it has come to this. At least with the elderly sick, they had to be consulted about their wishes. Newborns receive no such privilege.

I'm not surprised.

Once a single category of life is declassified as having no intrinsic value and a right to life, it is a very short step to declassify other categories when they are considered inconvenient, or burdensome.

Holland is a perfect example of what happens when there is no governing moral standard. The Dutch have decriminalized most drugs and people smoke dope openly in venues set aside for the practice. Prostitutes display their wares like mannequins in department store windows. And now we have at least one hospital murdering already born babies because someone has decreed them unworthy of life.

If ever there was a slippery slope to be studied, this is it.

The Dutch are now grappling with their open border policy. They have admitted thousands of radical Islamists who have not assimilated and are threatening the stability of the nation. A Dutch filmmaker was murdered last month by a radical who didn't like a film he made criticizing Islam's treatment of women.

And now we have the killing of newborns. All of this in a country where the Nazis murdered Ann Frank just because she was Jewish and therefore less than human.

Does history repeat? In Holland, apparently it does.
< /Idiot Alert >

< First of all, individuals have the right to choose their own life or death, a right they are afforded in the modern society. The criteria are anything but arbitrary. Triage is a necessary part of medicine and no matter what you think or say it not only should not but CAN NOT be eliminated. The "right to life" with these people always means the right to Try to Survive, a far cry indeed from having an actual life. One small reason that NOONE gets appropriate medical care without lots of money is that the extra that could be spread around is poorly spent. Decriminalizing drugs has led to a huge reduction in drug problems. >

Laser Wielder Faces Big Penalties

NEWARK, New Jersey -- Federal authorities Tuesday used the Patriot Act to charge a man with pointing a laser beam at an airplane overhead and temporarily blinding the pilot and co-pilot.

The FBI acknowledged the incident had no connection to terrorism but called David Banach's actions "foolhardy and negligent."

Banach, 38, of Parsippany, New Jersey, admitted to federal agents that he pointed the light beam at a jet and a helicopter over his home near Teterboro Airport last week, authorities said. Initially, he claimed his daughter aimed the device at the helicopter, they said.

He is the first person arrested after a recent rash of reports around the nation of laser beams hitting airplanes.

Banach was charged only in connection with the jet. He was accused of interfering with the operator of a mass transportation vehicle and making false statements to the FBI, and was released on $100,000 bail. He could get up to 25 years in prison and fines of up to $500,000.

Banach's lawyer, Gina Mendola-Longarzo, said her client was simply using the handheld device to look at stars with his daughter on the family's deck. She said Banach bought the device on the internet for $100 for his job testing fiber-optic cable.

"He wasn't trying to harm any person, any aircraft or anything like that," she said.

The jet, a chartered Cessna Citation, was coming in for a landing last Wednesday with six people aboard when a green light beam struck the windshield three times at about 3,000 feet, according to court documents. The flash temporarily blinded both the pilot and co-pilot, but they were later able to land the plane safely, authorities said.

"Not only was the safety of the pilot and passengers placed in jeopardy by Banach's actions, so were countless innocent civilians on the ground in this densely populated area," said Joseph Billy, agent in charge of the FBI's Newark bureau.

Then, on Friday, a helicopter carrying Port Authority detectives was hit by a laser beam as its crew surveyed the area to try to pinpoint the origin of the original beam.

According to the FBI, the Patriot Act does not describe helicopters as "mass transportation vehicles." As for why Banach was not charged with some other offense over the helicopter incident, Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office, did not immediately return calls for comment.

A few hours after the helicopter was hit by the laser, FBI agents canvassed Banach's neighborhood, trying to find the source of the beams. Banach told the agents it was his daughter who shined the laser at the helicopter, according to court papers.

Similar incidents have been reported in Cleveland, Houston, Washington, Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Medford, Oregon, raising fears that the light beams could temporarily blind cockpit crews and lead to accidents.

Last month, the FBI and the Homeland Security Department sent a memo to law enforcement agencies saying there is evidence that terrorists have explored using lasers as weapons. But federal officials have said there is no evidence the current string of incidents represents a terrorist plot.