School Mistakes Huge Burrito for a Weapon

CLOVIS, N.M. - A call about a possible weapon at a middle school prompted police to put armed officers on rooftops, close nearby streets and lock down the school. All over a giant burrito.


Someone called authorities Thursday after seeing a boy carrying something long and wrapped into Marshall Junior High.

The drama ended two hours later when the suspicious item was identified as a 30-inch burrito filled with steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa and jalapenos and wrapped inside tin foil and a white T-shirt.

"I didn't know whether to laugh or cry," school Principal Diana Russell said.

State police, Clovis police and the Curry County Sheriff's Department arrived at the school shortly after 8:30 a.m. They searched the premises and determined there was no immediate danger.

In the meantime, more than 30 parents, alerted by a radio report, descended on the school. Visibly shaken, they gathered around in a semi-circle, straining their necks, awaiting news.

"There needs to be security before the kids walk through the door," said Heather Black, whose son attends the school.

After the lockdown was lifted but before the burrito was identified as the culprit, parents pulled 75 students out of school, Russell said.

Russell said the mystery was solved after she brought everyone in the school together in the auditorium to explain what was going on.

"The kid was sitting there as I'm describing this (report of a student with a suspicious package) and he's thinking, 'Oh, my gosh, they're talking about my burrito.'"

Afterward, eighth-grader Michael Morrissey approached her.

"He said, 'I think I'm the person they saw,'" Russell said.

The burrito was part of Morrissey's extra-credit assignment to create commercial advertising for a product.

"We had to make up a product and it could have been anything. I made up a restaurant that specialized in oddly large burritos," Morrissey said.

After students heard the description of what police were looking for, he and his friends began to make the connection. He then took the burrito to the office.

"The police saw it and everyone just started laughing. It was a laughter of relief," Morrissey said.

"Oh, and I have a new nickname now. It's Burrito Boy."

Former warden recounts abuses in Florida prisons

TAMPA - "Goon squads" of guards roam Florida's prisons, beat up inmates and enforce vigilante justice while the top brass turns a blind eye, a former state Department of Corrections warden told a commission on Tuesday.

And many others among 2.2-million incarcerated Americans suffer such abuses as rape, unneeded strip-searches and inadequate medical care, members of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons were told Tuesday in Tampa.

This slew of abuse "doesn't fit with the core values of our democratic society and therefore, should trouble all Americans," said commission co-chairman John J. Gibbons, former chief judge of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"Everyone in society suffers" because of such abuses, said former U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, another co-chairman.

This nationwide commission is a privately organized but high-profile group whose members include former FBI director William S. Sessions; Iowa Deparment of Corrections director Gary Maynard; and former Arizona death row inmate Ray Krone, who was exonerated based on DNA evidence. The commission is supported by a consortium of foundations and law firms, and uses the staff of the Vera Institute for Justice, based in New York.

The commission plans four sets of hearings around the country; Tampa's is the first. The two-day hearing continues from 9:15 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. today at the offices of WEDU-TV, 1300 N Boulevard, Tampa.

Commission members made a point to say corrections officers generally are professional and honest. As the commission studies problems in jails and prisons, "we aim to work closely with corrections professionals every step of the way," Katzenbach said.

But before long Tuesday, commissioners were listening to stories of what has gone seriously wrong in some prisons and jails.

Ron McAndrew, who served as warden at Florida State Prison and two others, said his 23-year career showed him prisoner abuse in the state Department of Corrections "was systematically chronic. The large prisons were plagued with "goon squads' that were well known to, and feared by, staff and prisoners."

McAndrew also said that as he prepared to leave Florida State Prison in 1998, he warned incoming warden James Crosby about a "goon squad" at the prison that was so violent toward inmates he feared "it would only be a matter of time before a prisoner would be killed."

But he says his warnings went unheeded, and inmate Frank Valdes was killed by a squad of officers who entered his cell in July 1999 in a highly publicized case that led to the indictment of several guards on second-degree murder charges. Some of the guards were acquitted at trial and prosecutors dropped charges against the rest.

Since then, Crosby has become DOC secretary.

"Ron McAndrew has been using every avenue available for the last six years to discredit the reputation of Secretary Crosby, and his baseless allegations do not dignify a response from this agency or from the secretary himself," said DOC spokesman Sterling Ivey.

McAndrew, who is 66 and retired from the prison system, was one of several witnesses who testified Tuesday before the committee, which has much wider scope than Florida's prisons. The 21 commissioners say they are on a mission to study and prevent abuses in the nation's prisons.

Even as they noted the professionalism of most in the corrections business, they said abuses in prisons and jails keep recurring. "We don't know why well-meaning officials sometimes do awful things," Katzenbach said.

On Tuesday, the commissioners heard some examples. Among them:

Garrett Cunningham told commissioners he was raped by a guard in a Texas prison and that when he later complained, authorities brushed his complaints aside. The officer later was charged in an alleged assault on another inmate, and agreed to a plea deal that will keep him out of prison. Cunningham, 33, was released from prison about a year ago. He has begun a prisoner support organization.

Jeffrey Scott Hornoff, a former Rhode Island police detective, was convicted of murder and spent six years in prison, but was later cleared after another man confessed to the crime. He said he endured constant humiliation from guards - he refuses to use the term "correctional officers." He said he frequently heard inmates being beaten by guards in solitary confinement. Hornoff, 42, is trying to be reinstated at the police department where he once worked and carries a business card that lists his professional history: "Detective, convicted murderer, exoneree, speaker & advocate."

Judith Haney told commissioners that after she was arrested during the 2003 free trade agreement protests in Miami, she was forced to strip and consent to an invasive search. Female inmates at the time were routinely strip-searched in Miami-Dade, in spite of state law that says such searches can be done only in certain cases, and despite that male inmates arrested on similar charges were not. Haney, 51, of Oakland, Calif., was among those filing a class-action lawsuit over the searches. Miami-Dade County settled the case this week for $4.5-million and a promise to end the practice.

ACLU Challenges Government?s Use of Secrecy to Avoid Accountability in National Security Whistleblower Case

WASHINGTON -- During closed oral arguments today before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the government?s "radical theory" that every aspect of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds? case involved state secrets and therefore could not go forward. The ACLU also filed an emergency motion last night, along with other public interest groups and media outlets, challenging the court?s decision to close the courtroom to members of the press and the general public.

Edmonds, a former Middle Eastern language specialist hired by the FBI shortly after 9/11, was fired in 2002 after repeatedly reporting serious security breaches and misconduct. Edmonds challenged her retaliatory dismissal by filing a lawsuit in federal court, but her case was dismissed last July after Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the so-called "state secrets privilege," and retroactively classified briefings to Congress related to her case.

In January 2005, after significant delay, the Justice Department released an unclassified summary of its Inspector General?s report investigating the circumstances of Edmonds? termination. According to the summary, the Inspector General report concludes that Edmonds? whistleblower allegations were "the most significant factor" in the FBI?s decision to terminate her.

"The Justice Department?s own Inspector General has now concluded publicly that the FBI fired Edmonds for reporting agency misconduct," said Ann Beeson, Associate Legal Director of the ACLU, who argued on behalf of Edmonds today. "Clearly the FBI is using secrecy not to protect national security but to avoid accountability for its own mistakes."

The state secrets privilege, when properly invoked, permits the government to block disclosure of evidence that would cause harm to national security. In the Edmonds case, however, the government used the privilege to urge dismissal of the entire lawsuit, insisting that every aspect of Edmonds? case involves state secrets -- including where she was born and what languages she speaks.

The state secrets privilege has historically been rarely invoked, and even more rarely employed to dismiss an entire case at the outset. The outcome in Edmonds? case could significantly impact the government?s ability to rely on secrecy to avoid accountability in future cases, the ACLU said, including one pending case charging the government with "rendering" detainees to be tortured, and another charging racial discrimination by the CIA.

"Edmonds? case is not an isolated incident," Beeson said. "The federal government is routinely retaliating against government employees who uncover weaknesses in our ability to prevent terrorist attacks or protect public safety. From firing whistleblowers to using special privileges to cover up mistakes, the government is taking extreme steps to shield itself from political embarrassment while gambling with our safety."

The court?s surprise move yesterday to close the hearing to members of the press and general public resulted in multiple emergency motions filed last night by the ACLU and other public interest groups, as well as several media organizations including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Reuters America, the Associated Press and The Hearst Corporation. The ACLU said the decision to close the court did not appear to be based on state secrets concerns as it allowed those without security clearance to be present for the arguments. Furthermore, the briefs argued today were already made public when they were first filed in early 2005.

Several 9/11 family member advocacy groups have signed on to a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Sibel Edmonds. Advocates say that if government employees do not report misconduct or security breaches for fear of retaliation, then national security suffers. That brief, along with other legal documents and background materials, is available online at www.aclu.org/whistleblowers.

Religious Man Wants to Rename Mt. Diablo

An Oakley man has asked the federal government to rename Mount Diablo, saying the current name, which means devil in Spanish, is offensive to his religious sensibilities.

Art Mijares applied to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names for the change and suggests naming the mountain Mount Kawukum, which he believes has American Indian roots.

"Words have power, and when you start mentioning words that come from the dark side, evil thrives," Mijares told the Contra Costa Times. "When I take boys camping on the mountain, I don't even like to say its name. I have to explain what the name means. Why should we have a main feature of our community that celebrates the devil?"

To make the change, Mijares would need to persuade federal, state and local governments that it's necessary. That may be easier said than done.

It's been called Mount Diablo for at least 164 years, and references to the mountain permeate thousands of maps, books and historical documents.

The name Kawukum first surfaced in 1866, when a church group tried to change Mount Diablo's name for reasons nearly identical to Mijares', according to San Francisco Bay area researcher Bev Ortiz.

"We abhor the wicked creature to whom the name is appropriate, and spurn the use of the name for anything noble or good on earth," proclaimed the Congregational Church of San Francisco in its newsletter of the day.

The church proposed Kawukum, spelled then as Kahwookum, "a word learned from an unidentified Indian living at the base of the mountain," Ortiz wrote in a history of the mountain's name. Members presented a name-change petition to the Legislature, but lawmakers postponed a decision indefinitely.

The name Mount Diablo grew from the Spanish name given to an Indian village set near a willow thicket in modern-day Concord, where Chupcans staged a daring nighttime escape during an 1805 military campaign.

Spanish soldiers said Indians evaded them only with the help of evil spirits and named the site "Monte del Diablo," or thicket of the devil, which American explorers later mistakenly applied to the mountain.

Students Rewarded for Tattling at School

ATLANTA Apr 26, 2005 ? For a growing number of students, the easiest way to make a couple of hundred dollars has nothing to do with chores or after-school jobs, and everything to do with informing on classmates.

Tragedies like last month's deadly shooting at a Red Lake, Minn., school have prompted more schools to offer cash and other prizes including pizza and premium parking spots to students who report classmates who carry guns, drugs or alcohol, commit vandalism or otherwise break school rules.

"For kids of that age, it's hard for them to tell on their peers. This gives them an opportunity to step up if they know something that will help us make an arrest," said James Kinchen, an assistant school superintendent in Houston County, Ga., which earlier this month started offering rewards of up to $100 for reporting relatively minor crimes like vandalism or theft and $500 for information about a crime, or plans for a crime, involving a gun.

Critics call them "snitch" programs, saying they are a knee-jerk reaction to student violence. Some education professionals fear such policies could create a climate of distrust in schools and turn students against each other.

"There are very few things that I can think of that would be more effective at destroying that sense of community," said Bruce Marlowe, an education psychology professor at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I.

About 2,000 schools and colleges, from Honolulu to Palm Beach County, Fla., have adopted Student Crime Stoppers programs like Houston County, according to the nonprofit Crime Stoppers U.S.A., which began helping schools set up such programs in 1983.

Most schools offer an anonymous phone line or a school drop box for tips. Rewards range from cash to gift certificates to free parking passes.

Elsewhere in Georgia, Model High School in Rome uses the proceeds from its candy and soda sales to pay students up to $100 for tips about drugs or weapons on campus or other crimes.

The goal: "Heading off some problems rather than waiting until they happen and responding afterward," said Tim Hensley, a school system spokesman.

Some students fear classmates with a grudge or set on making some quick money may level false accusations or plant drugs or weapons in their lockers.

But Houston County's Kinchen said: "That will sort itself out. Our officers deal with these kind of things every day; they can find out which kid is being set up and which kid is telling the truth."

At Model High, some of the 650 students complain that the program wrongly implies their school is dangerous. In a Rome News-Tribune cartoon, the school's official mascot was mockingly changed from the Blue Devils to the "Tattlers."

No one has received a reward yet at Model High.

"Everyone just thinks it's a joke. No one is going to tell on their friends for cash," said senior Katie Burnes, president of the school's National Honor Society chapter. "If someone brings a gun to school or is doing drugs in the bathroom, no one has to pay me to let the teachers know."

Frank Farley, an educational psychology professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, said students should be taught to speak up without being offered a reward.

"This idea of surveillance there's something unsavory there," Farley said. "We're familiar with the history of that in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany." He added: "I think it's bad civics."

Court Rules Against DVD Copy Preventions

PARIS - A French court has ordered DVD vendors to pull copies of the David Lynch film "Mulholland Drive" off store shelves as part of an unprecedented ruling against copy prevention techniques.

The appeals court ruled Friday that copy prevention software on the DVD violated privacy rights in the case of one consumer who had tried to transfer the film onto a video cassette for personal use.

The ruling could be a major setback for the DVD industry, which places lock software on disks as part of its battle against piracy. The industry blames illegal copying for millions of dollars in lost revenues each year.

"This ruling means that 80 percent of DVDs now on the French market are equipped with illegal mechanisms," said Julien Dourgnon, spokesman for consumer advocacy group UFC-Que Choisir, which brought the case.

"Stores will probably not have to send back products already in stock," Dourgnon said Tuesday. "But in the future, no DVD or CD that has the device can be sold."

France, along with other European Union members including Germany and Spain, has laws guaranteeing the right of consumers to copy recordings they have purchased for private use.

Lionel Thoumyre, a lawyer for the artist rights group Spedidam, said the ruling sets a new precedent in the European Union, where intellectual property laws are nearly identical among member states.

"This is brand new," he said. "I think this is the first judgment in Europe going in this direction."

The consumer group filed the suit on behalf of a man who bought the "Mulholland Drive" DVD and then wanted to copy the movie onto a videocassette so he could show the film at his mother's home.

The ruling overturned a lower court's decision in favor of the defendants, co-producers Alain Sarde Films and Studio Canal and distributor Universal. The suit was filed in 2003.

The defendants also were found guilty of violating French consumer protection laws, which state that a vendor must notify consumers of a product's essential characteristics.

The only notification of the copy prevention software on the DVD in this case were the letters "CP," short for "copying prohibited," in small print on the cover, a warning that the court found insufficient.

Gtting it wrong on multicore

For years, enterprise software has been sold on a per-CPU basis. The process was simple, easy-to-track and made sense for both vendors and users.

But now a rapidly emerging technology called the multicore processor is fundamentally changing the way computers interact with software. This change is adding multiple layers of complexity to the once-simple per-CPU model and forcing software companies to re-evaluate the way they are licensing their products.

Without getting into technical details, a multicore processor essentially makes a single processor computer behave like a multiprocessor computer without taking up an additional socket (what was once called a CPU). The result is essentially more processing power.

From a licensing standpoint, the question then becomes: "If a multicore processor provides better performance, shouldn't the vendor then charge for more licenses? And if so, how much more?"

The disruption of multicore processing has created two camps of software vendors that are arguing about which approach is better.
Major vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle are beginning to state new and conflicting positions on how their traditional per-CPU licensing models will be affected now that multicore processing has become mainstream.

The disruption of multicore processing has created two camps of software vendors that are arguing about which approach is better: counting by core or counting by socket.

Despite the debate around these technical approaches to the problem, both are missing a far more important piece of the equation. It?s not that either argument is right or wrong; it's that neither takes into account the actual value that customers are deriving out of the software. In other words, both approaches are focused on licensing the environment in which the software is being run, as opposed to the value that the customer is deriving from that software.

Another argument that adds complexity to the discussion is: "What if the application doesn?t need the full power of the machine?"

If you have two applications running on one machine with eight CPUs, each application will typically be licensed as though it is running on an eight-CPU machine, as if it were the only thing running on those CPUs. So not only do these models assume the application is taking advantage of all the CPUs on the machine, it is not clear (and highly unlikely) that you are getting twice the value from a machine that has twice the CPUs. Even worse, if a vendor charges just for the number of CPUs used by the application, it is frequently administered through a painful, manual auditing process.
The evolution of processing has placed a major strain on existing licensing models relying on CPUs.

Now that the definition of CPUs has changed, the relationship between the value and the number of cores, CPUs and threads makes the ratio even less predictable. It is even harder, if not impossible, to quantify the value.

Value is best measured by very application-specific benchmarks, such as what features or capabilities get accessed or the number of users connected. The lure and strength of CPU-based licensing has been its simplicity. You don't have to count transactions, for example; it's just a single static number.

But now there are several major shifts that are shaking up the simplicity--and very definition--of CPU-based thinking, including single core versus multicore, hyper-threaded CPUs and symmetric multithreading, among others. These technologies essentially make a single CPU act as if they were multiple virtual CPUs.

The evolution of processing has placed a major strain on existing licensing models relying on CPUs and calls for other models to be available. As the landscape has evolved, there have been other alternatives--including floating, utility, node lock, subscription and pay-per-use pricing--so that vendors and enterprises can charge and pay for the value of the software regardless of the processing environment. As CPU-based licensing becomes more complicated, many software vendors are reevaluating their need for these alternative models.

If vendors do not look to these value-based models, customers will be confused about what they are paying for. They will get frustrated that their license agreements do not align with the value they are deriving. This ultimately gives competitive advantage to those companies that better understand the relationship between value and licensing.

Those competitors that are better meeting customer needs by offering more flexible and sensible licensing models will have a distinct advantage in the marketplace. I don't think software vendors want to be caught playing catch-up, do you?

Creed Trumps Deed for Boy Scouts

(Washington, DC) The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) this week gave one of their top ranked Eagle Scouts an ultimatum: affirm a belief in a higher power or quit the Boy Scouts. ?This is the kind of lesson the Boy Scout leadership is teaching young men: despite devotion to a cause, despite dedication to others, despite accomplished service, if supernatural beliefs differ, then loyalty is cast aside. Creed clearly trumps deed,? points out Tony Hileman, executive director of the American Humanist Association (AHA).

Darrel Lambert earned the rank of Eagle Scout after ten years of dedication to the organization and community. If Lambert followed BSA?s advice and professed belief in a supreme being, it would be a lie. "I wouldn't be a good Scout then, would I?" he asked.

The Bedrock of Scouting Values, a BSA publication asserts, ?Our commitment is that no child can develop to his/her fullest potential without a spiritual element.? Derek Sweetman, a Humanist Eagle Scout asks, ?Why doesn? t performance alone prove worthiness? If the dedication and service is there, how is the person?s attitude toward religion relevant??

?Lambert is a prime example that a failure to believe in God does not equate to a failure of good citizenship,? said Hileman.

The BSA is teaching youth to ignore accomplishments in favor of a declaration, sincere or not. By attempting to force a statement from Mr. Lambert the Boy Scouts of America are trivializing the meaning of belief. Hileman declared, ?Its time for the BSA to live up to its own standards and end this practice of exclusion.?

SUV owners get free gas -- courtesy of Uncle Sam

How would you like the U.S. government to send you a check that would pay for five years' worth of gasoline?

Well, it can be arranged.

Not everyone is eligible, of course. But if you use a vehicle 100% for business and purchase it, new or used, from a select list of big-time gas-guzzlers, Uncle Sam is ready to help you out.

Yes, I'm talking about the well-publicized special tax break for vehicles with a gross weight of at least 6,000 pounds. Gross weight is the weight of the vehicle including fuel, passengers and payload. Because of this, gross weight can be a good deal more than the empty weight of the vehicle.

Forty-one domestic and 15 foreign SUVs qualify for this tax break. The Porsche Cayenne, a notably business-like vehicle, is among them. As a consequence, while the depreciation write-off for any passenger car used for business is limited to only $2,960 in 2005, down from $10,610 in 2004, those claiming 100% business use of these SUVs could deduct 100% of the $89,665 price of the Porsche Cayenne Turbo during 2003 and until late October 2004. For those who bought in time, the write-off represented an immediate income tax savings of $31,383, provided the buyer was in the 35% tax bracket. Think of it as a bagatelle for the non-indigent from the Jobs and Growth Act of 2003.

One of the particularly compelling uses I've seen of this tax break was a bright parrot-green Hummer2 parked at a luxury marina in Burnt Store, Fla. A sign on the driver's door advertised a dress shop.

Tightened, not closed, loophole
Many readers will note (some with sorrow) that this tax break brought so much well-deserved excoriation to legislators that they closed it.

"Tightened" would be a better description.

If you failed to buy your Porsche Cayenne Turbo by last October, don't despair. Uncle Sam still wants to help. The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 reduced the immediate deduction to $25,000. In addition, you can take normal depreciation on the remaining value. Normal depreciation is 20%. That would be about $13,000 for the Cayenne Turbo.

So your total tax deduction would be $38,000. For those in the 35% tax bracket, that calculates to an immediate tax savings of $13,300.

Can you say 'counterproductive'?
That, of course is mere money. Suppose we measure the benefit in something of global importance, like gasoline.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy's Fuel Economy Web site, the Cayenne Turbo gets 13 mpg in the city, 18 mpg on the highway. It has an estimated annual fuel cost of $2,241, assuming a premium fuel price of $2.24 a gallon.

Divide the immediate income-tax savings by the annual cost of gasoline and you get the answer: Uncle Sam will pay for 14 years of gasoline, if you bought under the Jobs and Growth Act of 2003, or 5.9 years, if you bought under the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004. The table below shows the approximate years of fuel Uncle Sam paid for business guzzler buyers under both sets of rules. This assumes a typical annual gasoline cost of $2,000 and a 35% tax bracket buyer. The lowest subsidy covers over four years of gasoline.

It suggests that we should have a spelling bee for legislators to determine how many can spell "counterproductive."

Tax savings for guzzler buyers reduce government revenue, increase the federal deficit, increase our trade deficit, and send yet more money to the Middle East. If we were going to devise a formula for wrecking the country, it would be difficult to improve on this one. We might as well call this portion of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 the Osama Bin Laden Support Fund.

Video shows police handcuffing 5-year-old

ST. PETERSBURG - Videotape was rolling March 14 when the 5-year-old girl swung again and again, her bantam punches landing on the outstretched palms of Nicole Dibenedetto, the new assistant principal at Fairmount Park Elementary.

She tore papers off Dibenedetto's bulletin board and desk. She climbed on a table four times. About an hour had passed since she refused to participate in a kindergarten math lesson, which escalated into a series of defiant and destructive acts.

Dibenedetto had used tactics from a Pinellas school district training called Crisis Prevention Intervention:

Let the child know her actions have consequences but also try to "de-escalate."

Give her opportunities to end the conflict.

Try not to touch her, defend yourself and make sure no one else gets hurt.

As St. Petersburg police officers arrived shortly after 3 p.m., the girl suddenly sat quietly at Dibenedetto's table. And, just as suddenly, the tactics used by educators gave way to the more direct approach of law enforcement.

An officer sternly said the girl's name. Then: "You need to calm down. You need to do it now. OK?"

Seconds later, three officers approached and placed their hands on the girl's wrists and upper arms. They stood her up, put her arms behind her back and put on handcuffs. She bent over the table and let out a terrified scream.

"No. Nooooo. Ahhhhh."

The tape ends there.

Largo lawyer John Trevena provided it to the St. Petersburg Times this week after obtaining it from police.

"The image itself will be seared into people's minds when you have three police officers bending a child over a table and forcibly handcuffing her," said Trevena, who represents the girl's mother, Inga Akins. "It's incomprehensible ... She was sitting calmly at the table. There was no need for that."

The Police Department declined to comment, citing an official complaint by Akins that has sparked an investigation by the supervisor of the four officers involved. Two are new officers who were being trained that day. Police spokesman Bill Proffitt said the investigation would be complete in about two weeks and the findings would be made public.

The tape's existence is a fluke. The girl's teacher, Christina Ottersbach, was videotaping her class as a self-improvement exercise, district officials have said. Educators simply kept the camera rolling when the girl began to act out, prompting Dibenedetto to intervene and Ottersbach to escort her other students to another classroom.

Later, Ottersbach retrieved the camera from the classroom when the girl began to make a mess of Dibenedetto's office.

The tape, which lasts about 30 minutes, begins with Dibenedetto alone in the classroom with the girl, saying the child's name frequently as part of her commands.

"You need to stop," she tells her, using her hands to make the sign language signal for stop. "You don't get to wreck the room."

Using her radio, she calls for help from teacher Patti Tsaousis. She also asks the school office to call the girl's mother and tell her the school will have to call Pinellas Schools police if the behavior continues.

Word comes back that the mother would not be able to make it until 3:15 p.m. It is shortly after 2 p.m.

A short time later, the girl is heard off camera breaking a ceramic or plastic apple on Ottersbach's desk.

"Oh, you broke her apple," Dibenedetto says. "That is so sad."

Throughout the 23-minute segment in the classroom, the assistant principal tells the girl many times to stop, that her actions are "not acceptable." She tells her she needs to take her to her office to prepare for her mother's arrival.

The girl responds to each request with a curt, "No." When the girl reaches out to strike them at times, Dibenedetto and Tsaousis tell her to stop and hold their hands up in defense.

Dibenedetto and Tsaousis have two breakthroughs - once when they persuade the girl to clean up a small mess she made near Ottersbach's office and another when they finally get her to leave the classroom with them.

In the second instance, Dibenedetto brings herself to eye level with the girl and tries to get her to talk about why she's upset. She gives the girl the option of walking with her or Tsaousis to the office. When the girl relents, the educators praise her for making an "excellent choice."

The Times interviewed several top educators, including two district officials who had seen the video and two professors at the University of South Florida's College of Education.

All praised Dibenedetto for using patience and good training in a tough situation. They said she gave the girl wide latitude to opt for better behavior, used clear commands, called for help from another educator, removed the other students from the room for their safety and to eliminate an audience for the girl, reinforced commands with hand motions and successfully avoided physical confrontation.

Touching the girl, they said, would have escalated the situation.

The two educators "can't control what the children do, but they can control how they respond to it and, to me, they responded admirably," said Robert Egley, an assistant education professor at USF in St. Petersburg. "I give them an A-plus."

Trevena, the lawyer, disagreed, saying it appeared to him the two educators followed the girl too closely around the room. "It almost seemed like there was an intent to provoke the child," he said.

Akins, the girl's mother, said she had complained to the school about the assistant principal's treatment of her daughter. She said the administrator has been too harsh with the girl. The police had been called to the school at least once before in response to the girl's behavior. The girl has since transferred to another public school.

Dibenedetto could not be reached Thursday for comment.

More clear cut, Trevena said, are the police officers' actions and the Police Department's reaction. "It should have been denounced (by department higher-ups) as absurd, as excessive," he said. "That, I think, is even more alarming."

After being placed in the back of a police cruiser, police released the girl to her mother after the State Attorney's Office informed them a 5-year-old would never be prosecuted.

Educators declined to discuss the Police Department's role in the incident. But they all agreed that once police are called to a school, the situation is theirs to run. "I wasn't physically there," said Mike Bessette, an area superintendent whose responsibility includes Fairmount Park Elementary. "I take it they felt they needed to do what they did."

< There is so much wrong with this situation it's hard to know where to begin. I guess I'll let the rest of the world over-react about the cops... which leaves this: It is certainly more wrong to let a fucking brat destroy your office than to tie her bitch-ass to a chair. This doesn't mean you have to swing on her, but you certainly would be morally correct in defending yourself and public property in a circumstance such as this. With this security and lawsuit state we live in, of course bullshit like this is going to happen. The only way to stop it is to stop playing into it to these absurd extremes. The girl was wrong, the cops were wrong, and the assistant principal was more wrong than anyone else. The situation could have been "sit your ass down 'til your mom gets here" instead of this bullshit. >

Turin law: Walk your dog 3 times a day -- or be fined

ROME, Italy (Reuters) -- Dog owners in Turin will be fined up to $650 if they don't walk their pets at least three times a day, under a new law from the city's council.

People will also be banned from dyeing their pets' fur or "any form of animal mutilation" for merely aesthetic motives such as docking dogs' tails, under the law about to be passed in the northern Italian city.

"In Turin it will be illegal to turn one's dog into a ridiculous fluffy toy," the city's La Stampa daily reported.

Italians can already be fined up to 10,000 euros and spend a year in prison if found guilty of torturing or abandoning their pets, but Turin's new rules go into much greater detail.

Dogs may be led for walks by people on bicycles, the rules say, "but not in a way that would tire the animal too much."

On Broadway, Ads Now Get to Play Cameo Roles

In 1966, when the Neil Simon musical "Sweet Charity" opened on Broadway, a waiter in one scene asked a customer, "A double Scotch, again, sir?" In the revival, soon to open at the Al Hirschfeld Theater, the waiter asks, "Gran Centenario, the tequila?"

Madison Avenue has come to Broadway.

Product placement and endorsement deals have long been staples in television shows, movies and radio programs and even, more recently, on video games. But they have been rare on Broadway. Now, advertisers, casting about for new ways to attract increasingly distracted consumers, have turned their attention to the theater world. And producers, always looking for extra cash to offset rising costs, are receptive.

"Commerce and art always merge, unless it's some hermit who takes his creative ability into a cave," said Barry Weissler, who is producing the revival of "Sweet Charity" with his wife, Fran. "Picasso was a brilliant artist who was extremely commercial. He understood how to sell and market his work. And it kept his prices up."

"Are we so pure that we can't accept a commercial adjunct to what we create?" Mr. Weissler asked rhetorically. "I don't think so."

In addition to the deal that Gran Centenario has with "Sweet Charity," which is now in previews and is scheduled to open May 4, the Hormel Foods Corporation, which makes Spam canned meat, has endorsed the musical "Monty Python's Spamalot." "Spam hasn't gotten this much attention since World War II," said Nancy Coyne, chief executive at Serino Coyne, an ad agency in New York that worked on the "Spamalot" deals. Yahoo also has a deal with "Spamalot."

Hilton Hotels and Resorts is sponsoring the musical "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," playing, not coincidentally, at the Hilton Theater. Turtle Wax is endorsing the musical "Good Vibrations," which closes Sunday. And Visa sponsored the national tour of the musical "Movin' Out."

The deals are for amounts estimated to range from $500,000 to more than $1 million, depending on how long they last and how extensive they are. But just as there are critics of shows, there are critics of branding Broadway, who worry about blurring the line between art and commerce.

"It's sad to see Broadway become part of the marketing machinery, turning into another vehicle to help marketers bombard us with ads," said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a nonprofit organization in Portland, Ore., that seeks to stem what its members consider the creeping commercialization of American culture.

Madison Avenue, needless to say, has a different perspective.

Broadway is "an uncluttered environment where you don't have to share the spotlight as on television or in the movies," said Ms. Coyne, whose agency, owned by the Omnicom Group, specializes in theatrical marketing.

"And it's a more memorable experience because it's live," she added. "At 8 o'clock, the curtain goes up, and at 10:30, it goes down. And if you weren't there, you missed it."

Most of the details would not raise eyebrows, like the two drinks created by Gran Centenario to salute the show being sold in the Hirschfeld lobby and bars near the theater, and sponsorship of cast parties. In a dance number, crates bearing the brand logo appear onstage, and print ads call the brand, which has an angel in its logo, "Broadway's newest angel." In the theater world, of course, an angel is an investor.

The reference to Gran Centenario in the revised script is "elegant, organic, not forced," said Carlos Arana, managing director in New York for Jose Cuervo International, which makes Gran Centenario.

Mr. Arana and Mr. Weissler said that Mr. Simon, whose approval was necessary to rewrite the line, agreed to the change. A representative for Mr. Simon said yesterday that he could not be reached for comment.

Until now, advertisers have not often sought out Broadway for branded entertainment deals because the theater business is smaller than the entertainment industries they typically work with. And because theater is more entrepreneurial in nature, it is often harder to make deals there than with media conglomerates.

Previous Broadway deals were limited to traditional tactics, like placing products onstage in exchange for acknowledgements in tiny type under the "Credits" section in the back pages of Playbill. And if, say, Frank Loesser mentioned Vitalis and Barbasol in "Guys and Dolls," it was for purposes of verisimilitude, not because the makers paid their way into the song.

Elaborate branded entertainment deals were once rare on Broadway. One, in 1994, was a promotion by the producers of the revival of "Damn Yankees" and the maker of Topps baseball cards, which included adding to the script a scene featuring oversize cards bearing the likeness of the hero, Joe Hardy, and selling a line of "Damn Yankees" trading cards in the theater lobby. And the production of "La Bohème" that played on Broadway in 2002 featured brands like Piper-Heidsieck Champagne and Montblanc pens onstage.

As with stadiums and arenas, selling the naming rights to theaters has become popular, too; in addition to the Hilton Theater, formerly the Ford Center, there is the Cadillac Winter Garden and the American Airlines Theater.

Hilton likes Broadway because "there's no better tie-in than theatergoers," said Jeff Diskin, senior vice president for brand management at Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. "They're part of the traveler-customer demographic we're trying to reach, and they tend to have the means to stay in hotels."

The Hilton endorsement of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," now in previews and scheduled to open Thursday, includes a sweepstakes, travel packages that offer show tickets along with rooms in Hilton hotels, and parties for top Hilton customers at a V.I.P. room in the theater.

Hilton's deal for the theater naming rights, made with the Clear Channel Entertainment Properties division of Clear Channel Communications, is for "more than five years," Mr. Diskin said.

Hormel agreed to license the Spam name for the "Camelot"-spoofing title of the Monty Python show. Hormel is also selling in the New York market a special Golden Honey Grail flavor of Spam, in cans bearing tongue-in-cheek labels declaring it the "Wicked awesome 'Spamalot' collector's edition." "We didn't think Spam and Broadway would ever be hand in hand," said Larry L. Vorpahl, vice president and general manager for grocery products at Hormel in Austin, Minn.

"We like to be out there with the brand, and we like to have fun with the brand," Mr. Vorpahl said. "It's a perfect way to take advantage of the fun, the comedy, and attach our name to it."

Hormel was also interested in the deal because "Spamalot" was conceived as a musical that would appeal to men, particularly younger men, who are a particularly desirable demographic target for Spam, Mr. Vorpahl said.

That was also the reason Yahoo sought out the "Spamalot" producers after company executives learned that the plot would reprise elements of the 1975 film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

"We thought, 'the search for the holy grail,' " said Murray Gaylord, vice president for brand marketing at Yahoo in Sunnyvale, Calif., "and search is a big interest for Yahoo," especially when it comes to the younger computer users who are filling, or potentially filling, the seats at the Shubert.

"It's the first time we've done anything like this on Broadway," Mr. Gaylord said.

As part of the "Spamalot" deal, said Linda Bennett, senior director for buzz marketing at Yahoo in New York, the brand has been written into the script: A character says "Yahoo" (minus the yodel) and the company appears as a make-believe sponsor of an on-stage routine .

There are offstage elements, too. An actor stands outside the theater dressed in armor that bears the logo of the Yahoo Mail Spamguard service. And the show is promoted on the Yahoo Web site (yahoo.com).

Congress confuses file sharing with manslaughter

Making a movie available electronically prior to its release can now result in a three year sentence, thanks to the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act approved Tuesday by the House. The Senate has already passed its own version, and the final bill is expected to be signed by the President.

The bill also calls for three years in cases where a person is caught recording a movie in a theater with a camcorder - and six years for a second offence. It also indemnifies theater operators against all criminal and civil liabilities arising from detaining suspects "in a reasonable manner." (Welcome to movie jail.)

Since involuntary manslaughter brings, on average, anywhere from 0 to 36 months' incarceration, one might well question the morality of going harder on those who trade files than on those who negligently cut short the lives of fellow citizens. But the 109th Congress is about nothing if not morality, and it understands well the essential sacredness of the nation's ruling cartels.

Previously, criminal laws protecting copyright had been designed to target major, organized bootleggers doing serious damage, not individuals swapping files. The new legislation is designed to broaden the law to where almost anyone can now be treated as a hardcore criminal. And since we have seen the entertainment cartels using the civil courts to conduct a vendetta against file sharers in hopes of chastening them overall, one can expect that the same examples will be made of small fry using these new, quite Draconian, criminal sanctions as well.

Email destroys the mind faster than marijuana - study

Modern technology depletes human cognitive abilities more rapidly than drugs, according to a psychiatric study conducted at King's College, London. And the curse of 'messaging' is to blame.

Email users suffered a 10 per cent drop in IQ scores, more than twice the fall recorded by marijuana users, in a clinical trial of over a thousand participants. Doziness, lethargy and an inability to focus are classic characteristics of a spliffhead, but email users exhibited these particular symptoms to a "startling" degree, according to Dr Glenn Wilson.

The deterioration in mental capacity was the direct result of the trialists' addiction to technology, researchers discovered.

Email addicts were bombarded by context switches and developed an inability to distinguish between trivial and significant messages. Incredibly, 20 per cent of trialists jeopardized their immediate social relations by rushing off to "check their messages" in the middle of a conversation.

Wilson's research is no flash in the pan. Computer technology in its modern, "interconnected" form is dumbing down the population more rapidly than television.

A study of 100,000 school children in over 30 countries around the world testified that non-computer using kids performed better in literacy and numeracy schools than PC-using children. Education experts have dubbed it the "problem solving deficit disorder".

Awash with facts, we've forgotten how to think.

King's College's pioneering study focussed solely on messaging - but there are many other emerging technologies that could be dumbing down technologies too, and their consequences haven't been fully explored.

Police Payoff Probe

April 21, 2005 -- Two NYPD veterans are being investigated by Internal Affairs for allegedly accepting payoffs from the motion-picture industry to arrest vendors of pirated DVDs, law-enforcement sources told The Post.

One officer, a sergeant on the force since 1992, has been transferred from the Staten Island Task Force to the 122nd Precinct pending the internal investigation.

The other, a cop for five years, still works on the task force.

As members of the unit, the officers, ages 36 and 32, would arrest the sellers of illegal DVDs and confiscate their stock.

Often they would act on tips from investigators with the Motion Picture Association of America, many of whom are former cops, sources said.

There is nothing improper about that practice. But on at least four occasions in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Staten Island, the task force officers arrested the vendors, confiscated the illegal movies and then allegedly received gratuities of several hundred dollars from the MPAA itself or its investigators, the source said.

The MPAA strongly denied that the payoffs came from the trade organization.

"We don't give cash to police officers," said Bill Shannon, an MPAA anti-piracy official.

"We work with law-enforcement organizations by providing information and logistical support, and the police make the arrests."

No department charges have been filed against the NYPD officers, and neither is on modified duty.

The Staten Island Task Force last made headlines in 2003, when one of its members, Officer Bryan Conroy, allegedly shot and killed Ousmane Zongo, an unarmed African immigrant, inside a Manhattan storage warehouse.

Conroy and other officers were at the warehouse to bust DVD pirates.

Zongo, who spoke little English, was an innocent bystander. Conroy's trial earlier this year ended in a hung jury. He will be retried this summer.

The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that it loses $3.5 billion in potential worldwide revenue because of movie piracy.

Hollywood has stepped up its effort to bust video and DVD pirates.

An MPAA tip, for example, led to the recent prosecution of Randy Guthrie, the black sheep of a blueblood New York family, who was recently sentenced to 21/2 years in a Chinese jail for selling nearly $1 million in pirated movies over the Internet.

This Mouse Won't Hunt

Lawmakers from Augusta to Sacramento are locking and loading to shoot down a Web site that purports to let people hunt big game online. This topic has been heating up for more than a month after Texas-based Live-Shot.com opened for business, and is finally gaining front-burner status after a prominent Republican congressman introduced a bill to outlaw Internet hunting nationwide.

Explaining his bill, Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) said last week that "fair chase is a basic element of hunting. You have to be there, in the field, not sitting behind a computer screen."

Davis's views are shared across the country and across the partisan aisle. California State Sen. Debra Bowen (D) told Reuters that "Pay-per-view hunting doesn't meet any definition of 'sporting' that I've ever heard because there's nothing 'sporting' about sitting at your computer in your pajamas, using your mouse to shoot at hogs or antelope or any other animal that's halfway across the country."

But hold your fire, at least for a moment. People who don't hunt sometimes imagine all hunters as backwoods bubbas or weekend warriors from the city who can't shoot straight. In this situation, however, the poster-boy for the preservation of Live-Shot.com is Dale Hagberg, a 38-year-old quadriplegic who couldn't lift a rifle, let alone engage in "fair chase" in the field.

Hagberg, as the Los Angeles Times noted, worked a computer mouse with his mouth and tongue on Saturday, April 9, to shoot at an antelope on a game reserve near Boeme, Texas, while lying in bed in Ligonier, a town in northeastern Indiana.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter Jay Root provided more details of how Live-Shot.com works: "The system is pretty simple. The remote hunter can zoom in and out of the target area by operating remote cameras and has a control panel with four arrows in a circle and a 'fire' button in the middle. With a few mouse clicks, the hunter can swivel and fire a Remington Model 742 .30-'06 mounted on a pan-tilt motor," Root reported. Of course, he noted, "there has to be something to fire at ... For several hours in the morning and evening Saturday, Lockwood scoured a small swath of a ranch near Guadalupe River State Park for any sign of the black buck that Hagberg paid $1,300 for. If [Hagberg] doesn't shoot the animal before the end of August, when his Texas hunting license expires, Lockwood said, he'll refund the money."

Dale plans to try again on Saturday, April 30, Dale's father Robert Hagberg told me in an interview this morning.

If 14 states and a flock of furious animal rights activists have their way, however, Hagberg and other would-be Internet hunters will be banished to video-game territory. Virginia already has banned online hunting, as has Tennessee. Similar efforts are afoot in Maine, California and Texas.

Lawmakers opposed to sites like Live-Shot.com have plenty of allies. UKPets.co.uk reported that Humane Society President Wayne Pacelle is asking Internet service providers to block access to the site, while the Los Angeles Times quotes Texas Wildlife Association Executive Vice President Kirby L. Brown as saying, "It's not hunting... It falls off of the end of the ethical chart."

The L.A. Times presented an interesting point of view from Dale Jamieson, an environmental studies and philosophy professor at New York University. He said that Live-Shot is "an understandable, if disturbing, extension of a computer society that produces games like 'Grand Theft Auto.' Jamieson: "If you look at this as being kind of a continuum or slippery slope ... you have people who enjoy the act of killing and destruction in video games, you have people who enjoy killing animals over the Internet. But of course the next step in this is that people start killing people over the Internet. That's the worry."

That seems a bit far-fetched. Moving from Internet game-hunting to real-life versions of "The Most Dangerous Game" seems like a slope that's more slippery than Rick Santorum's views about where homosexuality will lead our society.

Shooting animals through an Internet connection might seem distasteful to those who oppose hunting on moral grounds to begin with, but using a broadband connection to bag game isn't any better or worse than doing it in person. I can't say whether I think that Dale Hagberg should have a right to hunt despite being paralyzed -- that will be a matter for Rep. Davis and 14 statehouses to deal with.
Just Offshoring

You've probably heard a lot of news reports about "offshoring" and "outsourcing," the practice of transferring jobs to cheaper labor markets overseas. Technology and lots of other companies like it because it saves them money and prevents them from having to procure lots of costly and difficult temporary worker visas for foreign talent to work back here in the states. Lots of unemployed Americans aren't so hot about the practice because they see it as taking jobs out of America. The practical effect, as many of you know, is that your customer support call might get answered in Bangalore rather than Bangor.

Two high-tech executives, however, think they might be able to move outsourced staff a little closer to the United States -- just off the coast of Los Angeles, as a matter of fact. Sourcingmag.com reported that entrepreneurs Roger Green and David Cook plan to position an old cruise ship just off the coast of El Segundo and set up a 24-hour-a-day programming shop, "thereby avoiding H-1B visa hassles while still exploiting offshore labor cost arbitrage and completing development projects in half the time they'd take onshore or offshore."

"The scheme first came to Mr. Cook one day while he was cutting his grass in San Diego. With his unusual background as a super-tanker captain and an IT professional, the idea made a lot of sense to him. He took it to Mr. Green, with whom he'd worked before and who has served as both a buyer and provider of outsourcing services, and they saw the possibility of creating a new form of IT sourcing," the site reported. "A year ago, they formed SeaCode, Inc. with Mr. Cook serving as CEO and Mr. Green as COO. They've signed on a marketing director and CTO and, even more importantly, found an investor. Start-up costs won't be cheap. A broker right now is searching for just the right ship to buy -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million." The advantage? It's a big, big time-saver for harried execs, Green told SourcingMag.

The company plans to use U.S. Internet connections and telecommunications access. On a very practical level, it also plans all sorts of first-class amenities for its residents as well as frequent ship-to-shore service via boat and helicopter: "These workers, they say, will each have private rooms with baths, meal service, laundry service, housekeeping and access to on-board leisure-time activities. Picture the Love Boat with a timecard."

< Aww, you missed the kill-zone, now the deer's a quadrapalegic too.

For the record, we are for animal rights but think the other people who are often go too far. There's a lot of people who deserve to live less than animals, and I don't mean ones who are convicted of something. >

Feds' weather information could go dark

Do you want a seven-day weather forecast for your ZIP code? Or hour-by-hour predictions of the temperature, wind speed, humidity and chance of rain? Or weather data beamed to your cellphone?

That information is available for free from the National Weather Service.

But under a bill pending in the U.S. Senate, it might all disappear.

The bill, introduced last week by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., would prohibit federal meteorologists from competing with companies such as AccuWeather and The Weather Channel, which offer their own forecasts through paid services and free ad-supported Web sites.

Supporters say the bill wouldn't hamper the weather service or the National Hurricane Center from alerting the public to hazards ? in fact, it exempts forecasts meant to protect "life and property."

But critics say the bill's wording is so vague they can't tell exactly what it would ban.

"I believe I've paid for that data once. ... I don't want to have to pay for it again," said Scott Bradner, a technical consultant at Harvard University.

He says that as he reads the bill, a vast amount of federal weather data would be forced offline.

"The National Weather Service Web site would have to go away," Bradner said. "What would be permitted under this bill is not clear ? it doesn't say. Even including hurricanes."

Nelson questions intention

The decision of what information to remove would be up to Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez ? possibly followed, in the event of legal challenges, by a federal judge.

A spokesman for Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., said the bill threatens to push the weather service back to a "pre-Internet era" ? a questionable move in light of the four hurricanes that struck the state last year. Nelson serves on the Senate Commerce Committee, which has been assigned to consider the bill.

"The weather service proved so instrumental and popular and helpful in the wake of the hurricanes. How can you make an argument that we should pull it off the Net now?" said Nelson's spokesman, Dan McLaughlin. "What are you going to do, charge hurricane victims to go online, or give them a pop-up ad?"

But Barry Myers, AccuWeather's executive vice president, said the bill would improve public safety by making the weather service devote its efforts to hurricanes, tsunamis and other dangers, rather than duplicating products already available from the private sector.

"The National Weather Service has not focused on what its core mission should be, which is protecting other people's lives and property," said Myers, whose company is based in State College, Pa. Instead, he said, "It spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year, every day, producing forecasts of 'warm and sunny.'"

Santorum made similar arguments April 14 when introducing his bill. He also said expanded federal services threaten the livelihoods of private weather companies.

"It is not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers, subscribers or investors when the government is providing similar products and services for free," Santorum said.

AccuWeather has been an especially vocal critic of the weather service and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The company has accused the federal agencies of withholding data on hurricanes and other hazards, and failing to ensure that employees don't feed upcoming forecasts to favored investors in farming and energy markets.

Weather service expands data

The rivalry intensified last year, when NOAA shelved a 1991 policy that had barred the weather agency from offering services that private industry could provide.

Also last year, the weather service began offering much of its raw data on the Internet in an easily digestible format, allowing entrepreneurs and hobbyists to write simple programs to retrieve the information. At the same time, the weather service's own Web pages have become increasingly sophisticated.

Combined, the trends threaten AccuWeather's business of providing detailed weather reports based on an array of government and private data. AccuWeather's 15,000 customers include The Palm Beach Post, which uses the company's hurricane forecast maps on its Web site, PalmBeachPost.com.

NOAA has taken no position on the bill. But Ed Johnson, the weather service's director of strategic planning and policy, said his agency is expanding its online offerings to serve the public.

"If someone claims that our core mission is just warning the public of hazardous conditions, that's really impossible unless we forecast the weather all the time," Johnson said. "You don't just plug in your clock when you want to know what time it is."

Myers argued that nearly all consumers get their weather information for free through commercial providers, including the news media, so there's little reason for the federal agency to duplicate their efforts.

"Do you really need that from the NOAA Web site?" he asked.

But some weather fans, such as Bradner, say they prefer the federal site's ad-free format.

Another supporter of the weather service's efforts, Tallahassee database analyst John Simpson, said the plethora of free data becoming available could eventually fuel a new industry of small and emerging companies that would repackage the information for public consumption. He said a similar explosion occurred in the 1990s, when corporations' federal securities filings became freely available on the Web.

Shutting off the information flow would stifle that innovation and solidify the major weather companies' hold on the market, Simpson said.

Santorum's bill also would require the weather service to provide "simultaneous and equal access" to its information.

That would prevent weather service employees from favoring some news outlets over others, which Santorum and Myers said has happened in some markets. But it also could end the common practice of giving one-on-one interviews to individual reporters who have questions about storms, droughts or other weather patterns.

"What we want is to make sure that whatever information is provided to one source is provided to all," Myers said.

But Johnson said it's importanst to answer reporters' questions so the public receives accurate information ? especially when lives are at stake.

"We are not interested in turning off our telephones," Johnson said. "I would be concerned that that would actually be dangerous."

S.F. Bid to sue over LSD rejected

A federal judge has tentatively ordered dismissal of a $12 million lawsuit against the U.S. government, filed by a former deputy marshal who said he was unknowingly drugged with LSD as part of a CIA mind-control program before trying to hold up a San Francisco bar nearly a half century ago.

In earlier rulings, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel rejected the government's attempts to dismiss Wayne Ritchie's suit and said he had shown that a CIA mind-control experiment code-named MKULTRA was operating in San Francisco in December 1957, when Ritchie says he was drugged.

During the program, which lasted at least a decade at the height of the Cold War, hundreds of unwitting Americans were given LSD and other drugs to study their possible use in behavioral control.

But after hearing Ritchie and other witnesses testify on his behalf at a nonjury trial last week, Patel ruled that Ritchie had failed to prove that LSD led to his criminal and psychological problems.

"It is not clear by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Ritchie was administered LSD,'' the judge said at Friday's hearing, according to a transcript obtained Tuesday. "It may be what happened. But this is a court of law. We don't operate on hunches. We have to operate on the facts.''

Federal agents in San Francisco were doing "things that were reprehensible,'' Patel said, but Ritchie was unable to prove that they did anything to him.

She gave Ritchie's lawyer until next Wednesday to file written arguments that might change her mind. The lawyer, Sidney Bender, said Monday that he would argue that the absence of written records to substantiate Ritchie's claims was due to the government's destruction of documents.

"There was a very compelling case for the plaintiff,'' Bender said. He said his expert witness, psychiatrist James Ketchum, a longtime researcher in the field, testified that "the only plausible cause was LSD.''

But Patel said she couldn't fully credit Ketchum's diagnosis because it was conducted so long after the fact. The government said Ritchie was merely drunk that night.

Ritchie, now 77 and living in San Jose, was a 30-year-old deputy U.S. marshal and Marine Corps veteran with a spotless record in December 1957. According to his testimony, he had four or five bourbon and soda drinks over several hours at an office Christmas party, left, and soon started feeling overwhelmed by depression and paranoia.

He retrieved his two revolvers, tried to rob a bar in the Fillmore neighborhood, got distracted, and was hit over the head and knocked unconscious. Ritchie pleaded guilty to attempted robbery and was fined $500.

Plagued by flashbacks and suicidal urges for years, Ritchie spent 34 years as a house painter before retiring in 1992. Seven years later, he read a newspaper article about MKULTRA and concluded he may have been one of its victims.

According to congressional testimony and other records, federal agents started giving mind-altering drugs to volunteers and unwitting subjects in the early 1950s and continued for at least a decade in an unsuccessful attempt to discover methods to control human consciousness.

One subject committed suicide in 1953. The government paid $750,000 to his widow and another $750,000 to nine Canadians who underwent MKULTRA experiments during psychiatric treatment. The government won a New York jury verdict in 1999 in the only other known case besides Ritchie's to go to trial.

Ritchie's case relied in part on a diary entry by an MKULTRA agent, Ira Feldman, that Ritchie's lawyer interpreted as admitting he was at the office party. In sworn depositions, Feldman at first denied that he knew Ritchie, but later referred to "this nitwit, Ritchie'' who "deserved to suffer.'' Patel, in a ruling in May, said the latter statements could be taken as an admission that Feldman had drugged Ritchie.

On Friday, Patel said that Ritchie, who had the burden of proof, had failed to establish at the trial that Feldman or any other agents were at the party. She also said Ritchie's description of his own behavior showed few of the known symptoms of LSD use.

Police in Ariz. Seek Monkey for SWAT Team

MESA, Ariz. - The Mesa Police Department is looking to add some primal instinct to its SWAT team. And to do that, it's looking to a monkey.

"Everybody laughs about it until they really start thinking about it," said Mesa Officer Sean Truelove, who builds and operates tactical robots for the suburban Phoenix SWAT team. "It would change the way we do business."

Truelove is spearheading the department's request to purchase and train a capuchin monkey, considered the second smartest primate to the chimpanzee. The department is seeking about $100,000 in federal grant money to put the idea to use in Mesa SWAT operations.

The monkey, which costs $15,000, is what Truelove envisions as the ultimate SWAT reconnaissance tool.

Since 1979, capuchin monkeys have been trained to be companions for people who are quadriplegics by performing daily tasks, such as serving food, opening and closing doors, turning lights on and off, retrieving objects and brushing hair.

Truelove hopes the same training could prepare a monkey for special-ops intelligence.

Weighing only 3 to 8 pounds with tiny humanlike hands and puzzle-solving skills, Truelove said it could unlock doors, search buildings and find suicide victims on command. Dressed in a Kevlar vest, video camera and two-way radio, the small monkey would be able to get into places no officer or robot could go.

It has been a little over a year since Truelove filed a grant proposal with the U.S. Department of Defense under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and he is still waiting for word.

If the grant goes through, Truelove plans on learning how to train the monkey himself and keeping the sociable monkey at home, just like a K-9 officer would. He projects that $85,000 in grant money would outfit the monkey with gear and pay for veterinarian care, food and habitat for three years.

Bush Says Raising Retirement Age a Possibility

COLUMBIA, S.C. (Reuters) - President Bush said on Monday proposals to raise the retirement age for Social Security benefits and restructuring those benefits to be more generous to low-income workers are among possibilities for overhauling the country's largest entitlement program.

Bush mentioned the possible ways to preserve Social Security's solvency and called for Congress to come together to make the tough choices in an address before a joint session of South Carolina's Republican-controlled legislature.

At the same time, he painted a dire picture of Social Security's future if nothing is done, saying problems would start in three years when the first baby-boomers retire.

"By 2034 the annual shortfall will be more than $300 billion and by the year 2041 the entire system will be bankrupt," he said.

He appealed directly to younger workers in his uphill battle to convince Americans of the need for private retirement accounts as part of the Social Security system.

Bush said younger Americans are comfortable with investing in stocks and bonds and the system would be set up so the money would not be wasted at the racetrack or in a lottery.

"Telling younger workers they have to save money in a 1930s retirement system is like telling them they have to use a cell phone with a rotary dial," Bush said.

He hailed various experts and Republican and Democratic lawmakers for offering proposals for changing the system. He praised in particular South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham for a proposal to raise the cap on Social Security taxes paid by high-income earners. Conservatives have called that a tax increase.

Graham has been pushing Bush to offer more details about how to fix the program's financial problems and insist on a vote in the U.S. Congress in coming months. Bush has spent more than two months pushing for an overhaul but has not offered a detailed proposal while calling for action this year.

Bush also cited a proposal to further raise the retirement age, which is currently 65 and already being increased so that people born in 1960 or after will be able to receive full benefits at 67.

Later, in an interview with CNBC, Bush was asked whether the retirement age should be raised to about 70. "Certainly one of the options. As I recall, President (Bill) Clinton, my predecessor, suggested that might be a good part of the fix," Bush said. "There's a variety of things on the table."

In his South Carolina speech, Bush mentioned proposals to tie Social Security benefits to prices rather than wages to slow their growth, and to have a progressive way of structuring benefits that will be more generous to low-income workers.

"In other words, all these ideas are on the table, but they have one thing in common, they all require us to act now," Bush said.

The only option Bush ruled out is raising the payroll tax, which is currently 12.4 percent. "That'll hurt the economy and cost jobs," he said.

< Oh what an issue! Ok, a few points of notice here... How many billions were spent on a useless war? How long has this problem been approaching and totally ignored? Why do we have to pay now for people to retire when they already paid and the government just used the money for other things instead? Using individual retirement accoutns is about as bad an idea as you can get. There is no security in the stock market. Social Security is supposed to be to provide security (duh). And finally, raising the retirement age because people are living longer is one thing, raising it to hurt old people because you fucked up with their money is another. >

Sanitizing Hollywood, one DVD at a time

I originally heard of the practice of "sanitizing" movies by editing out content that some find objectionable and then renting or selling the edited copy a few years ago, when a Utah-based company called CleanFlicks sparked controversy and a round of lawsuits by basing their rental business on the practice. Back then, the practice was mostly confined to Utah, but it has since spread to other states as multiple competing sanitized video rental companies have entered the field. The Washington Post has an article on the practice that covers the ongoing dispute between the Director's Guild of America and the film sanitizers.

Film sanitizers say their business falls within the "fair use" exception to copyright law, a concept that, among other things, allows artists to create parodies that look similar to an original work. Because they don't make multiple copies of an edited DVD, they say they aren't engaging in video piracy. To earn a profit, the companies typically mark up the original retail price of the DVD by $6 or $7. Lines compares film sanitizing to buying a new sports car, repainting it or restoring the interior, then reselling it. "Spielberg says no one has the right to impose their truth on top of his," he says. "My response to that is, he's the god of truth? We just want to watch a movie without sex and nudity."

But critics say sanitizers sometimes alter a film so much that its original themes are muted or even turned upside down. Robert Rosen, dean of UCLA's film, theater and television school, points to a sanitized version of "The Hurricane," about African American boxer Rubin Carter, that eliminated racial epithets uttered by police officials investigating Carter. That, according to Rosen, undercut two of the movie's central themes, racism and police corruption. "This has very little to do with protecting children," Rosen says. "There are all kinds of religious, political and ideological biases at work."

According to the article the type of sanitizing done by ClearPlay, where the DVD is edited in real time as it's played by special software in the DVD player, is only slightly preferable to Hollywood than out-and-out editing, though they still don't like it.

I personally am a bit torn over film sanitizing. Obviously, there's a market for content with toned-down sex, violence, and profanity that Hollywood just isn't filling. If that weren't the case, then companies like CleanFlicks and its competitors wouldn't be in business. So the free-market advocate in me is happy to see that demand being met by someone. Furthermore, the historian in me recognizes that CleanFlicks and its ilk are simply doing what storytellers have done for millennia, i.e. adapting someone else's material to fit the tastes of a specific audience in a specific time and place. Finally, I'm in full support people's right to do whatever they want with stuff that they pay money for, including mangling it and reselling it.

On the other hand, however, as a writer I'd really hate to fall victim to something like this, especially if I felt strongly about content that had been deleted and the sanitized version was more popular than the original. No artist wants to see some well-meaning but aesthetically challenged Philistine making a complete hash of something that they've labored over for years of their life. If I spent years and vast sums of money crafting the perfect cinematic experience, and I then learned that hundreds of thousands of people in Utah were renting and watching some horribly botched version of it that did no justice to my vision, I'd hunt down the person responsible and do something that would land me on the evening news.

< This topic has been censored. Isn't it fascinating to try to guess how? >

Happiness Is the Best Medicine

The pursuit of it was written into the Declaration of Independence, but finding the causes and effects of that elusive "it" -- happiness -- has been notoriously difficult.

Whatever brings you happiness, be it large breasts, lots of money, respect from your peers, a large bar of chocolate or even semen, it's hardly controversial to say that happy people are generally healthier than unhappy ones. That conclusion might be intuitively obvious, but just why are happy people healthier?

That's what researchers at University College London's Department of Epidemiology and Public Health are interested in. They have found that the functioning of certain key biological processes is improved by happiness.

"Psychosocial factors are vital to health," said Michael Marmot, professor of epidemiology and public health at the university and director of the International Centre for Health and Society. "In people who have their basic needs met -- clean water, sufficient food and shelter -- a crucial determinant of health is how circumstances affect the mind. That is, psychosocial factors."

Other studies have shown a connection between happiness and longevity. In 2001, Deborah Danner, at the University of Kentucky's Center for Gerontology, analyzed the handwritten autobiographies of 180 nuns of mean age 22, and compared the positive emotional content of the writings with the nuns' health six decades later. It turns out that sisters who used words like "joy" and "thankful" lived up to 10 years longer than did those who expressed negative emotions.

But Steptoe and colleagues wanted to know what causes such differences. What is the mechanism that helps happy people live longer?
"Marmot and colleagues, including health psychologist Andrew Steptoe, wanted to know what causes such differences. What is the mechanism that helps happy people live longer? To find out, they studied the emotions and health of more than 200 middle-aged Londoners in their daily lives..."

Marmot and colleagues, including health psychologist Andrew Steptoe, wanted to know what causes these differences. What is the mechanism that helps happy people live longer?

To find out, they studied the emotions and health of more than 200 middle-aged Londoners in their daily lives. They found that people who reported that they were pretty much happy every day were verifiably healthier. Happiness is associated with reduced neuroendocrine, inflammatory and cardiovascular activity. Their work is published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

To investigate the psychobiological connection, the UCL scientists put their volunteers -- men and women of white European origin aged 45-59 -- through laboratory stress tests and monitored their blood pressure and heart rate over a working day. Saliva samples were taken to measure the volunteers' cortisol content. Cortisol is a stress hormone related to conditions such as type II diabetes and hypertension.

"Cortisol is a key hormone," said Steptoe, "because it has an impact on so may different physical conditions."

The results were clear-cut. There was a 32 percent difference in cortisol levels between the least and the most happy subjects. Happy subjects also showed lower responses to stress in plasma fibrinogen levels, a protein that in high concentrations often signals future problems with coronary heart disease. Finally, happy men had lower heart rates over the day and evening, which suggests good cardiovascular health.

In addition to screening for happiness, Steptoe and colleagues also used an established method to measure psychiatric disorders that are known to predict coronary heart disease. So they were able to control for psychological distress -- and they found that health-related biological factors were independently related to happiness. In other words, people aren't just happy because they are healthy, they are healthy because they are happy.

It's all good news for comedians. Laughter is good for you -- it's practically official. Last month researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore showed that laughter is linked to the healthy function of blood vessels.

The researchers showed volunteers funny or stressful segments of movies and found that those that provoked laughter apparently caused the tissue that forms the inner lining of blood vessels, the endothelium, to dilate to increase blood flow.

Spirituality and religion, too, seem to be somehow beneficial to health. Last week at the American Academy of Neurology meeting in Miami Beach, Florida, Yakir Kaufman, director of neurology services at Sarah Herzog Memorial Hospital in Jerusalem, presented results suggesting that spirituality and the practice of religion may help slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease.

"We learned that the patients with higher levels of spirituality or higher levels of religiosity may have a significantly slower progression of cognitive decline," said Kaufman.

The new work may help to demystify the effect of spirituality or religion.

"There is some evidence that religious beliefs help people cope with the stresses and strains of life," said Steptoe, "so this could be linked with the same processes that we have studied."

Marmot concurred. "Our research shows that psychological processes have profound biological effects," he said. "Spirituality can be one example of how the brain, acting through its connections with the neuroendocrine system, can have important effects."

Texas Bill to Filter Highway Rest Stop Internet

also on Slashdot

'Mad Max' Fans Arrested for Re-creation

SAN ANTONIO Apr 18, 2005 ? Eleven "Mad Max" fans armed with fake machine guns were arrested after they surrounded a tanker truck while making their way to a movie marathon in a theatrical convoy.

As the group headed to San Antonio on Saturday, police received several calls from drivers who reported a "militia" surrounding a tanker truck.

Police charged nine people with obstruction of a highway and two others with possession of prohibited knives in addition to the obstruction charge.

One of the organizers, Chris Fenner, said the arrests were unfair. He said he didn't know why anyone would have confused the costumed crew recreating a scene from "Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior" set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with a real threat.

"I honestly don't know how that could be, because 'Road Warrior' was so over the top," he said.

The movie marathon was canceled after the arrests.

Surveillance Cameras Reduce Private Space

WASHINGTON - It's there when you ride an elevator and make a purchase in a store. There's no escaping it in a museum. Look up at the stoplight and a camera may be watching you. Being lens-shy just doesn't cut it in today's camera-crazed world. Chances are, during a good part of your day, there's a camera nudging into your private space.

There's no doubt surveillance cameras can aid police and protect property. Videos showing crimes are played routinely on news programs to help catch perpetrators.

But those same cameras can make people feel violated and uneasy. Their broad sweep makes no distinction between revelers at a parade and wrongdoers at a riot. And they never blink.

"I don't like to be watched," said K. Ann Largie, 29, of Laurel, Md. "It makes me feel uncomfortable."

Nikki Barnett, 31, of Burtonsville, Md., stopped showcasing her "happy dance" in elevators after learning many of them are monitored by cameras. "I stopped doing silly things," she says. "I don't want to portray myself in a certain light."

Closed-circuit cameras are spreading in cities, a trend hastened by concerns about terrorist attacks but by other reasons, too, including the mere availability of the technology.

"If I'm mugged at an ATM, I'm glad the bank has cameras so the person can be tracked down," said Justine Stevens, 32, of Arlington, Va. "But cameras in elevators monitoring behavior seems weird."

Indeed, for every videotaped image of a crime that leads to an arrest there are dozens of perfectly innocent moments captured.

"Cameras used for specific suspects and at specific times, that's good law enforcement," said Peter Swire, professor of law at Ohio State University. "But I don't want it part of my permanent record every time I scratch myself on a public street."

In Nashville, Tenn., a middle school installed cameras that parents, in a $4.2 million lawsuit, said captured their kids in various stages of locker-room undress. School officials say the cameras were put up in plain view to watch an outside door and hallway.

Perhaps nowhere are cameras more ubiquitous than in the nation's capital: federal buildings, museums, parks, traffic lights.

Some are discreetly placed in elevator ceilings and lamp posts. Others are more obvious, such as one fixed near an American flag adorning the Justice Department.

Some closed-circuit cameras run around-the-clock. Others come on for specific events. In Washington, 14 police cameras roll during parades, demonstrations and when the city goes on high alert. They are turned on a half-dozen or so times a year, and the police department publicizes it.

Kevin Morison, the department's spokesman, said there was a lot of hyperbole when the cameras were introduced. Critics claimed police were watching people leave home to go to work, then come home at night. "Frankly, we have no interest in doing that, or capacity to do that," he said.

That system is part of a larger one. At a police command center, feeds from those cameras are watched along with those from the city's subway system, transportation department and more.

Critics contend the camera lies or at least misleads. An innocent conversation can appear conspiratorial, depending on the angle, the lighting or many other factors.

But Paul Rosenzweig, senior legal research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said today's world demands that people be more open to the use of cameras.

"You can't sweep back the tide of technological development and you can't blink your eyes to necessity," he said. "We are in a changed circumstance today. For us, September 11 brings it home."

Chicago is working on plans to link more than 2,000 public surveillance cameras in a network that would use sophisticated software to alert authorities to potential crimes.

In Los Angeles, the police department recently deployed a remote camera surveillance system that is used to identify, track and record criminal activity in some parts of the city. The system is equipped with "intelligent" video capabilities and facial recognition software.

New Orleans is installing a sophisticated crime-fighting system of bulletproof cameras, each capable of eyeing an eight-block area. So far, about 240 of the proposed 1,000 cameras are in operation.

New Orleans officials say their system has plenty of safeguards against abuse. Cameras are not routinely monitored and video is stored for a brief period, to be watched if a crime is reported. Only a few officers have access to the video and they look at it only in response to a specific report, officials said.

< "Indeed, for every videotaped image of a crime that leads to an arrest there are dozens of perfectly innocent moments captured." This is a misprint. instead of dozens it should say millions! >

Man Barred from Making Slavery Tax Claims

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New York man was temporarily barred on Friday from preparing income tax returns for others because he has been including bogus tax credits such as reparations for African-American slavery and segregation.

The Manhattan U.S. attorney's office said it obtained a restraining order against Kevin Hardy of Mount Vernon that immediately barred him from working as a tax preparer until a full hearing can be held.

Prosecutors said that the Internal Revenue Code does not provide any such slavery reparations tax credit and that Hardy repeatedly prepared returns for others making such claims.

Inmates in U.S. using intermediaries to escape into Internet

State and federal prisons don't let inmates use the Internet. Neither do many county jails. But that hasn't stopped Maydak and thousands of other inmates across the United States from having their own websites.

Using their telephone and mail privileges, plus a network of family, friends or activists, inmates are contributing to websites to plead their case, pillory prosecutors or find pen pals.

Maydak, 34, of North Versailles became a computer bulletin board devotee after seeing the 1983 movie War Games.

He spent seven years in federal prison for a telephone scam that federal prosecutors say cost AT&T $550,000. He is jailed on a probation violation and is awaiting sentencing. From his Allegheny County Jail cell, he uses a network of toll-free numbers he controls and a group of friends to relay phone and e-mail messages. He also has a website, "Why is Keith Maydak in Jail?"

Joe Weedon, a spokesman for the American Correctional Association in Lanham, Md., said prisons keep inmates away from the Internet primarily for security reasons.

"There were a few jurisdictions that allowed it on a limited basis, but they ran into problems with offenders contacting their victims or inmates running scams of some sort," Weedon said.

Federal appeals courts haven't heard a major case on inmate Internet access, but victims' advocates promise to fight them.

"Your rights are very limited when you go to prison and certainly the right to communicate with people on the Internet is one of them," said Michael Rushford of the Sacramento, Calif.-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.

In 2000, inmates successfully fought an Arizona law that prohibited helping inmates to access the Internet and punished those who transmitted items to someone for posting on the web. The law was passed after a murder victim's family complained about the killer's Internet pen pal ad. A federal district judge struck down the law in 2003.

The American Civil Liberties Union pursued that case on behalf of the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty. The group publishes websites for about 500 U.S. death row inmates, and pen pal solicitations for about 700 more, said co-founder Tracy Lamourie.

"They're sentenced to death. They're not sentenced to silence," Lamourie said. "Even if just one was (innocent), how can we silence someone who's going to be killed in our name?"

Lamourie's group maintained a site for Juan Melendez, 53, who spent 18 years on Florida's death row before he was found to be wrongfully convicted three years ago.

Lamourie and her partner pay for envelopes, stationery and postage out of pocket or with donations. The server space for the web pages is donated by a European death penalty opponent.

"I try to understand how alarming it would be for a victims' family to see the smiling face of an inmate who has caused some great harm to a family on the World Wide Web looking for women to write to him," said Donna Hamm of Middle Ground Prison Reform Inc., an Arizona inmate rights group. "But it's difficult to imagine how that infringes on a free world person's right to put something on the Internet."

One inmate's website is at the centre of a death penalty appeal in Connecticut.

Serial killer Michael Ross has volunteered to be executed. Those trying to stop him said Ross decided to end his appeals only after his former fiancee broke up with him in 2002 - cutting off his access to the outside world through a website she ran.

These days, jails and prisons are trying to take advantage of Internet technology without letting inmates abuse it.

Arkansas prison officials recently OK'd an Internet banking system to let people send inmates money. Alabama officials are installing law library computers to give inmates better access to court rulings, but no Internet or e-mail access.

Such outreach programs sometimes backfire. Several inmates at the Weld County Jail in Greeley, Colo., are suspected of using jail library computers to access
Social Security numbers and other personal information of county employees.

The Body Heretic: It Scorns Our Efforts

THE promises are everywhere. Sure, you smoked. But you can erase all those years of abusing your lungs if you just throw away the cigarettes. Eating a lot of junk food? Change your diet, lose even 5 or 10 pounds and rid yourself of those extra risks of heart disease and diabetes. Stay out of the sun - who cares if you spent your youth in a state of bronzed bliss? If you protect yourself now, skin cancer will never get you.

Maybe it should be no surprise that America's popular and commercial cultures promote the idea of an inexhaustible capacity for self-rejuvenation and self-repair. After all, if America as an idea has meant anything, it has meant just that - the possibility of continual transformation - becoming wealthier, more spiritual, more beautiful, happier and feeling younger.

That optimism has helped create a society of unmatched vitality - a source of bewilderment, alarm and envy to the rest of the world. But Americans often forget, or aren't aware, of how unusual they are in this respect, notes Dr. Daniel Haber, director of the cancer center at Massachusetts General Hospital.

"I grew up in Europe and I travel in Europe," he said. "And there's an amazing contrast." Europeans are far more fatalistic about their lives, he said. They believe "you need to enjoy life," so they smoke, they bask in a sun, they take pleasure in a leisurely, indulgent meal and they don't feel compelled to go to a gym.

Americans, Dr. Haber says, believe in control - of their bodies, their mental faculties and their futures. So shedding some pounds or some unhealthy habits is not merely sensible. It suggests a new beginning, being born again.

Maybe that is why people may feel betrayed when Peter Jennings explains that he stopped smoking, at least for a while, and still got lung cancer. Or why, two decades after his death, people still talk about Jim Fixx, the running guru who lost weight, stopped smoking, ran every day and dropped dead of a heart attack.

In fact, science is pretty clear on all of this: There are real limits to what can be done to reverse the damage caused by a lifetime of unhealthy living. Other than lung cancer, which is mostly a disease of smokers, there are few diseases that are preventable by changing behavior in midlife.

But that is not what most people think, said Dr. Barnett Kramer, the associate director for disease prevention at the National Institutes of Health. Instead, they believe that if you reform you'll erase the damage, in part because public health messages often give that impression. "It is easy to overestimate based on the strength of the messages," Dr. Kramer said. "But we're not as confident as the messages state."

Eating five servings of vegetables and fruit has not been shown to prevent cancer. Melanoma, the deadly skin cancer, occurs whether or not you go out in the sun. Gobbling calcium pills has not been found to prevent osteoporosis. Switching to a low-fat diet in adulthood does not prevent breast cancer.

At most, Dr. Kramer said, the effect of changing one's diet or lifestyle might amount to "a matter of changing probabilities," slightly improving the odds. But health science is so at odds with the American ethos of self-renewal that it has a hard time being heard. Here, where people believe anything is possible if you really want it, even aging is viewed as a choice.

"It's hard to find an American who doesn't believe that, with enough will, he or she can achieve anything - we've been brought up to believe that," said Dr. Barry Glassner, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California. Health, he emphasized, is no exception: "It's the same whether you're 40, 50 or 80. It doesn't matter whether you are male or female, black or white. "

But in matters of health, the strongest willed person simply cannot wipe the slate of life clean and begin again. This is true even with lung cancer and smoking. Those who quit may greatly reduce their risk of lung cancer. But they cannot eliminate it.

"The best you can be is a former smoker - you can't be a 'never smoker,' " said Dr. Kramer. "It's not all or none. It's a matter of changing probabilities."

In fact, in every area of desired physical self-renewal, the probabilities make it hard to argue that life allows one to start over.

At health clubs, pear-shaped people in their 40's and 50's obsessively lift weights, trying for those defined muscles that, even in youth, come only to those with a certain genetic predisposition. But by middle age, the overweight tend to stay that way, and the body has a harder time increasing muscle mass. So even the greatest personal trainer will not produce rippling abs.

At the cardiologist's office, middle-age men, learning that their arteries are starting to clog, swear they'll never eat chips and hamburgers again, and that they will take up jogging. Some do and a small percentage even stick with it. But no amount of exercise or diet change will make the plaque in their arteries disappear. Despite common public health recommendations, walking for half an hour a day, five days a week probably won't make most people lose weight. And while a regular regimen of walking or running will likely improve your stamina and cardiovascular fitness, there is no guarantee that it will reverse heart disease, prevent or forestall a heart attack or in any way extend your life.

The effects of other measures, like changing lifestyle or switching to a diet rich in raw vegetables, are even less clear when it comes to preventing cancer, said Dr. Kramer. "Even if they do affect the cancer," he said, " it may be that it's over an entire lifetime."

So what are Americans, with their faith in starting over, to do? When it comes to making oneself over, said Dr. Glassner, they have two options. One, he said, "is that you can consider yourself inadequate or inferior" for failing to force the years to melt away. The other is to shift the definition of rejuvenation from a arduous restructuring of the self to a paint job.

"Now, instead of losing the weight you're going to go for cosmetic surgery," Dr. Glassner said.

That is not really an answer. Collagen injections or surgery may give people more youthful looking faces, but only for a while. And liposuction won't help for long if the body restores the fat that was suctioned off the patient's arms or buttocks.

Then there is a third possibility for the resourceful, Dr. Glassner said. An overweight person can simply redefine himself as a "food adventurer."

There is one group, however, for whom a strong sense of control over the future may be an unalloyed good: the sick.

"Protective illusions," says Dr. Shelley Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, can be a good thing. In her research, she found that among people with serious diseases, those who felt they still had control over their lives coped better with their illnesses.

The optimists fared better psychologically even when they became more ill - shattering the illusion of control. "What you often see is people use something like cancer as an opportunity to discover value in their lives, and meaning," Dr. Taylor said. "They reorder their priorities. They focus on relationships more. Control and optimism shift to things that can be dealt with."

For those in good health, there is still another option, though it is decidedly a minority position. This is simply to scale back on one's self-engineering and take more pleasure in simply getting from day to day.

The American essayist Joseph Epstein nicely expressed this view in an essay, written when he hit the age of 60, which he gave the mordant title, "Will You Still Feed Me?" In it, Mr. Epstein expresses the virtue of just enjoying the ride.

"At 60," he writes, "one probably does well not to expect wild changes, at least not for the better. Probably best not even to expect a lot in the way of self-improvement. Not a good idea, I think, at this point to attempt to build the body beautiful. Be happy-immensely happy, in fact-with the body still functional."

Of course, many in midlife will still decide to hit the gym, to eat better, drink less, relax more. And that's a good thing, if only because they will feel better for being fitter. But they shouldn't expect it to erase the effects of all those years that came before.