Summary: MediaBuys has approached about 75 corporations in search of sponsors, said the company's chief executive, who is Chick Ciccarelli, and enlisted the services of several large advertising firms, including Saatchi & Saatchi and Ketchum Inc. Mr. Ciccarelli said that they are still in negotiations with other corporations, who expressed confidence that more corporations would commit money before next weekend.


Summary: City officials here boldly decided last fall to hold the parades of Mardi Gras, even though the city treasury was empty and large swaths of the town still lay in ruins. With the official start of festivities scheduled for next Saturday, no corporation has come up with the $2 million the city was hoping to receive for the naming rights to Mardi Gras, which was first celebrated here 150 years ago. Mr. Collins says that although he doubts a white knight will sign up as a marquee sponsor, he still hopes that other corporations will follow Glad's example and help defray which is the costs of Mardi Gras.


Summary: David Rubenstein, who is a co-owner of Rubenstein Brothers that the business of New Orleans is tourism, and New Orleans has got to get back to business, said by David Rubenstein, a co-owner of Rubenstein Brothers, a clothing store on Canal Street. Mr. Rubenstein, whose store is on the parade route, said he was not worried about rioting or looting or anything like that. The city now has 1,300 police officers on its payroll, compared with 1,600 before Hurricane Katrina, said Tami Frazier, who is a spokeswoman for Mayor C. Ray Nagin.


Summary: Yes, it will be a challenge for us to come up with money, but this is a tourist economy, and we need to have it. Reginald Zeno, the city's finance director, said that he was ''concerned'' that the extra costs of Mardi Gras would put a further drain on a budget at a time we're already facing a deep deficit. But like Mr. Collins, Mr. Zeno sees Mardi Gras as an investment that the city has no choice but to make.


Summary: Mr. Garza said that he had been offered money from news organizations to reproduce the photograph, which also shows in partial profile Karl Rove, who is the president's top political adviser, at the May 9, 2001, meeting.


Summary: After weeks of White House's reduction4 to release pictures of President Bush with Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist, the first photograph to be published of the two men shows a small, partly obscured image of Mr. Abramoff looking on from the background as Mr. Bush greets a Texas Indian chief. Mr. Abramoff, who is a leading Republican fund-raiser who pleaded guilty last month to conspiring to corrupt public officials, is little more than a blurry, bearded figure in the background at a gathering of about two dozen people. But it provides a window, albeit an hazy one, into Mr. Abramoff's efforts to sell himself to Indian tribes as a man of influence who could open the most secure doors in Washington to them.


Summary: The authenticity of the photograph was provided to The New York Times by the Indian chief, whose name is Raul Garza of the Kickapoo tribe of southwest Texas. Mr. Garza, who is under indictment on federal charges of embezzling money from his tribe, said he was eager to demonstrate that he had nothing to hide in his dealings with the White House and Mr. Abramoff. A lawyer for Mr. Garza said Mr. Abramoff arranged for the chief to attend the meeting, in a conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House.


Summary: The authenticity of the photograph was provided to The New York Times by the Indian chief, whose name is Raul Garza of the Kickapoo tribe of southwest Texas. The chief did not seek payment from The Times for the photo or two others in which he appears with Mr. Bush.


Summary: FedEx, for example, flew Ya Ya and Le Le, the pandas at the Memphis Zoo, to the United States from China in a decorated ''Panda Express'' plane. The public was able to track the flight on a designated FedEx website.


Summary: Lun Lun and Yang Yang are Zoo Atlanta's giant pandas and they have needs. They require an expensive all-vegetarian diet  which is 84 pounds a day, each. They are attended by a four-person entourage, and both crave privacy.


Summary: The financial headache caused by the costly loan obligations to China has driven Dennis W. Kelly, chief executive of Zoo Atlanta, to join with the directors of the three other zoos to negotiate some budgetary breathing room. If no agreement with China can be made, he said, the zoos may have to return their star attractions. Mr. Kelly said that if they can't renegotiate, they absolutely will go back.


Summary: After the day Tai Shan, born at the National Zoo, the free tickets were being traded on eBay for as much as $200 each.


Summary: Chuck Brady, who is the chief executive of the Memphis Zoo said that there's a perception in China that U.S. zoos are very rich because when they come over, and the zoos are beautiful. He added that three year is his break-even year.


Summary: It was a sign from God that the flag fell from heaven during a battle which happened between the Danes and the Estonians nearly 800 years ago.


Summary: President Bush is focusing more about Darfur than most other leaders, but that's not saying much. Still, Mr. Bush is taking only small steps.


Summary: In the next edition of the journal Foreign Affairs includes an article by the man in charge of intelligence on Iraq till last year, Paul Pillar, who said the administration cherry-picked intelligence to support a decision to invade that had already been made.


Summary: Lawmakers from both parties have raised considerable doubt about the legality of this program, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made it clear at a Senate hearing that Mr. Bush hasn't the slightest intention of changing it. According to Mr. Gonzales, the administration can be relied upon to police itself and hold the line between national security and civil liberties on its own. Mr. Gonzales's own dedication to the truth is in fair doubt.


Summary: They can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers and just trust him. They also can't think of a president who has deserved that trust less. This has been a central fault of Mr. Bush's presidency for a long time.


Summary: Mr. Adams wasn't sure how much more money he and his wife would save the I.R.S. hadn't filled in all the details but early estimates suggested that the Prius's credit could be as high as $3,200. Michelle D. Lamishaw, who is an I.R.S. spokeswoman, could not say when the agency would provide more details but encouraged taxpayers to keep checking their website. Mr. Nadel said that the I.R.S. hasn't been clear on that, and that wasn't specifically in this law, but all of the underlying tax law should apply there.


Summary: After reading  Bill H. Adams last fall that is a bigger tax break on hybrid cars would take effect on January 1, he decided that buying a Toyota Prius could wait. Mr. Adams and his wife, Anna M. Ciambotti, had been considering the car for its gas-sipping engine and environmental elan. But while researching hybrids, He learned that for 2006 Congress had switched the deduction to a more lucrative tax credit.


Summary: Through the nationwide, a typical home system costs about $25,000, which is said by Thomas Leyden, a vice president in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, for PowerLight, which is a solar installer, so the $2,000 credit would apply in such a case. Mr. Leyden said that many states also offered incentives for solar power.


Summary: Bob D. Scharin, who is the editor of Practical Tax Strategies, a journal for tax professionals said that the same thresholds apply to solar-powered water heaters, but the water must be for showers and sinks, not pools or hot tubs.


Summary: Steven M. Nadel, who is the executive director of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy said that people who pay the alternative minimum tax, which limits tax breaks for many Americans, those who may not be eligible, and she is a executive director from nonprofit group in Washington. Mr. Nadel said that the I.R.S. hasn't been clear on that, and that wasn't specifically in this law, but all of the underlying tax law should apply on that point. Using formulas in the new law, Mr. Nadel's group has estimated the credit amounts for several cars, including the Prius, which it said could qualify for a $3,150 break.


Summary: Jackie Perlman, who is the senior tax research coordinator at H & R Block in Kansas City, Missouri, said that even if you're making $20,000 worth of improvements, you're still only going to get $500. Ms. Perlman said that if you decide to make these sorts of improvements, make sure that you understand which kinds of equipment are eligible, as the law includes specifications. She said that it has to be gas or propane or oil.


Summary: The new study, ''Live Prices and Stale Quantities: T+1 Accounting and Mutual Fund Mispricing,'' was conducted by Peter Tufano, a professor of financial management at Harvard Business School and Ryan Taliaferro, who is a doctoral student at Harvard; and Michael J. Quinn, who is a vice president at Analysis Group Inc., a consulting firm. That assumption is incorrect, according to Professor Tufano and his colleagues. The professor and his colleagues emphasize that this approach to calculating asset values known as ''T+1 accounting,'' shorthand for ''trade date plus one'' is used by many more than just a handful of funds.


Summary: After interviewing a number of fund industry professionals and fund auditors, the researchers concluded that it is the norm in the U.S. fund industry. The researchers note that the mispricing that comes from T+1 accounting is not the same as the stale pricing that was the basis of the mutual fund trading scandal exposed several years ago by the attorney general of New York named Eliot Spitzer. Mr. Spitzer's office had no comment on the current study. His investigations focused on funds whose securities had not traded for several hours when N.A.V.'s were calculated at 4 p.m. in New York.


Summary: The new study, Live Prices and Stale Quantities T+1 Accounting and Mutual Fund Mispricing, was conducted by Peter Tufano, who is a professor of financial management at Harvard Business School; Ryan Taliaferro, a doctoral student at Harvard; and Michael J. Quinn, a vice president at Analysis Group Inc., a consulting firm.


Summary: Ginny Clark from Manhattan got a face-lift. She had several reasons for pursuing out the procedure. Clark, who is 62, said that she wanted to look 20 years younger. She was socializing with a rather youthful crowd dating a man 10 years younger than she was, and often dining out with friends in their 30's and 40's.


Summary: Micki Nolan, director for business development at Global Cash Card in Irvine, Calif., and a patient of Dr. George Semel in Beverly Hills, said her procedures, liposuction on her chin, work around her eyes and a chemical peel, had helped her career, too. She said that the professional who's out there and feels her best will perform better. Ms. Nolan, Dr. Semel's patient, who took a week off for each of her procedures, said that for her, being gone for a couple of days is worth it.


Summary: A 1994 study by the University of Texas and Michigan State University found that men and women with above-average looks receive a pay premium, while workers with below-average looks receive a pay penalty. Partly because it is hard to quantify a procedure's effects, few patients speak willingly of their own post-surgery windfalls.


Summary: Wendy Lewis, a consultant based in New York who advises clients who are considering cosmetic surgery, said that it's not an isolated phenomenon. Ms. Lewis says, she often advises the career-minded to acknowledge that they have had at least a little bit of work done, on the grounds that people can see the results anyway. Ms. Lewis also advises clients to consider carefully how they will fit an operation, or upkeep, if a client is having Botox injections or other small treatments, into their work schedules.


Summary: Ginny Clark of Manhattan got a face-lift last April. Ms. Clark, 62, said she ''wanted to look 20 years younger.'' She was socializing with a rather youthful crowd, dating a man 10 years younger than she was, and often dining out with friends in their 30's and 40's. Ms. Clark is also among a growing number of people seeking out cosmetic surgery to get ahead in the workplace.


Summary: Wendy Lewis, a consultant based in New York who advises clients who are considering cosmetic surgery, said that it's not an isolated phenomenon. Ms. Lewis advised that the standard advice about plastic surgery  is that one should pick ones doctor and procedure carefully. She says, she often advises the career-minded to acknowledge that they have had at least a little bit of work done, on the grounds that people can see the results anyway. Ms. Lewis said that many doctors were beginning to offer longer hours to accommodate more working clients.


Summary: For many people, cut tax rates on dividends and long-term capital gains to a top rate of 15 percent, has not worked out that way and that is because their actual tax rate may not be the one that the politicians talked about or that the Internal Revenue Service prints on its tax forms.


Summary: STEPHEN J. ENTIN, a proponent in Washington of the supply-side theory of taxation that favors eliminating most taxes on capital, said last year that denying the 15 percent tax rate to some investors poisons the tax cut. Mr. Entin, the president of the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation, said in an interview last month that one should be a little more ticked off at the world if one is in the phase-out range and, like Mr. Carreiro, pay higher tax rates on dividends. In a report, Mr. Entin wrote that investors are still better off under the 2003 tax rate cuts even if they are in the phase-out range.


Summary: After President Bush and Congress cut tax rates on dividends and long-term capital gains to a top rate of 15 percent in 2003, many investors bought stocks that make big cash payouts, expecting to benefit from lower taxes. But the interaction of the alternative tax and the 2003 Bush tax cuts directly affect the taxation of investments in stocks. In his State of the Union address, President Bush again called for making his tax cuts permanent, but he said nothing about overhauling or repealing the alternative minimum tax. Over the next decade, the alternative tax will cost Americans $1.1 trillion in additional taxes, of which $739 billion is a result of the Bush tax cuts not being integrated into the levy, according to a report by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.


Summary: According to a report by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, over the next decade, the alternative tax will cost Americans $1.1 trillion in additional taxes, of which $739 billion is a result of the Bush tax cuts not being integrated into the levy.


Summary: The A.M.T. has its own rules, including fewer deductions and just two tax rates, 26 percent and 28 percent. Taxpayers in the phase-out zone pay even higher rates on wage income than other people trapped by the A.M.T. The A.M.T. has become such a money maker that by 2008 its repeal would cost more than repealing the regular income tax, according to the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, two research institutions in Washington.


Summary: In his State of the Union address, President Bush again called for making his tax cuts permanent, but he said nothing about overhauling or repealing the alternative minimum tax.


Summary: Rich Carreiro is one of those rare taxpayers who knew before he invested that he would not get the 15 percent rate on dividends. Mr. Carreiro, 38, takes a keen interest in the tax code, which is as complex as the code he works with as a software engineer in Arlington, Mass. One investing change that Mr. Carreiro and his wife did make because of the alternative tax was to avoid money market and bond funds that buy private activity bonds, those whose proceeds are used by private entities.


Summary: The A.M.T. has become such a money maker that by 2008 its repeal would cost more than repealing the regular income tax, according to the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, two research institutions in Washington.


Summary: The Rev. Harry L. Thomas, the pastor of the Medford, N.J., church that the family attended and who has remained steadfast in his support of Ms. Jackson, also testified for her. He said that he has known these people as very loving people who have a heart for children and have a heart for God.


Keith
Tyrone Jackson
Vanessa
Bruce Jackson
Vanessa Jackson
Keith Jackson
Jackson
Tyrone

Summary: Bruce Jackson reminded Vanessa Jackson, 50, who took him in as a foster child when he was 7 and later adopted him, how she took away his childhood as she yelled at them, cursed them, hit them with brooms, rulers, sticks, shoes and belt buckles and that he still has the marks to prove it. In a wrenching, angry series of statements that brought onlookers to tears, Mr. Jackson and his brothers described publicly for the first time the horror of their life in Mrs. Jackson's Collingswood, N.J., home. Jackson sat impassively in her chair, staring straight ahead, as the boys recounted their life with her and her husband, Raymond, who died in late 2004: their sparse diets of raw food, how they were beaten with brooms and belts and forced to stand on the occasions when they were allowed to eat.


Summary: Michael, now, 11, was about 3 feet tall and 23 pounds; he is now 4 feet 3 and weighs 63 pounds.


Summary: Republicans, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the chairwoman, said Michael D. Brown's disdain for the new domestic security structure left the department without crucial information it needed about what was happening in New Orleans.


Summary: Michael D. Brown said that he could not recall if he personally called the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, to relay the account of the levee breach. Two senior Homeland Security Department officials, who testified after Mr. Brown, said that his unwillingness to honor the chain of command and give regular updates to Mr. Chertoff or others in the department severely hampered the department's response.


Summary: Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said Friday morning while the hearing was under way that the administration already knew the city was being flooded. Regardless of the call from Mr. Brown, there were conflicting reports about whether a levee had been breached, Mr. McClellan said. he also said that the top priority at that time was on saving lives; it was on search and rescue operations.


Summary: Simon Williams is a senior economist with Economist Intelligence Unit in London who specializes in the Mideast.


Cargolux Airlines International
Cargolux

Summary: Etihad Airways, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates, approached Cargolux Airlines International, a freight carrier that uses United States airports, in December about buying a stake but no deal has been reached.


Summary: Senator Richard C. Shelby, the Alabama Republican who leads the Senate Banking Committee, said that while he strongly supports their investment policy and recognizes that it is vital to their national economic interests, he does not believe it should stand at any cost.


Summary: Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmitt said unresolved security questions on the Doncasters purchase by Dubai International Capital had led an administration committee to require an extended 45-day review. In confirming that it was participating in the 45-day Doncasters review, Dubai International Capital said in a statement it was pursuing all of the proper U.S. regulatory approvals. The statement said that it remains confident of obtaining those approvals and closing the transaction as originally envisioned.


Summary: At a Senate Banking Committee hearing, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, pressed administration officials to explain why the sale of the company, the Doncasters Group Ltd., merited a close review while the port deal covering a potentially greater vulnerability did not concluding that it just doesn't add up.


Summary: The federal mine safety agency had the legal authority to require better equipment and better communication, but it didn't use it, Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, said at a Senate oversight hearing. The case grows stronger every day for this Congress to adopt the West Virginia mine safety bill, he added.


Summary: Senator Michael B. Enzi, the Wyoming Republican who is chairman of the subcommittee, restated the need for caution in the search for new technology.


Summary: With a similar tone of skepticism, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, asked David Dye why, if his agency was doing everything it could to enforce safety, had it failed since 2003 to hand over any delinquent cases of violations to the Treasury Department for further collection efforts, as is supposed to occur after 180 days. To this Mr. Dye said that they've changed over, but since May 2005 the new computer system has not been able to process them.


Summary: Mark Herlach, a lawyer at Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan who represented British Nuclear Fuels in the deal and who specializes in energy asset sales, defended the price of the transaction, saying it made sense because of the rising costs of other fuels and concerns over greenhouse gases. He said that what Toshiba has done by this acquisition is acquired a leading technology in the AP-1000.


Summary: With industry hopes rising for a revival in orders for nuclear power reactors, the sale last month of Westinghouse's former nuclear division to Toshiba might stand out as a landmark. Toshiba surprised many in the industry by agreeing to pay a lofty $5.4 billion for a collection of nuclear power manufacturing facilities, with Westinghouse's being the centerpiece, assembled by British Nuclear Fuels. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently approved the design of a new Westinghouse model, the AP-1000  reactor that would have fewer moving parts in its safety systems. But in the short term, the least glamorous parts of Westinghouse's business may prove the most valuable for Toshiba.


Summary: Michael G. Morris, is the president and chief executive of American Electric Power, the largest power generator in the United States. Mr. Morris, whose company serves five million customers in 11 states, favors more nuclear power.


Summary: Peter Kernan, an analyst at S.& P. who was a co-author of the report, said that the market environment is now significantly riskier than it was when the original nuclear plants were built and that operators would need to be convinced there is a sound and robust business case for building a plant before they start devoting capital to it. He said there was no evidence yet to suggest that.


Summary: Toshiba surprised many in the industry by agreeing to pay a lofty $5.4 billion for a collection of nuclear power manufacturing facilities, with Westinghouse's being the centerpiece, assembled by British Nuclear Fuels. The bundle of assets being sold to Toshiba is the distilled result of years of scrambling and reassembling the companies that built reactors in the 1970's and 80's and still service them. But in the short term, the least glamorous parts of Westinghouse's business may prove the most valuable for Toshiba: the company's extensive repair and maintenance services.


Summary: Citing new photographic analysis, an Italian parliamentary commission has concluded that top Soviet leaders were behind the failed plot to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981. The commission wrote, using John Paul's given name, in a preliminary report released to news organizations this week, that this commission holds, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the leadership of the Soviet Union took the initiative to eliminate Pope Karol Wojtyla. The report has no legal bearing, but reopens a central unanswered question from the cold war era: Whether Bulgarian secret agents, working on behalf of the Soviets, played a role in the shooting in St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981, which gravely wounded John Paul. The report claims that the Soviet leadership saw John Paul as a threat because of his support for the Solidarity trade union, which worked to undermine Soviet control in his native Poland.


Summary: The absence of pop did not seem to bother Traffic.com's chief executive, Robert N. Verratti. Mr. Verratti said he talked to traditional investment banks but hired Hambrecht because the company's goal was to maximize its proceeds from the sale, which it used to pay off $37 million in high-interest debt.


Hambrecht
'' Hambrecht
R. Hambrecht & Company
Hambrecht & Quist

Summary: When asked what they did before Google at W. R. Hambrecht & Company, the investment bank in San Francisco, the answer is was that a lot less business. Hambrecht, the system-bucking champion of using auctions to sell initial public offerings of stock, has developed a following among entrepreneurs since Google went public in an auction 18 months ago. Using a method it calls OpenIPO, Hambrecht has auctioned off shares in two companies already this year, after taking five public that way in 2005. Traffic.com, which provides information about local traffic conditions to radio and TV stations and directly to consumers, raised $78.6 million in late January through an auction led by Hambrecht.


Summary: Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse managed the sale, a variation on a Dutch auction, and Hambrecht was part of the underwriting team.


Summary: The former federal emergency management chief, Michael D. Brown, who resigned under pressure on Sept. 12 as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was aggressively on the defensive, saying he was sick and tired of his remarks or e-mail messages being taken out of context or hearing that he lacked the leadership skills for his job.


Summary: The former federal emergency management chief, Michael D. Brown's politically charged appearance before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs quickly divided the panel's members by party.


Summary: Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota, said Michael D. Brown was shifting attention away from his own lack of responsiveness to the disaster. He says that Mr. Brown is not prepared to kind of put a mirror in front of his face and recognize his own inadequacies and admit that he has made some big mistakes. When asked what more Senator Coleman wants from Mr. Brown, he responded that a little more candor would suffice.


Summary: Testifying before a Senate committee, Michael D. Brown said he notified a senior White House official, probably Joe Hagin, the deputy White House chief of staff, but might have been Andrew H. Card Jr., the chief of staff, on the day the hurricane hit to report that it had turned into his worst nightmare and New Orleans was flooding. At first he could not recall whether he used those words but then later he said that he was sure Mr. Hagin or Mr. Card knew it and that he'd have told one of them about the breach during the conversation and that he could not recall whether he told the White House aide that he needed any particular help, at a time when the city was flooding, thousands were packed into the Superdome without adequate supplies and others were beginning to climb to roofs or attics to avoid drowning.


Summary: Michael D. Brown, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is sitting in Baton Rouge, so he's not sure at all times who is on the video conference, on the V.T.C., but the record indicates that on numerous occasions, at least Deputy Secretary Jackson and at least Matthew Broderick or Bob Stephans, someone from the H.S.O.C., the Homeland Security Operations Center, is in on those conversations on those V.T.C.'s.


Summary: Among the speakers were Senator Susan Collins, Michael D. Brown and Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota. Senator Coleman said that he understands some of the concerns that have been raised about the function of D.H.S. and the integration of FEMA. But as he listens to the testimony, he feels that Mr. brown is not prepared to kind of put a mirror in front of your face and recognize your own inadequacies.


Summary: Among the speakers were Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, Michael D. Brown and Senator Norm Coleman. Senator Collins said that D.H.S. officials told them that they did not know of the severity of the situation in New Orleans until Tuesday morning. That's almost 24 hours after they've received the information that she referred to about the severe flooding in New Orleans. She asks if they can help them understand this enormous disconnect between what was happening on the ground, a city 80 percent flooded, uncontrolled levees, people dying, people waiting to be rescued, and the official reaction among many of the key leaders in Washington and in Northern Command that somehow New Orleans had dodged the bullet?


Summary: Mr. Brown said that he finds it a little disingenuous that D.H.S. would claim that they were not getting that information, because FEMA held continuous video telephone conferences in which at least once a day, they'd be on conference calls and video calls to make certain that everyone had situational awareness. He also said that since this was a natural disaster, that has become the stepchild within the Department of Homeland Security, and so you now have these two systems operating, one which cares about terrorism, and FEMA and the state and local partners, who're trying to approach everything from all hazards. Senator Coleman said that he understands some of the concerns that have been raised about the function of D.H.S. and the integration of FEMA.


Summary: Senator Collins said that D.H.S. officials told them that they did not know of the severity of the situation in New Orleans until Tuesday morning. Mr. Brown said that he finds it a little disingenuous that D.H.S. would claim that they were not getting that information, because FEMA held continuous video telephone conferences, he'll refer to them as V.T.C.'s, in which at least once a day, if not several times a day, we would be on conference calls and video calls to make certain that everyone had situational awareness. Senator Collins said that he understands some of the concerns that have been raised about the function of D.H.S. and the integration of FEMA.


Summary: Senator Pete Domenici told a recent gathering of experts that if Congress is going to do anything useful this year about the two big energy-related questions of our time, oil dependency and global warming, it will have to focus on four or five big things instead of the usual laundry list of tax breaks, subsidies and modest research programs. The realist in him knows that this Congress is unlikely to take either of the steps that would be most likely to lower oil consumption as well as greenhouse gases: a big increase in fuel economy standards and a big gasoline tax. The question is whether Congress can focus on the big issues without engaging in the diversionary food fights that every energy bill seems to inspire.


Summary: Senator Pete Domenici told a recent gathering of experts that if Congress is going to do anything useful this year about the two big energy-related questions of our time, oil dependency and global warming, it will have to focus on four or five big things instead of the usual laundry list of tax breaks, subsidies and modest research programs. A New Mexico Republican who runs the Senate energy committee, Mr. Domenici has become something of a Senate visionary on energy policy. Mr. Domenici's vision of the future also includes safer, less expensive nuclear plants, which have the virtue of generating no greenhouse gases.


Summary: Last week, Judge William M. Skretny ordered an assistant United States attorney, Timothy C. Lynch, to produce a response from the Justice Department in Washington by Feb. 27. Mr. Marshall said Wednesday that he possessed no evidence that no-warrant eavesdropping was involved in the case, but made the request after news of the National Security Agency program was made public in December. The Justice Department issued a $5 million reward for his capture in 2003.


Summary: Last week, Judge William M. Skretny ordered an assistant United States attorney, Timothy C. Lynch, to produce a response from the Justice Department in Washington by Feb. 27. Philip M. Marshal said Wednesday that he possessed no evidence that no-warrant eavesdropping was involved in the case, but made the request after news of the National Security Agency program was made public in December. Mr. Lynch, who has been involved with the prosecution since the three men were indicted in 2002, said he had no knowledge of secret eavesdropping in the case. He said that he told the judge the only investigative techniques he knows that were used in this case were interviewing witnesses, intercepting express mail packages and using court-approved wiretaps.


Summary: Last month, Mohammed T. Albanna lawyer, Philip M. Marshall, asked Judge William M. Skretny of Federal District Court here to force prosecutors to reveal if secret surveillance by the National Security Agency was used. Last week, the judge ordered an assistant United States attorney, Timothy C. Lynch, to produce a response from the Justice Department in Washington by Feb. 27. Mr. Marshall said Wednesday that he possessed no evidence that no-warrant eavesdropping was involved in the case, but made the request after news of the National Security Agency program was made public in December.


Summary: Last month, Mohammed T. Albanna lawyer, Philip M. Marshall, asked Judge William M. Skretny of Federal District Court here to force prosecutors to reveal if secret surveillance by the National Security Agency was used. Last week, the judge ordered an assistant United States attorney, Timothy C. Lynch, to produce a response from the Justice Department in Washington by Feb. 27. Mr. Marshall said Wednesday that he possessed no evidence that no-warrant eavesdropping was involved in the case, but made the request after news of the National Security Agency program was made public in December. Mr. Marshall said that hedoesn't know if they're going to say yes, no or they are not going to say.


Summary: A man accused of illegally transferring money to Yemen has asked a judge to determine whether any of the evidence against him was gathered secretly and without a warrant as part of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. The suspect, Mohammed T. Albanna, 54, of Lackawanna, N.Y., just south of Buffalo, and two other men face charges that they ran a business that transferred $3.5 million from Yemeni-Americans to relatives in that country without the required permits. Mr. Albanna, an American citizen who runs a business that supplies candy and cigarettes to stores in the Buffalo area, said he and his co-defendants were part of an informal system, known as hawala, used to send money to people in countries lacking sophisticated banking and communications technology.


Summary: A man accused of illegally wiring money to Yemen has asked a judge to determine whether any of the evidence against him was gathered secretly and without a warrant as part of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. The no-warrant wiretaps were approved by President Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity and are now the focus of a debate over the extent of executive power.


Summary: Last week, Judge William M. Skretny ordered an assistant United States attorney, Timothy C. Lynch, to produce a response from the Justice Department in Washington by Feb. 27. Philip M. Marshall said on Wednesday that he possessed no evidence that no-warrant eavesdropping was involved in the case, but made the request after news of the National Security Agency program was made public in December. Mr. Marshall said that he doesn't know if they are going to say yes, no or they are not going to say.


Summary: Mohammed T. Albanna lawyer, Philip M. Marshal, asked Judge William M. Skretny of Federal District Court here to force prosecutors to reveal if secret surveillance by the National Security Agency was used.


Summary: General Motors, seeking to demonstrate to its union workers that it is willing to share the pain of radical cost-cutting, said it would halve the dividends it pays investors and the salary it pays its chief executive. G.M., which was once known to its employees as Generous Motors, also appointed Jerome B. York to its board. Mr. York, an adviser to the billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian, who is G.M.'s biggest individual shareholder, had called for many of the steps taken by G.M., which lost $8.6 billion in 2005.


Summary: Time Warner took a big step toward slimming down by agreeing to sell its book publishing unit a day before its most vocal shareholder, the corporate raider Carl C. Icahn, made public a plan by the investment bank Lazard to break the company into four pieces, sharply reduce expenses and buy back shares to raise its stock price. Mr. Icahn, who controls about 3 percent of Time Warner's stock, has been hounding the company to slim down and break itself up, saying those moves would increase the company's overall value in the stock market.


Summary: Time Warner has dismissed Carl C. Icahn's idea of slimming down and breaking itself up, but did agree to sell the Time Warner Book Group, which includes Little, Brown & Company and Warner Books, to Lagardère, the French conglomerate, for $537.5 million.


Summary: Time Warner also hired Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns to help it fend off Carl C. Icahn.


Summary: President Bush proposed a $2.77 trillion budget that would increase spending on the military and homeland security while cutting domestic programs like education and farm subsidies, and curbing the growth of Medicare spending. He also wants to make his tax cuts permanent, reducing projected federal revenue by $1.35 trillion over the next decade. Democrats said Mr. Bush's emphasis on tax cuts created a false choice between reining in the budget deficit and keeping necessary social programs.


Summary: Time Warner took a big step toward slimming down by agreeing to sell its book publishing unit a day before its most vocal shareholder, the corporate raider Carl C. Icahn, made public a plan by the investment bank Lazard to break the company into four pieces, sharply reduce expenses and buy back shares to raise its stock price.


Summary: Time Warner has dismissed his idea, but did agree to sell the Time Warner Book Group, which includes Little, Brown & Company and Warner Books, to Lagardère, the French conglomerate, for $537.5 million.


Summary: Seeking to settle two class-action lawsuits, Nortel Networks offered to give about $2.4 billion in cash and stock to shareholders who saw their investments in the company's stock shrivel amid the telecom disappointment and an accounting scandal. After discovering the accounting irregularities, including reporting sales of switches and other telecommunications gear that had not yet been made, Nortel fired seven top managers in 2004 and later restated four years of results. Nortel is suing three former executives to recover some of its losses and all of the $10.5 million in bonuses it paid them.


Summary: In mid-January, when the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration's effort to use federal drug-control legislation to block Oregon's law permitting doctor-assisted suicide for the terminally ill, the decision touched off predictions that the practice might again become a high priority on the national agenda. The Supreme Court decision could give those measures a new impetus or spur a drive on Capitol Hill to block them.


Summary: The survey, conducted every three years by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, found that real income, or income adjusted for inflation, fell across the board for New Yorkers at the same time that rents, as tracked by several indicators, continued to rise.


Summary: Brad Lander, the director of the Pratt Center for Community Development and an advocate for low-income housing, said a majority of the new units, 29,000 of them, were built for sale, not rent. Mr. Lander said the study offered no truly surprising findings, especially to the many people who must dig deep every first of the month for their home payments. This confirms what New Yorkers know as rents are up, low-rent units are almost impossible to find, and people are struggling to pay the housing bills.


Summary: Shaun Donovan, the city's housing commissioner, said that the city's overall housing stock and the number of homeowners in New York are both at a record high, but acknowledged that city tenants are facing a painful spiral of rising rents and falling wages. He also said that vacancy rates had increased which means that pressure is slowly being let off the market and that renters had rated their satisfaction with their neighborhoods at the highest levels in 27 years. Mr. Donovan suggested that, given Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's recently expanded plan to build affordable housing in New York, he expects rents and housing prices may soon come down.


Summary: Daniel Gross writes in V Life, a Variety publication, in its last issue, that the long-held mutual suspicion between the Dream Factory and the Deal Factory is slowly giving way to mutual trust and that in the past year, several nine-figure deals have been struck worth about $2 billion. According to figures from the Motion Picture Association of America cited by Mr. Gross, the average film cost $98.4 million to make and produce in 2004 so the studios need the financing help. He estimates that the typical studio has the infrastructure to release 20 to 24 films a year, but the ability to finance only a dozen or so on its own.


Summary: Daniel Gross writes that in the past year, several nine-figure deals have been struck worth about $2 billion. Firms like Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse First Boston have arranged private equity investments that have financed ''portions of the entire slate'' of films produced by Disney, Paramount and Warner Brothers.


Summary: HERE are a few things, courtesy of Kiplinger's, to ponder while you are waiting to pay for the flowers, or the boxer shorts with the little red hearts on them, you are buying in anticipation of Tuesday: The total amount of money that will be spent nationwide to celebrate Valentine's Day: $13 billion.


Summary: Rabbi Kass has had a colorful run: there were the death threats that earned his family months of round-the-clock security and a starring role in a hostage crisis that was resolved with a pastrami sandwich. Rabbi Kass persuaded the self-identified Jewish hostage-taker to exchange his guns for two Carnegie Deli sandwiches. Addressing a class of police academy students this week, the rabbi lectured the recruits about the lures of graft, the temptation to prejudge those of other ethnicities, and, more profoundly, an officer's power to take away life.


Summary: Dr. Suzan Johnson Cook, a black Baptist and the first female chaplain, and Iman Izak-El Mu'eed Pasha, the unit's first Muslim religious figure who recently retired.


Summary: Rev. Robert Romano, a chaplain with the New York City Police Department, a phone call at 4 a.m. is almost always a prelude to sorrow: a patrolman killed in the line of duty, a beloved veteran felled by a drunk driver, or more recently, a rookie shot by a fellow officer. Father Romano, for one, spent 10 months at ground zero and accompanied the body of every recovered officer as it was carried out of the pit.


Summary: Officer Eric Hernandez, who died after 11 days on life support, having been shot by another officer in a case of mistaken identity in a White Castle parking lot in the Bronx. And next week, at Officer Hernandez's funeral, there will be another bout of soul-searching and the need for a chaplain's reassuring presence.


Summary: Rev. Robert Romano, a chaplain with the New York City Police Department, a phone call at 4 a.m. is almost always a prelude to sorrow: a patrolman killed in the line of duty, a beloved veteran felled by a drunk driver, or more recently, a rookie shot by a fellow officer. Robert Romano, a chaplain with the New York City Police Department, a phone call at 4 a.m. is almost always a prelude to sorrow: a patrolman killed in the line of duty, a beloved veteran felled by a drunk driver, or more recently, a rookie shot by a fellow officer.


Summary: Early laboratory tests showed that the juice was contaminated with a foreign substance, said Capt. Fred W. Komm of the Darien police. He said the results showed that the contaminant was not bacteria or a well-known poison. According to Captain Komm, a church official bought a single bottle of Welch's grape juice at a CVS store. Captain Komm said he did not think any of the church officials who administered the communion were involved.


Summary: The bottle was kept in the trunk of a church official's car overnight, Rev. Dr. Anthony L. Gibson said. But Dr. Gibson said the deacon who opened the juice believed that the seal was intact. He said the church would continue to use Welch's but in the future would taste the juice before pouring it for communion.


Summary: Captain Komm, a church official bought a single bottle of Welch's grape juice at a CVS store a. The CVS store immediately pulled the remaining bottles of Welch's grape juice from its shelves as a precaution, and Captain Komm said that tests revealed no traces of the substance in any of those containers. A Welch spokesman, Jim Callahan, said that the bottle in Darien was one of 240,000 bottles of grape juice produced on a single day at the company's manufacturing plant in North East, Pa.


Summary: The U.S. Bank Tower, the city's tallest building, has long been presumed to be an inviting target for terrorists. It was designed to withstand an 8.3 magnitude earthquake, but not an alien invasion.  An article about the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles, which President Bush described as the target of a thwarted attack by Al Qaeda, misidentified the building's designer.


Villaraigosa
Mayor Villaraigosa
Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa

Summary: Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa complained that he had not been called directly by the White House, learning of the new information on the alleged plot only from state officials and staff members. Mayor Villaraigosa, a Democrat, said that he had twice written to the White House to request a meeting with the president to discuss security threats to Los Angeles. He said that he had tried to meet with the president at the White House on a number of occasions every time that I've gone to Washington, D.C., to discuss specifically this issue of homeland security, and to no avail.


Summary: President Bush said that the 72-story building, known as the Library Tower until U.S. Bancorp acquired naming rights in 2003, was to have been the target of a follow-up attack by Al Qaeda after the terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, 2001.


Summary: Chief William J. Bratton of the Los Angeles Police Department said that he had been aware of threats to the skyscraper since he took over as chief in 2002. He said he had devoted significant counterterrorism resources to the building and to Los Angeles International Airport, another potential target because Al Qaeda is known to carefully research its targets and to try to strike more than once, as it did at the World Trade Center. He said he was working with federal and local law enforcement officials on a program, Operation Archangel, to identify critical sites around the country that might be targeted for terrorist attacks and to design methods to defend them.


Summary: President Bush said that the 72-story building, known as the Library Tower until U.S. Bancorp acquired naming rights in 2003, was to have been the target of a follow-up attack by Al Qaeda after the terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, 2001. Officials have discussed the alleged plot numerous times in recent years as an example of terrorist actions that might have been foiled by government vigilance, but Mr. Bush offered new details. The White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, said federal officials had passed along the new information to the authorities in Los Angeles and Sacramento, telling them that Mr. Bush would discuss it later.


Summary: President Bush said that the 72-story building, known as the Library Tower until U.S. Bancorp acquired naming rights in 2003, was to have been the target of a follow-up attack by Al Qaeda after the terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, 2001. He said he had devoted significant counterterrorism resources to the building and to Los Angeles International Airport, because Al Qaeda is known to carefully research its targets and to try to strike more than once. An article about the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles, which President Bush described as the target of a thwarted attack by Al Qaeda, misidentified the building's designer.


Summary: Frank Vetro, the new principal of the high school, posted a letter to parents and students on the school's Web site. He was arrested and drove away from the school and was arraigned in Suffolk County District Court in Central Islip on seven misdemeanor counts of second-degree aggravated harassment. The county police said Mr. Vetro, 34, of Moriches-Middle Island Road in Shirley, made sexually explicit calls from his cellphone to at least two women's shoe stores, to a former student, and to former co-workers from Newfield High School in Selden. Mr. Vetro, who is a former science teacher at Newfield High School, was named an assistant principal in Hampton Bays in 2003 and was promoted to the $122,000-a-year job of principal in August.


Michael L. Hernandez
Eric Hernandez
Hernandez
Officer Hernandez
Eric

Summary: Officer Eric Hernandez's dress blue uniform has been retrieved from Haig's Cleaners, in Yonkers. Officer Hernandez died on Wednesday from wounds suffered 11 days earlier, when he was shot by another officer after he was beaten by a group of men at a White Castle restaurant. Detective Ed Gardner, the general manager of the department's football team, on which Officer Hernandez, 24, was a running back, said he was planning something special for Officer Hernandez's family.


Summary: George M. Klett, executive vice president of North Fork Bank, said his bank was approached some years back about complaints about buildings in its loan portfolio. As a result, Mr. Klett said, his bank has agreed to send inspectors to buildings about which it receives complaints and, if necessary, to encourage the owners to make repairs.


Summary: The coalition, Housing Here and Now, called on the New York Community Bank, which has 150 branches in the metropolitan area, for regular inspection of dilapidated buildings on which they hold mortgages and to force the owners to make repairs or face penalties, including possible foreclosure. The group proposed that the bank's planned acquisition of another bank, Atlantic Bank of New York, be held up until New York Community Bank press its clients to maintain their buildings, which the group said the bank has the power to do under a so-called good repair clause in its mortgage agreements.


Summary: The coalition, Housing Here and Now, called on the New York Community Bank, which has 150 branches in the metropolitan area, to regularly inspect dilapidated buildings on which they hold mortgages. The group also proposed that the bank's planned acquisition of another bank, Atlantic Bank of New York, be held up until New York Community Bank compels its clients to maintain their buildings, which the group said the bank has the power to do under a so-called good repair clause in its mortgage agreements. New York Community Bank operates a network of branches including Queens County Savings Bank and Roslyn Savings Bank.


Summary: Also, there is a precedent for lieutenant governors becoming governor Mario M. Cuomo did it.


Summary: Ryan Toohey is the campaign manager of Mr. Spitzer, described Mr. Paterson in an e-mail message as a trusted partner who can deftly work the halls of the State Capitol.  But it is not as if minority leaders are true power brokers in Albany, where the majority party of the Legislature decides which bills are voted on, how much state aid goes to each lawmaker's district, and even how office supplies are doled out.


Summary: Mr. Paterson has explained political skills in the past, he became the minority leader in the Senate a little more than three years ago by pulling off a coup, which is a rare feat in Albany. Still, the successes that Senate Democrats have had in recent elections have led some political analysts here to believe that they could be within an election or two of wresting control of the Senate from the Republicans for the first time in more than three decades. The news which Mr. Paterson was preparing to leave the Senate set the Capitol astir, with Republicans gloating that it could be a sign that the news of their impending death has been greatly exaggerated.


Summary: A poll last May found that only 4 percent of New Yorkers could name the current lieutenant governor, Mary O. Donohue.


Spitzer
Paterson
David A. Paterson
Spitzer-Paterson
Basil A. Paterson
Eliot Spitzer

Summary: State Senator David A. Paterson has been patiently awaiting the day when the Democratic minority he leads can take over the chamber, and take his seat with the governor and the Assembly speaker to decide how New York State is governed. Mr. Paterson stunned the political world here when the news broke that he had agreed to join Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's ticket as a candidate for lieutenant governor. The campaign could raise the profile of Mr. Paterson, 51, the scion of a prominent Harlem political family who was born legally blind and worked as a prosecutor before entering politics. The news that Mr. Paterson was preparing to leave the Senate set the Capitol astir, with Republicans gloating that it could be a sign that the news of their impending death has been greatly exaggerated.


Summary: H. Carl McCall, another member of Harlem's old guard who served as state comptroller and ran for governor in 2002, called the Spitzer-Paterson ticket ''a dream team.''


Summary: The Center for Democracy and Technology, a digital rights policy group, filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against one of the largest makers of Internet advertising software, 180solutions Inc. At the 180solutions corporate Web site, the company said that it had made changes to address the privacy concerns about its product and that it shared the Center for Democracy and Technology's vision of protecting the rights and privacy of consumers on the Internet.


Summary: Jonathan Zittrain, who holds the chair in Internet governance and regulation at the Internet Institute at Oxford University and is taking part in the StopBadware effort with Harvard, said the long-term survival of the Internet as a free and unregulated place is at stake in making sure rogue companies are brought to heel. Mr. Zittrain said that they were at a stage where anybody can write code that can run on nearly everyone else's machine in about 10 minutes.


Summary: A top priority will be the development of a database of testimony from consumers on their experiences with malicious software, which they will be able to submit at the project's Web site, StopBadware.org.


Summary: In an effort to stamp out what has become an epidemic of spyware, unwanted adware, and other malicious software plaguing millions of computers and costing consumers billions of dollars each year, Internet research centers at Harvard Law School and Oxford University plan today to unveil a program aimed at outing the shady companies that produce them. The project has received initial financing ''in the seven figures'' from several leading technology companies, including Google, Lenovo, and Sun Microsystems, according to John G. Palfrey Jr., the executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.


Summary: The Federal Trade Commission has begun taking aggressive steps against some spyware companies, established a Web site -- OnGuardOnline.gov. The Center for Democracy and Technology, a digital rights policy group based in Washington, filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against one of the largest makers of Internet advertising software, 180solutions Inc.


Summary: The advocate, Nina E. Olson, told Congress that her staff sampled the frozen returns and found that among those who pressed for a refund, two-thirds were due all or more than what was requested and most of the remaining 20 percent of cases seemed to involve issues other than fraud. Olson said the program was unfair to honest taxpayers and possibly illegal.


Summary: The Internal Revenue Service said that it would begin notifying taxpayers if their requests for a refund were being frozen because a computer program had identified possible fraud. Mark W. Everson, the I.R.S. commissioner, did not disclose any details about how taxpayers would be notified or whether notice would be given to those whose accounts were currently frozen. The I.R.S. criminal investigation division, in reports to the taxpayer advocate, referred to the people whose tax returns it froze as criminals.


Summary: The vast majority of the 1.6 million taxpayers whose refunds were secretly frozen over the last five years appear to have done nothing wrong, the I.R.S. taxpayer advocate told Congress two weeks ago. The advocate, Nina E. Olson, told Congress that her staff sampled the frozen returns and found that among those who pressed for a refund, two-thirds were due all or more than what was requested and most of the remaining 20 percent of cases seemed to involve issues other than fraud. Congress created the advocate position inside the I.R.S. as a way to give taxpayers a voice.


Summary: Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said that they need to diligently review and repair this program until all taxpayers are treated fairly.


Summary: Mark W. Everson, the I.R.S. commissioner, did not disclose any details about how taxpayers would be notified or whether notice would be given to those whose accounts were currently frozen or only to those whose returns are frozen in the future. Mr. Everson said that he believes appropriate notification should be given when refunds have been frozen. He said that the agency would also try to refine the computer program that looks for refund fraud so that fewer honest taxpayers would be affected.


Summary: When Stefano Barbagallo and Claudio Marini, decided to open an upscale food market together, they needed a storefront. Mr. Barbagallo and Mr. Marini are presiding over the creation of a 650-square-foot shop, which this spring will stock items like imported olive oils and buffalo mozzarella.


Summary: Frank J. Sciame, whose firm is also the construction manager, said they had purchased about 80 percent of that stretch of Front Street from the city for $5 million. In the 1970s, the city seized a wider area through eminent domain, and several projects were proposed, but none of the earlier ones ever took root, Mr. Sciame said. Mr. Sciame, who plans to develop a cubist tower designed by the architect Santiago Calatrava as ultra-expensive condominiums nearby at 80 South Street, said he was interested in the Front Street project.


Summary: When Stefano Barbagallo and Claudio Marini, Midtown restaurateurs, decided to open an upscale food market together, they needed a storefront. Mr. Barbagallo and Mr. Marini are presiding over the creation of a 650-square-foot shop, which this spring will stock items like imported olive oils and buffalo mozzarella.


Summary: Martin D. Brazeau and Per E. Ahlberg are the researchers from Uppsala University, base their claim on a study of a fossil of Panderichthys, a 370-million-year-old fish that is an immediate ancestor of the most primitive tetrapods. Mr. Brazeau said that the first thing that happens is that the spiracle becomes very large. He said that it's got this combination of fish- and tetrapod-like features. He is the one who undertook the research as part of his work on a doctorate in evolutionary biology. In Panderichthys, Mr. Brazeau said that the first thing that happens is that the spiracle becomes very large. Further he said, including changes to a bone that is the forerunner of the stapes, or stirrup bone, that is part of the middle ear structure.


Summary: The Transportation Security Administration said that applicants denied access can use its Office of Redress for appeal.


Summary: The Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it would offer a variety of enhanced or time-saving participant benefits at security checkpoints for people who enroll in the Registered Traveler program. The Association of Corporate Travel Executives has urged frequent fliers to look carefully at how the Registered Traveler program will operate. Greeley Koch, the president of the corporate travel executives' group, said that he sincerely hopes they will continue to solicit the recommendations of the Registered Traveler program's largest user group, the business traveler.


Summary: The Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it would offer a variety of enhanced or time-saving participant benefits at security checkpoints for people who enroll in the Registered Traveler program. The agency did not describe the benefits, but it is widely presumed that they will include eliminating some checkpoint requirements, like removing jackets and taking laptops out of their cases. The agency said that benefits will change from time to time in order to make it more difficult for terrorists to anticipate their security activities. To enroll in the program, travelers agree to a federal background check and pay an annual fee for an ID card encoded with electronic images of their fingerprints and irises.


Summary: Some journal editors are considering adopting a test, in use at The Journal of Cell Biology, that could have caught the concocted images of the human embryonic stem cells made by Dr. Hwang Woo Suk. But as the Hwang case showed again, reviewers can do only so much. She became interested as a quality control measure, not because of the concocted papers of Dr. Hwang, two of which Science published.


Summary: Since when the test was put in place, 25 percent of all accepted manuscripts have had one or more illustrations that were manipulated in ways that violate the journal's guidelines, said Michael Rossner of Rockefeller University. While reformatting illustrations submitted in the wrong format, Dr. Rossner realized that some authors had used Photoshop to misrepresent the original data. To prohibit such manipulations, Dr. Rossner and Dr. Mellman published guidelines saying, in effect, that nothing should be done to any part of an illustration that did not affect all other parts equally.


Summary: With a grant from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is interested in ways of authenticating digital images presented in court, Dr. Hani Farid an applied mathematician at Dartmouth is devising algorithms to detect alterations. His work has attracted interest from many people, he said, including eBay customers concerned about the authenticity of images. The human eye is largely indifferent to changes in lighting, Dr. Farid said, but conflicting sources of illumination in a single image can be detected by computer analysis and are a sign of manipulation.


Summary: Stanislas Dehaene, another co-author and a professor of psychology at the College of France, is not willing to go quite that far. The Mundurukú, like all of us, do interact with 3-D objects, navigate in a complex spatial environment, and so on. Dr. Dehaene described an innate ability, rather than an innate knowledge.


Summary: An indigenous group called the Mundurukú, who live in isolated villages in several Brazilian states in the Amazon jungles, have no words in their language for square, rectangle, triangle, or any other geometric shape except circles. The Mundurukú language has few words for numbers beyond five except few and many. The Mundurukú subjects, tested by a native speaker of Mundurukú working with a linguist, were asked to identify the image. The Mundurukú, like all of us, do interact with 3-D objects, navigate in a complex spatial environment, and so on.


Summary: Elizabeth Spelke, a co-author of the paper and a professor of psychology at Harvard said, across cultures that live extremely different lives, we see common foundational sets of abilities and they are not just low-level kinds of abilities that humans share with other animals, but abilities that are at the center of human thinking at its highest reaches. Dr. Spelke sees in these results evidence of the universality of human thought processes.


Summary: At the halfway mark between the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina and the beginning of the 2006 hurricane season which occurred on June 1, the Army Corps of Engineers has completed only 16 percent of its planned repairs to New Orleans's battered flood protection system, according to corps representatives. The corps says its work is on track for restoring the system to its pre-hurricane strength by the June 1 deadline, but in the meantime many groups that have studied the disaster are coming up with proposals of their own that they say could be cheaper, faster or stronger.


Summary: A MARRIOTT RESIDENCE INN has officially opened in Manhattan, adding 357 guest rooms in a borough that has been depleted of 3,600 rooms since 1999. Many are limited-service brands, like Holiday Inn Express and Courtyard by Marriott, and most are smaller than the average for a Manhattan hotel, which is 275 rooms.


Summary: Harry Gross, chairman and chief executive of G Holdings, which built the Residence Inn and has other Marriott-brand hotels in the city. Mr. Gross said it took more than five years to put together the deal because of the complex land assembly. The apartments are priced at $650,000 to $950,000; the median price for Manhattan condos, Mr. Gross said, is $1.2 million.


Summary: Marriot Residence Inn has officially opened in Manhattan, adding 357 guest rooms in a borough that has been depleted of 3,600 rooms since 1999, as many hotels have been converted to residential use. The new Residence Inn, at the Avenue of the Americas and West 39th Street, is an extended-stay hotel, in Manhattan. The Residence Inn, for example, will have 96 condo units on the top 10 floors, in addition to the hotel guest rooms, retail space and a parking garage.


Summary: Rebecca Robertson, who will become chief executive of the future arts institution, said that its mission had to be determined. The goal is to get the right mix that supports our programming vision, which is said by her in a telephone interview from Lincoln Center, where she is the outgoing executive director of the center's ambitious redevelopment project. Robertson said there was no flexible open floor space for the visual and performing arts in the city.


Summary: Mr. Smith said that carpenters, electricians, exposition workers and Teamsters all earn a living from armory shows.


Summary: The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey refuses to rent an empty warehouse to American Stevedoring, a shipping company that built a thriving business over the last 10 years on piers. American Stevedoring, the Teamsters union, and political supporters of both say the Port Authority is keeping more than 100 dockworkers from earning a living. The Port Authority has said it will not renew Stevedoring's lease on five other piers when it expires.


Port Authority of New York
Port Authority

Summary: The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the Red Hook piers, refuses to rent an empty warehouse to American Stevedoring, a shipping company that built a thriving business over the last 10 years on piers that once employed thousands but then stood vacant for decades. The Port Authority has evicted the stevedores from two piers to make room for a cruise-ship port and a planned waterfront development that combines parkland and luxury housing and is favored by the city. The Port Authority said it will not renew Stevedoring's lease on five other piers when it expires next year.


Summary: Representative Jerrold L. Nadler is a Democrat whose district snakes along miles of waterfront in Brooklyn and Manhattan, said the city and the port are going about the process all wrong. He said that they are correct than that the better place for a port is Sunset Park.


Summary: Charles A. Russell, who is a spokesman for Mr. Scrushy, said he was not aware of an explicit agreement for the Lewis Group to pay Ms. He said that there is nothing there he think Richard would have any part of. He said that Mr. Scrushy reviewed the articles before they were published.


Scrushy
Richard M. Scrushy
Richard
Richard Scrushy

Summary: A writer said that Richard M. Scrushy, the former chief executive of HealthSouth, paid her through a public relations firm to produce several favorable articles for an Alabama newspaper that he reviewed before publication during his fraud trial last year. Mr. Scrushy was acquitted in June in a six-month trial there on all 36 counts against him, despite testimony from former HealthSouth executives who said he presided over a huge accounting fraud. Mr. Scrushy said in a statement that his foundation donated money to Mr. Henderson's church, but said the payments were unrelated to his case.


Summary: Audrey Lewis said she received $10,000 from Mr. Scrushy through the Lewis Group and another $1,000 to help buy a computer. Charles A. Russell, a spokesman for Mr. Scrushy, said he was not aware of an explicit agreement for the Lewis Group to pay Ms. Lewis provided copies of a retainer agreement that Mr. Scrushy signed last April with the Lewis Group, a public relations firm controlled by Jesse J. Lewis Sr., the founder of The Birmingham Times, and a check issued to her in May from the Lewis Group.


Ms. Lewis
Audrey Lewis
Jesse J. Lewis Sr.
James E. Lewis
Lewis

Summary: Lewis provided copies of a retainer agreement that Mr. Scrushy signed last April with the Lewis Group, a public relations firm controlled by Jesse J. Lewis Sr., who is 82, the founder of The Birmingham Times, and a check issued to her in May from the Lewis Group.


Summary: A Titian Travels To Washington An erotic landscape by Titian that inspired Manet's celebrated ''Déjeuner sur l'Herbe'' is coming to the United States for the first time as part of ''Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting,'' an exhibition opening at the National Gallery of Art in Washington on June 18. Until 20 years ago the work, ''Pastoral Concert (Concert Champêtre),'' about 1510, was thought to be by Titian's elder rival Giorgione.


Summary: A Titian Travels To Washington An erotic landscape by Titian that inspired Manet's celebrated ''Déjeuner sur l'Herbe'' is coming to the United States for the first time as part of ''Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting,'' an exhibition opening at the National Gallery of Art in Washington on June 18. Until 20 years ago the work, ''Pastoral Concert (Concert Champêtre),'' about 1510, was thought to be by Titian's elder rival Giorgione. It shows why these Venetian pictures have this extraordinary brilliance of color. Recent X-rays and infrared reflectography conducted at the Louvre on the Titian painting reveal his original design beneath the top layer of paint.


Summary: David Brown, curator of Italian paintings at the National Gallery, said that the painting was only outside France once, in 1955, when it was in a Giorgione exhibition in Venice. Mr. Brown added that the picture was emblematic of what we're trying to do in the show. Mr. Brown said that this was an important new discovery arousing much interest among scientists and art historians.


Summary: A Titian Travels To Washington An erotic landscape by Titian that inspired Manet's celebrated ''Déjeuner sur l'Herbe'' is coming to the United States for the first time as part of ''Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting,'' an exhibition opening at the National Gallery of Art in Washington on June 18.


Summary: It is a warning that New Jersey government had lost the people's confidence, Jon S. Corzine was sworn in as the state's 52nd elected governor and pledged to guide in a new era marked by ethics reform and fiscal restraint. Offering a sober message in blunt language, Mr. Corzine, who is a former Wall Street executive, said that the state faced deep financial problems, and he complained that past failures of leadership had relegated key aspects of the government to the control of the state and federal courts. He also pledged wide-ranging ethics reform, including an elected state comptroller to monitor the government.


Summary: Both the State Senate and the Assembly are purely under Democratic control, though Mr. Corzine has had some awkward moments with the man he is replacing, former acting Gov. Richard J. Codey, who is the president of the Senate. Mr. Codey who became governor after the sudden resignation of James E. But he stepped aside when Mr. Corzine indicated that he would spend whatever was necessary to win.


Summary: Edmund J. McMahon, is the director of the Empire Center for New York State Policy, a project of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group, was pleased to see tax cuts, and a proposal to give tax credits to some parents for educational expenses including private school tuition. But he said he was concerned by the spending increase this year, and the fact that so many of the tax increases do not take effect or have to be paid for until Mr. Pataki leaves office.


Summary: Before 11 years, as a rookie governor, George E. Pataki shook up Albany by proposing a budget that cut overall state spending for the first time since World War II. Governor Pataki unveiled his 12th and final state budget proposal. Over the years, spending increases helped the Republican governor win re-election twice in this overwhelmingly Democratic state, but they have sparked distrust of Mr. Pataki in some conservative circles.


Summary: Senator David A. Paterson, the Democratic minority leader, said that a different set of rules for the next governor than they had for yourself.


Summary: Edmund J. McMahon, the director of the Empire Center for New York State Policy, was pleased to see tax cuts, and a proposal to give tax credits to some parents for educational expenses including private school tuition. But he said he was concerned by the spending increase this year, and the fact that so many of the tax increases do not take effect or have to be paid for, until Mr. Pataki leaves office.


Summary: Diana Fortuna, the president of the commission, said that he had come in as a belt-tightener, and over time succumbed to the pressure to add spending, à la Albany.


Summary: So Mr. Pataki showed reporters a chart indicating that the 5 percent annual growth in spending was less than the average for all states (5.9 percent) and less than the average growth during the administration of his predecessor, Mario M. Cuomo (7.5 percent).


Summary: The governor's spending habits have changed over time, according to an analysis of his budgets by the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog group.


Summary: Nabil N. Ghaly, chief signal engineer in the department of capital program management at New York City Transit, said that it was a gradual implementation of technology. Dr. Ghaly, an electrical engineer, said the new system would increase by nearly 20 percent the number of trains that can be operated at once on a line; at the height of the commuter rush, for example, 33 trains an hour might pass through a station, compared with today's 28. Dr. Ghaly said that the next line projected for modernization is the No. 7. Design for a new signaling system on that line is to be completed this fall, with a contract to be awarded next year.


Summary: New York City Transit, the largest arm of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, began the project in 1999 after years of planning.


Summary: New York City Transit, the largest arm of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, began the project in 1999 after years of planning. Nabil N. Ghaly, chief signal engineer in the department of capital program management at New York City Transit, said that it was a gradual implementation of technology. New York City Transit tried to remove the conductors from the L, arguing that their traditional role to open and shut doors and make announcements had become obsolete.


Summary: Jane R. Hirschmann, a leader of Time Out From Testing, that they were sick and tired of these tests and especially the high-stakes nature of the tests when these tests are so deeply flawed. Ms. Hirschmann also said that the state needed to come forward and the city and say this test was invalid, and it would not be used and the state education commissioner, Richard P. Mills, should be dismissed or forced to resign.


Summary: While the problem was isolated to New York City, it left officials struggling to explain an embarrassing error on a test used to measure school performance under federal law and to decide which students are eligible to move to eighth grade under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's promotion rules. Critics of standardized testing and of Mr. Bloomberg's promotion policies immediately seized on the problem.


Summary: Tom Dunn, a spokesman for the State Education Department, said that city officials spotted the problem early yesterday morning, before the tests were administered, and quickly alerted teachers. Mr. Dunn said the state saw no reason to adjust results and would continue to administer the second part of the test today. Mr. Dunn said that while the exam booklet had been prepared by CTB/McGraw Hill, the test publisher, answer sheets are devised regionally.


Summary: The roughly 65,000 seventh graders in New York City who took the statewide English test yesterday might have anticipated a challenging question or two. What they did not expect was to be stumped by the answer sheet. Stephen Morello, a spokesman for the city's Education Department, said that they acknowledged that a mistake was made.


Summary: Nicholas Scoppetta said that the numbers were already dropping when the system was probably at its worst who was appointed commissioner of the Administration for Children's Services by former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in 1996 and who oversaw a multi-million dollar reconstruction of the agency. Two years into Mr. Scoppetta's overhaul of the agency, the number of child deaths spiked, to 36. Mr. Scoppetta said that Child welfare was enormously complicated, and that was why you saw errors of judgment, even when they were going by the rulebook.


Summary: Aly Borst says that she knows the feeling. She had spent a couple of years drifting at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, which emphasizes individual projects. She decided she was ready to go back to college -- but she didn't head to Hampshire, with its libraries, museums, climbing wall and pool nestled amid an apple orchard.


Summary: Barbara K. Townsend, who is the author of ''Understanding the Impact of Reverse Transfer Students on Community Colleges'' said that often they get to campus and find they're just not ready and he is also a professor of educational leadership and policy analysis. She said she had seen that happen on her campus, the University of Missouri, Columbia, where lecture classes pack in as many as 500 students. Dr. Townsend is familiar with the trend.


Summary: The rapid rise in university tuition is also pushing students or parents who pay the bills to consider a respite at a community college, according to George R. Boggs, president of the American Association of Community Colleges. Mr. Boggs says the number is most likely even higher. He asked to keep hearing from college presidents that there had been even more reverse transfers in the last few years.


Summary: But new computer modeling by Erik Asphaug and Craig B. Agnor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows that things weren't that simple. He said that most of the time, the impactor and the target go off on their merry ways. He further said that the impactors suffer all kinds of fates.


Summary: This is a teacher-pupil relationship, say Nigel R. Franks and Tom Richardson of the University of Bristol in Britain.


Summary: This turns out, is a teacher-pupil relationship, say Nigel R. Franks and Tom Richardson of the University of Bristol in Britain.


Summary: MAXjet, the all-business-class trans-Atlantic start-up airline, has set the start date for its second route, between Washington Dulles International Airport and Stansted Airport in London. MAXjet will operate four round trips a week on that route. As it does on its initial New York-Stansted route, MAXjet will fly a Boeing 767 outfitted with 102 standard business-class seats.


Summary: MAXjet, the all-business-class trans-Atlantic start-up airline, has set the start date for its second route, between Washington Dulles International Airport and Stansted Airport in London. MAXjet will operate four round trips a week on that route. The introductory fare will be $999 round trip, for a limited time, and the normal round-trip fare will be $1,750, as said by the company.


Summary: Jean-Phillipe Perol, vice chairman of the European agency said that they believed that the United States still holded enormous potential for travel to Europe.


Summary: Michael Kantrow, president at Margeotes Fertitta Powell, will add the duties of chief executive, succeeding George Fertitta, who becomes chairman, a new post.


Summary: Jim Ferguson is the chairman and chief creative officer at TM Advertising, Irving, Texas, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, is giving up the posts, the agency said, to become executive creative officer, a new post.


Summary: Charles Ensley, who is the president of the social services workers union local , whose age is 37, said yesterday that the supervisor, Roger Moore, a 20-year veteran who managed more than a dozen investigators and hundreds of cases of alleged child neglect or abuse, lacked the college degree required for his position when he was hired. He changed his application, as said by Mr. Ensley, and when the city found out about it several years ago, it took no action. Mr. Ensley said yesterday that they didn't dismiss him, which was well within their rights to do.


Summary: Mr. Browne said that the only way I could answer that was to say that the department had no reason to question the detectives' conduct. He was asked if he planned to review the department's role in the case, or the performance of the detectives, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said that he had no reason to question in any way, shape or form the performance of the detectives in this case. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, acknowledging that Nixzmary had had a number of contacts with the city's child welfare agency, said that chances to save her life had been lost and perhaps mishandled. The Bloomberg administration's efforts to resolve discrepancies in accounts of a child abuse investigation involving the death of a 7-year-old Brooklyn girl misstated part of the name of the union representing the city's child welfare caseworkers.


Summary: Police played  important role in investigating concerns about the young girl, Nixzmary Brown. The New York Daily News reported yesterday that what it said were Nixzmary's case records from the child welfare agency suggested that the police had helped interview relatives and decided not to get more involved because  they don't get any clear  evidence. The president of the union had allowed a top supervisor in the Brooklyn child welfare office responsible for protecting Nixzmary and another child who died in recent weeks to stay in his job despite having misrepresented his qualifications when he was hired.


Summary: Charles Ensley, president of the social services workers, said that the supervisor, Roger Moore, a 20-year veteran who managed more than a dozen investigators and hundreds of cases of alleged child neglect or abuse, lacked the college degree required for his position when he was hired. Mr. Moore resigned from his position as field director of the child welfare office in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn last week. Child welfare agency officials said that he had been suspended in December and was under threat of being fired, because he had admitted to doctoring records during an investigation into the death in November of a 16-month-old child who was being monitored by child welfare workers in his office.


Summary: Icahn Partners has invested in a variety of troubled companies such as Kerr McGee, the oil and gas company, and Time Warner while agitating for corporate changes in them.


Summary: Stacy Widlitz, an independent media analyst, says that she doubts that mail-order rentals will remain a growing business. She said that another threat was that movie studios might release new films in several ways, including on DVD's, before they get to the rental market. She added that she didn't think they sufficiently assumed when they tested the strategy that consumers would hold on to videos for a far longer period.


Summary: The performance is not crucial to his $2.7 billion fund, which, according to a person close to Icahn Partners, has risen 17 percent in value since it was started in late 2004. More recently, Icahn Partners has invested in a variety of troubled companies among them Kerr McGee, the oil and gas company, and Time Warner while agitating for corporate changes in them.


Summary: Blockbuster shares closed at $3.86 a share, a drop of more than 50 percent since 2004, when Mr. Icahn began accumulate his 17 million shares, now worth roughly $63 million. But Mr. Icahn's magic touch seems to have eluded him with Blockbuster, the home-rental video company that his fund, Icahn Partners, has been accumulating at an average price of about $8 a share.


Summary: It will be not a smart move to bet against Carl C. Icahn. He has made a fortune by investing in troubled companies and pressuring their management for change. Over the years, Mr. Icahn now thought of as an activist investor in some circles has made a fortune as a corporate raider, and is perhaps best known for his four-year battle to get RJR Nabisco to split itself into two companies, which he finally won in 2000.


Summary: John F. Antioco, who took over as Blockbuster's chief executive in 1997, maintains that he is doing just that and said that it has to be run to maximize current revenues. He said through e-mail that with the exception of the necessary investment to grow our online businesses, they all are essentially running the business for cash while profitably growing market share. He has defended the package.


Summary: When the Maryland legislature passed a law last week requiring that its largest employers, including Wal-Mart Stores, which at least spend 8 percent of their payrolls on health care, supporters of the measure claimed they had delivered a clear message to corporate America that companies cannot shirk their duty to employees. Maryland's bill, drafted to apply to companies with 10,000 or more employees, actually affects only one company in the state like Wal-Mart Stores, which has come to symbolize corporations that do not provide adequate health benefits to their employees.


Summary: D. Piro is the chairman of the health law group at Hewitt Associates, which is a consulting firm. He said that it's seems like that this will go to court. He also said that States are searching for ways to pay for programs like Medicaid. He also agreed that it seems to be a cheap fix.


Summary: The executive director of Health Access California, named Anthony Wright said that there is more public consciousness about how large employers do not provide health care, a consumer coalition that supported a similar law in California that was narrowly defeated by voters a little more than a year ago. Mr. Wright, the California advocate  said that tehy won't be the leaders of the opposition, and he said the majority of the resistance in his state came from fast-food and retailing companies.


Summary: Six miles from the heavily mined and guarded zone that divides North Korea from South Korea, workers at LG.Philips LCD are starting to produce liquid-crystal display screens at a new $5 billion plant.


Summary: The political detente between the two countries is bearing economic fruit as South Korea's economic expansion washes away psychological barriers and now laps at the southern edge of the long-feared DMZ. Three industrial parks and one planned city of 150,000 are going up, all within 15 miles of the southern edge of the DMZ. Choi Gwi Nam, director of the planned city said that the area near the DMZ is abundant in natural resources, environmentally friendly, labeled Ubiquitous City because all the apartments will have high-speed Internet access.


Summary: Antonio R. Villaraigosa, who is the Mayor of Los Angeles stood before the news media and declared unequivocally, he said that this is the capital of homelessness in America. The mayor was reacting to the bald truth of a report which was released Thursday, based on what officials called the most comprehensive census and survey of homelessness in Los Angeles County, that found 88,345 homeless people in the city and surrounding communities.


Summary: It was not the sort of Chamber of Commerce cheer expected from the chief executive of one the nation's sunniest and most tourist-conscious cities.


Summary: Recently, the conservative candidate's campaign has shifted gears, to emphasize that he is a take-charge, and can-do, self-made man and to argue that his background in business, administering companies and creating jobs, makes him the best choice to succeed President Ricardo Lagos. And he said that he knows Ricardo Lagos, and Michelle Bachelet is no Ricardo Lagos.


Summary: Michelle Bachelet is the front-runner, who would be the first woman to be elected president in Chile; and her rival, Sebastián Piñera, would be the first billionaire to hold that office there. Bachelet, whose age is 54, a pediatrician who has not held an elective office but who has been minister of health and defense, she is the daughter of a general who died in prison after the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973. She had three children by two men, one of whom she never married, and lived with another who had links to a guerrilla group, according to recent biographies. She is not married and known as a single mother.


Summary: The front-runner, Michelle Bachelet, would be the first woman to be elected as a president in Chile; and her rival named Sebastián Piñera, would be the first billionaire to hold that office here. But Mr. Piñera, whose age is 56, also breaks with tradition though not at all in the same arena. His campaign advertisements and public appearances cast him as an flawless family man and show him with his wife, sometimes accompanied by their four children.


Summary: Though Mr. Piñera represents an alliance of right-wing parties, he has tried to deprive the left of the political use of its favorite punching bag by openly criticizing Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the military dictator who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. This election is less polarized between democracy and dictatorship than the three previous votes held since General Pinochet left power, and that makes it more difficult. Mr. Piñera questioned the competency of the center-left coalition that has governed the country since the Pinochet dictatorship, pointing to what he described as squandered opportunities.


Summary: Institutions like the Metropolitan Museum formed collections that included plaster replicas of architectural elements like the pediments of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, reliefs from the Parthenon and casts of Italian Renaissance art like Della Robbia's relief of a Virgin with saints. As times and tastes have changed, the Met has given hundreds of these casts to places like the Art Students League of New York, the National Taipei Teachers College and Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. But the Met still has more casts on its hands than it wants, so it has decided to sell 177 of them at the York Avenue headquarters of Sotheby's on Feb. 28.


Summary: The Met still has more casts on its hands than it wants, so it has decided to sell 177 of them at the York Avenue headquarters of Sotheby's on Feb. 28. Doralynn Pines, associate director for administration at the Met, said that they didn't exhibit them anymore because they were not art; they were reproductions of art.


Summary: Johnnie Mask, Charles Cullen's lawyer , said that Charles Cullen, the nurse, was so upset about his sentencing being canceled last week that he is pulling out of a carefully constructed plea deal in which he had agreed to help identify his victims in exchange for not facing the death penalty, his lawyer.  Mr. Mask added that then it was on the prosecutors' shoulder whether somebody else dies.


Summary: Envelopes marked Price Rite Photo are stacked by a door. The proprietors of Price Rite are a subject of complaints to the state attorney general, the city Department of Consumer Affairs, the county district attorney and the Better Business Bureau. The company is only one of several online camera dealers in Brooklyn that have gained nationwide notoriety for hard sales tactics and bait-and-switch advertising, but when customers suddenly began rallying against the dealers, Price Rite was the center of attention.


Summary: Robert Colon said that no one had picked up the mail since the business quit the premises two months ago. At the warehouse in Sunset Park, Mr. Colon, the handyman, had his own ideas about the whereabouts of Price Rite and its proprietor. Robert Colon, explaining that he was never paid for moving an air-conditioner, said that he owed him money.


Department of Consumer Affairs
Consumer Affairs

Summary: The proprietors of Price Rite are a subject of complaints to the state attorney general, the city Department of Consumer Affairs, the county district attorney and the Better Business Bureau. The state attorney general Eliot Spitzer mediated four complaints against Price Rite and referred two to the city Department of Consumer Affairs. A spokesman for Mr. Hynes said his office refers them to the attorney general and Consumer Affairs.


Summary: The proprietors of Price Rite are a subject of complaints to the state attorney general, the city Department of Consumer Affairs, the county district attorney and the Better Business Bureau. Anthony Barbera, manager of the Information and Investigations Department of the Better Business Bureau of New York, said that it was a perennial problem for us, particularly in New York, not necessarily for New York customers but for customers around the country.


Summary: The address, at donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/, is known among serious camera consumers, but its fame grew when it was mentioned in an online rant by Thomas Hawk of Piedmont. Mr. Hawk posted a 2,333-word complaint about Price Rite Photo on his Web site, describing hard sales tactics and threats. By 2 a.m. the next day, this dispute over a $3,000 camera was an enormously popular topic of discussion online, casting Mr. Hawk in the timeless role of the outraged underdog. Mr. Hawk quickly declared victory, and online discussion forums with names like Digg filed the story under headlines like "Digg Users Take Revenge at Bad Online Store." The episode was not complete for Mr. Wiss, whose photographs of Brooklyn buildings had been mentioned in Mr. Hawk's rant under the headline "Update #20." Mr. Wiss said, he received several calls accusing him of putting stores out of business and threatening him with death.


Summary: A study by Jessica Stapley and Martin J. Whiting at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa shows that they do.


Summary: A genetic analysis by Gaku Tokuda and colleagues at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, Japan, has provided some answers.


Summary: Peter J. Mumby, a biologist at the University of Exeter in Britain, said that people have used marine reserves to manage reef fish for many years. Dr. Mumby and colleagues set out to see whether this was so, studying fish populations at a reserve in the Bahamas. He said that this reserve that allowed predators to come back also allowed parrotfish to come back. Dr. Mumby and his colleagues found that parrotfish longer than about six inches were too big for the grouper to eat.


Summary: The airport selected the Clear plan, developed by Verified Identity Pass, which introduced it at Orlando International Airport in Florida last July. By then, competitors to Verified Identity Pass are expected to be in business.


Summary: Under the Registered Traveler Program, fliers submit basic information that enables them to be cleared for expedited screening by the Transportation Security Administration.


Summary: Cendant, a conglomerate that was built through the acquisition of dozens of the nation's most prominent businesses said it would break itself up into four different companies. But Cendant's stock dropped more than 5 percent on the first day after the announcement, and the decline has widened to almost 13 percent now.


Summary: For the chairman, Sumner M. Redstone, it was a bold step to try to create value from a company whose stock price had been treading water, as well as a frank acknowledgment that his previous strategy had failed.


Summary: Viacom, the media giant, announced almost a year ago that it would split itself in two. For the chairman, Sumner M. Redstone, it was a bold step to try to create value from a company whose stock price had been treading water, as well as a frank acknowledgment that his previous strategy had failed. But instead of rising after the announcement, Viacom's stock price initially fell by some 20 percent then recovered slightly before the spinoff, which took place last week with much fanfare.


Summary: VIACOM announced almost a year ago that it would split itself in two. Instead of rising after the announcement, Viacom's stock price initially fell by some 20 percent, then recovered slightly before the spinoff, which took place last week with much fanfare.