Summary: Last year, for example, when Medtronic and Guidant recalled certain heart defibrillators, both companies provided new devices free and agreed to reimburse patients up to $2,500 in out-of-pocket expenses for replacement operations. Jeffrey Swann, a lawyer in Louisville said that they can't tell from their records if a doctor implanted a Guidant, who is representing several insurers who are considering suing that company. Both Medtronic and Guidant face scores of lawsuits, and Guidant is also under investigation by the Justice Department in connection with its handling of safety issues involving those devices.


Secretariat
United Nations Secretariat
United Nations

Summary: The congressmen wrote that they are writing with regard to the outrageous attack you have launched on behalf of the Group of 77 against the United Nations Secretariat for its aggressive effort to shine a light on the corruption that has infected the United Nations procurement office. The dispute comes while intense negotiations are going on to reach consensus on proposals to tighten management of the United Nations, and to produce a new Human Rights Council to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission.


Summary: Conflict burst into the open after John R. Bolton, the American ambassador to the United Nations, scheduled Security Council briefings on two volatile issues that many on the 191-member General Assembly believe are their responsibility and two United States congressmen wrote an accusatory letter to Ambassador Dumisani S. Kumalo of South Africa, head of the Group of 77, which represents 132 developing nations.


Summary: All four declined to comment after their appearances before Judge Gerald Bruce Lee in United States District Court. Judge Lee set a $1 million bond for each, and ordered three of them for not traveling outside of the United States. Judge Lee gave an exception to Mr. Milton, permitting him to visit his 80-year-old mother in Britain as long as he notified the court in advance.


Summary: Gary Ban, the chief executive for Oasys Mobile, said that the consumers in that target demographic do not want in-your-face marketing as they wanted something that was risqué, funny and something that involves the consumer. He also said that raising the ire of people who initially believed in the power of Pherotones is simply a negative consequence of the whole effort.


Summary: Oasys, based in Raleigh, N.C., enlisted the advertising firm McKinney & Silver, in Durham, N.C., to introduce its brand inexpensively, with a nontraditional campaign that it hoped would grab the attention of its desired 18-to-24-year-old demographic. David Baldwin, the executive creative director at McKinney, a unit of Havas, said that they have a brand that nobody knows what it is and they have a consumer that's very specific.


Summary: The Suffolk police commissioner, Richard Dormer, who was also at the news conference, said that he considers this the sleaziest kind of investigation, but he considers it necessary. In a separate case, a traffic and weather reporter for a Long Island radio station was indicted on federal charges of possessing child pornography. Commissioner Dormer said the detectives stayed in character, as naïve children and that the predators seduced the youngsters; the youngsters did not seduce the predators.


Summary: Of the 12,000 families whose benefit ended Monday, 10,500 have received rental assistance or a trailer, said Libby Turner, head of the Hurricane Katrina/Rita Transitional Housing Unit at FEMA.


Summary: Many of those who have returned to New Orleans have begun to rebuild, enroll their children in school or, like Dominique Handy, get a job. Ms. Handy, 22 , a waitress, stood on the street outside the Royal St. Charles Hotel on Monday, her belongings in the trunk of a friend's car, her baby daughter, Amyrie, balanced on her hip. She had $1,800 from FEMA, which was supposed to pay for three months' rent, an impossibility in a city so strapped for housing that officials could not even find a place to serve as an emergency shelter.


Summary: A federal immigration court judge in Manhattan yesterday dismissed the deportation proceedings against José Rodas, a 7-year-old whose case was described in a front-page article in The New York Times on Friday about how low-level immigration gatekeepers and prosecutors are using their growing discretionary power over travelers .Immigration authorities had been trying to deport José over the protests of his mother, Emily Arroyo,  ever since he returned from a brief trip to his native Canada two years ago without the right visa. As the minor child of a citizen, José is eligible to apply for permanent residency now that he is no longer in deportation proceedings.


Summary: The judge, Sarah M. Burr, suggested that lawyers for United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement use their discretion to close the case administratively.


Summary: 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, which is said by Tami Frazier, who is a spokeswoman for Mayor C. Ray Nagin. Those officers are keeping constant watch over a much smaller city, and Ms. Frazier said that the National Guard troops still in town were supplementing the efforts of the police force.


Summary: Not everyone here agrees with the wisdom of putting on Mardi Gras, which has been canceled 13 times in the past, almost always because of wars, said by Arthur Hardy, who has written extensively on the celebration in New Orleans. Mardi Gras Day will be celebrated on Febuary 28. Twenty-eight of the krewes, or social clubs, that build the elaborate floats and organize the parades will be participating this year, compared with 34 last year, said by Mr. Hardy.


Summary: After weeks in which the White House has declined 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 in May 2001. And it leaves unanswered questions about how Mr. Abramoff and the tribal leader, whom he was trying to sign as a client, gained access to a meeting with the president on the White House grounds that was ostensibly for a group of state legislators who were supporting Mr. Bush's 2001 tax cut plan. It is not clear what contact, if anyoccurred, Mr. Abramoff had with Mr. Bush during the 20 minutes or so that the session lasted.


Summary: White House records show that the meeting was also attended by Grover Norquist, a friend of Mr. Abramoff's who is a leading conservative strategist and president of the group Americans for Tax Reform, which was helping to rally support for Mr. Bush's tax cuts. A spokesman for Mr. Norquist declined to comment on Mr. Norquist's involvement in the meeting.


Summary: 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 abutting to the White House.


Summary: In the zoo's favor is that the lease program has generated important reproductive successes for a species that is critically risked, said by David L. Towne, who is the director of the Giant Panda Conservation Foundation. Mr. Towne said that it was like having a World Series winner in his town, who lives in Seattle. But now, he said, based purely on economics that he has told mayor and everyone else that the last thing we want is pandas.


Summary: Lun Lun and Yang Yang they are Zoo Atlanta's giant pandas and 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: It seems to be some surprise that the Danish people and their government are standing behind the newspaper firm, Jyllands-Posten and its decision to publish drawings of the Prophet Muhammad last fell. When the Danish flag was burned on the streets in Arab countries, the reaction here was outrage and calls for standing even more firmly behind Jyllands-Posten. They tried to get Jyllands-Posten to recognize its offense.


Summary: Op-Ed Contributor of a Danish newspaper Martin Burcharth is the United States correspondent for Information.


Summary: The photo in the upper left shows Assim, who is 5, Asiel, who is 3, and Salma, which is almost 2; Assim says he misses the village trees he used to climb, for in the camps the trees have all been cut for firewood.


Summary: Muslim countries are silent about the kill of Darfur's Muslims, while China disgraces itself by protecting Sudan which occurred in the United Nations and underwriting the genocide with trade.


Summary: Michael D. Brown said it was baloney for Department of Homeland Security officials to claim they did not know of the extent of the flooding until Tuesday, because he and other FEMA officials had notified them the day before. Mr. Brown said he told the White House aide that everything that they had planned about, worried about, that FEMA, frankly, had worried about for 10 years was coming true. Mr. Brown said that FEMA's role within the Homeland Security Department had been subordinated to fighting terror.


Summary: Michael D. Brown, the former federal emergency management chief who became a ridiculed symbol of the Bush administration's flawed response to Hurricane Katrina, returned in anger to Capitol Hill on Friday and lashed back at his former superiors. In the aftermath of the storm, administration officials said they were caught by surprise when they were told of the levee breach on Tuesday, Aug. 30. Mr. Hagin was the senior staff member with President Bush on the day the hurricane hit, when Mr. Bush was traveling in California. Several senators, including Democrats, said they were surprised by Mr. Brown's inability to remember crucial details from the early days of the storm, including which White House aide he spoke with and whether Mr. Bush participated in the telephone call.


Summary: Democrats, including Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Daniel K. Akaka of Hawaii, said Michael D. Brown was being made a scapegoat to deflect criticism from the White House. Mr. Lautenberg advised to keep his chin up and fight back.


Summary: Michael D. Brown, the former federal emergency management chief who became a ridiculed symbol of the Bush administration's flawed response to Hurricane Katrina, returned in anger to Capitol Hill on Friday and lashed back at his former superiors. Mr. Brown said that he told a senior White House official early on of the New Orleans flooding, and that the administration was too focused on terrorism to respond properly to natural disasters. Testifying before a Senate committee, Mr. 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 that New Orleans was flooding.


Summary: Among the speakers were Senator Susan Collins, Michael D. Brown, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency; and Senator Norm Coleman. 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 would be on conference calls and video calls to make certain that everyone had situational awareness. He says that since this was a natural disaster, that has become the stepchild within the Department of Homeland Security, and so they now have these two systems operating, one which cares about terrorism, and FEMA and the state and local partners, who are trying to approach everything from all hazards.


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: The police officer, Edward C. Belvin, had a blood alcohol level of 0.326 percent, more than three times the legal limit of 10 at the time. He was driving 62 m.p.h. at the time of the early-morning accident, according to the board.


Summary: An investigation by the  Board has concluded that a two-car collision in New Jersey that killed six people on May 1, 2003, could have been avoided if there had been a concrete median barrier in place, as there was along the rest of the highway in the area. The driver and passengers in the Taurus were returning home to Elizabeth, N.J., after finishing their shifts at a Houlihan's restaurant. The federal safety board said in its report that the state's Department of Transportation had concluded that a median was not needed along that stretch of the highway.


Summary: The collision occurred when an off-duty police officer heading south on Routes 1 and 9 in Linden in his 1998 Mercedes-Benz CLK 320 jumped a six-inch curb dividing the highway and crashed into a northbound 1986 Ford Taurus containing five people. The officer and all five occupants of the Taurus were killed.


Summary: Nassau County Executive Thomas R. Suozzi announced a plan that intended to reduce abortions, calling the proposal a risky step as he contemplates running for governor. Mr. Suozzi's proposal would give nearly $1 million in county grants to groups including Planned Parenthood and Catholic Charities to promote birth control, adoption, housing for unwed mothers, and abstinence. Mr. Suozzi said that his proposal was obviously a very risky thing to do. Mr. Suozzi, a Roman Catholic, supports legalized abortion, but his plan to reduce the number of abortions helps position him as a moderate. Although Mr. Suozzi declined to respond to Naral, his aides called the group's criticism unjustified.


Summary: Naral Pro-Choice New York countered in an e-mail message to the news media that President Bush was already pumping millions into abstinence programs that have been shown not to work. Tom Suozzi should have known better and not join the Bush administration in putting taxpayer dollars into programs that fall short. Naral's president, Kelli Conlin, said, Mr. Suozzi was pandering in the worst possible way. What drew Naral's criticism were two grants to a Protestant-affiliated group and an anti-abortion group, to promote abstinence.


Summary: Nassau County Executive Thomas R. Suozzi announced a plan on Tuesday intended to reduce abortions, calling the proposal a ''politically risky'' step as he contemplates running for governor this year.


Summary: Both Yahoo and Amazon said that their profits were not as large as analysts had expected.


Civil Liberties Union
New York Civil Liberties Union

Summary: In the 13 months ended last October, more than a third of the 360,000 people arrested in New York City sat in jail beyond the legal limit of 24 hours, according to a study released by the New York Civil Liberties Union. Donna Lieberman, who is the executive director of the Civil Liberties Union said that you're arrested in New York City, there's a good chance you'll do the time without being convicted of doing the crime, which is said by Donna Lieberman, executive director of the Civil Liberties Union.


Summary: Joseph R. Biden Jr. who is the Senator and Democrat of Delaware said that there ain't no capital. And he further said that as a matter of fact, he will be going there to borrow. Republicans would hardly concede that point, but they did show a little less spring in their steps.


Summary: Focusing his priorities, President Bush invited ordinary people like a teacher, a physicist, an Afghan politician, the family of a fallen soldier to the State of the Union address. But a Democratic congresswoman turned the tables on Mr. Bush by inviting a guest of her own Cindy Sheehan, the antiwar protester who has determined Mr. Bush from his Texas ranch to the White House. When he entered the House chamber, his latest political trophy Samuel A. Alito Jr., newly confirmed and sworn in as a justice of the Supreme Court was on full display, a powerful reminder that Mr. Bush can still flex his muscles on Capitol Hill.


Summary: The president arrived in the Capitol at a chaotic moment for Congressional Republicans, who are absorbed by the fallout from the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal and consumed with the outcome of leadership elections scheduled for Thursday.


Summary: Following days of bitter negotiations, school officials said late yesterday that they had ordered administrators of the Boys Choir of Harlem to vacate their offices and storage space in a Harlem school building by the end of the day, effectively ending a troubled partnership that had given the world-renowned choir its home in a public high school. Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and other education officials have sought to sever their relations with the choir's leadership for months, saying that its founder, Dr. Trumbull has refused to overhaul his administration of the choir despite its deep financial problems, and has continued to exert personal control of its business affairs despite an order from the Department of Education to step aside. Kelly Devers said Dr. Trumbull and the choir's administrators were expected to vacate the Harlem school, with their files and equipment, by the end of the day yesterday.


Summary: Before the Oscar winners are announced, there is already one clear group of victors: the independent production companies and specialty divisions seem likely to grab the industry's most coveted hardware. The producers guild has instituted an auditing process that involves the measurement of 46 different tasks to decide whether a producer deserves credit come Oscar time, an attempt to clarify such so-called parenting issues. The nominations announced here at the headquarters of the academy are the mother's milk of the industry, in a business that is awash in money and privilege, an Oscar is the one thing that cannot be bought.


Summary: Mark Newhouse, the deputy commissioner of small-business services said that a mall has a global view, managing the mix of retail and making sure everything looks good.


Summary: Time Inc., after eliminating 105 management jobs just before Christmas, is moving to cut about 100 more, including up to 10 at its flagship, Time magazine. Both editorial and business-side employees are being cut at several of the company's domestic magazines. The company employs about 13,400 people. The cuts come as the company continues the reorganization it began late last year, when it sought to streamline its multilayered management structure.


Summary: The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act simply required the government to obey the Constitution in doing so. And FISA was affective after 9/11 to make the job much easier than before. In fact, FISA was enacted in 1978 to avoid just this sort of abuse.


Summary: Thalia Stavrides who is the prosecutor said that Mr. Kalmus's  blood-alcohol level was .21 percent, nearly three times the legal limit. He appeared tense and nervous as Ms. Stavrides questioned him in court about his actions the day of the crash.


Summary: Keith J. Kalmus's time as a Queens prosecutor led him to a successful practice as a criminal defense lawyer in Suffolk County. Mr. Kalmus, whose age is 39, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and vehicular murder, admitting that he was drunk on the afternoon of 5th June of 2005, when his Ford Explorer slammed into an oncoming Subaru sedan on an Amagansett highway. He advertised that he defended drunken driving cases, said that on the day of the accident he was on his way home from an afternoon of drinking in a Montauk bar.


Summary: Mr. Gifford Miller who was Quinn's predecessor, was widely criticized last year for spending $1.6 million in Council money on mailings that were seen as thinly veiled political ads for his failed mayoral campaign. Mr. Miller's aides then compounded the problem by grossly underestimating the cost of the mailings, reporting an expense of only $37,000. He also said that the previous speaker, Mr. Miller, paid the price when his mailings came across as blatantly self-promotional rather than substantive.


Summary: Verified Identity Pass began operating the program at Orlando International Airport in Florida, which is still the only airport at which it is available (for $79.95 a year).


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. At The Journal of Cell Biology, the test has revealed extensive manipulation of photos. Science, in fact, has adopted The Journal of Cell Biology's guidelines and has just started to apply the image-screening test to its own manuscripts.


Summary: The editor of the journal, Ira Mellman of Yale, said that most cases were resolved when the authors provided originals. To prohibit such manipulations, Dr. Rossner and Dr. Mellman published guidelines. The scientific community has not yet come to grips with the temptations of image manipulation, Dr. Mellman said, and he would like to see other journals adopt the image-screening system.


Summary: The Bring New Orleans Back Commission, the group formed by Mayor C. Ray Nagin to produce a blueprint for the city's recovery, issued a proposal to upgrade hurricane protection. The mayor's commission also proposed a network of dams that would block or slow the opening between the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal and Lake Pontchartrain, and block storm surges from flowing up the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. The fast-track structures would cost $100 million to $170 million, according to the commission's estimates.


Summary: At a pier in Red Hook, Brooklyn, sits a 600-foot container ship brimming with 36 million pounds of Ivory Coast cocoa bound for chocolate factories in Pennsylvania and points west. 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.


Seed Media Group
JWT New York and Seed Media
JWT New York
JWT
Seed Media

Summary: IF great oaks from little acorns grow, a company called the Seed Media Group is hoping that its efforts in a fledgling field, will yield a forest. Seed Media, which produces science publications in print and online, is seeking to broaden its audience and its appeal to advertisers by introducing on Monday a network of blogs, or Web journals, devoted to science and science-related subjects. JWT New York and Seed Media are collaborating on a study exploring the relationship between consumers and science.


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


Summary: The president at Margeotes Fertitta Powell, New York whose name is Michael Kantrow, is a part of MDC Partners, will add the duties of chief executive, succeeding George Fertitta, who becomes chairman, a new post.


Summary: Neil Powell, who is the executive creative director, has been promoted to chief creative officer.


Summary: Bloomberg administration officials met for more than three hours yesterday at City Hall but still could not say what role, if any, the police had played in the investigation of child abuse involving a 7-year-old Brooklyn girl who the authorities said that she was beaten to death by her stepfather.


Summary: Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan, said that Blockbuster's recent results -- for the third quarter, same-store revenues declined 3.8 percent, gross profits fell 8.3 percent and worldwide rental revenues fell 2.5 percent. He said that they all believed that the decline in rentals that they had seen in the prior three years was attributable to a rise in DVD sales. But, Mr. Pachter noted, even as DVD sales growth slowed to 7 percent last year, rental revenues declined by 9 percent.


Summary: Adventure Life Journeys, 800-344-6118, www.adventure-life.com. For those on a budget who would like to reach Isabela and Fernandina, Adventure Life Journeys offers the Samba, a tourist-class boat with bunk beds.


Summary: Mr. Ashcroft's top deputy, James B. Comey, who was acting as attorney general in his absence, had indicated he was unwilling to give his approval to certifying central aspects of the program. Mr. Comey was unwilling to sign off on the program. Mr. Thompson's successor, Mr. Comey, was eventually authorized to take part in the program and to review intelligence material that grew out of it, and officials said he played a part in overseeing the reforms that were put in place in 2004.


Summary: The office of President Viktor A. Yushchenko noted that negotiations of the settlement of the gas problem have crossed into a new phase. Since Ukraine tilted westward after presidential elections last year, Russia has signaled its dislike for Mr. Yushchenko, and the Kremlin and Gazprom have sought to raise Ukraine's gas price from the $50 per 1,000 cubic meters it has been paying to as much as $230 per 1,000 cubic meters, a more realistic market price. A gas shortage during heating season could discredit the Ukrainian president and weaken his party before parliamentary elections in March.


Summary: The office of President Viktor A. Yushchenko noted that negotiations of the settlement of the gas problem have crossed into a new phase.


Summary: He said, he was approached by Democratic Party representatives from his native state, Ohio, to see if he would be interested in running for the United States Senate after he left the show.


Summary: Though the show began at the end of the Clinton administration, it soon found its creative niche by evoking a parallel reality, one that imagined how the White House might have been different if George W. Bush had not been elected to two terms.


Summary: Senior Democrats blamed Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, as striking a deal and then being unable to bring along key Republicans. Mr. Frist said that here had been one huge problem, and that problem had been created by the Democratic leadership. Mr. Reid said the major problem, however, was that Mr. Frist had shaken hands on the bipartisan compromise and then was unable to quiet Republican critics who were trying to gum up the works.


Summary: With other business like annual spending bills starting to pile up and the election drawing closer, some lawmakers said the best opportunity to approve legislation and start negotiations with the House might have been lost. A senior House Republican engaged on immigration issues, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, also suggested that Congress might want to slow down. Republicans also criticized the Democratic leadership as insisting on assurances that members of the Judiciary Committee would serve as negotiators with the House over a final bill before the Senate even gave initial approval to the measure.


Summary: Representative Dan Gelber, a Miami Beach Democrat on the Criminal Justice Appropriations Committee, said the video suggested that guards at the Bay Boot Camp were following an established use-of-force protocol. He said that he was just shocked that the officers seemed to think this was what they were supposed to do and that they clearly were inflicting substantial force on somebody who was not threatening them or him. Mr. Gelber added that they knew the camera was there, they knew they were being filmed, they weren't trying to hide anything.


Summary: Many states have closed military-style boot camps for teenagers in recent years, but Mr. Bush said Thursday that they have yielded a good result, and Anthony Schembri, his juvenile justice secretary, affirmed that assessment in an interview Friday. Mr. Schembri said of the five surviving boot camps, that he thinks the remainder are good options that we can use for certain kids, though he said every camp should have education and therapy components. Mr. Schembri, who would not discuss the Anderson episode except to call it tragic, said he would also revise use-of-force policies at boot camps, which in Florida are for moderate risk young offenders.


Summary: After supervising a second autopsy of Martin's body on Monday, a special prosecutor appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush disputed the findings of the original pathologist in the case: that the youth had died from complications of sickle cell trait, an undiagnosed blood disorder. Governor Bush and his Department of Juvenile Justice are reviewing policies for the state's five other boot camps, as the Legislature debates whether they should remain open. Many states have closed military-style boot camps for teenagers in recent years, but Mr. Bush said Thursday that they have yielded a good result, and Anthony Schembri, his juvenile justice secretary, affirmed that assessment in an interview Friday.


Summary: The McClatchy Company, a California newspaper publisher, won a one-bid auction for Knight Ridder, offering $4.5 billion in cash and stock for its 32 newspapers, including The Miami Herald, The Star-Telegram of Fort Worth and The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. To help finance the deal and head off some antitrust concerns, McClatchy, which is based in Sacramento, immediately put 12 of the papers back up for sale. Among those it plans to sell are The Mercury News in San Jose, Calif., Knight Ridder's hometown; The Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio, which was the first in the chain; and both papers in Philadelphia, The Inquirer and The Daily News.


Summary: Billions of dollars in mergers were announced this week, building on the momentum created when AT&T offered to acquire BellSouth for $67 billion earlier in the month.


Summary: Just as investors may have been recovering from General Motors' $8.6 billion loss last year, the company stepped up to say the loss was actually $10.6 billion. It said the added losses more accurately reflected the costs of scaling back its North American operations and of helping its former parts subsidiary, Delphi, restructure while in bankruptcy protection. G.M. said it would also restate five years of results and delay filing its annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission while it looks into accounting irregularities at its residential mortgage unit.


Summary: The trend of AT&T offering to acquire BellSouth for $67 billion swept up entire stock exchanges, as the Nasdaq Stock Market offered to buy the London Stock Exchange, and Euronext, the owner of the Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and Lisbon stock markets, said it was interested in buying Deutsche Börse, the German exchange.


Summary: General Motors said the added losses more accurately reflected the costs of scaling back its North American operations and of helping its former parts subsidiary, Delphi, restructure while in bankruptcy protection.


Summary: Softbank beat out a competing bid by a group of private equity firms led by Cerberus Capital Management of the United States.


Summary: Japan's customers paying world's highest user fees is largely a result of the near monopoly status of the largest mobile service provider, NTT DoCoMo. Analysts said Vodafone had proven too timid to challenge DoCoMo, which controls just over 50 percent of Japan's cellphone market and that it would be costly for a newcomer to take on DoCoMo.


Summary: Softbank, the Japanese Internet company, will buy Vodafone's Japanese cellphone unit in a deal worth $15.4 billion. The sale will create a communications giant in Japan by giving Softbank and its billionaire chief executive, Masayoshi Son, control of the country's third-largest mobile carrier, with 15 million subscribers. Mr. Son said that they can start from a far bigger base than if they had to begin from scratch and that Softbank would borrow as much as 1.2 trillion yen ($10.3 billion) to finance the purchase, which will give his company a 97.68 percent share of Vodafone's Japan unit.


Summary: Softbank, the Japanese Internet company, will buy Vodafone's Japanese cellphone unit in a deal worth $15.4 billion, which will probably relieve some of the pressure on Vodafone's chief executive, Arun Sarin, who has faced boardroom turmoil and intense criticism from shareholders for the company's lackluster performance. Mr. Sarin said that given the relative competitive position of the business, the reduced prospects for superior long-term returns and a good offer from Softbank, the board took the decision to sell. The sale may take some of the pressure off Mr. Sarin to sell other Vodafone assets, like its 45 percent stake in Verizon Wireless, the cellphone company in the United States.


Summary: Softbank, the Japanese Internet company, will buy Vodafone's Japanese cellphone unit in a deal worth $15.4 billion, the companies said Friday, ending the British mobile phone giant's foray into one of the world's largest and toughest markets. Softbank beat out a competing bid by a group of private equity firms led by Cerberus Capital Management of the United States. Masayoshi Son, Softbank's billionaire chief executive said Softbank would borrow as much as 1.2 trillion yen ($10.3 billion) to finance the purchase, which will give his company a 97.68 percent share of Vodafone's Japan unit.


Summary: Softbank, the Japanese Internet company, will buy Vodafone's Japanese cellphone unit in a deal worth $15.4 billion, the companies said Friday, ending the British mobile phone giant's foray into one of the world's largest and toughest markets. Masayoshi Son, Softbank's billionaire chief executive said that the purchase of Vodafone Japan allows them to drastically accelerate their efforts and they can start from a far bigger base than if they had to begin from scratch. Mr. Son said Softbank would borrow as much as 1.2 trillion yen ($10.3 billion) to finance the purchase, which will give his company a 97.68 percent share of Vodafone's Japan unit.


Summary: The sale may take some of the pressure off Arun Sarin to sell other Vodafone assets, like its 45 percent stake in Verizon Wireless, the cellphone company in the United States.


Summary: Kirk Boodry, an analyst in Tokyo for Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, said that Softbank will be a very aggressive competitor.


Rolls-Royce-General Electric
General Electric
Rolls-Royce

Summary: Lord Drayson objected to a recent Pentagon decision to drop a Rolls-Royce-General Electric engine from the program and pointedly told the committee that his country was not even consulted on the decision. The Pentagon's decision to drop the Rolls-Royce-General Electric engine has been criticized by Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the Armed Service Committee.


Summary: In the middle is the Joint Strike Fighter's prime contractor, Lockheed Martin.


Summary: These were a few of the vivid details offered at the racketeering trial of the retired detectives, Louis J. Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, in Federal District Court in Brooklyn. They stand accused of taking part in at least eight murders for the mob. Mr. Kaplan's most gripping testimony, however, was the account in which he told how Mr. Eppolito, 57, and Mr. Caracappa, 64, had taken part in the contract killings of Israel Greenwald, a Long Island diamond dealer, and Edward Lino, a Gambino family captain, and in the kidnapping of James Hydell, a would-be mob assassin.


Summary: There were a few of the vivid details offered at the racketeering trial of the retired detectives, Louis J. Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, in Federal District Court in Brooklyn. The most gripping testimony, however, was the account in which Mr. Eppolito, 57, and Mr. Caracappa, 64, had taken part in the contract killings of Israel Greenwald, a Long Island diamond dealer, and Edward Lino, a Gambino family captain, and in the kidnapping of James Hydell, a would-be mob assassin. Mr. Kaplan told the jury that as Mr. Lino bent down in his seat, Mr. Caracappa shot him in the head.


Summary: Mr. Kaplan's most gripping testimony, however, was the account in which he told how Mr. Eppolito, 57, and Mr. Caracappa, 64, had taken part in the contract killings of Israel Greenwald, a Long Island diamond dealer. In 1986, he said, he hired the two detectives to murder Mr. Greenwald, having learned of them through Mr. Eppolito's cousin Frank Santora Jr., whom he had met in prison. The two detectives stopped their victim on the highway, took him to a parking garage, bound his hands, and stuffed a bag over his head, Mr. Kaplan said. Then, the witness added, Mr. Santora put a pair of bullets in his head.


Summary: Burton Kaplan took the stand and in measured tones told jurors of a secret meeting in a Staten Island cemetery, a kidnapped mobster screaming in a trunk and a bullet-laced Mercedes. Mr. Kaplan said he served as a liaison between the gangster and the lawmen, ferrying Mr. Anthony Casso's orders to the two detectives in secret meetings at his Brooklyn home or at an isolated rest stop near Exit 52 of the Long Island Expressway. It was strange to hear such violent accounts from the 72-year-old Mr. Kaplan, a docile man who suffers from arthritis, poor circulation, and high blood pressure.


Summary: Anthony Casso, the Luchese family underboss, now in prison, a man whom Mr. Kaplan, his old friend, called a homicidal maniac. What drew Mr. Casso to the lawmen was a taste for retribution. And within weeks, Mr. Casso had a manila envelope of police reports with the names and addresses of almost everyone involved in the unsuccessful hit.


Summary: The most gripping testimony was the account in which Mr. Eppolito, 57, and Mr. Caracappa, 64, had taken part in the contract killings of Israel Greenwald, a Long Island diamond dealer, and Edward Lino, a Gambino family captain, and in the kidnapping of James Hydell, a would-be mob assassin. He then proceeded to interrogate and torture James Hydell until he revealed the names of the other would-be killers one of whom was Edward Lino, Mr. Kaplan said. Before he died at the hands of Mr. Casso, Mr. Hydell had begged for his body to be dumped in the street.


Summary: The most gripping testimony, however, was the account in which Mr. Eppolito, 57, and Mr. Caracappa, 64, had taken part in the contract killings of Israel Greenwald, a Long Island diamond dealer, and Edward Lino, a Gambino family captain, and in the kidnapping of James Hydell, a would-be mob assassin. He then proceeded to interrogate and torture James Hydell until he revealed the names of the other would-be killers one of whom was Edward Lino, Mr. Kaplan said. As for Mr. Lino, he was a dapper and respected legend in the mob, a tough Gambino family soldier who had played a role in the killing of Paul Castellano, the family's don, in 1985.


Summary: In a report to be released, New York Acorn, a community group, argues that the city's most popular tax-incentive program, known as 421-a, is not only not generating much moderately priced housing in places like Downtown Brooklyn but is, in effect, subsidizing a lot of expensive housing in gentrifying neighborhoods. The group, which claims 36,000 low and moderate-income families as members, wants the city to change the program to require that all developers receiving these tax breaks for building apartments in much of Downtown and central Brooklyn make 30 percent of all new units affordable to people of modest means. New York Acorn, which successfully pressured the Forest City Ratner Companies to include mixed-income housing in its 9.1 million-square-foot Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, looked in its new report at 87 housing development projects in various Brooklyn neighborhoods starting at the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges and extending toward Prospect Park.


Summary: Manuel Perló Cohen, director of the University Program for Studies of the City at Mexico's National Autonomous University, said that it is a system held together by a thread.


Summary: The Lighthouse Group is led by Charles Wang, the Long Island businessman and owner of the New York Islanders, who are based at the Coliseum, and by Reckson Associates, a local real estate firm. Mr. Wang was the first developer and for a time the only developer to present a plan for the 77-acre site, most of which is now parking lots. Mr. Wang seems to have held the inside track all along because he alone could guarantee that a sports franchise, the Islanders, would continue to occupy the county-owned coliseum. Mr. Wang had since amended his proposal to include a baseball stadium and a trolley that would connect the stadium to the coliseum. His plan also proposes $200 million in improvements to the aging arena.


Summary: Officials involved in the yearlong selection process said County Executive Thomas R. Suozzi would announce his choice of a $1.5 billion proposal by the Lighthouse Group, one of four plans submitted for consideration. The Lighthouse Group is led by Charles Wang, the Long Island businessman and owner of the New York Islanders, who are based at the Coliseum, and by Reckson Associates, a local real estate firm.


Summary: The House majority leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, who has not been keen on the travel restrictions, was noticeably absent from the morning news conference where Mr. Dreier and other House leaders, including Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, announced their plan. Later, asked about the travel provisions, Mr. Boehner said that there's some discontent over that. Yet another member of the leadership, Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is charged with helping to elect Republicans to Congress, called the plan a work in progress. Despite the apparent rift, the House proposal signals the leadership's determination to move ahead with some kind of lobbying legislation.


Summary: Two House Republicans, Representatives Jeff Flake of Arizona and Dan Lungren of California, said they would introduce competing legislation that would avoid a ban by creating a preapproval process for private travel and require lawmakers to post records of such trips on the Internet. Critics like Mr. Flake and Mr. Lungren say the moratorium went overboard, prohibiting a university from paying travel expenses for a lawmaker to speak at commencement. Mr. Lungren said he served on the board of a charitable foundation in his home state and would be required under the moratorium to pay his own way to board meetings.


Summary: Representative David Dreier, Republican of California, said that they felt very strongly about the need to bring about bold, strong reforms. The House majority leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, who has not been keen on the travel restrictions, was noticeably absent from the morning news conference where Mr. Dreier and other House leaders, including Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, announced their plan. Backers of the plan, including Mr. Dreier, say it would force the ethics panel, the only evenly split committee in the House, with five Democrats and five Republicans to work in a bipartisan way.


Summary: The endless tug-of-war between New York City, and residents of the city's upstate watershed, gets played out daily in Angela and David Walker's home. Mr. Walker is an operating engineer who works under the streets of Manhattan, digging New York's third water tunnel. The Walkers' home, a woodsy cabin just downstream from the mammoth Pepacton Reservoir, has been flooded at least five times in the last few years, and now, like many others in this rural corner of Delaware County more than 120 miles from New York, blame the city for holding so much water in its reservoirs that a big rain or snowmelt can cause devastating floods.


Summary: Just this week, Daniel L. Doctoroff, deputy mayor for economic development, traveled the 130 miles to the farthest of the city's upstate reservoirs to announce that the city would install flood gates and release valves in the 80-year-old Gilboa Dam to control future floods at the Schoharie Reservoir. Mr. Doctoroff said that while the Senate's actions were not a factor in revising the flood policy, it never hurts to be reminded. But State Senator James L. Seward, a Republican who represents watershed communities, said there was no question that the city had bowed to the pressure to accept responsibility for flood control.


Summary: Today is the third anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old from Washington State who was killed by an Israeli Army bulldozer in the Gaza Strip as she tried to protect a Palestinian home. Given the sharply divided opinions of Ms. Corrie, idealistic or recklessly naïve, depending on one's political point of view, James C. Nicola said on Monday that the workshop needed more time to learn more and figure a way to proceed.


Summary: In an interview, James C. Nicola, the workshop's artistic director, insisted that they wanted only to postpone, not cancel, the show, despite declarations by the authors and the Royal Court Theater. Mr. Nicola originally said that he had spoken to religious leaders in making his decision; this week he said that the workshop did a wide reaching out into the complexity of the community of New York that included reading Palestinian views on Web sites. Mr. Nicola said that they soon realized there was not enough time to work out the concerns and complete the general artistic process and informed the Royal Court on Feb. 17 that the workshop would delay the production.


Summary: Stephen Graham, the founding trustee on the theater's board, said that one or two board members raised questions in mid-January. Mr. Graham, who founded the workshop in 1979, said he lamented the postponement, but understood how it happened.


Summary: Mr. Nicola said that he read what he thought the authors intended for him to read, which was that this life, was an example to Americans, who were in some fog of avoidance right now. The political situation in the Middle East intensified after a stroke suffered by the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, and electoral victories by Hamas, the militant Palestinian group.


Summary: Some details remain murky, what is certain is that discussions between the workshop and the actor Alan Rickman, who assembled the play with Katharine Viner, an editor at The Guardian in London, began late last year. The Royal Court, which issued a statement in last week, offers a different account, saying the deal was definite, an opinion Ms. Viner seconded.


Summary: James C. Nicola, the workshop's artistic director, and Lynn Moffat, its managing director, insisted that they wanted only to postpone, not cancel, the show -- despite declarations by the authors and the Royal Court Theater. Ms. Moffat decided that the workshop might need to organize nightly post-show talk-backs to provide context as it had done with plays like Mr. Kushner's ''Homebody/Kabul.'' Mr. Nicola said that they soon realized there was not enough time to work out the concerns and complete the general artistic process and informed the Royal Court that the workshop would delay the production. The Royal Court, which issued a statement, offers a different account, saying the deal was definite.


Summary: There is just a concrete platform, a bench in a plexiglass shelter and Ken Shea, who confronted a sharp wind and not much else when he stepped down from the two-car Amtrak train he takes each day from New Haven. He was on his way to welding classes at a technical school in East Windsor, across the Connecticut River from the station, where he arrives, not always on time, on the 11:11 a.m. train. Mr. Shea said that he was the only one he knew who got off there every day.


Summary: M. Jodi Rell's proposed budget, a few years from now the Windsor Locks station would become a critical business hub linking the airport to a new commuter rail line running on the existing Amtrak route from New Haven to Hartford to Springfield. A scaled down version of that proposal by Mrs. Rell, a Republican, would cost just $162 million, with $16 million coming from the federal government. Mrs. Rell's plan follows a $1.3 billion measure she pushed through the legislature last year that added 342 new cars to the Metro-North New Haven Line, spent $300 million for a new rail maintenance facility for that line and paid for improvements to some interstate highways.


Summary: Ken Shea, who confronted a sharp wind and not much else when he stepped down from the two-car Amtrak train he takes each day from New Haven. M. Jodi Rell's proposed budget, a few years from now the Windsor Locks station would become a critical business hub linking the airport to a new commuter rail line running on the existing Amtrak route from New Haven to Hartford to Springfield. Amtrak trains now run more than an hour apart.


Summary: There was one major exception, a company known as HealthExtra. It prospects grew worse, and its sale price fell, in the months after the PIPE deal was sold in 2001. But its business later improved and the share price has risen sharply.


Summary: The S.E.C. says, it is illegal to use the shares obtained from the PIPE to repay the shares borrowed, since that would amount to having sold the PIPE shares too early. In addition, the S.E.C. says, it is illegal insider trading to sell the shares short if the seller knows a PIPE deal is coming, but that fact has not been announced to the public. Mr. Thorp, 42, of New York and the funds settled the case without admitting or denying the S.E.C. allegations.


Summary: Jeffrey Friestad, an S.E.C. lawyer, said the penalty was the largest ever imposed in a PIPE case. He said that it represented their ongoing commitment to stamp out fraud and ongoing abuses in the PIPE market. Mr. Friestad of the S.E.C. said the commission would look to see whether brokers had any responsibility for this and bring charges if appropriate. The S.E.C. said that in the PIPE trades from 2000 to 2002, the defendants realized profits of $7 million.


Summary: Shortly after the lobbyist, Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to corruption charges, Mr. Dreier and Speaker J. Dennis Hastert called for tough restrictions, including a ban on gifts, meals, and privately financed travel. Mr. Hastert said that he believes that to regain the trust of the American people in this institution, they must go further than prosecuting the bad actors. Mr. Dreier and Mr. Hastert both said in January that they wanted bipartisan support for the legislation.


Summary: And Norman J. Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has testified frequently on lobbying law changes, said the fervor for reform, in this case, was driven by a fear that a match was about to be lit to dry tinder.


Summary: A chief architect of the legislation, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said that the bill was off track and that she feared its chances had been jeopardized. A lot of this is politically reacting to a situation, and when you get down to it, you realize that there's an awful lot of rules already on the books, and what we need to do is apply them. Ms. Already a Senate committee has rejected a plan, advanced by Ms. Collins.


Summary: In the House, Representative David Dreier of California, the Republicans' point man on lobbying legislation, said reaching consensus on what the bill should include had been more difficult than he had expected. Shortly after the lobbyist, Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to corruption charges, Mr. Dreier and Speaker J. Dennis Hastert called for tough restrictions, including a ban on gifts, meals, and privately financed travel. Mr. Dreier and Mr. Hastert both said in January that they wanted bipartisan support for the legislation.


Summary: Congress tends to have a short attention span. Outside observers say it will now take another eruption, the indictment of a member of Congress in the Abramoff inquiry, or a similar scandalous event to put the issue front and center again.


Summary: A survey by the center in January, the week after Mr. Abramoff's guilty plea, found that just 18 percent of Americans had closely followed the case; by comparison, 32 percent had closely followed President Bush's acknowledgment that he had authorized the National Security Agency to conduct some domestic wiretapping without warrants.


Summary: In the Senate, debate on a lobbying bill was derailed by the fracas over port security, and it is unclear when the measure will return. On the other hand, members regard themselves as ethical, and some question whether we should be moving to fix the laws when it was the laws that were broken. The initial votes on the Senate bill have shown the limits of the appetite for change. While the Senate did vote in favor of a ban on gifts and meals from lobbyists, the real fight will be over whether to limit a much more lucrative perk: private travel, and lawmakers' use of corporate jets.


Summary: Mr. Gotti was approaching the record of his late father, who earned the nickname the Teflon Don after he eluded conviction in three cases between 1986 and 1990, though he ultimately died in prison in 2002 while serving a life sentence.


Summary: As he left the courtroom in Federal District Court in Manhattan, a subdued Mr. Gotti hugged his waiting sisters, Angel and Victoria, his mother, also named Victoria, and his younger brother, Peter, telling his brother that they gotta go one more time. Later, Mr. Gotti added that he just wanted to see his children.


Summary: For the second time in six months, after more than a dozen witnesses, a Manhattan jury failed to reach a verdict yesterday in the case of John A. Gotti, the son of the famous Mafia boss. After just a day and a half of deliberations, a federal judge ruled that the jury was deadlocked and declared a mistrial, and Mr. Gotti went home. Mr. Gotti grew so rich that he could afford a mansion on Long Island and a country estate in Milford, Pa., and that he carelessly stashed $358,000 in bundled cash in a broken refrigerator in a cluttered Queens basement.


Summary: Formally, the younger Gotti was charged with ordering the botched kidnapping and beating of Curtis Sliwa, the radio host and founder of the Guardian Angels; with loan-sharking; and with construction industry extortion, all as part of a broad pattern of racketeering dating to the 1980s.


Summary: After the first note, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin instructed the jurors to keep trying. Judge Scheindlin demurred that she had never seen a clearer deadlock. The note, the judge added, was beautifully written, indicating that the jurors had clearly understood her earlier charge about consulting their consciences.


Summary: Over the last three weeks, prosecutors have told a story starring Mr. Gotti as the faithful son of John J. Gotti or John Senior, as he has been familiarly called at trial carrying out his father's legacy as head of the Gambino crime family.


Summary: Mr. Sliwa, whose kidnapping and shooting provided the government with its most publicized charges, Ronald L. Kuby, a lawyer who had testified as a defense witness. Mr. Kuby told the jury that in a 1998 conversation, Mr. Gotti told him he was sick of this life and wanted to be done with it. Mr. Sliwa said Mr. Kuby's testimony hurt me more than those three hollow-point bullets and that baseball bat, referring to not just the kidnapping in which Mr. Gotti was charged, but a previous attack on Mr. Sliwa with baseball bats that he and prosecutors attributed to Mr. Gotti's underlings.


Summary: The audience for the first day of the retrial, according to several people in the courtroom that day, included Mr. Giuca's mother, Doreen Giuliano, and Jennifer Baker, a young woman who had handed out pamphlets at Mr. Giuca's sentencing. Mrs. Giuliano declined to directly comment on her attendance at the Moore trial, but said her son would be exonerated in the Fisher case.


Summary: Mr. Giuca, 22, described by prosecutors as a leader of a fledgling street gang called the Ghetto Mafia, was convicted in September for the murder of Mark Fisher. Mark Fisher, a 19-year-old Fairfield University sophomore, arrived at Mr. Giuca's home in Brooklyn on Oct. 11, 2003, after a night of hasty familiarities, missed trains and alcohol. His body was found on a nearby sidewalk the next morning, but the police made no arrests for more than a year.


Summary: The audience for the first day of the retrial, according to several people in the courtroom that day, included Mr. Giuca's mother, Doreen Giuliano, and Jennifer Baker, a young woman who had handed out pamphlets at Mr. Giuca's sentencing. She identified herself as a reporter for a weekly campus newspaper at Brooklyn College and said she was writing about the case. Annamaria Scaccia, editor-in-chief of The Kingsman, and Lauren Darson, managing editor of The Excelsior, said they did not employ anyone named Jennifer Baker and did not have reporters assigned to the courts or the district attorney's office.


Summary: When John Giuca was convicted last year for the murder of a Connecticut college student, prosecutors said they were not done with the case. Mr. Giuca, 22, described by prosecutors as a leader of a fledgling street gang called the Ghetto Mafia, and was convicted in September for the murder of Mark Fisher. Mr. Giuca and Antonio Russo, 19, were sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for the murder.  Mr. Giuca was transferred this week to the state prison system, where he will become eligible to receive visitors on March 18, according to Linda Foglia, a spokeswoman for the Department of Correction.


Summary: A lawyer for Mr. Giuca, Samuel Gregory, said he was unaware of the actions of his client's supporters.  Mr. Gregory said that he hadn't known they had been at the trial.


Summary: Last month, familiar faces from the trial started attending an unrelated case assigned to the same prosecutor, Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, an assistant district attorney. She opened the state's case against Kayson Pearson and Troy Hendrix, accused of raping and killing Romona Moore, 21. Ms. Nicolazzi has been accompanied to court by a woman wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a walkie-talkie marked "Kings County D.A." Jerry Schmetterer, chief spokesman for the district attorney's office, declined to comment.


Summary: The Deutsche Börse and Euronext have made runs at the exchange. In addition to the Deutsche Börse and Euronext bids, other offers have come London's way in recent years, from Macquarie Bank of Australia and the operator of the Stockholm stock market.


Summary: Richard Herr, an analyst with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, said that it was a pre-emptive strike to prevent New York from making a bid for London. Mr. Herr of Keefe Bruyette said that since 2004, people had been trying to buy London without too much success.


Summary: The offer comes just a few days after Nasdaq's archrival, the New York Stock Exchange, started trading as a public company. Indeed, the New York Exchange's chief executive, John A. Thain, has made no secret of his desire to be a leader in the consolidation of the world's markets. London has an obvious allure for Nasdaq, which historically has lagged the New York Stock Exchange in attracting the largest listed companies. The market capitalization of companies on Nasdaq is $3.6 trillion, compared with $22.5 trillion on the New York Exchange.


Summary: Doug Atkin, chief executive of Majestic Research and the former chief executive of Instinet, said that London was the crown jewel of Europe. Mr. Atkin also said that he would imagine dinner plans were being canceled.


Summary: The New York Exchange's chief executive, John A. Thain, has made no secret of his desire to be a leader in the consolidation of the world's markets. Now that John Thain has his currency, Nasdaq is concerned, they will go pursue global consolidation. Other exchanges have seen London as an attractive target. For Mr. Thain, losing this chess piece to Nasdaq is a big deal. A person close to the London Stock Exchange said New York had not made any formal overtures toward bidding for the exchange.


Summary: The Chicago Mercantile Exchange went public in December 2002 at $35 a share; yesterday, it closed at $428.40.


Summary: The London Stock Exchange, Europe's biggest stock market, announced yesterday that it had received and rejected a $4.1 billion informal cash offer from Nasdaq, an indication that the arms race among the world's leading exchanges is escalating. The board of the London exchange said the offer substantially undervalues the company, its unique position and the very significant synergies that would be achievable from the combination of London Stock Exchange with any exchange group. The exchange disclosed the offer after the close of trading in London. Shares of the L.S.E. have risen 82 percent in the last 12 months.


Summary: Deutsche Börse shareholders rejected a takeover of the London exchange and ousted its chief executive, Werner Siefert.


Summary: A federal judge issued a highly unusual classified ruling, denying a motion for dismissal of a case against two leaders of an Albany mosque who are accused of laundering money in a federal terrorism sting operation. Judge Thomas J. McAvoy of United States District Court for the Northern District of New York came only a few hours after the government filed its own classified documents to the judge. The prosecutors asked the judge to review their papers in his chambers without making them public or showing them to the defense.


Summary: The defense lawyers had asked the judge to dismiss the case, saying that they believed the government's evidence came from wiretaps obtained without a warrant by the National Security Agency. Mr. Kindlon asked that all evidence in the case stemming from N.S.A. wiretaps be given to the defense. Mr. Kindlon said Judge McAvoy's action convinced him that there was N.S.A. wiretap evidence in the case.


Summary: The classified order by Judge Thomas J. McAvoy of United States District Court for the Northern District of New York came only a few hours after the government filed its own classified documents to the judge.


Summary: The defense lawyers had asked the judge to dismiss the case, saying that they believed the government's evidence came from wiretaps obtained without a warrant by the National Security Agency.


Summary: McAvoy of United States District Court for the Northern District of New York came only a few hours after the government filed its own classified documents to the judge.


Summary: Christopher Dunn, a lawyer for the New York Civil Liberties Union, which has asked to participate in the case, said such decisions appeared to be rare.


Summary: The two mosque leaders, Yassin M. Aref, 35, and Mohammed M. Hossain, 50, were charged with conspiring with a government informant to take part in what they believed was a plot to import a shoulder-fired missile and assassinate a Pakistani diplomat. The arrest of Mr. Aref, an Islamic scholar who is the imam of Masjid As-Salaam in Albany, and Mr. Hossain on Aug. 5, 2004, came after a yearlong sting operation in which the informant posed as a terrorist. Mr. Aref was free on bail for 13 months, but he was sent to prison to await trial after the government brought new charges.


Summary: The two mosque leaders, Yassin M. Aref, 35, and Mohammed M. Hossain, 50, were charged with conspiring with a government informant to take part in what they believed was a plot to import a shoulder-fired missile and assassinate a Pakistani diplomat. The arrest of Mr. Aref, an Islamic scholar who is the imam of Masjid As-Salaam in Albany, and Mr. Hossain on Aug. 5, 2004, came after a yearlong sting operation in which the informant posed as a terrorist. Mr. Hossain remains free on bail.


Summary: Christopher Dunn, a lawyer for the New York Civil Liberties Union, which has asked to participate in the case, said such decisions appeared to be rare. Mr. Dunn said his group had no record of a classified decision in a case that it had handled.


Summary: Prosecutors were responding to a motion filed on Jan. 20 by Mr. Aref's lawyer, Terence L. Kindlon. At midafternoon the judge issued a document announcing that he had entered the classified order denying Mr. Kindlon's request. As of late yesterday, Mr. Kindlon, even though he has a federal security clearance to represent Mr. Aref in the trial, had not been able to see the substance of the ruling.


Summary: After two years, the investigation revealed that the credit card John McCormick used was one of 75 that two top school administrators, including his mother, Pamela Gluckin, had distributed to relatives, friends, and associates for their personal, unauthorized use. Ms. Gluckin has pleaded guilty to stealing about $4 million in school funds. Prosecutors said Mrs. Gluckin kept detailed records of all the money disbursed fraudulently during her tenure as a business administrator.


Summary: When he used a Roslyn school district credit card in 2002 at a Home Depot store in Selden, John McCormick unwittingly set off a chain of inquiry that eventually led investigators to uncover the theft of $11.2 million from the district. Mr. McCormick, 40, a home improvement contractor, pleaded guilty to grand larceny charges in connection with his use of the card to purchase more than $80,000 worth of building materials over several years. Mr. McCormick was the last of six major defendants to plead guilty in connection with the Roslyn scandal.


Summary: The others were his mother; Debra Rigano, a district account clerk and niece of Mrs. Gluckin's; Andrew Miller, the accountant who helped cover up the theft; Frank Tassone, the school district superintendent from 1992 to 2004; and Mr. Tassone's partner, Stephen Signorelli, a computer specialist. Only Mr. Miller, the accountant, has been sentenced so far. He received a four-month jail term and five years' probation.


Summary: Rick Weiss, a science reporter at The Post and co-chairman for the Post unit of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild said despite the pending loss of jobs, the atmosphere in the newsroom was not doom and gloom but a recognition that things elsewhere were worse.


Post
The Post
The Washington Post
Washington Post Company

Summary: The Washington Post is planning to cut about 80 jobs, or about 9 percent of its newsroom, over the next year, joining a roll call of major American newspapers reducing editorial positions as the industry continues to face a sluggish advertising environment and declining circulation. The Post last offered buyouts in late 2003, when it reduced its staff by 7 percent. This month, The Post reported revenue of $252.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2005, down 3 percent from a year earlier.


Summary: Leonard Downie Jr., the Post's executive editor, said in an interview that the goal of the latest cuts was to operate more efficiently and that they're not anywhere near maximizing what they can do in their multimedia presentations. Mr. Downie said other cost savings could come from having foreign correspondents cover broad topics, terrorism, say, rather than cover specific countries, thus allowing for the elimination of some foreign bureaus.


Summary: Boisfeuillet Jones Jr., the paper's publisher, said in a memo to the staff that during the past year newspaper revenues have flattened while expenses, particularly newsprint, have continued to rise and that the cuts would come through buyouts and attrition, not layoffs.


Summary: Six weeks into the trial of Enron's former chief executives, Jeffrey K. Skilling and Kenneth L. Lay, the company's third-highest officer, the former chief financial officer, Andrew S. Fastow, took the witness stand and wasted no time in pointing a finger at his former bosses. Mr. Fastow testified that both Mr. Skilling and Mr. Lay knew that Enron was verging on collapse even as they assured employees and investors that it was prospering. Mr. Fastow is scheduled to return to the witness stand on Monday, when he will be cross-examined by Mr. Lay's lawyer, Michael Ramsey.


Summary: New York's attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, filed a civil lawsuit against Entercom Communications, the nation's fifth-largest chain of radio stations, expanding his effort to curb the practice of selling radio time to record companies to promote their music. In the lawsuit, filed in Manhattan, Mr. Spitzer said programming executives at Entercom, based in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., accepted gifts, trips and cash in exchange for ordering some of the company's 105 stations to play certain songs, sometimes as often as 100 times a week.


Summary: New York's attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, filed a civil lawsuit against Entercom Communications, the nation's fifth-largest chain of radio stations, expanding his effort to curb the practice of selling radio time to record companies to promote their music. In the lawsuit, Mr. Spitzer said programming executives at Entercom, based in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., accepted gifts, trips and cash in exchange for ordering some of the company's 105 stations to play certain songs, sometimes as often as 100 times a week. Entercom officials denied the allegations.


Summary: MULTIBILLION-DOLLAR mergers of companies with household names are not often swept aside by other news just days after they are announced, but by yesterday it was almost easy to forget that the week began with AT&T's bid for BellSouth. Ending months of speculation, AT&T offered to acquire BellSouth for $67 billion, taking the offensive against low-cost rivals in the free-for-all for phone, wireless and television customers.


Summary: Stu Loeser, the mayor's press secretary, said that it was easy to have a political speech but he had got to do something, and he had got to fund it and he had got to fund it every single year. Loeser said later that Mr. Bloomberg had not been referring to any particular individual in his comments. Mr. Loeser also said that he was referring to this administration and previous administrations as well as Congress that for decades had not paid enough attention to port security.


Summary: But at least some politicians and their advisers saw the mayor's comments as a challenge to New York's Congressional delegation, including Senator Schumer and Representative Peter King, who have been outspoken critics of the Dubai deal. Both said that they disagreed with the mayor. Mr. King said that progress had already been made, but he added that more was needed.


Schumer
Senator Schumer
Charles E. Schumer

Summary: Some of the state's leading politicians, including Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles E. Schumer, both Democrats, have been among the most outspoken in assailing the deal. Mr. Schumer said he began raising the issue of port security in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.


Summary: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg used some decidedly caustic language yesterday in criticizing public officials for belatedly raising questions about port security, concerns that derailed a deal with a Dubai company to take over several American port operations. Mr. Bloomberg, a Republican, said security risks had long been an issue at American ports, but many federal officials had all but ignored such concerns until now.


Summary: The creepy John Grisham-style Washington firm called the Carlyle Group, suffused with Arab connections and money, and seeded with Saudi money, even gave some thought to investing in the ports, before backing off. One minute they're scaring Americans into supporting their power grabs. The next minute, the Persian Gulf is still the great nexus for capitalist deals by the likes of Treasury Secretary John Snow, Dick Cheney, Halliburton and the Carlyle Group.


Summary: A source called Deep Water, who helped check out new hires for the New Jersey port before and after 9/11, told the F.B.I. a couple of years ago about what he saw as gaps in security practices on the waterfront and a suspicious flow of recent Arab immigrants, some speaking little English, being hired as port watchmen. Deep Water said he'd recently been interviewed by New York detectives.


Summary: The goof-off Michael Chertoff is remarkably still in charge.


Summary: The phenomenon of the ''Ambien driver'' was described in an article by Stephanie Saul in The Times. An earlier article by Ms. Saul cited the case of a lawyer who said that in his first month of taking Ambien, he had torn a towel rack out of the wall during the night but had no memory of it the next morning.


Summary: Some people who use the popular sleeping pill Ambien sure seem to be having bizarre experiences. Ambien has been implicated in enough automobile accidents that it has commanded the attention of top forensic scientists. Ambien, the nation's best-selling prescription sleeping pill, is taken by millions of Americans every year. The Food and Drug Administration needs to determine whether Ambien-related sleepwalking or sleep-driving is serious enough to warrant a stronger warning label or other regulatory action.


Summary: The Food and Drug Administration needs to determine whether Ambien-related sleepwalking or sleep-driving is serious enough to warrant a stronger warning label or other regulatory action.


Summary: Claire Davidson, a spokeswoman for the company in London, said that Yukos would contest the filing. Ms. Davidson said that Yukos disclosed that the Yukos RM director, Anatoly Nazarov, had refused to fire a subordinate suspected of financial mismanagement after an audit found that $50 million was unaccounted for last year.


Summary: The banks, which include Deutsche Bank, ING, Citigroup and BNP Paribas, join a long list of Yukos creditors in Russia and led by the country's tax authorities, which are still laying claim to more than $6 billion.


Summary: A consortium of Western banks led by Société Générale of France filed suit in Moscow Friday seeking to have the Yukos Oil Company declared bankrupt just over a year after the Kremlin seized its largest production asset in a politically tinged tax dispute. Adding to the turmoil at Yukos, the company's managers in Moscow openly defied orders this week from senior managers in self-imposed exile in London, raising concerns over whether the unusual arrangement could continue. In suing, the banks, which include Deutsche Bank, ING, Citigroup and BNP Paribas, join a long list of Yukos creditors in Russia, led by the country's tax authorities, which are still laying claim to more than $6 billion.


Summary: Yukos disclosed that Yuko's RM director, Anatoly Nazarov, had refused to fire a subordinate suspected of financial mismanagement after an audit found that $50 million was unaccounted for last year. Mr. Nazarov fired a member of the audit team, Roman Khomenko, who had been appointed by the London-based management to succeed the suspect oil trader.


Summary: In suing, the banks, which include Deutsche Bank, ING, Citigroup, and BNP Paribas, join a long list of Yukos creditors in Russia, led by the country's tax authorities, which are still laying claim to more than $6 billion.


Summary: The company's former chairman, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, is serving an eight-year sentence in a Siberian penal colony for fraud, embezzlement and tax evasion.


Summary: Before the government began dismantling the company in a back-tax case in 2004, President Vladimir V. Putin had said that the Russian government would never bankrupt Yukos. The 2004 seizure of Yukos's main Western Siberian production unit undermined investor confidence in Mr. Putin's management of the Russian economy, though the market has since rebounded on high oil prices.


Summary: Caius Rapanu, co-director of research at the UralSib brokerage firm, said that they realized if they wanted anything at all, it had to be done now before the other shoe fell.


Summary: A consortium of Western banks led by Société Générale of France filed suit in Moscow Friday seeking to have the Yukos Oil Company declared bankrupt just over a year after the Kremlin seized its largest production asset in a politically tinged tax dispute.


Summary: When the chief of staff to Gov. M. Jodi Rell called top state administrators into her office late last year and asked them to distribute invitations to their subordinates for a campaign fund-raiser for the governor, not everyone agreed and some who did were clearly uncomfortable doing so, according to a report by the State Elections Enforcement Commission. Moody with clear discomfort, and their accounts to investigators suggest a tension among some in the Rell administration that contrasts with the sunny humor they display publicly.


Summary: The report said that Anne C. George, one of five commissioners of the Department of Public Utility Control, expressed her concern directly to the chief of staff, M. Lisa Moody. Governor Rell, a Republican, suspended Ms. Moody for two weeks in January because her actions violated her policy against doing campaign work during office hours. Moody acknowledged an account by Mr. Mattiello in which she told him this meeting wasn't happening, but told investigators that the comment was intended as a joke and that she has a very dry, flip sense of humor.


Summary: Transportation Commissioner Stephen E. Korta II said to a deputy when he handed the man an invitation that he was asked to give this to him. Mr. Korta told investigators he had been called on the carpet by Ms. Moody two weeks earlier.


Summary: The report said that Anne C. George, one of five commissioners of the Department of Public Utility Control, expressed her concern directly to the chief of staff, M. Lisa Moody. Moody with clear discomfort, and their accounts to investigators suggest a tension among some in the Rell administration that contrasts with the sunny humor they display publicly. Investigators wrote that Moody gave him invitations for five department employees and made it quite clear that they needed to get the invites.


Summary: The report said that Anne C. George, one of five commissioners of the Department of Public Utility Control, expressed her concern directly to the chief of staff, M. Lisa Moody.


Summary: When Rocketboom sold a week's worth of ads for $40,000 last month, it proved that while there are some advertisers who get it, most still do not, according to the blogger Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com. Mr. Jarvis wrote that those advertisers should have been falling over themselves to grab this unique bargain.


Summary: Prince Campbell, a former media executive who runs the Chartreuse (BETA) blog, wields superlatives in a particularly bloggish manner at chartreuse.wordpress.com. Having declared that TV is dead, Mr. Campbell says broadcast television stays afloat because the public is valuing new media much more than the old, but the advertisers still value the old.


Summary: The video blog Rocketboom drew an average of 200,000 people a day to watch its short daily news reports on technology, the arts and other topics. When Rocketboom sold a week's worth of ads for $40,000 last month, it proved that while there are some advertisers who get it (those who bid for space on Rocketboom), most still do not, according to the blogger Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine.com.


Summary: The Securities and Exchange Commission requires companies to report only how many employees they have, it adds.


Summary: Andrew L. Stern, president of the 1.8-million-member Service Employees International Union, argues that as corporations become increasingly global, unions must, too, so that they can remain effective.


Summary: Jennifer Kahn writes in Wired, the problem is, in the United States, the number of patients who are willing to sign up for clinical trials is abysmally low. Ms. Kahn writes that as many as half of all clinical trials are already conducted in countries like India, China and Brazil, adding that countries are now jockeying to attract trial drugs, both because the medications may prove to be helpful and to receive the money the research companies spend on the tests.


Summary: Mercer found that only 20 percent of the 100 largest United States public companies discussed human resources in their reports to shareholders. Rick Guzzo, a Mercer consultant, was surprised at how a company spends one-third of its revenue on a capital investment and never addresses it with shareholders.


Summary: That is one logical question to ask, after reading the research done by Mercer Human Resource Consulting. Mercer found that only 20 percent of the 100 largest United States public companies discussed human resources in their reports to shareholders. Rick Guzzo, a Mercer consultant, asked to imagine a company spending one-third of its revenue on a capital investment and never addressing it with shareholders.


Summary: Mitchell H. Pally, a vice president of the Long Island Association, said that this was not just about educating our children.


Summary: Thomas R. Suozzi, the Nassau County executive, said that taxpayers on Long Island sent $3 billion more to the state treasury annually than they get back in state services and aid to public schools. According to Mr. Suozzi, New York State pays 37 percent of the per pupil costs in public schools statewide, but in Nassau County, that figure averages only 17 percent. He said the reason for the disparity was a weighted state aid formula that calculates each school district's need according to the aggregate value of commercial and residential properties in the district.


Port Authority of New York
Port Authority

Summary: The developer, who leased the trade center, is ready to go to court if the city or the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey tries to prevent him from rebuilding the complex, said the representative, Janno Lieber. George E. Pataki for the developer to work out his many differences with the Port Authority. The Port Authority would move into one of the other towers on Church Street, seek a developer for the second tower, and build a large shopping mall. The city has supported the Port Authority's position, saying Mr. Silverstein does not have enough money to complete the $7.3 billion job. Mr. Lieber also took aim at the city's proposal to install the Port Authority as the anchor tenant in one of the Church Street towers and to put a hotel, apartments, and office space in the other one.


Summary: Anthony R. Coscia, the chairman of the authority, has called on Mr. Silverstein to go ahead with building the Freedom Tower and a second tower. That, Mr. Coscia, contends, would enable the rebuilding effort to proceed more quickly.


Summary: Even as the developer Larry A. Silverstein negotiates behind closed doors to relinquish part of the World Trade Center site, his representative said publicly yesterday that contrary to claims by the Bloomberg administration, Mr. Silverstein had the resources and the passionate commitment to rebuild all the office towers at ground zero. The Bloomberg administration contends that the developer will run out of money in 2010 after building only two towers, default on his lease and walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars in profit, leaving the Port Authority with an unfinished project and no way to finance it.


Summary: Larry Silverstein is prepared to assert his legal rights to be allowed to rebuild, said Mr. Lieber, a senior vice president of Silverstein Properties, at a City Council hearing about the uncertainty surrounding the reconstruction effort downtown. Mr. Lieber said the company was prepared to move forward with each of the towers as soon as the Port Authority can prepare the sites for construction. The company's statements were made only five days before a deadline. But Mr. Lieber of Silverstein Properties said the city's economic analysis was misleading. He said the developer would build the towers with a 50-50 combination of insurance money and borrowed money. Acknowledging that the Freedom Tower will be difficult to lease because of its location, size, and name, Mr. Lieber said the Port Authority should move there instead.


Larry Silverstein
Larry A. Silverstein
Silverstein

Summary: Even as the developer Larry A. Silverstein negotiates behind closed doors to relinquish part of the World Trade Center site, Mr. Silverstein had the resources and the passion to rebuild all the office towers at ground zero. Indeed, the developer, who leased the trade center, is ready to go to court if the city or the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey tries to prevent him from rebuilding the complex, said the representative, Janno Lieber. Mr. Silverstein has rejected the authority's proposal. The city has supported the Port Authority's position, saying Mr. Silverstein does not have enough money to complete the $7.3 billion job, because only $2.9 billion in insurance proceeds are available.


Summary: Rents downtown would have to soar for the developer to avoid a financial loss said Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff. Mr. Doctoroff said Mr. Silverstein doesn't have one dime in this project but has already collected tens of millions of dollars in developer's fees. Mr. Doctoroff said the city would not provide the $1.7 billion in Liberty Bonds that Mr. Silverstein requested for buildings that, the deputy mayor said, would never be built.


Summary: The company's statements were made only five days before a deadline set by Gov. George E. Pataki for the developer to work out his many differences with the Port Authority.


Summary: Janno Lieber, a senior vice president of Silverstein Properties, at a City Council hearing yesterday about the uncertainty surrounding the reconstruction effort downtown, said that Larry Silverstein is also prepared to assert his legal rights to be allowed to rebuild.


Summary: The most visible antismoking group, the American Legacy Foundation, which came into being as a result of the settlement, has sharply cut its advertising budget. The foundation received financing from the initial tobacco settlement in 1998, getting up to $300 million a year. The foundation's marketing has centered on its Truth campaign, an effort created by Arnold Worldwide, a unit of Havas, and Crispin Porter & Bogusky, part of MDC Partners, that began in 2000 and has been credited with reducing teenage smoking.


Summary: In "Thank You for Smoking," a satire about tobacco companies adapted from a 1994 novel by Christopher Buckley, there is no smoking at all. Mr. Buckley said Jason Reitman, the director, purposely omitted any smoking and that according to Mr. Reitman, the movie is about other things but it was very deliberate and he thinks it's rather cool.


Summary: Dana Bolden, a spokesman for Philip Morris USA said that's where they really did most of their communications.


Summary: In New York, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg recently proposed a 50-cent increase in the city's cigarette tax.


Summary: Leslie Rahl has been running a hedge fund advisory firm for a dozen years, after a long career running the derivatives desk at Citibank.


Summary: Leslie Rahl, 55, has been running a hedge fund advisory firm for a dozen years, after a long career running the derivatives desk at Citibank. A typical day might be spent meeting with clients from Japan and Norway, but one recent afternoon she was accompanying Dasharah Green, a fifth grader from the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. When asked by Dasharah what she does, Ms. Rahl replied by saying that she runs her own company.


Summary: A typical day for Leslie Rahl, who has been running a hedge fund advisory firm for a dozen years, might be spent meeting with clients from Japan and Norway, but one recent afternoon she was accompanying Dasharah Green, a fifth grader from the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, who is 10 and wants to be a pediatrician, and asked Leslie what she does, while waiting to tour the NBC studios in Midtown Manhattan with some classmates and an equal number of high-powered women.


Summary: A consultant to the financial services industry, Charles B. Wendel, said that in terms of charitable works he doesn't see hedge fund guys doing a lot of that. They don't do much of that except writing checks, just after they buy the Ferrari.


Summary: New Building, New Mission For Institute in Boston The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston is getting ready for the opening in September of its new $51 million home, the first new art museum to be built in Boston in nearly 100 years. Designed by Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the 65,000-square-foot building on the waterfront will have three times the exhibition space of the institute's current building on Boylston Street. The institute will no longer function as a kunsthalle (an art space without holdings of its own). Instead, it will become a collecting institution.


Summary: The Denver Art Museum is completing its addition, designed by Daniel Libeskind and scheduled to open this fall. The idea came from Continuum Partners, local developers who are providing the space and operating funds, and Adam Lerner, a former curator at the Denver Art Museum who is the Lab's executive director.


Summary: Barbara Lee, a Boston philanthropist and board member, has already donated several works by artists the institute has shown. Ms. Lee also gave a photograph by Nan Goldin and an installation piece by the Beirut-born artist Mona Hatoum.


Ian Woodner
Woodner
Andrea
Andrea Woodner

Summary: In 1991 Ian Woodner's two daughters, Dian and Andrea Woodner, along with the Ian Woodner Family Foundation, sold the gallery a Cellini drawing and a page from an album by Vasari containing 10 drawings by Botticelli and Filippino Lippi. This group, given by Andrea, brings the total number of gifts from the Woodner collection to 118.


Summary: New Building, New Mission For Institute in Boston The Institute of Contemporary Art which is in Boston is getting ready for the opening of its new $51 million home, the first new art museum to be built in Boston in nearly 100 years. Designed by Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the 65,000-square-foot building on the waterfront will have three times the exhibition space of the institute's current building on Boylston Street. The institute will no longer function as a kunsthalle.


Summary: Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker, has been under pressure from some members of his conference, including several members of the black and Hispanic caucus, to endorse an education tax credit plan. Mr. Silver has been careful not to fully embrace or reject the governor's tax credit proposal, and has said that he is sympathetic to parents who pay tuition at private schools. When supporters of the tax credit rallied in Albany last month, Mr. Silver asked some of the religious leaders present to pledge that they would not raise tuition if the tax credit were approved.


Summary: The plan of George E. Pataki to give some families a tax credit for their children's education, Assembly Democrats have come up with their own proposal a tax credit for every child in families earning up to $150,000 a year, according to lawmakers who were briefed on the proposal. So the Democrats came up with a counterproposal that would benefit a wider array of families, according to seven Assembly Democrats who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plan was discussed in a private conference. The Assembly's proposal is likely to appease opponents of the governor's education tax credit, including the powerful teachers' unions, who had complained about giving public money to private schools when they say public schools are underfinanced.


Summary: When asked about the cases, the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, declined to elaborate on the investigation.


Summary: The bouncer, Darryl Littlejohn, 41, who has a long criminal history, remains the focus of the investigation into the death of the student, Imette St. Guillen, on Feb. 25, even though he has not been officially named a suspect. According to state records, Mr. Littlejohn has no history of sex crimes. The authorities have been able to hold him in jail because his job as a bouncer at the Falls, a SoHo bar where the victim was last seen alive, kept him out past a 9 p.m. curfew required for his state parole. He was being held on Rikers Island under one of his many aliases, Jonathan Blaze and he has been questioned extensively by detectives, who have also searched his Queens home and two vans parked nearby.


Summary: The investigation into the death of a 24-year-old graduate student who was murdered and dumped in Brooklyn as detectives searched for links to at least three unsolved rape and kidnapping cases in Queens and on Long Island, said by the officials in both jurisdictions. Although he has not been officially named a suspect, the bouncer, Darryl Littlejohn, whose age is 41, who has a long criminal history, remains the focus of the investigation into the death of the student, Imette St. Guillen. Mr. Littlejohn has no history of sex crimes, according to state records.


Summary: The committee's vote is also a victory for the drug's developers, Biogen Idec and Elan, which lost substantial market value when Tysabri was withdrawn from the market, only three months after it was approved. Shares of Biogen, rose about 8 percent. Biogen executives said that if doctors rigorously monitor patients, they might detect P.M.L. early enough to stop giving Tysabri and avoid death or disability. Biogen had proposed making the registry voluntary but the F.D.A. staff objected.


Summary: A Minneapolis physician, Dr. Barry J. Maron, whose patient died after a defective Guidant defibrillator failed, is among those scheduled to testify. His memos, which make reference to Dr. Maron, were written last May, just after Guidant told the Minneapolis physician that his patient had had a type of Guidant defibrillator that had repeatedly short-circuited because of an electrical flaw. At that time, Dr. Maron and a colleague, Dr. Robert G. Hauser, urged Guidant to alert physicians about the device defect about which the company had known for three years.


Summary: In two lengthy memos written just before Guidant was swamped by controversy, the consultant, Dr. Richard N. Fogoros, also told company executives that their decision to withhold such data, while statistically defensible, was questionable. He wrote in one memo that Guidant, while believing it was acting in the patients' best interest, had violated a sacred obligation it had to doctors by interposing its medical judgment for theirs. He also noted that Guidant had a clear conflict of interest that would naturally lead it to disclose product failures only when absolutely necessary. He wrote in a memo dated May 18, 2005: that this this conflict is not tacit; it is obvious for all to see, which means that when a tragedy occurs, their decisions will be viewed in the harshest light possible, without any objective consideration of the statistical niceties supporting our actions.


Summary: A consultant to the Guidant Corporation told the company that he believed it had a clear ethical obligation to tell physicians about heart device defects, and urged the company to overhaul its practices, newly released court records show. In two lengthy memos written just before Guidant was swamped by controversy, the consultant, Dr. Richard N. Fogoros, also told company executives that their decision to withhold such data, while statistically defensible, was questionable. Guidant executives have said they did not publicize defibrillator flaws because they believed that patients faced greater risks from replacement surgery than from the units.


Summary: Bill Elliott said that an operator will stay on the line until anyone reach their destination, he is the director of marketing, voice and integrated services at Sprint. Mr. Elliott said that Sprint 411, at $1.40 a call, is a bargain because a caller can get up to three pieces of information, like a phone number, a sport score and directions.


Summary: As cellular bandwidth increases, those offerings will go from voice to text to multimedia, said Tom Moran, executive director of product management and development for Verizon LiveSource. Pretty soon, if you ask for the number of a movie theater, we'll send the movie trailer to your cellphone, Mr. Moran said. If you ask for the number of a restaurant, you might get a menu or a $10-off coupon sent to your phone, Mr. Moran said of possible future service.


Summary: Directory assistance ''truly is a cash cow,'' said by Saroja Girishankar, who is a vice president at the Pelorus Group, a telecommunications market research firm based in Raritan, New Jersey. She and other industry analysts said that the carriers paid wholesalers who actually provide the 411 service from 25 to 50 cents a call. Despite all the enhanced services, 95 percent of customers are simply looking for a phone number when they dial 411, Ms. Girishankar of the Pelorus Group and others said.


Verizon
Verizon LiveSource
LiveSource
Verizon Wireless
Verizon Communications

Summary: Carriers like Sprint and Verizon charge more than $1 and sometimes as much as $2 a call from a cellphone. As cellular bandwidth increases, those offerings will go from voice to text to multimedia, said Tom Moran, who is the executive director of product management and development for Verizon LiveSource. (LiveSource, which is a subsidiary company of Verizon Communications, handles about 1 billion 411 calls a year for customers not only of Verizon Wireless, but of T-Mobile, Cingular and Alltel.)


Summary: (LiveSource, whose parent company is Verizon Communications, handles about 1 billion 411 calls a year for customers not only of Verizon Wireless, but of T-Mobile, Cingular and Alltel.)


Summary: Companies like Google, offer free directory assistance via text message. One is offered by Google (at the five-digit address 46645), another by UpSnap Inc. of Davidson, N.C. (at 27627) and a third by Synfonic Inc. of Berkeley, California. In each case, typing the word ''rice'' and the ZIP code 11215 was enough to get him the number of Rice Thai Kitchen, though the text messages also offered alternatives, like Paul Rice Architecture (from Google) or Nancy Rice M.D. This is according to Mr. Garrick.


Summary: James Albert Smith, who is a spokesman for Verizon LiveSource said that the listing always has to be relevant to the customer's request.


Summary: Carriers like Sprint and Verizon charge more than $1 and sometimes as much as $2 a call from a cellphone. Sprint is already offering one location-based service like driving directions with your current location as the starting point. An operator will stay on the line until you reach your destination, said Bill Elliott, who is the director of marketing, voice and integrated services at Sprint.