Friends had speculated someone forced Michael Scott to drive to the river before shooting him — and maybe even wrapped his fingers around the trigger.

But within days, police recreated Scott’s 20-minute drive through the city using high-tech equipment that singled out his car on a succession of surveillance cameras, handing the image from camera to camera. The video didn’t capture Scott’s final moments, but it helped convince police his death was a suicide: He wasn’t followed. He wasn’t following anyone. He never picked up a passenger.

The investigation offered a riveting demonstration of the most extensive and sophisticated video surveillance system in the United States, and one that is transforming what it means to be in public in Chicago.

In less than a decade and with little opposition, the city has linked thousands of cameras — on street poles and skyscrapers, aboard buses and in train tunnels — in a network covering most of the city. Officials can watch video live at a sprawling emergency command center, police stations and even some squad cars.

“I don’t think there is another city in the U.S. that has as an extensive and integrated camera network as Chicago has,” said Michael Chertoff, the former Homeland Security secretary.

New York has plenty of cameras, but about half of the 4,300 installed along the city’s subways don’t work. Other cities haven’t been able to link networks like Chicago. Baltimore, for example, doesn’t integrate school cameras with its emergency system and it can’t immediately send 911 dispatchers video from the camera nearest to a call like Chicago can.

Even London — widely considered the world’s most closely watched city with an estimated 500,000 cameras — doesn’t incorporate private cameras in its system as Chicago does.

While critics decry the network as the biggest of Big Brother invasions of privacy, most Chicago residents accept them as a fact of life in a city that has always had a powerful local government and police force.

And authorities say the system helps them respond to emergencies in a way never before possible. A dispatcher can tell those racing to the scene how big a fire is or what a gunman looks like. If a package is left sitting next to a building for more than a few minutes, a camera can send an alert.

Cameras have recorded drug deals, bike thefts and a holiday bell ringer dipping his hand into a pot outside a downtown store. Footage from a camera on a city bus helped convince a suspected gang member to plead guilty to shooting a 16-year-old high school student in 2007.

In the death of the school board president, the cameras helped diffuse mounting suspicion and anger.

“It really closed that piece of the puzzle,” police Superintendent Jody Weis said. “We don’t know what was going through his head, but we definitely know he was alone.”

The network began less than a decade ago with a dozen cameras installed in Grant Park to deter violence during the annual Taste of Chicago festival. It now includes private cameras as well as those installed by a variety of public agencies.

While authorities won’t say exactly how many cameras are included, with 1,500 installed by emergency officials, 6,500 in city schools and many more at public and private facilities, nobody disputes an estimate of 10,000 and growing. Weis said he would like to add “covert” cameras, perhaps as small as matchboxes.

City officials from around the world have visited Chicago to see the system and how effective it is.

Chicago police point to 4,000 arrests made since 2006 with the help of cameras. And, an unpublished study by the Washington-based Urban Institute found crime in one neighborhood — including drug sales, robberies and weapons offenses — decreased significantly after cameras were installed, said Nancy La Vigne, director of the institute’s Justice Policy Center.

“It does stop people from coming out and acting the fool,” observed Larry Scott, who lives in one of the city’s last remaining public housing high rises.

He said residents rarely complain, unless they get caught for a minor offense or the cameras fail to record a violent attack.

“People were upset when that boy was killed by the 2-by-4 and there were no pictures,” he said, referring to the beating death of a high school student that was recorded by cell phone but not city cameras last year.

Police say they usually hear from Chicago residents about the cameras only when they want one installed in their neighborhood or worry one will be removed. Such a claim is supported by an unlikely source: The American Civil Liberties Union, which has criticized the use of cameras as an invasion of privacy and ineffective crime fighting tool.

“It does appear that people only object is when they get a ticket (because of a camera) for running a red light,” ACLU spokesman Edwin Yohnka said.

Although courts have generally found surveillance cameras placed in public don’t violate individuals’ privacy, Yohnka said they could too easily be misused.

“What protections are in place to stop a rogue officer from taking a highly powerful camera and aim it in a way to find or track someone who is perhaps a former love interest or something like that?” he asked.

Aric Roush, director of information services at the city’s 911 center, responded that dispatchers see nothing officers wouldn’t see if they were on the scene.

“You can’t afford to put a police officer on every single corner (and) it is a lot more cost effective and efficient to put a camera where you don’t have eyes,” he said.

Chicago residents tend to be tough on crime and are likely to support any tool police use, said Paul Green, a Roosevelt University political science professor. Many literally applauded the officers who swung billy clubs at protesters during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he recalled.

Mayor Richard Daley, he said, “could put 10,000 more cameras up and nobody would say anything.”

By DON BABWIN, Associated Press Writer

Here’s a Black Friday reality check: Of the hordes of pre-dawn shoppers who line up for hours outside stores on the day after Thanksgiving, most will not bag the best bargains that appear in merchants’ circulars.

Look at the fine print that appears next to an advertised “doorbuster deal” at the bottom of the page in this year’s circulars.

It will either say “While supplies last,” “Minimum 2 per store,” “No rainchecks” or “All items are available in limited quantities.”

A quick scan through a few of this year’s Black Friday circulars show quantities as low as a “minimum of 5 per store” on some models of large plasma and HDTVs and popular brands of home appliances such as a washer-dryer pair.

Should Black Friday deal hunters feel cheated? Yes they should, say some retail experts.

“It’s a sleazy practice,” said Craig Johnson, retailing expert and president of retail consulting group Customer Growth Partners.

“I am old school,” said Johnson. “If a retailer is advertising a juicy deal and they are not prepared to have in sufficient quantity, don’t advertise it. Or give consumers a raincheck.”

Johnson said it’s not enough for retailers to mention that they’ll have such limited quantities of a product on one of the most-hyped shopping days of the year.

“Retailers aren’t winning any customers. They are just pissing off people,” he said. “It’s poor retailing practice.”

Unfortunately for consumers, more examples abound.

CNNMoney.com spoke to industry experts to uncover a few dirty secrets of Black Friday deals.

Limited quantities: Advertising a Black Friday deal as “limited quantities” is bogus, said Johnson.

“The only time it makes sense to have only two or three [items] in stock is if the deal is on a $2 million gift product that appears in the Neiman Marcus holiday catalog,” he said.

Edgar Dworsky, a consumer advocate and editor of Consumer World, agreed with Johnson.

“C’mon guys. Give me a break,” said Dworsky. “How can you be the size of a retailer like Sears and only get a minimum of five per store, yet devote big space in your circular to advertise that deal?

Sears (SHLD, Fortune 500) has not officially revealed its Black Friday sales. However, the company confirmed to CNNMoney.com that two of its post-Thanksgiving deals include a Samsung 40-inch 1080p LCD HDTV for $599.99, “Only while quantities last, minimum three per store, no rainchecks.”

The other is a Kenmore 3.5-cubic-foot high-efficiency washer and 5.8-cubic foot dryer pair for $579.98, “Limit four per store, no rainchecks.”

“Sure, you probably have more, but how do you put out a circular to millions of households and only have three?,” Dworsky asked.

When asked for a comment, Sears spokesman Tom Aiello said he was “not comfortable” addressing the issue of limited quantities for some Black Friday deals.

Such short supply on deals are not only annoying but can also be dangerous to Black Friday shoppers.

“We saw the stampede at a Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500) store in New York last year on Black Friday that led to an employee’s death,” said Burt Flickinger, managing director of consulting firm Strategic Resource Group. “The stampede happened because so many of the deals were advertised as limited supply.”

One retailer, while not explaining why its advertised deals are in such limited supplies, said it is taking measures to better handle the Black Friday rush.

“From going down the line and handing out doorbuster tickets that guarantee a purchase in advance of the store opening, to printing the minimum quantities in the circular, we go to great lengths to ensure that the Black Friday consumer knows exactly how many items will be at the store and whether or not they will be able to purchase one prior to entering the store,” Best Buy (BBY, Fortune 500) wrote in an e-mail.

What do you mean this HDTV is a “derivative?” Some of the holiday electronics with those low sale prices are derivatives, models that have a few less features than a standard model in that product line, said Dworsky.

The difference can be subtle. “The image contrast ratio might be 20,000 in a derivative model versus 30,000 in a standard model,” he said. “Most consumers probably won’t even notice the difference.”

A report earlier this month in Consumer Reports called attention to HDTV models from Samsung and Sony advertised in Black Friday deals that appear to be “derivatives.” The report said these one-off TVs “with unfamiliar model numbers” are usually cheaper than the standard model in their class.

Dworsky cautions that retailers usually don’t advertise these models as derivatives. “There’s no way the average consumer will know that the TV model they are buying is not the standard one unless they are savvy enough to compare their model numbers,” he said.

Which Black Friday deals are online? “Many retailers will say that their Black Friday deals are available online,” said Dworsky. “But they’re not nice enough to tell you which ones.”

“How about telling me which exact ones so I can shop online from home and I’m not in my pajamas at 5 a.m. in front of your store,” he said.

Online deals that never get shipped: Case in point: Sears. Last year, one of Sears’ hottest Black Friday doorbuster deal was on a Kenmore washer-dryer pair for $600.

Even though the retailer advertised that deal to be in “limited quantities,” the company decided to honor every customer order made on that deal last Black Friday.

Big mistake. The manufacturer could not ramp up production fast enough. Some customers waited months before their order was shipped. Others were sold a substitute model, that was “comparable or even better” for the same deal price, said Sears’ Aiello.

Lesson learned. “We will not be doing that again this year,” he said.

Be careful if you’re shopping online on Black Friday, said Dworsky.

“Since retailers don’t have a live inventory online you run the risk of getting an e-mail weeks later that your order had been delayed or worse, canceled, because the product is out of stock,” he said.

About those rainchecks: Finally, if a retailer does offer you a raincheck on a deal, it could still turn out to be an empty promise, Flickinger warned.

“A raincheck doesn’t guarantee that you will eventually get that elusive Black Friday deal,” he said. “Consumers can go weeks waiting and hoping, and the retailer may never get more of the product shipped to its stores.”

Copyrighted, CNNMoney. All Rights Reserved.
CNNMoney.com

Hidden in the hilly jungle, the ancient site of Kiuic (KIE-yuk) was one of dozens of ancient Maya centers abandoned in the Puuc region of Mexico’s Yucatan about 10 centuries ago. The latest discoveries from the site may capture the moment of departure.

“The people just walked away and left everything in place,” says archaeologist George Bey of Millsaps College in Jackson Miss., co-director of the Labna-Kiuic Regional Archaeological Project. “Until now, we had little evidence from the actual moment of abandonment, it’s a frozen moment in time.”

The ancient, or “classic” Maya were part of a Central American civilization best known for stepped pyramids, beautiful carvings and murals and the widespread abandonment of cities around 900 A.D. in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and El Salvador. They headed for the northern Yucatan, where Spanish conquistadors met their descendants in the 1500s (6 million modern Maya still live in Central America today).

Past work by the team, led by Bey and Tomas Gallareta of Mexico’s National Institute of Archaeology and History, shows the Maya had inhabited the Puuc region since 500 B.C. So why they headed for the coast with their brethren is just part of the mystery of the Maya collapse.

New clues may come from Kiuic, where the archaeologists explored two pyramids and, most intriguingly, plantation palaces on the ridges ringing the center. Of particular interst: a hilltop complex nicknamed “Stairway to Heaven” by Gallareta (that’s “Escalera al Cieloa” for Spanish-speaking Led Zeppelin fans) because of a long staircase leading from Kiuic to a central plaza nearly a mile away.

Both the pyramids and the palaces look like latter-day additions to Kiuic, built in the 9th century, just as Maya centers farther south were being abandoned. “The influx of wealth (at Kiuic) may spring from immigration,” Bey says, as Maya headed north. One pyramid was built atop what was originally a palace, allowing the rulers of Kiuic to simultaneously celebrate their forebears and move to fancier digs in the hills.

When the team started exploring the hilltop palaces, five vaulted homes to the south of the hilltop plaza and four to the north, the archaeologists found tools, stone knives and axes, corn-grinder stones called metates (muh-TAH-taze) and pots still sitting in place. “It was completely unexpected,” Bey says. “It looks like they just turned the metates on their sides and left things waiting for them to come back.”

“Their finds look very interesting and promising,” says archaeologist Takeshi Inomata of the University of Arizona, who is not part of the project. “If it indeed represents rapid abandonment, it provides important implications about the social circumstance at that time and promises detailed data on the way people lived.”

Inomata is part of a team exploring Aguateca, an abandoned Maya center in Guatemala renowned for its preservation. “I should add that the identification of rapid abandonment is not easy. There are other types of deposits — particularly ritual deposits — that result in very similar kinds of artifact assemblages,” Inomata cautions, by email.

Bey and colleagues presented some of their findings earlier this year at the Society for American Archaeology meeting in Atlanta. The team hopes to publish its results and dig further at Kiuic to prove their finding of rapid abandonment there. “I think you could compare it to Pompeii, where people locked their doors and fled, taking some things but leaving others,” Bey says.

So far, what drove people to leave the site remains a mystery, as it is for the rest of the ancient Maya. The only sign of warfare is a collection of spear points found in the central plaza of Kiuic. There are signs that construction halted there — a stucco-floored plaza sits half-complete, for example. “Drought seems more likely, that would halt construction,” Bey says.

Having climbed the “Stairway to Heaven” a few times, Bey can answer one minor mystery, however. Why weren’t the palace sites looted as so many other Maya sites have been? “The hills are a good climb,” he says. “People just didn’t bother to climb the hills to search the rooms.”

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
Copyright USA Today usatoday.com

After spending three years in the dark, a 90-year-old great-great-grandfather from Oregon who had been declared legally blind claims he’s suddenly regained much of his sight.

“God never treated anybody as good as he’s treated me,” Marty Alvey told the Daily News, three days after his vision inexplicably returned.

“When I got out of bed this morning, I looked into the mirror, and I said, ‘Hello there, Marty, nice to see you.’”

Alvey had given up reading and was forced to watch TV from a distance of 6 inches after being stricken with macular degeneration, which causes the loss of central vision.

Now the retired carpenter is hoping to go on sightseeing trips throughout the Northwest and possibly meet “a nice young gal, about 80 years old.”

“I’ve been reborn,” Alvey said, noting he can see clearly 5 feet ahead.

Alvey’s transformation came early Saturday after he awoke feeling woozy. After getting stuck in the bathroom, he crawled to his phone and called 911. On the way to the hospital, Alvey started feeling better.

When a doctor walked into his room, Alvey says he realized his vision had improved.

“He started talking to me, and I said, ‘You know, I can see you! I can see you!’” Alvey recalled. “I went crazy, completely crazy.”

A pair of ophthalmologists examined Alvey’s eyes two days ago and found no explanation for his improved vision.

“There are no anatomical changes within the eye to account for his subjective visual improvement,” said Dr. Anthony Cirino, of Kaiser Permanente in Portland, noting that Alvey’s performance on an eye exam showed no improvement. “From my standpoint, I can’t explain it.”

Alvey has spent the past few days tidying up his home in Tualatin, a suburb of Portland. The feisty nonagenarian has also relished gazing at photos of his five children and numerous grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren – and greeting his neighbors.

“Now when I meet people, I say, ‘Good morning, nice to see you,’ and I really mean it,” Alvey said. “Some people think I’m an old ding-a-ling, but that’s okay. I can see.”

BY Rich Schapiro
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Copyright NyDailyNews.com

With the countries separated by the 2,250-kilometre-wide (1,400-mile-wide) Tasman Sea, the 30 centimetre (12 inch) closing of the gap in New Zealand’s southwest won’t make much difference.

But earthquake scientist Ken Gledhill of GNS Science said the shift illustrated the huge force of the tremor, the biggest in the world so far this year.

“Basically, New Zealand just got a little bit bigger is another way to think about it,” he told AFP.

While the southwest of the South Island moved about 30 centimetres closer to Australia, the east coast of the island moved only one centimetre westwards, he said.

The biggest quake in New Zealand in 78 years caused only slight damage to buildings and property when it struck the remote southwest Fiordland region of the South Island last Thursday.

A small tsunami was generated by the earthquake, with a tide gauge on the West Coast of New Zealand recording a wave of one metre.

“For a very large earthquake, although it was very widely felt, there were very few areas that were severely shaken,” Gledhill said.

Aerial inspection of the forested fiords near the quake’s epicentre showed few land slips or other signs of damage.

This was partly because the type of rupture at the boundaries of the Australian and Pacific plates meant the energy from the quake was largely directed westwards towards the sea rather than inland towards the nearest towns.

The type of quake, known as a subduction thrust rupture, also meant the quake produced lower frequency shaking, felt as a rolling motion, rather than sharp jolts which would have caused more damage.

New Zealand frequently suffers earthquakes because it marks the meeting point of the Australian and Pacific continental plates.

Gledhill said the latest quake may have brought forward a major quake on the offshore section of the Alpine fault, off the coast of Fiordland in the Tasman Sea.

“There could easily be another large earthquake in another part of that region. We can’t predict that obviously.”

The latest quake was the biggest since February 2, 1931 when a 7.8 quake killed at least 256 people in the North Island city of Napier.

The biggest quake recorded here measured 8.2 and caused major damage in 1855 in the fledgling European settlement that later became the capital Wellington.

The latest quake was unusual in striking right on the boundary of the Australian and Pacific plates and will be important in researching earthquake hazards, Gledhill said.

by David Brooks – AFP

But astronomers, scientists and secularists are trying to play down claims of evil portent in connection with Wednesday’s natural spectacle, when the moon will come between the Earth and the sun, completely obscuring the sun.

In Hindu mythology, the two demons Rahu and Ketu are said to “swallow” the sun during eclipses, snuffing out its life-giving light and causing food to become inedible and water undrinkable.

Pregnant women are advised to stay indoors to prevent their babies developing birth defects, while prayers, fasting and ritual bathing, particularly in holy rivers, are encouraged.

Shivani Sachdev Gour, a gynaecologist at the Fortis Hospital in New Delhi, said a number of expectant mothers scheduled for caesarian deliveries on July 22 had asked to change the date.

“This is a belief deeply rooted in Indian society. Couples are willing to do anything to ensure that the baby is not born on that day,” Gour said.

Astrologers have predicted a rise in communal and regional violence in the days following the eclipse, particularly in India, China and other Southeast Asian nations where it can be seen on Wednesday morning.

Mumbai astrologer Raj Kumar Sharma predicted “some sort of attack by (Kashmiri separatists) Jaish-e-Mohammad or Al-Qaeda on Indian soil” and a devastating natural disaster in Southeast Asia.

An Indian political leader could be killed, he said, and tension between the West and Iran is likely to increase, escalating into possible US military action after September 9, when fiery Saturn moves from Leo into Virgo.

“The last 200 years, whenever Saturn has gone into Virgo there has been either a world war or a mini world war,” he told AFP.

It is not just in India that some are uneasy about what will transpire because of the eclipse.

In ancient China they were often associated with disasters, the death of an emperor or other dark events, and similar superstitions persist.

“The probability for unrest or war to take place in years when a solar eclipse happens is 95 percent,” announced an article that attracted a lot of hits on the popular Chinese web portal Baidu.com.

Sanal Edamaruku, president of the Indian Rationalist Association, dismissed such doomsday predictions.

“Primarily, what we see with all these soothsayers and astrologers is that they’re looking for opportunities to enhance their business with predictions of danger and calamity,” he told AFP.

“They have been very powerful in India but over the last decade they have been in systematic decline.”

Astronomers and scientists are also working to educate the public about the eclipse.

Travel firm Cox and Kings has chartered a Boeing 737-700 aircraft to give people the chance to see the eclipse from 41,000 feet (12,500 metres).

Experts will be on board to explain it to passengers, some of whom have paid 79,000 rupees (1,600 dollars) for a “sun-side” seat on the three-hour flight from New Delhi.

The eclipse’s shadow is expected to pass over the aircraft at 15 times the speed of sound (Mach 15), said Ajay Talwar, president of the SPACE Group of companies that promotes science and astronomy.

“It’s coming in the middle of the monsoon season. On the ground, there’s a 40 percent chance of seeing it in India. On the aircraft you have almost a 90 percent chance of seeing the eclipse,” he added.

Siva Prasad Tata, who runs the Astro Jyoti website, straddles the two worlds.

“There’s no need to get too alarmed about the eclipse, they are a natural phenomenon,” the astrologer told AFP.

But he added: “During the period of the eclipse, the opposite attracting forces are very, very powerful. From a spiritual point of view, this is a wonderful time to do any type of worship.

“It will bring about good results, much more than on an ordinary day.”

by Phil Hazlewood Phil Hazlewood
AFP

Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its “rubber rooms” — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues — pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.

“You just basically sit there for eight hours,” said Orlando Ramos, who spent seven months in a rubber room, officially known as a temporary reassignment center, in 2004-05. “I saw several near-fights. `This is my seat.’ `I’ve been sitting here for six months.’ That sort of thing.”

Ramos was an assistant principal in East Harlem when he was accused of lying at a hearing on whether to suspend a student. Ramos denied the allegation but quit before his case was resolved and took a job in California.

Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.

“It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract,” spokeswoman Ann Forte said.

City officials said that they make teachers report to a rubber room instead of sending they home because the union contract requires that they be allowed to continue in their jobs in some fashion while their cases are being heard. The contract does not permit them to be given other work.

Ron Davis, a spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers, said the union and the Department of Education reached an agreement last year to try to reduce the amount of time educators spend in reassignment centers, but progress has been slow.

“No one wants teachers who don’t belong in the classroom. However, we cannot neglect the teachers’ rights to due process,” Davis said. The union represents more than 228,000 employees, including nearly 90,000 teachers.

Many teachers say they are being punished because they ran afoul of a vindictive boss or because they blew the whistle when somebody fudged test scores.

“The principal wants you out, you’re gone,” said Michael Thomas, a high school math teacher who has been in a reassignment center for 14 months after accusing an assistant principal of tinkering with test results.

City education officials deny teachers are unfairly targeted but say there has been an effort under Mayor Michael Bloomberg to get incompetents out of the classroom. “There’s been a push to report anything that you see wrong,” Forte said.

Some other school systems likewise pay teachers to do nothing.

The Los Angeles district, the nation’s second-largest school system with 620,000 students, behind New York’s 1.1 million, said it has 178 teachers and other staff members who are being “housed” while they wait for misconduct charges to be resolved.

Similarly, Mimi Shapiro, who is now retired, said she was assigned to sit in what Philadelphia calls a “cluster office.” “They just sit you in a room in a hard chair,” she said, “and you just sit.”

Teacher advocates say New York’s rubber rooms are more extensive than anything that exists elsewhere.

Teachers awaiting disciplinary hearings around the nation typically are sent home, with or without pay, Karen Horwitz, a former Chicago-area teacher who founded the National Association for the Prevention of Teacher Abuse. Some districts find non-classroom work — office duties, for example — for teachers accused of misconduct.

New York City’s reassignment centers have existed since the late 1990s, Forte said. But the number of employees assigned to them has ballooned since Bloomberg won more control over the schools in 2002. Most of those sent to rubber rooms are teachers; others are assistant principals, social workers, psychologists and secretaries.

Once their hearings are over, they are either sent back to the classroom or fired. But because their cases are heard by 23 arbitrators who work only five days a month, stints of two or three years in a rubber room are common, and some teachers have been there for five or six.

The nickname refers to the padded cells of old insane asylums. Some teachers say that is fitting, since some of the inhabitants are unstable and don’t belong in the classroom. They add that being in a rubber room itself is bad for your mental health.

“Most people in that room are depressed,” said Jennifer Saunders, a high school teacher who was in a reassignment center from 2005 to 2008. Saunders said she was charged with petty infractions in an effort to get rid of her: “I was charged with having a student sit in my class with a hat on, singing.”

The rubber rooms are monitored, some more strictly than others, teachers said.

“There was a bar across the street,” Saunders said. “Teachers would sneak out and hang out there for hours.”

Judith Cohen, an art teacher who has been in a rubber room near Madison Square Garden for three years, said she passes the time by painting watercolors of her fellow detainees.

“The day just seemed to crawl by until I started painting,” Cohen said, adding that others read, play dominoes or sleep. Cohen said she was charged with using abusive language when a girl cut her with scissors.

Some sell real estate, earn graduate degrees or teach each other yoga and tai chi.

David Suker, who has been in a Brooklyn reassignment center for three months, said he has used the time to plan summer trips to Alaska, Cape Cod and Costa Rica. Suker said he was falsely accused of throwing a girl’s test sign-up form in the garbage during an argument.

“It’s sort of peaceful knowing that you’re going to work to do nothing,” he said.

Philip Nobile is a journalist who has written for New York Magazine and the Village Voice and is known for his scathing criticism of public figures. A teacher at Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill School of American Studies, Nobile was assigned to a rubber room in 2007, “supposedly for pushing a boy while I was breaking up a fight.” He contends the school system is retaliating against him for exposing wrongdoing.

He is spending his time working on his case and writing magazine articles and a novel.

“This is what happens to political prisoners throughout history,” he said, alluding to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “They put us in prison and we write our `Letter From the Birmingham Jail.’”

By KAREN MATTHEWS, Associated Press Writer

In just four months, Mohamed Altoumaimi has found a formula to explain and simplify the so-called Bernoulli numbers, a sequence of calculations named after the 17th century Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, the Dagens Nyheter daily said.

Altoumaimi, who came to Sweden six years ago, said teachers at his high school in Falun, central Sweden were not convinced about his work at first.

“When I first showed it to my teachers, none of them thought the formula I had written down really worked,” Altoumaimi told the Falu Kuriren newspaper.

He then got in touch with professors at Uppsala University, one of Sweden’s top institutions, to ask them to check his work.

After going through his notebooks, the professors found his work was indeed correct and offered him a place in Uppsala.

But for now, Altoumaimi is focusing on his school studies and plans to take summer classes in advanced mathematics and physics this year.

“I wanted to be a researcher in physics or mathematics; I really like those subjects. But I have to improve in English and social sciences,” he told the Falu Kuriren.

By AFP

News that there is a flimsy piece of paper worth close to a quarter of a billion bucks inspired a mad rush to the Search box. Though they were nowhere near as popular as the “lotto winner” queries, searches on “lottery curse” were conducted by more than a few. Indeed, there seems to be many times when someone wins millions of dollars only to suffer misfortune shortly thereafter.

An ABC article from 2007 highlights some of the more glaring incidents. A couple won $25 million and saw their marriage end just months later. In 2002, another man won millions of dollars but “his life was consumed by hardship,” including the death of his granddaughter and the end of his marriage. Most bizarrely, a 1996 lotto winner was kidnapped and killed by his sister-in-law and an accomplice.

But before you get too depressed, let’s get back to today’s news: A very lucky $232 million ticket. Queries on “powerball numbers may 27 2009,” “powerball winner,” and “powerball winnings” posted immediate gains.

Also surging among the greedy and curious: “biggest lotto win ever.” While $232 million is nothing to sneeze at, it’s far from the biggest jackpot ever. That title belongs to a $390 million jackpot from 2007. (Although, according to MegaMillions.com, that prize was shared between two winners. Sheesh, only $195 million each? Why even bother?)

Here’s hoping the winner of this recent windfall manages to do what so many past winners have tried to accomplish: Do some good while continuing to live a happy life. Oh, and don’t forget to pay your taxes.

by Mike Krumboltz

The incident, highlighted in the Annals of Oncology, was reported by the patient’s doctor, Tan Eng Huat, who advised cancer patients taking this drug to carry a doctor’s letter when traveling to the United States.

The drug, capecitabine, is commonly used to treat cancers in the head and neck, breast, stomach and colorectum.

One side-effect is chronic inflammation of the palms or soles of the feet and the skin can peel, bleed and develop ulcers or blisters — or what is known as hand-foot syndrome.

“This can give rise to eradication of fingerprints with time,” explained Tan, senior consultant in the medical oncology department at Singapore’s National Cancer Center.

The patient, a 62-year-old man, had head and neck cancer that had spread but responded well to chemotherapy. To prevent the cancer from recurring, he was put on capecitabine.

“In December 2008, after more than three years of capecitabine, he went to the United States to visit his relatives,” Tan wrote.

“He was detained at the airport customs for four hours because the immigration officers could not detect his fingerprints. He was allowed to enter after the custom officers were satisfied that he was not a security threat.”

Tan said the loss of fingerprints is not described in the packaging of the drug, although chronic inflammation of the palms and soles of feet is included.

“The topmost layer … is the layer that accounts for the fingerprint, that (losing that top layer) is all it takes (to lose a fingerprint),” Tan told Reuters.

“Theoretically, if you stop the drug, it will grow back but details are scanty. No one knows the frequency of this occurrence among patients taking this drug and nobody knows how long a person must be on this drug before the loss of fingerprints.”

By Tan Ee Lyn
Reuters