net127

Woman ticketed for appearing naked on Internet

Kevin O'Hanlon, Associated Press, reports:

LINCOLN, Neb. — It may be legal to appear naked in cyberspace, but police ticketed a Lincoln woman Monday for posting nude pictures of herself on the Web that were taken in downtown bar.
"It's unlawful to be naked in public in Lincoln," said police chief Tom Casady.

Melissa J. Harrington, 21, was ticketed for violating Lincoln's public nudity ordinance by posting pictures on her Web site "showing her naked at one of our downtown bars and in several other locations around the city," Casady said.

"They're not going to stop me from doing what I'm doing. I enjoy what I do and they really don't have any grounds now to go off of," to prosecute the case, she said.

Harrington, who works as a Web designer at a local bank, says on her Web site that she likes "being naked in public ... even more when there's a lot of people there to watch."

Her Web site is linked to another which shows explicit pictures of women who purportedly are college students in Nebraska.

Casady said no one has been ticketed in connection with those pictures because it is not apparent where they were taken.

"Some of them are clearly stock photos that someone has gotten from some place else," he said. "Some of them, you just can't tell where they are."

In Harrington's case, Casady said it is obvious that the photos were taken inside the Marz Intergalactic Shrimp and Martini Bar.

Repeated phone calls to the bar Monday rang busy.

Casady said the police department planned to send a letter to the state Liquor Control Commission to see if the bar violated any state laws.

Harrington was to be arraigned in Lancaster County Court on Jan 29. If convicted, she faces a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a $500 fine.

Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The terror threat at home, often overlooked

As the media focus on international terror, a Texan pleads guilty to possessing a weapon of mass destruction.

Kris Axtman, The Christian Science Monitor, writes:

HOUSTON – It began as a misdelivered envelope and developed into the most extensive domestic terrorism investigation since the Oklahoma City bombing.
Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the home and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and antigovernment literature.

"Without question, it ranks at the very top of all domestic terrorist arrests in the past 20 years in terms of the lethality of the arsenal," says Daniel Levitas, author of "The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right."

But outside Tyler, Texas, the case is almost unknown. In the past nine months, there have been two government press releases and a handful of local stories, but no press conference and no coverage in the national newspapers.

Experts say the case highlights the increased cooperation and quicker response by US agencies since Sept. 11. But others say it points up just how political the terror war is. "There is no value for the Bush administration to highlighting domestic terrorism right now," says Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas in Austin. "But there are significant political benefits to highlighting foreign terrorists, especially when trying to whip up support for war."

Mr. Levitas goes even further: "The government has a severe case of tunnel vision when it comes to domestic terrorism. I have no doubt whatsoever that had Krar and his compatriots been Arab-Americans or linked to some violent Islamic fundamentalist group, we would have heard from John Ashcroft himself."

The case began in the fall of 2002 when a package bound for New Jersey was misdelivered to a New York address. The family inadvertently opened the package and found fake identification badges, including Department of Defense and United Nations IDs. The FBI eventually tracked the package back to Mr. Krar in Noonday, Texas.

The cache of weapons and bombs was found when the FBI served a search warrant in April of this year. Krar and his common-law wife, Judith Bruey, and the receiver of the package, New Jersey Militia member Edward Feltus, were arrested.

All three have pleaded guilty to separate counts and are awaiting sentencing.

Brit Featherston, the assistant US attorney in charge of the case, says it was Krar and Ms. Bruey's connections to white-supremacist groups that prompted further investigation. "Any little town has worse criminals on paper than these two. But because of their background, the red flags were flying all over the place - especially after Sept. 11," says Mr. Featherston, in the eastern district of Texas.

Before Sept. 11, he says, the case most likely would have been worked as a false-ID case and ended there. Instead, dozens of law-enforcement agencies were involved and hundreds of subpoenas were served. "This case was very high priority," says Featherston.

Still, investigators have been unable to answer questions such as: Where was the sodium-cyanide bomb destined And were the weapons being prepared for a group or sold individually Featherston says the investigation is ongoing and won't end until these questions are answered.

Experts say the case is important not only because of what it says about increased government cooperation, but also because it shows how serious a threat the country faces from within. "The lesson in the Krar case is that we have to always be concerned about domestic terrorism. It would be a terrible mistake to believe that terrorism always comes from outside," says Mark Potok at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.

The fact is, the number of domestic terrorist acts in the past five years far outweighs the number of international acts, says Mark Pitcavage of the fact-finding department at the Anti-Defamation League. "We do have home-grown hate in the United States, people who are just as ill-disposed to the American government as any international terrorist group," he says.

Levitas estimates that there are approximately 25,000 right-wing extremist members and activists and some 250,000 sympathizers. The Southern Poverty Law Center counted 708 hate groups in 2002.

While Mr. Pitcavage was surprised the Krar case did not receive more attention, "It is a fact that a lot of stories involving domestic extremists get undercovered," he says. He points to a case he calls one of "the major terrorist plots of the 1990s" in which militia from around the country converged in central Texas allegedly to attack a military base. They were arrested at a campground near Fort Hood on the morning of July 4, 1997, with a large collection of weapons and explosives. "There was virtually no media coverage of that incident either," says Pitcavage.

Featherston speculates that the Krar case got little attention because the arrests were made just after the war began in Iraq. "Excuse me, a chemical weapon was found in the home state of George Bush," says Levitas. "I'm not saying the Justice Department deliberately decided to downplay the story because they thought it might be embarrassing to the US government if weapons of mass destruction were found in America before they were found in Iraq. But I am saying it was a mistake not to give this higher profile."

For his part, Krar has remained silent. He will most likely be sentenced sometime in February, and could receive up to life in prison. His attorney, Tonda Curry, says the US government has no reason to be afraid of him. "It looks a whole lot worse than it is. He had a lot of things that most people would never have any desire to have, but much of what he had was perfectly legal."

MySQL Quashes Defects in Database Release MySQL Quashes Defects in Database Release

Brian Fonseca, eWeek, reports:

MySQL AB on Monday released Version 4.0.17 of its MySQL open-source database software. The update features a number of cleaned up code defects that were recently sniffed out by an independent inspection company.

[..] Despite the uncovered bugs, Reasoning concluded that Uppsala, Sweden-based MySQL AB's code quality was in fact six times better than that of comparable commercial, proprietary code. [..]

Available in source code and binary form, the MySQL 4.0.17 maintenance release for the current MySQL production version corrects all valid bugs discovered during an October poll conducted within the development community via an independent study by Mountain View, Calif.-based Reasoning Inc.

ADVERTISEMENT

According to its study, Reasoning officials said the company found 21 software defects in 235,667 lines of MySQL source code. The report's Defect Summary noted 15 defect instances of NULL Pointer Deference, three defect instances of an allocated memory leak, and three defect instances of an uninitialized variable prior to usage.

Despite the uncovered bugs, Reasoning concluded that Uppsala, Sweden-based MySQL AB's code quality was in fact six times better than that of comparable commercial, proprietary code.

Reasoning performed its independent analysis using defect density as a prime quality indicator. Defined as the number of defects found per thousand lines of code, MySQL's defect density registered as 0.09 defects per thousand lines of source code. Through its analysis, Reasoning concluded that the commercial average defect density—covering 200 recent projects and totaling 35 million lines of commercial code—came to 0.57 defects per thousand lines of code.

NYT on VoIP(Vonage): A Voice in the Calling Wilderness

DAVID LEONHARDT, The New York Times, writes:

MAYBE you have had the fantasy while sitting at home for an entire afternoon and waiting for a 10-minute visit from the phone company to install a new telephone line. Or maybe the dream has come to you while were you on hold, once again, hoping to resolve the latest billing mix-up caused by Verizon, SBC or whichever local phone company dominates your market.

For me, it began when my family moved into a new apartment this year and Verizon informed us that we would need to wait two weeks for a working phone line. Once that service began, we would have to pay about $50 a month even though we wanted to make only local phone calls on the line. Thinking we were without any better options given the dodgy quality of mobile phones, we grudgingly said yes.

But I could not shake a fantasy that millions of other Americans have had. I imagined that I could respond to the monopolistic customer service of local phone companies the same way I would react to such treatment by a restaurant or a shoe store and take my business elsewhere. I dreamed of an economy in which I was not all but required to tithe the descendants of Ma Bell every month.

Little did I know, that economy already existed. Thanks to the proliferation of high-speed Internet connections in homes, a jumble of companies, including start-ups and cable television operators, have begun to sell telephone service that does not rely on a traditional phone line. Instead, the service typically enters homes through a cable modem and connects to a simple phone, which emits a reassuring dial tone when picked up.

Stewing over my latest experience with Verizon, I soon decided to do something that I rarely do: become an early adopter of a new technology. For the last month, my wife and I have relied on the Internet for our main phone line. The service, from Vonage, a New Jersey company that is the largest of the start-ups, costs less than $30 a month (including taxes) for unlimited local calls, 500 minutes of long distance, voice mail, caller ID and the like. For unlimited long distance as well, the price is about $38 a month, about $30 less than what Verizon, MCI or AT&T charge for similar packages.

None of this would matter, of course, if Internet phone service suffered from dropped calls and scratchy reception as often as mobile phones do. But the most encouraging result of our experiment has been the nearly imperceptible difference between a land line and a Vonage connection, save one disappointing call. The friends and relatives we spoke with never asked what kind of phone we were using or, the ultimate insult, whether we were on a cellphone.

Before spending an hour as a guest on a radio talk show, I asked the producer how our connection was, and he rated it "great."

There are still drawbacks. Unless you have a backup battery, a blackout like last summer's can knock out Internet phone service even when traditional phones continue to work. A breakdown in cable TV service, hardly an unknown phenomenon, would do the same. Vonage phone numbers will not be listed in the phone book. And a call to 911 will not display the caller's address to the operator.

But telephone and cable TV companies have made clear in recent weeks how serious a competitive threat Internet telephones pose. Time Warner, with help from Sprint and MCI, will soon offer Internet phone service to many of its cable customers, and AT&T is following suit by using high-speed telephone data lines, known as D.S.L., instead of cable modems.

"It's a very scary situation for the incumbent telephone carriers," said Charles Golvin, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, speaking on a Vonage phone line himself, "because they're going to have real competition."

Vonage now has almost 80,000 customers, up from 7,000 a year ago. (Over all, according to the research firm InStat/MDR, about 135,000 American consumers now have Internet phone service.) Part of the service's early success stems from its relative freedom from federal rules that bind phone companies. It barely needs to charge its customers any taxes, at least for now, and it does not have a mandate to ensure universal telephone access across the country, as the Baby Bells do.

Federal regulators will probably need to level the playing field at some point, but Internet phone service will still increase competition. Even with a 1996 law intended to foster competition in local markets, the Baby Bells have so far retained much of their power. While long-distance carriers now have the right to sell local service, they must lease the lines from local carriers, creating abundant opportunity for trouble. A married couple I know in the Bronx went more than a month without service while AT&T and Verizon blamed each other about which company was responsible for the problem.

Internet phone service avoids this free-market bottleneck by circumventing the so-called last mile of telephone wiring, which is owned by the Baby Bells. Companies like Vonage instead break down voice traffic into packets of data that are sent through cyberspace and reconstituted as voice on the other end. If the person receiving the call has a land line, Vonage pays a fee to the local phone company to complete the call.

After reading about Vonage in a handful of places, I did a Google search for it and quickly found a coupon that made the second month of service free. (The company says it can transfer most land-line or mobile-phone numbers to a Vonage account, although we did not try to do so; we were given a number in the 646 area code.) Including a $30 activation fee, my start-up costs amounted to about $85, about half of which was for a device called a router that permits simultaneous calling and Web surfing. Vonage has since switched to a different device, which acts as both router and phone adapter and which it sends to new customers free.

Setting up the system was not as easy as Vonage had advertised, but a phone conversation with a customer service agent from the router manufacturer cleared up the confusing directions from the manual. Minutes later I was listening to a dial tone (a fake one, piped in by Vonage to make the system feel familiar). In my own version of "Mr. Watson, come here!" I then dialed my parents and announced: "Hi, Mom. I'm talking to you from the Internet." She did not know what I was talking about, which was precisely the point.

Over the next month, few other people suspected anything was different, either. My wife, Laura, and I alternated between thinking the sound quality was just as good as it was on a land line and judging it to be slightly worse. At times, voices seemed tinnier than they did on a land line, almost as if we were using the phone in a big, empty room.

We never lost a call, but it does happen. Mr. Golvin, the analyst at Forrester, said he occasionally had trouble with incoming calls on his Vonage line. And when a Vonage employee called me on an Internet line to set up an interview with Mr. Citron, the message left on my voice mail was indecipherable.

"We're not that happy with the level of service today," said Jeffrey Citron, Vonage's chief executive, adding that the company was working to improve it. "You shouldn't ever be able to tell the difference" between an Internet line and a land line, he said.

For us, the service became a problem only once, when Laura was uploading photographs onto our computer and I was talking on the telephone. The call became fuzzy, presumably because too much data was flowing over our cables at once. Mr. Citron said the device Vonage now sends to customers gives priority to voices, allowing calls to sound normal and delaying simultaneous downloads by a few seconds.

The smaller start-ups that offer Web phone service seem more problematic. As part of my experiment, I persuaded some other family members to sign up with two Vonage rivals, and none of my relatives was satisfied. My sister and her husband signed up for VoicePulse, and they found that their phone line often slipped out of the device it was plugged into. During the one conversation I had with them over the line, we were cut off three times for no apparent reason.

My parents used Packet8, and I had high hopes for it, since it costs a little more than $20 a month for unlimited calling to anyone in the United States and Canada. But their line simply went dead one night, and the customer service department was never easy to reach.

With Vonage, I suspect most people will find that the biggest drawback is needing to bind their phone to their modem. This makes a cordless phone essentially mandatory. If you are using the Internet for your primary phone line, you will probably want to buy a splitter at an electronics store, allowing you to have more than one phone for the line.

We still have some reservations about Vonage, but the big difference in cost and the tiny difference in quality have persuaded us to make it our main phone line. We are now trying to decide whether to keep a bare-bones land line at a monthly cost of about $18 in case of emergency, or whether we feel comfortable relying on a combination of a cellphone and a backup battery for the cable modem.

In other words, this service is far from perfect, and all of the individual companies seem to have the potential to provide the same kind of what-me-worry customer service as local phone companies. And can anybody really get excited about relying even more on Time Warner or other cable companies, which tend to act like the monopolies they long have been

But the wonderful thing about a competitive market is that the foibles of any one company will not matter for long. If Time Warner tries to overcharge you, you can switch to Vonage. If Vonage regularly makes you wait on hold for 15 minutes to get the answer to a simple question, as it did to me this week, you can sign up with AT&T. Maybe Verizon and other Baby Bells, once they are forced into real competition for customers, will emerge as the best choice. They just won't be the only one.

China's war: Against wires

TED ANTHONY,
ASSOCIATED PRESS writes:

SHANGHAI—On sections of Beijing Road, you can barely see the sky. On Tibet Road, they dangle in garden-hose rolls and knots intricate enough to confound a Boy Scout. Over on Hefei Street, one enterprising apartment dweller even used them to hang-dry selected cuts of meat.

Tech-happy Shanghai, the most wired city in China, has a problem: wires. Telephone wires. Fiber-optic wires. Electrical wires. Wires no one can seem to identify. Black wires. Blue wires. Magenta wires. They're everywhere, and they're gumming up the works.

"Shanghai has a long history of development, and it wasn't all consistent. It would have been a lot easier if it was," says Gong Jiehua, who oversees the Shanghai Roads and Pipelines Office. Then he sighs loudly.

So China is doing what China usually does when confronted with such dilemmas, be they economic, political or technological: It's mounting a campaign, asking the masses for help — and unrepentantly yanking down wayward wires as it goes.

It's not an easy task. Companies, hospitals, schools, utilities — all have erected their own lines. As of earlier this year, Shanghai had 12,500 kilometres of above-ground wires within its outer-ring road.

It had 5,900 kilometres inside the inner-ring road.

"Look at all these cables. It doesn't make our city look good. A modern city needs to be attractive, too," says Wang Guojian, a bus driver who sometimes wonders why more wire-powered cable cars don't crash in the thickets of cables.

The wire jungle is also partially responsible for a ban on kites in Shanghai's 125 parks; too much tangling.

The government's $1.45 billion (U.S.) solution, instituted in 1999, will bury 30 per cent of the wire network by 2005 and 70 per cent by 2010. The city has established no-wire zones, and more than 700 miles have been buried, according to Zhou Jun, a city engineer on the project.

Such burials are four times more expensive than they should be, city officials say, because they require costly efforts to protect historical sites in a city that once had major Jewish, German and British populations.

History, of course, isn't on the minds of many Shanghainese these days. It's difficult to think of any city that modernized faster than Shanghai. Even Tokyo took a generation to become the high-tech metropolis it is today.

The late leader Deng Xiaoping had much to do with it. The earliest days of his economic reforms, the late 1970s and early 1980s, were notable for their a vigorous campaign to promote the "Four Modernizations" — agriculture, military, industry and science-technology.

Shanghai took the final one to heart, and today the city is the poster child of Chinese technology, a benchmark for the rest of the country.

The progress is no accident, but rather the result of policy. No other Chinese city can match the investment — human, financial and educational — in Shanghai's tech ascendance.

It has five of China's top seven universities. It aggressively courts investment by IBM, Intel and other foreign companies by using tax breaks and, like Singapore, bureaucratic fast-tracking.

The city has spent heavily on broadband Internet and other infrastructure, runs its own high-tech venture capital fund and offers incentives to lure entrepreneurs from elsewhere in China.

Shanghai's recent urban development, like China's itself, is nevertheless characterized by a sometimes astonishing lack of planning — a problem hardly surprising for a land whose east-coast cities have done a century's worth of modernization in barely two decades.

It happened like this: People put up wires, and nobody noticed. Then people put up more wires. By the time folks figured out that cables were strung 30-deep over some intersections, those wires were the arteries and veins that carried Shanghai's lifeblood.

Wires are just one urban challenge. Bedeviled by ballooning rat populations, Shanghai has turned not to poison but to rodent contraceptives. And the municipal government is considering limits on new skyscrapers; tall buildings, it seems, have helped make the city sink an inch a year.

Under the new wire regulations, people who want to lay wiring must apply for underground space and register their intentions — a daunting effort in cataloging that, officials hope, will allow the city to prevent such problems in the future.

Unidentified wires already in the sky are being targeted, too. Only 15 firms are licensed to string wires in Shanghai; others are illegal. So the city is placing public notices in newspapers, describing the various mystery cables and giving their owners 90 days to come forward.

"No one responds, we cut them," says Li Zhenjun, who oversees the regulatory efforts. "We can't just have people putting up wires at their leisure.''

The situation is slowly improving, and people are noticing. Qian Tubiao, a clerk at the Xinwang Pavilion Restaurant in a neighbourhood undergoing underground wire embedding, says the project is inconvenient for the moment but useful in the long run.

"Dust and noise and traffic jams from morning to night," he grumbles, then allows: "In the bigger scheme of things, yes — this will make our city feel more like a world-class place.''

That's Gong's attitude exactly. His face furrows as he peers out of his office window — and down onto thickets of wires below.

"Modernization is imperative," he says, "but this isn't."

(At Least) 100 Years Of Powered Human Flight

David Rennie in Washington for the (UK) Telegraph writes:

An army of 35,000 aviation buffs, President George W Bush among them, will descend on the sand dunes of North Carolina today to mark the centenary of the first controlled flight by a heavier-than-air craft - the Wright brothers' 12-second hop.

Weather and luck permitting, Kevin Koschersberger, an engineering lecturer and early aircraft fanatic, will pilot a near-perfect replica of the Wright brother's flyer.

He aims to launch off 100 years to the minute after Orville Wright's historic flight, at 10.35am local time, or 3.35pm GMT.

The re-enactment will require a headwind of 12-17 mph, and either clear skies or a light rain. The craft was, and is, extremely hard to fly, remaining stable only at airspeeds between 27mph and 35mph. Anything slower, and its tiny, 12-horsepower engine cannot maintain lift. Faster, and its nose pitches uncontrollably.

Mr Bush is due to deliver what has been billed as a "major announcement" on space exploration, hoping to sweep aside a dismal few years for the once-proud American aviation and space industries, still reeling from by such disasters as the September 11 hijackings and this year's loss of the space shuttle Columbia.

Master of ceremonies for the event is to be John Travolta, the film star who is an airline-level pilot. The event will feature flypasts and appearances by Nasa astronauts, and by Brig-Gen Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the speed of sound, just 45 years after the Wright brothers took to the air.

That first flight was witnessed by just five local men, who had helped to pull the 600lb wood and muslin aircraft to a wooden launch track on Kill Devil Hills.

Orville won a toss of a coin for the right to be pilot from his brother Wilbur.

Organisers had planned to choose between two pilots, to decide whether today's honour would go to Prof Kochersberger, or Terry Queijo, an American Airlines pilot. But Ms Queijo was relegated to the supporting role of Wilbur Wright after crashing the replica Flyer during tests.

The Wright brothers, painfully shy bicycle makers from Ohio, did not only overcome astonishing technical obstacles to achieve their success. They also had to wait many years for widespread official recognition of their feat.

Leica camera MP: Elegant outsider in a digital world

By Robert Plotkin,
The Miami Herald, writes:

Digital technology attracts many photographers, but a small segment is repelled and takes refuge with Leica, a German maker of exquisite manual cameras.

Around the world, photojournalists with pretensions of art, those who dream of being accepted into the Magnum Photo Agency, carry a Leica in addition to their digital SLRs. These battered Leicas, loaded with black-and-white film, are for their personal work--work that will never appear in the publications for which they take pictures, but work that satisfies an artistic need.

To them, Leica is the platonic camera, made from steel and black-lacquered brass.

And now Leica has introduced the MP (short for Mechanical Perfection), which refers back to a limited number of cameras produced for photojournalists in the 1950s.

It costs $2,595 and is available lacquered or plated in chrome. The 35 mm F/1.4 lens with which it was tested costs $2,495.

The MP comes in response to Leica fans who objected to the absence of a totally manual camera after the introduction of the M7, which incorporated aperture-priority metering, a technology widely available since the 1970s.

This should tell you about the Leica owner. The Leica owner does not want an autowinder because that would eliminate the pleasure of winding the exquisite metal lever. Autofocus would eliminate the need for turning the beautifully damped focus ring.

The MP is surprisingly heavy for such a slim camera, but it is the weight of quality, of compact density. The Leica feels like a black bar of gold, but the pleasure is in its use, which has an anachronistic charm.

To learn to use the Leica is to master the art of available-light photography. Leica has some of the world's fastest lenses, permitting photography in low light that can drape across a subject like couture gauze. The Leica owner rarely carries a flash, preferring to go unnoticed. The whisper-quiet shutter rarely alerts subjects to their exposure.

Many Leica owners disdain the alchemy of the darkroom and prefer to edit images in Photoshop, the premier photo-editing program. (The consumer version, Photoshop Elements, is included with many digital cameras.)

To digitize the image, use a film scanner. The best is the just-released Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400, with breakthrough optical resolution of 5,400 dots per inch. This permits the wealthy aesthete, owner of both Leica and Dimage, to produce unmatched 37-megapixel images.

Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune

Rumsfeld hails capture of Saddam Hussein as momentous

Pentagon-AP -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is hailing the capture of Saddam Hussein as momentous for the Iraqi people.

In a written statement, Rumsfeld says the Iraqi people now have been liberated in spirit as well as fact. Rumsfeld says many Iraqis now can dare to believe that the era of Saddam's brutal dictatorship is over.

The defense secretary notes the capture was the result of close coordination of intelligence and rapid military action. Rumsfeld says it reflects the hard work, courage and determination of U-S and coalition forces.

Members of the Army's Fourth Infantry Division and special forces conducted the raid near Saddam's hometown of Tikrit (tih-KREET').

But Rumsfeld notes praise also should go to all the U-S and coalition forces who have given their lives to make the moment of capture possible.

Copyright 2003 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

In the Capital of the Car, Nature Stakes a Claim

KATE STOHR, The New York Times, reports:

PAUL WEERTZ lives less than 10 minutes from downtown, but the view from his window is anything but urban. On a warm day this fall, the air was ripe with the smell of fresh-cut hay and manure. In the alley behind his house, bales of hay teetered and listed where garbage cans once stood. Chickens scratched in the yard, near a garage that had been turned into a barn. Mr. Weertz drives a Ford — not a sleek sedan but a rebuilt 1960 tractor.

"My sisters and brothers gave me a pig for my birthday," Mr. Weertz said, referring to his newest barnyard resident. "I am not sure what I am going to do with it."

After decades of blight, large swathes of Detroit are being reclaimed by nature. Roughly a third of this 139-square-mile city consists of weed-choked lots and dilapidated buildings. Satellite images show an urban core giving way to an urban prairie.

Rather than fight this return to nature, Mr. Weertz and other urban farmers have embraced it, gradually converting 15 acres of idle land into more than 40 community gardens and microfarms — some consuming entire blocks.

Mr. Weertz, a science teacher, turned to farming 10 years ago to give his students a hands-on understanding of the food chain. Other Detroit farmers work for food banks, churches and community organizations hoping to sow seeds of urban renewal.

Staking claims on abandoned lots, they produce about six tons of produce a year, said Ashley Atkinson, head of the Detroit Agriculture Network, a loose coalition of 230 growers and volunteers.

"People really don't believe it until they see it," Ms. Atkinson said. "I have friends who say, `You are joking me, right This doesn't really exist in the city.' "

Actually, it exists in nearly every major city. The population here has dropped to less than a million today from nearly two million in 1950. After the 1967 riots destabilized the city, families left in droves, leaving 40,000 lots vacant. The Department of Public Works says it spends $2.2 million a year clearing debris and weeds from the lots, which are periodically auctioned for as little as $250.

"Detroit has been abandoned by everything, including grocery stores," Ms. Atkinson said, suggesting that in a city where many do their shopping at "party stores," liquor stores that sell some convenience items, community farms are more than a symbol of environmental awareness.

Mr. Weertz has scattered his farm over 10 acres in seven locations. It churns out not only hay but also alfalfa, honey, eggs, goat's milk, produce and the occasional side of beef, which is butchered at a vocational school. About 100 students work as volunteers.

On three vacant lots in northern Detroit, 500 volunteers are helping the Capuchin Soup Kitchen to plant, pick, pack, can and distribute a ton of produce a year: tomatoes, kale, cabbage, wax beans and more than a dozen other vegetables, leafy greens and herbs. Proceeds from sales, roughly $2,000, barely cover irrigation and other expenses, said the Rev. Rick Samyn, who coordinates the operation.

Urban farmers face a number of challenges, from finding water (renegades tap into fire hydrants, Brother Samyn said) to eliminating broken glass, concrete and unsavory contaminants like lead from the soil. Hayfields, mistaken for "ghetto grass," have been mowed down by the Department of Public Works just as they are ready to be cut and baled. Greenhouses are sometimes claimed by the homeless, and pilfering is a fact of life.

None of the farms are profitable, and all depend on students and volunteers — more than 1,000 citywide, Ms. Atkinson said. Members of her network have received about $300,000 in grants and donations, she estimated, including a few grants from the United States Department of Agriculture normally aimed at rural growers.

Advocates often say profits are secondary to building a sense of community. "It's a means for people to take control of their neighborhoods and get tangible results that they can see and eat," said Yamini Bala, coordinator of Detroit Summer, a youth gardening group.

In 2000, frustrated by stadium-building and other traditional means of drawing business downtown, a group of growers, architects, urban planners and activists collaborated on an alternative city plan focused on neighborhoods called Adamah (Hebrew for "of the earth"). Drafted by architects and students at the University of Detroit Mercy, it proposed converting four and a half square miles on the east side into a self-sustaining village, complete with farms, greenhouses, grazing land, a dairy and cannery. For irrigation, Adamah proposed tapping an underground creek (now used as a sewage main).

Some of Adamah's elements are already taking shape in northeast Detroit, where John Gruchala, an electrician, and his neighbor Tris Richardson, a carpenter, began farming nearly an acre of vacant land six years ago.

Today, working with neighbors, they produce a ton of tomatoes, cabbage, kale and peppers a year. They are converting an auto body shop into a community center with a cafe, a cannery and a greenhouse.

Mr. Gruchala says such a center could encourage other small businesses to invest in the neighborhood. "Growing vegetables is just a vehicle for other kinds of change," he said.

He and others would like farming to become a permanent part of the Detroit landscape. But much of what they do falls below city officials' radar. The chief city planner, George Dunbar of the Planning and Development Department, was surprised to learn that some farmers had claimed plots as large as an acre.

"Outstanding," he said. "If that's the case, then I commend the individuals who do that, but I tell you, if we advertise the property and it's city-owned land that we can get a housing development on, then I'll take that. I am always trying to increase the tax rolls to keep city services going."

In fact, earlier this year the city tried to use eminent domain to build an athletic field on nine lots farmed by Mr. Gruchala and Mr. Richardson, only six of them owned by Mr. Gruchala. The farmers worked out a compromise that will enable them to continue farming on all nine of the lots.

Others have been less fortunate. Three years ago Kami Pothukuchi, an assistant professor in urban planning at Wayne State University, dug a garden at a busy corner in southwest Detroit owned by a community group. A year ago, the group sold the lot to a developer. A convenience store is now planned for the site, Ms. Pothukuchi said.

In the absence of a citywide vision of a new kind of Detroit, of farms perhaps entwined with new businesses, nature continues to run its course.

As frost settles on Mr. Weertz's farm, it's not uncommon to see rabbit warrens or pheasants. "It's a totally surreal experience," Mr. Weertz said. "You are in this urban area, and you are seeing this whole natural transformation that you'd normally have to go miles away to see."

Pentagon Tells Recruiters To Stay Out Of Canada

That prohibition covers all activities in Canada, including recruiting at high school and university job fairs and on native reserves, Mr. Doiron said.

The U.S. embassy has also given assurances that there was no ongoing policy of active recruitment in Canada, he added.

"Quite obviously, Canadian native people are free to join U.S. military forces," Mr. Doiron said. "For that matter, they would cross the border."

With ongoing combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has found itself in need of more troops. One method being used to increase the ranks has been to recruit so-called "green-card soldiers," individuals who are legal, permanent U.S. residents but do not yet have citizenship.

Last year, George W. Bush, the U.S. President, signed an order significantly reducing the time that such military members have to wait before becoming American citizens. Those efforts have sparked some concern in the Hispanic community in the U.S. that overzealous recruiters have been specifically targeting Latinos holding green cards.

Currently, there are about 37,000 non-Americans serving in the U.S. forces.

An ageing population and strong economy have contributed to ongoing problems in attracting recruits.

As well, over the years the size of the American military has been reduced as a cost-cutting measure. At the height of the Cold War there were some 2.5 million Americans in the regular forces, but by this year that had dropped to 1.4 million.

Alain Pellerin, a Canadian defence analyst, said the U.S. is facing a major problem finding enough personnel for duty in Iraq. Some units that took part in the invasion of that country and have since returned to the U.S. have now been told they are heading back to the Middle East, he added.

Mr. Pellerin noted that in some native communities along the American-Canadian border there has been a tradition among young people to serve with the U.S. military. "The Mohawks have in the past joined up, in particular with the U.S. Marines," he said.

The Americans were relying on what is known as the Jay Treaty to justify their recruitment of natives in Canada. But according to Canadian government officials, that treaty was a commercial agreement between the British and American governments.

"We did remind the U.S. authorities that even though they can refer to the Jay Treaty, we do not recognize the treaty and therefore recruitment activities on reserves in Canada was not exactly corresponding to our views on the matter," Mr. Doiron said.

According to Justice Department officials, the 1937 Foreign Enlistments Act prohibits foreign agents from recruiting in Canada. But they say there has never been a prosecution under that legislation.

(Ottawa Citizen)

© National Post 2003

Automated External Defibrillator

Heartstart FR2 Automated External Defibrillator

Jason Roosa, National Registry Emergency Medical Technician-Basic &
Mountain Rescue Association Member, writes:

Early defibrillation is the best thing for somebody having a heart attack. The quicker you can get a defibrillator onto somebody, the better the outcome. Standard non-automated defibrillators, like the ones with the paddles you see doctors using on TV, require costly and time consuming training to use, and anybody who doesn't do it all the time is likely to get rusty pretty quickly. However the particular condition (ventricular fibrillation) that a defibrillator remedies can reliably be detected by a computer. New automated defibrillators decide themselves if the patient needs to be defibrillated, or "shocked." The machine will not apply a shock under any other situation...i.e. people can't use them to shock each other for kicks. All the responder needs to do is attach the sticky-pads to the right place on the body (there is a picture on each pad), turn on the machine, and do what the machine tells him to do. One could argue that somebody with no training could do it pretty well; it's definitely easier to do correctly than the Heimlich Maneuver, and everybody seems to have a pretty good grasp on how to do that. However, the AHA and manufacturers currently require training to qualify to use one. Almost any Red Cross or Emergency Medical course with Basic Life Support training will teach students how to use an Automated External Defibrillator (AED) as well.

The bottom line is that if I were having a heart attack, I'd be OK with somebody with no medical training having access to an AED and just following the instructions that the machine gives. It's better than being dead. These are rather expensive at the moment -- $2000 $3000 -- but they are state-of-the art and their price will likely come down as the market expands. My guess: they will soon be as common in public buildings as fire extinguishers are now.

[emphasis added]
(via Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools)

Public Safety and VoIP Leaders Connect on 911

Jeff Pulver (), in The Pulver Report - December 8, 2003 Issue, writes:

The National Emergency Number Association (NENA) and VoIP leaders forged
an agreement to provide access to emergency service for VoIP users

NENA and the companies have agreed upon the following action items:

* For service to customers using phones that have the functionality
and appearance of conventional telephones, 911 emergency services
access will be provided (at least routing to a Public Safety Access Point
(PSAP) 10-digit number) within a reasonable time (three to six months),
and prior to that time inform customers of the lack of such access.

* When a communications provider begins selling in a particular area,
it should discuss with the local PSAPs or their coordinator the
approach to providing access. This obligation does not apply to any
"roaming" by customers.

* Support for current NENA and industry work towards an interim
solution that includes (a) delivery of 911 call through the existing 911
network, (b) providing callback number to the PSAP, and (c) in some cases,
initial location information.

* Support for current NENA and industry work towards long-term
solutions that include (a) delivery of 911 calls to the proper PSAP, (b)
providing callback number/re-contact information to the PSAP, (c)
providing location of caller; and (d) PSAPs having direct IP connectivity.

* Support for an administrative approach to maintaining funding of
911 resources at a level equivalent to those generated by current or
evolving funding processes.

* Development of consumer education projects involving various
industry participants and NENA public education committee members to
create suggested materials so that consumers are fully aware of 911
capabilities and issues.

By this agreement, NENA and the IP Communications industry have
demonstrated the ability for public safety and industry to work together
effectively on a voluntary basis, forging an agreement on 911 that will
protect the interests of consumers, businesses and emergency personnel.
The agreement recognizes the growing potential of VoIP and the universal
need for consistent and reliable access to emergency services.

The agreement was signed by: 8x8, AT&T Consumer Services, Broadsoft,
dialPad, ITXC, Level 3 Communications LLC, Level 3 Enhanced Services,
PointOne, pulver.com, Voice on the Net (VON) Coalition, Vonage, Webley.

If you would like to add your company to the growing list of companies
supporting this voluntary effort, please contact Bruce Jacobs:

Worm Hits Windows-Based ATMs

Automated teller machines at two banks running Microsoft's popular Windows software were infected by a computer virus in August, the maker of the machines said Monday.

The ATM infections, first reported by SecurityFocus.com, are believed to be the first of a computer virus wiggling directly onto cash machines.

Computer security experts predicted more problems to come as Windows migrates to critical systems consumers rely on.

An unknown number of ATMs running Windows XP Embedded were shut down during the spread of the so-called Nachi worm, said executives at Diebold, which made the ATMs and refused to name the customers affected.

The Nachi worm, also dubbed "Welchia," was written to clean up after the MSBlast, or Blaster, worm. Instead it crippled or congested networks around the world, including the check-in system at Air Canada. Both worms spread through a hole in Windows XP, 2000, NT and Server 2003.

In January, the SQL Slammer worm led to technical problems that temporarily kept Bank of America's customers from their cash, but did not directly cause the ATM outage.

"It's a harbinger of things to come," said Bruce Schneier, chief technical officer of network monitoring company Counterpane Internet Security.

"Specific-purpose machines, like microwave ovens and until now ATM machines, never got viruses," said Schneier, author of "Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World." "Now that they are using a general purpose operating system, Diebold should expect a lot more of this in the future," he said.

John Pescatore, an analyst at Gartner, agreed.

"It's a horrendous security mistake," he said of specific-purpose machines like ATMs running Windows, which is written for general-purpose computers and for which Microsoft releases security fixes on a regular basis. "I'm a lot more worried about my money than I was before this."

Diebold switched from using IBM's OS/2 on its ATMs because banks were requesting Windows, said Steve Grzymkowski, senior product marketing manager at Diebold.

"They have been asking us to ship ATMs with Windows because of the graphics capabilities. They want a common look between the ATMs and Web-banking sites," he said. "Another advantage is they are familiar with Windows."

To help prevent future problems Diebold is shipping ATMs with firewall software designed to block out viruses and other attacks, he said.

"As far as it happening again, I wouldn't want to speculate on that," Grzymkowski said.

Schneier and Pescatore said they were worried about the security of other Windows-based Diebold appliances--voting machines, which run Windows CE.

But a Diebold representative said the company's voting machines are not used on a network, so "that is currently not an issue."

Story Copyright  © 2003 Reuters Limited.  All rights reserved.

First Full Internet Map From The Opte Project

This is [The OpteProject's] first full Internet map with color and other graphing logic. RFC1918 addresses have been hashed into a unique checksum so they do not incorrectly overlap with other routers or hosts. The checksums resolve to the same host each time to be sure that all routes connect correctly. Another bit of code also removed the routing loops that made a rather large mess out of previous maps. The colors were based on Class A allocation of IP space too different registrars in the world. The color system is very basic now and rather ugly, I would like to spend some more time in the next week making a better color system.

Stephen King: forget piracy, boomers are just tired of buying crap

Stephen King's editorial in the new Entertainment Weekly (not online, but the best part is below) opines that the real crisis in the entertainment industry isn't piracy, it's mental fatigue among moneyed baby boomers.

"So what happened in the '90s I think we're seeing an entire generation -- my generation, the baby-boom generation -- turning off the lights upstairs and putting a sign on the door: SORRY, BUT I'M TAKING A NAP. MIND CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. Pretty much the same deal is going on with music sales. Piracy and illegal downloads, although covered to a fare-thee-well in the press, account for only a fraction of the drop in $$. I think what's happening is all too clear: We baby boomers are just too pooped to party. Oh, we do buy some records -- you may have heard that we love the Beatles, Rod Stewart, and those funksters the Rolling Stones. Just don't try to get us to listen to anyone who isn't registered with AARP! Bob Seger was probably correct when he told us rock & roll never forgets, but it sure gets tired."

"Movie-ticket sales have remained strong, but only because the studios are selling a product aimed almost solely at Gen-X and Gen-Y. Most R-rated movies go in the tank. PG-13 rules. A film like ''The Fast and the Furious'' strikes box office gold, while Clint Eastwood's ''Mystic River'' muddles along at the box office. I'd argue that 20 years ago, ''Mystic River'' would have done ''Chinatown'' box office numbers. Now the baby boomers look at the previews on TV and think, Nah, that looks too serious. Too hard. Guess I'll stay home and watch ''Jeopardy!'' And the ''Jeopardy!'' answer is ''Just about the saddest thing Steve King can think of.'' The question is ''What do you call a whole generation going to sleep''

(via BoingBoing)

Anti-Terror Line: Audblogging The Man

The Anti-Terror Line is the reverse of a Fed snitch line -- it's a number you can call when The Man is giving you a hard time in the name of defending the homeland from terrorists -- your call (and anything you can get your attacker to utter into the handset) is recorded and published on a webserver where you can annotate it. Natalie Jermijenko, the project's originator, has used it to record herself being put off an airline for using the first class toilet.

(via BoingBoing)

Photo of the Day: Dick

Democratic presidential hopeful Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., casts a shadow on the flag as he is introduced to speak at a rally Monday, Dec. 1, 2003, at the police station in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Gephardt, faulting President Bush for ``gambling with our safety,'' on Monday called for spending $100 billion over five years on homeland security.(AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Nathaniel Jones Used PCP

Courtland Milloy, Washington Post Metro Columnist, writes:

Well before Nathaniel Jones had his violent and ultimately fatal confrontation with Cincinnati police Sunday, something happened that pretty much sealed his fate.

He used PCP.

And what we saw on that police video was a predictable result from a drug with its own special ways of killing and getting people killed.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse classifies PCP as a "dissociative anesthetic," meaning the user becomes disconnected from his environment; he knows where he is, but does not feel as if he is part of it.

The condition is sometimes referred to as an "out of body" experience. But what we're really talking about is the walking dead. PCP, or phencyclidine, aka "Angel Dust," "Peace Pill" and "DOA," does nothing if not ruin lives.

Jones, 41, was reportedly lying in the grass outside a White Castle restaurant about 6 a.m. when an employee heard him yelling "19" and called police. For all we know, Jones could have been calling for help -- the number 19 being 911 in his mind.

Such is the illogical speech, confused thinking and sensory distortions that PCP brings about.

Emergency medical personnel showed up before police. But Jones became a "nuisance," as one firefighter put it. With the man standing 5 foot 6 and weighing at least 350 pounds, that's got to be an understatement. In the District, ambulance drivers have been known to bail out of their vehicles because of unruly PCP users who weighed a lot less than that.

Soon after the police arrived, the camera began to roll -- but not at the very start, which has caused some to question whether police provoked Jones into a fight. For an agitated PCP user, it wouldn't take much; the sounds of silence would be enough to push him over the edge.

On PCP, Jones would be more likely to perceive himself as under attack by ninjas from outer space than to see himself being questioned by police.

Then there's the change in body image, another deadly feature of the drug. Some PCP users have come to see themselves as Superman, for instance, and, believing they could fly, jumped to their deaths from buildings.

Others have imagined themselves as surgeons -- with X-ray vision, no less -- and used knives to get at things they saw moving beneath their skin. And sometimes the skin of others.

Just recently, Antron Singleton, a rapper who goes by the name of "Big Lurch," was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a 21-year-old woman in a gruesome PCP-induced attack last year. The woman's chest had been ripped open, and police found bite marks on her face and lungs.

Did Jones see himself as Mr. Invincible His aggressive behavior said yes, but his moans and sad facial expressions said no. So severe is the mental and physical discombobulation caused by PCP that Jones may well have wanted to give up but was too disconnected from his body to stop it from fighting.

Consider the horror of it all a wake-up call.

In the Washington area, for instance, there was a 148 percent increase in patients showing up at hospital emergency rooms with PCP in their systems from 2001 to 2002, according to estimates recently released by the Drug Abuse Warning Network. The total rose from 525 patients to 1,302 -- a return to a level not seen since 1995, the report said.

The Prince George's police lab, which tests all drugs seized in the county, received more than 115 PCP samples in 2002 -- up from eight in 2000.

No doubt all of the ingredients for another Nathaniel Jones, and worse, are in abundant supply right here.

In the wake of Jones's death, Calvert Smith, president of the Cincinnati chapter of the NAACP, assessed what he'd seen on the video. "If proper police procedure means that you can use that kind of force to clobber people who are clearly disarmed, there is something wrong," he said.

That something, at least in this case, is the use of PCP by Jones. Do not underestimate the dangers posed by this drug, especially as it seeps in and spreads throughout mostly black urban areas.

If there is concern in Cincinnati that police are targeting blacks, there must also be concern when blacks make targets of themselves. And anyone on PCP is a walking bull's-eye.

E-mail: .

Cincinnati Police Officers Beat Black Man to Death

Barry M. Horstman, Cincinnati Post staff reporter, writes:

Cincinnati police officers ordered Nathaniel Jones to stop resisting arrest and place his hands behind his back at least 16 times before, while and after they repeatedly struck him with their nightsticks in an effort to subdue him, videotape of the fatal confrontation shows.

The videotape, from cameras in multiple police cruisers that responded to the deadly encounter, is the critical piece of evidence in various investigations into yet another controversy that threatens to unravel the halting progress made in police-community relations in the 2½ years since riots erupted on Cincinnati's streets, and that has once again placed the city in an unflattering national and international spotlight.

Although the investigations center on whether police officers responded properly or excessively when the 350-pound Jones lunged and swung at them, the videotapes strongly suggest that the Cincinnati Fire Department also will face tough questions -- in particular, why fire paramedics who initially responded to a 911 call for medical aid left after police arrived.

When police officers realized that Jones, by then handcuffed on the ground, was not breathing, one glanced around, hoping to wave over the fire paramedics, only to be surprised to see that the fire truck had left, the videotape shows.

"Where'd they go'' one police officer asked.

"Are those firemen helping him or are they going to bail'' another asked.

"They bailed. They were just here,'' the first officer responded.

A few seconds later, another officer said disgustedly: "They call us, then they leave -- What a bunch of crap.''

Several minutes later, after police requested emergency medical assistance, a fire truck returned to the scene and its paramedics began treating Jones, who was pronounced dead shortly later at University Hospital. It is unclear from the videotape whether that truck was the same one that had left minutes earlier, or a different unit.

Chief Fred Prather, a spokesman for Fire Department, said Monday he is uncertain why firefighters and paramedics left the scene. That will be the subject of an internal investigation, he said.

On the issue of the delay in getting medical treatment for Jones, police also will have some explaining to do based on their actions -- or, more accurately, inaction -- on the videotape.

After detecting a pulse but noticing that Jones was not breathing after officers rolled him over onto his back, a half dozen officers stood around the 41-year-old Northside man for about two minutes without administering CPR or other first aid.

"Sir Sir Sir'' one officer standing over Jones said repeatedly, trying unsuccessfully to get a response.

"C'mon, big 'un,'' another officer said.

The Fire Department's departure and the police officers' failure to attempt resuscitation efforts before paramedics returned are among the questions raised Monday by an American Civil Liberties Union advisory panel to the landmark 2002 collaborative agreement that altered police use of force policies and established new procedures governing how allegations of police misconduct are investigated.

There will be at least four probes into Sunday's fatal incident, and more could be announced later this week. The Citizen Complaint Authority, the independent investigative body spawned by the 2002 pact, the police department's homicide and the police internal affairs sections will examine the case, and the Cincinnati chapter of the NAACP said Monday that it will conduct its own investigation. Other agencies, including the U.S. Justice Department, are reviewing the case before deciding whether to perhaps launch additional inquiries.

The debate at this early stage is breaking along familiar and predictable lines.

Police brass and some city officials defend the officers' actions as a justified, by-the-book response to a dangerous situation primarily of Jones's making.

While urging Cincinnatians and others to reserve judgment pending the investigations, Mayor Charlie Luken Monday offered at least preliminary support for the officers.

"These officers were assaulted, the assault was violent and they responded with the training they received," Luken said. "You could see on the tape, if you watched it, the troubled looks on their faces."

Critics, though, counter that officers could have -- and should have -- found a way to defuse a hazardous, but less than life-threatening, situation before it escalated into an episode from which one person would never walk away.

"Somehow the city of Cincinnati must find the will to end this nonsense of the death of African-American citizens in the process of and/or after being arrested by the Cincinnati Police Department,'' Cincinnati NAACP President Calvert Smith told a news conference.

The dramatic footage on the videotape gives both sides ammunition in that contentious battle.

When officers arrived on the scene outside a White Castle in Avondale shortly before 6 a.m. Sunday, responding to a call about a disruptive man, Jones clearly was the aggressor, the videotapes released Monday show.

The intiial 911 call had sought aid for an unconscious man, but when fire paramedics arrived, they found Jones both conscious and disruptive, prompting dispatchers to request police assistance. Preliminary results from an autopsy by the Hamilton County coroner's office showed that both cocaine and PCP, or so-called "angel dust,'' were in Jones's system at the time, perhaps accounting for the strange, aggressive behavior that officers viewed as a possible sign of mental illness, leading them to request backup from an officer specially trained in handling mentally ill suspects.

"Tell me what's going on,'' one officer said as he approached Jones.

"White boy, red neck,'' Jones shouted back.

"Back up! Back up!'' the officer said as Jones moved toward him.

An instant later, Jones lunged forward and threw a right fist at the officer, touching off a melee in which officers James Pike and Baron Osterman wrestled Jones to the ground and began attempting to handcuff him.

Throughout that violent scuffle, officers shouted at least 16 times: "Put your hands behind your back.''

Because of Jones's heft, officers had considerable difficulty handcuffing him. "This ain't going to work,'' one officer said. The task was accomplished only after four additional officers arrived and helped restrain Jones.

Jones can be heard moaning loudly during the struggle. "Ow, ow!'' he bellowed at one point.

If those are the key moments on the videotape that police defenders will point to, critics will focus on the extensive scenes showing officers pummeling Jones with their nightsticks. Alternately wielding their batons like a baseball bat or using them to violently prod Jones on his torso, buttocks and legs, the officers struck Jones more than 30 times in the portions of the struggle caught on the police cruisers' video cameras.

Publication Date: 12-02-2003