Police Cite Boy, 7, for Taking $6 From Mom 
BISMARCK, N.D. (Reuters) - As part of a program aimed at cracking down on youthful offenders, a 7-year-old North Dakota boy faced a criminal theft charge after police cited him for stealing $6 from his mother, police said on Wednesday.

According to police, the Bismarck mother discovered $6 missing from a pile of cash she had left lying on the counter in her kitchen over the weekend. When she questioned her two sons about the missing bills, the 7-year-old admitted taking the money.  ``She called the police, she wanted him cited for theft, so that is what we did,'' said Bismarck police Lt. Nick Sevart.  Upon questioning, the boy said he took the money because he wanted to buy a ``Beanie Baby'' toy, Sevart said.

The boy was issued a criminal citation for theft and released to his mother's custody. The matter now heads to juvenile court, where youth counselors will become involved in working out an acceptable punishment, Sevart said.  ``The reason we determine consequences is to help them avoid this type of trouble in the future,'' he said. ``We believe in early intervention.'' 

This is what we need to fill our coastal waters will, not oil wells but pollution free power sources!!  We just need to build them to withstand winds of 200 mph so that the investments won't blow away one day.

It did not say when the sentences would be carried out, but public executions normally take place where the crime occurred. Stoning is relatively rare in Iran, where drug smugglers and murderers are regularly hanged under strict Islamic Sharia law.

Men who are stoned to death are first buried waist deep in the ground. If they manage to escape, they can go free. Women are buried deeper to stop stones hitting their breasts.  The last time two Iranians were stoned to death was for adultery in June 1996.

COMMENTARY -By Paul Somerson -
We've all seen films where someone tags bears with radio transmitters. Or slaps beepers under cars to follow them without being spotted. Or inserts gizmos through Arnold Schwarzenegger's nose or Keanu Reeves's belly button in sci-fi flicks so the bad guys can track every movement the hero makes. Well get ready, because they're about to make a real movie like this, and you're the star.

Over 300 million people worldwide carry cell phones. Most of these devices are always on to receive calls. Service providers today can use triangulation or RF multipath "fingerprinting" techniques to locate you within "a few thousand square feet, or up to six square miles in rural areas," according to Bell Labs.

But the noose is tightening. Part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act mandated Enhanced 911 that would force carriers to be able to locate all callers by October 2001. And newer FCC (news - web sites) rules require greater precision—164 feet for GPS-based phones, 328 feet for network-based triangulation.  The government says that this would help them respond better to the 30 million emergency calls made each year from wireless devices, many of which are made by incoherent or lost callers.

Location-based services (LBS) actually do sound very useful. GPS chips in phones and small tracking devices could locate kids, pets, stolen items, package or pizza deliveries, truck fleets, and anything else that moves. Even edgier are advanced "trigger-mode" services. You could load your whole phone book into a cell phone and have it alert you when a friend or family member happens to be nearby. You could tell your phone you wanted a new Armani suit on sale and have the phone beep if you went past a store with one in your size at your price. Your phone could become a matchmaker at a trade show if you needed 10,000 purple widgets and someone across the hall had them in stock. Or it could find you a date or a mate, like an advanced version of Japan's "lovegetties." Some analysts predict LBS will be a $20 billion business by 2005.

But there's a darker side. Several government agencies are claiming that the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act lets them use this technology to track you legally, without a warrant or even probable cause, in what it deems "emergencies." Do you trust these clowns?  And do you trust others who can get their slimy hands on this data? The highway patrol will know you're traveling at 66 mph and be able to pinpoint your location. Ugly gold digging divorce cases will get even uglier as each side subpoenas logs of all addresses a spouse visited for years. Bosses or the IRS will know how long you stayed away from your desk, or map your precise whereabouts during road trips. Is this what we want?

Service providers balked at the October 2001 deadline, whining that they needed more time to pass on all the costs to the public and wriggle out of any liability issues. The FCC agreed to phase in adoption, moving the deadline for total implementation to the end of 2005. It's coming. And since we can't be without our phones, pucker up and kiss your freedom of movement good-bye. Trust me.

Well today is the first day that Apple's new OS X operating system officially started shipping on it's systems.  Only time will tell as to how good it competes in the marketplace against Windows and Linux

After licking the women's breasts, the men lost all will-power. They came to their senses hours later to find they had lost their wallets and cars but with no memory of what had happened.  The three women, in their late teens or early 20s, were arrested in Bogota on Thursday in possession of powerful narcotic pills.  ``They dissolved the pills in water and rubbed it into their breasts,'' the spokeswoman said.  Colombia's inventive thieves often dope people to rob them. On rare occasions, some of the victims have died. 

Sony studio executives are shocked--shocked!--after learning that Manning is a fake.  According to Newsweek, which broke the story in this week's issue, Manning was concocted by an unidentified Sony marketing executive last July to put a positive spin on the hit-starved studio's films.   In addition to the recent plaudits for A Knight's Tale and The Animal, Manning's manufactured blurbs appeared in print ads for Sony's Hollow Man and Vertical Limit.  Newsweek says Manning's critiques were completely fabricated and the studio has launched an internal investigation into the incident. 

"It was an incredibly foolish decision, and we're horrified," Sony spokeswoman Susan Tick tells the magazine. "We are looking into it and will take appropriate action."  Tom Nash, publisher for the Ridgefield Press, the small Connecticut weekly where the mysterious Manning was supposedly employed, said he became aware of the controversy more than a year ago, but initially thought it was only a mix-up with a review service his paper uses. 

"We thought it was a database error that mixed up a reviewer with our paper," Nash said Monday.  "We buy our movie schedules from a company called Cinemasource and [these ads] also include reviews. "We thought [Manning] was a Long Island News Day guy."   Sony wishes that were so. In Hollywood, where movie marketeers go to great lengths to generate the ever-elusive buzz (often quoting virtually unknown critics or dubious publications), the Manning deception is getting a thumbs-down review from its own honchos. 

"It's hard to believe. It's terrible. Sony has to apologize and pull the ads. That certainly does cross the line. We would never, never, never, ever do that," Revolution Studios honcho Joe Roth tells Newsweek. His company produced The Animal, which Sony is distributing.   The news comes as Sony's marketing crew is taking heat for another of its recent ploys.  The studio broke a long Hollywood tradition of giving away trailers to exhibitors by paying theaters to play previews of The Animal before such blockbusters as The Mummy Returns. (The Animal placed third in its debut over the weekend behind Shrek and Pearl Harbor). 

As for the Manning debacle, Sony reps say the studio is working to remove the fake blurbs from print ads across the country. However, some of Manning's quotes will still show up in newspapers that went
to press over the weekend.  Calls to Manning's office were, of course, not returned.