ICE: Tab to remove illegal residents would approach $100 billion

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- It would cost at least $94 billion to find, detain and remove all 12 million people believed to be staying illegally in the United States, the federal government estimated Wednesday.

Julie Myers, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, gave the figure during a hearing before a Senate committee Wednesday.

She acknowledged it was based on "very rough calculations."

An ICE spokesman later said the $94 billion did not include the cost of finding illegal immigrants, nor court costs -- dollar amounts that are largely unknowable.

He said the amount was calculated by multiplying the estimated 12 million people by the average cost of detaining people for a day: $97. That was multiplied by the average length of detention: 32 days.

ICE officials also considered transportation costs, which average $1,000 per person.

But that amount can vary widely, the spokesman said. Some deportees are simply driven by bus across the border, while others must take charter planes to distant countries, he said.

Finally, the department looked at personnel costs, bringing the total to roughly $94 billion.

The statistic is likely to become one more piece of fodder in the heated debate between the Bush administration -- which has fought for a "path to citizenship" for people who have lived peaceably in the United States -- and those who want to see more aggressive enforcement of immigration laws, up to, and including, the deportation of all illegal immigrants.

Web search for bomb recipes should be blocked: EU

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Internet searches for bomb-making instructions should be blocked across the European Union, the bloc's top security official said on Monday.

Internet providers should also prevent access to any site giving instructions on how to make a bomb, EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini said in an interview.

"I do intend to carry out a clear exploring exercise with the private sector ... on how it is possible to use technology to prevent people from using or searching dangerous words like bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism," Frattini told Reuters.

The EU executive is to make this proposal to member states early in November as part of a raft of anti-terrorism proposals.

These include the screening of private data of passengers flying into the 27-nation bloc and the creation of an early warning system to alert police forces to thefts of explosives.

Representatives of the Internet industry are meeting the EU on Tuesday, the sixth anniversary of al Qaeda's September 11 attacks on the United States, at a European Security Research and Innovation Forum.

The Internet has taken on huge importance for militant groups, enabling them to share know-how and spread propaganda to a mass audience, as well as to link cell members.

MORE COOPERATION

Asked whether a plan to block searches for bomb instructions or for the word 'terrorism' on Web search engines could infringe on the rights to expression and information, Frattini said in the phone interview:

"Frankly speaking, instructing people to make a bomb has nothing to do with the freedom of expression, or the freedom of informing people.

"The right balance, in my view, is to give priority to the protection of absolute rights and, first of all, right to life."

Frattini said there would be no bar on opinion, analysis or historical information but operational instructions useful to terrorists should be blocked.

He said European legislation would spell out the principles of blocking access to bomb instructions. The details would be worked out by each EU country.

Disconnecting a Web site immediately was currently possible only in a minority of EU states including Italy, Frattini said.

After German police arrested three men suspected of a major bomb plot last week, politicians called for greater powers to monitor computers. Germany's top appeals court has ruled the clandestine monitoring of computers by police is illegal.

"The level of the threat (in the EU) remains very high," Frattini said. "That's why I am making appeals and appeals for stronger and closer cooperation."

Aston Martin is the UK's coolest brand

Luxury sports car maker Aston Martin has beaten a slew of high-profile online companies to be named the UK's coolest brand for the second year in a row.

The car manufacturer heads a technology-heavy list of 20 of the country's coolest brands, including the iPod (in second place), YouTube (in third place) and Google (fifth).

Brands associated with quality and heritage also dominate the list, with Bang and Olufsen in second place, Ferrari ranking 11th and Rolex coming in at 14.

The top 20 was compiled by the CoolBrands Council, a group of style experts, designers and commentators from across Britain, and took into account a YouGov poll on the opinions of more than 2,000 members of the public.

Stephen Cheliotis, chairman of the council for 2007/2008, said the large number of online brands in the top 20 suggested that the needs of British consumers were changing.

Last year Google was the only web-based company to make the list, ranking sixth.

Mr Cheliotis said: "You could argue that it is split into two pretty clearly defined categories - on the one hand, things can become cool by virtue of their necessity or prevalence in your life, like Google or Amazon.

"On the other, the things you really want, but may know you'll never get - like a Rolex or a Ferrari - are considered just as cool."

He said Aston Martin topped the list, partly because of its strong association with the James Bond franchise, also considered cool by consumers.

The cars have featured in several James Bond films, including Goldfinger and Casino Royale.

The Prince of Wales has driven a blue Aston Martin DB6 since the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh gave him one for his 21st birthday.

This year's council, convened by consumer opinion company Superbrands, included designer Ben de Lisi, DJ Trevor Nelson and Dazed &Confused editor Nicki Bidder.

As well as brands, the council identified the country's coolest celebrities.

The Beckhams, especially David, topped the list, with Kate Moss, Kylie Minogue and Shilpa Shetty featuring prominently.

David Cameron was "overwhelmingly" picked as the coolest politician, but Tony Blair, Boris Johnson and Gordon Brown also rated a mention.

The public chose the Tate Modern as coolest place to visit in the UK, while Italy was the only European destination to make the top 100 coolest countries list.

List of top 20 brands

1. Aston Martin
2. iPod
3. YouTube
4. Bang and Olufsen
5. Google
6. Playstation
7. Apple
8. Agent Provocateur
9. Nintendo
10. Virgn Atlantic
11. Ferrari
12. Ducati
13. eBay
14. Rolex
15. Tate Modern
16. Prada
17. Lamborghini
18. Green & Blacks
19. iTunes
20. Amazon

Alpha Women, Beta Men

Wives are increasingly outearning their husbands, but their new financial muscle is causing havoc in the home.

After dropping off their children at their East Side private school one morning, Betsy and another mother shared a secret. “It was one of those things where you circle around each other,” Betsy remembers. “I assumed they had a pretty conventional marriage.”

By that she means, as with most of the other families at the school, the other woman’s husband was a chest-beating breadwinner who set off for Wall Street each morning in his Town Car to bring home the six- or seven-figure bacon. Or, alternatively, both husband and wife slaved away at medium-to-high-powered jobs, neglecting their children, to pay for the August rental in the Hamptons and their $25,000-per-kid tuition bills.

The embarrassing truth the other mother confided to Betsy was that she was her family’s sole support. She worked in advertising while her spouse, an “artist”—predominantly in his own imagination, since he had not a single gallery show nor even a commission to show for his talent—puttered around the house. “She kind of indicated they were living on her money, and I was surprised,” Betsy says.

And perhaps a little relieved. Betsy thought she was the only mother in their grade supporting a stay-at-home husband—especially one who refused to polish the surfaces. “It’s like one of those things,” she says, “where you realize you’re married to people who drink.”

Well into feminism’s second generation, there are finally a significant number of women reaching parity with the men in their fields—not to mention surpassing them—and winning the salary, bonuses, and perks that signify their arrival. (The Town Cars idling in front of their children’s schools these days at morning drop-off are almost as likely to be Mom’s as Dad’s.) In 2001, for example, wives earned more than their spouses in almost a third of married households where the wife worked. Yet this proud professional achievement often seems to have unhappy consequences at home.

From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Alias to Kill Bill, the culture has for some time been awash in fantasies of powerful women. Fetching as these female superheroes may be—and however potent at the box office and in the Nielsens—are these really the same chicks the average, or even above-average, guy wants to curl up next to in bed in real life? Perhaps not. As the wives grow more powerful and confident, their husbands often seem to diminish in direct proportion to their success.

Indeed, there’s little evidence to show that as women acquire financial muscle, relations between the sexes have evolved successfully to accommodate the new balance of power. Neither the newly liberated alpha women nor their shell-shocked beta spouses seem comfortable with the role reversal.

For women, the shift in economic power gives them new choices, not least among them the ability to reappraise their partner. And husbands, for their part, may find to their chagrin that being financially dependent isn’t exactly a turn-on. According to psychologists (and divorce lawyers) who see couples struggling with such changes, many relationships follow the same pattern. First, the wife starts to lose respect for her husband, then he begins to feel emasculated, and then sex dwindles to a full stop.

Anna, a public-relations executive, saw her relationship with her Web-designer husband collapse as she became more and more successful and he floundered. In the last year of their marriage, she earned $270,000 while he brought in $16,000.

“He never spent money that wasn’t his in an extravagant way,” she says while taking therapeutic sips of a Sea Breeze at Tribeca Grill on a recent evening. “But by not helping, he was freeloading.”

She felt unable to confront him. “We were really dysfunctional,” she admits. “We acted as if we were a two-income family. He was in denial, and I was sort of protecting him. He’d pay for groceries. He was running up credit-card debt to make it appear he had more money.”

While they may have been able to avoid the truth while she was off at work during the day, it came back to haunt them at night. “Sexuality is based on respect and admiration and desire,” says Anna. “If you’ve lost respect for somebody, it’s very hard to have it work. And our relationship initially had been very sexual, at the expense of other things.

“Sex was not a problem for him,” she goes on. “It was a problem for me. When someone seems like a child, it’s not that attractive. In the end, it felt like I had three children.”

“The minute it becomes parental, it becomes asexual,” agrees Betsy. “A friend of mine who works and makes money and whose husband doesn’t told me one day that he was taking $100-an-hour tennis lessons,” she recalls. “She said to him, ‘You are not in the $100-an-hour category.’ She had to spell it out for him. It was totally parental.”

There are, of course, happy exceptions: couples evolved enough to feel perfectly comfortable acknowledging that the wife is more driven to be the breadwinner, so it makes sense for everyone if he’s giving junior his first feeding while she’s off covering the presidential campaign.

“Kurt has never been someone who defines himself by his job,” says Jami Floyd, a correspondent with ABC’s 20/20, of her stay-at-home husband, Kurt Flehinger. “Nor does he care much what people think about him. He’s not a Master of the Universe type. I am much more testosteronic. I’m much more driven, much more traditionally male.”

But in many cases the role reversal is the work of market forces as much as force of personality; the husband’s career is expected to take precedence, and initially it does, but it’s overtaken by his wife’s. Neither of them saw it coming—nor do they welcome it.

“Maybe the guy’s industry changed and he lost his job,” says Ken Neumann, a psychologist and divorce mediator who has seen his share of depressed dads lately. “Or the wife steps into the right place—something she couldn’t fully have anticipated. The question is, how secure does the guy feel? When the woman earns more, we can’t assume in our culture it’s a nonevent. We’re a long way off from a world where it doesn’t affect the relationship.”

“I think women earning more than men can be devastating to relationships unless the guy is doing something the wife regards as having cachet, such as academia,” says Betsy, even though she still speaks fondly of her ex-husband and sends him the occasional check.

It’s not as if these women ever expected their husbands to support them completely—at least a lot of them didn’t. It’s just that it never occurred to them that they might be the ones doing all the heavy lifting. And as hip and open-minded as they like to think they are, they were, after all, raised on the same fairy tale as the rest of us—the one where Prince Charming comes to the rescue of Sleeping Beauty.

“I didn’t really give a damn where the money came from,” says Betsy, an attorney. “That’s not the gift I expected a husband to give me. I wanted a romantic figure.” That was until she found him taking money from her wallet and leaving an IOU. “I just didn’t want to be giving him spending money.”

At first, her spouse, a composer, satisfied that fantasy. “It was about his artistic vision,” she says. To this day, despite the fact that he’s refused to make any of the compromises necessary to get ahead—and blamed Betsy for contributing to his failure by being too controlling—she continues to believe in his talent. “I think Tom’s smarter than I am,” she says. “He really gets excited by ideas.”

‘It’s not a matter of how good you are,” says Anna, still trying to fathom why she’s successful and her former husband is not. “It’s a matter of how you get work in this town. It’s about connections and attitude and how you market yourself, and it’s about confidence.”

Among the reasons these women were originally attracted to their husbands—sex appeal, sense of humor, charisma—earning power may not have been high on the list. But that could be because it was a given. Unfortunately, the other qualities start to fade over time if the husband isn’t adding something tangible to the equation.

“It was the artist thing I thought I was getting,” says Anna, who met her husband when she hired him to design her company’s Website. “Sexy was part of it. There was a huge physical thing. I’m not the kind of person to be attracted to a lawyer—maybe next time I will be.

“If he’d really been a starving artist, I’d have been fine with that,” she adds. “But he wasn’t a starving artist in the end. He wasn’t driven to do his art.”

The problem with living in a meritocratic culture such as New York’s—and to the misfortune of those who consider moving the family car on alternate-side-of-the-street mornings a prolific day’s work—is that there are objective ways to measure success, even in fields as traditionally unprofitable as literature and the arts. There are bylines and advances and gallery shows and paid commissions.

“The first year Barbara Corcoran’s income exceeded her husband’s, she pretended it was an accounting error. ‘By the time the third year hit, I was earning five times more than him and it was obvious we had to adjust to the reality.’”

“The successful artist makes money,” Neumann observes. “You’re better off being an academic. People see through the artist shit.

“An academic person might get a ‘waiver,’ ” he adds. “Or a serious, published writer. A primary-school teacher wouldn’t get a waiver. We may think, What a great thing we have men teaching! However, we’re not giving waivers yet for men teaching primary school.”

When it works, it tends to be when the wife’s respect for her husband remains intact. “Women need to admire their partner,” says psychologist Harriette Podhoretz. “They need to find something that doesn’t interfere with their passionate glue, that keeps the marriage charged up and alive.”

One such relationship where the adhesive seems to be holding, against the considerable social stresses of Upper East Side living, involves Laura, an investment banker for a top Wall Street firm. Her husband, Jeff, is an actor, though one you haven’t heard of. He has yet to land a role in anything, even a toothpaste ad.

But the relationship works well, they report, because Laura’s admiration for Jeff, whom she met when they both worked in finance for a giant West Coast media conglomerate, seems complete. “Jeff was never laid off,” his wife explains. “There’s not that feeling that my husband is a loser. We made a conscious decision—he’s got the creative talent—to play to each other’s strengths.

“I know my husband could do my job with his eyes closed,” she says. “He’s really good at math. He’s twice as smart as I am.”

Sometimes it’s the Alpha woman who needs reassurance that she’s still feminine.

“When you’re a big money earner and your husband isn’t, it makes you question how feminine you are,” says Barbara Corcoran, the ubiquitous real-estate broker. “I felt I was less feminine than if I was a supporting wife, or a second fiddle, or ‘Mrs. Higgins.’ The struggle was as much mine as Bill’s.”

Corcoran harks back to her husband Bill Higgins’s glory days. Bill’s career included a stint as an FBI agent—“He had more arrests than anybody ever,” his wife boasts—and a top post in the Naval Reserve during the first Persian Gulf war. His last job was running his family’s New Jersey real-estate company, which he sold in 1997. A teaching fellowship in the Bronx followed, but now he answers to “spouse,” the title on his business card.

“My husband had a very strong identity and was successful in his life,” Corcoran explains. “Thank God for that. There’s no way I can control him. I wouldn’t stay married to him if I felt I could. I can readily take my business personality into the home. But he forces me to be a partner rather than the boss. It’s what keeps our marriage healthy. He won’t give me an inch of satisfaction. He won’t acknowledge my superiority.”

But it took them a long time and a lot of counseling to reach that place.

The first year her income exceeded her husband’s—he was still in the real-estate business at that point—Barbara pretended it was an accounting error. “I explained it away as one good year,” she remembers. “On some level, I was happy it was one good year. I explained away the second good year, too. By the time the third year hit and I was earning five times more than him, it was obvious we had to adjust to the reality.”

Making things worse was the fact that Bill sold his company during that period and found himself adrift. “My mistake was I didn’t have a plan,” he says. “I’d sleep in. Resentment starts to build.” “The real issue became social events,” Corcoran says. “How do you introduce your husband and answer the New York question, ‘What do you do?’ I remember the day he said, ‘I’m retired,’ and I realized we were okay with it.”

Corcoran also reports feeling less pressure among her fellow alpha earners after attending Fortune’s annual “Most Powerful Women in Business Summit,” where she said house husbands were the rule. “I don’t think any of them are married to really successful men,” she says of her peers. “All these men wrap themselves around their wives’ schedules much like a trophy wife would.”

Emily, a senior sales executive, admits she enjoys the control she has over Mark, a struggling photographer. But sex has become an issue.

“I can’t give up the position of empress,” she says. “Everything is in my name. When I’ve gotten really bratty, I’ve said, ‘Well fine, leave,’ knowing he can’t leave. I’ve never had such security in a relationship. There’s no risk of flight. But it’s only giving me a short-term gain. Ultimately, it’s emasculating for him.

“Mark,” she adds, “was the best sex I ever had.” But that was long ago. “We fight instead,” she says. “We’re embroiled in some weird combat. It’s like Lysistrata. I tell him, ‘Your business is going to have to get better faster.’ Until then, I’m withholding.”

When Emily comes home, she doesn’t always want to be the boss. But she says her husband no longer has the authority to take over. “I want somebody to take that power role away from me,” she explains. “Ultimately, it gets down to pretty basic stuff. It’s hard to be the power broker every day and then be the femme fatale. I’m not going to pay the bills—I feel like his mother—and then come home and suck his dick.”

Alpha Women, Beta Men

Among the more tantalizing facts scientists at the Center for Research on Families at the University of Washington have uncovered is that the more money the wife makes, the more housework she does in proportion to her husband, and it’s not nearly as equitable as when both partners are working. “There’s an association with housework being woman’s work,” says the center’s associate director, Julie Brines. “They’re not going to compound the difficulty by the husband doing more housework.”

Or making them cook dinner. Betsy recalls the first and last time her husband did. “Tom made dinner one night,” she says. “I came to the table and there was spaghetti, in the pot, right on the table. No salad, no bread, no napkin folded at your place. Why didn’t he know about the rest of it? He does know about the rest of it. He’s been eating all his life!”

Once Anna sought a divorce—“You know what my lawyer called him? A parasite”—she, like many other women in her position, was in for a shock. Divorce lawyer Harriet Newman Cohen explains, “The law is supposed to be gender-blind. Therefore, when a marriage is breaking up at the insistence of either the breadwinning wife or the supported husband, the lawyer has to apprise the client that when a big-earner wife comes in, the court bends over backward to be gender-neutral, and it is possible the bum is going to be rewarded for sitting on his hands. You do a flip-flop and make believe she is a guy.”

More often than not, this doesn’t involve alimony. “A lot of men, I’ve noticed, feel embarrassed to ask for alimony,” says Ken Neumann, since they already know their partner’s reaction. “The wife’s idea is, ‘You’re not going to ask for alimony, are you? It’s bad enough I was making more than you.’ ”

The wife’s sense of being the victim of a scam can intensify when children are involved. Even though some freeloaders are excellent fathers, responsibilities for arranging playdates, setting the table for dinner, and soothing children with nightmares inevitably falls to the mother, whether she has a PowerPoint presentation to deliver at eight the next morning or not. “Once you add a child into the equation, the likelihood of resentment is much higher,” observes Barbara Corcoran.

“I wouldn’t mind as much if he’d really been ‘Mommy’ and I’d really been ‘Daddy,’ ” says Anna, referring to the fact that she was forced to cut her husband a check for $100,000 when they divorced—half the amount of the appreciation over the course of their marriage of a house she owned. “But he wasn’t really Mommy. We had full-time babysitting.”

What she remembers with special bitterness was having to return to work two weeks after the arrival of their second child because she was freelancing. As the family’s sole earner, she couldn’t afford to take maternity leave.

Yet even in the best of marriages, where the husbands stay home while the wives go off to work, the women seem unable to avoid doubt over their decision.

“Every day, I ask myself, ‘Will I regret it when I’m lying in my grave?’ ” Jami Floyd admits. The question is exacerbated in the Disneyland atmosphere of Manhattan, where legions of wealthy mothers seem to have carved out quasi-idyllic existences (at least it looks that way from the outside) centered on the rhythms of child-rearing, wraparound babysitting, and frequent lunches and dinners with friends.

“In our circle, there are so many mothers who either work part-time or don’t work,” says Jeff. “When Laura was on maternity leave, I could see her eyes opening.

“She can be a little envious of the relationship I have with our son,” he adds. “There were times he’d say, ‘I don’t want Mommy, I want Daddy to tuck me in.’ It was difficult for her. She felt she was not being a good mother.

“We’ve always made a rule: If we argue, we don’t do it in front of the kids. We had more arguments this year where we have not been able to stop raising our voices in front of them. There were times when I said, ‘I really hope we can make it through this year.’ ”

“It’s hard,” Laura acknowledges from her cab on the way to the airport for a Sunday-afternoon flight to Dallas. “I’d like to spend more time with the kids, but I’m in this crazy, nutso, high-paid job and I’d better go for it. There’s no job security anymore. It’s a struggle with two kids—you can’t take your foot off the gas.”

The combat resulted in an epiphany of sorts for Jeff. “It was a great eye-opener for me to think, Damn! Why doesn’t my wife come home and tell me she appreciates the way I’m unpacking the moving boxes? I probably don’t praise her in a way that she needs it—to say, ‘I really appreciate what you’re doing for the family.’ ”

After four years, the stay-at-home experience is starting to wear thin for Kurt Flehinger, too. “He’s a highly intellectual person, and at the park, people want to talk about poop consistency and the shape of the pacifier,” Jami explains. “I think he’s ready to move on from that.”

She also balks each time someone tells her how lucky she is to be married to “a saint.” “While I applaud Kurt’s forward-thinking and out-of-the-box approach to his life, no one ever comes up to a woman who has two children and says, ‘You’re a saint.’ She’s just a mom doing what’s expected of her.”

“It can be mind-numbing,” admits Kurt, who’s thinking of going back to work, much to his wife’s regret. “I love my children, but in terms of stimulating my intellect, it doesn’t do it for me.”

Ken Neumann recently conducted a divorce mediation in which one of the sticking points involved the stay-at-home husband’s wish to have his wealthy real-estate-professional wife continue to rent him an office even though he doesn’t work. “He left his house in the morning with his kid pretending to go to work,” Neumann recalls.“The wife said, ‘You don’t need the office,’ and he said, ‘I really want our daughter to see me as going to work.’ So she said, ‘Why don’t you just get a job like everybody else?’ Children do pick up when the father is a freeloader.”

Anna says that after she and her spouse split and sold their apartment, her 8-year-old asked her why her new apartment was larger and more luxurious than her dad’s. “I said, ‘Because I pay the rent here,’ ” she recalls. “And she said, ‘You do work harder than Daddy, don’t you?’ Kids are not stupid. I work way harder than Daddy.”

Betsy isn’t sure how being the child of a marriage where the mother is all-powerful will affect her college-age son. “I’m curious myself how it will play out,” she says. “He says to me, ‘I’m 70 percent my father, and the 30 percent that’s you is working real hard.’ ”

For her part, Anna has promised to be more tough-minded in her choice of mate if and when she slips back into the dating scene. “I didn’t ask the right questions,” she laments. “ ‘What have you done? Where have you come from, and how much have you made?’ It’s not the kind of thing one talks about. You believe what you want to believe. When you’re madly in love, you don’t really care about that kind of thing. But I will the next time.”

She's spent £226k on plastic surgery but 'I still can't get a Hollywood part', says Demi

She once spent more than £220,000 on a head-to-toe surgical makeover to make herself look younger.

But four years later - and having failed to secure the string of big-money parts she had presumably hoped to win - Demi Moore has decided to speak out against ageism in Hollywood.

The 44-year-old told a magazine: "It's been a challenging few years, being the age I am. Almost to the point where I felt like, well, they don't know what to do with me. I am not 20. Not 30.

"There aren't that many good roles for women over 40. A lot of them don't have much substance, other than being someone's mother or wife."

Miss Moore's comments are particularly unexpected given her own somewhat bullish attitude to holding back the years.

After a string of flops in the 1990s, she took a career break, during which time she met her current husband, 29-year-old Ashton Kutcher.

Miss Moore then returned to the screen in 2003's Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, emerging from the sea in a skimpy bikini which showed off the results of a cosmetic surgery spending spree.

As well as breast implants, collagen injections and liposuction on her hips, thighs and stomach, she had a £5,000 procedure to lift the sagging skin on her knees.

She also employed an army of advisers - including a nutritionist, personal trainer, yoga teacher and kick-boxing coach.

But since then she has appeared in just two films, Bobby and Half Light, with two more scheduled for release this autumn.

In the same time, her ex-husband and the father of her three children, 52-year-old Bruce Willis, has appeared in 13 films, including the action thriller Live Free Or Die Hard.

Miss Moore, who once commanded an estimated $12million a film, told Red magazine she wanted to overturn the belief that juicy roles should not be given to older actresses.

"If we are told we are not valuable once we hit 30, it is a problem," she said. "We all have more to give.

"We can't just wait for something to happen. We have to say, 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more'."

Miss Moore is latest in a string of older actress to complain of ageism in Hollywood.

Sharon Stone, 49, once said: "When I went to the Oscars, it was like, 'Oh, there's been an archeological dig and look what we've found, a 40-year-old'."

British actress Charlotte Rampling also condemned the treatment of actresses of a certain age.

The 61-year- old said: "The system in Europe is nothing like in Hollywood. It is not so barbaric in terms of the ageing process."

Buffet worker stomps garlic with boots

NANUET, N.Y. (AP) -- Stomping on garlic with your shoes on is apparently not the correct way to prepare food. The Rockland County health department hit the Great China Buffet restaurant with two violations after someone took pictures of an employee stomping on a bowl of garlic with his boots in an alley. The man alerted health inspectors.

"I go back there, and the guy's stepping on garlic," said Dan Barreto, who used to eat at the restaurant. "There he was just jumping up and down on it, smashing it up, having a good time."

The health department does not consider a person's shoe or boot a proper instrument to use in food preparation, senior public health sanitarian John Stoughton said Tuesday.

"It was a novel way to prepare food," he acknowledged.

Great China Buffet owner Jiang Shu said the worker has been fired over the incident.

The health department said it would inspect the restaurant again.

Buffet worker stomps garlic with boots

NANUET, N.Y. (AP) -- Stomping on garlic with your shoes on is apparently not the correct way to prepare food. The Rockland County health department hit the Great China Buffet restaurant with two violations after someone took pictures of an employee stomping on a bowl of garlic with his boots in an alley. The man alerted health inspectors.

"I go back there, and the guy's stepping on garlic," said Dan Barreto, who used to eat at the restaurant. "There he was just jumping up and down on it, smashing it up, having a good time."

The health department does not consider a person's shoe or boot a proper instrument to use in food preparation, senior public health sanitarian John Stoughton said Tuesday.

"It was a novel way to prepare food," he acknowledged.

Great China Buffet owner Jiang Shu said the worker has been fired over the incident.

The health department said it would inspect the restaurant again.

Police: Boy Killed Parents, Didn't Want To 'Disappoint' Them Anymore

FORT PIERCE, Fla. -- A 16-year-old boy told detectives he killed his parents because he didn't want to disappoint them anymore, according to a police documents.

Jacob Brighton said he shot his parents last month because he always felt like a disappointment to them because he didn't have a job, smoked marijuana and didn't share the same "qualities or interests" as his father, according to the recently released documents.

"So there's nobody, now there's nobody to be disappointed in me, try to make me lead ... their life," Brighton said.

Brighton pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of Richard Brighton, 47, and Penny Brighton, 46, in their Fort Pierce home. He could get life in prison if convicted.

"There are some things in his young life that happened that will shock and disturb the community," said his attorney Darren Shull. "They are traumatic events that happened to Jacob."

Shull declined to elaborate.

Brighton was being held without bond.

Watch Local 6 News for more on this story.

Seven Inmates Escape Tennessee Jail; Four Still On the Loose

MORRISTOWN, Tenn. — Seven inmates escaped from a county jail by telling a guard they needed ice and then attacking him when he brought it, authorities said.

Sheriff's officials say the inmates confined the guard and escaped late Tuesday night by pushing a button in the jail control room that opened an outside door.

Two of the inmates, Paul Edward Long, 23, and Joshua Lee Adkins, 26, were arrested separately Wednesday without incident, authorities said.

A third, 22-year-old Michael Curtis Long, was arrested late Wednesday at a Morristown residence without incident. Officials believe Long, a federal prisoner serving a nearly 12-year sentence on a firearms charge from an armed robbery, may have spearheaded the escape.

The other inmates who escaped from the Hamblen County Jail, about 40 miles northeast of Knoxville, were identified as Michael J. Banner, Nathan W. Carroll, Brandon S. Collins and Nicholas Kyle Short. They remained at large Wednesday night.

It was not immediately known if the Longs were related.

Authorities say all of the men are repeat offenders, but the rest were in jail on misdemeanors and none were considered dangerous.

There were 69 inmates in the 32-bed dormitory-style annex where the inmates overpowered the guard. But 62 inmates decided not to take flight, Chief Deputy Wayne Mize said.

"They're smart enough to put their time in and put it behind them rather than add an escape charge," Mize said.

Mize blamed severe overcrowding and design flaws for making it easier for inmate to escape. The jail is licensed for 197 inmates. On Wednesday morning it was holding 296.

"Just the fact that they're in there under terrible conditions makes them want to leave more than they ordinarily would," Mize said.

The jailer attacked by inmates, Josh Petit, suffered abrasions and a swollen hand. He was treated and released.

Nude Web Pics Dog Albion Mayor

A night after admitting to DWAI, Albion's mayor is now dealing with what he calls a personal attack.

It comes in the guise of nude pictures.

Mayor Michael Hadick was back to work Wednesday running a village board meeting. After conducting village business, he spoke out for the first time about his conviction and pictures posted on a local Website that claim to show Hadick naked.

It all comes as Hadick deals with calls from some residents for his resignation.

“No resignation whatsoever will happen,” said Michael Hadick, Albion's mayor.

Hadick told the village board and a large group of residents Wednesday that he wasn’t going anywhere. In June the mayor was charged with DWI. Tuesday, he accepted responsibility for a lesser DWAI charge.

“The case was closed last night and I pleaded guilty to DWAI. I’m moving forward and taking the punishment the court handed to me,” Hadick said.

On the same day he pleaded guilty Web pictures surfaced. The publisher claimed they are naked pictures of the mayor. Hadick says they were doctored and were likely taken before he was elected.

“So don’t believe everything you read, come see me, come talk to me anytime you like, I’m always here,” said Hadick.

Some residents say enough is enough.

“I ... suggest that you resign,” Albion resident Larry Harvey said as he read from a hand-written letter. “In my eyes, you are not qualified to run the business of mayor. Your lack of integrity and moral character has a lot to be desired.”

“We elected him and I think he needs to step down and listen to the people who put him in because I think we’re tired of it,” said Annette Finch of Albion, who doesn’t believe the mayor’s claims that the nude photos published online are doctored.

Hadick believes most village residents support him and he just wants to do the job he was elected to do.

“We need to work together as people, common people, and not divide each other. That’s all we’re doing is dividing,” said Hadick.

One village board member also asked Hadick to step down, but the majority of the board still supports him. Another trustee told R News off-camera that Hadick's drinking and driving conviction was a simple mistake and that Hadick has apologized, and should be allowed to continue.

Diet-conscious Los Angeles eyes moratorium on fast-food outlets

The city council is set to vote on a measure next week that would put a two-year moratorium on new outlets in South L.A. amid concern about high obesity rates there.

Los Angeles - Pointing south from the corner of Figueroa and Adams in South Central L.A., Tanisha Jackson says when it comes to fast food, her community "has it all."

"If you want it cheap and quick – McDonald's, Burger King, Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken – we've got it," says the mother of two.

Some city officials see the myriad fast-food outlets as a health problem and are seeking change. "Fast food is primarily the only option for those who live and work here," says City Councilwoman Jan Perry. "It's become a public-health issue that residents be given healthier choices."

She has introduced a two-year moratorium on new fast-food outlets in this part of the city, where small, single-family homes dominate and gangs thrive in a rough urban landscape.

Many national food and health experts say the measure – which is slated for a vote on Sept. 18 – may be the first example of a health-zoning law in the United States. In 2006, New York City health committee chairman Joel Rivera lobbied against uncontrolled growth of fast-food chains, but did not introduce legislation. These observers are applauding the idea as a way to raise awareness about America's obesity epidemic, which hits poorer neighborhoods disproportionately.

"Limiting fast food could be a practical solution if it starts to address the imbalance of too many outlets with food that is not nutritious," says Mark Vallianatos, director of the Center for Food and Justice at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

Others say it is a well-meaning but misguided attempt by government to control social behavior, doomed to failure, like prohibition in the 1920s. "You can't regulate the supply side of a behavioral problem and expect results," says Dennis Lombardi, executive vice president of Foodservice Strategies, a consulting firm for the restaurant industry.

Perry says she introduced the legislation because statistics show that residents here have higher incidence of diseases that doctors link to obesity than the rest of the city and the county. "The side effect of a constant diet of fast food is that society pays in the long run in medical costs," she says.

The ordinance would affect about 700,000 residents of South Central, where a recent Los Angeles Times survey found that 46 percent of restaurants are fast-food chains, compared with 12 percent on the west side of Los Angeles.

Perry and her supporters acknowledge that health zoning raises some questions: Will other healthier restaurants move into the region if new fast-food outlets are prohibited? Can the city government aid that transition? Will residents frequent restaurants with healthier options?

"We should always be very cautious about restricting food and dining options for other groups of people," says Barry Glassner, professor of sociology at the University of Southern California and author of "The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong."

He and others cite several benefits fast-food restaurants offer to those living in poorer neighborhoods: good, inexpensive food; a safe environment for kids; and fast preparation, which is particularly appealing to single parents, many of whom work more than one job.

"If a particular community wants to kick out certain kinds of food, that is one thing. For outsiders to do it is patronizing and demeaning," says Dr. Glassner. "Calling all fast food evil is just too simplistic."

Still, others hold more moderate views. Kathleen Hall of the Stress Institute of Atlanta agrees that healthier eating contributes to a longer, more satisfying life. Besides food zoning, efforts must include educating youths about food, countering media influences, and promoting the importance of families eating together in quiet environments, she says.

"We have to teach inner-city kids how to eat or they will find the less healthy foods even at the better restaurants," she says. "Many of these fast-food outlets are actually offering healthier items, but they don't promote them as much as the fattier stuff because they make more money off the big meals."

Burger King, for example, has announced it will roll out apple slices in French-fry cups for kids' meals this fall. Earlier this year, Subway introduced a healthy kids menu, offering raisins or sliced apples instead of chips.

But more needs to be done to encourage healthier eating. Education means giving a higher priority to the health hazards of eating the wrong kinds of foods. In this sense, the proposal in L.A. could help create a more enlightened civic environment about public health.

"Los Angeles's ordinance is helping the community face the fact that there is collective responsibility in this as well as personal responsibility," says Christine Ferguson, director of the Stop Obesity Alliance in Washington.

But Perry and other health officials say they are not trying to play father figure to residents or even eliminate fast food from the city scene.

"The grocery stores in this area are terrible if you want healthy fresh fruits and vegetables," says Lark Galloway-Gilliam, executive director of L.A.-based Community Health Councils, a health policy advocacy group, and also a resident of South Central.

After the Rodney King riots in 1992 devastated these neighborhoods, officials promised more supermarkets and restaurants, she says. But for a variety of reasons, that has not happened.

"Sure, I can get a healthy salad at Whole Foods, if I want to drive 10 to 12 miles and take half an hour. This is not about regulating business; it's about planning communities and giving people healthy choices," Ms. Galloway-Gilliam says.

Madison Twp. Man Uses Pocket Knife To Dig Himself Out Of Disaster

A Tri-state man is now safe after using a pocket knife to literally dig himself out of a disaster.

The 83-year-old Madison Township man says he was on his tractor outside his Keister Road home when the tractor flipped and he was trapped.

He's says it's amazing how much strength you get when you're in a life-and-death situation.

The tractor flipped as John Cockerham was trying to move a post on his property.

He ended up with his leg pinned and his entire body stuck under the tractor.

So, for two hours he struggled to free his leg.

Then, he says he pulled his pocket knife out and spent another two hours digging at the dirt under him to create room so he could squeeze out.

"I hollered, 'Lord, don't let me die here. I don't want to die under this tractor. help me to get out!,' and by the grace of God, he had given me the strength to get out," said Cockerham.

Cockerham has eight children, 21 grandchildren, 28 great grandchildren – plus one great-great grandchild.

So, a lot of people are grateful.

Cockerham spent one night at the hospital and has a lot of bruises, but he's doing fine now.

Palestinian bomber unlikely star of Israeli film

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - A Palestinian suicide bomber is the unlikely star of a new Israeli film billed by its director as an effort to destroy prejudices that fuel conflict in the Middle East.

Scheduled to be screened in early 2008, the film stands to make cinematic history in the Jewish state, where movie-makers tend to shy away from treating the controversy of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

Its makers say that by personalizing the bomber -- named Tarek and portrayed as coming from the West Bank town of Tulkarm -- they hope to show Israelis the complex motives behind many such attacks in the Jewish state.

"Behind the belts and the suicide bombers and the victims, there are real people, with feelings, motives and fears," Israeli director Dror Zehavi told Reuters during a recent filming session in Tel Aviv.

Tarek is a Palestinian youth who infiltrates from the Israeli-occupied West Bank wearing a belt packed with explosives which he intends to detonate in a busy outdoor market in Tel Aviv.

The bomb's switch fails to operate, and he seeks the help of an unwitting Israeli electrician, whom he ends up befriending, in addition to another young Israeli woman who lives on the same block.

He never completely backs out of his plan, feeling compelled to carry out the attack to placate militants back in the West Bank who have threatened to kill his father if he reneges.

But he does make an effort to keep his Israeli friends out of harm's way, say the filmmakers, who have given the movie the working title of "Shabat Shalom Maradona" (Good Sabbath Maradona), a nod to Tarek's passion for soccer and Argentine superstar Diego Maradona.

"Our goal in making this film is to build a bridge between Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, to allow for reconciliation despite the very explosive situation in which we live," Zehavi said.

Dozens of suicide bombings have killed more than 400 people in Israel since 2000, though the frequency of these attacks has subsided in recent years. In all some 4,200 Palestinians and 1,030 Israelis have died in fighting and armed attacks in a wave of violence since peace talks failed seven years ago.

STEREOTYPES

In the movie, Zehavi said the would-be bomber's explosives belt "symbolizes the stereotypes that we need to explode."

The bomber "isn't motivated by hatred of Jews or wanting to destroy Israel," Zehavi added. "He's trying to save his father's life."

The movie is based in part on accounts divulged by Israeli security agents, following several thwarted bombings in which suspects have said their motives were more personal than ideological.

While many Israeli films portray war and the hallowed military of a country that has fought seven wars and confronted two Palestinian uprisings over 60 years, Zehavi's is the first to tackle the sensitive subject of suicide bombings.

His film is sure to stir controversy in Israel. Critics have already panned the subject. A recent article in the Maariv tabloid newspaper denounced it as a "cultural bomb."

Israelis protested when the award-winning Palestinian movie "Paradise Now" -- about a suicide bomber pair -- was nominated for a best foreign language film Oscar in 2005, a prize it ended up losing to South Africa's "Tsotsi."

Shredi Jabarin, a young Israeli Arab actor who plays Tarek, expects to weather some criticism for his role: "I have to play a character that everyone hates, yet I have to try to make the audience love him. It's complicated," Jabarin says.

Zehavi cites recent Israeli-Palestinian efforts to renew stalled peace talks as a sign Israel is ready for such a film.

Producers also hope for a box office boost from at least one popular actor in a key supporting role.

Shlomo Vishinsky, a member of one of Israel's foremost theatre groups called the Cameri, will add populist punch in the role of the electrician who befriends Tarek.

Vishinsky's own son died two years ago in a gun battle with Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip. His personal tragedy hasn't shaken his conviction of a need to compromise for peace, the actor said in an interview.

He said he hopes the movie can drive home the point that both Israelis and Palestinians have shed too much blood in conflict.

"You never know what goes on in their (Palestinians') heads. We think they just want to be some religious martyr, but this guy is acting more on personal than political reasons," Vishinsky said.

"After all that has happened, most people just want peace."

Meat Now Blamed For Global Warming

LONDON (Reuters) - Eating too much red meat is not only bad for your health -- it is also bad for the planet, according to scientists.

Worldwide, agricultural activity accounts for about a fifth of total greenhouse-gas emissions and livestock production has a particularly big impact because of the large amount of methane emitted from belching cattle.

Tony McMichael of the Australian National University in Canberra and John Powles of the University of Cambridge, writing in the Lancet journal, said worldwide average meat consumption could be realistically reduced by 10 percent.

This would help in the battle against global warming and also reduce health risks associated with excessive consumption of red meat, they said.

Global average meat consumption is currently 100 grams per person a day but there is a tenfold variation between high-consuming and low-consuming populations.

Swiss police find kilogramme of cocaine in a pair of sandals

GENEVA (AFP) - Swiss border guards found more than one kilogramme (two pounds) of cocaine in a pair of sandals belonging to a man trying to drive over the border, police said Wednesday.

The man, a Nigerian who came from Germany but lives in Switzerland, was placed in detention last July.

The white powder had a street value of 70,000 Swiss francs (42,000 euros, 60,000 dollars), according to border guards.

51% - British With Favorable View of U.S.

This year America’s image shows further signs of erosion in Western Europe and Canada, reaching a new low in Great Britain (51%), America’s closest European ally, as well as in Germany (30%); this continues a trend that began in 2003 and 2004, following the start of the Iraq war. Favorable views of the U.S. are up this year in Spain, although Spanish opinion remains quite negative; only 34% have a favorable view of the U.S., compared with 60% who have an unfavorable opinion.

Homeowners wave victory flag after accord in pole flap

JUPITER — After seven years, residents George and Ann Andres can fly the American flag the way they want - and not lose their home in the process.

According to their attorney, Barry Silver, the Andreses and their homeowners association have settled most of their differences in the flag pole war that put the Indian Creek community on the national map.

The battle erupted in 1999, when Korean War veteran George Andres began flying his flag on a 12-foot pole outside his townhouse, instead of hoisting it to brackets on the outside of their home, like his homeowners association said he should.

The association eventually took Andres to court for breaking its rules, and the two have been battling it out ever since with attorneys.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, attorneys for both sides filed paperwork in Palm Beach County Circuit Court to settle several cases stemming from the dispute.

The association agreed to pay a portion of Silver's fees, using the rest to go toward waiving violation fees filed against the Andreses, according to a news release.

The fines had piled up so high - to the tune of $35,000 to $40,000 - that the association moved to foreclose on the couple's home to make up the money.

The one matter still outstanding is Andres' claim for attorney fees in the case where the retired electrician won a temporary injunction to use the pole to fly his flag.

George Andres, 71, said he would celebrate the settlement by simply going out to dinner with his wife.

"What else am I going to do? I got my flag flying and it's going to stay flying, that's all that counts," he said.

Hunk Colin Farrell's touching friendship with street guy shows what a class act he is

The beggars of Yorkville have eyes as big as pans these days.

All those film stars. All that spare change.

But a street regular known as Stress has struck gold. Pure Irish gold ...

Lunchtime. Eighty fans with Kodaks and pens are poised outside the InterContinental Hotel on Bloor St.

The brass door spits out an A-lister. Colin Farrell.

Not sure which dark, musky hunk is Farrell?

Ask your wife. Her knees will buckle.

Anyway, Farrell is no snob. Patiently, he signs for everyone, then turns toward his chauffeured, charcoal Audi.

And there stands Stress. For years, he has haunted Yorkville and environs, peddling Outreach papers or mooching loonies.

"Peaceful, harmless guy," coffee salesman Bill Ikos, 32, tells me. Bill's hobby is photographing stars, often in Yorkville, which is how he knows Stress.

Bill is outside the InterContinental for the hunk/homeless hug.

"Hiya," says Stress. The film star's eyes light up.

Four years ago, He was in town shooting A Home At The End Of The World.

A radio babe offered $2,000 to anyone who could bring Colin Farrell (sigh!) down to the station.

Farrell grabbed the first rubby he saw and, bingo, Stress was $2,000 richer.

"Jump in," Farrell says at the reunion Tuesday.

I wish I'd been a fly in that Audi. Down to Front St. they cruise, to Europe Bound Travel Outfitters.

"Get him anything he wants," says Farrell, in that commanding Irish tone. He wears jeans and a black muscle shirt.

Women staffers swoon. And not just over the bill, which comes to $2,100.

"Cool guy," manager Dave Mott, 36, tells me. "He doesn't act like a movie star."

Mott plans to tour Ireland by bike. "Don't miss the Ring Of Kerry," says Farrell, 31, born in Castleknock, Dublin, a preemie at 1 pound, 6 ounces. Maybe that explains all this.

They roam the store, Colin and Stress, cracking jokes, trying things on.

"Like they were best buddies," says Mott.

"The homeless guy was going around, grabbing stuff." Stress talks fast, hence the nickname.

"Whatever he needs," Farrell says again.

They pick out a $500 Arc'teryx coat, a North Face down sleeping bag, and a rolling backpack stuffed with socks, boots and underwear.

"Everything top line," says Mott.

Yes, Stress will be the best-dressed beggar in Yorkville this winter.

But hold on to your baseball cap. There's more Stress relief.

"Where's the nearest bank machine," Farrell asks Mott.

He returns with a wad of $20s. AND, he arranges to pay a year's rent on a nice room for Stress back up Bloor St.

The total tab must be near 10 grand.

Two and a half hours after Stress was swept off the street, he is back at Bellair and Cumberland.

"Where the hell you been?" says Bill Ikos.

"I'm all set up," says Stress, a tad frazzled. "This is my chance to get off the street." And he walks away.

"Amazing," Bill tells me. "You hear about someone like Al Pacino giving $100 bills. But to take a guy shopping and try to help turn his life around?"

Good thing Stress didn't run into Whoopi Goldberg or another star on the Yorkville panhandlers' "avoid" list.

"She never gives anything," says Joe Beard, who works Cumberland St. I've known Joe for years. Gentle as a dove. Kiefer Sutherland usually drops him a $10 or $20.

The film festival is high season for these guys.

The Colin Farrell gesture has them abuzz, which is how I hear. No one in the actor's camp, I hasten to add, has tried to use it.

Funny thing. As Stress, Farrell and a couple of aides leave Europe Bound, the security beep goes off.

Someone forgot to remove a tag.

Or it is the fates signalling thanks to a class act.

Praised, panned light-switch art gets Hub showing

The walls are bare, the gallery is empty. But the lights switch on, and within five seconds, back off. Martin Creed's signature work is ready for opening night.

The Scottish artist's creation - which goes on display in the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts starting tomorrow - is called "Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off," and the title describes exactly what happens.

Every five seconds, the gallery's 67 track lights illuminate the white walls and then flick off, controlled by a laptop in a back room. The piece won Creed, now 38, the prestigious Turner Prize from London's Tate Britain, the national gallery of British art, in 2001, and it subsequently earned a spot in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection.

The work also made Creed a lightning rod for critics of conceptual art, a genre in which the artist's idea for a work is typically regarded as more important than the physical form of any work produced - a far cry from traditional painting or sculpting.

"This guy got 20,000 pounds for demonstrating the same artistic talent as a defective circuit breaker," columnist Dave Barry wrote after the prize was awarded.

Curator Laura Donaldson, who has brought "Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off" to the Mills Gallery, doesn't know if it will face the same criticism here. But she's ready to defend Creed, whom she calls a "brilliant" artist.

"I love the subtlety of the piece," said Donaldson, 36. "The work really provokes a response from the audience. It has a lot of layers of conversation around it."

Creed, who studied at the Slade School of Art in University College, London, in the late 1980s, is known for conceptual, sometimes humorous, and often provocative pieces that have included "Work No. 88: A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball" (that's all it is) and "Work No. 200: Half the Air in a Given Space," in which Creed filled half a room with white balloons.

The Tate Britain has praised Creed's prize-winning piece for celebrating "the mechanics of the everyday" while challenging the viewer's expectations. "Our negotiation of the gallery is impeded, yet we become more aware of our own visual sensitivity, the actuality of the space and our own actions within it. . . . Creed exposes rules, conventions and opportunities that are usually overlooked, and in so doing implicates and empowers the viewer."

While some exhibitions can take years to plan, this one needed relatively little lead time. Donaldson first e-mailed Creed in June. His instructions were straightforward. It didn't matter what size the room was, or what color its walls were.

"It's very important to me that the existing [gallery] lights are used," Creed explained by phone from London. "Special lights will not be better. All lights are created equal in an artistic sense."

In the interview, Creed described how he came up with the idea for the piece more than a decade ago. "I was trying to make a sculpture for people to look at and felt unsure or unwilling to put my faith in one material," he said. "So I kind of was looking into ways of making something without making an object."

The piece has been exhibited several times, and the only real variable is how often the lights switch on and off. In 1995, when Creed installed the work for the first time in a London gallery, he set the timer for 30-second intervals. That long version, he says, is meant for group shows in which other works are on the walls. A one-second edition has been used in rooms that people can see into, but not enter. The Mills Gallery version, with 5-second intervals, is the one that earned the Turner Prize.

One of the world's most important contemporary art awards, the Turner Prize is given each year to an artist under 50 and has often provoked controversy. Past winners have included Damien Hirst, famous for displaying fish, sheep, and cows in formaldehyde, and Richard Long, who creates patterns on gallery floors to evoke walks he has taken in landscapes from the Alps to the Sahara.

Creed's victory set off a remarkable backlash. "What a pity that the little attention [artists] can get for their work in a frivolous, easily distracted age is diluted and embarrassed by the antics of charlatans," lamented John Derbyshire in his column for the National Review.

Reached this week at his Connecticut home, Derbyshire said his view of the piece has not softened. Creed's creation, he said, is insulting. "Leonardo da Vinci didn't set up his easel thinking, 'This will poke a finger in their damned eyes,' " said Derbyshire. "That's not an artistic temperament. That's an adolescent temperament."

But the piece is admired by many in the art world. "It's subversive, and there's a great element of humor," said Cheryl Brutvan, curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts. "It's great that people can be so annoyed about art. What a great emotional response, to think that we can be so engaged with something we call art."

Bill Arning, curator of MIT's List Visual Art Center, is even more enthusiastic. With the lighting shifts, "the actual environment of the space changes," said Arning. "And then there's also the hint of something wrong. Think about where the Mills Gallery is. A ton of people walk past that space everyday and then occasionally stop in. Think of how it's going to look from the outside, as if something's gone horribly wrong in there."

Mike LaChance, 36, works next door to the Mills as the City Stage theater company's program manager. Out on the sidewalk earlier this week, LaChance said he had no doubt Creed's piece was art.

"It really comes down to intention," said LaChance. "If the artist who created it did it with the intention of it being a work of art, it is. It shouldn't matter what other people think."

Nicholas Baume, chief curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art, said he understands the concept behind the piece, and he's eager to visit the gallery to see if he actually likes it.

"Sometimes pieces that are very simple and, in a sense, kind of a very modest gesture, can be surprisingly profound," said Baume. "And sometimes they can fall flat. He's playing with the metaphor of the light bulb going off, playing with a great concept. Can that now create something that's interesting to experience? That's what we're being invited to find out."

As for Creed, he said he isn't looking to rile up anyone with the work. "I don't think it's provocative," he said. "It's just the lights going on and off. What's provocative about that?"

Creed said he's not about to explain what the piece means. "Meanings are projected onto things by people based on their hopes and desires and experiences," he said. "I don't think of myself as making meaning. It's more like the artists make things in which people can find their own meaning. And I personally hate being told what to think."

Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com. For more on the arts, visit boston.com/ae/ theater_arts/exhibitionist.

Banks told stop using women to lure clients

ABUJA (Reuters) - Nigerian banks must stop using attractive women to persuade customers to open accounts, Senate President David Mark was quoted as saying in Thursday's newspapers.

Mark said that despite a consolidation of the sector in 2005 that reduced the number of banks to 25 from 89 and was supposed to make them more efficient, many banks still used women to attract new business.

"Banks have made it a policy to employ beautiful ladies and give them targets to meet," Mark said during the inauguration of the new Senate committee on banking and insurance on Wednesday.

"This is unacceptable and must stop. You ordered the consolidation, so I think you must do something to stop it," he said, addressing officials of the central bank.

"We thought that with the consolidation in the banking sector, the banks will have enough money and capacity to get customers. Why is it that all these girls are now moving around hustling as if they are looking for something other than money?"

The consolidation, triggered by the central bank's decision to raise the minimum capital base for banks twelvefold, has been hailed by the Nigerian government as one of the major successes of a broader programme of economic reforms.

Banking stocks have boomed on the Lagos stock market since the consolidation, but analysts say many of the banks remain weak because they are reliant on deposits from government agencies and do little retail business.

Apple calls on UK press as iPhone talk swirls

LONDON (Reuters) - Apple Inc is calling a London news conference next Tuesday as speculation mounts that the consumer electronics guru will unveil long-awaited plans to bring its iconic iPhone cell phones to Europe.

Apple, whose slick, touch-screen device combines its popular iPod music player, a video player and Web browser, is expected to hand a UK sale deal to Spanish Telefonica's O2 UK unit, a German deal to Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile and a French deal to France Telecom's Orange.

Apple declined to divulge details about the planned news conference in London, and an Apple spokesman in Germany said only that the company would announce which telecoms operators had clinched the sales deal by the end of September.

Telefonica, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom have maintained a strict silence about any deal.

But analysts are expecting initial exclusive transactions in the run-up to the key Christmas trading period to give Apple a share of data revenues and, in an unprecedented move, a share of voice revenues generated by the new phones.

Steve Jobs, the Apple chief executive who helped found the company in the 1970s, has staked his reputation on the second-generation (2G) phone and music player catching the imagination of customers in the same way his iPod has.

But although iPhones flew off the shelves when they first went on sale amid much fanfare in the U.S. in late June, Apple slashed the price of its $599 model to $399 last week, sending its stock falling on market concerns that sales were slowing.

Jobs attempted to calm angry customers who had paid top dollar by offering them a $100 store credit. A few days later, the company announced it had sold a million iPhones in the U.S. -- ahead of its end-September target.

Apple, which has said it plans to sell 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008, has signed up the top U.S. operator AT&T Inc to distribute the device in the United States.

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Woman Uses Garden Tool to Foil Scooter Thieves

MELBOURNE, FL -- A man trying to swipe a scooter tangled with the wrong woman on Monday.

50-year-old Melbourne, Florida resident Grace Heuseinkveld stabbed the would-be thief as he was dragging her gas-powered scooter across her driveway.

"I'm proud of her. You have a right to protect your property," husband C.W Heusinkveld said.

Heusinkveld knew all along his wife was tough.

When the thief tried to drag away their scooter, she picked up a heavy, forked weeding tool.

She thrust it into his back so hard he fell over, and she fell on top of him.

"She's probably tougher than I am. I don't want to mess with her, and I'm married to her," Heusinkveld said.

The 74-year-old was asleep when it happened.

He said it was lucky for the thief that he was.

Police came up empty handed when they searched for the thief, but Heusinkveld said he is ready in case he returns.

They never found the gardening tool.

Police think the suspect will eventually show up in a hospital.

Teen hits 107 mph in Route 101 chase

CANDIA – Police say a 17-year-old Manchester girl in a Toyota Prius hybrid hit 107 mph during a police chase that ended on Route 101.

Officer Rick Langlois was eastbound on Old Candia Road shortly before midnight Tuesday when an oncoming car swerved into his lane. He pulled into the breakdown lane to avoid a crash and then turned to pursue the car, which accelerated toward westbound Route 101.

"If I hadn't swerved, there definitely would have been a collision," Langlois said yesterday.

Police said the vehicle hit 85 mph as it approached the Chester Turnpike bridge and clocked in at a maximum of 107 mph. Auburn police officer Chip Chabot deployed spike strips near Exit 2. Even with three blown tires, the driver continued on, finally halting near Exit 1.

Police said Amanda Wilson had a blood-alcohol level of .08, four times the amount necessary for a minor to be classified as a drunk driver. She was charged with aggravated drunk driving, reckless driving, driving without a license, disobeying police and transportation of tobacco and alcohol by a minor.

She was arraigned in Auburn District Court yesterday. Judge David LeFrancois ordered her held on $10,000 cash bail. She remains behind bars at the Rockingham County Jail.

Amish stoically endure scars of massacre

No events will mark the anniversary. "Each day," said a report, "brings ... pain, grief and questions."

One girl is confined to a wheelchair and fed through a tube, but she rewards family members with smiles. Another recently underwent nerve surgery to improve usage of her shoulder and arm. A third girl has caught up in school despite persistent vision problems from a head wound.

As the anniversary of the West Nickel Mines Amish School massacre approaches, the committee organized to handle donations to the community yesterday released a heart-felt statement on the anguish and progress experienced since the Oct. 2 tragedy that left five girls dead and five others wounded.

"To the casual observer 'life goes on' in Nickel Mines, with its daily and seasonal demands of work, school, births, family and church," wrote the Nickel Mines Accountability Committee, a nine-member panel of Amish and non-Amish leaders. "But for the families each day brings with it the pain, grief and questions that remind them of their loss."

The group said that no public memorial events were planned on the anniversary, but that the school built to replace the scene of the shootings will close for the day.

"The Amish just aren't accustomed to doing much by way of memorials and monuments," Herman Bontrager, spokesman for the committee, said in an interview yesterday. The panel was organized two days after the shooting and still meets in the Bart Township fire hall.

The families "do a lot of talking with each other, almost like a 'living memorial' concept," said Bontrager, an insurance executive in New Holland, Lancaster County. "It's not that they ignore the issue. Among themselves there will be lots of visitation on that day."

In the months after the killings, more than $4.3 million in donations poured in from throughout North America and numerous countries, the committee said in its statement.

About one-third has been spent on medical, therapeutic, transportation and living expenses for the victims and their families, the group said. Funds have been placed in a trust account to pay for the girls' long-term needs.

The Amish also have donated to the charity funds of medical providers and to service organizations that assisted on Oct. 2.

Additional funds were spent to construct the New Hope Amish School a mile from the now-razed West Nickel Mines school where gunman Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, also killed himself. Roberts, a local milk-truck driver, left a note explaining that he was tormented by the death of his infant daughter in 1997 and by the 20-year memory of having sexually molested two young female relatives, a statement investigators could never substantiate.

The new one-room school has added security features - locks, brick rather than wood construction, and a "panic bar" on the front door. It opened on April 2.

In a gesture of forgiveness and compassion, the Amish made a donation to Marie Roberts, the widow of the gunman and a mother of three young children.

Bontrager said Roberts has remarried and relocated to a nearby community. Because of the move, there has not been ongoing contact between her and the Amish families, though "nobody is trying to avoid that," he said.

Despite intense outside interest, the close-knit Amish have not discussed their experience publicly and have mostly kept their grief to themselves. But with the anniversary approaching, the statement said, the families of the injured wanted to provide an update on their daughters "to the public from whom they received generous support, emotionally and financially, this past year."

Students started the 2007 school year the week before Labor Day, with some new children in the class and the same teacher as last year, according to the report. After teacher Emma Mae Zook escaped the Nickel Mines school, Roberts let all 15 male students go, along with a pregnant woman and three adults with infants. One 9-year-old girl slipped out with them. The other girls were then tied up and shot at close range.

"The children are reported to be enjoying their classes, but they keenly miss the girls who died," the committee wrote.

To help them cope with the trauma, the families and others are using counseling services, the report said. Some of the boys are struggling with survivor's guilt, Bontrager said.

"It's difficult for all of the children. But they are also living fairly typical and normal lives, with the farm and work and home life and play and so forth, and that's what the families are really trying hard to do - provide stability and continuity for their children," he said.

Four of the five injured girls have been in school since December. The fifth, Rosanna King, who was 6 when she was shot, suffered a severe head injury and is unable to talk. She uses a reclining wheelchair and is "totally dependent on her family members for personal care, mobility and feeding by tube," the statement said.

"The doctor did not give us any hopes at all for survival, so at 8:30 [on the night of the shooting] they took the breathing machine off, thinking she would soon pass," her family said in a recent update to the church community. "A couple times that night and the next couple days we thought we were losing her. By Friday she was a little more stable."

Now Rosanna "smiles a lot, big smiles" and recognizes her family, the Kings said.

A second severely injured victim, Barbie Fisher, recently underwent reconstructive surgery to improve her shoulder and arm. A third girl, Sarah Ann Stoltzfus, suffers impaired vision on her left side from a head wound. Her older sister, Anna Mae, was killed in the attack.

Sarah Ann's therapists and her brain surgeon at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia "all said it's a true miracle that she recovered as fully as she did, which we thank God for," the Stoltzfus family reported in the statement.

"We also know that healing is not always as complete as we would wish for everyone, but we do know that God is with us in all things," the family said.

The Nickel Mines committee said that reaching out to others in similar circumstances has been part of the healing for the Amish families. A group of them recently traveled to Blacksburg, Va., to meet with Virginia Tech officials and families affected by that deadly school shooting and to deliver a "comfort quilt," the statement said.

"Through shared suffering and pain, in shoulder-to-shoulder labors of love, in mutual respect despite differences," the committee wrote, "the people of Nickel Mines are bearing each other's burdens as they seek solace and healing in their terrible loss."

Robot Maker Builds Artificial Boy

RICHARDSON, Texas (AP) - David Hanson has two little Zenos to care for these days. There's his 18-month-old son Zeno, who prattles and smiles as he bounds through his father's cramped office. Then there's the robotic Zeno. It can't speak or walk yet, but has blinking eyes that can track people and a face that captivates with a range of expressions.

At 17 inches tall and 6 pounds, the artificial Zeno is the culmination of five years of work by Hanson and a small group of engineers, designers and programmers at his company, Hanson Robotics. They believe there's an emerging business in the design and sale of lifelike robotic companions, or social robots. And they'll be showing off the robot boy to students in grades 3-12 at the Wired NextFest technology conference Thursday in Los Angeles.

Unlike clearly artificial robotic toys, Hanson says he envisions Zeno as an interactive learning companion, a synthetic pal who can engage in conversation and convey human emotion through a face made of a skin-like, patented material Hanson calls frubber.

"It's a representation of robotics as a character animation medium, one that is intelligent," Hanson beams. "It sees you and recognizes your face. It learns your name and can build a relationship with you."

It's no coincidence if the whole concept sounds like a science-fiction movie.

Hanson said he was inspired by, and is aiming for, the same sort of realism found in the book "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," by Brian Aldiss. Aldiss' story of troubled robot boy David and his quest for the love of his flesh-and-blood parents was the source material for Steven Spielberg's film "Artificial Intelligence: AI."

He plans to make little Zenos available to consumers within the next three years for $200 to $300.

Until then, Hanson, 37, makes a living selling and renting pricey, lifelike robotic heads. His company offers models that look like Albert Einstein, a pirate and a rocker, complete with spiky hair and sunglasses. They cost tens of thousands of dollars and can be customized to look like anyone, Hanson said.

The company, which has yet to break even, was also buoyed by a $1.5 million grant from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund last October. The fund was created by Gov. Rick Perry in 2005 to improve research at Texas universities and help startup technology companies get off the ground.

Hanson concedes it's going to be at least 15 years before robot builders can approach anything like what seems to be possible in movies. Zeno the robot remains a prototype.

During a recent demonstration, Zeno could barely stand and had to be tethered to a bank of PCs that told it how to smile, frown, act surprised or wrinkle its nose in anger.

Robotics, Hanson believes, should be about artistic expression, a creative medium akin to sculpting or painting. But convincing people that robots should look like people instead of, well, robots, remains a challenge that robot experts call the "uncanny valley" theory.

The theory posits that humans have a positive psychological reaction to robots that look somewhat like humans, but that robots made to look very realistic end up seeming grotesque instead of comforting.

"Nobody complains that Bernini's sculptures are too darn real, right? Or that Norman Rockwell's paintings are too creepy," Hanson said. "Well, robots can seem real and be loved too. We're trying to make a new art medium out of robotics."

So just how did Hanson end up with two Zenos, anyway?

It all goes back to when his wife, Amanda, gave birth to their first child and Zeno the robot was already in the works.

They rattled off several names to their baby boy, but it wasn't until they whispered "Zeno" that "this look of peace fell over his face; it was like soothing to his ears," Hanson recalled.

"There was no way we could give him any other name. He chose Zeno as his name," he said.

That was just fine with Amanda.

"I thought that it was very endearing, very sweet," she said.

The similarities go beyond the name. Though Zeno the robot was built to resemble the animated Japanese TV show character Astro Boy, his plastic hair and saucer-shaped eyes bear a striking resemblance to the curly locks and wide-eyed smile of the real Zeno.

"So by coincidence they're both Zeno, and in other ways this robot has become more of a portrait sculpturally of the son, although it's almost coincidence," said Hanson, whose previous jobs include working as a character sculptor for The Walt Disney Co. "We didn't consciously sculpt this robot to look like him. It's the way things filter through the hands of the artist."

Hanson says one of the robot Zeno's biggest advancements is that its brains aren't inside the robot. Instead Zeno synchs wirelessly to a PC running a variant of Massive Software - the same Academy Award-winning code that enabled the fantastical battles among humans, orcs and elves in the "Lord of the Rings" movies.

Like some modern version of Geppetto's workshop, Hanson's office is crammed with rows of shelves stacked with books about robots next to toy robots and plastic skulls. Notes ranging from mathematical formulas to design sketches cover several white boards like high-tech graffiti.

There are scattered bits from Hanson's previous creations, including Albert Hubo, a white robotic body topped with a realistic head of Albert Einstein that has graced magazine covers and even shaken hands with President Bush.

Hanson has been recognized for his work, garnering accolades from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2005 and a "best design" award at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Triennial last year.

But Hanson is most proud of the real Zeno, a rambunctious toddler who frolics with free rein among priceless electronics.

"If the robots become popular I suppose it will pose an identity crisis for my son," Hanson said. "But I think that the amount of love that he receives will make him feel like an individual no matter what."

Twenty years in a dying industry

Commentary: Why media revolution only just beginning

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- The daytime city editor at The Boston Herald came running over the minute I sat down at my desk that Monday morning.
"Dave, I'm glad someone from (the business desk) is here. The Dow is down more than 300 points in the first hour. This seems big. What do you think?"
Well, even for a young reporter four weeks into his first full-time job, I could figure this one out. While any 300-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($INDU:
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$INDU13,428.05, +136.40, +1.0%) is news, the one that morning of Oct. 19, 1987 represented almost a 14% drop in the famous stock market index, equivalent to a loss of more than 1,800 points on the Dow at today's levels. Not bad for the first hour of trading.
By the end of the day, the Dow had fallen 508 points, or almost 23%, triggering declines in markets around the world, fears of a global recession after five years of boom times on Wall Street, and the coining of the term Black Monday.
By sheer luck, I happened to be in the right place at the right time in the Herald newsroom that morning, and got to write the story. The news business is like that. It remains one of the biggest news events I ever covered -- so big that I didn't even get a front page byline. The tabloid newspaper blew out the whole front page with a frantic image of the New York Stock Exchange trading floor and the headline "Meltdown on Wall Street."
Twenty years later, as I prepare to mark a different September anniversary this week - two decades in business journalism -- the sense of fear and foreboding among readers and investors remains fresh in my mind. Crowds of people massed outside the Fidelity Investments walk-in center on Congress Street that day to watch the Dow plunge on the window ticker. The Boston Stock Exchange was locked down to reporters. The words recession and stock market crash rang from Boston to Wall Street and every other regional stock market in the country, most of them now closed.
Those same words ring through the markets today. The same concern and fear are out there, just hiding behind terms such as subprime, hedge funds and credit crisis, instead of junk bonds, program trading and portfolio insurance. The market looks vulnerable. Even Alan Greenspan, a rookie Fed chief in 1987 who faced a trial by fire, says the current markets look a lot like they did that autumn.
But the difference between now and then is that we know what happened then. The markets rebounded at the end of 1987 to finish the year higher. The crisis ended. And though we've endured several more crises in the intervening decades -- the Salomon Brothers trading scandal, the Mexican currency crisis, the collapse of Barings Plc, the Long-Term Capital Management crisis, the bursting of the Internet bubble -- the markets over the long term have managed to continue rising. The Dow today is more than six times what it was 20 years ago, despite the daily fear and loathing chronicled by the business press. Investors who hung in there and did not give way to panic did great.
Which brings me to my own industry.
Back in 1987, it was widely assumed that newspapers were dying. The post-Watergate rush to become a reporter was over. Circulations were down. And new technologies were threatening. At one point, the hot new thing was to deliver news by fax machine, and papers were going to die because readers would be able to get news quicker by fax. They would even be able to tailor the type of news they wanted to receive. Imagine that?
In my section of the paper, which we affectionately called FIN for "financial," we kept abreast of the market's movement with an old Dow Jones news ticker, which clacked out spools of dark blue, inky copy all day long, and market updates once an hour. You had to get up from your desk, where primitive word processors had been installed only a year before, and walk over to the ticker, which was close to a blood stain on the aging carpet that newsroom legend held had been there ever since a printer coughed up a lung two decades before that. It was right out of The Front Page.
I'm told the rug has been cleaned. But 20 years later The Herald is still there, breaking news and still providing a daily slap upside the head to its larger, more comfortable rival, The Boston Globe. In the meantime, the industry has morphed completely.
Business journalism took off in the late 1980s, then continued to grow in the 1990s as companies like Bloomberg News came on the scene. The Wall Street Journal launched a subscription Web site in the mid-'90s and soon after companies like MarketWatch, TheStreet.com, The Motley Fool, and a host of new Web sites from legacy business began competing for the online financial news reader.
But while the names changed and new companies came on the scene to compete with old, the stories remained the same -- thrilling, devastating, frightening, heart-wrenching -- all in need of real journalists to report them and tell the world.
There's been a lot said about the latest craze in news dissemination recently, in which some Web sites electronically post news based on how many readers have hit the stories, instead of letting editors decide. This is a fascinating development in online community and user-generated editorial.
But go to any one of these sites and ask yourself the simple question, what's going on in the news today. At one of the sites Wednesday afternoon, the lead story was a video from YouTube headlined "Leave Britney Alone." Another site led with "How to hide beer in the office." Clearly an under-emphasized talent, but hardly newsworthy on a day oil prices hit $80 a barrel and Vladimir Putin dissolved the Russian government.
I know I'll come under fire for stepping into this, and maybe after 20 years I'm in danger of becoming the curmudgeon I always thought some of my older journalistic brethren were. But as long as there are Enrons and Worldcoms out there; hedge funds and pyramid schemes; crimes and wars and corrupt leaders, there will be journalists who will find platforms to report on them -- whatever the technology.
Indeed, this is not the beginning of the end for journalism. It wasn't 20 years ago either. It's a bull market for those who can write a sentence and tell a story and know how to do it across the mediums of print, Web, audio, video and mobile. The stories are there for the taking.
Oh, and one more thing about my first job at The Herald. It was owned at the time by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., in-coming owner of Dow Jones & Co., which publishes MarketWatch.
So 20 years of excitement later, here we go again. End of Story

---

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Indonesia rocked by another quake

JAKARTA, Indonesia (CNN) -- A strong earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.2 struck late Thursday off the western coast of Sumatra, the same area shaken by a major 8.4-magnitude temblor that killed nine people Wednesday.

The region has been wracked by quakes and aftershocks for the past two days.

The most recent quake struck at 11:09 p.m. (12:09 p.m. ET), 110 kilometers (65 miles) west-northwest of Sumatra's Bengkulu province at a depth of only 3 km (2 miles), according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Indonesian government issued, then canceled, a tsunami alert. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

A quake with the same magnitude struck the region several hours earlier, at 5:48 p.m. (6:48 a.m. ET). The temblor vibrated under the Celebes Sea at a depth of about 21 km (13 miles).

It was centered about 290 km (180 miles) northeast of Bitung, a city on the northern coast of Sulawesi, and the same distance south-southeast of General Santos, Mindanao, Philippines.

Wednesday's quake generated a series of aftershocks, including two major ones early Thursday measuring 7.8 and 8.1, said David Applegate, senior science adviser at the U.S. Geological Survey.

"It's been an incredible number of years for Indonesia and particularly for Sumatra" in terms of earthquakes, Applegate said on CNN's "American Morning" on Thursday.

"What we have here is a subduction zone, where one of the Earth's plates is moving down beneath the other," he said.

"In this case, the Indian Ocean and the Australian Plate are moving beneath the Eurasian Plate.

"In this kind of a situation you're going to get earthquakes as the strain builds up, but what we're seeing now is almost every segment of this plate has ruptured just in the last several years," Applegate said.

"In each case, it relieves pressure in one area but then that increases the pressure somewhere else. And so, for example, what we saw yesterday was the magnitude 8.4 quake ruptured to the north along this boundary. This 7.8 was at the northern end of that."

In the past 24 hours the region has been rocked by heavy seismic activity -- with a total of at least 60 tremors rattling the country, according to Indonesia's Social Welfare Minister Aburizal Bakrie.

The seismic shakedown began Wednesday night with a deadly 8.4-magnitude quake -- centered in southern Sumatra, which is west northwest of Jakarta.

A 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Thursday morning at about 6:45 a.m. (7:45 p.m. Wednesday ET), USGS said. The epicenter was about 185 km south-southeast of Padang and about 200 km northwest of Bengkulu.

About four hours later, the USGS reported that a 7.1-magnitude quake had rocked the region. Sandwiched in-between were half a dozen temblors measuring 5.0 and above.

At least 10 aftershocks of magnitude 5.1 to 6.0 were felt in the region after the larger quake, which shook buildings hundreds of miles away, killed at least nine people and generated a small tsunami about 60 cm high along the Sumatran coast.

"Our main concern is the people," Bakrie said from Padang. "The victims are not as dire as we thought and everything has been taken care of."

People in the Indian Ocean region have been extremely skittish about the possibility of earthquake-induced tsunamis since December 2004, when gigantic waves triggered by a 9.1-magnitude quake that killed more than 200,000 people in seven countries.

Wednesday evening's quake killed at least nine people in Bengkulu province and Padang, and an unknown number were injured or missing, according to officials. Search-and-rescue operations, suspended overnight, resumed at daylight Thursday, which also marked the start of the holy month of Ramadan in the mostly Muslim country.

The relatively light loss of life can be attributed to national and provincial governments being battle-tested by a string of powerful earthquakes over the last three years, Bakrie said.

"The people understand more about the problems and the danger of the earthquakes," according to Bakrie. "The central government as well as the district government, at the provincial level, has warned the people ... so the system works."

The powerful quake shook buildings about 385 miles away in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, and also in Singapore, about 435 miles from the epicenter.

"Doors started to creak, and the whole apartment seemed to ... make a cracking noise," said Rahayu Saraswati, who lives on the 35th floor of a building in Jakarta. "We ran out to the emergency staircase with other residents of the floor and ran all the way down to the lobby."

Bakrie said thousands of homes have been damaged in Sumatra.

Indonesia, a chain of islands in a seismically active area, is highly prone to earthquakes. Since the devastating tsunami of December 2004, Indonesia has fallen victim to 15 earthquakes with magnitudes of 6.3 or higher, according to the USGS. The quakes have killed almost 8,000 people, with the bulk of the deaths coming last summer.

The deadliest quake last summer came on May 26, 2006, when a magnitude-6.3 quake 16 km south-southeast of Yogyakarta left 5,749 dead. On July 17, 2006, a magnitude-7.7 temblor hit 145 miles south-southwest of Tasikmalaya, in Indonesia's Java region. The quake killed 730 people.

Another devastating quake on March 28, 2005 -- a magnitude-8.7 about 201 km west-northwest of Sibolga -- killed 1,313 people.

Grass must be green, HOA decrees

Community board cuts homeowners no slack in drought

WAKE FOREST - Amid record drought and heat that have pushed Raleigh into severe water conservation measures, residents of the Margot's Pond community off Ligon Mill Road have been told by their homeowners association to keep the grass green.

"While the Board is aware of the inconvenience presented by the heat and water restrictions, we believe that having neatly landscaped lawns of grass is of the utmost importance to our community," said a letter sent to the homeowners in August.

Local homeowners associations are loosening restrictive covenants requiring green grass and manicured lawns. But the Margot's Pond association is not giving residents a break -- and it's causing dissension among some members.

In a letter Aug. 16, Talis Management Group, which carries out the policies of the Margot's Pond HOA, required the homeowners to have:

* Healthy grass free of brown patches and weeds.

* Living trees with mulch.

* Planter beds with living shrubs and flowers.

The letter gave an October deadline to meet the HOA standards. Violators would be subject to fines or "self-help" -- a landscape company would fix the violations; the homeowner would get the bill.

Vann Holland, a member of the Margot's Pond landscaping committee, thought the requirements were too stringent. In an interview with WTVD last week, she asked the HOA to "give the homeowners a break."

Talis promised to send a letter giving homeowners more time, Holland told The News & Observer. So far no one has seen it. "If anything," Holland said, "they've gotten more and more aggressive."

Two days after the television interview, the HOA board removed her from the landscape committee.

"No board member is authorized to make statements without the board's approval," said Margot's Pond HOA president Dave Sroelov.

After the Thursday meeting, members of the HOA board said the Aug. 16 letter was sent before Raleigh instituted one-day watering restrictions.

Calling the timing, "unfortunate," board member Bill Casey said the October deadline was still in effect, but could be changed. "We're open to that possibility based on future rain or water restrictions," he said.

Board members would not comment on Holland's removal.

Betsy Poole, 75, Holland's mother, was among several homeowners to be served with "self-help." It's not clear to her why she got orders before the October deadline.

"It's hard to consider doing any landscaping with the water restrictions," Poole said.

Casey said "self-help" work performed recently had nothing to do with the Aug. 16 letter and stemmed from existing yard problems.

Some other communities subject to water restrictions have taken a more lenient approach.

In the River Ridge Golf Community in Raleigh, Ed Thomas, president of the homeowners association board, has been playing the role of friendly water cop. The Old River Ridge Homeowners Association has appearance standards for lawns and shrubs, but Thomas, 62, said he draws the line at nagging people about their lawns in a drought.

"We haven't even vaguely considered that," Thomas said. "My guess is half the lawns in our neighborhood are browned out."

In Cary, where mandatory water restrictions have been in place since 2000, some communities are getting creative. Marie Cefalo, the town's water conservation coordinator, said the Carramore subdivision has installed mostly warm season grass, which is more drought-resistant.

Management companies hired to handle the administrative duties of HOA boards said they're advising clients to be flexible with landscaping rules.