Many Questions on Killing of Pace Student by Police - New York Times

It was the homecoming game, and a reunion of sorts for two childhood friends on the opposing teams. Danroy Henry Jr. was a junior defensive back for the home team, Pace University, in Pleasantville, N.Y. Everyone called him D.J.

Brandon Cox was a running back for the visitors, Stonehill College of Easton, Mass. The two 20-year-olds had been teammates at Oliver Ames High School in North Easton, where their coach called them inseparable. And though Stonehill drubbed Pace on Saturday, 27-0, that was no reason not to get together for some postgame fun at a Westchester County restaurant near campus.

Within hours, Mr. Henry lay fatally wounded in the front seat of a car riddled by police bullets, and Mr. Cox was injured, in a shooting that has mystified people who were close to the young men.

“They were just a joy to be around, never in any trouble,” said Jim Artz, their high school coach. “If my sons grew up to be like these two, I would have been very happy.”

The State Police and the Westchester County district attorney’s office said on Monday that they would join the investigation into the shooting, which involved Pleasantville and Mount Pleasant police officers.

According to the Mount Pleasant police, officers were trying to subdue an unruly crowd around 1 a.m. Sunday in a parking lot outside Finnegan’s Grill, a popular student hangout in Thornwood, about two miles from the Pace campus and about 33 miles north of New York City.

One of the officers approached a car that was parked in the fire lane, where Mr. Henry sat in the driver’s seat. Mr. Cox was in the passenger seat, and a third football player, Desmond Hinds, a senior wide receiver at Pace, was in the back.

When the officer knocked on the window, Mr. Henry tried to speed away, striking one officer and pinning another against the hood, the police said. The officer clinging to the hood then pulled out his gun and fired into the car. Another officer also fired into the car, which crashed into a parked police car and came to a stop.

At an impromptu news conference outside their upper-middle-class home in South Easton, about 30 miles south of Boston, Mr. Cox’s family gave a starkly different version of the shooting.

“They thought the police were asking them to move out of the fire lane,” Thomas Parks, Mr. Cox’s stepfather, said. “The next thing you know there’s a police officer jumping from behind a car and he starts shooting.”

Mr. Cox, who was grazed in the shoulder and wore a hooded sweat shirt covering the bandages as he joined Mr. Parks, said he was “devastated” by the loss of his friend, but did not discuss the shooting in detail.

“We did not do anything to deserve this,” he said. “In my mind, what went on, there was no need for any of that.”

The officer who fired from the hood was identified as Aaron Hess, a former New York City police officer who has been with the Pleasantville police since 2003. The other officer who fired was identified as Ronald Beckley, a 30-year veteran of the Mount Pleasant police. Both were in uniform at the time, the police said. It was unclear on Monday how many shots were fired at the car and how many bullets struck Mr. Henry.

No one has been charged in the case. The officers, who suffered minor injuries, have been placed on administrative duties.

Janet DiFiore, the Westchester district attorney, said the investigation would be “detailed, thorough and complete,” and would include many witness interviews and a review of video surveillance.

Mr. Henry’s parents, who had traveled from Massachusetts along with Mr. Cox’s parents to watch the game on Saturday, did not return calls seeking comment on Monday. The families had met for pizza before the game.

A message on the Henrys’ voice mail on Monday said the family needed some time alone and asked supporters to “tell every single person how much influence Danroy had on you, or the good person he was, and just let everybody know he’s not the kind of person they’re going to try to make him out to be.”

At Mount Pleasant police headquarters, Police Chief Louis Alagno had a pained expression as he greeted visitors on Monday. On his office wall was a classic Norman Rockwell print of an officer at a counter talking with a little boy. The picture could have been ripped from a scene out of Mount Pleasant, where, the chief said he believed, no officer had fired a weapon in the line of duty since the early 1980s.

“This is devastating,” Chief Alagno said. “Just about every officer that was on the scene is truly devastated.”

The chief said he met with Mr. Henry’s father, mother and two younger siblings on Sunday. “They are a beautiful family,” he said. Mr. Henry’s father, he said, “was much more composed than I would have been under the circumstances.”

Nate Schweber and Ted Siefer contributed reporting.

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Ky. attack ad hit, even by hopeful's backer - Washington Times

The U.S. Senate race is Kentucky is heading into November much like it started — a bare-knuckled contest with Democrats again trying to define Republican Rand Paul by dredging up his past.

The race has tightened over the past weeks, but such a strategy already appears to be backfiring as one of the biggest cheerleaders for Democratic candidate Jack Conway denounced his recent TV ad questioning Mr. Paul's religious beliefs.

The 30-second ad that began airing last week says that while attending Baylor University, Mr. Paul was in a secret society that mocked Christianity and that he forced a female student to bow to a god named "Aqua Buddha."

The Paul campaign posted a response ad Monday titled "False Witness," with the narrator asking: "What kind of shameful politician would sink so low as to bear false witness against another man just to win an election?"

Sen. Claire McCaskill, Missouri Democrat, said Monday the Conway ad was "very dangerous" and "came close to the line" of being inappropriate.

"Candidates who are behind at the end reach, and sometimes they overreach," she said on MSNBC-TV's "Morning Joe" program. "This ad is a very dangerous ad because it reaches back to college. ... I think the ad came close to the line."

Mrs. McCaskill made the comments about 24 hours after she branded the "tea party"-backed Mr. Paul an "extreme candidate" and predicting Mr. Conway, the state's attorney general, would come from behind to win the race.

"Ask Elizabeth Dole what might happen," Republican strategist Elliott Curson said Monday about the Conway ad.

Mr. Curson was referring to a TV ad Mrs. Dole ran in the final weeks of her 2008 North Carolina U.S. Senate re-election bid that questioned Democratic challenger Kay Hagan's ties to an atheist political group.

Ms. Hagan, who was an official at a Presbyterian church in Greensboro, defeated Mrs. Dole, who was seeking a second term.

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Facebook Vows to Fix a Flaw in Data Privacy - New York Times

At the same time, you agree that Facebook can use that data to decide what ads to show you.

It is a complicated deal that many people enter into without perhaps fully understanding what will happen to their information. It also involves some trust — which is why any hint that Facebook may not be holding up its end of the bargain is sure to kick up plenty of controversy.

The latest challenge to that trust came on Monday, when Facebook acknowledged that some applications on its site, including the popular game FarmVille, had improperly shared identifying information about users, and in some cases their friends, with advertisers and Web tracking companies. The company said it was talking to application developers about how they handled personal information, and was looking at ways to prevent this from happening again.

Facebook’s acknowledgment came in response to an article in The Wall Street Journal that said several popular applications were passing a piece of data known as a user ID to outside companies, in violation of Facebook’s privacy policy.

Having a user ID allows someone to look up that user’s name and any data posted on that person’s public profile, like a college or favorite movies, but not information that the user had set to be visible only to friends.

Privacy advocates and technology experts were split on the significance of the issue.

“That is extremely serious,” said Peter Eckersley, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online liberties group.

Mr. Eckersley said advertisers could use the user IDs to link individuals with information they had collected anonymously about them on the Web. “Facebook, perhaps inadvertently, is leaking the magic key to tracking you online,” he said.

At the same time, Mr. Eckersley said there was no evidence that anyone who had access to this data had actually misused it.

Zynga, the maker of FarmVille and other games on Facebook that have a combined 219 million users, did not respond to requests for comment.

Several technology pundits and bloggers minimized the issue, with some saying that credit card companies and magazines have access to far more detailed information about customers than any Facebook application.

Facebook also sought to play down the importance of the leak, saying the sending of user IDs appeared to have been inadvertent. “Press reports have exaggerated the implications of sharing” a user ID, Mike Vernal, a Facebook engineer, wrote on a company blog for application developers. “Knowledge of a UID does not enable anyone to access private user information without explicit user consent.”

In a statement, Facebook said that while it would be a challenge to do so, it planned to introduce “new technical systems that will dramatically limit the sharing of user IDs,” and would continue to enforce its policies on outside applications, shutting them down when necessary. It added that the companies that had received the user IDs said they had not made use of them.

Regardless, the problem underscores another challenge facing the company: Facebook has grown so rapidly, in both users and in technical complexity, that it finds it increasingly difficult to control everything that happens on its site. In addition to more than 500 million Facebook users, there are more than one million third-party applications running on the site.

The latest information leak was made possible by a quirk in a long-established technical standard used by Web browsers. The standard allows Web sites to record the address of the page a user clicked on to arrive there, a bit of information known as a referrer.

Facebook has been including user IDs in these referrers for some time, and last year technology experts pointed out that user IDs had leaked to advertisers that way. Facebook fixed that this year, but apparently never addressed the problem when it came to referrers used by applications on its site.

“Facebook isn’t benefiting from it, and Facebook is not intentionally leaking this data,” said Christopher Soghoian, a privacy advocate and research fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University. “But it is not a trivial thing to re-engineer their systems.”

This year he filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, claiming Google was leaking personal information because search terms appeared in its referrers.

The latest issue may have had particular resonance with Facebook users because the company has been reeling from a series of privacy controversies, in part because it has been subtly pushing users to share data more publicly.

This year, for example, many users complained when Facebook changed the way in which users expressed preferences for certain movies or bands, essentially making it more difficult to keep that information private.

And in May, after a series of complaints from some users and privacy advocates, the company made wholesale changes to its privacy settings.

Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, apologized to users, saying the settings were often too complicated for people to understand. Despite the changes, the privacy issue has continued to dog Facebook.

“This is one more straw on the camel’s back that suggests that Facebook needs to think holistically not just about its privacy policies, but also about baking privacy into their technical design,” said Deirdre Mulligan, a privacy expert and professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Judge tentatively rejects 'don't ask, don't tell' stay request - Los Angeles Times

A federal judge in Riverside who declared the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy banning gays unconstitutional issued a tentative ruling Monday rejecting the federal government's request to stay her decision while the case is appealed.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips said the government failed to provide sufficient proof that her injunction halting the policy would cause "irreparable harm" to the military or that the government's appeal would be successful. Phillips planned to issue her final decision early Tuesday.

Paul Freeborne of the U.S. attorney's office argued that the injunction immediately halting enforcement of the policy, which bans gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, jeopardized national security.

He urged Phillips, who issued the injunction last week, to set aside her decision while the government appealed the ruling and injunction to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

In a sworn declaration submitted to the court, Clifford L. Stanley, undersecretary of defense for overall military readiness, cautioned that an abrupt transition would undercut the Pentagon's survey of military commands around the world to determine how best to create a policy that allowed people who are openly homosexual to serve.

"The stakes are so high, and the potential harm so great, that caution is in order," he said.

But Phillips on Monday rejected that argument. The judge said her ruling ordered an end to all discharge and separation proceedings under "don't ask, don't tell," but did not prohibit the military from crafting a new policy or educating military personnel about serving side by side with openly gay service members.

Phillips also said that the government failed to produce any evidence during the two-week trial that showed allowing gays in the military would harm military readiness or troop cohesion.

"The arguments by the government are vague … and belied by the evidence produced at trial," Phillips said Monday. She also chastised the federal government lawyers for not filing their objections when she was considering the injunction.

In her initial Sept. 9 ruling, Phillips found that the ban on gays had a "direct and deleterious effect" on the armed services, including the dismissal of crucial military personnel such as translators. She noted that the Pentagon violated the policy when it saw fit, routinely delaying the discharge of service members suspected of violating the law until they completed their deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

During Monday's hearing, Freeborne also argued that the judge exceeded her authority by issuing an injunction worldwide, as opposed to limiting it to the plaintiffs in the case or within her Southern California district. That argument will be a primary aspect of the government's appeal.

The ruling has put President Obama in a tricky spot. He strongly opposes the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which he once called a threat to national security, but says his administration has an obligation to defend laws passed by Congress.

Meanwhile, the military has suspended enforcement of the policy while Phillips' injunction is in place.

The challenge to the "don't ask, don't tell" policy was filed in 2004 by the Log Cabin Republicans, the largest gay GOP political organization. It was the first successful broad-based constitutional challenge to the policy since Congress enacted it in 1993.

Dan Woods, the lead attorney for the Log Cabin Republicans, argued during Monday's hearing that lifting the judge's injunction would "deprive very patriotic Americans of their constitutional rights" and urged the judge to keep it in place.

Former President Clinton adopted the "don't ask, don't tell" policy as a reform to the military's practice of seeking out and discharging gays and lesbians. Under the policy, as long as gays and lesbians keep their sexual orientation secret, they are allowed to serve. More than 13,000 service members have been discharged under the policy.

The House of Representatives voted to repeal the policy last spring, contingent on the outcome of a Pentagon study to determine if it can adapt to the change without harming military readiness. The study is expected to be completed by December. The proposed repeal was blocked on the Senate floor, although it may be reconsidered during a lame-duck session after the November election.

phil.willon@latimes.com

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Disc-free and better than ever - CNET

October 18, 2010 2:55 PM PDT By: Matthew Moskovciak

As of this morning, PS3 owners should notice a new icon under the video section of the menu: Netflix. The PS3 gained the ability to stream Netflix back in November of 2009, but it required using a special Netflix disc and the user interface now looks outdated compared to newer offerings from Apple TV and Xbox 360. (The Nintendo Wii can also stream Netflix without a disc now as well.)

Photo credit: Matthew Moskovciak/CNET

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A Life Between - New York Times

Part of this is of course because she is a Republican who served under a deeply unpopular president. After the N.A.A.C.P. dutifully honored her with a President’s Image Award in 2002, the black Columbia historian Manning Marable dismissed Rice as a “leading race traitor” and the award as “accommodation” to an antiblack corporate establishment. Around the same time, black audiences chuckled approvingly when Amiri Baraka read the line “Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleezza,” from his poem “Somebody Blew Up America.”

Yet there is more to it than that. Rice’s public self-presentation is distinctly impersonal. Unethnic, for one, but shading into outright ineffability. One grapples for an adjective to describe her personality, even after reading her autobiography, “Extraordinary, Ordinary People.”

She would have us believe that her dazzling journey, from growing up in segregated Birmingham to helping to lead the world, can be credited to attentive parents, the “extraordinary, ordinary” folk of the title. Yet it becomes clear that Rice has always been a wunderkind singleton. As a result, one detects a touch of the perfunctory in the family aspect of her tale, as well as a disinclination toward serious introspection.

Rice’s parents, both educators, provided a fine environment for germination. Rice grew up in the parallel universe that middle-­class black parents in the segregated South built for their children, a world of socials, bowling and bonnets, with black children from “rough” neighborhoods kept at a distance. Her recollection of her parents all aflutter trying to teach her about the birds and the bees plays like something out of “Father Knows Best.”

As a young piano student, Rice liked to imagine herself as Mozart’s wife, and in 1968, when she was 13 years old, she spent afternoons mimicking ice-skating moves to Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. No one in this era was tarring any of this as “white,” and parents insisted that blacks had to be twice as good as whites to succeed. Rice notes, “This was declared as a matter of fact, not a point for debate.”

All of this was ordinary for middle-class blacks in that time and place. What wasn’t ordinary was Rice’s coming out of a political science course at the University of Denver so entranced with Russian history that she decided to become a Soviet specialist. It does not discount black people’s wide range of interests to say that in the early ’70s, Soviet affairs was an unusual career choice for a black woman raised in Jim Crow Birmingham. Members of this first generation of black academics much more commonly sought to explore the black past and present.

You would never know this from Rice’s breezy account of this period in her life. She sometimes sounds like a white debutante from somewhere in Connecticut, as if black people from the Deep South always named their cars after the protagonist of their favorite Russian opera (hers was “Boris Godunov,” for the record). We learn little about Rice’s inner life as she sails to one triumph after another, as a Stanford fellowship becomes a tenure-track assistant professorship, the Council on Foreign Relations sends her to Washington and next thing she knows she’s working at the National Security Council, getting appointed provost of Stanford, and fielding calls from George Bush père, who wants her to meet his son for some foreign policy brush-up.

The rest we know. Yet we will need biographers to give us more than Rice does about her actual work and the reasons for its rapturous reception. Her book comes close only in furnishing scattered childhood evidence of a furiously disciplined, even insular, individual. Rice reminds us that she liked the Temptations and Led Zeppelin and admits a tendency to procrastination (one she has apparently indulged only rarely over the past 30 years). However, this is also someone who as a girl encouraged her father to rat out local kids who were having an unchaperoned party; refused to settle for the kiddie plate in restaurants; and as a teenager adhered enthusiastically to a schedule that had her up at 4:30 for skating practice, followed by school at 7, piano lessons and more skating afterward, and bedtime by 9:30. Plenty of her peers, even the above-average ones with self-sacrificing parents, would have considered this schedule unthinkable.

This singularity presumably helps explain the Republicanism that all but a sliver of her black generation rejected. Her explanation is that she’d rather be ignored by Republicans than patronized by Democrats, but this suggests an ironic, back-door motivation that does not correspond to her general politics, upon which she would find little disagreement from Michael (as well as Shelby) Steele. “There are no excuses and there is no place for victims,” she says she was taught. She rejects the idea that one needs mentors who “look like you,” as well as the term “African-­American.”

Yet Rice is not deracialized in the way some suppose. It would be hard to be, growing up in Birmingham in the ’50s. She knew the girls who died in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, and reminds us that to blacks of that era, the immediate response to John F. Kennedy’s assassination was terror that a Southerner was now in the White House.

Despite reports to the contrary, she favors affirmative action, albeit in the sense of outreach rather than so-called diversity quotas (although her comments here reveal a level of ambivalence about aspects of implementation). At Stanford in the 1990s, she helped found the Centers for a New Generation, a youth-education program in depressed East Palo Alto; and she acknowledges that her own rise at Stanford, early in her academic career, was facilitated by the university’s affirmative-action efforts.

We learn these things as facts, but over all, “Extraordinary, Ordinary People” is oddly detached for an autobiography. People like Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maya Angelou are fully present in their childhood recollections of similar circumstances in a way that Rice never is; she often seems to be watching rather than writing about herself. Those interested in her romantic life, for instance, will have to be satisfied with elliptical glimpses. (She didn’t marry her main college sweetheart, the Denver Broncos wide receiver Rick Upchurch, because he mysteriously “had too many irons in the fire.”)

In general, her political aperçus rarely go deeper than this: “But the war left the Iraqi dictator in power, able to threaten his neighbors and oppress his people. That would be a problem for another day.” Nor is this “Memoir of Family” an insider’s report on Rice’s life after 2000, to which she devotes a single page: the last one.

If there is a lesson from Rice’s book, it is that the civil rights revolution made it possible for an extremely talented black person (a woman, no less) to embrace a race-neutral subject and ride it into service as secretary of state, all the while thinking of herself largely as just a person. That the story is not exactly exciting can perhaps be taken as confirmation of how considerably times have changed.

John McWhorter teaches at Columbia University and is a contributing editor for The New Republic and City Journal.

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