It appeared as a floating two-story house with a glowing red interior (previous report).  A week later it has attracted national media and a team of investigators led by a former FBI agent who wants to know if the object was an alien spacecraft.  John Velier and his team from Las Vegas went to the St. Louis, Missouri, area to learn more about a UFO spotted a week ago first by a Highland, Illinios, miniature-golf course owner and then by four police officers.  When it flew over Melvern Noll's head as he stood on his golf course about 4 a.m., the craft was traveling silently at a snail's pace. He said he saw at least two rows of windows and red lights inside the object and along its metallic dark belly.

"I kept my eyeballs on it," said Noll, 66. "It was all lighted up and so low that someone could have waved at me out the window."

He estimated it was about 1,000 feet above the ground.  Noll said he drove to the Highland police station and asked the dispatcher to call the Lebanon police because the object was floating that way.  Besides Noll, four police officers saw the object as it moved above Lebanon, Illinios; Shiloh, III.; Dupe, Illinios; and Millstadt, Illinios  More than 20 calls about the sighting ring into the Millstadt police station a day since It was first reported last Friday. Chief Ed Wilkerson posted his officers' report on the department's Web site along with the drawings and photo. He stopped media interviews, refusing inquires from ABC News in New York and Extra, the tabloid TV news show.

"It's going to affect policing if we don't put a stop to it," he said. "I never thought anything like this would draw this much attention, Well, at least it puts Millstadt on the map."

Police in Millstadt don't believe the sighting was a visitor from outer space but they won't make any assumptions about what it was, either.

"This has been one of the biggest things we have experienced in this area. It's reached the world," Wilkerson said.

Velier's team came from the National Institute for Discovery Science, a Las Vegas research institute to collect evidence of the sighting.  The institute, founded in 1995, has about a dozen former law enforcement officers and scientists investigating sightings professionally

"We are using the scientific method," said Colm Kelleher, an administrator for the institute.  "We are looking for facts, not trying to promote any agenda."

The institute sent a team to Illinois because of the overwhelming credibility of the witnesses - nearly all police officers, Kelleher said.

"Police officers are a higher quality observers than other witnesses because they have good memories," he said.

WASHINGTON - Government lawyers studying ways to limit Microsoft's expansive influence in the technology industry want to break the software giant into three parts, arguing that lesser remedies in the antitrust trial would be inadequate, people close to these discussions confirmed yesterday.  If U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson were to agree to such dramatic solution, such a breakup of Bill Gates' software empire would carry enormous implications for the way consumers buy and use computer programs.  Justice Department lawyers laid out their favored proposal to break Microsoft into three parts during a secret meeting last week in Washington with representatives of the 19 states also suing the company over alleged antitrust violations, according to people close to the case who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Justice Department, which last month disclosed it had hired as its adviser a financial consulting firm, Greenhill & Co. LLC of New York, argued that any lesser sanctions - such as prohibiting the company from abusing its influence would be inadequate to rein in Microsoft's aggressive behavior.  USA Today reported that the government  favored breaking Microsoft into two parts, not three. The Justice Department said the story was "inaccurate in several important respects, and it does not adequately represent our views."

Can you imagine working at the following company?  It has a little over 500 employees with the following statistics:

• 7 have been arrested for fraud
• 3 have been arrested for assault
• 8 have been arrested for shoplifting
• 21 are current defendants in lawsuits
• 29 have been accused of spousal abuse
• 19 have been accused of writing bad checks
• 117 have bankrupted at least two businesses
• 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
• 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges
• In 1998 alone, 84 were stopped for drunk driving

Can you guess which organization this is?  Give up?  It's the 535 members of your United States Congress. The same group that perpetually cranks out hundreds upon hundreds of new laws designed to keep the rest of us in  line.

In the past few days, Millstadt, Missouri, police Officer Craig Stevens has slept little, taken countless phone messages from national experts and heard all of the little green men jokes his fellow officers can muster.

"It's amusing - to a point," he said.  "It's not like I'm the only one who saw it and I'm Joe Blow from the local bar who just stepped out drunk, you know?"

Stevens and at least three other officers from the Lebanon, Shiloh and Dupe, Missouri, police departments said they saw something in the sky early Wednesday - something that looked like a UFO.  Shaped like an arrowhead, sprinkled with dimmer lights all over its surface and three brighter lights on its tail, the thing made its northeast-to-southwest flight across the area about 4 a.m. CST The first report came in to the Highland, Missouri, police from the owner of a miniature golf course. He was driving into Lebanon, so the police contacted Lebanon authorities. The officer there guffawed at the dispatcher but he spotted the thing heading toward Shiloh, and he sped through traffic lights to try to catch up with it.  It reached Shiloh, where an officer there spotted it.  Stevens, sitting in his patrol car in
Millstadt on his overnight shift, heard the radio chatter and drove to the north end of town.  He scanned the sky but saw only airplane lights.  Then he looked west.

"Wow," he thought, jumping out of the car. "This thing's huge!"

He said it moved slowly, like a blimp, about 1,000 feet off the ground. It was about two stories high and about three times as long. In addition to the three lights in the back, dimmer lights sprinkled the entire surface, almost, as he described it, like a starfield camouflage.  He grabbed his Polaroid camera and snapped a shot. The object headed toward Dupe, and Stevens radioed dispatch.  The dispatcher radioed back, reporting an officer there spotted it, too.  The Polaroid didn't develop well in the cold, and the image only shows the three bright lights. At the station, Stevens made an unofficial police report
and sketched a likeness of what he saw.

"It's been driving me nuts since I've seen it," he said. "I haven't been able to sleep for the last day and a half."

SAN FRANCISCO - Makers of anti-virus software are warning computer users that a new version of a destructive bug may be slumbering in their e-mail in boxes.  The MiniZip virus, first reported early last week, struck several major companies Tuesday, damaging files on hard drives and overloading e-mail systems, the software makers said.  Anti-virus experts cautioned users against opening an e-mail if they don't know the sender or why it was sent. They said the virus could be fought with updated anti-virus software that can be  downloaded from their Web sites.

The government-chartered CERT Coordination Center at Canegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh had no first-hand reports as of yesterday. Bill Pollak, a spokesman, said he could not comment further.  Dan Schrader, vice president at Trend Micro, an anti-virus software maker in Cupertino, California, said he fielded complaints of significant problems from four Fortune 500 companies and many other companies.

Sal Viveros, a marketing manager for Network Associates, a Santa Clara, California based company that also writes anti-virus software, said 20 large corporations had been affected by Wednesday evening.  Both declined to identify the affected companies.

MiniZip, also identified as Worm.ExploreZip (pack), is a version of Worn.ExploreZip, which infected hundreds of thousands of computers at major companies in June. This version is compressed, meaning it has been reduced in size. Unlike the Melissa and Chemobyl bugs that spread like wildfire over the Internet earlier this year,  Worm.ExploreZip did most of its damage within infected organizations' computer networks.  On an infected computer, the MiniZip reads the addresses of new and unread
mail in the Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express or Exchange e-mail programs and automatically sends itself as a response, changing the subject line from, for example, "Work Meeting" to "Re: Work Meeting."

The body of the message reads: "Hi (recipient's name)! I received your e-mail and I shall send you an e-mail ASAP.  Till then, take a look at the attached zipped docs. bye."

The virus is contained in an attachment to the e-mail called "zipped-files.exe.''  Double clicking on the attachment activates the virus in the new victim's system.  It then destroys various files by replacing them with empty files.  As with Worm.ExploreZip, MiniZip is only known to attack computers using Microsoft operating systems Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT. Rival operating systems such as Macintosh and Unix apparently are not vulnerable.

LONDON - The British Museum orchestrated an "illegal and improper" cover-up for 60 years of the irreparable damage inflicted on the Elgin Marbles under its stewardship, according to a report published yesterday by a -senior academic.  Two British prime ministers, the museum's professional staff and even the present culture secretary, Chris Smith, have been hoodwinked by the conspiracy, according to the historian William St. Clair.

The latest twist in the long-running saga of the marbles comes on the day the museum, the official custodian of the 2,500-year-old Greek sculptures, will come under its most sustained questioning yet about its trusteeship of the treasure when an international symposium on the issue opens in London.  Central to the symposium will be the damage caused to the sculptures when they were scraped and cleaned using wire brushes and copper chisels in the 1930's.  According to St. Clair, a former treasury and ministry of defense civil  servant,  the museum  conspired to keep the extent of the damage a closely guarded secret.

The scandal has its roots in the late 1930's when the government entered an agreement with Lord Duveen, an entrepreneur with a reputation for "touching up" European masterpieces, to finance a new gallery for the marbles. He decided that the sculptures, which had become discolored by years of exposure to the London atmosphere, should be cleaned until they were whiter than white, and induced museum staff to carry out the work.  The museum, fearful that its reputation would be irrevocably tarnished if the full scale of the damage inflicted on the marbles ever emerged, set about covering up the scandal.

St. Clair, whose paper is published in the International Journal of Cultural Property, claims parliament and the press were misled at the time. In 1958, Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was not told about the damage when he was advised to assure parliament that the sculptures had been well cared for at the museum.  When the incoming Labor government reviewed the policy concerning the marbles in 1965 Harold Wilson was not made aware of the damage caused during the 1930's, and when the present culture secretary, Chris Smith, made a statement to parliament about the condition of the marbles in June 1998 he was not alerted to the problem.

According to St. Clair the museum's official records relating to the episode, which should have been available to the public, have also been illegally withheld.  In 1984 the museum told him that he could not see the papers because there were security implications in the file, a claim that the museum later admitted was not the case.  In a paper submitted to the symposium - which has taken on special significance since the House of Commons select committee on culture, media and sport agreed to review the controversial issue of the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece - the British Museum denies  the  cover-up charges.  It claims the Duveen episode has always been in the public domain, and that the alleged damage to the marbles is not nearly as severe as has been maintained.

The symposium will be presented with a 100-page report by Greek conservationists detailing  the "irreparable damage" inflicted on the marbles in the 1930's. The six-member team of archaeologist, conservationists and  chemical engineers spent four days studying the marbles with the latest technological methods - the first time the treasures have been examined by anybody outside the British Museum since 1816.

CHICAGO - Chester Nerheim gets mad a lot these days. Every time he turns on the TV or opens his newspaper, somebody is talking about how the new millennium is just weeks away.  He's put in calls to everyone from the editor of his hometown newspaper in Muskegon, Michigan, to radio commentator Paul Harvey.  He'll tell anyone who'll listen that, hey, the new millennium won't start until January 1, 2001. All his talk - not to mention the fact that he got his grandson to raise the issue with his junior high teacher - has his wife muttering something about giving it a rest.

"I'm not a perfect individual, but I think right is right and I guess on this issue I'm kind of adamant," says the 76-year-old Nerheim. "I like to see things kind of square."

He's not alone. All across the country,   so-called  millennium purists are phoning, writing and e-mailing complaints about everything from talking M&M's who proclaim themselves the "Official Candy of the New Millennium" to America Online's "Countdown. to the Millennium."

Their point: The new millennium really begins on Jan. 1, 2001, more than 13 months away.  They're even voting. On Millennium 321, the self-proclaimed "official" Web Site of the new millennium, more than 9,000 electronic votes have been east - more than 80 percent coming down on the side of January 1, 2001.  The furor has spawned other Web sites, including one belonging to the Real Millennium Group, which millennium 2001 types can join, buy a T-shirt, and scold those who don't agree with them, or don't care.

"Well, then, let's just say that two plus two equals nine," Jim Bergevin, founder of the Real Millennium Group, wrote to someone suggesting that 2000 be made the millennium to "solve all the problems and fighting."  Bergevin, the general manager of Slocum's Bowlodrome in Ewing, NJ, has taken on the anonymous and the famous. "This is the stupidest thing I have seen yet," he wrote on the Web site after opening Peter Jennings's book, The Century, and reading how the 20th century will end Dec. 31, 1999.

Jennings himself got a letter for that one. TV Guide has heard from Bergevin, too.

"What really bugs me is (that) people are ignoring  history,"  Bergevin said.

That history is the work of a monk named Dionysius Exiguus, who's also been called Dennis the Small or Denny the Runt, depending on who's translating his name.  About 1,500 years ago, Dionysius was assigned by a pope to calculate the exact date of Easter. In doing that, he came up with a calendar that begins with A.D. 1, which he calculated as the year of Christ's birth.  It seems he made a mistake on the birth year, which means in all likelihood the millennium was actually three or four years ago but that's another story.  He's also been criticized for starting with one rather than zero but since the Roman numeral system in use at the time had no zero, it's tough to call him on that one.  Whatever
problems he had, that calendar is all the history so-called millennium purists need.

"The inexorable mathematical logic which cannot be refuted is that the year 2000 is the last year of this millennium and 2001 is the first of the next millennium," said Frank Morgan, a mathematics professor at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

The Royal Greenwich Observatory and the United States Naval Observatory have weighed in on the side of the 2001 people.  So have some Trekkies. Nobody takes their star dates more seriously and while the nationwide network of Star Trek fan clubs hasn't taken an official position, it's no secret where Trekkie sentiments lie.

"Mr. Spock would say the year 2001," said Richard Benker, a 58 year-old fleet captain in Starfleet International and auto parts store employee in Las Vegas. "If Vulcans celebrated the new year, that's when they would celebrate it."

So what's the big deal? Some say there isn't one.

"It's like a kid born at 11:45 at night on January 6," said University of Kansas mathematics professor Saul Stahl. "On his 10th birthday you celebrate in the afternoon. You don't wait until 11:45 to say he's 10 even though you know technically he's not 10."  Then, he adds, "My position is I really don't care."

Nerheim hates that kind of talk. "The editor of the Chronicle told me, 'Yeah, you're right, but what difference does it make?' " he said.

"I took umbrage at that."    Larry Smith, co-founder of Millennium 321, calls such disregard for the truth "very dangerous," particularly for children. "I want my kids to learn history as fact," he said. "With movies like JFK, that's very difficult to do these days."

WASHINGTON - Hours after President Kennedy was assassinated, FBI agents reportedly listened to a tape of a phone call that a man identifying himself as "Lee Oswald" had placed to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City.  They made a startling discovery: The voice on the tape was not Oswald's, government records say.  This controversial tape has been a question mark in the assassination investigation since Kennedy was killed. The assassination occurred 36 years ago today and only now have new details about the tape come to light.  The CIA said years ago that the, tapes on which it recorded the call were
erased.  Documents released in recent years said otherwise. The latest and newest of declassified documents offer more evidence that the tapes survived.

The discovery that the voice on the tape was someone other than Oswald was a "disquieting discovery because the man who impersonated Oswald was still at large," said John Newman, an ex-military  intelligence analyst, author and professor at the University of Maryland.

Oswald was in Mexico City in September and October 1963. During his one-week stay, he contacted the Soviet Embassy and the Cuban consulate, inquiring about visas needed to go to the Soviet Union via Cuba.  It is widely known that the CIA bugged telephones and took surveillance photos at both the embassy and consulate but the agency maintained that it had routinely erased and reused tapes of the phone intercepts.

A message from the CIA's Mexico City station to headquarters on Nov. 24, 1963, said, "HQ has full transcripts all pertinent calls. Regret complete recheck shows tapes for this period already erased."

It was also known that while he was in Mexico City, Oswald had contact with Valeriy Kostikov - a man that one CIA memo described as a "case officer in an operation which is evidently sponsored by the KGB's 13th Department responsible for sabotage and assassination." It was the caller who is thought to have impersonated Oswald who links him to this Soviet spy unit known as Department 13.

Newly declassified documents - some released in the past six months - say that after the president was shot, a Navy plane carried a top-secret package from Mexico City to Dallas and landed there about 4 a.m. EST the day after the murder.  Former FBI agent Eldon Rudd, later a Republican congressman from Arizona, was aboard the plane.

"There were no tapes to my knowledge," Rudd said in a telephone interview. "I brought the pictures up (from Mexico) and it was my understanding that it was just pictures.''

Documents contradict Rudd's understanding. A newly released memo dated  Nov. 27, 1963, from FBI headquarters to its office in Mexico City, stated, "If tapes covering any contacts subject (Oswald) with Soviet or Cuban embassies available, forward to bureau for laboratory examination and analysis together with transcript.  Include  tapes  previously reviewed Dallas if they were returned to you."

A transcript of a telephone call FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made to President Johnson just six hours after the plane arrived in Dallas supports the belief that FBI agents listened to a tape that suggested an impersonation.

"We have up here the tape and, the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet embassy using Oswald's name," Hoover told Johnson, according to a transcript of that call released in 1993. "That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man's voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it appears that there is a second person who was at the Soviet embassy down there."

While they would not speculate about the identity of the caller, several assassination researchers privately offered some explanations: Oswald could have been impersonated by a CIA officer who called the Soviet Embassy simply to fish for details about what Oswald was doing in Mexico City, or maybe someone was trying to link Oswald to the KGB's assassination unit before Kennedy's murder.

 WASHINGTON - An e-mail making its way to computers across the country warns that Congress plans to impose a 5¢ charge on every e-mail sent. It says the legislation was introduced by "Congressman Schnell" and would benefit the Postal Service but no such bill exists, nor does "Congressman Schnell."  The hoax that has spurred angry e-mailers to call, write and, yes, e-mail their representatives on Capitol Hill.

"It comes in waves," said Rep. Heather Wilson, a New Mexico Republican, whose office has fielded the complaints for months. "It's a hoax."

In the year and a half she's been in Congress, Wilson said this is the first time her staff has had to respond to speculation spread on the Internet.

"The bottom line is that the Internet is a marvelous tool, and something which has helped open new worlds to millions of people," he wrote to his constituents in mid October. ". . . but like any other tool, we've got to be careful - not only in how we use it, but in what we're asked to believe."

The Postal Service was concerned enough about the hoax to post a message on its Web site (www.usps.com) denying it: "The U.S. Postal Service has no authority to surcharge e-mail messages sent over the Internet, nor would it support such legislation."

The Federal Communications Commission (www.fcc.gov) has a similar message: "... the FCC
has no intention of assessing per minute charges on Internet traffic or changing the way consumers obtain and pay for access to the Internet," adding it has received "hundreds of thousands" of e-mails on the subject over the last two years.

The hoax is one of two floating around  the  Internet.  Another claims that "CNN has reported that
within the next two weeks Congress is going to vote on allowing telephone companies to charge a toll fee for Internet access. Translation: Every time we send a long distance e-mail we will receive a long distance charge. This will get costly."

SAN FRANCISCO - Computer security experts are. warning of a dangerous new e-mail virus, one able to destroy information even when users don't fully open their messages.  "Bubbleboy," apparently nicknamed after an episode of the TV show Seinfeld, is the first known email virus that doesn't even need to be fully opened to be activated. Just highlighting the e-mail's subject line in Microsoft Outlook Express activates its hidden code.  It also takes every address in a computer's e-mail program and passes the virus along, unless the computer user has installed a patch distributed in August by Microsoft.

The virus, technically a "worm" program, requires that a component of Windows, called Windows Scripting Host, also be installed on the victim's computer. It doesn't affect Microsoft's more robust Windows NT software typically used by companies. Unlike viruses, worms are self-contained and don't attach themselves to another program to propagate.

Researchers at Network Associates, a Santa Clara computer security company, said "'Bubbleboy' could become the framework for the easy delivery of a host of malicious programs. This ushers in the next evolution in viruses."

"It breaks one of the long-standing rules that you have to open an e-mail attachment to become infected," spokesman Sal Viueros said. "That's all changed now."

"Bubbleboy" was e-mailed late Monday to Network Associates and the company put a free software patch capable of blocking the attack on its Web site the next day.  The company isn't certain who sent the virus, but researchers believed the threat is so serious that they notified the FBI, said  Vincent Gullotto, director of the company's virus detection team.

"It could basically disable your PC easily, "Gullotto said. "This could be a watershed."

After midnight on the day he was going to be arrested, Jay Brocco wandered around Dupont Circle in a sleepless daze. A short while earlier, he knew, Fairfax County police had scoured his Reston, VA, home in his absence, removed his computer and some family photos and accused him of being a sex pervert. In a few hours, Brocco was going to surrender, get fingerprinted and be charged with indecent exposure.

Walking the streets of Washington, he was a fugitive of sorts, aware that Fairfax police held an arrest warrant for him. His wife was home alone, bewildered. Earlier, Brocco had called her from his lawyers' office, the first of many emotional conversations the two would have in the ensuing weeks.

"I didn't do this," he recalls telling her.

Olga Brocco assured him she already knew that.  What neither of them knew - then or now, really - was how Jay Brocco, the quintessential middle-aged, solid citizen kind of guy, with a good job and a loving family, got caught up in a Kafka-esque drama opposite a dogged detective intent on nailing him with a crime - a sex crime, at that - that Brocco didn't commit.  In his 54 years, he'd had virtually no run-ins with the law. He'd lived a quietly successful life in the Virginia suburbs: chief financial officer for a major defense firm, married 28 years, a father, a grandfather. Family and friends describe him the same way: a private person, a Christian, respected.  Now,  Brocco  desperately sensed his good name vanishing. After his arrest, he'd have to tell at least his closest friends and his boss of his humiliation. Once the newspapers got wind of it, everywhere he went he'd feel that people were staring at him, whispering.

In the Dupont Circle hotel room  where  his  lawyers arranged for him to spend his last hours of anonymity, wanting to spare him a middle-of-the-night arrest, Brocco couldn't sit still, much less sleep, as he pictured a squad of investigators rooting through his belongings.

"Your husband's got a secret life you're not aware of," the detective had told his wife, showing her an affidavit accusing Brocco of flashing a nude photo of himself to a 16-year-old male lifeguard at his Reston health club.

"The loneliest feeling in the world" is how Brocco now recalls the long night he spent waiting for  his  public  degradation. "You're the only person in the world, other than the actual perpetrator, who knows you didn't do this."

Remarkably, within two weeks Brocco's lawyers had convinced Fairfax prosecutors that, in fact, he didn't do it, that the police had the wrong guy. The charge of indecent  exposure  was dismissed but while it's relatively easy to erase an arrest from court records, blotting it from the psyche is an entirely different matter.  That is where things stand now.  To this day, nearly 11 weeks after police first knocked on his door, Brocco has not told his aging parents, retired and living in Florida, what happened. Why turn their world upside down, too?

The ordeal that Brocco later would compare with being cast in a Hitchcock horror film didn't begin with the search of his house Oct. 4 or his arrest the following day.  It started more than a month earlier, on the afternoon of Aug. 24, when Fairfax police Detective Ricky Savage visited the Broccos' house in the North Point, area of Reston. Brocco was at his job at TRW, where he is chief financial officer for a company subsidiary.

Savage asked Olga Brocco to have her husband call him. She asked why. "I can't tell you," she recalled Savage saying, "but he knows what it's about."

She figured it was something related to her husband's security clearance. That night, Brocco left a message for the detective.  The next day, Savage called back, again while Brocco was at work.

"What is this about?" Olga asked a second time.

"We know what he's doing," she said Savage told her: "and we're watching him."

In these and several subsequent contacts, the Broccos say, Savage never explained why he was calling, and he always seemed to phone when only Olga was home. The calls were unnerving.

"What were the police after?"

"Your husband knows ..."

Only, he didn't know. The couple hired a lawyer.  Several weeks later, without warning, came the Oct. 4 ,search of their home.  Savage and six other officers showed up. One of them handed Olga Brocco - Jay was at work a search warrant as the officers fanned out through the house. An affidavit filed to obtain the warrant outlined the July 9 incident at the health club and said police were searching for child pornography or evidence of child sexual abuse - items to "substantiate the victim's report of indecent exposure." The officers also had an arrest warrant for Brocco.  The next morning, lawyers at his side, Brocco turned himself in to Savage and was booked, handcuffed and taken to the Fairfax jail.

"You go through the fear, the paranoia and anger," he said. "You feel totally helpless."

With his release on bond a few hours later came a new worry: "You pray it's not publicized. 'Is this going to be in the press?' is another devastating thought."

Two days later, his picture appeared in the Fairfax Journal with a story quoting from the police
affidavit.

At work, someone approached and said, "Sorry about the article."

Brocco asked, "What article?"

The co-worker showed him.

"My heart just sank," be said. "I left work. I couldn't function."

Within  days  of Brocco's arrest, his attorneys, William Moffitt and Henry Asbill, had determined
several key facts, chief among them: Brocco wasn't even at the health club the day of the
incident. The club has a pool side surveillance camera, but police never looked at the tape for July 9; nor does Brocco's name appear on the computerized attendance log for that date.

The  defense  team  also learned that the police hadn't shown the lifeguard Brocco's picture.  When  Moffitt  informed prosecutors of this, they directed Savage to show the photo to the lifeguard.  The teenager took one look and told the police they had the wrong man.  Three days later, charges against Brocco were dropped.  On Oct. 18, hours after Brocco's case was dismissed, Fairfax police charged another man, James A. Brokke, of Falls Church, VA. Brokke, 60, attends the same health club as Brocco. Legal correspondence in the case suggests the lifeguard may have confused the similar sounding names in his initial report on the incident.

Fairfax police have begun an internal investigation into how Brocco was wrongly accused and "will take appropriate action based on the outcome," said Lt. Col. William Brown.

"If an apology is due," Chief J. Thomas Manger has said, "I will give him one."

That, and maybe more. Brocco and his attorneys say they are considering filing a civil action
against the police department.

"I don't see any evidence that an investigation occurred," Asbill said. "If even a cursory investigation had occurred, my client would never have been charged."

Jay Brocco got his good name back. It cost him more than $35,000 in legal fees. Some think it cost him a lot more.

MILWAUKEE, WI - Touched by the plight of Lenny Miller, who owns a cabin in Wisconsin and was sentenced to jail for setting a booby trap for burglars on his property, strangers have sent him dozens of letters and donations.  Many have mailed checks and cash to help defray $14,000 in attorney and jail fees that Miller incurred in the ease.

Miller, a Minnesota shoe factory worker, was sentenced to six months in jail in September after the booby trap wounded a would-be burglar in the ankle in July.  A Florida radio station called to help start a fund drive. A trucker from Texas called the local Wisconsin newspaper, the Barren News-Shield, to find out where he could send money to Miller. A chili supper last weekend at the Almena Veterans of Foreign Wars post near his cabin raised $1,000 from well-wishers. He's had interviews with Minnesota Public Radio, a Milwaukee television station and newspapers in Minnesota.  All of this has been a bit of a surprise for Miller.

"I'd have to say I'm totally shocked. I didn't expect it," Miller said in a phone interview.

Miller will begin his jail sentence Jan. 4 in Red Wing, MI, where he lives and works at Red Wing Shoe Co. He must pay $65 a day for work release. The $11,700 tab is due on the day he begins serving his jail term. A defense fund set up at the Firstar Bank in Almena has netted $1,100, Miller said. He hopes to raise half of the money he needs to pay his jail and attorney bills and then take out a loan to pay the rest.  Many letter writers and callers to radio programs have sympathized with Miller.

"People write in (and say) what a miscarriage of justice and what a creek," said Miller, who pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of endangering safety by negligent handling of a weapon.  "I'm intrigued that there are that many people out there who are actually paying attention to the media and that there are so many cabin owners who have been burglarized and they're fed up with the system," Miller said.

Miller's cabin was broken into three times in less than a year. He notified the Barren County (WI) Sheriff's Department, but the burglaries were not solved. After the third break-in, Miller got fed up
and positioned a shotgun to fire if someone broke into a shed where he keeps his all terrain vehicle.  The man wounded by the trap, Arlin P. Zuech, was charged with attempted burglary. He was scheduled for a plea hearing Wednesday.

In sentencing Miller to six months in jail, two years of probation and 100 hours of community service, Barren County Judge Edward Brunner noted that anyone could have gotten hurt by the booby trap. Calling it "vigilante justice," the judge also admonished Miller for taking the law into his own hands.

Miller said he has been encouraged by the expressions of sympathy, including those from the many people who said they had been victims of burglaries. "There is pity there, and they hope something can be done about the law," said Miller.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Sixty-eight-year-old Gene Moe couldn't have been in a more vulnerable position when the Kodiak brown bear came for him.  He had nearly finished butchering a Sitka blacktail deer. The animal's hide and quarters were set aside near his rifle. His hands were inside the deer's carcass, removing the tenderloins.  That's when he heard slobbering and the thunder of heavy feet coming through the devil's club in a thick patch of forest on Raspberry Island, 35 miles northwest of the city of Kodiak, Alaska.  Moe, who has lived in Alaska for 50 years, looked up to see a charging bear less than 10 feet away.  His first thought was that his time had come.

Looking up to see the bear, Moe recalled from his hospital bed Wednesday, "I know I'm done but I'm not going down without a fight."

The Anchorage contractor figured he had just,enough time to do what damage he could with the weapon at hand - a hunting knife with a 6-inch blade.

"I tried to get him in the eye the first time," Moe said. "But I missed. I hit his head."

The grizzly didn't seem to notice. The knife bounced off the bear's thick skull. After knocking Moe down, the bear clamped its jaws on his right shoulder and started to shake.

"This one wanted to kill me," Moe said.

He could think of only two things: keep the bear away from his face and hang on to the knife.  Bears, he knew, instinctively try to grab for the head of an adversary - be it another bear or a man - to disable it. He knew this was the only hope he had of fighting off the animal.  Moe is unclear about what happened next, but the bear eventually let go of his shoulder and grabbed his leg. By now he was a wreck, with cuts all over his arms, legs and shoulders. But his spirit remained strong.  With an arm free, Moe could finally fight back. He stabbed the bear again and again and again with the 6-inch blade, driving the knife in as deep as he could. He doesn't know how many times he stabbed the bear. He doesn't know whether the blood that coated everything was his or the bear's. All he knows is that he was fighting for his life.

"Finally (the bear) backed away and went over and laid down," Moe said. "Probably the 10th or 15th or 20th time I stabbed him."

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