Inaccurate

All utility bills are not created equal. Miss some payments to the electric or telephone utility and your power or phone service might be shut off. Neglect to pay your water bill in Baltimore and some counties, though, and risk losing your home. With such a severe price to pay, it's imperative that you deal with water bill disputes immediately - and not in the same way you might treat a lot of your other debt. Beth Woodell tackled her city water bill problem head-on when she noticed that her bill statements seldom matched the reading from the meter in her basement.

WASHINGTON -- Adding to complaints about one of the nation's primary counterterrorism safety nets, a Justice Department audit has concluded that the FBI provided the governmentwide terrorism watch list with incomplete, inaccurate and outdated information on suspects for nearly three years. As a result, many innocent people stayed on the "Consolidated Terrorist Watchlist" long after they were cleared of any wrongdoing, and real threats to national security were sometimes left off the list or not added to it in a timely manner, according to the audit, released yesterday by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.

WASHINGTON -- Head Start teacher Enrique Renteria sits on the floor, holding up a book and asking the dozen 3- and 4-year- olds sitting around him about the flowers in the picture: What color is this flower? How do you say it in Spanish? What shape is this petal? The children shout out the answers, and Renteria praises them or prompts them to try again. Then, less than 10 minutes after sitting down, the kids are up, off to another activity. Loudell Robb, a program director in charge of Head Start for Washington's Rosemount Center, where Renteria teaches, says young children learn best that way: through play and with activities suited to their short attention spans and bursts of energy.

WASHINGTON -- The other day, I gave two teachers I know $300,000 apiece. Hypothetical money, that is. If $300,000 fell out of the sky, I said, and you could use it to improve your school, how would you spend it? Mary Ann, who works at an elementary school in Los Angeles, wanted to hire classroom aides to work one-on-one with "troublesome students who have not been properly diagnosed so they can be educated and not just written off." Sonya, who teaches in the Chicago area, envisioned an incentive program - not necessarily monetary - that gave kids an attaboy for doing well in school and showed them "some kind of immediate connection between academic success and real-life success."

The feud between the city Police Department and city State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy flared again yesterday when Jessamy accused the department of using a "rogue database" to discredit her agency's prosecution of violent felons. Jessamy, who has clashed with Mayor Martin O'Malley and the Police Department in the past, told the city's Criminal Justice Coordinating Council that statistics compiled by the police and forwarded to some City Council members last month were inaccurate. The dispute stems from a contentious budget hearing last month during which Jessamy squared off against Councilman James B. Kraft and council Vice President Stephanie C. Rawlings Blake, who criticized the top prosecutor for not submitting her agency to a management audit.

Article was inaccurate, Mount Hebron girls say Regarding the article by Kate Crandall about Mount Hebron girls lacrosse ["At Mt. Hebron, winning so much it hurts,"Aug. 21], we wanted to let The Sun know that we were disappointed at the tone of the article, the inaccurate information, the misquotes and the quotes that were taken out of context. We literally spent hours talking to the reporter over the course of three months. While we did talk about the pressure of being on the top-ranked team in the nation and the dedication required to maintain that ranking, we also repeatedly emphasized the joy of playing together, the other aspects of high school life that we experienced and the excitement we feel about playing for our respective colleges.

WASHINGTON - We in the news business are in the soup again. This time it's the result of the printing and retraction of a Newsweek item claiming that a U.S. military investigation had uncovered abuse of the Quran at the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. I say "we" because evidence of false, inaccurate or unethical practice by one reporter or editor on one news publication sends ripples of public mistrust and disbelief coursing through the whole craft...

In a closed-door meeting yesterday, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and top executives of The Sun discussed the paper's coverage of the governor and the administration's order that bans state workers from speaking with two journalists at the newspaper. The 90-minute meeting, however, resulted in little apparent progress toward lifting the ban other than an agreement to continue talking. Ehrlich provided the paper's editors with a list of articles that he believes contain inaccuracies, and Sun editors agreed to review the stories and meet with the governor's staff to go over them soon.

WASHINGTON - Falling victim to "group think," American intelligence agencies gave top policy-makers and Congress inaccurate or overblown information about Iraq's banned weapons and repeatedly dismissed contrary viewpoints, the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a report released yesterday. The long-awaited report concluded that the key intelligence judgments used by the Bush administration to justify invading Iraq last year were incorrect or exaggerated. It attributed the failures to reliance on unproven assumptions, inadequate or misleading sources and bad management.

Residents of communities surrounding the giant Arundel Sand & Gravel Co. quarry in eastern Harford County are rallying their forces to protest the company's plan to shift two large piles of mining waste from one section of its property to another. Foes of the proposal argue that Arundel's plan poses a serious threat to the health of people nearby and to pupils at Meadowvale Elementary School. "They are trying to move two ugly piles that you can see from I-95 to one larger pile," John Blomquist, president of River Hills Club Inc., told a gathering of about 120 people at the community association's meeting Monday evening at Havre de Grace High School.