Phone Calls

GADGETS: Foreign phone calls The new National Geographic Talk Abroad Travel Phone lets users receive incoming phone calls without charge in 65 countries, including all of Europe. Rates begin at 90 cents a minute for outgoing calls in Europe, according to Cellular Abroad, the company that is distributing and servicing the phone. The phone, which has the National Geographic name and logo on it, works on a pre paid plan, so users do not have to sign a contract. It can be rented starting at $49 a week and purchased for $199.

She's a Georgia peach who never imagined true love would carry her so far from her Atlanta home. He calls himself a "Baltimoron" and says he can't imagine living anywhere but Fells Point.How did two people from such diverse geographic backgrounds end up getting married in North Carolina on May 23? It's easy to explain the location: The wedding site is a stately historic home built by her great-great grandfather in the picturesque mountains south of Asheville.The rest of the story spans several years and involves old friends, electronic mail and a small fortune spent on telephone calls and plane fare.

Every time Joseph and Dubby Balter pick up the phone to make a long-distance call, the Baltimore couple become communication-age pioneers.What's so special about their telephone service? At first blush, very little. When Joseph wants to call his sister in Australia, for instance, he picks up his phone, punches in a calling-card number, and the phone rings 12,000 miles away.But once he starts to talk, he's on the cutting edge. The Balters use a long-distance service called Net2Phone Direct by IDT Corp.

Brand name didn't matter when John Carruth bought his latest mobile phone in early November.Features? Also unimportant. Twenty-four hours into owning his new Nokia phone, this Dallas telecom engineer saw little or no fundamental difference from his old Ericsson. Just one thing counted, Carruth said. "It was the phone that came with the special deal."Ahhh, that special deal.AT&T Wireless' flagship Digital One Rate plan, which set a new standard for how mobile phone calls are priced, has also made Finland's Nokia the hottest mobile phone manufacturer in the United States.

CHICAGO -- Iridium, the global satellite phone service, has opened for business, giving people the power to make and receive calls anywhere from Mount Everest to the Dead Sea."After 11 years of hard work, we are proud to announce that we are open for business," Iridium LLC Chief Executive Edward Staiano said in a statement yesterday. "The potential uses of Iridium products are boundless."Iridium, which took $5 billion and 11 years to create, made its service available Sunday after a one-month delay.

NOW THAT WE'VE all misdialed our phone calls a half dozen times, I have an observation to offer. What good does it do to dial a phone these days? The chances are you'll never get a human voice to greet you.In time, I'll get accustomed to the 410-301 business. This isn't the first time I've experienced a change in phone usage. After all, didn't we have to shed all those distinctive names of the old telephone exchanges like Saratoga, Homewood, Tuxedo, and Forest? I don't really miss those cumbersome calls from the long-distance operator saying that she had a call from Lock Haven on the wire.

Call it the ultimate advertising coup or simple serendipity.Whatever it was, it sold mattresses.When the calls rolled in to the Laurel office of Dial-A-Mattress last Saturday, the question was the same: "What is the answer to the clue for 1 Down in today's crossword puzzle?"Sales staff members were a bit puzzled. All except one, who was doing The Sun's crossword puzzle and found this clue: Order for 1-800-Mattres. He knew the answer. Serta, of course.But thousands of people were stumped. So they called the number and were connected with Dial-A-Mattress.

WASHINGTON -- Senate investigators sought yesterday to show President Clinton was being deceptive in his claims that he cannot recall making fund-raising phone calls from the White House.Republicans on the committee chaired by Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee commended businessman Richard Jenrette after two hours of testimony in which he acknowledged receiving phone calls from Clinton in 1994 and from Vice President Al Gore in 1996 asking him for political donations.Jenrette told the Governmental Affairs Committee he wrote five checks totaling $50,000 to the Democratic National Committee after the president called him to say he wanted to raise a total of $2 million "from 40 good friends" -- an average of $50,000 apiece.

WASHINGTON -- During the 1992 presidential campaign the Clinton-Gore headquarters in California made a practice of faxing daily ''talking points'' to party leaders and officials around the state so they could reinforce the arguments the national candidates were making that day.One official, then-Rep. Leon Panetta, refused to allow the talking points to be faxed to his office. Because the fax machine and paper were government property, the future White House chief of staff ruled, they couldn't be used for political purposes.

THE PLANE LEAVES for Phoenix in an hour. I am dressed in comfortable pants and a long, loose blouse, eager to attend my first national biology teacher's conference. My husband will drop me off at the airport on his way to work. I hear evidence of the morning's activities -- the shower, a hair dryer, the soft thud of the refrigerator door closing. The aroma of a pop tart wafts upstairs.''Where's the jeep?'' my husband asks, standing at the south window facing our driveway.''The jeep?''I open the east window overlooking our front yard.

Gov. Martin O'Malley is launching a federal lobbying effort to allow the jamming of cell phone calls by prison inmates, and he wants permission to test the technology to see if it works. The governor's request, made public on Sunday, is part of an effort to crack down on witness intimidation, prison gangs and retaliation. It comes several weeks after federal authorities indicted four corrections officers and members of the Black Guerrilla Family prison gang accused of conducting business on conference calls with prisoners across the state using smuggled cell phones.

For soldiers stationed overseas, phone calls are a crucial link to loved ones and the lives they left behind to serve their country. So when Colin Sawyer's mom in Mount Wolf, Pa., sent him an AT&T prepaid phone card, the 24-year-old Army gunner in Iraq was excited to have the precious 550 minutes to call home. "I went to use it one night after patrol and an automated voice came on and said, `You have 55 minutes left for this call,'" said Sawyer, who was on leave recently to visit family.

GADGETS: Foreign phone calls The new National Geographic Talk Abroad Travel Phone lets users receive incoming phone calls without charge in 65 countries, including all of Europe. Rates begin at 90 cents a minute for outgoing calls in Europe, according to Cellular Abroad, the company that is distributing and servicing the phone. The phone, which has the National Geographic name and logo on it, works on a pre paid plan, so users do not have to sign a contract. It can be rented starting at $49 a week and purchased for $199.

Now that the primaries are over and the political riff-raff has been sent packing -- oh, not you, William Donald Schaefer, you're a legend, even if it was time for you to go -- I have a small request to make of the remaining candidates for office as we head into the general elections in November. And that request is: Don't call me at home, OK? Don't call if you're running for governor. Don't call if you're running for Congress. Don't call even if you're running for dog catcher. (I don't know, does anyone even run for dog catcher anymore?

A federal appeals court has backed a Bush administration effort to make it easier to wiretap Internet-based phone calls, a ruling that supporters say will seal off a haven for criminals and terrorists and that critics fear could erode privacy rights. In its 2-1 decision yesterday, a three-judge panel of the Washington appeals court ruled that the Federal Communications Commission had the right to expand the reach of a 12-year-old telephone wiretap law into cyberspace. The court ruled that computers handling strictly internal communications in private networks - such as those run by corporations, colleges and universities - would not have to install the equipment throughout their systems.

Let terrorists worry about surveillance I would compare the collection of telephone records to the tracking of a contagious disease ("Hayden defends legality of NSA spying," May 19). No one I know would have a problem with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracking a contagious disease-carrier, especially if it meant stopping the spread of disease or learning whom to vaccinate. And I do not think that anyone would have a problem with tracking a serial killer to his or her lair to prevent the next killing of an innocent person.

WASHINGTON -- A report that major phone companies gave the National Security Agency voluminous data about the phone calls of ordinary Americans adds a new element to the debate over government surveillance in the post-Sept. 11 era. It also raises a host of new questions about exactly what the government might be up to, and what it does or doesn't know about the activities of millions of its citizens. Siobhan Gorman, who covers the intelligence agencies for The Sun, looks at some of the questions that are emerging.

This isn't about your safety. You can watch Sanjay Gupta on CNN for that. This has absolutely nothing to do with the study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that found 80 percent of crashes happen within three seconds of driver distractions, most of which are phone calls. This is about you boring the crap out of me. You need to stop calling me from your cell phones while you're driving. I've seen through your tricks. You're not looking to catch up, or let me know you care, or discuss how my emotional distance is deteriorating the marriage.

A Baltimore man convicted this year of a 1998 rape solved through DNA testing was sentenced to life in prison yesterday in a case that prosecutors say had an unusual - and chilling - twist. Thurman Spencer Jr. began calling the woman he was accused of raping after his arrest, Baltimore County prosecutors said. It was an attempt, they said, to concoct a defense that he had a consensual sexual relationship with the woman and that his semen, found on her bedsheets in October 1998 after a masked gunman broke into her Owings Mills apartment, was not the result of an assault.

Afew more things on Miguel Tejada that may or may not interest you ... I had to get Tejada at the ballpark because he has been nearly impossible to track down this offseason. And I'm not just saying he hasn't returned reporters' phone calls - he isn't returning anyone's phone calls, least of all those from Orioles management. s blog at baltimoresun.com/maeseblog