Telephone Calls

Actor John Heard will have 18 months of supervised probation and must attend a 22-week program for abusive men at the House of Ruth, Baltimore District Court Judge Barbara B. Waxman decided yesterday.Heard, 51, best known for his role as the father in the "Home Alone" movies, was found guilty in March of trespassing and harassing his ex-girlfriend, "Homicide" actress Melissa Leo, with telephone calls. The charges resulted from a dispute between the two over Heard's visitation rights to their son, John Matthew, 9, who was placed in Leo's custody by a New York judge in 1994.

DID VICE PRESIDENT Al Gore break the law by soliciting campaign donations through telephone calls from his White House office?The answer will depend on which interpretation of a 114-year-old law prevails in a tug of war in Washington charged with partisan politics.In this case, Republicans want the strictest possible interpretation to apply, while supporters of the president and vice president argue that a 114-year-old law specifically designed to protect government employees from political solicitations has never been enforced in this way before.

ATTORNEY GENERAL Janet Reno marches to her own drummer. She's not beloved by either the Clinton White House or the Republican Congress. That's why her decision not to name a special prosecutor to probe telephone fund-raising by the president and vice president deserves careful analysis on its own merits.There's no doubt Republicans were gleeful at the prospects of a probe of the president. It's just as true spin-control artists among Democrats did their best to dismiss the allegations as political hot air. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

WHATEVER HIS MOTIVE, President Clinton's threat to keep the Senate in session until it debates and votes on a bill to curb abusive campaign financing practices seems to have had its desired effect. The way is now clear for action on a watered-down reform measure.That is a remarkably positive advance for a proposal that had been shelved by Majority Leader Trent Lott. Still, resistance remains stiff, especially from the Republicans' champion of unlimited party fund-raising, Sen. Mitch McConnell.

A roundup of new products and servicesCut It OutArista Technologies Inc. has a new product for your home-entertainment center -- a device that fast-forwards through television commercials on taped programs. Commercial Brake 500, as it's called, eliminates between eight and 16 minutes of commercials from each hour of taped programming. This version is easier to set up and use than last year's introductory model, which was designed for "high-end" users. Commercial Brake 500 retails for $199.

Roughly 200 Loyola College students rallied yesterday against politicians, but this was no rebellious, '60s-style protest.For one thing, college officials sent out news releases to promote it. And the phones on which students made the calls were sponsored by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.In telephone calls from a table in front of the North Baltimore campus' main theater, Loyola undergraduates told senators and representatives to retain full funding for student loans.

WASHINGTON -- In a surprising side effect of new technologies, Americans' telephone calls are suddenly getting much shorter -- and if the phone companies have their way, those short calls will soon get much more expensive.Despite the nation's long love affair with leisurely phone chats, innovations such as pagers, voice mail, e-mail, electronic credit card readers and fax machines are now abbreviating telephone calls and luring longer connections off the public phone network.Today, as people leave voice mail rather than call back -- or send e-mail rather than call at all -- some 52 percent of residential phone conversations last one minute or less, compared with 22 percent of such short connections in 1982.

Baltimore County police continue to receive telephone calls with information about the unsolved 1969 slaying of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik, "and there is some substance to the calls," said Capt. Rustin E. Price, head of the homicide squad.Some of the calls have taken investigators to other states because people have moved in the intervening years. "It's tedious work, but we are diligently following up every piece of information we get," Captain Price said.Sister Catherine, a popular teaching nun, disappeared Nov. 7, 1969, after she left on an evening shopping trip from her residence at the Carriage House Apartments on North Bend Road, in Southwest Baltimore.

NEW YORK -- The financial difficulties that prompted the collapse of Whittle Communications Corp., the once high-flying alternative media company led by the entrepreneur Christopher Whittle, were significantly more severe than previously believed and masked in part by accounting misrepresentations, says an article in The New Yorker.The article also reported that Benno C. Schmidt Jr., the chief executive of the Edison Project, Whittle's expensive effort to found a chain of privatized schools, recommended to the Edison board that Mr. Whittle be removed as chairman.

I won't say life has been dull lately, I'll just say that I have been amusing myself by calling our new telephone answering device. While most of the rest of the civilized world has owned telephone answering machines for years, our household has owned one only for a few weeks.For the longest time I resisted buying a telephone answering device because I felt the family already had telephone answerers, our two kids. Since roughly 90 percent of the household's incoming telephone calls concerned the kids' social lives, I figured the kids should be the ones who answer the phone.

WASHINGTON - At times yesterday, the telephone calls into the Capitol Hill office of Rep. Elijah E. Cummings merged into a single, constant ring. And with a House vote possible today on the $700 billion financial rescue package approved by the Senate, the Baltimore Democrat was hearing from both sides. After meeting last night with his fellow House Democrats, he said he was still "wrestling" with his vote. "We're still trying to make sure that there's clarity with regard to helping people who are facing foreclosure," said Cummings, who voted against a bailout earlier this week.

Michael Stebbins recently joined Rep Stage as artistic director, producer and occasional actor. He is starting his job in spectacular fashion by starring in Fully Committed. Becky Mode's comedy, which runs through Feb. 26, puts Stebbins alone on the stage for an hour and a quarter, playing 40 characters. The show is a series of telephone conversations, with Stebbins acting both sides. The central character, Sam, is an aspiring actor who works in the dingy basement of a posh New York restaurant, answering phones and booking reservations.

State Comptroller William Donald Schaefer's tirade at Wednesday's Board of Public Works meeting complaining about immigrants who don't speak English brought about 180 telephone calls to his office yesterday - the vast majority from people who agreed with him, a spokesman said. "It seems like people are in favor of what the comptroller had to say," said Schaefer spokesman Mike Golden. "Only about eight of the calls were opposed." Schaefer, the octogenarian former governor and Baltimore mayor, made the comments, which some described as insensitive and inappropriate, recounting a trip to a McDonald's restaurant where a woman who took his order didn't speak English.

Mount Airy Volunteer Fire Company is warning area residents of a possible scheme involving telephone solicitation for donations to the fire company. Complaints have been received about telephone calls asking for a $100 donation to Mount Airy fire company and asking to pick up the check. The fire company does not solicit by telephone. All fire company fund-raisers are conducted by mail or in person for the annual door-to-door photo drive. Solicitors for the photo drive carry fire company credentials.

To reduce distractions in Anne Arundel County's 911 center, police Chief P. Thomas Shanahan has ordered officers to limit the types of radio and telephone calls they make to emergency dispatchers. The chief's directive, issued last week, also reduces the number of radio channels that 911 operators are required to monitor. The orders were handed down as part of a review of the communications center that began in August when a 911 call about a fatal carjacking was botched. Although Shanahan said the call was mishandled because of "human error," the chief ordered a review of the 911 center's staffing, equipment and operating procedures.

This season's strike zone seems to be causing more conflict between the umpires and Major League Baseball officials than between umpires and players. Umpires are outraged over instructions that have come to some of them in the past 10 days via e-mail and telephone calls from Sandy Alderson, baseball's chief of operations, two persons who had been told by umpires said yesterday. Alderson said that either the messages had been misinterpreted or the reaction "is all part of a political agenda that some people have," stemming from the bitter feelings between two factions of umpires over which union would represent them.

There are senior citizens out there who, this time around, probably heard from the mayor's office before they heard from their own kids. Not to lay a guilt trip on my fellow baby boomers, but it looks as if that nice, young O'Malley fella scored some serious points with Ma and Pa by getting his people to the phones first. The mayor's office claims to have made about 18,000 telephone calls to see if any of our elderly citizens needed anything during and immediately after Tuesday's storm.

ATTORNEY GENERAL Janet Reno marches to her own drummer. She's not beloved by either the Clinton White House or the Republican Congress. That's why her decision not to name a special prosecutor to probe telephone fund-raising by the president and vice president deserves careful analysis on its own merits.There's no doubt Republicans were gleeful at the prospects of a probe of the president. It's just as true spin-control artists among Democrats did their best to dismiss the allegations as political hot air. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

DID VICE PRESIDENT Al Gore break the law by soliciting campaign donations through telephone calls from his White House office?The answer will depend on which interpretation of a 114-year-old law prevails in a tug of war in Washington charged with partisan politics.In this case, Republicans want the strictest possible interpretation to apply, while supporters of the president and vice president argue that a 114-year-old law specifically designed to protect government employees from political solicitations has never been enforced in this way before.

WHATEVER HIS MOTIVE, President Clinton's threat to keep the Senate in session until it debates and votes on a bill to curb abusive campaign financing practices seems to have had its desired effect. The way is now clear for action on a watered-down reform measure.That is a remarkably positive advance for a proposal that had been shelved by Majority Leader Trent Lott. Still, resistance remains stiff, especially from the Republicans' champion of unlimited party fund-raising, Sen. Mitch McConnell.