t's not really a card, but more of a pearl jewelry service. Among other things, it allows you to change the phone number that shows up on someone else's caller ID to be whatever you want it to be. In that way, you can represent yourself to a friend as someone you are not – and pull off a clever practical joke. You can place calls directly from the SpoofCard website, or you can download an application for your cell phone.

In a SpoofCard use that may be more sinister, however, people can change the caller ID number to match the number they're calling. On some phones, that is enough to be granted access to that number's voicemail.

This is what Wise is alleged to have done. Prosecutors say she checked and even deleted voicemails from the accounts of four women, rivals for the affections of Wise's former boyfriends. She is charged with four counts each of computer trespassing, eavesdropping, computer tampering, and aggravated harassment, plus one count of stalking, according to the New York Post.

How do most people use SpoofCard?

According to testimonials on the biwa pearl SpoofCard website, not-so-nice practical jokes are popular. Most stories aren't G-rated, so we won't reprint them here, but here's one of the less-harmful spoofs:

"Telling my friend who is a licensed plumber that his license has been revoked due to unethical practices. It drove him nuts.... it was [sic] hillarious."

The service also includes a voice-distorter that can disguise the caller's identity or even change the tone of one's voice enough to sound like a different gender. (Imagine the fun guys are having calling their buddies as women.) SpoofCard can also be used to record phone calls.

Is it legal?

Prosecutors in the Wise case seemed to think not, at least not the way she used it.

The company says this on its website:

"Each of the capabilities of SpoofCard is legal in the US. However, certain uses may be illegal depending on which state you are calling from or to. For example, a handful of states have passed laws that make it illegal to spoof caller ID for certain purposes, such as 'to mislead, defraud or deceive the recipient of a telephone call.' Before using the spoofing capability of SpoofCard, you should determine whether the use you will make of the service is legal in the state where you are calling from and the state where the party you are calling is located.

"In addition, it is illegal under the law of numerous states to record a telephone call without informing the other party that the call is being recorded. Before using the recording capability of SpoofCard, you should determine whether it is legal in the state where you are calling from and the state where the party you are calling is located to record the call without informing the called party. If you do not know whether such recording is legal in both states, you should protect yourself from possible state criminal prosecution by informing the other party that you are recording the conversation. SpoofCard cannot monitor conversations to determine whether they are being legally spoofed or recorded. SpoofCard disclaims any and all liability or responsibility for your use of the akoya pearl Card's spoofing or recording capability."

These cautionary notes apparently aren't deterring people from using SpoofCard. The company reports that its iPhone application has been downloaded more than 30,000 times. (It has similar products for Blackberry and Android mobile phones.) While the applications are free to download, calls cost $4.95 for 25 minutes in the US

On Monday, the Standish City Council passed a unanimous resolution expressing interest in having a federal prison at the Standish Max Correctional facility, slated to close Oct. 31 due to budget cuts. But the resolution stripped out all reference to the detainees currently being housed at the US base in Cuba.

While some reports have interpreted the change in language to mean that the welcome mat has been officially yanked, the community 120 miles north of Detroit is not ruling out taking the more than 200 detainees, says Ruth Caldwell, vice president of the pearl jewelry Standish Chamber of Commerce.

"[The City Council] watered it down a little because a few people don't want it and have been very vocal, but they did pass it last night," says Ms. Caldwell, who owns Pleasantries gift boutique. And the motion "states we're in favor of a federal option."

President Obama has said he wants to close the facility at Guantánamo by year's end. The prison at Standish, which can hold about 600 inmates, is reported to be one option the federal government is considering. Another is Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, home of the military's only maximum-security prison.

Arenac County, where Standish is located, passed a resolution that supported housing the detainees last week. Arenac County Commissioner Mike Snyder says he has been assured that Standish's door is still open. "The whole point of [the wording change] was to remove the detainee language and replace it with 'federal prisoners.' Did the change in biwa pearl fact exclude Guantánamo detainees? The mayor says it does not," says Mr. Snyder.

Opposition to the plan includes The Coalition to Stop Gitmo North and Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra, who is believed to be a contender for the 2010 Michigan gubernatorial race. Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) has also expressed concerns about bringing the detainees to Michigan.

On Tuesday, the Coalition launched a move to recall the Standish City Council, three of whom are already at the end of their terms, Commissioner Snyder says.

"My extreme concern is about the hatemongering and mistruths and lack of information" on the part of the Coalition, says Snyder. Until the government makes a decision, "we're dealing with wild speculation that's hurting everyone. It's incredibly detrimental to a real understanding of what's going on."

Ms. Caldwell says her own stance is unchanged: "We need to have something here."

The city must repay bonds taken out when the prison was built in 1990, and one-quarter of its budget ($36,000 a month) comes from the prison's water and sewer bill. Pennsylvania is reportedly also considering the site to help ease overcrowding at akoya pearl its prisons.

But with less than two weeks until the prison closes, Standish is running out of options to replace its largest employer. On Thursday, 100 employees at Standish Max and Camp Lehman in Grayling received notice of layoffs, and others received transfer notices.

Ultimately, Caldwell points out, the city itself has little say in the future of the prison. "It really doesn't matter: If the federal government wants it here, it will be here."

The US Supreme Court has let stand a ruling in Virginia that police officers must personally observe erratic driving before stopping a suspected drunken driver.

On Tuesday, the high court declined to take up an appeal involving a Richmond motorist who was pulled over by a police officer based on an anonymous tip that he was driving under the influence of alcohol.

The issue in the case, Virginia v. Harris, was whether the officer was justified in confronting the driver with a roadside sobriety test, or whether he should have waited until Harris' driving gave rise to a reasonable suspicion of drunk driving independent of the anonymous tip.

The case stems from a pearl jewelry December 2005 telephone call received by police. The caller said that an intoxicated driver named Joseph Harris was driving an Altima, southbound on Meadowbridge Road in Richmond. The caller gave a partial license plate number.

Officer Claude Picard of the Richmond Police Department soon located an Altima being driven by a man with a license plate similar to the number offered by the caller.

The officer followed Mr. Harris and watched as the motorist slowed down before crossing an intersection where he had the right of way, and slowed down again 50 feet before reaching a red stop light. At other times the car was traveling at the stipulated speed limit of 25 mph.

Once through the intersection, Harris pulled his car over to the shoulder and stopped. Officer Picard pulled up behind Harris and activated his lights and siren.

The officer detected a strong odor of alcohol on Harris' breath and noticed that his speech was slurred. Picard administered a field sobriety test. Harris failed. He was charged with operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated. Harris had been convicted of the same offense twice before.

At trial, Harris' lawyer argued that the charge should be dropped because the police officer lacked the level of reasonable suspicion needed to biwa pearl justify the traffic stop. The trial court rejected the argument and Harris was convicted and sentenced to serve 90 days in prison. A state appeals court affirmed the decision.

The Virginia Supreme Court voted 4-3 to throw out the conviction. The state high court said the anonymous tip did not provide enough evidence of criminal wrongdoing to overcome Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The police officer must personally observe criminal activity before an investigative stop is justified, the Virginia court ruled.

The Virginia attorney general's office appealed the decision to the US Supreme Court, urging the high court to overturn the opinion and make clear that in cases involving suspected drunk drivers, police officers are justified in conducting a brief traffic stop.

The Supreme Court turned down the appeal without comment. Chief Justice John Roberts filed a dissent, joined by Justice Antonin Scalia.

Chief Justice Roberts said a sharp disagreement had emerged in federal and state courts over this particular Fourth Amendment issue. Most courts have upheld the police stop, but some have ruled for the motorist. "The conflict is clear and the stakes are high," he wrote.

"The effect of the rule below will be to akoya pearl grant drunk drivers 'one free swerve' before they can legally be pulled over by police," Roberts said.

"It will be difficult for an officer to explain to the family of a motorist killed by that swerve that the police had a tip that the driver of the other car was drunk, but that they were powerless to pull him over, even for a quick check."

a vexing problem – how to keep the public and policymakers informed and engaged on what many scientists say is the primary long-term challenge to humanity’s well-being: global warming.

You could invite folks to burrow into the most recent 998-page climate-change opus by 620 leading scientists and editors. Or, for lighter reading, peruse the 34-page “frequently asked questions” primer on that same 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

But to capture public attention while avoiding the need for a PhD on sea-ice thickness, glacier melt rates, and carbon dioxide concentrations, you could just put that data into a single index that tracks the pulse of climate change as it happens.

So says Daniel Abbasi, who has proposed a Global Climate Change Index, not unlike the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which tracks stock prices. The index would try to distill the latest ecological figures into something simple enough for the average reader to understand and concrete enough to hold policymakers accountable for lowering greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere.

“We’ve got these big reports that appear every few years, but few people read them,” says Mr. Abbasi, a former senior adviser at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in an interview. “Why not reduce this thing into an easier-to-understand set of indicators that can be weighted and aggregated – a distillation that reveals actual impacts we’re seeing in the pearl jewelry  field.”

Now director of regulatory and public policy research for MissionPoint Capital Partners, a Norwalk, Conn., investment firm, Abbasi’s proposal is stirring scientific debate even as other projects with similar goals are beginning to emerge in the public square.

The big problem with global warming, he says, is not just that the planet is being roasted – it’s trying to maintain public focus on an “inconvenient truth” that is currently portrayed in a nearly incomprehensible way, he says.

“In their scrupulousness to accurately reflect the complexity of climate change when communicating with the public and decisionmakers, scientists have overwhelmed many people,” he writes in an online essay about his idea.

Besieged by disparate climate data and deniers’ claims, both the public and policymakers “have tuned out the science and relegated climate change to a matter of ideological opinion rather than fact,” he writes.
But by distilling the arcana and regular data drips into a single Global Climate Change Index or GCCI, the US and other nations could avoid political drift on this critical issue.

Television news anchors might spout off the latest shift in the GCCI, breaking out for specific attention to key nuances.

Still, the key reason to do it would be to keep policymakers focused on actually reducing climate impacts – not simply developing policies that make constituents happy but don’t effect the needed shift.

Buried in the massive American Clean Energy Security Act of 2009, which recently passed the House, is a “look back provision” that requires the EPA to biwa pearl report the latest data to Congress by 2013. The National Academies of Science would assess those findings and report on if the US climate program was on target.

But what happens between those big, monumental four-year reports? The bill would bring “an impressive succession of reports, but no real action to keep our emissions targets and other action in line with the latest science,” Abbasi contends. Enter the GCCI, which would fill the gap and provide a reality check for both Congress and the president.

It’s early days yet, but Abbasi’s proposal unveiled in late August already has scientists and congressional staffers debating its merits. “There’s great strength in the idea of something that’s up there all the time – an index with long-term averages and trends,” says Richard Somerville, a research professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California in San Diego.

He’s quick to provide caveats about the idea that worry him, such as getting agreement on what measures to use and how to weight them. Another hazard: how to keep such an index from masking dangerous tipping points that would lead to runaway environmental or climate tipping.

“While it’s good to track these things, it might divert attention from underlying causal mechanisms and could lull the public into a false sense of security,” says Paul Raskin, president of the Tellus Institute, a Boston-based environmental think tank.

Abbasi says that his index – unlike the “debt clock” in New York (see sidebar) – would be more than a counter. He wants to focus much more on the impacts. It would also incorporate climate modeling data in order to provide a predictive capability.

Overall, the index idea also resonates with some thinkers behind other types of newly emerging projects to inform the public on climate change.

The world’s first “carbon counter,” tracking tonnage of carbon-based greenhouse-gas emissions into the atmosphere, was unveiled in June, just outside New York’s Madison Square Garden.

“Alerting the public and keeping their attention on climate is a good thing – certainly part of our motive was to focus public attention on the issue,” says John Reilly, a scientist and lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School, who helped create the Deutsch Bank-financed carbon counter.

Sporting a 70-foot-high sign with a 13-character digital display with bright red letters, the counter is tracking more than 3.6 trillion of tons of greenhouse gases humanity has so far emitted into the atmosphere.

By tracking simple tonnage, the akoya pearl Deutsch Bank Carbon Counter avoids one key weakness of an index: the difficulty of deriving significant meaning from a combination of measures and deciding the proper weighting for each one.

“I haven’t seen this proposed index, but it sounds a little like indices that try to quantify the best school or the best community to live in,” Dr. Reilly says. “They can lead you in the general direction, but may give some odd results. The challenge is how things are weighted together.”

Meeting that challenge is important, Abbasi argues, because without it, the political process is unlikely to meet what science says is needed to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

“There’s a strong likelihood that the targets we set in Congress will be scientifically inadequate to deal with climate change,” he says in the interview. “We need to make this scientific look-back provision stronger, put some teeth into it, so that when the legislation is revised someday, we won’t have a repeat of today with the political dynamics taking over

Authorities announced Thursday that they have found the body of seven-year-old Somer Thompson in a Georgia landfill 50 miles from her home. She was abducted Monday as she was walking home from school in Orange Park, Fla.

Police have said it was a homicide but have not reported any motives for the crime. They are interviewing convicted sex offenders living in Somer's community.

Florida's sexual offenders and predators registry, which is updated daily, shows 88 registered offenders live in Orange Park, and 161 offenders live within a pearl jewelry five-mile radius of her home.

But experts say these figures are not out of the ordinary. With cities of all sizes increasingly limiting where sex offenders can reside, high-density clusters – sometimes with as many as 100 offenders living within one square mile – are becoming increasingly common.

"There are sex offenders living in all communities," says Jill Levenson, a professor of psychology at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., who specializes in studying sex-crimes policy.

The number of offenders in the area surrounding Somer's home "may seem like a lot, but where do we think they're going to be living?"

Local ordinances prohibiting sex offenders from settling near schools, day care centers, and parks can affect the density of offenders in a particular area – a relatively new phenomenon, says Corey Yung, a professor at John Marshall Law School in biwa pearl Chicago.

Sex offender clusters exist in some parts of Florida – though Orange Park does not qualify.

• The Miami Herald recently reported on more than 70 sex offenders living under the Julia Tuttle Causeway in Miami because they couldn't find legal residences.

• Similarly, 35 sex offenders were found living in the same apartment complex outside Pahokee, Fla.

• A woman in central Florida has planned to open a day care center, thereby forcing 100 sex offenders to move out of the area, which includes a local school bus stop.

Florida – along with Georgia and Louisiana – tend to have the toughest sex-offender laws. It has the third most registered sex offenders in the nation and ranks sixth per capita.

"It's certainly one of the least welcoming states," says Professor Yung, who focuses on sex offender and criminal law.

This may contribute to Florida's relatively high number of offenders, but it also might provide a "false sense of security," says Professor Levenson.

She criticizes the registry, saying it does not assess an offender's risk to the community. "The registry is full of all kinds of different people," she says. "There's this huge list with little ability to distinguish between types of offenders."

A broad list, however, can have "benefits in akoya pearl investigative purposes," says Mary Coffee, a planning and policy administrator with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. This is one of the original intended uses of the sex offender registry list, she says.

Individuals are also listed with information about their crimes, which can be as specific as their court or arrest reports, she adds