New York

Dennis Overbye in The New York Times:

A growing number of police departments are turning to mobile camera systems to fight motor vehicle theft and identify unregistered cars.

The cameras read license plates of parked and moving cars -- hundreds per minute -- and check them against vehicle databases, said Lance Clem, a spokesman for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which purchased several systems for its police vehicles last fall.

States looking to unload surplus property used to do little more than take out an advertisement in the local newspaper, hang an "Open" sign at a warehouse and set up a cash register.

Not anymore. This spring, Vermont will begin selling its surplus goods on eBay, the online auction site. The goal is to attract more bidders and bring in more revenue to state coffers, says Mark Casey, the state's Surplus Property Programs assistant.

"We can move a lot more stuff," Casey says from his office at the warehouse in the central Vermont town of Waterbury.

As more states consider controls on cell-phone use in vehicles and Congress mulls a nationwide texting-while-driving ban, a study released Friday suggests the bans have not reduced the number of accidents. The Highway Loss Data Institute compared insurance claims in four states that have bans with areas where drivers can talk freely and found no significant difference.

"The laws aren't reducing crashes, even though we know that such laws have reduced handheld phone use and several studies have established that phoning while driving increases crash risk," said Adrian Lund, HLDI president.

Tech executive Parikshit Arora had an unconventional response the morning he discovered that his office computer was no longer working. Rather than fixing it himself or calling in help from the information technology department, he discarded the device. "It wasn't booting up," says Arora, vice-president for technology at iQor, a company that handles call-center work for clients. "I didn't even care to find out why. I threw it away and got another one."

Nokia is reducing its retail presence in the U.S. The Finnish phone maker announced Thursday the closing of its two flagship stores. The company said the decision to close the stores in Chicago and New York was based on advertising success as U.S. consumer awareness has grown substantially since the stores opened three years ago.

Stung by an embarrassing electronic leak last month revealing ethics investigations into dozens of lawmakers, Congress moved Tuesday to prohibit federal employees from using the same type of Internet file-sharing software blamed for the disclosure.