In a little known policy, Wal-Mart and its subsidiary Sam’s Club locks workers in overnight. Contrary to company denials, it is often the case that no one on the premises has a key and workers are threatened with being fired if they use the fire exits for any reason other than a fire — including a medical emergency or a wife going into labor at home. Company spokespeople say the policy is employed at perhaps ten percent of its stores in high-crime areas to protect store employees; affected workers dispute this and say it is used to reduce employee pilferage and slack time. Managers who promise to come in at any time to unlock the doors in an emergency are often unavailable when the need arises. While Wal-Mart says the practice of overnight lock-ins is not unusual in the large retail segment, its competitors and retail sector analysts say no one else does it. Of note, the company apparently began to make sure managers with keys were on duty overnight after the Times started to investigate the matter. — New York Times

Combine this with other Wal-Mart’s employee tactics, like taking out accidental death insurance on employees without their consent, and tell me if this is a place you really want to patronize regardless of the potential savings.

Getting better with age… at 95: “A handful of major composers have had Indian summers – Verdi and Haydn wrote masterpieces in their 70s and 80s – but (Elliott) Carter’s tenth decade of creativity is unprecedented in the history of music…

Carter has lived in America nearly all his life, and in the same apartment since the mid-1940s. But his dogged refusal to bend to the whims of the culture around him makes him a strangely isolated figure in Manhattan. His music is performed much more often in Europe than in America – his only opera, composed in 1998, has never been staged in the US – and he finds himself at odds with the compositional trends that have come and gone in New York.” — Guardian.UK

Man fails in effort to create his own 10-year old Manchurian Candidate: “Chartiers Township police Chief James Horvath said he couldn’t believe what he was hearing: an audio recording of a man encouraging his 10-year-old stepson to kill his 4-year-old brother.

David Winniewicz, 36, of 130 Poplar Court, Houston, was arrested Wednesday on charges including criminal solicitation to commit homicide for making the audiotape and playing it as the 10-year-old slept, in an apparent attempt to plant a subliminal message in the boy’s mind.”

Paul Krugman: “Fortune magazine rightly declared paperless voting the worst technology of 2003, but it’s not just a bad technology —it’s a threat to the republic.” — New York Times

“Tracks from Bob Marley’s early years, never before released, will be issued this spring, Universal Music said on Thursday…

More than 200 tracks, recorded between 1967 and 1972, feature a young Marley with street attitude, influenced by the American civil rights movement and beginning to explore Rastafarianism. The first release, a three-CD set, is planned for March.” — New York Times

Michael Kinsley: The Compassion Puzzle: “When Bush started calling himself a ‘compassionate conservative’ during the 2000 campaign, critics dismissed this as an oxymoron — or ‘baloney’ to use the technical term. It seemed like an especially brazen example of the near-universal politicians’ vice of trying to have it both ways (and, more important, letting the voters have it both ways).

Supporters said: No, compassionate conservatism represents a real philosophy of government. It bears some relation to ‘national-greatness conservatism,’ another concept being promoted around that time. Both terms were intended to retrofit Reagan-style conservatism (which did not turn out to be an inexorable machine of history) for political terrain transformed by Bill Clinton. The idea was that a nation is more than just a collection of individuals after all. National goals such as promoting moral values domestically and American values abroad are okay.” — Washington Post op-ed

Contradicting Bush’s Optimism: “CIA officers in Iraq are warning that the country may be on a path to civil war, current and former U.S. officials said Wednesday, starkly contradicting the upbeat assessment that President Bush gave in his State of the Union address.

The CIA officers’ bleak assessment was delivered verbally to Washington this week, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the classified information involved.” Knight-Ridder [via CommonDreams]

Meanwhile: Bush: “Don’t Change Leaders in Mid-War”: “President Bush, focusing on a subject sure to be prominent in his re-election campaign, said Thursday his administration is notching successes in the war against terrorism but will not let up while danger lingers.” Salon News Of course, another way to put this is, “…not let up while my tenure in the White House depends on it”?

“Five times this month, the vote of one Supreme Court justice would have stopped the execution of a convicted killer who claimed it was unconstitutionally cruel to use chemicals to carry out a death sentence.

The executions went forward, even though four of the nine high court justices wanted to grant at least a temporary reprieve. The 5-4 votes, all announced without comment by any of the justices, are the latest illustration of the deep rift on the court over capital punishment.” Salon

“A new report by researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston has found little evidence to support a widely held belief about clinical trials of experimental cancer treatments: that patients who enroll in them fare better than those who do not.” —New York Times

NASA unable to communicate with Mars rover: “The Spirit rover has stopped transmitting data from Mars, NASA mission controllers said Thursday, but there were signs it is still operating at a basic level.” —CNN

Margaret Cho answers ‘Michael’. Hilarious, although it will be wasted on ‘Michael.’ —Margaret Cho’s Blog [via walker]