Isolation

A bill that would require the state to report on how often special education students are isolated because of emotional outbursts has passed the Connecticut House. State representatives voted 142-to-0 in favor of an amended version of the measure Tuesday. It now awaits action in the state Senate. The amended bill would require the State Board of Education to produce an annual report on the use of physical restraint and seclusion on disabled children, but would not include instances of in-school suspension.

A bill that would require the state to report on how often special education students are isolated because of emotional outbursts has passed the Connecticut House. State representatives voted 142-to-0 in favor of an amended version of the measure Tuesday. It now awaits action in the state Senate. The amended bill would require the State Board of Education to produce an annual report on the use of physical restraint and seclusion on disabled children, but would not include instances of in-school suspension.

A white teen charged with capital murder in the hit-and-run death of a black man in Mississippi is being held in isolation from other inmates. The Clarion Ledger reports that Hinds County Sheriff's Department spokesman Lt. Jeffery Scott says the publicity associated with the case of 19-year-old Deryl Dedmon accounted for the decision to isolate him. Dedmon is charged with intentionally running over 46-year-old James Craig Anderson on June 26...

WASHINGTON - The US Secret Service in the last 2 1/2 years has received no misconduct complaints similar to those about some personnel ahead of President Obama's recent trip to Colombia, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told lawmakers Wednesday. "There was nothing in the record to suggest that this behavior would happen, and it really was, I think, a huge disappointment to the men and women of the Secret Service," Napolitano said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, noting that the agency has provided protection during more than 900 foreign trips and more than...

There's something strangely beguiling about people imprisoned by the past, caked with layers of psychic dust. Norma Desmond of "Sunset Blvd.," Miss Havisham of "Great Expectations," Baby Jane Hudson of "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" - they're the great figures of gothic decay, women entombed in hollow mansions clinging to yesterday's dreams. Their skin sags, their speech is passe, their dress is fashion-way-backward. And yet their delusions are sadly beautiful and heroic, particularly to the world's drag queens and lovers of camp tragedy.

Norwegian police say they will no longer insist that confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik be held in isolation as he awaits trial on terror charges for July 22 attacks that killed 77 people. Police attorney Christian Hatlo says investigators are increasingly confident that Breivik had no accomplices when he set off a bomb in Oslo's government district and opened fire at a political youth camp outside the capital. Hatlo told reporters Thursday that investigators now consider it "safe" to end Breivik's solitary confinement.

RE "INMATE feared ‘losing my mind': Before his suicide, murder suspect long held isolated" (Metro, March 13): Like the death penalty, solitary confinement is an inhumane relic that remains only because public opinion demands that we punish wrongdoers and never "coddle. " Advocates' calls for reforms to address criminal and civil detained populations are scorned by conservative policy makers who know that Americans demand retribution when crimes are committed. Eric Snow's alleged crimes are horrific, but we degrade ourselves when we punish him only to make...

ROME - Italian sociologist Maurizio Montalbini, who spent months dwelling in caves to study how the mind and body cope with complete isolation, has died at 56. Mr. Montalbini died of a heart attack Saturday while in a mountain hamlet near the central Italian town of Macerata, said Guido Galvagno, a longtime colleague. Galvagno said the death did not appear connected to Mr. Montalbini’s record-breaking cave stays. Mr. Montalbini spent a total of two years and eight months underground since he started his experiments in the 1980s, according to a biography on his website.

WINCHESTER - How many of us know what the buildings at Ellis Island look like? It's not somewhere that calls to mind specific images. Perhaps that's as it should be, since, really, it doesn't so much designate a place or institution as an idea or aspiration. It's a sacred American site, like "Mount Vernon," "Gettysburg," "Ground Zero. " Yet where they are all homes (once for the living, now for the dead), Ellis Island is something quite different. It offered entry to a home. It's a transit point, not a resting place.

The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living off the Grid By Baron Wormser University Press of New England, 199 pp., $24.95 I would have liked this book if only because it confirms my long-held belief that Ned Martin, the Red Sox radio announcer for more than 30 years, was the most literate and literary baseball commentator in history: "A former English major," Baron Wormser writes, "[Martin's] words were measured, astute , and, at times, poetic ; he quoted from Shakespeare and Hemingway.

HAVANA (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI demanded more freedom for the Catholic Church in communist-run Cuba and preached against ‘‘fanaticism" in an unusually political sermon before hundreds of thousands at Revolution Plaza, with President Raul Castro in the front row. Later, the president's brother, revolutionary leader Fidel, grilled the pontiff on changes in church liturgy and his role as spiritual leader of the world's Catholics, a...

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Warning North Korea from its doorstep, President Barack Obama said Pyongyang risks deepening its isolation in the international community if it proceeds with a planned long-range rocket launch. ‘‘North Korea will achieve nothing by threats or provocations," Obama said during a news conference Sunday in Seoul, South Korea, where he was to attend a nuclear security summit. Obama spoke fresh off his first visit to the tense Demilitarized Zone, the heavily patrolled no-man's land between North and South Korea,...

RE "INMATE feared ‘losing my mind': Before his suicide, murder suspect long held isolated" (Metro, March 13): Like the death penalty, solitary confinement is an inhumane relic that remains only because public opinion demands that we punish wrongdoers and never "coddle. " Advocates' calls for reforms to address criminal and civil detained populations are scorned by conservative policy makers who know that Americans demand retribution when crimes are committed. Eric Snow's alleged crimes are horrific, but we degrade ourselves when we punish him only to...

Better keep an eye on the sky. Showers and even isolated thunderstorms are possible today as a low pressure system approaches, the National Weather Service said. Highs are expected to reach the upper 40s and lower 50s across the region, with some mid-50s temperatures in the Connecticut River Valley, the services said. The area will dry out tonight as the precipitation moves offshore, but there will be dense fog in some areas Saturday morning, the forecasters said. Dry weather and above normal temperatures are expected for the St. Patrick's Day...

HARTFORD — Some lawmakers who oppose efforts to repeal Connecticut's death penalty say that any measure to end it should also ensure that inmates who would have been destined for death row are segregated from the general prison population if it passes. State Senator John Kissel of Enfield, the ranking member of the General Assembly's Judiciary Committee, discussed potential compromises to the legislation at the bill's Wednesday public hearing. The death penalty repeal bill being considered this session would abolish the punishment for all future cases.

Eric Snow died as he had lived since he was charged with murder in 2007: alone in his jail cell. But in the weeks before his apparent suicide Saturday, Snow pleaded with Plymouth jail officials to free him from more than four years "in the hole. " "All I want is to please be able to live in regular population where I'm not confined to a cell for five days a week losing my mind," he wrote Feb. 27 to the jail's security director. Snow, one of two men accused of bludgeoning two homeless men to death in Hingham in 2005, had spent more than four years in...

Are You Happy?: A Childhood Remembered By Emily Fox Gordon Riverhead, 244 pp., $23.95 Disorganized, sloppy, clumsy, pudgy, a failure at school, a disappointment at home, Emily Fox Gordon was nonetheless a happy child. Rambling alone or tagging along with other outcasts, Gordon made her own adventures. Williamstown was an idyllic spot. Children were free to wander alone in the pretty college town and its surrounding woods, pursuing their own fun and fantasies.

Natalie Weaver, a 25-year-old musician who lives in Roxbury, does not go to church. But every three weeks or so, she visits a white vinyl-sided building on Dorchester Avenue, a former convent, to meet with her spiritual director. For about an hour, she sits with a gentle, bearded man in a quiet room with gleaming oak floors and talks about the experiences that most awaken her spirit, the people who make her feel most connected and alive. "It's another person who is listening, and kind of asking questions and even just pointing things out," she said.

The players' association believes the leak of NL MVP Ryan Braun's drug test was an isolated occurrence. ESPN reported in December that Braun tested positive for elevated testosterone. Representatives of the Milwaukee outfielder argued during a grievance hearing that specified procedures for handling the sample were not followed, and arbitrator Shyam Das last month overturned the 50-game suspension Braun faced. "Everybody associated with the case is extremely disappointed that it leaked out," union head Michael Weiner said Sunday at the Milwaukee Brewers' training camp.

With tea party-backed first-termers calling the shots, House Republicans snatched political defeat from the jaws of victory in a year-end showdown over Social Security payroll tax cuts and jobless benefits. This time, they pushed the country to the brink — and wound up blinking. "In the end House Republicans felt like they were re-enacting the Alamo, with no reinforcements and our friends shooting at us," said veteran Republican Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas. Precisely.