REGION'S TEACHERS AT HEAD OF THE CLASS.(CAPITAL REGION)

Byline: RICK KARLIN Staff writer

New York has a new class of top teachers this year, including a bumper crop from the Capital Region.

Of the 103 newly minted nationally certified teachers in the Empire State, 30 are from Capital Region schools, with a half dozen from Schenectady alone.

Still, the Empire State is behind nationally in the number and percentage of teachers who have earned the prestigious National Board Certification.

New York now has a total of 286 nationally certified teachers who have undergone a rigorous program of training, self-evaluation and testing that can take up to 400 hours. But some other states count their …

A CRESCENDO OF SOUNDS.(Living Today)

Byline: Patrick Kurp Staff writer

Phil Collins sings - booms - "This Must Be Love" and I feel my ears about to hemorrhage.

With the twist of a dial, Jim Crispino has turned his '86 Mustang GT into a sonic hell. The car quakes at 123 decibels. I don't hear the music so much as suffer it.

Crispino eases the volume to a hushed 110 decibels - in the jackhammer-subway-thunderstorm range - so we can talk about noise.

"I like to play it at a good clip, but not so it kills you," said the general manager of Auto Sound Plus in Latham.

Crispino, 25, spent $4,000 to install a Sony CD player and 13 Rockford-Fosgate speakers and amps in his car. For the effort he won Best of Show in last year's Crank-It-Up Contest at his store. His system was clocked at a bone-marrow-conducting 129 decibels.

About three miles away, in his office in the old friary on the Siena College campus, the Rev. Dennis Tamburello - a 15-year member of the …

Swiss court keeps Polanski in jail, rejects bail

Roman Polanski's three decades as a fugitive are coming back to haunt him.

Noting his previous escape from U.S. authorities, Switzerland's top criminal court on Tuesday rejected Polanski's appeal to be released from prison because of the "high" risk that the 76-year-old director would try to flee again.

Polanski's offers of bail, house arrest and electronic monitoring failed to sway the tribunal. Even a Swiss chalet in the luxury resort of Gstaad was brushed aside as insufficient collateral to guard against Polanski fleeing the country, as the United States seeks to have him extradited for having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977.

…

A Successful Civil War Partnership

A Successful Civil War Partnership Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War. Charles Bracelen Flood. Farrar, Straws and Giroux. 460 pages; maps; photographs; notes; index; $27.

Military history is replete with successful partnerships that have shaped the course of the wars in which they fought. Whereas the majority of Civil War historians concentrate on Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, few battlefield leaders have been as successful as Union commanders Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. Over the course of the bloody strife, their friendship won the Civil War. In the latest analysis of President Abraham Lincoln's field commanders, …

The Winners and the Losers of 2000.

Though each campaign is different, and the level of consultant participation varies race-by-race, a political professional's win-loss record is one of the best indicators of their work effort and performance in any given election cycle. But the limitations on what these records really mean, and how they should be interpreted, must be kept in mind.

AFTER EACH two-year election cycle, Campaigns & Elections presents the win-loss records of political consultants across the nation. This year's collection is larger than ever, reflecting the increasing professionalism and specialization of modern campaigns at the federal, state and local levels.

Before you begin …

Edible oils and fats international conference.(members' news)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

THE NEW GENERATION OF OILS AND FATS will be the focus for the international conference on 'Edible Oils and Fats: from fundamentals to the future'.

The two-day conference on Edible Oils and Fats, will be held from 15 to 16 April 2008 in the Hilton Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. It will focus on:

* Raw materials

* Processing

* Modifications

* Applications

* Health aspects

Healthy eating is becoming an increasingly important part of our modern lifestyle. Today, a considerable number of mainstream consumers are not only aware of the health benefits, but also of the harmful effects of specific food ingredients.

Out with the bad, in with the good

Take the recent case of the presence of nutritionally-undesirable trans fatty acids (TFAs) in foods containing partially hydrogenated oils. The mainstream consumer has now been …

OFFICERS MOURN SLAIN HOUSING COP.(CAPITAL REGION)

Byline: Associated Press

NEW YORK -- As he lay wounded in an ambulance, Officer Ralph Dols told a detective he had seen the men who ambushed him in a gangland-style shooting, and would recognize them if he saw them again.

Seven hours later, Dols, 28, was silenced by death. With the murder still unsolved, city officials and thousands of police officers turned out in Dols' Brooklyn neighborhood Friday to pay their final respects to the housing cop and bodybuilder many considered a gentle giant.

``We will not rest until whoever is responsible for this is brought to justice,'' Police Commissioner Howard Safir told Dol's wife, Kim …