"While the vendor has fixed many of these flaws, many important vulnerabilities remain unaddressed," the report said.

The lab found, for example, that someone with only brief access to a machine could replace a memory card with one preprogramed to read one candidate's votes as counting for another, essentially switching the candidates and showing the loser winning in that precinct.

"The attack can be carried out with a reasonably low probability of detection assuming that audits with paper ballots are infrequent," the report said.

Browning asked Diebold Elections Systems to address the problems by Aug. 17, and expressed confidence that the company will do so before next year's primary election.

"To Diebold's credit, they have come to the table and been willing to get these changes made and get them made timely," Browning said.

A company spokesman said the deadline would be met.

"These are not major changes, and we are confident we can meet the deadline," said Mark Radke, who also said the company has worked well with the state. "We look forward to continuing this relationship and to continuing to improve the security of our elections systems."

Browning said that the memory cards are locked in machines and that only a few people have access to them in a setting where others wouldn't see them unscrewing machines, breaking seals and switching cards.

"It is not where you just walk up to a machine and pop out a card," he said.

Tampering with the software is much easier in a laboratory than trying to carry out the same actions during an election, Browning said. Still, he said, his office will advise county elections supervisors on steps that should be taken to ensure machines won't be tampered with.

Florida's voting system drew national attention in 2000, when dimpled, pregnant and hanging chads on punch card ballots held up a final count in the presidential election. Florida was eventually decided by 537 votes after the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in, handing the election to George W. Bush. The state has since banned the punch cards.

Currently, 15 of Florida's 67 counties use paperless touch-screen voting machines, while the rest use optical scan machines where a voter marks a paper ballot with a pencil and it is electronically scanned. Touch-screen machines are being scrapped because of a newly signed state law that requires a verifiable paper trail for all voting machines.

Doe's attorney, Thomas M. McNamara, said his client is seeking "the value of what McSheffrey and the diocese took from him that he'll never be able to regain. We'll let a jury decide what that is."

In 2005, the Hartford Archdiocese reached a $22 million settlement with 43 alleged clergy sex abuse victims. That settlement stemmed from abuse claims against 14 priests, including McSheffery.

McSheffery, now in his mid-70s, has been on administrative leave since 2002, when the first abuse allegations against him arose.

Doe, now in his 40s, can legally file the civil suit because of a state law passed in 2002 that extended the statute of limitations so that victims of child sexual abuse can file suits until they are 48.

New Haven attorney Hugh Keefe, who is representing McSheffery, had no comment on the most recent lawsuit, but emphasized that his client has not been convicted of any crime.

"Father McSheffery has not been found guilty either civilly or criminally in any court anywhere," Keefe said Wednesday.

The Rev. John Gatzak, director of communication for the Archdiocese of Hartford, said he had no comment specifically about the most recent lawsuit, but said such allegations "cause us to think of the pain on the part of the victims and to redouble the church's efforts to make sure such abuse never occurs again."

The lawsuit, which originally was filed in 2004, had alleged the Novartis unit was discriminatory in its pay, promotions, evaluations and treatment of women who take pregnancy leave. A Novartis spokesman declined to comment, saying the company had just received the judge's order and was reviewing it.

A Senate committee Wednesday embraced legislation that would for the first time allow federal regulation of cigarettes.

The bill, approved 13-8 by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, would require the Food and Drug Administration to restrict tobacco advertising, regulate warning labels and remove hazardous ingredients.

The agency also would be given the authority to set standards for products that tobacco companies advertise as "reduced risk" products.

"This is an enormous step forward," said Matt Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "This could end up being the signature public health action this Congress takes."

The bill has broad bipartisan support in the Senate, where more than 50 senators have signed on as co-sponsors. A similar bill passed the chamber in 2004 but was blocked in the House.

The tobacco legislation was crafted through several years of negotiations led by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., involving health groups and tobacco giant Philip Morris, which broke from its competitors to endorse FDA regulation.

The bill would allow the FDA to reduce the amount of nicotine in cigarettes, but only Congress could permanently ban them.

The committee adopted an amendment by Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., that would ban clove cigarettes, reversing a controversial decision by Kennedy to allow the FDA to make that decision.

Kennedy, the panel's chairman, said he was responding to several senators who contacted him with concerns that a ban on cloves would not be compliant with World Trade Organization rules. But Kennedy agreed to the ban after several senators objected.

Most cloves are marketed in Asia, and Philip Morris, a unit of New York-based Altria Group Inc. (MO), recently launched a Marlboro cigarette flavored with cloves in Indonesia.

Kennedy said at the meeting that Philip Morris had "nothing to do with our decision" and he supported the clove ban as long as it is WTO compliant.

Philip Morris's competitors are strongly opposed to the overall bill, saying it would lock in Philip Morris's dominant market share. The panel rejected several amendments by Republican Sen. Richard Burr, who represents R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. in his home state of North Carolina. Kennedy said that Burr's amendments would undermine the legislation.

After the hearing, Burr said he would not rule out trying to hold up the bill on the Senate floor.

Enzi, the top Republican on the panel, also opposes the legislation and has objected to Philip Morris's involvement.

"If this bill is good for big tobacco, how can it be good for public health?," Enzi asked after the hearing. "The fact is, it can't. This bill is nothing more than a 'Marlboro Protection Act,' written to keep Philip Morris at the top of the tobacco market."

Enzi has introduced his own bill that would aim to greatly shrink the size of the tobacco market over the next 20 years.

I find myself in an unaccustomed and unexpected position: defending Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Gonzales fans, if there are Gonzales fans left, except for the only fan who counts: Don't take any comfort from my assessment.

In his Senate testimony last week, Gonzales once again dissembled and misled. He was too clever by seven-eighths. He employed his signature brand of inartful dodging — linguistic evasion, poorly executed. The brutalizing he received from senators of both parties was abundantly deserved.

But I don't think he actually lied about his March 2004 hospital encounter with then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. I certainly don't think he could be charged with — much less convicted of — perjury.

Go back to December 2005, when The New York Times reported on a secret program of warrantless wiretapping. President Bush acknowledged an effort "to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al-Qaida and related terrorist organizations."

Soon, the first stories about the hospital visit appeared.

In a Jan. 1, 2006, article, the Times reported then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey's refusal to approve continuation of the surveillance program and described "an emergency visit" to Ashcroft's hospital room by Gonzales and Andrew Card, then White House counsel and chief of staff, respectively.

Similarly, Newsweek reported how the White House aides "visited Ashcroft in the hospital to appeal Comey's refusal. In pain and on medication, Ashcroft stood by his No. 2."

It was in this context — senators knew about the hospital visit well before Comey's riveting description in May — that Gonzales appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in February 2006.

Asked about those reports, he said that "with respect to WHAT THE PRESIDENT HAS CONFIRMED, I do not believe that these DOJ officials that you were identifying had concerns about this program." The disagreements, he said, "dealt with operational capabilities that we're not talking about today."

Flash-forward to last week, when Gonzales once again said: "The disagreement that occurred and the reason for the visit to the hospital ... was about other intelligence activities. It was not about the Terrorist Surveillance Program THAT THE PRESIDENT ANNOUNCED TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE."

The emphasis is mine, and it matters. We know, from Comey's account, that the dispute was intense. We don't know precisely what the disagreement was about — and it makes sense that we don't know: This was a classified program, and all the officials, current and former, who have testified about it have been deliberately and appropriately vague.

In his May testimony, Comey referred only to "a particular classified program." FBI Director Robert Mueller told the House Judiciary Committee last week that the hospital-room encounter was about "an NSA program that has been much discussed."

Does this really contradict Gonzales or turn him into a perjurer? It's clear there was an argument over the warrantless wiretapping program. Comey refused to recertify it. In response, something about the program changed; Justice officials were willing to go along with the modified program.

The New York Times reported Sunday that the disagreement involved "computer searches through massive electronic databases" — not necessarily the more-limited program the president acknowledged. As the Times put it, "If the dispute chiefly involved data mining, rather than eavesdropping, Mr. Gonzales' defenders may maintain that his narrowly crafted answers, while legalistic, were technically correct."

Congress deserves better than technically correct linguistic parsing. So the bipartisan fury at Gonzales is understandable. Lawmakers are in full Howard Beale mode, mad as hell at Gonzales and not wanting to take it anymore.

But perjury is a crime that demands parsing: To be convicted, the person must have "willfully" stated a "material matter which he does not believe to be true."

The Supreme Court could have been writing about Gonzales when it ruled that "the perjury statute is not to be loosely construed, nor the statute invoked simply because a wily witness succeeds in derailing the questioner — so long as the witness speaks the literal truth" — even if the answers "were not guileless but were shrewdly calculated to evade."

Consequently, the calls by some Democrats for a special prosecutor to consider whether Gonzales committed perjury have more than a hint of maneuvering for political advantage. What else is to be gained by engaging in endless Clintonian debates about what the meaning of "program" is?

Rather, lawmakers need to concentrate on determining what the administration did — and under what claimed legal authority — that produced the hospital room showdown. They need to satisfy themselves that the administration has since been operating within the law; to see what changes might guard against a repetition of the early, apparently unlawful activities; and to determine where the foreign intelligence wiretapping statute might need fixes.

That's where Congress's focus should be — not on trying to incite a criminal prosecution that won't happen of an attorney general who should have been gone long ago.

Under the terms of the agreement, Nike Retail Services will pay $7.6 million to the current and former employees to resolve the claims. The lawsuit covers black employees who worked at the store from 1999 until now.

Nike also must make a host of other changes to address diversity, such as appointing a diversity consultant to monitor the Chicago store's compliance and a compliance officer at Nike's headquarters in Beaverton. The company must also add an ombudsperson at the store and conduct diversity training for all supervisors and managers there.

Nike also is required to review its human resources practice, create equal opportunity objectives for the store and review its theft-loss policies. It also will create a formal mentoring program for black employees.

The company and the attorney for the plaintiffs declined to comment further on the case.