Command Center

2012 Toyota Prius C Three: The C is for "cuter. " Price: $23,519 as tested. (Including $850 for the sunroof, $225 for floor mats, and $49 for a cargo net.) Marketer's pitch: As the millions of TV commercials have said: "A (Game of Life) game piece to move you to the next level. " Conventional wisdom: The 25-dollar fill-up makes a comeback. Reality: A less interplanetary Prius. A delicate balance: Whenever I try out the Driver's Seat on well-known models, I brace myself for the inevitable onslaught of responses, most of them less-than-favorable.

On Friday, I went on a tour of AT&T Inc.'s Philadelphia "command center," a rare peek inside a secure facility that handles a terabit of information every second. It was a way for local AT&T managers to show how the telecommunications company plans to spend $19 billion nationwide on its wireless and wireline networks and other capital projects in 2011. On Sunday, Dallas-based AT&T showed another way that it hopes to spend its capital: It intends to buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom AG for $39 billion in a cash-and-stock transaction.

The new year will bring a new vehicle to Gloucester County. Not just any vehicle, though, but a sophisticated, high-tech $198,000 command center - called Field Comm1 - that can serve as headquarters during major emergencies in the county. As part of a six-year plan, the county bought the field command center in 1996. It will replace the 28-foot-long vehicle the county has been using since 1982, and which used to belong to the Whitman Fire Company in Washington Township. Once the new Field Comm1 is painted, it will be stand ready for emergencies.

Standing at the altar before 100 parishioners attending morning Mass, Msgr. Martin Geraghty had just begun his blessing of the Communion host and wine when he heard a boom and felt the brick church in Belle Harbor rattle. The noise was overpowering. He paused, looking down at the faces of the men and women in church who stared back at him with the same look of fear that he felt inside. "I hope that wasn't a terrorist attack," he thought. His parish of 1,800 families in this neighborhood sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and Jamaica Bay already lost a dozen people on Sept.

Mike Armstrong goes inside AT&T's Philadelphia command center. C1.

The soldiers in the doomsday bunker are headed for the day shift. The Pentagon announced yesterday that the Alternate National Military Command Center, a huge post buried inside Raven Rock Mountain near the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, is going off its 24-hour alert and on to "a normal week-day schedule. " The center served throughout the Cold War as a backup Pentagon, where commanders were to gather if Washington were destroyed in a nuclear war. Visitors to the secret post, just off the Appalachian Trail northwest of Camp David, Md., say it is a subterranean city with streets and electric cars, fresh-water reservoirs, tons of freeze-dried food and hundreds of soldiers.

All systems were go in a Northeast High School space lab this morning. Astronauts Brett Dolnick and Duane Pettus, in the jumpsuits, were seated inside the capsule of a two-story-high space shuttle mockup. Other students surrounded a control panel designed to look like the one at NASA's command center in Houston. All eyes were on two giant monitors and other smaller screens as the countdown for Discovery in Cape Canaveral, Fla., moved toward 0:00. Then liftoff. Applause filled the lab of Northeast's medical, engineering and aerospace sciences magnet program at Cottman and Algon Avenues.

Joseph Certaine, a longtime political adviser to Mayor Goode and a key member of Goode's primary-campaign staff, has been named to fill a newly created post overseeing the city's response to routine emergencies, city officials said yesterday. Certaine, 40, assumed the job of assistant managing director about two weeks ago, said Managing Director James S. White, who called Certaine "the best man for the job. " Although White refused to say how much Certaine is being paid, three other assistant managing directors on White's staff earn between $40,000 and $43,200 a year.

A 9-year-old girl was missing after her parents were found shot to death in their Virginia home near the North Carolina border yesterday, police said. State and local law enforcement authorities were combing the area for Jennifer Short, whose slain parents were discovered Thursday morning by a co-worker who came by the house in Bassett, Va., police said. "No one knows the whereabouts of the child," said Lt. Cliff Roop of the Henry County Sheriff's Department in Martinsville.

Libya has moved its command center for the army and air force from the capital to the desert town of Hun, about 300 miles from Tripoli, Western diplomats said yesterday. Also yesterday, 18 U.S. jets of the type used in the Libyan raid flew into Britain, but British officials said the aircraft were there for a routine NATO exercise planned before the attack. And the Defense Department announced that the aircraft carrier Forrestal would remain in the Mediterranean after completing exercises with Egypt today.

2012 Toyota Prius C Three: The C is for "cuter. " Price: $23,519 as tested. (Including $850 for the sunroof, $225 for floor mats, and $49 for a cargo net.) Marketer's pitch: As the millions of TV commercials have said: "A (Game of Life) game piece to move you to the next level. " Conventional wisdom: The 25-dollar fill-up makes a comeback. Reality: A less interplanetary Prius. A delicate balance: Whenever I try out the Driver's Seat on well-known models, I brace myself for the inevitable onslaught of responses, most of them less-than-favorable.

Mike Armstrong goes inside AT&T's Philadelphia command center. C1.

On Friday, I went on a tour of AT&T Inc.'s Philadelphia "command center," a rare peek inside a secure facility that handles a terabit of information every second. It was a way for local AT&T managers to show how the telecommunications company plans to spend $19 billion nationwide on its wireless and wireline networks and other capital projects in 2011. On Sunday, Dallas-based AT&T showed another way that it hopes to spend its capital: It intends to buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom AG for $39 billion in a cash-and-stock transaction.

A government report accusing Unisys Corp. of underperforming on a $1 billion Transportation Security Administration contract is fraught with contradictions, the company said yesterday. The Department of Homeland Security Inspector General's report released Thursday also castigated the TSA for sloppy oversight of the Blue Bell company's work. It recommended that TSA dump Unisys and start fresh with a new bidding process for services including e-mail, high-speed Internet, and communications technologies at U.S. airports.

News of pitcher Jon Lieber's signing with the Phillies flashed on one of the many flat-screen televisions mounted on the walls of the office building that houses Scott Boras' law firm. Then came word that Al Leiter was headed to the Florida Marlins, and Jaret Wright was joining the New York Yankees. "Dustin Hermanson to the White Sox," announced an associate, poking his head into a conference room where Boras was seated Wednesday afternoon. Baseball's most powerful agent looked up from the stack of files he'd been thumbing through.

Bucks County hostage negotiators turned a Warminster catering hall into a command station yesterday amid reports that an armed teenager was holed up inside his parents' house a block away. The 16-year-old boy, who has a bipolar disorder, had threatened violence during a heated conversation with his mother around 9:30 a.m. inside their house on the 300 block of Ivy Street, near Madison Avenue and Street Road, police said. A neighbor called police to the scene after the boy's mother had told her what had happened, police said.

The Marines' northward march through Mesopotamia has been three days of constant fighting, leaving a trail of havoc and enemy casualties. A 4,000-man U.S. Marine regiment won a decisive battle Tuesday for control of this Baath Party stronghold without loss of American lives. After daylong fighting, the central Iraqi town was desolate, littered with charred vehicles and the bodies of Iraqi soldiers and civilians. But yesterday, key supply routes leading here from the south still were not entirely secure, and the Marines' progress was slow.

The misery that the Rev. Benjamin Chinnappan has seen distresses his musical voice. "According to Hinduism, my people are born at the bottom of society and are much worse than dust," he says with a frown that darkens his cherubic face. Coworkers at Holy Spirit Hospital here know "Father Ben" as their polite chaplain from India, but most don't realize his unusual station in life. He is an Untouchable, a member of a despised "outcaste" in his homeland. Untouchables, known today as Dalits, are a landless people subject to blatant bigotry even in India's Christian world, where millions of Dalits have sought emancipation.

A 9-year-old girl was missing after her parents were found shot to death in their Virginia home near the North Carolina border yesterday, police said. State and local law enforcement authorities were combing the area for Jennifer Short, whose slain parents were discovered Thursday morning by a co-worker who came by the house in Bassett, Va., police said. "No one knows the whereabouts of the child," said Lt. Cliff Roop of the Henry County Sheriff's Department in Martinsville.

Standing at the altar before 100 parishioners attending morning Mass, Msgr. Martin Geraghty had just begun his blessing of the Communion host and wine when he heard a boom and felt the brick church in Belle Harbor rattle. The noise was overpowering. He paused, looking down at the faces of the men and women in church who stared back at him with the same look of fear that he felt inside. "I hope that wasn't a terrorist attack," he thought. His parish of 1,800 families in this neighborhood sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and Jamaica Bay already lost a dozen people on Sept.