Pictures

WASHINGTON is now in the middle of one of its favorite games: Should It Show and Tell? The playing pieces: a new round of pictures and videos of atrocities committed by U.S. troops on Iraqi prisoners. Should the images be released to the public or kept hidden for fear of further inciting Arab anger? President Bush may make the final determination. Much of this game is based on make-believe. In this case, several Pentagon officials and their supporters on Capitol Hill are make-believing that these pictures - which have been passed along among troops and even used as screensavers on military computers - will somehow not end up in the hands of the media or some Web site somewhere.

If you're hung up about what to hang on your walls, put down your hammer and nails and flip through a new book. Decorating With Style (Clarkson Potter, $35) is by Stephanie Hoppen, a London print and fine-art dealer whose shop is famous as a masterpiece of display. The book covers a number of subjects - curtains, tabletops, fireplaces - but its strength is picture-hanging. Hoppen is enormously clever at taking one unassuming image - a vintage print of a sofa, for instance - and hanging it with images of chairs and interiors.

DogMeetsWorld.org has little to do with dogs and everything to do with making children happy around the world - through photography. What's not: The cost. Participants, who are provided with the stuffed dog, make a $30 donation and need to buy a portable printer. But it's free to go to the website and view the photos. - Jen Leo, Los Angeles Times

Jayson Werth has an explanation for his improved performance of late: more photographs. "When I'm seeing the ball well, it's almost like taking 1,000 still pictures of the ball from the time it is pitched to the time it gets to the plate," he said. "When I'm not seeing the ball well, it's like two pictures. " After a slump in which he admitted to feeling "totally lost," the Phillies rightfielder began last night batting .303 (10 for 33) in the first nine games of a 10-game road trip.

The Inquirer has won three awards in the 45th annual Pictures of the Year competition at the University of Missouri. David Griffin, art director of The Inquirer Sunday Magazine, won in the category of feature story picture editing. Griffin and three other Inquirer photo editors - Tom Gralish, Bert Fox and Larry Price - won for newspaper-produced magazine picture editing. The Inquirer Neighbors sections won first place in the category "best use of photographs by a newspaper - zoned edition.

Try St. Joseph's University Gallery on the Lower Merion side of City Line Avenue near the new pedestrian bridge overpass. Blaise Tobia's photographs star there in his first solo show in our region. These pictures are mostly about our basic experiences of city life with its rational enough buildings and artifacts and its unreasonable emotions. Pictures based on emotionally loaded memories often have an oddly insistent intimacy that underscores their natural poignance. Tobia, who is in his sixth year teaching photography at Drexel University, travels back and forth between his Old City residence and his home in Brooklyn.

It is, at bottom, an argument about pictures and words. The pictures are of captured al-Qaeda terrorists, hooded, shackled and kneeling. The words are unlawful combatants, the U.S. government's preferred term for the men it has interned on a military base in Cuba. Together, words and pictures have inflamed an international debate. Human-rights groups have accused the United States of treating the detainees inhumanely. Even America's staunchest ally, Britain, has registered rumblings of concern.

Lester Lee Weiss, a solid landmark in Lawndale's business community, is going to retire. But don't let anybody tell you he's quitting work. After 42 years of selling clothes out of Weiss' Kiddie Shop, 6427 Rising Sun Ave., he has no intention of just handing over the keys and walking out. "The young fellow who's buying the store hasn't been in the business," Weiss said. "I've agreed to stick around and lend a hand, to break him in. " The details are still a little loose, but Weiss, 70, expects to begin work as a "consultant" to his replacement, a 26-year-old entrepreneur, late this month or early in March.

The men who repeatedly raped a 25-year-old woman, killed a man and wounded another in a rampage last year took pictures of each other, posing with their shotguns during the episode. "The pictures were meant to be a trophy of their adventure," said Assistant District Attorney Michael McGovern. "This type of barbaric, brutal conduct is difficult to understand. " Most of the photos were destroyed, but one was available for use at the trial of six men before Common Pleas Judge Carolyn E. Temin.

NEW YORK - A New York Police Department detective told a federal judge that he has seen no evidence that one of his informants brought up the subject of jihad as a way to bait Muslims into making incriminating remarks. But text messages obtained by the Associated Press show otherwise. While the detective, Stephen Hoban, described the activities in a new legal filing in U.S. District Court as narrowly focused on a few people under investigation, text messages show a wide-ranging effort.

CLEVELAND - The man accused of holding three women captive for a decade in his home terrorized the mother of his children, frequently beating her, playing twisted psychological games, and locking her indoors, her relatives say. Several relatives of Grimilda Figueroa, who left Ariel Castro years ago and died last year after a long illness, painted a nightmarish portrait of life with Castro. In interviews with the Associated Press, the relatives described Castro as a "monster" who abused his wife and locked his family inside their own home.

Swarthmore College is in rare company nationally as a school that collects nearly as much or more revenue from investments as it does from students. Its $1.5 billion endowment - about $1 million per student - allows the highly ranked college to spend more on each student, but it does not fully shield Swarthmore from the economic forces threatening higher education. "When we think about the future, we're worried about . . . economic growth in this country," said Suzanne Welsh, vice president for finance and treasurer at Swarthmore.

If the doomsday budget being floated by the nearly broke Philadelphia School District comes to pass, this is what school will look like in September: "No books, no paper, no clubs, no counselors, no librarian," Masterman teacher Elizabeth Taylor grimly told City Council last week. There would be bigger classes, but no aides to help manage them. Schools would lack sports, support staff to monitor lunchrooms and playgrounds, and secretaries. Some would lose security officers. Thousands of musical instruments would sit unplayed because there would be no music teachers to give lessons.

THE HOUSTON Texans are hoping two massive new video screens will help lure the 2017 Super Bowl to Reliant Stadium. The Texans are in the process of installing the video boards, which will be ready for use in Houston's first preseason game in August. Cowboys Stadium in Arlington currently has the biggest screens, and Houston's will be about 30 percent larger than those. The two new boards will have about six times the area as the current video boards and will be placed in each end zone.

CLEARWATER, Fla. - Yuniesky Betancourt snared a line drive in the ninth inning Sunday and turned it into a double play for his final act as a Phillie. Six minutes after a 7-6 loss to Boston ended, Betancourt slipped on red shorts and walked to Charlie Manuel's office. He emerged a free agent four minutes later, destined for a job elsewhere in the majors. "It was a very difficult decision," Phillies general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. said. "He played great for us. We had some other guys feel great, and we're comfortable with where we are as far as those players are concerned.

Richard Lathrop zeros in on North Wildwood to show off a new tool that predicts where the water will go as sea level rises. Looking at high tide, sections of marsh now flood. With a foot of sea-level rise, water laps at a few streets. Two feet, and some neighborhoods flood. Three feet, and portions of the evacuation route are awash - all at high water. No wonder he calls the future view of New Jersey, as envisioned by Rutgers University's new sea-level mapping tool, "disturbing.

Having spent enough time over the last several weeks trying to prove I'd spent all of the money in my flexible spending account on medical expenses, I immediately grasped the reason Bill Marvin's business has grown so much. InstaMed , based in Center City, said last week that it had processed more than $60 billion of health-care payments through its electronic payments network - just one year after having surpassed the $30 billion mark. Based on the trends InstaMed tracks from the hospitals, doctors' offices, and insurers who use the network, Marvin said he projects "triple-digit growth" in transactions over the next year.

HEAVILY FAVORED "Argo" won the Academy Award for best picture last night, but there was a silver lining for Philadelphia. Jennifer Lawrence won Best Actress for her role as a troubled widow determined to woo a bipolar man (Bradley Cooper) in "Silver Linings Playbook. " The shot-in-Philadelphia movie had earned eight nominations - this was the only win. The excited 22-year-old Lawrence tripped on her way to the stage. "I feel bad that I fell. This is really embarrassing. This," she said, looking at her new Oscar, "is nuts.

IT WAS A RECORD that stood for 11 years. That's how long Nick Nolte's mug shot had been atop the worst-of-all-time list. But alas, the wild-haired photo of the scowling actor - taken after his arrest for DUI in 2002 - has been topped. By Raiders starting defensive lineman Desmond Bryant. On Sunday morning, a shirtless Bryant was arrested after showing up uninvited at a neighbor's house in Miami and causing a commotion. According to the police report, he was drunk, which isn't hard to believe judging by the post-arrest photo that accompanies this column.