The editorial board bemoans the U.S. Supreme Court decision that inmates have no right to DNA testing that could exonerate them. Attempts by an accused person to find exculpatory evidence should be considered a basic part of due process. The board agrees with Colombian leaders that they, not the United States, should be the ones to try a man accused of holding 15 hostages including three who worked for military contractors. The board also takes a look at the Alameda Unified School District's new curriculum for teaching elementary school children about tolerance toward gays and lesbians, and concludes that the lessons take too heavy-handed an approach for such young children:

It's high time that schools took anti-bullying measures more seriously. We just never thought that would include requiring fifth-graders to recite the meaning of each letter in LGBT.

In attempting to discourage taunting of gay students, the Alameda Unified School District turned what should be a basic lesson on treating others kindly into a primer on sexual identity. Its new anti-bullying curriculum for kindergartners through fifth-graders will begin in the fall and focus solely on gay and lesbian issues -- as if harassment based on race, religion or failure to wear cool clothes were nonexistent. Parents who might object cannot opt their children out of it.

On the other side of the fold, writer Richard Farrell describes the haunting heights and low points of life with his domineering, sometimes abusive, sometimes intensely loving father. And a UCLA English professor parses the language of Middle East coverage and finds that it favors Israel over the concerns of Palestinians.

Illustration by Polly Becker for The Times

In today's Los Angeles Times opinion pages, the editorial board says it's time to sell the picturesque state-owned castle, pictured at right, perhaps for condos. The castle, by the way, is the prison at San Quentin.

Selling San Quentin and building homes or businesses in its place would boost the state's economy, lower prison operating costs and possibly provide a one-time cash infusion to the general fund, all without costing taxpayers a dime. Lawmakers should get it done, even if it won't solve the budget crisis.

The board also ponders the diminution of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel after a recent Supreme Court opinion, penned by Justice Antonin Scalia, in the case of Jesse Jay Montejo. The ruling overturns a 1986 precedent and blurs what ought to be a bright line: that once a suspect has a lawyer, questioning should stop unless the lawyer is present.

And then there's sexting, the practice of young teens, usually girls, of sending naked and other personal photos of themselves to boys -- who, too often, forward them to the rest of the school, the neighborhood, and all of cyberspace. So are we dealing with sex crimes? Child abuse? The Times calls on everyone to pause and take a breath:

By sexting, to quote one expert, teens are giving themselves "cyber tattoos" for life. So although it may be necessary to bring charges in the most egregious cases, that shouldn't be the rule. Education and attentive parenting will go further toward addressing this worrisome trend than new laws and tough prosecutions.

On the Op-Ed side, historic preservation comes to the moon. No, really. Louisiana State University School of Art graduate student Jill Thomas and professor Justin St. P. Walsh say we should worry about space tourists messing with the Apollo landing sites.

The sites of early lunar landings are of unparalleled significance in the history of humanity, and extraordinary caution should be taken to protect them. Armstrong's iconic footprint and the American flag placed by the astronauts may yet be intact -- there is no wind or rain on the moon to damage or destroy them.

Election law maven, blogger, and Loyola Law School professor Richard Hasen calls for Al Franken to be seated in the U.S. Senate. Democrat Franken led incumbent Republican Norm Coleman by 312 votes after a lengthy recount in Minnesota, but Coleman has appealed to the state Supreme Court and may not stop there.

If, as expected, the court rejects Coleman's challenge and confirms Al Franken as the winner, the U.S. Senate should be ready to seat Franken provisionally, even if Coleman vows further legal action and even if the state's governor refuses to sign Franken's election certificate.

And columnist Gregory Rodriguez takes up the Latino-ness of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, who is of Puerto Rican descent.

Because the media and the political elites make no distinctions among Latino groups, Mexican Americans may find themselves waiting a very long time for one of their own to be nominated to the Supreme Court.

Photo: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

A couple of decades ago, the trend in Western medicine was to discourage parents from having their newborn sons' penises circumcised, a dramatic turnaround from the trend of a couple of millennia ago. But trend cycles have a way of speeding up, and we're already back to doctors saying biblical Abraham might have had the right idea after all, though he undertook the procedure at a more advanced age.

A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine finds that circumcision is associated with dramatically reduced rates of the virus that causes genital warts, the virus that causes cervical cancer in women, and syphilis. This comes on top of findings a couple of years ago that circumcision appeared to have a protective effect against HIV infection. reducing infection rates in males by up to 60%.

As a result, some doctors are calling for circumcision as a public health measure. Knowing doctors, though, and the rate at which medical advice changes (Did wine end up being good or bad for us in the latest round?), males with uncertain sentiments on the subject will likely want to hold off before making radical anatomical modifications. It's a lot easier to eat more garlic -- or give up garlic -- than to undo genital surgery.

Photo: A mohel, who performs Jewish ritual circumcisions, with a client. Credit: Handout from Rabbi Jacob Shechet

Ew. No, really. This is just ... distasteful.

Southwest Airlines has adorned one of its 737s with a huuuge illustration of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model named Bar Refaeli reclining along the fuselage, cleavage at about Row Two, white-bikinied crotch over the wing, feet nearing the very back row.

This turns out to be an even worse idea than airlines trying to charge passengers for water. The Fort Worth newspaper says some passengers complained about having to board a plane "plastered with soft porn."

With its low fares and jokey crew banter, Southwest is the spiritual airline heir to the departed PSA, Pacific Southwest Airlines, which was practically California's unofficial in-state airline for almost 40 years, until 1988, when it finally gave up the ghost in a merger with USAir. Its fares were very cheap, and standby fares were affordable even for students; I remember flying up to San Francisco late one afternoon at the last minute for some concert, flying back that same night, and getting change out of seventy bucks.

Unfortunately, PSA sometimes made too much of its motto, "The World's Friendliest Airline." There was more to it than the comic cabin patter. A Times reporter wrote in 1971 that you could just as easily call PSA the "Airborne Playboy Club," and he meant it flatteringly. Stewardesses -- for that's what they were called --  often wore miniskirts and, later, "banana-skin tight" hot pants. They were instructed to make nice with the chiefly male passengers -- so much so that you'd have thought they were working for tips instead of $330 a month (the starting salary in 1971).

In that 1971 article, the president of the airline described the ideal "PSA girl" as having "beauty head to toe. Good face. Good build. Flashing eyes. She's the sort of girl who can swing and yet keep herself under control when the passenger goes too far." Not a word about the first responsibility of flight attendants: passenger safety.

I remember boarding a flight one February 14, and after the plane took off, the "PSA girl" went up and down the aisle, handing out drawing materials to the men on board and sing-songing, "Make me a Valentine! Make me a Valentine!"

It wasn't cute, it was ridiculous. I think it demeaned the flight attendants as much as it demeaned passengers, especially women passengers.

When it comes to what should happen to this new fleshly adornment on the Southwest plane, I'll invoke a double entendre that might have suited the old PSA: "Take it off."

They never met
Not even briefly
I know what you thought
You thought that they might . . .

I was reminded of those lyrics from the hilarious Martin Mull song when I read the latest twist in my favorite prehistoric tale: the "Did they?/Didn't they?" story of modern humans and Neanderthals.

The story has toggled back to "they didn't"  -- interbreed, that is. The release of findings from the mapping of Neanderthal DNA indicates, in USA Today's decorous langauge, that "our extinct cousins made 'very little, if any' contribution to human genes." They may have met, but they probably never did the nasty.

As I have noted before, speculation about whether Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalis ever mated long has aroused the prurient interest of amateur anthropologists. It also has provided science writers with an evergreen topic, because scientists keep changing their mind.

The conventional wisdom used to be that the two lines crossed during their relatively brief cohabitation in Europe and Asia, as was supposedly obvious from the fact that some modern people have Neanderthal-like weak chins and protruding brow ridges. Someone even suggested that if you dressed a Neanderthal and gave him a shave and haircut he would be indistinguishable from anyone else in a subway car. (I doubt it, but maybe in a WWE crowd.)

Not long ago, there was even the suggestion that modern humans in Europe and Asia borrowed their brain power from Neanderthals, in the form of a gene called microcephalin-1. Alas, the latest study from the Max Planck Institute  seems to render that theory extinct. Neanderthals apparently carried an earlier version of the microcephalin gene.

The study does suggest that Neanderthals and moderns might have shared a different trait.  The Neanderthal DNA included a gene known as FOXP2, which is involved in speech and language. So it's possible that a Neanderthal swain might have asked a human woman to share his cave -- and she said no.

Even though justice should be pursued for the victims of molestation by Catholic priests, the editorial board worries that the legal grounds used for an investigation into Cardinal Roger M. Mahony stretch prosecutorial creativity too far. The board also looks at the curious case of a billboard magnate who claims to be an artist, and comes out in firm support of the Los Angeles Unified School District's exams during the academic year, despite a call by the teachers' union to boycott the tests, as a useful way of keeping students' learning on track:

If a test showed that most of a fourth-grade class couldn't convert fractions to decimals, even though the teacher had covered that material, wouldn't the teacher want to know as soon as possible? .... Teachers who fail to carry out such a basic duty as a required exam should be written up. Student progress is simply not negotiable.

On the other side of the fold, columnist Joel Stein isn't happy that he's being asked to vote again, just a few months after he completed a fatiguing ballot. P.W. Singer of the Brookings Institution outlines the way modern war is increasingly fought by machines, and writer Henry Alford tells the story of a 114-year-old woman who can teach us something about not just the quantity but the quality of longevity.

I would argue that man has accorded himself long life because elders serve an important role in society. As an old African saying runs, "the death of an old person is like the burning of a library." These living libraries are among our greatest sources of wisdom.

* Illustration by Joel Pett / Lexington Herald-Leader

The Opinion Manufacturing Division offers two very different views on the birth of octuplets in Bellflower. Author William H. Woodwell Jr., citing the troubles his family experienced with twin daughters born 16 weeks early, throws a glass of cold water on the celebratory coverage of the Bellflower babies. Extremely premature births impose tremendous costs, Woodwell argues, and often lead to less than fully functional children. That's why he calls for a crackdown on fertility treatments and -- here's the ugly part -- culling some of the multiple fetuses they sometimes create:

Fertility doctors must be held more accountable for their actions. The medically assisted birth of triplets or higher should be viewed as the equivalent of malpractice.

In addition, when fertility treatments yield triplets or more, we need to promote responsible decision-making on the part of parents -- chiefly, by encouraging or even somehow requiring them to engage in multifetal reduction.

Sorry, but that sounds too much like China's brutal one-child policy to me. (Remember, irate letter writers, that Op-Ed writers do not express the Views of This Newspaper.) On the other side of the spread, the editorial board takes a much more equanimious approach to the event. It notes the great challenges that the births pose to the family, yet it doesn't assume the worst:

People might cluck, but then people are always ready to cluck at the parenting decisions of others. We're more inclined, as a society, to define and foresee problems in eccentricity than to think that perhaps it will turn out to be simply extraordinary.

Elsewhere in the editorial stack, the board blasts Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) for trying to make President Obama's choice for attorney general, Eric Holder, promise not to prosecute a set of potential defendants (U.S. intelligence officers who used "enhanced interrogation techniques") before he's confirmed. And it praises President Obama for starting his efforts in the Middle East on the right note, giving his first official television interview as president to the Saudi-owned satellite news channel Al Arabiya. Hmm. I wonder if Obama's appearance drew more viewers than Al Jazeera did when it aired its last Osama bin Laden tape.

Back in Op-Ed land, freelance writer Lee Gapay offers a rare bit of unadulterated good news: He's finally found space in a subsidized housing project for seniors after 6 1/2 years spent living in his pickup truck. (You may remember Gapay from his last piece about being homeless, which ran on Thanksgiving Day.) And columnist Tim Rutten writes that the decision by Pope Benedict XVI to rescind the excommunications of four anti-Semitic bishops in a traditionalist Catholic sect wasn't merely an inside-the-Vatican issue, but also a blow to religious liberty and tolerance.

Photo: Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center/Getty Images

I guess you have to give them points for trying. Just don't give them any of my money.

Porn mogul Larry Flynt and a fellow named Joe Francis, who dreamed up those "Girls Gone Wild" videos, are asking Congress for a $5-billion bailout for the porn industry.

Now, I've always read that when times get bad, porn prospers. When times are good, porn prospers. Porn, in sum, is a foolproof economic performer. These two admit that the porn industry isn't exactly facing the perils of Detroit, or even California and its budget, but as they declared in their press release, "Why take chances?"

Just in case anyone's even thinking of taking this seriously, please, Congress, don't put a $20 or any other public money in their thongs. Heck, Francis is scheduled to go on trial in a couple of months in L.A. on felony federal tax-evasion charges. That's the only kind of relationship he should have with the federal government.

But I do think that porn's lobbyists could take their case to Congress, just for the entertainment value. Back in 2001, the California porn industry went to Sacramento to lobby over taxes and Internet privacy.

Nearly two dozen porn performers, strip club operators and others campaigned office by office, handing out fliers showing just how much money their business makes in California; one of them, Nina Hartley, said, "We are a revenue generator, and we'd like a little respect."

It  was a trifle ... what's the word? Awkward. But persuasive. One conservative lawmaker was "dour" when the adult industry group first showed up in his office, but after 20 or 25 minutes, he'd warmed up so much that he invited the head of the Free Speech Coalition to play golf with him.

Imagine if that act went to Capitol Hill. Trying to josh with John Kerry, maybe trying to get a laugh out of Oklahoma's Tom Coburn with a naughty joke.

One exotic performer made a huge splash in D.C. years ago. Democrat Wilbur Mills ran the House Ways and Means Committee in 1974, at least until he ran up against some cops.

They stopped him as he drove a bit woozily around the Tidal Basin at 2 o'clock in the morning, a month before the 1974 election. Drinking and driving, not such a big deal back then. But it didn't stop there. His passenger leaped into the water to get away. Her name: Fannie Fox, a.k.a. the Argentine Firecracker, a top-drawer stripper. Fox changed her stage name to the Tidal Basin Bombshell and wrote a book, "The Stripper and the Congressman."

Mills won reelection a month later -- there's no accounting for some voters' taste -- and then called it quits.

And they call those the good old days.   

Too late for Michael  Crichton, scientists reported this week that they have recovered a good deal of the woolly mammoth's DNA from tufts of hair. Before you could say "Jurassic Park,"  journalists were speculating about the possibility of reviving the species by tinkering with the ova of elephants to replicate the mammoth's DNA sequence.

John McCain didn't like the federal government paying for research involving bear DNA, but even he might warm to the idea of bringing back the mammoth for a mere $10 million in federal funds. Stampeding mammoths probably wouldn't be as terrifying as a flock of velociraptors. And the Treasury could recover its investment by nationalizing Ripley's Believe It Or Not.

Still, is this trip really necessary? It isn't just that scientists have better things to do. A successful quasi-cloning of a mammoth would tempt scientists to try the same thing with other extinct species, including Neanderthals, those hunky hominids whose possible interbreeding with humans has figured in prurient speculation for years.

On its blog, New Scientist magazine notes: "With a  rough draft of the Neanderthal genome due around Christmas season, some reports speculate on the prospect for a Neanderthal-human hybrid or the more ethically palatable chimpanzee-human mashup." New Scientist provides this quote from genomicist George Church:  "The big issue would be whether enough people felt that a chimp-Neanderthal hybrid would be acceptable, and that would be broadly discussed before anyone started to work on it."

Enough people? All it would take is a few mad (or mischievous) scientists and a rich patron, a la "Jurassic Park." Then, when the resulting Neanderchimp reached marriageable age, all the speculation about human-Neanderthal mating could be put to the test, perhaps on the Maury Povich show. Creationists could picket outside the studio, joined by PETA and the SPCA.

On second thought, maybe the mammoth should be allowed to rest in peace. With global warming, the hirsute beast would probably go extinct all over again.

When things go wrong in the L.A. public schools, they go so depressingly wrong. And the reasons they go wrong are just as depressingly predictable -- either the extreme politics and hidden agendas that shouldn't be part of running schools, or worse, the crushing weight of an immovable bureaucracy in which no one is really responsible and no one is held accountable.

And so the investigation on how a suspected child molester came to be assigned to a middle school, where he allegedly molested two students, ended with a report written to the tune of: People made mistakes, but no current employee is to blame. (This tune should be familiar. It was played repeatedly after the payroll fiasco in which thousands of teachers were getting either wildly overpaid or underpaid for months on end.)

That's their story and they're sticking to it, even though the superintendent of the local district, Carol Truscott, violated district policy by not initiating an investigation of Steve Thomas Rooney before assigning him to Markham Middle School. She didn't realize it was the policy, she said. And the district didn't tell her to do an investigation.

Yet Truscott, like all top administrators, must certify twice a year that she's up on all the policies. Paperwork, the district can do. Accountability for the paperwork actually meaning something is another matter.

But with or without a policy, why was Truscott (and other administrators who were faulted in the Rooney case) waiting for orders to act? The point of having managers in local districts is so that they can take the initiative to respond to the needs of their schools and students. At least she could have asked the central office, "Are children safe if I reassign this guy to a school with vulnerable preteen girls?" Or something like that.

Truscott has a solid reputation as a caring and capable administrator. But if people are never held accountable in the schools, no one will ever act. It's so safe to wait for directions - -safe for staff, that is. Not for students.