December 1, 2005

THE waiting room for Hilarie Cash's practice has the look and feel of many a therapist's office, with soothing classical music, paintings of gentle swans and colorful flowers and on the bookshelves stacks of brochures on how to get help. But along with her patients, Dr. Cash, who runs Internet/Computer Addiction Services here in the city that is home to Microsoft, is a pioneer in a growing niche in mental health care and addiction recovery.

United States military is said to be engaged in multimillion-dollar covert campaign to plant paid propaganda in Iraqi news media and pay friendly Iraqi journalists monthly stipends; Lincoln Group, Washington-based public relations firm paid by Pentagon, takes articles prepared by American military, translates them into Arabic and submits them to Iraqi newspapers or advertising agencies without revealing Pentagon's role; in addition to paying newspapers to print government propaganda, Lincoln has paid dozen Iraqi journalists whose past coverage has not been antagonistic to US; State Dept and United States Agency for International Development are paying contractors millions of dollars to help train journalists and promote professional and independent Iraqi media; Pentagon is paying millions more to Lincoln Group for work that appears to violate fundamental principles of Western journalism; military spokesmen claim they have no informatin on contract with Lincoln Group (M)

Dressed in a gray prison jumpsuit and rubber slippers, Allan Cameron, 27, the man accused of killing a New York City police officer in Brooklyn early Monday morning and wounding another officer nine days before, sat in a jail cell yesterday and described himself as a longtime drug user, a man with multiple girlfriends and someone with an appetite for hard partying. ''I smoke weed morning till night, like everyone in the ghetto,'' Mr. Cameron said. ''I'm Jamaican. We don't use those other fancy drugs.''

Dave Anderson Sports of The Times column discusses Dallas Cowboys coach Bill Parcells, who has coached number of his players while heading up New York Jets or New England Patriots (M)

IT was early in 1999 that Joshua Suzanne Ethier, a proprietor of Rags-A-GoGo, a vintage clothing store on West 14th Street and an avatar of downtown style, reckoned that she'd like a muscle car for spring. Ms. Ethier, 42, hoped to match, in a vehicular way, the adventuresome, evolving aesthetic she has cloaked herself in since high school in West Dennis, Mass. Today, she sports a softened Mohawk hairdo -- a fauxhawk, as she put it recently -- articulated with color and a clothing style she describes as gladiator-cowboy: union suits, 70's-era athletic wear, well-worn calf-high lace-up Frye boots, sheepskin vests and so forth. A friend had a friend who knew someone -- an owner of the Sonic fast-food chain, as it happened -- who had a lipstick-red 1969 Chevy Camaro, which was then parked in Oklahoma City, that he wanted to unload. It had its original engine and white racing stripes down its hood. After Ms. Ethier drove it home to Manhattan, she slapped a new license plate on it that read ''Chick 69.''