Iaq Pubs

Really, does it get any cooler than testing out the classic cartoon joke involving a trail of gunpowder and a big explosion?

Not for “Mythbuster” Adam Savage, who deems this blow-up one of his favorites. You can’t swing a comatose Sylvester without hitting a rerun of “Mythbusters” on Discovery Channel, but finding fresh episodes can be a challenge since the network rolls out a few at a time throughout the year. The good news is that fans can look forward to seven new episodes beginning Wednesday.

“We lit a line of gunpowder to a keg leading to an explosion,” Savage says of the segment airing Wednesday. “It was one of the more minor explosions we’ve done on ‘Mythbusters,’ but more deeply satisfying from a cartoon perspective.”

The series has gone beyond merely being a hit cable series. It’s a cultural icon, based in co-host Jamie Hyneman’s special effects studio on San Francisco. The No. 1 question the ‘busters get asked is if they will ever run out of myths?

“We say we’ll run out of ideas when people ever stop believing stupid things,” Savage says. “We just finished one that has confounded us our entire careers.”

The episode, which airs in December, finds Savage and Hyneman tackling a question baffling everyone from bloggers to pilots: If a plane is traveling at takeoff speed on a conveyor belt, and that conveyor belt is matching the speed in reverse, can the plane take off?

“We put the plane on a quarter-mile conveyor belt and tested it out,” says Savage about the experiment using a pilot and his Ultralight plane. “I won’t tell you what the outcome was, but the pilot and his entire flight club got it wrong.”

Savage often describes “Mythbusters” as ” ‘Jackass’ meets Mr. Wizard.” And when you think about wacky stunts done on the show, Tory Belleci’s name invariably pops up. On the Nov. 14 “Supersized” two-hour episode, Belleci will attempt to wakeboard from the back of a cruise ship.

Not, he says, the craziest thing he’s had to do on the show. In fact, this season also has him testing out whether your pants can catch fire while being dragged behind a horse. Other seasons has seen him sticking his tongue onto a frozen pole and getting in a pen with a bull to see if the animal would indeed charge him because he was wearing a red outfit.

“When I was in the arena with the bull or with the crocodile, everything inside my body was saying don’t do it, but you know you have to do it,” Belleci says. “I feel like I spent my whole life preparing for this job. I loved playing with fire and at 19 I was almost arrested for making a pipe bomb. Everything I used to get in trouble for I’m now doing as my job.”

Both Belleci and Grant Imahara came to “Mythbusters” after working at Industrial Light and Magic.

“People always ask why I would leave ILM, and it’s because ‘Mythbusters’ sounded like fun. Working on movies and TV is a blast, and ILM has the most talented people in the world,” Imahara says. “But on ‘Mythbusters’ I’ve been able to go places I would never have access to otherwise.”

Not only that, but Imahara says he believes “Mythbusters” just may be responsible for making nerds cool.

“Look at ‘Heroes’ and ‘Numb3rs’ and all these new shows coming out now and we were on the forefront,” Imahara says. “The nerd is the protagonist, the hero. I worked at ILM the same time Masi Oka was there. Who would have thought that two Asian-American nerds from ILM would be on hit shows?”

The voice was groggy.

Lauren Jackson was barely awake in her Sydney, Australia, home when told the news she had hoped to hear: The Storm would return to play the 2008 season at KeyArena. New owner Clay Bennett announced the decision at a sunny Friday afternoon news conference in September, which translated to the wee hours of Saturday morning for Jackson.

“That’s great to hear,” she sort of grunted.

When she was asked whether Bennett’s announcement was enough to convince the two-time league MVP to return after a record-setting season that ended in a third consecutive first-round postseason exit, Jackson couldn’t answer the question clearly.

Although the Storm received a reprieve, theoretically nothing has changed. It helped Jackson, the only one of the team’s stars under contract, to open the door to “probably” returning, but she still has not said definitively she will play in Seattle next summer.

Holding her back is reality.

Bennett began the September news conference with the announcement the Storm would play at least one more season in Seattle. But after he quickly bobbled through the prepared statement, he segued into his real reason for gathering the media.

More court filings. More threats he’ll relocate the Sonics and Storm.

And more declarations that neither team is for sale. Even if the offer is more than the $350 million Bennett’s eight-member group paid Howard Schultz’s group for the Sonics and Storm.

“I had a very pleasant conversation with Lauren, she’s all about winning,” Bennett said of speaking with Jackson before she departed Seattle. “We’re very supportive of [coach] Anne Donovan and the team. KeyArena is not a viable option. It’s not working at all here; we have a significant cash loss.”

This time the Sonics will twist and turn as news regarding the arena situation competes with stories about rookie phenom Kevin Durant’s fadeaway. During the summer, it was Jackson’s MVP season that was clouded by the same topic.

Storm players, scattered across the world for overseas play, say they’re relieved to have a place to return for the summer. Still, they’re busy checking their e-mail for updates from Karen Bryant, the Storm’s chief operating officer. Jackson and teammate Sue Bird, who will also begin play in Russia in November, will pay closer attention because they purchased homes in Queen Anne, knowing their team is the smaller stake in the struggle. WNBA franchises typically sell for $10 million.

Bird, who turned 27 earlier this month, is an unrestricted free agent, hopeful of re-signing with Seattle. But Bryant said no promises have been made to anyone not under contract, though guard Tanisha Wright did say Donovan, also director of player personnel, said the team would pick up the fourth-year option of her rookie contract.

“We need to make changes,” said Bryant, whose other players under contract are starting forward Iziane Castro Marques and guard Katie Gearlds. “We weren’t happy with the way the season went and we’re going to spend all the time in the offseason, nearly every month, to really look at what our options are.”

Remaining optimistic, Bryant keeps her focus on team logistics and building the 2,400-season-ticket holder base. The WNBA expanded to 14 teams, with a new franchise in Atlanta, and the league will have to ratify a new collective-bargaining agreement before free agency can open in January.

The WNBA will have a monthlong hiatus for the Olympics, as it did during the 2004 season, when the Storm won its only championship. That would give Jackson, 26, some time to train with her national team, but the Australian federation could restrict all Aussies from playing in the WNBA, as other countries such as Russia have, in order to prepare for the Beijing Games.

“With the Olympics coming up, I have a few things to decide upon,” Jackson wrote in a recent e-mail.

And then there’s the future. Bennett said his Oklahoma-based group is preparing its application to apply for relocation after the Sonics season starts, so the Storm should know the setting for 2009 before the 2008 season, the ninth for the franchise. If the team is relocating, do established players play in 2008? Do they try to muster support for someone to make Bennett an offer so they can stay in Seattle?

Bennett and Bryant admitted private offers have been made for the WNBA franchise, but Bennett said he isn’t interested. Retaining the team in the city would be best for the league, which experienced another slight dip in attendance last season.

It’s difficult for the WNBA to attract fans, and though potential new sites such as Oklahoma City are near women’s college basketball hotbeds like Oklahoma’s campus in Norman, where the Sooners averaged about 10,000 fans last season, the support doesn’t always translate to the pro game.

“There are still many unknowns because of the CBA [collective-bargaining agreement] and the future of the Sonics and Storm on a more permanent level,” Bird wrote in a recent e-mail. “I’m obviously very excited. I love the city of Seattle. The fans are incredible and deserve to see the Storm play another season.”

And more.

Jayda Evans: 206-464-2067 or jevans@seattletimes.com

EUGENE, Ore. - A high school chemistry teacher convicted of sexually abusing two students was sentenced to two years in prison.

Curtis N. Buell, 26, was also sentenced to five years supervised probation and must register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

“We’re certainly very pleased that the judge saw fit to impose a term of imprisonment because of the general deterrent effect it might have on teachers who are considering engaging in inappropriate conduct with their students, said Erik Hasselman, deputy district attorney in Lane County.

A jury convicted the former Churchill High teacher of four felony and 11 misdemeanor counts of sexual abuse in August after one day of deliberations. Buell was accused of touching the girls intimately over and under their clothing, having one girl touch his genitals and performing oral sex on one girl.

Most of the encounters occurred at the teacher’s office or the school auditorium. One incident occurred at Buell’s Eugene home.

“The crime’s particularly egregious because parents just don’t send their kids to school to be abused or taken advantage of by their teachers,” Hasselman said. “Although it could be argued that the contact was consensual, the balance of power is so disparate between a teacher and students that it’s hard to conclude these young ladies had the same power to say no as they would have had in a traditional relationship.”

The case broke when one of the girls shared some details with her boyfriend. He told his parents, and they contacted school administrators and police.

Lane County Judge Gregory Foote on Tuesday thanked the boy for having the courage to report the abuse.

During their investigation, Eugene police found that Buell had placed more than 1,000 phone calls to one of the victims and several hundred to the other. He was placed on paid administrative leave last October and resigned Jan. 31.

Police arrested him in March.

More than 2,500 U.S. educators were punished for sexual misconduct from 2001-05, according to a recent investigation by The Associated Press.

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Information from: The Register-Guard, http://www.registerguard.com

AP-WS-10-31-07 0350EDT

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court issued an 11th-hour stay for a Mississippi murderer scheduled to be put to death Tuesday night, the third execution the justices have blocked since agreeing to decide whether lethal injections violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The reprieve came less than an hour before Earl Wesley Berry was to be put to death for the kidnapping and murder of Mary Bounds in 1987.

Death-penalty activists and criminal-justice experts said the court’s action is further evidence of a de facto moratorium on executions until it decides the lethal-injection issue. The court itself has not declared such intentions.

The Mississippi Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit had both said Berry had raised too late his claim that Mississippi’s execution procedures violate the Eighth Amendment.

The justices gave no reason for granting the stay, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito said they would have allowed the execution to go forward. At least five of the nine justices must agree to a stay for it to take effect.

A growing number of states have halted lethal injections because of charges that the three chemicals used may not properly protect inmates from pain. That is the issue justices will consider next year in the case they took in September from Kentucky, Baze v. Rees.

PHILADELPHIA - Democrats Barack Obama and John Edwards challenged Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s candor, consistency and judgment Tuesday in a televised debate that illustrated her front-runner status.

Obama, the Illinois senator, began immediately, saying Clinton has changed her positions on the North American Free Trade Agreement, torture policies and the Iraq war. Leadership, he said, does not mean “changing positions whenever it’s politically convenient.”

Edwards, the former North Carolina senator, was sharper at times, saying Clinton “defends a broken system that’s corrupt in Washington, D.C.” He stood by his earlier claim that she has engaged in “double-talk.”

Clinton largely shrugged off the remarks. She said she has specific plans on Social Security, diplomacy and health care. “I have been standing against the Republicans, George Bush and Dick Cheney, and I will continue to do so, and I think Democrats know that,” she said.

But she avoided direct answers to several questions. The New York senator wouldn’t say how she would address the fiscal crisis threatening Social Security, she declined to pledge whether she would stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon or say whether she supports giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

It was the Democrats’ first debate in a month, and during that time Clinton has solidified her front-runner position, gaining in polls, taking the lead in fundraising and dominating the agenda. The Iowa caucuses are scheduled for Jan. 3, and the New Hampshire primary could be earlier.

Clinton defended her Senate vote in favor of designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group. Obama, Edwards and others have said President Bush could interpret the measure as congressional approval for a military attack.

Edwards challenged Clinton’s claim that she stands up to the Bush administration. “So the way to do that is to vote yes on a resolution that looks like it was written literally by the neocons?” he said.

Clinton answered, “In my view, rushing to war - we should not be doing that - but we shouldn’t be doing nothing.”

Clinton also was the main focus during a discussion of the Iraq war. Again, Edwards leveled the toughest charges against her.

“If you believe that combat missions should be continued in Iraq” without a timetable for withdrawal, Edwards said, “then Senator Clinton is your candidate.” Edwards vowed to have all combat troops out of Iraq “in my first year in office.”

Clinton replied forcefully, saying, “I stand for ending the war in Iraq, bringing our troops home.” She added, however, that “it is going to take time,” and some troops must remain to fight al-Qaida in Iraq.

“I don’t know how you pursue al-Qaida without engaging them in combat,” she said.

Edwards, drawing a link between Iraq and Iran, pressed on. “What I worry about is, if Bush invades Iran six months from now, I mean, are we going to hear: ‘If only I had known then what I know now?’ ”

He was alluding to comments Clinton has made about her 2002 vote to authorize military action against Saddam Hussein.

Some candidates expressed frustration that most questions were directed to Clinton, Obama and Edwards. Seventeen minutes into the debate, Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich had yet to get a question and blurted, “Is this a debate here?” Minutes later, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson threw up his hands in protest that he hadn’t been called on either.

Richardson criticized his rivals for challenging Clinton so sharply, rebuking their “holier-than-thou attitude.”

But Edwards and Sen. Chris Dodd, of Connecticut, cited Clinton’s relatively high unfavorability ratings. “Fifty percent won’t vote for her,” Dodd said.

Sen. Joseph Biden, of Delaware, also participated in the debate.

The debate, held at Drexel University, was aired by MSNBC. Organizers excluded Mike Gravel on grounds that he did not meet fundraising and polling thresholds.

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. - Daniel Chopra was born in Sweden, raised in India by grandparents and had to fly overseas to buy golf balls. He seemingly spent time on every pro tour imaginable, and those stops flashed through his mind as he stood over the final putt.

“You never know how you’re going to react,” the 33-year-old Chopra said.

He reacted just fine - and posted his first PGA Tour victory.

Chopra reclaimed the outright lead with a birdie at the par-5 16th hole Monday morning and held on to capture the oft-delayed Ginn sur Mer Classic, edging Fredrik Jacobson and Shigeki Maruyama by one stroke at Tesoro Club.

“It’s amazing,” Chopra said. “It’s something that I’ve dreamed about for a long time.”

Chopra closed with a 2-under-par 71 and finished at 19-under 273, becoming the 12th first-time winner on Tour this season.

The victory came in Chopra’s 133rd career start, and the $810,000 winner’s check pushed his career earnings to just shy of $5 million.

He saw a four-shot lead over his nearest pursuers evaporate as darkness fell on the course Sunday night, but returned to compete in the morning and found a way to prevail.

It was hard to tell who was happier: Chopra in victory, or Maruyama in defeat.

The Japanese player left with a good consolation prize - a Tour card for next season. His tie for second earned him $396,000, vaulting him from 137th to 103rd on the money list with one tournament remaining, meaning he will finish among the top 125 and have full playing privileges next season.

Not bad, considering he was at No. 208 on the list earlier this year.

“This year was really hard, the most difficult year in eight years for myself,” said Maruyama, who had been in the top 80 on the money list in each of his first seven years on Tour. “I’m really happy.”

He might skip this week’s Children’s Miracle Network Classic at the Disney courses near Orlando, Fla. “Bye, bye, Disney,” Maruyama said.

Jacobson’s finish was his best in 96 starts on Tour.

Dicky Pride (64) was fourth at 16 under, earning $216,000 - the second-biggest check of his career, $9,000 shy of what he made for winning the 1994 St. Jude Classic.

Michael Putnam of University Place tied for 45th at 4 under and is 157th on the money list. Jeff Gove of Seattle tied for 55th at 2 under and is 153rd in earnings.

Chopra, Maruyama and Jacobson entered the morning at 18 under, with Chopra having three holes left and the others with two. That figured to give Chopra an edge, since his first hole Monday was the par-5 16th, the easiest on the course this week. He birdied it for the fourth time.

Note

• American Michelle Wie, who has yet to fully recover from wrist injuries, will not compete against men next month in the Japan Golf Tour’s Casio Open in Kochi.

The splendor of fall color may have as much to do with soil composition as with trees themselves.

As the season turns, cooler temperatures and shorter days inhibit production of chlorophyll, the molecule that enables plants to absorb energy from the sun and gives leaves their green color. As the chlorophyll dwindles, the yellow pigments that it masked become apparent to the eye.

But some trees also appear to produce more red pigments, known as anthocyanins, in their leaves when their roots are in soil that is relatively low in nitrogen and other nutrients, according to research presented Monday at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting in Denver.

That finding was made by researcher Emily Habinck, then an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, who surveyed and analyzed the fall foliage of sweet gum and red maple trees in a nature preserve in Charlotte.

Scientists believe anthocyanins and the red color they produce protect the leaves, delaying their decay and allowing the tree to harvest more nutrients from the leaves before winter. Trees in poor soil therefore would be expected to produce more red leaves.

“For species that don’t turn red, they are probably adapted to higher nutrient conditions,” said Habinck, now an interpretive ranger at McDowell Mountain Regional Park near Phoenix.

NEW ORLEANS - The view from Kinh Nguyen’s front door these days is nothing like the “abandoned cemetery” she saw upon returning to her New Orleans neighborhood two months after Hurricane Katrina.

Gone are the blue tarps and plywood boards that covered storm-damaged homes in Village de l’Est, a mostly Vietnamese-American neighborhood. Nguyen’s lawn, which turned dark brown after briny floodwaters killed her grass, is now a lush green. Streets once littered with storm debris are as clean and pothole-free as any in the city.

“They’re all back,” Nguyen, a 45-year-old mother of four, said of her neighbors. “Every home looks nicer, newer.”

Village de l’Est’s rebound has been a remarkable success story in this misery-stricken city. At the same time, for better or worse, the hurricane has brought profound political and cultural change to the community.

Language and cultural barriers long kept Vietnamese-Americans on the sidelines of the city’s civic scene after they began flocking to New Orleans upon the fall of Saigon in 1975. Since Katrina, however, they have been emerging as a force in a city where politics is customarily viewed in black-and-white terms.

“In a short period of time, they’ve had a major impact in the community,” said Jefferson Parish Councilman John Young, who represents a New Orleans suburb with a significant Vietnamese population.

The resilience of the Vietnamese-American community in New Orleans is a bright spot for a city still missing roughly one-third of the 455,000 residents who lived here before the Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane.

An estimated 90 percent of the 25,000 Vietnamese-Americans who lived in southeastern Louisiana before Katrina had returned within two years of Katrina’s onslaught, according to community leaders. They were among the first to start rebuilding their homes and reopening their businesses, and their community is recovering much more rapidly than some other parts of New Orleans.

Like many of her neighbors, Kinh Nguyen didn’t wait for the government’s help to repair her home, a modest, ranch-style house. She moved her family back in in March 2006, about 18 months before she received a federal housing grant.

To save money, she gutted the house and removed the mold herself, using directions she found on the Internet. Friends and relatives helped with some of the most grueling labor. Even the Catholic priests from her nearby church, Mary Queen of Vietnam, pitched in and helped her fix her kitchen.

“Hand in hand, we support each other,” she said.

Adversity is nothing new to New Orleans’ Vietnamese. Many families lost everything before they fled their homeland three decades ago.

“Katrina itself is almost like a bug bite for us,” said Anh “Joseph” Cao, a lawyer who ran for state representative this year in a district that includes part of eastern New Orleans. “It’s sort of bothersome. It itches. But it’s not something we’re terrified of.”

Cao is a prime example of the community’s newfound political activism. Knocking on voters’ doors one recent evening, he introduced himself as the first Vietnamese-American to run for office in the city. Cao, one of six candidates on the Oct. 20 primary ballot, finished in fifth place in a tight race.

“After the hurricane, the Vietnamese people, especially of this community, became a lot more visible to the city at large,” Cao said before the election. “We felt that this is an opportune time for a Vietnamese to run and maybe have a chance to win.”

One issue that fueled his campaign is a landfill that opened near Village de l’Est after Katrina. The landfill closed last year, but neighbors are still pressuring officials to remove potentially hazardous storm debris from the site.

At a recent City Hall hearing on the issue, dozens of elderly Vietnamese people donned earphones and listened to a translation of the proceedings. That scene repeated itself several weeks later at a forum for City Council candidates held in eastern New Orleans.

Jennifer Vu, a leader of the Mary Queen of Vietnam Community Development Corp., said the community didn’t have a political rallying point before Katrina.

“There was no illegal landfill. There was nothing to contaminate the water, the soil, anything to be hazardous to our lifestyle,” she said. “Now that we’re being attacked with these things, we just have to respond in this way.”

The Vietnamese-Americans are not immune to problems that plague the rest of the city: Many lost jobs and had to learn new trades. Ambitious development plans are stymied by red tape and a lack of affordable insurance. The nearest emergency room is downtown, a dozen miles away. Rising crime has unnerved many.

Katrina has brought other changes to the Vietnamese community.

In Village de l’Est, where many Vietnamese own small businesses such as nail salons, grocery stores, gas stations and restaurants, some are catering to the many Hispanic workers who have moved into eastern New Orleans since the storm.

Supermarket Los Paisanos replaced a hair salon. A taco restaurant opened next to a Vietnamese restaurant. At Viet My Supermarket, the shelves are stocked with Spanish plums, jalapeno peppers, refried beans and salsa along with Vietnamese fare like jasmine rice and salted jellyfish. The Vietnamese owner of a pharmacy keeps an English-to-Spanish dictionary on hand so he can converse with Hispanic customers.

Phuong Tran, owner of Phuoc Loc Supermarket, estimated that 60 percent of his customers were Vietnamese and 40 percent were black before Katrina. Now, he said, his black customers have been replaced by Hispanic ones.

“Without them, it would be pretty bad,” Tran said.

Residents of Village de l’Est aren’t content just to rebuild what Katrina destroyed. Some see an opportunity to turn the neighborhood into a destination for tourists looking for an alternative to the French Quarter’s excesses.

The neighborhood development agency, which was created after Katrina, is printing up “Viet Village” banners that will hang in the commercial district.

Even if those ambitious plans fall flat, the Vietnamese community already has enjoyed considerable success over the past two years.

Shortly before Katrina’s second anniversary, a producer from “The Oprah Winfrey Show” called Mary Tran, the community development agency’s executive director, for help in locating a Vietnamese family still rebuilding.

Tran couldn’t find one.

SAN ANTONIO - Tim Duncan has agreed to a two-year, $40 million contract extension with the San Antonio Spurs, an official familiar with the negotiations said Tuesday.
The agreement will add to Duncan’s existing three-year deal and keep him in San Antonio at least through the 2011-12 season, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the source was not authorized to discuss negotiations.
The 31-year-old Duncan has led the Spurs to four NBA titles in the past nine seasons, and he was the finals MVP for the first three. He also won back-to-back league MVP titles in 2002-03.
Duncan, entering his 11th season, was the No. 1 pick in 1997, two years before the Spurs won their first title.
The nine-time All-Star has career averages of 21.8 points and 11.9 rebounds.
The Spurs open defense of their title Tuesday night at home against Portland. Before the game, they will be presented their championship rings after sweeping LeBron James and Cleveland in June.
The Spurs are seeking their first repeat after failing to defend their titles in 2000, 2004 and 2006. They didn’t make it past the second round in any of those seasons.
“There’s no better feeling than being the last team standing,” Duncan said earlier this month. “And no matter how many times you attain that goal, you want to do it again.”
The quiet Duncan, who will be 36 at the end of the extension, is the foundation of the Spurs and their league-leading defense. Spurs coach Gregg Popovich’s hardworking and methodical approach are apparent in Duncan, who is known for almost unparalleled effort on and off the court.
Hobbled by plantar fasciitis in previous seasons, Duncan was healthy last year and has said he feels ready again this season.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether Exxon Mobil should pay $2.5 billion in punitive damages to victims of the huge Exxon Valdez oil spill that fouled more than 1,200 miles of Alaskan coastline in 1989.

The high court stepped into the long-running battle over the damages that Exxon Mobil owes from the supertanker accident in Prince William Sound that was the worst oil spill in U.S. history. The Exxon Valdez ran aground on a reef, cracking its hull and spilling 11 million gallons of oil.

Hundreds of thousands of seabirds and marine animals died as a result.

It is a case filled with superlatives. The award, even after it was cut in half by a federal appeals court in December, would be the largest punitive-damages judgment ever. A jury in Alaska awarded $5 billion in damages in 1994, and the company has been appealing the verdict ever since.

Exxon Mobil, based in Irving, Texas, is the world’s largest publicly traded oil company and last year posted the largest annual profit by a U.S. company - $39.5 billion. That result topped the previous record, also by Exxon Mobil, of $36.13 billion set in 2005.

Arguing against Supreme Court review, lawyers for the plaintiffs, some of whom have died, said the damages award is “barely more than three weeks of Exxon’s net profits.”

The plaintiffs still living include about 33,000 commercial fishermen, cannery workers, landowners, Native Alaskans, local governments and businesses. They urged the court to reject the company’s appeal, saying, “After more than 18 years, it is time for this protracted litigation to end.”

But the justices said they would consider whether the company should have to pay damages at all under the Clean Water Act and centuries-old laws governing shipping. The court frequently has sided with business interests in punitive damages and other cases of corporate liability.

John Paul Jones, a University of Richmond law professor and expert in maritime law, said the court was right to jump into the case because lower courts long have been divided on some of the issues peculiar to the laws concerning accidents on the water.

“The decision in this case could dictate the outcome of a significant number of cases,” Jones said.

Exxon said that even if the court finds some money is due, it should rule that the $2.5 billion award violates the Constitution because it is too large. The justices said they would not consider that argument when they hear the case early next year.

Justice Samuel Alito, who owns between $100,000 and $250,000 in Exxon stock, did not take part in the decision to accept the appeal.

The court’s last ruling on punitive damages, in February, set aside a nearly $80 million judgment against Altria Group’s Philip Morris USA. It was awarded to the widow of an Oregon smoker.

Exxon said it already has paid $3.4 billion in cleanup costs and other penalties resulting from the oil spill.

“This case has never been about compensating people for actual damages,” company spokesman Tony Cudmore said in a statement. “Rather it is about whether further punishment is warranted. … We do not believe any punitive damages are warranted in this case.”

The company marshaled more than a dozen organizations ranging from groups of shippers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to support its bid for Supreme Court review.

The company contended it should not be held responsible for the mistakes of the ship’s captain, Captain Joseph Hazelwood, who violated clear company rules when the Exxon Valdez ran aground with 53 million gallons of crude oil in its hold on March 23, 1989.

The plaintiffs said Exxon knew Hazelwood had sought treatment for drinking but had begun drinking again. “Exxon placed a relapsed alcoholic, who it knew was drinking aboard its ships, in command of an enormous vessel carrying toxic cargo across treacherous and resource-rich waters,” they said.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reduced the punitive damages because, in part, the company tried to clean up the spill and didn’t spill oil from the tanker Exxon Valdez deliberately.

The disaster prompted Congress in 1990 to pass a law banning single-hulled tankers like the Valdez from domestic waters by 2015.

AP writers Jeannette Lee and John Porretto contributed to this report.