Viewers send promising Lilly Scott home, but keep subpar Paige Miles

So I’m thinking maybe it’s time that people got a refresher course on this whole “American Idol” voting thing.

The point of the competition is to vote for the very good singers and send home the ones who aren’t as good. If you don’t, there are two problems: The first is that you stop hearing the better singers because they’re gone. The second is that you hear more from the inferior ones because they’re still there.

Seriously, what was the point of sending home Lilly Scott and keeping, say, Lacey Brown? I like Lacey’s voice and hope she finds herself soon, although her rambling answer to Ryan Seacrest’s question about what kind of artist she is did not exactly fill me with optimism. But if you had to pay a $5 cover to hear one or the other perform a set, who would you pick

You’d really rather hear Paige Miles try her hand at a Rolling Stones song than Scott? Or to have Didi Benami give it a shot? Because that, my friends, is what you are going to get next week. Don’t complain to me when you do.

That was the biggest disappointment of the last semifinal round. Well, tied for the biggest disappointment with the Randy Jackson bikini photo. Seriously, guys, you had 24 hours to come up with an image for the obvious riff off of Simon Cowell’s comment last night, your show makes a bazillion dollars a year and the best you can do is crop Randy’s head onto a bikini body? An 8-year-old with Photoshop could do that. Heck, it looked like an 8-year-old with Photoshop did do that. Where was the CGI?

Anyway, it wasn’t just a sad night for the Scott fan club — three other singers got the unkindest cut of all. The other woman to go was Katelyn Epperly, with the surprise being that she and Miles were both up onstage at the same time, meaning one was assured of sticking around. Paige got the reprieve, a fair result for someone who was solid for the first two semifinal rounds before laying an egg Tuesday.

There was less outrage among the men, mainly because aside from Michael Lynche, Lee Dewyze and Casey James, they’re all pretty much the same right now. I’ll miss Todrick Hall, and I wouldn’t have sent Alex Lambert home yet, but will I remember that either was on “Idol” in a month? Well, yes, because I write about the show. But most people probably won’t.

Or they might remember Lambert because he looked so completely heartbroken that everyone who didn’t call in and vote for him felt guilty. If not, they should have. How could you look at those red-rimmed puppy-dog eyes and not say, “In hindsight, his voice is way better than Tim Urban’s. We should have kept him around!” Unless you didn’t vote for him because you were afraid that Ellen DeGeneres would make more banana jokes, in which case, I can respect that decision.

But Urban … it doesn’t take a genius to see that he’s a better bet to be this season’s Sanjaya than he is to win the competition. From barely slipping into the Top 24 to performing poorly the first two weeks of the semifinals, he’s parlayed one decent week into a spot in the final 12. I credit the mop-top haircut, and also that people were pleasantly surprised that he sang “Hallelujah” without imploding that they felt he deserved to stick around.

In “Green Zone,” Matt Damon plays Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, who has no great love for helmets

Who says that history is written by the victors? It wasn’t long after President George W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq that the triumphant narrative he’d constructed began to unravel.

Turned out the president was several years premature in announcing the beginning of the end. Even the beginning wasn’t over. The reasons we’d gone to war in the first place would be debated more ferociously in retrospect than they ever were at the time, not least because the notorious WMD never did materialize.

That disappearing trick is at the heart of “Green Zone,” a revisionist Baghdad thriller from the Jason Bourne team: star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass.

Damon plays Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, who’s disgusted by the bad intel. His men risk their lives to turn up biological, chemical or nuclear weapons, but every time they come back with a big fat doughnut.

People keep telling Miller to stop asking questions and do his job. Instead, he listens to an Iraqi informant who leads him to the doorstep of a Ba’athist general, one of Saddam’s right-hand men. The general escapes, but he won’t elude them for long, and his discovery will surely bring the truth about WMD out into the open …

Filmed in the same jittery gun-it-and-run-it mode as the “Bourne” movies, “Green Zone” plunges headlong into the ethical no-man’s-land between action movie escapism and political drama-documentary.

Greengrass made “United 93″ between Bourne assignments, and he seems persuaded that one style fits all. (Heaven help us if he ever decides to tackle a love story.) It’s exciting in fits and spurts, but it becomes tiresome over 115 spasmodic minutes.

Shot by Barry Ackroyd (who also photographed “The Hurt Locker”), the film reconstructs the destruction of Baghdad out of bits and pieces of Morocco and Spain.

Maybe there’s too much street lighting — wasn’t the city without power for long stretches in the weeks and months after the invasion? And like many a movie star soldier before him, Damon seems curiously unattached to his helmet. But the scale is genuinely impressive, and the film gives the sense that the whole country is a powder keg of ethnic tensions and resentments the Americans scarcely comprehend.

Despite what the credits may claim, Brian Helgeland’s script isn’t really based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.” The book is first-person reportage by The Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief, and you won’t find “Roy Miller” in its pages, nor the mid-level conspiracy he stumbles across.

Maybe Robert Altman could have done justice to Chandrasekaran’s tragicomic snapshots of the surreal dissonance between the luxurious comforts of home enjoyed by the American administrators occupying Saddam’s former palace and the rampant anarchy just outside the Green Zone perimeter.

Greengrass catches it on the fly — when Miller comes in, bruised and bleeding from the battlefield, and walks into a scene resembling cocktail hour poolside at the Bellagio — but he’s not a natural ironist; he takes no pleasure in it.

Still, the movie accurately reflects the book’s central thesis: that the Iraqi insurgency was a byproduct of an American civil war and the ascendancy of neocon crusaders (represented here by Greg Kinnear’s security adviser) over the State Department’s seasoned diplomats (Brendan Gleason as a CIA Middle East expert).

Whether you agree with that assessment or not, the movie feels underplotted and overdetermined. The American press corps is reduced to one fictional correspondent. The Iraqis get a couple of speeches to vent their anger, and it’s left to Matt Damon to expose the truth about all the lies.

The argument adds up, right down to the last, teasing shot of the oil fields, but “Green Zone” falls over itself in its eagerness to explain what went wrong over there.

Unlike “The Hurt Locker”, this finger-pointing doesn’t involve any real soul-searching.

“Punky Brewster” star Soleil Moon Frye has raised her profile via Twitter

When Conan O’Brien randomly started following Sarah Killen’s Twitter page (@LovelyButton) she got nearly 19,000 followers, a new iMac, a free wedding gown, gratis wedding rings, $2,600 in donations for her cancer walk, and the chance to meet Ludacris.

In return, Sarah is inviting Conan to her wedding. “My fiance wants Conan to be his best man,” she said. “That would be really cool. And hey, if he wants us to come on his show, we’d get married on there. That would be fantastic.” Guess she’s not that big of a fan if she hasn’t heard that there isn’t a show anymore?

Responders had sued New York City saying they were sickened

NEW YORK - After years of fighting in court, lawyers representing the city, construction companies and more than 10,000 ground zero rescue and recovery workers have agreed to a settlement that could pay up to $657.5 million to responders sickened by dust from the destroyed World Trade Center.

The settlement was announced Thursday evening by the WTC Captive Insurance Co., a special entity established to indemnify the city and its contractors against potential legal action as they moved to clean up the site after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The deal, which still must be approved by a judge and the workers themselves, would make the city and other companies represented by the insurer liable for a minimum of $575 million, with more money available to the sick if certain conditions are met.

Most if not all of the money would come out of a $1 billion grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg called the settlement “a fair and reasonable resolution to a complex set of circumstances.”

“The resolution of the World Trade Center litigation will allow the first responders and workers to be compensated for injuries suffered following their work at Ground Zero,” he said in a statement.

‘Good settlement’
Marc Bern, a senior partner with the law firm Worby, Groner, Edelman & Napoli, Bern LLP, which negotiated the deal, said it was “a good settlement.”

“We are gratified that these heroic men and women who performed their duties without consideration of the health implications will finally receive just compensation for their pain and suffering, lost wages, medical and other expenses, as the U.S. Congress intended when it appropriated this money,” he said in a statement.

Workers who wish to participate in the settlement would need to prove they had been at the World Trade Center site or other facilities that handled debris. They also would have to turn over medical records and provide other information aimed at weeding out fraudulent or dubious claims.

For the settlement to be enforced, 95 percent of the workers would need to agree to be bound by its terms.

The agreement comes with just two months to go until the first trials are to begin in the case. Thousands of police officers, firefighters and construction workers who put in time at the 16-acre site in lower Manhattan had filed lawsuits against the city, claiming it sent them to ground zero without proper protective equipment.

Third party to decide cases
Many of those workers now claim to have fallen ill. A majority complained of a respiratory problem similar to asthma, but the suits also sought damages for hundreds of other types of ailments, including cancer.

Lawyers for the city claimed it did its best to get respiratory equipment to everyone who needed it. They also had challenged some of the claims as based on the thinnest of medical evidence, noting that thousands of the people suing suffered from conditions common in the general population or from no illness at all.

Under the settlement, the task of deciding what each worker will be paid will fall to a neutral third party, to be picked by the two sides. Lawyers for the plaintiffs have previously said they favor Kenneth Feinberg, the special master who determined payouts from the federal fund set up to compensate victims of the terror attacks.

Payments will be based on a system that ranks each illness by severity and factors in potential exposure to the dust.

Some workers are likely to receive payments of only a few thousand dollars. Others could be in line to get more than $1 million, depending on their injuries.

A special insurance fund will be set up to cover workers who develop cancer in the future.

Trials postponed?
Lawyer Andrew Carboy, who represented a group of firefighters in the case, said he would urge them to accept the deal.

“The proposed settlement demonstrates that the justice system can tackle such a factually complicated and emotionally charged situation,” he said. “The settlement, most importantly, will treat each worker as an individual. And their settlement will be based on the merits of their case.”

Both sides in the case were scheduled to appear Friday afternoon before the federal judge handling the litigation, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who previously had said he favored a settlement but planned to analyze it carefully to make sure it was fair.

Two other hungry animals are reportedly shot dead after attacking keeper

BEIJING - Eleven rare Siberian tigers kept in small cages and fed only chicken bones have died of malnutrition at a cash-strapped zoo in China’s frigid northeast, state media said Friday.

A manager at the Shenyang Forest Wild Animal Zoo in Liaoning province, however, said the animals had died of disease.

Siberian tigers are one of the world’s rarest species, with just 300 believed remaining in the wild.

Liu Xiaoqiang, vice chief of the Shenyang Wild Animal Protection Station, a local animal protection agency, was quoted by the China Daily as saying 11 of the zoo’s tigers died of malnutrition in the last three months after subsisting on a meager diet of chicken bones.

Two others were shot dead by police in November after the hungry animals attacked a zookeeper, the report said.

Iron crates
The Liaoshen Evening Post, a local Shenyang newspaper, reported on its Web site that the company that owns the zoo was trying unsuccessfully to auction the zoo property, and many staffers complained they hadn’t been paid in 18 months.

Wu Xi, one of the managers of the Shenyang Forest Wild Animal Zoo Co. Ltd., told The Associated Press that “various kinds of diseases” had killed 11 tigers at the zoo over the past three months.

Wu said the animals were kept in iron crates indoors because it was an unusually cold winter and the zoo had no heating. He refused to specify what diseases the animals had or respond to allegations they starved to death.

The China Daily said the zoo was mainly privately owned, though the Shenyang municipal government holds a 15 percent stake.

Xie Yan, China director for the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, said many Chinese zoos and wildlife parks have more tigers than they can afford to keep.

The animals are expensive to take care of because they require a lot of food and space to roam and ticket sales generally aren’t enough to support them.

‘Massive blow’
Xie said Chinese zoos began breeding tigers in the 1980s and captive populations increased rapidly in the 1990s. There are now about 6,000 captive tigers of various species in China, she said, but it’s not clear how many of those are Siberian tigers.

“In the past two or three years, people have started to realize it’s become a problem,” she said, referring to zoos that have more animals than they can afford to keep.

Xie said the government should do more to regulate zoos and enforce standards for animal care. She also said birth control is needed to keep the captive tiger population at manageable levels.

Chris Chaplin, a spokesman for WWF International’s Beijing office, said the news was “a massive blow” to conservation efforts.

WWF colleagues in Changchun, the capital of Jillin province, which neighbors Liaoning, were  investigating the allegations, he said.