Al's Morning Meeting

Feb. 14, these investigators joke, is their Super Bowl of Surveillance.

"Eighty percent of cheating spouses will try to spend part of the day with the other person," said Jimmie Mesis, editor of the trade journal PI Magazine.

Ruth Houston -- founder of InfidelityAdvice.com and author of "Is He Cheating On You?" -- says she normally discourages the use of private investigators, but makes an exception for Valentine's Day.

"I've seen too many people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, only to come up empty except for a receipt," Ruth said. "But if someone's cheating, they are going to make contact on Valentine's Day, either to give a gift or receive one."

[Jeanene] Weiner is the founder of Busted Confidential Investigations, an all-woman outfit in Marietta boasting the grrl-power motto "Where Intuition and Information Meet."

Her Valentine's Day will begin early, because she knows from experience that many of the cheaters will schedule a breakfast or lunch-hour tryst.

"This way, they get to go home after work and spend a romantic evening with the person they're married to, and no one suspects a thing," she said.

Last year, The Wall Street Journal found:

The Institute for Divorce Financial Analysts, a Southfield, Mich., trade group of professionals trained to review divorce settlements, says filings typically spike in mid-February. "It's so consistent I can't deny a pattern," says Natalie Nelson, a divorce financial analyst in Boulder, Colo.

Indeed, divorce lawyers say they frequently turn up evidence of Valentine's Day duplicity when they review financial documents. Credit-card receipts from restaurants or purchases at fancy jewelry stores are the most common giveaways, says Heidi Harris, a partner at New York law firm Sheresky Aronson & Mayefsky.

New York attorney Raoul Felder concurs: "The kinds of purchases documented for Feb. 14 give an indication of how serious the relationship is," he says.

School Bus Drivers on Cell Phones

The American School Bus Council says bus drivers should stop talking on cell phones while they're behind the wheel.

Think this doesn't happen? Think again.

ABC-11 in Raleigh, N.C., found "example after example" of bus drivers yakking on the phone while driving.

Convicted Drunks Driving School Buses

The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch wanted to know how many school bus drivers in the Columbus area had DUI convictions or drug-related license suspensions. The answer: 167 drivers in 106 school districts.

Why does this happen? One reason is because the state, while knowing the complete history of every driver, offered school districts only a summary of the last three years' driving records.

The story points out:

The near-universal reaction of school officials when informed that they had hired drivers with checkered pasts: "We didn't know."

State laws, practice and policies make it virtually impossible for school officials to review complete driving histories maintained by the state.

The shortcomings have placed more than 150 schoolbus drivers on the road who might otherwise have been barred from delivering children between their homes and classrooms.

Cities Losing Parking-Meter and Ticket Money in Big Snow

Lots of snow makes parking meters (and spaces) inaccessible. Cities lose money.

Al's Morning Multimedia

Take a look at The Boston Globe's story about a Marine who took his own life after Veterans Affairs told him to wait for a bed in the government hospital's ward for post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers. He was 26th on a waiting list for 12 beds. The piece includes a chat with the reporter and a moving audio slideshow.

The story says:

The apparent failure of the Department of Veterans Affairs to offer him timely and necessary care has electrified the debate on the blogs and Web sites that connect an increasingly networked and angry veterans community. It has triggered an internal investigation by the VA into how a serviceman with such obvious symptoms faced a wait for hospital care.

And it is being cited by veterans' advocates and their allies in Congress as a searing symbol of a system that they say is vastly unprepared and under=funded to handle the onslaught of 1.5 million veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who are returning home, an estimated one in five of them with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. One in three Iraq war veterans is seeking mental health services, according to a report by an Army panel of experts last year.