Copied without permission Please read, this is amazing!

The machines that made the Jet AgeBy Tim Heffernan- Share this article

This is a companion piece to Iron Giant: One of America’s great machines comes back to life, a feature by Tim published in The Atlantic

Germany, June 1945. The Nazi regime has been toppled; the war in Europe is over. But the Allied victory is largely the result of sheer overwhelming force, not technological superiority — and the victors know it. Most glaringly, while the Allies still rely on propeller-driven aircraft, the Luftwaffe has put three jets successfully into service.

A Messerschmitt Me 262, the first military jet to enter service. Brought to you by Krupp’s magnesium forging division. Photo: USAF

A Boeing B-29, the first bomber with pressurized crew compartments. Brought to you by Rosie the Riveter. Source: USAF

The reasons for German air superiority were several, of course, but a key one was their mastery of light-metal forging. While the Allies were still bolting together their planes out of steel plate, a slow, labor-intensive process ripe for error and unsuited to design optimization, the Germans were stamping and squeezing out complex structural elements from magnesium and aluminum alloys.

Not surprisingly, after Germany surrendered, both the U.S. and the USSR sought to take control of its forging facilities.

The Soviets got the good stuff.

In so doing they got a head start on the Cold War race for supersonic air superiority. Unwittingly, they also set in motion a larger, and largely forgotten, industrial revolution that shaped the second half of the 20th century and will shape the 21st. This is the story of the birth of the Jet Age — but it’s anchored firmly to the ground.

Photo: Library of Congress

The magnificent machine pictured above is a closed-die forging press, one of the biggest in the world. (For reference, check out the men standing at its foot, down there on the left.) It and nine other huge forges were built in 1950s by the U.S. government, in a long-forgotten endeavor called the Heavy Press Program. I wrote about the press and the program in the March Atlantic, and Maggie kindly invited me to write a bit more here, because — well, first of all, because just look at that thing. It stands nine stories tall (four of them are hidden under the floor), weighs 16 million pounds, exerts 50,000 tons of compressive force, and, like Vulcan’s own waffle iron, squeezes ingots of solid metal between its jaws until they flow like batter.

Here’s another picture for scale:

Each casting was loaded individually onto a specially built train car and carried from Pittsburgh to Cleveland. Photo: USAF Air Force Material Command

Those are just four of the 14 steel castings that make up the Fifty, as the press is known, and they aren’t even the biggest ones. Those would be the twin 250-ton upper stationary crossheads, shown in Figures 5 and 6 of this document— also a good source for more technical details about the press.

And here’s a before-and-after of the Fifty’s handiwork:

Press-forging minimizes waste metal compared to machining, and by realigning the metal’s internal crystalline structure along natural lines of stress, results in much stronger parts than casting would produce. Photos: Library of Congress

That’s a piece of titanium about 15 feet wide and a foot thick, in its raw state and after being forged in a single stroke between the Fifty’s hardened steel dies under 100 million pounds of pressure.

Though they were built nearly 60 years ago, the ten machines of the Heavy Press Program — four forging presses, the waffle irons, and six extrusion presses, basically giant caulking guns except the “caulk” is solid metal — are still among the most powerful ever made. Even more impressively, at least eight of the ten are still in use.

Extruded aluminum parts (not parts from Heavy Press Program machines). Photo courtesy Dalcio Metal

So, what do they do? Well, in strict terms, they make heavy components for aircraft, spacecraft, and power-generation facilities. That chunk of titanium, for example, became one of the bulkheads that anchor the engines, fuselage, and wings of an F-15. More familiarly, every time you fly on a Boeing or Airbus, you’re relying on parts made by the Heavy Press Program machines to keep you aloft—things like the wing spars, which connect the wings to the plane’s chassis.

But in broader terms, what the machines do is make the Jet Age possible. On a plane, a pound of weight saved is a pound of thrust gained—or a pound of lift, or a pound of cargo. A lighter plane also puts less stress on its chassis when it goes through maneuvers. Supersonic military jets are optimized for speed and strength. Subsonic passenger and cargo jets are optimized for fuel efficiency and load capacity. Without the ultra-strong, ultra-light components that only forging can produce, they’d all be pushing much smaller envelopes.

Dawn of the Military-Industrial Complex

Back to 1945 for moment. The Soviet acquisition of Germany’s biggest forges made it all but inevitable that the U.S. would build its own heavy presses—but it’s important to note that it did not make the Heavy Press Program inevitable. Private industry could have built its own machines. The government could have built them, too, and indeed early plans called for the military to construct a “pilot plant” and dole out chunks of time to the air industry to experiment on government-run machines. The idea that it was in the public’s interest to pay for the machines but cede their control to industry was a controversial one, and many leaders in Congress strongly resisted it as a dangerous blurring of private and civic concerns.

On the other hand, with millions of WWII servicemen and women being demobilized, mass unemployment was a threat, and shoring up the aerospace industry was an attractive way to stave it off and harness wartime technology to the peacetime economy. Cold War policy also encouraged massive defense spending, but (as ever) a secondary war was being waged by the military branches for funding, and heavy forging wasn’t of much use to the Army or Navy. It was a complex situation, and one that could have been resolved in several ways. But by 1949 it had been decided that the government would build a number of heavy forging machines and the factories to support them, and that these facilities would be leased to the great metals companies of the day on very generous terms. The Heavy Press Program had begun.

Nifty Fifty

The Fifty was installed at Alcoa’s Cleveland Works facility and began operations on May 5, 1955. A complementary 35,000-ton press was installed shortly after. I have their initial production list, and it reads like catalog of American military air power of the age: wing roots for the Republic F-105, wing spars for the Convair B-58, landing gear trunions for the Boeing B-52, bulkheads for the Lockheed C-130—in all, hundreds of items. From the start, the forges were busy machines.

The Heavy Press Program also supplied Wyman-Gordon of Grafton, Massachusetts, with a 50,000- and 35,000-ton pair of forging presses. Here’s their 50K, nicknamed Major (yep, the 35K is Minor), and again, note the man standing at its foot for scale:

The two 50,000-ton presses were of very different design — those interested can compare them here and here — but their dies were made to be interchangeable, so that production would not be disrupted if one of the machines broke down or was attacked during war. Photo: Library of Congress

To these four were added the six huge extrusion presses: a 12,000-tonner for Curtiss-Wright in Buffalo; twin 8,000-tonners for Kaiser in Halethorpe, Maryland; a 14,000-tonner for Alcoa in Davenport, Iowa; and an 8,000- and a 12,000-tonner for Harvey Aluminum in Torrance, California, just south of L.A. With stroke lengths of up to 92 feet, the extruders were used to produce long, hollow structures like aluminum missile bodies and wing struts in a single, seamless piece, saving time, weight, and material. Here’s the Harvey 12K, which went into service in August 1957:

Though it was nearly 300 feet long and weighed 8 million pounds, the maximum variance along the Harvey 12K’s chassis was just 0.004 inches. Source: USAF Materiel Command

This iron giant—which reminds me somehow of a steam train—is the one Heavy Press Program machine that definitely no longer exists: it was cut up for scrap in the 1990s. And I haven’t been able to confirm the fate of the 8,000-tonner at Harvey—though it may have been shipped to Korea or China.

As for the other eight machines, they’re still working. Curtiss-Wright’s extruder ultimately was bought by Precision Castparts and moved to Houston, and Kaiser’s pair was taken over by Alcoa, but their jobs haven’t changed. They make the things that make us fly, and they’ll be doing so for decades yet.

A Stamp on History

I see three main legacies of the Heavy Press Program.

First, of course, is the aeronautics industry as it now exists. We are accustomed to talking about the ways abstractions like “technology” or “Washington” have affected life the world over. But the machines of the Heavy Press Program are a concrete—well, an iron-and-steel—example of how industry and politics can collide with enormous yet unpredictable effect. The civilian air industry was an afterthought when the program was conceived, yet it is arguably the program’s signal achievement. Again, every Boeing and Airbus jet you’ve ever flown, every one that has carried mail or freight across the oceans, on was built around vital structural components made by these huge machines. Their impact on global society and commerce has been incalculably great. But every American military jet that has fired a gun or dropped a bomb in war was also built around Heavy Press parts—and thus the greatness of the program’s impact is morally blurred.

You can’t have this...

...without this.

Second is the military-industrial complex. I don’t believe it’s possible to place its origin in any single spot. But I am also not aware of any defense program since the HPP that was meaningfully opposed by Congress on the grounds that it threatened the functioning of American democracy. That a given project was “wasteful” or “bloated,” sure—but that’s just bookkeeping. The Heavy Press Program was in many ways the test case for the proper division between private and public interest, and it was decided in favor of what amounts to a mutual aid society between American industry, the American military, and Congress. The consequences are plain, and not often pretty.

Lastly is a legacy of absence. Today, America lacks the ability to make anything like the Heavy Press Program machines. The Fifty, to pick the one I’m most familiar with, was made by the Mesta Machine Company of West Homestead, PA, just outside of Pittsburgh. Mesta built the machines that built Steeltown — the furnaces, the blowers, the rolling mills and the forges. Mech-heads will want to check out this digitized Mesta brochure of 1919, a kind of Whole Earth Catalog for the iron industry. The less avid can just enjoy the picture below, from the same era. Then imagine what Mesta Machine could do by 1950, with three decades worth of further innovation under its belt.

Mesta could mold, cast, forge, machine and field-test huge components under one roof — literally — a full-service shop of the sort that no longer exists in the U.S. Photo: Carnegie Museum of Art.

The company went under in the mid-1980s. It is not unambiguously bad that it and the rest of American ultra-heavy manufacturing are gone. But it’s not unambiguously good, either. Conventional wisdom would say that the industry went to less-developed nations, freeing American resources for higher-tech pursuits. In fact, the only companies today capable of producing Heavy Press-size equipment are in the backwaters known as Germany and Japan, with companies in Russia, Korea, and China rapidly catching up and the UK actively rebuilding its top firm, Sheffield Forgemasters, through cheap government loans. Just last year four Japanese companies joined forces to build a new 50,000-ton press for the aerospace and power industries, and while I was working on this piece China Erzhong, a nationalized conglomerate, announced that it will build an 80,000-ton press — the biggest ever — to support its nascent aerospace industry.

Now is not the time for America to build new forges: eight really is enough. But the original heavy presses, which have lived far longer and spurred far more innovation than was ever imagined, set an example that I think might yet be followed. Big machines are the product of big visions, and they make big visions real. How about a Heavy Fusion Program?

Whitney Houston, Pop Superstar, Dies at 48

By JON PARELES and ADAM NAGOURNEY NY Times

Whitney Houston the multimillion-selling singer who emerged in the 1980s as one of her generation’s greatest R & B voices, only to deteriorate through years of cocaine use and an abusive marriage, died on Saturday in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 48.

Her death came as the music industry descended on Los Angeles for the annual celebration of the Grammy Awards, and Ms. Houston was — for all her difficulties over the years — one of its queens. She was staying at the Beverly Hilton hotel on Saturday to attend a pre-Grammy party being hosted by Clive Davis, the founder of Arista Records, who had been her pop mentor.

Ms. Houston was found in her room at 3:55 p.m., and paramedics spent close to 20 minutes trying to revive her, the authorities said. There was no immediate word on the cause of her death, but the authorities said there were no signs of foul play.

From the start of her career more than two decades ago, Ms. Houston had the talent, looks and pedigree of a pop superstar. She was the daughter of Cissy Houston, a gospel and pop singer who had backed up Aretha Franklin, and the cousin of Dionne Warwick. (Ms. Franklin is Ms. Houston’s godmother.)

Ms. Houston’s range spanned three octaves, and her voice was plush, vibrant and often spectacular. She could pour on the exuberant flourishes of gospel or peal a simple pop chorus; she could sing sweetly or unleash a sultry rasp.

Dressed in everything from formal gowns to T-shirts, she cultivated the image of a fun-loving but ardent good girl, the voice behind songs as perky as “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and as torchy as what became her signature song, a version of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.”

But by the mid-1990s, even as she was moving into acting with films like “The Bodyguard” and “The Preacher’s Wife,” she became what she described, in a 2009 interview with Oprah Winfrey, as a “heavy” user of marijuana and cocaine. By the 2000s she was struggling; her voice grew smaller, scratchier and less secure, and her performances grew erratic.

All of Ms. Houston’s studio albums were million-sellers, and two have sold more than 10 million copies in the United States alone: her 1985 debut album and the 1992 soundtrack to “The Bodyguard,” which includes “I Will Always Love You.”

But her marriage to the singer Bobby Brown — which was, at one point, documented in a Bravo reality television series, “Being Bobby Brown” — grew miserable, and in the 2000s, her singles slipped from the top 10. Ms. Houston became a tabloid subject: the National Enquirer ran a photo of her bathroom showing drug paraphernalia. And each new album — “Just Whitney” in 2002 and “I Look to You” in 2009 — became a comeback.

At Central Park in 2009, singing for “Good Morning America,” her voice was frayed, and on the world tour that followed the release of the album “I Look to You” that year, she was often shaky.

Whitney Houston was born on Aug. 9, 1963, in Newark. She sang in church, and as a teenager in the 1970s and early 1980s, she worked as a backup studio singer and featured vocalist with acts including Chaka Khan, the Neville Brothers and Bill Laswell’s Material.

Mr. Davis signed her after hearing her perform in a New York City nightclub, and spent two years supervising production of the album “Whitney Houston,” which was released in 1985. It placed her remarkable voice in polished, catchy songs that straddled pop and R & B, and it included three No. 1 singles: “Saving All My Love for You,” “How Will I Know” and “The Greatest Love of All.”

Because Ms. Houston had been credited on previous recordings, including a 1984 duet with Teddy Pendergrass, she was ruled ineligible for the best new artist category of the Grammy Awards; the eligibility criteria have since been changed. But with “Saving All My Love for You,” she won her first Grammy award, for best female pop vocal performance, an award she would win twice more.

Her popularity soared for the next decade. Her second album, “Whitney,” in 1987, became the first album by a woman to enter the Billboard charts at No. 1, and it included four No. 1 singles. She shifted her pop slightly toward R & B on her third album, “I’m Your Baby Tonight,” in 1990, which had three more No. 1 singles.

For much of the 1990s, she turned to acting, bolstered by her music. She played a pop diva in “The Bodyguard,” and its soundtrack album — including the hits “I Will Always Love You,” “I’m Every Woman,” “I Have Nothing” and “Run to You” — went on to sell 17 million copies in the United States. It won the Grammy for album of the year, and “I Will Always Love You” won record of the year (for a single). After making the films “Waiting To Exhale” in 1995 and “The Preacher’s Wife” in 1996 — which gave her the occasion to make a gospel album — Ms. Houston resumed her pop career with “My Love Is Your Love” in 1998.

Ms. Houston married Mr. Brown in 1992, and in 1993 they had a daughter, Bobbi Kristina, who survives her. Ms. Houston’s 2009 interview with Ms. Winfrey portrayed it as a passionate and then turbulent marriage, marred by drug use and by his professional jealousy, psychological abuse and physical confrontations. They divorced in 2007.

Her albums in the 2000s advanced a new persona for Ms. Houston. “Just Whitney,” in 2002, was defensive and scrappy, lashing out at the media and insisting on her loyalty to her man. Her most recent studio album, “I Look to You,” appeared in 2009, and it, too, reached No. 1. The album included a hard-headed breakup song, “Salute,” and a hymnlike anthem, “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength.” Ms. Houston sang, “I crashed down and I tumbled, but I did not crumble/I got through all the pain,” in a voice that showed scars.

Neil R. Portnow, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which bestows the Grammys, called her “one of the world’s greatest pop singers of all time, who leaves behind a robust musical soundtrack.”

“A light has been dimmed in our music community today,” he said.

Lt. Mark Rosen, a spokesman for the Beverly Hills Police Department, said that emergency workers responded to a 911 call from security at the Beverly Hilton hotel on Wilshire Boulevard at 3:43 p.m., saying that Ms. Houston was unconscious in her fourth-floor suite. He said that some Fire Department personnel were already on the scene to help prepare for a pre-Grammy party.

Lieutenant Rosen said that detectives had arrived to conduct what he said was a full-scale investigation into the death. He said that Ms. Houston’s body was still in the hotel room as of 8 p.m. and would not be removed until the investigation was completed.

“There were no obvious signs of foul play,” he said. “It’s still fresh an investigation to know whether — the reality is she was too far too young to die and any time you have the death of someone this age it is the subject of an investigation.”

Ms. Houston arrived at the hotel with what Lieutenant Rosen described as an entourage of friends and family, some of whom were in the hotel suite at the time. He said that police had notified Ms. Houston’s mother and daughter of the death; it was unclear whether or not they were there.

At Mr. Davis’s party, where Ms. Houston was a regular guest and performer, tourists shot cellphone pictures of a police crime laboratory van parked outside. But inside, the glamour of the event seemed undiminished, even if Ms Houston’s name was on everyone’s lips

The streets in front of the Beverly Hilton, already crowded because of the Grammy Awards party taking place there, swarmed with reporters and fans, drawn by the news of this latest high-profile pop star dying in Los Angeles.

Even after the news of Ms. Houston’s death had been released, celebrities and other partygoers continued to arrive for the Davis event, which went on as planned, while fans stood behind a rope trying to take pictures. Dressed in evening gowns and tuxedos, people stepped out of limousines at curbside and streamed into the hotel.

A number of fans came to mourn Ms. Houston and to show their support. “I was in utter, total disbelief,” Lavetris Singleton said. “Who was not a fan of Whitney Houston at some point?”

“I want to show support because she inspired a lot of people and nobody’s perfect,” she said. “But if we’re not out here then she’ll be forgotten. We are her legacy.”

Performers at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, where the Grammys are to be held, heard about Ms. Houston’s death just as Rihanna and Coldplay were about to rehearse their number for the awards.

The show’s producer, Ken Ehrlich, debated about how to acknowledge Ms. Houston’s death. (The show is already scheduled to include a tribute by Alicia Keys and Bonnie Raitt to Etta James, the blues singer who died last month, as well as a video segment about music figures who died in 2011.)

After the initial shock, Mr. Ehrlich said he called Jennifer Hudson and asked her to come and sing one of Ms. Houston’s songs during the televised show on Sunday as a simple memorial. “We are going to do something very simple, not elaborate,” he said. “We just want to keep it respectful.”

“My feeling was it’s too early to do an extended tribute,” Mr. Ehrlich added, “but we really wanted to remember her because she was so closely tied to the Grammys.”

Besides her daughter, now 18, Ms. Houston is survived by her mother. A woman who answered the telephone at the Edgewater, N.J., home of Ms. Houston’s mother on Saturday night said she would not speak to reporters.

Jon Pareles reported from New York, and Adam Nagourney from Santa Barbara, Calif. Reporting was contributed by Ian Lovett, Jennifer Medina and Ben Sisario in Los Angeles and Channing Joseph and James C. McKinley Jr. in New York.

Newfound alien planet 'best candidate to support liquid water'

A planet recently discovered orbiting a nearby star is located in the star's 'habitable zone,' meaning that it could support life as we know it.

By Denise Chow, SPACE.com / February 2, 2012

An artist's conception of the alien planet GJ 667Cc, which is located in the habitable zone of its parent star.

A potentially habitable alien planet — one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface — has been found around a nearby star.

• NASA discovers 26 new alien planets in 11 solar systems
• Amazing planets: mini solar system, 'Star Wars' lookalike among new finds

The planet is located in the habitable zone of its host star, which is a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet's surface.
"It's the Holy Grail of exoplanet research to find a planet around a star orbiting at the right distance so it's not too close where it would lose all its water and boil away, and not too far where it would all freeze," Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz told SPACE.com "It's right smack in the habitable zone — there's no question or discussion about it. It's not on the edge, it's right in there."

RELATED: Are you scientifically literate? Take our quiz to find out!

Vogt is one of the authors of the new study, which was led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution for Science, a private, nonprofit research organization based in Washington, D.C.
"This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it," Anglada-Escudé said in a statement.

An alien super-Earth

The researchers estimate that the planet, called GJ 667Cc, is at least 4.5 times as massive as Earth, which makes it a so-called super-Earth. It takes roughly 28 days to make one orbital lap around its parent star, which is located a mere 22 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Scorpius (the Scorpion).
"This is basically our next-door neighbor," Vogt said. "It's very nearby. There are only about 100 stars closer to us than this one."
Interestingly enough, the host star, GJ 667C, is a member of a triple-star system. GJ 667C is an M-class dwarf star that is about a third of the mass of the sun, and while it is faint, it can be seen by ground-based telescopes, Vogt said.
"The planet is around one star in a triple-star system," Vogt explained. "The other stars are pretty far away, but they would look pretty nice in the sky."
The discovery of a planet around GJ 667C came as a surprise to the astronomers, because the entire star system has a different chemical makeup than our sun. The system has much lower abundances of heavy elements (elements heavier than hydrogen and helium), such as iron, carbon and silicon.
"It's pretty deficient in metals," Vogt said. "These are the materials out of which planets form — the grains of stuff that coalesce to eventually make up planets — so we shouldn't have really expected this star to be a likely case for harboring planets."
The fortuitous discovery could mean that potentially habitable alien worlds could exist in a greater variety of environments than was previously thought possible, the researchers said.
"Statistics tell us we shouldn't have found something this quickly this soon unless there's a lot of them out there," Vogt said. "This tells us there must be an awful lot of these planets out there. It was almost too easy to find, and it happened too quickly."
The detailed findings of the study will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

An intriguing star system

Another super-Earth that orbits much closer to GJ 667C was previously detected in 2010, but the finding was never published, Vogt added. This planet, called GJ 667Cb, takes 7.2 days to circle the star but its location makes it far too hot to sustain liquid water on its surface.
"It's basically glowing cinders, or a well-lit charcoal," Vogt said. "We know about a lot of these, but they're thousands of degrees and not places where you could live."
But, the newly detected GJ 667Cc planet is a much more intriguing candidate, he said.
"When a planet gets bigger than about 10 times the size of the Earth, there's a runaway process that happens, where it begins to eat up all the gas and ice in the disk that it's forming out of and swells quickly into something like Uranus, Jupiter or Saturn," Vogt explained. "When you have a surface and the right temperature, if there's water around, there's a good chance that it could be in liquid form. This planet is right in that sweet spot in the habitable zone, so we've got the right temperature and the right mass range."
Preliminary observations also suggest that more planets could exist in this system, including a gas giant planet and another super-Earth that takes about 75 days to circle the star. More research will be needed to confirm these planetary candidates, as well as to glean additional details about the potentially habitable super-Earth, the scientists said.

Finding nearby alien planets

To make their discovery, the researchers used public data from the European Southern Observatory combined with observations from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the new Carnegie Planet Finder Spectrograph at the Magellan II Telescope in Chile.
Follow-up analyses were also made using a planet-hunting technique that measures the small dips, or wobbles, in a star's motion caused by the gravitational tug of a planet.
"With the advent of a new generation of instruments, researchers will be able to survey many M dwarf stars for similar planets and eventually look for spectroscopic signatures of life in one of these worlds," Anglada-Escudé said in a statement. Anglada-Escudé was with the Carnegie Institution for Science when he conducted the research, but has since moved on to the University of Gottingen in Germany.
With the GJ 667C system being relatively nearby, it also opens exciting possibilities for probing potentially habitable alien worlds in the future, Vogt said, which can't easily be done with the planets that are being found by NASA's prolific Kepler spacecraft.
"The planets coming out of Kepler are typically thousands of light-years away and we could never send a space probe out there," Vogt said. "We've been explicitly focusing on very nearby stars, because with today's technology, we could send a robotic probe out there, and within a few hundred years, it could be sending back picture postcards

Christian Science Monitor 2012

In Million-Dollar Theft Case, Church Worker With a Secret Past

By SHARON OTTERMAN and RUSS BUETTNER NY Times

For eight years, the woman worked in accounts payable for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, gaining the trust of her superiors.

Colleagues praised her quiet dedication and hard work, and noted that she prayed often; her volunteer work at an event at St. Patrick’s Cathedral won mention in the church’s newspaper, Catholic New York. No one, then, questioned the hundreds of checks she wrote at the archdiocese to cover small expenses, like office supplies and utility bills.

On Monday, the woman, Anita Collins, 67, was charged with embezzling more than $1 million over seven years from the archdiocese.

Prosecutors in Manhattan said she did not live lavishly. But at her modest home in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx, a particular interest of Ms. Collins’s became apparent: expensive dolls.

Detectives emerged from her three-bedroom apartment on Monday carrying boxes filled with personal effects: 17 or 18 were labeled dolls, many from the Madame Alexander catalog; about three more were labeled bears. And when a postal service carrier walked by, she noted the volume of mail and packages that the family received.

“They get packages like no tomorrow,” she said.

Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said Ms. Collins was confronted about the missing money in December after an annual audit raised red flags. She was fired, and the archdiocese referred the matter to the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr.

When Ms. Collins was hired by the archdiocese in June 2003, it did not perform criminal background checks on prospective employees, as it does now, Mr. Zwilling said. So church officials were unaware until recently that she had been convicted of grand larceny in one case and had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in another.

Mr. Zwilling said the scheme diverted money “designated for the purpose of helping to provide Catholic education.” The archdiocese has been closing churches and schools for lack of money, and asking for more than $15 million in an annual charity appeal.

“We are continually reviewing how money is handled, our financial controls,” Mr. Zwilling said, “because we want to be good stewards of the money entrusted to us.”

Prosecutors said Ms. Collins had issued 468 checks from the archdiocese to “KB Collins,” the initials of one of her sons. After each check was printed, she would change internal records to show that the check had been issued to a legitimate vendor, prosecutors said.

“At first, we thought it was only a handful of checks, but we quickly realized that it was much bigger,” Mr. Zwilling said.

She kept the amounts to less than $2,500 each to avoid the approval of a supervisor required for larger checks, a prosecutor, Amy Justiniano, said during Ms. Collins’s arraignment.

“She held herself out to be a religious woman, going to church every day,” Ms. Justiniano said.

But all the while, the prosecutor said, she was “lying” and “stealing” and writing checks to herself in all but one month during her years at the archdiocese.

Ms. Justiniano said Ms. Collins also used the money on $18,000 in furniture from Bloomingdale’s, $37,000 in clothes from Barneys and Brooks Brothers, and $19,000 in goods from an Irish gift shop. Ms. Justiniano said that Ms. Collins had confessed.

Ms. Collins appeared in Manhattan Criminal Court wearing a green cable-knit sweater over a white turtleneck, her white hair pulled back in a short ponytail. She said nothing during the arraignment.

Ms. Collins was charged with first-degree grand larceny and falsifying business records. She could face a maximum of 25 years in prison on the grand larceny count. Mr. Vance’s office intends to seek a grand jury indictment this week. Judge Michelle A. Armstrong set bail at $750,000 in a secured bond or $350,000 in cash.

Ms. Collins’s court-appointed lawyer, Howard Simmons, said she had no money left and seemed to have “accepted her fate.” She has two grown sons in Florida and a daughter who lives with her and is being treated for cancer, he said, but none of her relatives came to court.

Ms. Collins and her daughter have for 15 years lived in a $1,400-a-month apartment in a multifamily building in the Bronx, blocks from the intersection of the Bruckner and Throgs Neck Expressways, one of the building’s owners, Domenica Viscogliosi, said.

“It makes me upset, because they were nice people,” said Ms. Viscogliosi, whose own daughter lives in a unit below Ms. Collins. “She was quiet, a nice lady.”

Ms. Collins sometimes attended Mass at a nearby church, Saint Benedict’s. The priest there, the Rev. Stephen Norton, said he did not know Ms. Collins well but would address the concerns of his parishioners.

“These things are always difficult,” he said. “But we’re a church of redemption.”

Two years ago, Ms. Collins helped organize a ceremony at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for 600 people preparing to enter the Catholic Church.

“It’s a wonderful day for the Church of New York, and it’s great to see this new blood entering the Church,” Ms. Collins was quoted saying in Catholic New York. “Seeing people coming into the faith makes me feel good because my faith has always been a steadfast part of my life, and to me it’s very heartwarming to see this. I think it’s marvelous and I just love it.”

According to court records, Ms. Collins was arrested in June 1999, and charged with stealing at least $46,000 over 16 months from AccuStaff, a Manhattan temporary employment agency where she worked as a payroll manager.

In that case, she was accused of issuing duplicate checks to some employees, and then cashing them with check-cashing cards she had issued to herself under various names.

She pleaded guilty to one count of grand larceny in the third degree and received five years’ probation. Her sentence also required her to pay $10,000 in restitution to AccuStaff and complete 100 hours of community service, records from the district attorney’s office show.

Ms. Justiniano, the prosecutor, said Ms. Collins was still on probation when she began working for the archdiocese.

In January 1986, she was arrested in the Bronx on multiple counts of criminal forgery and grand larceny. In that case, she pleaded guilty to a Class A misdemeanor and received three years’ probation, according to court papers.

The current accusation against Ms. Collins has also set off an additional review of financial procedures and oversight at the archdiocese, Mr. Zwilling said, though he added that at this point, no disciplinary actions were being considered against any of Ms. Collins’s superiors.

Hannah Miet, Noah Rosenberg and Kate Taylor contributed reporting.

After S.C.: Newt Heads for Fla. with Victory in Sight

Posted by John Cassidy The New Yorker

Give the devil his due. In South Carolina on Saturday, Newt Gingrich didn’t just defeat Mitt Romney and the other Republican candidates: he crushed them. With the scale of his victory, he is now perfectly placed to rampage into Florida. If he doesn't defeat Mitt there, he will surely give him the scare of his life.
Closing out an amazing week, Newt won the Republican primary by twelve percentage points—40-28—and carried forty-three out of forty six counties. Even in Charleston, a virtual retirement home for rich corporate executives like Mitt, he ran within a few points of the erstwhile front-runner.

The CNN exit poll illuminated the extent of Gingrich’s victory and Romney’s defeat. Newt won by sixteen points among men and nine points among women. He topped Romney in every age group by at least eight points. He outpolled him handily in every income group except those earning more than two hundred thousand dollars a year, which Romney won by four points. He ran well ahead of him in every education group except post-graduates.
Newt stomped on Romney so badly that even Karl Rove, doing his punditry duties on Fox, could hardly think of anything positive to say about the candidate he and many other members of the Republican establishment have thrown in their lot (and cash) with. The best Rove could come up with was that previous Republican winners in South Carolina had done even better than Newt. Since 1980, he said, they had averaged forty-five per cent of the vote and a victory margin of seventeen per cent. But none of the prior winners had started the final week so far behind in the polls, and none of them had been heavily outspent by another candidate. Newt overcame both of these things. Given where he was a couple of weeks ago, this wasn’t just a win over Romney: it was a whupping.
In the circumstances, he could afford to be magnanimous in his victory speech, and he was. With the mannequin-like Callista by his side, her peroxide helmet seemingly held in place by a cryogenic freezing agent, he didn’t waste time attacking Paul, or Santorum, or even Romney. Paul was right about the monetary system and had been for twenty-five years; Santorum had displayed great courage in Iowa; Mitt was a hard-working fellow who did a terrific job at the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Yes, that Mitt—the one Newt has spent the past month depicting as a job-destroying, company-looting, tax-evading plutocrat. The former Speaker, it was clear, had now moved on. Beyond South Carolina, beyond Florida, which votes January 31, beyond all the Republican primaries and to the fall, when he would be where he feels most alive—on a debate stage, facing down Barack Obama, the liberal media, and all the other members of the New York/Washington “elite” that take their inspiration from the legacy of Saul Alinsky.
Saul Alinsky? If you haven’t heard of the Chicago-based community organizer, who died in 1972, a year after he published a book called “Rules for Radicals,” you haven’t been listening to Newt for the past twenty years—and for that I commend you, and envy you. Alinsky is a fixture in Gingrich’s speeches. In this one, he came up three times, which was twice more than Romney did. “The centerpiece of the campaign is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky,” Newt declared.
If you suspect that most Americans had no idea who Gingrich was talking about, you are right. ("He was a Jewish guy who tried to help blacks," my wife said, after looking it up.) But Newt is a lot cannier than he sometimes appears. When many Republicans listen to him speak, they don’t sweat the details. They let the aura, the anger, and the erudition pour over them, and it feels good. Here is an eloquent pugilist who gives voice to their resentment and fears and desires, and he’s not doing it from a bar stool, or a church lectern, or the back of pick-up truck with a confederate flag on the bumper. He’s a PhD and former Speaker of the House, who can quote just as many obscure professors and academic studies as any Harvard-trained Democrat.
This isn’t just my theory of Gingrich. It’s his, almost entirely. “It’s not that I am a good debater,” he said in a display of false-modesty that didn't fool anybody. “It is that I articulate the deepest held values of the American people.” Substitute “prejudices” for “values” and “some of the” for “the,” and there you have Newt in a nutshell.
Now onto Florida. Romney has money (which means ads), endorsements—but not one from Jeb Bush, it emerged Saturday night, and an estimated 200,000 votes that have already been cast in advance of polling day. In an electorate that may total 1.2 million, this is a big margin for Newt to overcome. Right now, I’d bet on him doing it.
Why so? Lots of reasons. He has the best storyline: the “double Lazarus.” That will ensure him lots of free media. There are two television debates to come—Monday and Thursday—where he will get the opportunity to demonstrate, yet again, that he is a far better speaker than Mitt. Plus—and this is important—most of the dirt on him is already out there. Short of a former lobbyist for Lehmann Brothers stepping forth to reveal he’s been having a torrid gay affair with Gingrich behind Callista’s back, it’s hard to see what could unbalance the portly Georgian.
But the main reason I think Newt could win is what is happening to Mitt's campaign. Outside of his own backyard, the former Massachusetts governor has yet to win more than twenty-seven per cent of the vote. At this stage, he is beginning to look ominously like another establishment favorite from the North East who had everything going for him except the voters in his own party: Ed Muskie.
Mitt's poor showing on Saturday, and his potential weakness in Florida, reflects several factors. First, there was his religion. It clearly cost him in Iowa, where he did very poorly among evangelical Christians, and the same thing happened in South Carolina. According to the CNN exit poll, twenty-seven per cent of those surveyed said that in deciding how to vote the religious beliefs of the candidate mattered a great deal to them. In this group, Gingrich got forty-five per cent of the vote, and Romney got nine per cent—yes, nine. Another thirty-three per cent of those questioned said the candidates’ religious beliefs mattered somewhat. In this group, Gingrich got forty-seven per cent of the vote, and Romney got twenty-seven per cent.
Then there is the issue of Romney’s record at Bain Capital, and, inextricably linked to it, his tax history. This is now threatening to rob him of what was supposed to be his greatest advantage: his strength on economic issues. Ninety-seven per cent of the people interviewed in the CNN exit poll said they were worried about the economy, but that didn’t help Mitt much. More than six in ten voters said the economy was the most important issue in the election. And in this group, he lagged Newt by eight points—32-40.
The other problem facing Romney is his weakness as a campaigner. In the last couple of debates, particularly, his performance has been lackluster. When he was going up against Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and even Rick Santorum, his failure to engage the audience, and his tendency to get rattled by questions he doesn't like, didn’t matter very much. But in taking on a buoyant and deadly brawler like Newt, he desperately needs to step it up.
The Romney campaign knows it is facing a crisis. If he loses in Florida, the Republican establishment will look around for another candidate—a Chris Christie or a Jeb Bush—to enter the race and take on Gingrich. Mitt will now go after Gingrich more aggressively, especially on his record as Speaker. He may even release some information about his taxes. Will this be enough? CNN's David Gergen, whom I regard as the best cable pundit of the lot, expressed some doubts. “Newt Gingrich is a street fighter who carries a switchblade,” he said. “I don’t think Mitt Romney owns a switchblade.”

Gergen regards Newt as a potential menace not just to Romney and Rove, but to President Obama too. This, of course, is a minority view. Most Democrats think that if Newt were to secure the nomination the Obamas could start ordering new curtains for the Lincoln Bedroom. But Gergen points out that things might not be so straightforward. Gingrich could end up doing a better job than Romney of appealing to white working class voters—the sort of voters who often decide the presidential election. “He speaks in the vernacular—there’s a strength to it,” Gergen said after Newt’s victory speech. “That sledgehammer approach—in a country that’s angry, that’s something for the White House to be worried about.”
Maybe that is getting ahead of things. But one thing is incontestable. The 2012 election looks different now than it did a week ago.

Chris Crocker on “Me @ the Zoo,’ YouTube & More

Chris Crocker hit the viral jackpot with ‘Leave Britney Alone!’ Now the star of a documentary, he talks to Adam Auriemma about bullies, porn—and YouTube’s new “Disney Channel” vibe.

by Adam Auriemma |                                                   

The first video ever uploaded to YouTube is 19 seconds long. In it, Jawed Karim, a co-founder of the site, stands in front of an elephant exhibit at the San Diego Zoo. “The cool thing about these guys is they have really, really, really long trunks,” Karim says. He pauses. “And that’s pretty much all there is to say.”

Not quite. That was a simpler time, before Chris Crocker came along. In 2007, the gay Tennessee native uploaded a histrionic screed against Britney Spears haters— “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!”—that blew up the video-sharing site for the first time, racking up millions of hits overnight. But the dialogue about the then 19-year-old Crocker quickly turned nasty. CNN, Fox News, and late-night hosts caught on, mercilessly mocking his androgynous looks and obscene sobs. He was the original Rebecca Black, except rather than a slick music video, the world was making fun of the shaky recording of a kid in his bedroom.

Crocker was put through the pop-culture wringer, with much of the attention focused on his looks; his experiments with hair extensions and make-up bordered on drag. Now he’s the subject of a new documentary, aptly titled Me @ the Zoo, premiering at Sundance on Saturday. (HBO has already snapped up U.S. broadcast rights.) He’s also barely recognizable, sporting a buzz cut and 30 extra pounds of muscle. Crocker calls it a gradual transformation and says it has nothing to do with the feedback: “I don’t give in to the pressures of society.”

Almost a third of the film is lifted straight from Crocker’s massive YouTube catalog, before and after the infamous Spears outburst. Most of the videos are silly—teasing his grandmother, cold-calling his online fans, strolling through Walmart—but all of them are honest. “A lot of YouTubers are just on there to make money and do make-up tutorials and wack shit,” Crocker says in an interview as he prepares to head to Sundance. “I feel like I have a real relationship with my audience.”

But the site, he says, feels much different now. “I think that I made YouTube sort of stand up on their toes and realize anyone can become the face of YouTube overnight. So I think that since then they’ve created roadblocks...It feels a lot more controlled now. Everything feels so Disney Channel to me.”

Chris Moukarbel, who directed Zoo with Valerie Veatch, agrees. “It probably unsettled people at YouTube…He’s not necessarily who they would want to be the face of the site.”

But Crocker has undeniable star quality; Moukarbel and Veatch didn’t even intend to make a film about him. “We were making a history of reality TV,” says Veatch. “Initially, we interviewed him for this larger film. We just kind of focused on Chris once we realized that his story was the film.”

Besides being an irresistible screen presence, Crocker exemplified—in his typical over-the-top way—the perils of making one’s life available for viewing on the Web. “He’s definitely an indicator of how people will socialize in the years to come,” Veatch says. “Chris’s experience—his immersion in the medium—is going to be the standard.” And not just for young people, she adds. “My mom has to pick out a Facebook profile photo.”

The film’s most poignant scene is, in a bizarre but heartbreaking way, tied to “Leave Britney Alone!” Moukarbel and Veatch, who filmed Crocker for more than two years, capture a day Crocker spends with his mother, an Iraq War vet who had him when she was 14. At night, they head to his car and she asks her son to just drop her off somewhere downtown; she hasn’t had a home in five years.

Crocker didn’t realize until he saw the film that his idolization of Spears was tied to his missing mother.

“When my family gave up on my mother, I was the only family member that still was rooting for her. I was very sympathetic to my mom still when everyone else was just turning their backs on her. And that was happening at the same time that Britney was going through [her own struggles]. And I felt like at that time I was the only person that was looking at Britney as a young woman who has kids, and everyone’s talking about her weight when she’s clearly on drugs.”

In this context, “Leave Britney Alone” feels less psychotic and more cathartic. Not all of Crocker’s videos have such a raw subtext, but the entire collection is grown from a dark place.

Starting from preschool, Crocker was intensely bullied. “Every single day was hell for me. I live in the dirty, dirty South.” It got so bad so he was yanked out of school on the advice of his guidance counselors. “When you live in the South, they can spot it 10 miles ahead, before they even see you. They’re like, ‘That’s a gay kid.’”

Lonely and with a well of young angst, Crocker was primed for YouTube. “I had to really just own whatever I was at an early age or let that defeat me. And so I just don’t have shame in any kind of way. Not having shame, I guess, makes someone very watchable on camera.”

When Crocker says no shame, he means it. He’s been flirting with a career in porn for some time now. And he doesn’t understand why anyone would be surprised. “I’ve always photographed myself in my own—I would say privacy, but it’s not really private when I’m uploading them to the Internet…I don’t see what’s different between the porn stars and the people that watch it.”

Chris Moukarbel and Valerie Veatch

With Zoo bringing him more attention than any time since 2007, Crocker says he’d be open to getting back into the entertainment business, but he’s wary of jumping into the wrong project. After the Britney video blew up, he moved to L.A., chasing a reality-show deal, and admittedly became a caricature of his YouTube persona. “I would flash the paparazzi and act outrageous in public to keep it going,” he says. The antics backfired, and video in which he satirized himself by saying Britney Spears was more important than 9/11 was the final straw. He left, broke, for home.

Crocker says he turned down another reality offer just a few days ago. If all else fails, he’ll go back to school. “I dropped out of school in eighth grade and I’ve wanted to get my GED for a long time. It’s just that this Chris Crocker thing has provided me with monthly income for a while.”

“Not having shame, I guess, makes someone very watchable on camera.”

One of the most-watched clips in YouTube history is called “David After Dentist.” It’s gotten 105 million views—outpacing “Leave Britney Alone” by 60 million. In it, a young boy who got way too much nitrous oxide at the dentist’s office is acting woozy in the backseat of his dad’s SUV. “Is this real life?” he asks. “Is this going to be forever?”

In more grownup terms, Crocker and Me @ the Zoo are tackling the same questions. “My life has changed because of my online life,” Crocker says, “and people that don’t necessarily know me in person recognize me in real life. And so there’s really…the blur is kind of becoming clearer and clearer. It’s all real life.”

 

©2011 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC