hey, wait a minute Don't Fear Starbucks
Why the franchise actually helps mom and pop coffeehouses.

By Taylor Clark (Slate)
The first time Herb Hyman spoke with the rep from Starbucks, in 1991, the life of his small business flashed before his eyes. For three decades, Hyman's handful of Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf stores had been filling the caffeine needs of Los Angeles locals and the Hollywood elite: Johnny Carson had his own blend there; Jacques Cousteau arranged to have Hyman's coffee care packages meet his ship at ports around the world; and Dirty Dozen leading man Lee Marvin often worked behind the counter with Hyman for fun. But when the word came down that the rising Seattle coffee juggernaut was plotting its raid on Los Angeles, Hyman feared his life's work would be trampled underfoot. Starbucks even promised as much. "They just flat-out said, 'If you don't sell out to us, we're going to surround your stores,' " Hyman recalled. "And lo and behold, that's what happened—and it was the best thing that ever happened to us."
Ever since Starbucks blanketed every functioning community in America with its cafes, the one effect of its expansion that has steamed people the most has been the widely assumed dying-off of mom and pop coffeehouses. Our cities once overflowed with charming independent coffee shops, the popular thinking goes, until the corporate steamroller known as Starbucks came through and crushed them all, perhaps tossing the victims a complimentary Alanis Morrisette CD to ease the psychic pain. In a world where Starbucks operates nearly 15,000 stores, with six new ones opening each day, isn't this a reasonable assumption? How could momma and poppa coffee hope to survive? But Hyman didn't misspeak—and neither did the dozens of other coffeehouse owners I've interviewed. Strange as it sounds, the best way to boost sales at your independently owned coffeehouse may just be to have Starbucks move in next-door.
That's certainly how it worked out for Hyman. Soon after declining Starbucks's buyout offer, Hyman received the expected news that the company was opening up next to one of his stores. But instead of panicking, he decided to call his friend Jim Stewart, founder of the Seattle's Best Coffee chain, to find out what really happens when a Starbucks opens nearby. "You're going to love it," Stewart reported. "They'll do all of your marketing for you, and your sales will soar." The prediction came true: Each new Starbucks store created a local buzz, drawing new converts to the latte-drinking fold. When the lines at Starbucks grew beyond the point of reason, these converts started venturing out—and, Look! There was another coffeehouse right next-door! Hyman's new neighbor boosted his sales so much that he decided to turn the tactic around and start targeting Starbucks. "We bought a Chinese restaurant right next to one of their stores and converted it, and by God, it was doing $1 million a year right away," he said.
Hyman isn't the only one who has experienced this Starbucks reverse jinx. Orange County, Calif., coffeehouse owner Martin Diedrich started hyperventilating when he first heard a Starbucks was opening "within a stone's throw" of his cafe, yet he reported similar results: "I didn't suffer whatsoever. Ultimately I prospered, in no small part because of it." Ward Barbee, the recently passed founder of the coffee trade magazine Fresh Cup, saw this happen scores of times. "Anyone who complains about having a Starbucks put in next to you is crazy," he told me. "You want to welcome the manager, give them flowers. It should be the best news that any local coffeehouse ever had."
Now, lest we get carried away with the happy civic results of Starbucks' global expansion, I hasten to point out that the company isn't exactly thrilled to have this effect on its local competitors' sales. Starbucks is actually trying to be ruthless in its store placements; it wants those independents out of the way, and it frequently succeeds at displacing them through other means, such as buying a mom and pop's lease or intimidating them into selling out. Beyond the frothy drinks and the touchy-feely decor, Starbucks runs on considerable competitive fire. Consider Tracy Cornell, a former Starbucks real-estate dealmaker who found and locked up a staggering 900 North American retail sites for the company in her decade-plus career. "It was sort of piranha-like," Cornell told me of her work for Starbucks. "It was just talking to landlords, seeing who was behind on their rent. All I needed was an opening like that, where the landlord wanted out. I was looking for tenants who were weak."
As much as independent coffeehouse owners generally enjoy having a Starbucks close at hand, most of them seem to have a story or two of someone from the company trying to undercut them. And occasionally a new Starbucks will hurt a mom and pop—even drive them out of business. For example, in 2006, cafe owner Penny Stafford filed a federal antitrust suit against the company, alleging a nearby Starbucks illegally sank her Bellevue, Wash., coffeehouse. Starbucks employees were passing out samples right outside her front door, Stafford claims, even though the company's nearest outlet was over 300 feet away.
But closures like this have been the exception, not the rule. In its predatory store placement strategy, Starbucks has been about as lethal a killer as a fluffy bunny rabbit. Business for independently owned coffee shops has been nothing less than exceptional as of late. Here's a statistic that might be surprising, given the omnipresence of the Starbucks empire: According to recent figures from the Specialty Coffee Association of America, 57 percent of the nation's coffeehouses are still mom and pops. Just over the five-year period from 2000 to 2005—long after Starbucks supposedly obliterated indie cafes—the number of mom and pops grew 40 percent, from 9,800 to nearly 14,000 coffeehouses. (Starbucks, I might add, tripled in size over that same time period. Good times all around.) So much for the sharp decline in locally owned coffee shops. And prepare yourself for some bona fide solid investment advice: The failure rate for new coffeehouses is a mere 10 percent, according to the market research firm Mintel, which means the vast majority of cafes stay afloat no matter where Starbucks drops its stores. Compare that to the restaurant business, where failure is the norm.
So now that we know Starbucks isn't slaughtering mom and pop, the thorny question remains: Why is Starbucks amplifying their business? It's actually pretty simple. In contrast to so-called "downtown killers" like Home Depot or Wal-Mart, Starbucks doesn't enjoy the kinds of competitive advantages that cut down its local rivals' sales. Look at Wal-Mart. It offers lower prices and a wider array of goods than its small-town rivals, so it acts like a black hole on local consumers, sucking in virtually all of their business. Starbucks, on the other hand, is often more expensive than the local coffeehouse, and it offers a very limited menu; you'll never see discounts or punch cards at Starbucks, nor will you see unique, localized fare (or—let's be honest—fare that doesn't make your tongue feel like it's dying). In other words, a new Starbucks doesn't prevent customers from visiting independents in the same way Wal-Mart does—especially since coffee addicts need a fix every day, yet they don't always need to hit the same place for it. When Starbucks opens a store next to a mom and pop, it creates a sort of coffee nexus where people can go whenever they think "coffee." Local consumers might have a formative experience with a Java Chip Frappuccino, but chances are they'll branch out to the cheaper, less crowded, and often higher-quality independent cafe later on. So when Starbucks blitzed Omaha with six new stores in 2002, for instance, business at all coffeehouses in town immediately went up as much as 25 percent.
The key for independent coffeehouse owners who want to thrive with a Starbucks next-door is that they don't try to imitate Starbucks. (As many failed coffee chains can attest, there's no way to beat Starbucks at being Starbucks.) The locally owned cafes that offer their own unique spin on the coffeehouse experience—and, crucially, a quality brew—are the ones that give the Seattle behemoth fits. Serve an appetizing enough cappuccino, and you can even follow Hyman's lead and take aim at almighty Starbucks, where automated espresso machines now pull consistently middling shots at the touch of a button—no employee craftsmanship required.
After all, if Starbucks can make a profit by putting its stores right across the street from each other, as it so often does, why couldn't a unique, well-run mom and pop do even better next-door? And given America's continuing thirst for exorbitantly priced gourmet coffee drinks, there's a lot of cash out there for the taking. As coffee consultant Dan Cox explained, "You can't do better than a cup of coffee for profit. It's insanity. A cup of coffee costs 16 cents. Once you add in labor and overhead, you're still charging a 400 percent markup—not bad! Where else can you do that?" Until Americans decide they need to pay four bucks a pop every morning for a custom-baked, designer-toast experience, probably nowhere.Taylor Clark is a writer based in Portland. His first book, Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture,was published in November.

Ike Turner leaves bad reputation and historic rock'n'roll
Jon Parele New York Times
IKE TURNER, whose achievements as one of the founding fathers of rock'n'roll were overshadowed by his former wife Tina Turner's claims that he beat her for almost two decades, has died at the age of 76.
His death was announced on Wednesday by Jeanette Bazzell Turner, who married Turner in 1995. She gave no cause of death, but said he had had emphysema.
Turner was best known for discovering Anna Mae Bullock, a teenage singer from Nutbush, Tennessee, whom he renamed Tina Turner. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue recorded a string of hits in the 1960s before the Turners broke up in 1975.
Tina Turner described the relationship as abusive in her autobiography, I, Tina, which was adapted for the 1993 film What's Love Got to Do With It? and made Ike's name synonymous with domestic abuse.
"I got a temper," he admitted in 1999 in his autobiography, Takin' Back My Name: The Confessions of Ike Turner, co-written with Nigel Cawthorne. But he maintained that the film had "overstated" it.
Turner's career extended back to the 1950s, when he played with pioneering Mississippi Delta bluesmen and helped shape early rock'n'roll as well as soul and rhythm and blues. Rocket 88, a song his band released in 1951, is regularly cited as a contender for the first rock'n'roll record for its beat, its distorted guitar and its honking saxophone.
Turner, whose full name is variously given as Izear Luster Turner jnr and Ike Wister Turner, was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and was brought up there by his mother after his father, a minister, was beaten to death by a white mob.
He grew up around Delta musicians such as the bluesman Robert Nighthawk jnr and the pianist Pinetop Perkins, who gave him boogie-woogie lessons, and he learned to play guitar.
In high school he formed a group called the Kings of Rhythm. B.B. King helped that band get a steady weekend gig and recommended them to Sam Phillips at Sun Studios in Memphis. They had been performing jukebox hits, but on the drive to Memphis, they decided to write something of their own. Their saxophonist, Jackie Brenston, suggested a song about the new Rocket 88 Oldsmobile. The piano-pounding intro and the first verse were by Turner, and the band collaborated on the rest; Brenston sang. It sold half a million copies. Turner was paid $US20 for the record.
In 1958, Anna Mae Bullock joined his band and quickly became its focal point as Tina Turner. The band was renamed the Ike and Tina Turner Revue.
The Rolling Stones chose the Revue as their opening act on a 1969 tour, introducing them to many rock fans. In 1971, the Revue reached the pop Top 10 with their version of Creedence Clearwater Revival's Proud Mary, with Ike's deep vocal counterpoint and Tina's memorable spoken-word interlude.
"We never do anything nice and easy," Tina Turner said. "We always do it nice and rough."
She walked out on him in 1975. He, already abusing cocaine and alcohol, spiralled further downward during the 1980s while she became a multimillion-selling star. In 1989, he went to prison for cocaine possession offences and was in jail when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
On his release from prison, Turner set out to reclaim his place in rock history. In the end, the music business embraced him: his 2006 album, Risin' With The Blues, won the Grammy as best traditional blues album.
The New York Times

OPINION/IDEAS
Last call
Why the gay bars of Boston are disappearing, and what it says about the future of city life
By Robert David Sullivan
THE FIRST THING I ever did to identify myself as a gay man - before coming out to a friend or relative, before putting a rainbow-flag pin on my jacket - was to walk into a gay bar. This was not so unusual in the early 1990s, when few gay men identified as such before they left high school. Some of us needed to walk around the block four or five times before finally pushing open a dimly lit, unmarked door.
At the time, there were plenty of dimly lit doors in Boston. The Napoleon Club was a piano bar near Park Square that attracted theater students and older men who left big tips on small glasses of red wine. A few blocks away, Luxor was a video bar for younger guys; nearby were Buddies (all ages) and Chaps, a dance club where dressing conservatively meant keeping your shirt on. In other parts of town, there were Sporters, a friendly Beacon Hill dive, and Playland, a Combat Zone bar known for its sketchy clientele, banged-up piano, and year-round Christmas lights. In all, there were 16 gay bars in Boston and Cambridge, according to Pink Pages directories from 1993 and 1994.
Today, that number has been cut to less than half. None of the bars I've mentioned are still in business, and most of the city's seven remaining gay-every-night bars have sparse customers for most of the week. (Lesbian bars were never numerous to begin with.) The gay population may have political clout and the right to marry in Massachusetts, but it has fewer and fewer public spaces to call its own.
The disappearance of places like Buddies and Chaps may sound like a problem limited to gay men, but it is part of a much larger trend reshaping American cities. As gay bars vanish, so go bookstores, diners, and all kinds of spaces that once allowed "blissful public congregation," as sociologist Ray Oldenburg described their function in his 1989 book "The Great Good Place."
In New York, the Jewish deli - a staple of the city's identity - has all but vanished. In the Boston area, many of Harvard Square's bookstores, Kenmore Square's student eateries, and myriad other places that guaranteed a diverse urban experience have closed their doors, replaced by a far more uniform lineup of bank branches, chain stores, and upscale restaurants.
This change is a serious challenge to the city, which has historically been defined by the breadth and variety of its street-level experience - and the wide diversity of people it threw together. "City air makes free," a saying that dates to medieval times, was a favorite of urban-studies pioneer Jane Jacobs. But as a wide range of gay bars dwindles to a handful of survivors - and the city's diners, indie bookstores, and dive bars yield to high rents and shifting patterns of commerce - that air is becoming the province of an increasingly narrow set of people.
Oldenburg calls public gathering spots a "third place" where we can temporarily step out of our household and workplace roles. Besides taverns, he cites drugstores (the kind with soda fountains), pool halls, and barber shops as examples. But if you were a gay man in the late 20th century, the place with all the qualities of an ideal third space was the gay bar.
For many closeted gays, bars were the only places where they could safely be themselves. They were also a nexus for political organizing and charitable work, they promoted safer-sex education after the onset of AIDS, and they served as a welcome mat for gay newcomers to a city.
"When I was in college, I'd go out to a few different bars with my friends every week," says gay novelist Wayne Hoffman, who came to Boston in the late '80s and now lives in New York. "It was a chance for us to socialize off campus, meet new people - including new boyfriends - and figure out how we fit into the larger gay world. The bars opened up a whole world of possibilities for me."
For decades gay bars kept a low profile (unmarked doors, blackened windows), and were often run by mobsters or underworld figures, since more respectable businessmen weren't crazy about the prospect of frequent police raids. The general population was either unaware of them or saw them as sinister.
But in 1969, New York police raided the Stonewall Inn, a rather boisterous Greenwich Village bar, and the gay patrons unexpectedly fought back. The resulting riot helped to turn bars into flag-bearers for gay culture, and "Stonewall" itself began to be used in the names of gay and lesbian political organizations (the Stonewall Democrats, for example) as shorthand for "don't push us around."
When gays moved out of the shadows during the '70s, then began settling in certain areas of major cities (like the South End in Boston), gay bars evolved. Some became respected neighborhood institutions, offering meeting space to social groups, sponsoring softball teams and arts festivals, distributing condoms and health information, and buying ads in local newspapers. By the mid-1980s, they were a major force in turning Gay Pride holidays into citywide celebrations, sponsoring eye-catching parade floats and raucous block parties.
But at the same time, larger trends in American life were massing that would soon sweep these bars away.
One was the rising price of urban real estate. Gay bars traditionally appeared in marginal neighborhoods, or in predominately gay neighborhoods, with cheap rents and accommodating (or indifferent) neighbors. As those areas have progressively been developed with high-end housing, bars have struggled to pay their rent, and neighborhood groups have been increasingly hostile toward anything that creates noise or attracts idlers. The same forces have stripped such neighborhoods of other iconic businesses, such as fringe theaters and free and low-admission art spaces.
Meanwhile, the gay population is becoming more dispersed. As gay men feel more comfortable coming out to family, neighbors, and co-workers, they may also feel more comfortable living in small cities or towns rather than in the "gay ghettos" of large cities. As a result, it's much harder for a neighborhood gay bar to attract a steady clientele.
Perhaps the most important change, however, is the Internet. When Internet access became widespread in the mid-1990s, gay chat rooms on America Online and other subscription services quickly attracted a crowd. More elaborate sites such as Gay.com quickly followed, usurping gay bars' most important function: a place for men to meet each other.
At the time of the Stonewall riots, "gay people had to go out to a bar to meet other gay men," at least if they didn't want to go to more dangerous cruising areas such as parks and men's rooms, says Michael Bronski, Dartmouth College professor and author of "The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom."
There are several gay chat sites where a month's membership can cost as little as the price of one cocktail at Club Cafe - and on a recent Saturday night, one of them listed nearly 600 Boston-area members online. The site claims 600,000 members nationwide.
As a result of these changes, there are stories of gay bars closing all over the country. Since the early '90s, New York has lost its two biggest leather bars (the Spike and the Lure), as well as piano bars (the Five Oaks and Pegasus) and martini lounges (the popular but short-lived Hell). In Laguna Beach, Calif., the first city in America to elect an openly gay mayor, one of the two biggest gay bars closed this spring, and the other has been purchased by a developer who wants to tear it down. And the oldest gay bar in Pittsburgh (ironically, the setting for the TV series "Queer as Folk") closed earlier this year, after Carnegie Mellon University purchased its building.
Gay bars are just one kind of business struggling to survive in what is, to use the phrase popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name, the age of "the long tail." That phrase refers to an economy in which the Internet can make even low-demand products profitable. Until the Internet, large cities offered the closest thing to a long tail economy. Thanks to Cambridge's concentration of intellectual shoppers, for instance, Harvard Square had stores full of the most obscure books, magazines, and records you could think of buying. The students in Kenmore Square kept cheap eateries, music clubs, and record stores alive; the South End's gay population once supported not just bars, but also inexpensive card-and-gift shops (such as Tommy Tish), a sex-toy shop with the feel of an old-fashioned general store (the Marquis de Sade), and a gay bookstore.
Now the classic example of a long tail business is online retailer Amazon.com, which stocks close to a million book titles - including more gay novels and intellectual books than any local store could offer. As long tail businesses migrate to the Internet, cities like Boston are being skinned alive.
Businesses like bookstores, video stores, and gay bars can no longer afford to occupy valuable real estate when their goods or services are more easily and cheaply delivered electronically. As these businesses disappear from Boston streets, they're usually replaced by more profitable land uses, such as office towers and high-end restaurants. The result is a variant of the "tragedy of the commons": Hotels, condo complexes, and other upscale businesses market themselves as part of a vibrant city, but they can also make it more difficult to maintain that vibrancy. (The ground floors of new office and housing buildings are often reserved for retail use, but CVS and other chain stores usually snap up the space.) These high-end businesses attract new residents and consumers to urban neighborhoods, but when they aren't balanced by other types of economic activity, the result can be a sterile streetscape rather than a diverse ecosystem.
This development would have disappointed William H. Whyte, the sociologist who may be rivaled only by Jane Jacobs in the cogency and passion of his arguments for active city life. Albert LaFarge, editor of "The Essential William H. Whyte," says that the ideal urban neighborhood from Whyte's point of view is fueled by "the intensity and unpredictability of different people using the same space for their own reasons, and often contradictory ones, but all respecting the goals of vibrancy and function."
If a place like the South End accommodates fewer and fewer of these reasons for a person to be there, says LaFarge, it not longer meets the definition of a successful urban neighborhood.
Gay neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco are reportedly undergoing the same transformation as in the South End, but there is at least one exception to this trend. In Philadelphia, the city has encouraged the development of its "Gayborhood," a nine-block part of downtown, by adding rainbow flags to street signs, and the city's tourism board has an aggressive campaign targeted at gay travelers. Jeff Guaracino of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. says that the Gayborhood provides "a very good economic return for the city. Businesses are making a profit there."
Making a profit, of course, isn't always the same as serving a community's needs. Gay bars seem to be doing well in resort areas such as Palm Springs and Provincetown, but they're more vacation party spots than true third spaces for locals.
The fate of the Jewish delicatessen in New York is a reminder that "theme park" gay bars would be no substitute for what we've lost in Boston. Thousands of delis have disappeared from New York since the 1930s. Many of the dozen or so survivors seem to be thriving, but the tourist-oriented Carnegie and Stage delis, with their long lines and rapid turnover of tables, don't bear much resemblance to the classic model. At a panel discussion called "Jewish Cuisine and the Evolution of the Jewish Deli," held this summer and reported on by The New York Times, food historian Joel Denker described the delis of the '50s and '60s as having "this sort of yeasty combination of intellectuals, writers, and leftists, sitting together over tea and cottage cheese and fruit, talking about the issues of the day."
Sitting and talking for hours at a time. Sadly, that's not considered an efficient use of space during today's supposed revival of city life.
Boston's gay community is adapting to its scaled-down bar scene, but there's still a sense of something missing. There are probably more spiritual groups, youth programs, and health resources than ever in the gay community, but none of them really fit the definition of a third space where one can drop in and hang out. "There was a whole group of friends who I would only ever see at the Napoleon Club," says Rick Park, a Boston-based actor, "and when it closed, they all disappeared."
You can see the change for the worse in the city's annual Gay Pride celebration. Years ago, the highlights of the parade were the outrageous parade floats, featuring drag queens and go-go boys, sponsored by gay bars. Now those delightfully pointless displays are outnumbered by contingents of waving employees from banks and utility companies in matching T-shirts. It's a positive development that so many people are out at work, to be sure, but the parade has become a lot less fun for gay and straight spectators alike.
A few weeks ago I attended a panel discussion sponsored by the History Project, which maintains archives on Boston's gay and lesbian history. A lesbian of a certain age, reflecting on the changes in the gay community since the Stonewall rebellion, said with rueful irony that "life may be easier now, but it might have been more exciting then."
That sounded a little bit like Red Sox fans complaining that they liked watching the team more when it was laboring under an 86-year curse. But I knew what she was talking about. So does Abe Rybeck, artistic director of the gay-themed Theater Offensive. He no longer considers himself a bar regular - there's too much to do running a theater company and participating in other activities - but he says that he would feel their disappearance.
"I went to Fritz to watch a World Series game this year," he says, "and it was fun to be in a room with a bunch of gay men enjoying a sports event in the way gay men would. In their minds, they were all going home with Jacoby Ellsbury. I was glad I could watch the game with my people."
Robert David Sullivan is the managing editor of CommonWealth magazine and primary writer of the blog Beyond Red & Blue (at massinc.org). The History Project (historyproject.org), which maintains archives on Boston's gay and lesbian history, provided much of the information in this article.
© Copyright Boston Globe

From Time Magazine
Chavez Tastes Defeat Over Reforms
By TIM PADGETT
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's left-wing, oil-fueled revolution usually carries itself like a swaggering, cocksure juggernaut. So it was a sign that things perhaps weren't looking good for the fiery, anti-U.S. leader Sunday night when he didn't appear on the balcony of Miraflores, the Caracas presidential palace, pumping his fists and crowing confidently about victory. Venezuela's polls had closed in a national referendum on a raft of constitutional reforms that would have profoundly tightened his hold on political power in Venezuela — including an amendment to eliminate presidential term limits (which currently last six years). Instead, Chavez's Vice President, Jorge Rodriguez, appeared as the night wore on and told reporters, "We will respect the result, whatever it is."
And, to the astonishment of his opponents, Chavez did. At around 2 am this morning, Caracas time, Chavez conceded his first electoral defeat since winning Venezuela's presidency in 1998. After facing an unusually strong protest movement on the streets of Venezuela's major cities — led not by traditional opposition figures but by university students who'd grown fearful that Chavez was moving the country toward a Cuba-style dictatorship — his reforms were narrowly beaten back by a 51% to 49% margin. The result, and Chavez's graceful acceptance of it, may well have set not only Venezuela, a key U.S. oil supplier, but all of Latin America on a far surer path to democracy in the 21st century. "This was a photo finish," Chavez told his stunned backers after his defeat was announced. "Don't feel sad, don't feel burdened."
Only about half of Venezuela's 16 million registered voters showed up at the polls on Sunday. Low turnout was supposed to have hurt the opposition's NO vote; but in the end it was Chavez, thought to have a reliable populist political machine at his disposal to get out the YES vote, who couldn't rouse his base among Venezuela's majority poor. Even that cohort, despite having benefited from Chavez's vast socialist project, backed away from his bid to solidify "21st-century socialism," which also would have put the autonomous Central Bank under his control and exerted deeper federal authority over local and state governments. Given the fact that Venezuela's National Assembly and Supreme Court are already Chavez's rubber stamps, those issues seem to have overridden the economic carrots Chavez's reform package held out, like expanded social security benefits and shorter working hours (from 8 to 6 hours each day).
Venezuelans also appear to have told Chavez and his Bolivarian Revolution (named for South America's 19th-century independence hero, Simon Bolivar) that despite the country enjoying the fruits of record oil prices — the country has the hemisphere's largest oil reserves — they're fatigued by almost a decade of polarizing revolutionary rule and would like to return to some normalcy. "This is a country divided in two," said Stalin Gonzalez, a student at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas. "There's a part that loves Chavez and a part that hates him. A middle ground is lacking. We won't build a country that way."
The movement led by Gonzalez and tens of thousands of fellow students proved decisive: they articulated an opposition message and galvanized its sympathizers far more effectively than Venezuela's older political elite ever could. It was a force Chavez had not planned on reckoning with, particularly since students have long been a bloc that Latin America's political left could depend on. Chavez also couldn't withstand the defections within his own bloc, including socialist state Governors and, perhaps most important, his erstwhile pal and former Defense Minister, Raul Baduel, who earlier this month called Chavez's amendments a "constitutional coup d'etat." The attempt by Chavez and his backers to demonize figures like Baduel — labeling them "traitors" — backfired, especially since Baduel had helped put Chavez back in power after a botched opposition coup attempt against him in 2002.
But just as important was Chavez's concession. The opposition "won this victory for themselves," he admitted in a voice whose subdued calm was in contrast to his frequently aggressive political speeches. "My sincere recommendation is that they learn how to handle it." Despite his authoritarian bent, Chavez (whose current and apparently last term ends in 2012) had always insisted he was a democrat — that he was, in fact, forging "a more genuine democracy" in a nation that had in many ways been a sham democracy typical of a number of Latin American countries. His presidential election victories — in 1998, 2000 and 2006, as well as his victory over an attempt to recall him in a 2004 referendum — were all recognized by credible international observers; and that conferred on him a democratic legitimacy that helped blunt accusations by his enemies, especially the U.S., that he was a would-be dictator in the mold of Fidel Castro.
In the end it was a cachet that, fortunately, he knew he couldn't forfeit. As a result, the referendum result will resonate far beyond Venezuela. Latin Americans in general have grown disillusioned by democratic institutions — particularly their failure to solve the region's gaping inequality and frightening insecurity — and many observers fear that Latin Americans, as they so often have in their history, are again willing to give leaders like Chavez inordinate, and inordinately protracted, powers. Chavez, critics complained, was in fact leading a trend of what some called "democratators" — democratically elected dictators. His allies in Bolivia and Ecuador, for example, are hammering out new Constitutions that may give them unlimited presidential re-election. The fact that Venezuelans this morning resisted that urge — and that Chavez so maturely backed off himself when he saw it — may give other countries pause for thought as well. It could even revive the oft-ridiculed notion that this might after all be the century of the Americas.
with reporting by Jens Erik Gould/Caracas

Sucker Punch
The art, the poetry, the idiocy of YouTube street fights.By Carlo Rotella

From SLATE

Cheap, ultraportable video technology has freed bystanders at street fights to do more than simply shout, "Fight! Fight! Fuck him up!" Now they can record the event for posterity, too. The result is a growing online video archive of informal fisticuffs. You can find these videos collected on Web sites that specialize in them—ComeGetYouSome.com, Psfights.com, NothingToxic.com, and others—or you can just go to good old YouTube and type in "street fight" or other evocative keyword combinations, such as "sucker punch" or "knock out." The videos that come up offer near-infinite permutations on the eternal street-fight drama of posturing, mayhem, and consequences.
The more of them you watch, the more familiar you become with certain recurring formulas: mean kid or kids nailing unsuspecting victim, drunk guy flattening drunker guy outside a bar, bully getting or not getting comeuppance, go-ahead-and-hit-me scenarios, girls fighting for keeps while male onlookers anxiously strain to find them hilarious, backyard or basement pugilism, semiformal bare-knuckle bouts, pitched battles between rival mobs of hooligans.
Some of the fights are fake, many are real, some fall in between. There's a lot of hair-pulling incompetence, but there are also moments of genuine inspiration in which regular folks under pressure discover their inner Conan. And, of course, there are a few very bad boys and girls out there who know what they're doing. (Some offer how-to lessons.) Watching fight after fight can grow dispiriting (look, another brace of toasted poltroons walking around all stiff-legged, puffing out their chests and loudly prophesying each other's imminent doom), but only when you have worked through a few score of them does the genre begin to amount to something more than the sum of its often sorry-ass parts. The various subgenres and minutely discrete iterations flow together into a cut-rate, bottom-feeding, mass-authored poem of force. Ancient Greece had its epic tradition, and classical Chinese literature had the jiang hu, the martial world; we've got YouTube.
I realize that this probably makes me a bad person, but I find the online archive of street fights to be edifying, even addictive, ripely endowed as it is with both the malign foolishness that tempts you to despise your fellow humans and occasional flashes of potent mystery that remind you not to give in to the temptation. There's an education in these videos—in how to fight and how not to fight, for starters (executive summary: Skip the preliminaries, strike first, and keep it coming), but also in how the human animal goes about the age-old business of aggression in the 21st century.
Here's the beginning of a guidebook, a preliminary sketch of some lessons to be learned in the land of a thousand asswhippings.
1) If you're going to pick a fight, or consent to such an invitation, know what you're getting into and be prepared for a fast start and a quick finish.
Squaring off for a street fight resembles questioning a witness in court: Like a lawyer (and unlike, say, an English professor), you should know the answer to your question before you ask it. The question is, "If we fight, who will win?" The answer frequently comes as a surprise to all involved.
For instance, this unfortunate guy picked a fight with the wrong motorist. Note the brisk elegance of the victor, who acts as if he's double parked and in a hurry and just has a moment or two to spare to lay out this fool. He doesn't even break stride before delivering the bout's first and only meaningful blow, a crushing forearm shot. Having just KO'd the big talker, he should spin on his heel, stalk back to his car, and depart, like some tutelary deity of street protocol making an instructional visit to Midgard. But he ruins a moment of gemlike concision by staying to rain follow-up blows on his helpless antagonist. They don't do as much damage as the first one, but they're a lot harder to watch.
These two louts don't exactly pick a fight, since they don't do any actual fighting, but they ask for the spanking they get. With an accomplice manning the camera, they appear to have picked the wrong victim for a "happy slapping" attack. Depending on whom you ask, happy slapping is either the fad practice of smacking strangers for fun that swept Great Britain and Europe a few years back, or it's a scare label applied by a nervous press to a few random incidents. (Either way, given the American tendencies toward violent touchiness and carrying concealed firearms, you can see why it didn't really catch on over here.) One of the pair contrives to bunt a passing woman in the face, and her escort punishes them with a whirlwind series of combination punches. Some of the blows don't land, but his form is always good, and some definitely do. Note the lovely around-the-shoulder-from-behind shot with which he catches the slapper, who has turned away in an occluded attempt to flee his wrath.
These guys likewise commit the double error of messing with the wrong opponent and being unready for a fast start. As a general rule, if you pick a fight with someone who immediately assumes a relaxed but erect shuffle-stepping stance with his hands up and his chin tucked and a blandly businesslike expression on his face, you have probably just answered the question of the day wrong, even if you have him outnumbered.
2) If people are standing around smiling mysteriously and pointing cell phones at you for no apparent reason, you should get ready to duck.
This is an increasingly important rule of adolescent life in the 21st century because the era of wall-to-wall video has given new aesthetic vigor to the traditional mean-spirited sucker punch out of the blue. Here is a case in point. Here's another kind of after-school sucker punch. Let's pause to savor the reaction of the kid who was losing the fight and who suddenly turns into the winner when an ally intervenes. Having perhaps studied moral philosophy at the feet of Quentin Tarantino, he unhesitatingly switches on the instant from cringing submission to lording it over his fallen foe, as if he himself—and not his icy confederate, who may well go on to a distinguished career as an attorney or Capitol Hill staffer—had turned the tables with a brilliant maneuver.
3) There's a thin line between doofus and genius, and people often fight with one foot planted on each side of it.
Take, for example, this 81-second masterpiece. Listen to the crowd's response when the guy in the red shirt assumes his stance. It's as if they're exclaiming "Doofus!" and "Genius!" at the same time. Is Red Shirt a clown? Is he actually good at martial arts? Is he scared stiff and trying to bluff his opponent, or deeply serene and about to wipe the floor with him? The doofus/genius effect persists throughout the fight, which you have to watch to the very last second in order to appreciate its full import. On the one hand, Red Shirt displays competence: He keeps his feet from getting tangled up, stays focused on his foe but also checks for blindside attacks by additional opponents, remains relatively calm when warding off blows, and delivers a decisive shot. On the other hand, his performance takes on a certain awkward quality when the initial You Just Made a Big Mistake moment gives way to an extended sitzkreig that goes on so long the video-maker had to edit some of it out. When he does finally land the big blow, it looks more like a prayerful haymaker than an expert application of the Vibrating Fist of Death.
4) Street fights inspire commentary that's worth attending to.
Not that such commentary is unfailingly eloquent or surprising, of course. Usually, it's not. Combatants, onlookers, and especially the online viewers who post comments from a safe distance frequently repeat the same old hateful tribal hoots and grunts. Scan the online postings accompanying street fight videos, and you'll see a lot of "that ghetto bitch got a asswoopin HA HA HA LOL," "little white boy try to be bad gets owned," or the superheated Kurd vs. Turk rhetoric attending the three-on-one fight above.
But even at its most stupid or pathetic, the commentary can be bizarrely honest. For instance, noncombatants do not hesitate to stake an osmotic claim, no matter how unlikely, to a share of combatants' presumed manliness. Check out the post-fight repartee of the entourage of Kimbo Slice, a prolific online bare-knuckle pugilist. Once Kimbo has triumphed (having let his terrified opponent punch him in the face and then dropped him with a cogent bob-and-counter move), the members of his crew turn to the camera to proclaim their intimacy with the big man's power. They're oxpeckers perched on his broad back, and they want you to know that they've been nibbling vermin off him a long time, dawg, a long time.
Also, the atmosphere of violence emboldens people who want to be regarded as cool to come out and say so in plain language. I'm hideously fascinated by the sheer dumb enormity of this infamous sucker-puncher's belief that landing one of the most cowardly cheap shots in the archive confirms him as a man among men. He actually says, "I'm so cool"—and adds, somewhat anticlimactically, "I'm not the average motherfucker." As for his victim, what's more touching, his abject version of a prefight chest-puffing routine or his supine post-coldcock attempt to initiate what he hopes will play as a bygones-dismissing handshake between two proud warriors?
Street fights inspire astonishingly literal-minded dialogue because they are astonishing. "Damn, he just hit you," a voice from the crowd will say as the opponents tear into each other. "He just hit you again. He's beating your ass!" To whom is this commentary directed? Who benefits from it? Not the fighters. They already know who hit whom. Not others in the crowd. They're standing right there watching it for themselves. No, the commentator is just giving expression to the most visceral reaction of all to a fight—disbelief that it's really happening. Maybe that's what onlookers mean when they shout, like mynah birds, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" They can't get over the naked fact of it.

Carlo Rotella, Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (SLATE)
Nevermind those little alien guys—how about that suburban malaise!By Keith PhippsPosted Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2007, at 7:39 AM ET
Steven Spielberg became a household name with tales of action, adventure, and, beginning with Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, visitors from other worlds. It's a subject he would return to again and again, and one he approached with the zeal of a true believer. Prior to making his 1977 follow-up to the breakthrough hit Jaws, the young director had spent years clipping mentions of UFO sightings from newspapers, talking to ex-military men who believed in a cover-up, and befriending experts like J. Allen Hynek, whose scale of UFO encounter types gives the film its title. But take a closer look at Close Encounters, particularly if you haven't seen the movie in a while, and you realize the movie has a rather un-Spielbergian subtext. The protagonist, a young suburban dad penned in by the responsibilities of fatherhood, leaps at the first chance to leave those responsibilities behind. Given the opportunity, in the movie's final scene, to board the aliens' mother ship and fly away, he doesn't spare a thought for the wife and kids he's leaving behind. The stars await.
This from the director who has been ratifying the importance of family for a quarter-century now, in movies as diverse in their subject matter and genres as E.T., The Color Purple, Hook, Empire of the Sun, and Minority Report. Spielberg himself acknowledges that Close Encounters is a different kind of movie. "I would never have made Close Encounters the way I made it in '77, because I have a family that I would never leave," he said in a 1997 making-of documentary. "That was just the privilege of youth." But though he's twice re-edited the movie—in 1980 and again in 1997—each time casting a more skeptical eye on Neary's abandonment of his family, the act of abandonment still stands out. It's a glimpse of a different Steven Spielberg than the one we've come to know.
All three versions of Close Encounters are included on the new three-disc "30th Anniversary Ultimate Edition DVD," and in all three our protagonist is Roy Neary, a Muncie, Ind., electric company lineman played by Richard Dreyfuss (the actor Spielberg has often referred to as his onscreen surrogate). Roy becomes obsessed with aliens after seeing a UFO firsthand. Dispatched to investigate some strange outages, he gets lost along an Indiana back road and buzzed by a small, colorful alien ship. After returning home, Roy is able to focus on nothing else. He begins collecting newspaper clippings and turning every pliable substance he can find into a shape he'll later discover is Wyoming's Devil's Tower. When he eventually raids a neighbor's yard for chicken wire so he can build a living-room-sized sculpture of that landmark, Roy's wife, Ronnie (Teri Garr), packs their three children into the family station wagon and leaves both husband and film behind.
In the version seen in theaters in 1977, Roy's obsession takes hold of him like a fever. Returning from his first sighting with only his burned face as evidence, he whisks his family off to share what he's seen. But the aliens have disappeared, his family is incredulous (even the kids), and Roy is forced to choose between his growing obsession and his family responsibilities. It's not presented as much of a choice. In the 1977 version, we never get a chance to know him, or his family, before he's called away to check on those outages.
Save for this short scene and a few others of Roy at work, the movie shows us only Roy's post-UFO life. The 1977 version, however, wasn't exactly the one Spielberg wanted to make. He'd been rushed to finish by a cash-strapped Columbia in need of a hit for the holiday season. He began work on a new cut, and 1980 saw the theatrical release of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind: Special Edition, a re-edit made years before director's cuts become common practice.
The bulk of the new and previously excised material fleshes out Roy's maddening home life, including a considerably longer introduction to the Neary family. We see suburban Muncie as a sprawl of carefully arranged, nearly identical houses stretched out beneath a starry sky. But within those tidy houses, Spielberg finds chaos. Clutter piles on top of clutter in a family room that can barely contain its family. Conversations overlap but fail to drown out the television's blare. And at the center of it all is a man already half-mad from all the commotion, unable to focus on his toy trains and stuck with a family unable to appreciate the whimsy of Pinocchio.
Instead of a man perhaps taken from his family by forces outside his control, we see a man with his foot halfway out the door. If the kids can't appreciate Pinocchio, how are they going to understand what Roy's seen? Other additions include a harrowing scene of Roy, tortured by his need to sculpt Devil's Tower, breaking down and showering while fully clothed. Ronnie makes an apparently sincere offer for the family to seek therapy together, but as the kids start screaming, she lets accusations of selfishness and neglect fly.
The scene hews closer in tone to John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence than It Came From Outer Space. Garr plays Ronnie as a bit of a harridan, but who would react well if their spouse suddenly began following lights in the sky? And what did the kids do to deserve any of this?
The more context Spielberg provides for Roy's decision to leave his family, the less sympathetic that decision becomes. It's a flesh-and-blood family Roy abandons when he boards the mother ship. It's no wonder that when, in this version, we actually see inside that ship—a concession Spielberg had to make to get Columbia to let him tinker elsewhere—we find Roy standing by himself, alone, at last, with his bottomless capacity for wonder. Revisiting Close Encounters yet again in the 1990s, Spielberg removed the scene inside the mother ship but kept every frame of the scenes depicting the Nearys' domestic turmoil, and restored a few moments trimmed in 1980.
Spielberg has racked up a remarkably diverse filmography since Close Encounters, but in film after film he has circled back to the primacy of family, as if to apologize for Roy's departure. As early as E.T., released in 1982, Spielberg was reversing elements of Close Encounters. Elliott, the young protagonist of E.T., and his family take in an alien stranded in their suburban neighborhood. (They don't have to go searching for the wonders of the cosmos; the wonders of the cosmos come crashing down in their back yard.) And unlike Roy, they're restored, not undone, by this discovery. In fact, it's the elements of Elliott's middle-American life that allow him to befriend the alien—their trust formed with Reese's Pieces, their communication fostered by Sesame Street—and eventually rebuild his family.
His 2005 remake of War of the Worlds suggests an even more explicit reversal of Close Encounters. Here, instead of benevolent aliens whisking a man away from his bummer of a family, malevolent aliens threaten a family already destabilized by divorce. By film's end, they've learned that the only safety and comfort they'll ever know will come from one another, far away from twinkling stars, flashing lights, and the promise of other worlds.
The seeds of what would become the more signature Spielberg story line are present in Close Encounters. A subplot tells the story of a single mother (played by Melinda Dillon) desperately searching for a son abducted by the aliens. Mother and son end the film in each other's arms after the aliens release him and a few dozen other apparently unharmed abductees. But it's Roy's story that dominates the movie. And while the changes Spielberg has made to the film over the years have invited viewers to feel ambivalent about Roy's departure, Spielberg has never gone so far as his friend George Lucas (who softened Han Solo's nastiness by making Greedo shoot first). Roy still gets on the ship, fulfilling the fantasy of everyone who's ever wanted to leave everything and everyone behind, even if it's a fantasy his creator no longer shares.

Keith Phipps writes about movies for The A.V. Club, the entertainment section of the Onion.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Comcast sued over Web interference
By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology

A San Francisco Bay area subscriber to Comcast Corp.'s high-speed Internet service has sued the company, alleging it engages in unfair business practices by interfering with subscribers' file sharing.
Subscriber Jon Hart based his claims on the results of an investigation by the Associated Press published last month that showed Philadelphia-based Comcast actively interferes with attempts some high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online.
Hart's lead lawyer, Mark N. Todzo of San Francisco, said his client suspected before reading the AP report that Comcast was interfering with his Internet traffic.
"What the AP report did was just confirm to him that it wasn't just him who was suffering from the problem," Todzo said. "There was this confluence of events where everyone seemed to reach the same conclusion, which was that Comcast was engaging in this activity."
Other users claimed they had seen interference with some file-sharing applications. Subsequent tests by the Electronic Frontier Foundation confirmed the AP's tests, which showed that Comcast is causing software on both ends of a file-sharing link to believe the connection has been dropped.
A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars formally asked the Federal Communications Commission early this month to make Comcast stop interfering with file sharing. Two of the groups also asked the FCC to fine Comcast $195,000 for every affected subscriber.
Comcast is the country's largest cable company and second-largest Internet service provider with 12.9 million Internet subscribers.
The company denies it blocks file sharing. But it acknowledged after the AP report was published that it delays some of the traffic between computers that share files.
Comcast said the delays are designed to improve the Internet experience for its subscribers as a whole. A relatively small number of file sharers is enough to slow down a network.
Hart's lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Alameda County Superior Court, alleges Comcast misleads customers by promising "mind-blowing" speeds and "unfettered access" to the Internet in advertisements while hindering the use of certain applications such as peer-to-peer file sharing. It seeks unspecified money damages.
Todzo is seeking class action status for the lawsuit.
Comcast and its subsidiaries "intentionally and severely impede the use of certain Internet applications by their customers, slowing such applications to a mere crawl or stopping them altogether," the lawsuit reads. "This class action seeks to end (Comcast's) practice and seeks recovery of fees paid by customers who paid for services they did not receive."
A Comcast spokesman reached late Wednesday said the company hadn't been served with the lawsuit yet and could not comment.
Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press.

A genuine servant of compassion!

Rev. Chad Varah, Anglican Priest Who Helped the Suicidal, Dies at 95
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
The Rev. Chad Varah, an outspoken, publicity-sly, sometimes cantankerous Anglican priest who started a telephone hot line for the suicidal after concluding that loneliness is the most heart-rending anguish, died Thursday in Basingstoke, England. He was 95.
His death was announced by Samaritans, the suicide-prevention charity he founded.
From his initial rush to the aid of a despairing mother in November 1953, Father Varah’s mission to give hope to the perhaps fatally depressed grew to 200 branches in Britain and Ireland and 200 more in 38 other countries. It became a model for crisis hot lines.
Father Varah’s vision began in 1935, when, as a 23-year-old deacon, he brooded bitterly after the first burial service he conducted for a girl, who, by varying accounts, was 13 or 14. She had killed herself because she wrongly feared that the onset of menstruation meant she had a venereal disease.
“Here was a life that could have been saved if only there had been an intelligent person she could bring herself to talk to,” he said in an interview with Church Illustrated magazine in 1959.
As he moved from parish to parish, Father Varah found that many people he helped with sexual problems, his emerging interest, were suicidal. He learned that in the London area, an average of three people killed themselves each day. He began to dream of an emergency telephone line where those in despair might “get some love from a stranger.”
The opportunity came in 1953, when he became the rector of St. Stephen Walbrook, a church in London built by Christopher Wren. The church is just behind the Mansion House, where the lord mayor, the church’s only parishioner, lives. That meant that Father Varah could largely devote himself to what he called “the parish of despair.”
As Father Varah told the story, he was digging through the church’s rubble-choked vestry when he found a telephone that had survived bombing by the Germans and still worked. He called to ask for a new number, suggesting “Mansion House 9000.” It turned out that that was already the number.
“I took it as a sign that God wanted me to go ahead,” he told Church Illustrated for an article that was condensed in The Reader’s Digest in 1960.
The first call to the number came from a woman who, with her four children by three fathers, was about to be evicted. As reported by The Independent in 1992, Father Varah left his post, something he later never allowed. He found the woman with two of her children in a hotel room.
He placed one child with his wife and rushed around London in a taxi scrambling to find someone to take the baby. Eventually, the taxi driver and his wife did.
There was one more call that day, but soon they were coming in at the rate of 100 a day. Clients ranged from paupers to millionaires, teenagers to octogenarians, and people in all manner of occupations and professions.
Samaritans got its name from a headline in The Daily Mirror. The reference to the biblical story did not please Father Varah, who was adamant that all religious teaching should be avoided when helping the desperate. Nor could the police be informed of anything that clients discussed confidentially.
Edward Chad Varah was born on Nov. 12, 1911, at Barton upon Humber, Lincolnshire, England, the eldest of nine children of Canon William Edward Varah, vicar of St. Chad’s Church there. He graduated from Oxford with a degree in politics, philosophy and economics, then from Lincoln Theological College. He served in a string of parishes before St. Stephen.
Father Varah added to his income by writing scripts for comic strips and became known for the liberality of his views on sex. He refused to condemn adultery in all cases, promoted abortion and gay rights, and served on the board of a sexually frank magazine. He said he was called “a dirty old man by the time he was 25,” and, years later, “Britain’s oldest sex therapist.”
When he was summoned as a witness in the obscenity trial of Linda Lovelace, the star of “Deep Throat,” a famous pornographic movie, he was asked about the Seventh Commandment, on adultery. “Why are you quoting this ancient desert lore at me?” The Times of London said he answered.
Almost from the beginning, Father Varah fought with others in Samaritans. He left the organization in its second year, but served as director of its London branch. He became very active in the international efforts of the organization, which, after several permutations, is now called Befrienders Worldwide.
Father Varah’s wife, the former Doris Susan Whanslaw, died in 1993. She was president of the Mothers’ Union, the Anglican Church’s principal women’s organization. He is survived by their daughter and three of their four sons.
In 1963, Father Varah conducted the funeral service of Diana Churchill, Winston Churchill’s daughter. She had worked as a volunteer for Samaritans before she committed suicide herself. In 1994, he officiated at the marriage of Lady Sarah Chatto, the only daughter of Princess Margaret. Until he retired in 2003 at 92, Father Varah commuted by public transportation.
His penchant for incendiary statements was evident in 1993, when in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph he castigated Pope John Paul II for his opposition to contraception. “It was a great mistake to make an ignorant Polish peasant into a pope,” he said.
Father Varah, who was said to be able to recite every poem he had ever heard, was more curious than concerned about death, because of his belief in reincarnation. His favorite three words of advice were intended to provide a sense of proportion: “It doesn’t matter.”

Astronomers find system with five planets
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
NASA scientists said they discovered a fifth planet orbiting a star outside our own solar system and say the discovery suggests there are many solar systems that are, just like our own, packed with planets.
The new planet is much bigger than Earth, but is a similar distance away from its sun, a star known as 55 Cancri, the astronomers said on Tuesday.
Four planets had already been seen around the star, but the discovery marks the first time as many as five planets have been found orbiting a solar system outside our own with its eight planets, said Debra Fischer, an astronomer at San Francisco State University.
Life could conceivably live on the surface of a moon that might be orbiting the new planet, but such a moon would be far too small to detect using current methods, the astronomers said.
"The star is very much like our own sun. It has about the same mass and is about the same age as our sun," Fischer told reporters.
"It's a system that appears to be packed with planets."
It took the researchers 18 years of careful, painstaking study to find the five planets, which they found by measuring tiny wobbles in the star's orbit. The first planet discovered took 14 years to make one orbit.
They said 55 Cancri is 41 light-years away in the constellation Cancer, a light-year being the distance light travels in one year -- about 5.8 trillion miles.
The newly discovered planet has a mass about 45 times that of Earth and may resemble Saturn, the astronomers said.
HARBORING LIFE?
It is the fourth planet out from the star and completes one orbit every 260 days -- a similar orbit to that of Venus.
"It would be a little bit warmer than the Earth but not very much," said Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona.
The planet is 72 million miles from its star -- closer than the Earth's 93 million miles, but the star is a little cooler than our own sun.
"If there were a moon around this new planet ... it would have a rocky surface, so water on it in principle could puddle into lakes and oceans," said Geoff Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley.
But the moon would have to carry a lot of mass to hold the water, he said. Water is, of course, key to life.
"This discovery of the first-ever quintuple planetary system has me jumping out of my socks," Marcy added. "We now know that our sun and its family of planets is not unusual."
Marcy and other astronomers strongly believe that many stars are hosts to solar systems similar to our own. But small objects such as planets are very hard to detect.
Technology that would allow scientists to detect planets as small as Earth is decades away, the scientists agreed.
The researchers have been looking at 2,000 nearby stars using the Lick Observatory near San Jose, California, and the W.M. Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
They have posted images of what the planets may look like on the Internet at http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/telecon-20071106/.
The inner four planets of 55 Cancri are all closer to the star than Earth is to the sun. The closest, about the mass of Uranus, zips around the star in just under three days at a distance of 3.5 million miles.
(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Defense Offers New Evidence in a Murder Case That Shocked Arkansas
By SHAILA DEWAN NY TIMES
ATLANTA, Oct. 29 — In 1994, three teenagers in the small city of West Memphis, Ark., were convicted of killing three 8-year-old boys in what prosecutors portrayed as a satanic sacrifice involving sexual abuse and genital mutilation. So shocking were the crimes that when the teenagers were led from the courthouse after their arrest, they were met by 200 local residents yelling, “Burn in hell.”
But according to long-awaited new evidence filed by the defense in federal court on Monday, there was no DNA from the three defendants found at the scene, the mutilation was actually the work of animals and at least one person other than the defendants may have been present at the crime scene.
Supporters of the defendants hope the legal filing will provide the defense with a breakthrough. Two of the men, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, are serving life in prison, while one, Damien W. Echols, is on death row. There was no physical evidence linking the teenagers, now known as the West Memphis 3, to the crime.
“This is the first time that the evidence has ever really been tested,” said Gerald Skahan, a member of the defense team. “The first trial was pretty much a witch hunt.”
Brent Davis, the local prosecutor, did not respond to requests for comment about the new evidence and the case, but in general prosecutors and investigators have continued to express confidence in their investigation.
The story the defendants’ supporters have presented — of three misfits whose fondness for heavy-metal music made them police targets — has won the men the support of celebrities like Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Marilyn Manson and the creators of “South Park.” Many learned of the case through an HBO documentary, “Paradise Lost,” and a sequel.
The prosecution hinged on a confession riddled with factual errors and a Satanic cult expert with a mail-order degree. Mr. Echols’s own lawyer called him “weird” and “not the all-American boy.”
Many viewers who watched the sequel, in fact, concluded that the police should have been investigating John Mark Byers, the stepfather of one of the children, who made seemingly drug-addled, messianic speeches on camera, gave the filmmakers a blood-stained knife, and had a history of violence and run-ins with the police. His child, Christopher Byers, was the most badly mutilated of the three.
But there was a surprise in the new forensic report filed by Mr. Echols’s lawyers: a hair found in one of the knots binding the children belonged most likely to the stepfather of another of the victims, not to Mr. Byers.
The three victims — Christopher, Steve Branch and James Michael Moore — were last seen riding their bikes on May 5, 1993. They were found the next day in a drainage ditch in Robin Hood Hills, near West Memphis, a low-rent town across the Mississippi River from Memphis. The boys were naked and hogtied with shoelaces.
The police quickly zeroed in on Mr. Echols, then 18, who was familiar to them because he was on probation for trying to run away with his girlfriend. They also believed he was involved in cult activities.
But they could find little evidence against him until Mr. Misskelley, mildly retarded and with a history of substance abuse, came in to speak with them. At the time there was a $30,000 reward.
After hours of questioning, Mr. Misskelley, 17, gave the police a taped statement that implicated himself, Mr. Baldwin, then 16, and Mr. Echols, then 19. Despite coaching by the investigators, Mr. Misskelley was incorrect in several significant details, including the time of the crime, the way the victims were tied and the manner of death. He said the children had been sodomized, an assertion that even the state medical examiner’s testimony appears to refute.
The team of forensic experts assembled by Mr. Echols’s lawyers, which included Dr. Michael Baden, the former medical examiner of New York City, also said there was no evidence of sexual abuse. Many of the wounds sustained by the victims were caused by animals, they said, including the castration of Christopher.
As for the stray hair, the West Memphis Police Department and the stepfather it appears to belong to, Terry Hobbs, have discounted the finding, saying it could easily have been picked up at home by his stepson, Steve Branch. But Dennis P. Riordan, a lawyer for Mr. Echols, said the hair was found in the shoelaces tying Michael Moore, not Steve Branch.
Further, Mr. Riordan said, a hair was found at the scene that most likely belongs to a friend of Mr. Hobbs who was with him for part of the evening.
The court filing also argues that jurors relied on the statement Mr. Misskelley gave the police to convict Mr. Echols and Mr. Baldwin, even though it was deemed inadmissible except in Mr. Misskelley’s trial. Several jurors have acknowledged that they knew about the confession before the trial, though they did not say so during jury selection.
The passing of time has not only allowed the defense to gather new information, but has also softened the public’s belief in the guilt of the convicted men, said Mara Leveritt, the author of “Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three.”
“What I’ve seen in the past 14 years has been not quite a 180-degree, but maybe a 170-degree turn,” Ms. Leveritt said. “It all comes down to, ‘Where’s the evidence?’”

Apple Blasts Past the Forecasts
The iPod, iPhone, and especially the Mac fueled a record-breaking quarter. And Apple expects to beat the consensus again next quarter
by Arik Hesseldahl ( BUSINESS WEEK)
Superlatives were in short supply for anyone looking for perspective on Apple's financial results released Oct. 22. The consumer electronics company shattered records in its fiscal fourth quarter, and its forecast for the current period blew past Wall Street's most optimistic predictions. One of the only questions left for analysts in the aftermath concerns what Apple will do for an encore.
For the most recent quarter, Apple (AAPL) reported $6.2 billion in sales, a fourth-quarter record, and finished the fiscal year with sales of $24 billion, beating by $4.5 billion its previous best for annual sales. Apple also reported profit of $904 million, or $1.01 a share. In extended trading, investors propelled the stock $11.99, or 6.9%. That left Apple's share price north of $186 and brought it within spitting distance of the $200 price target set by many analysts.
Then Apple executives let loose with an even bigger surprise: Rather than give conservative guidance for this quarter—the period that includes the all-important holiday season—they reported expectations that were well ahead of the Wall Street consensus. Apple forecast fiscal first-quarter sales of $9.2 billion, compared with analysts' forecasts for sales of $8.58 billion. Apple also said it expects per-share earnings of $1.42—3¢ higher than the consensus analyst estimate.
On a conference call, analysts repeatedly probed Apple Chief Operating Officer Timothy Cook and Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer about what it meant, and despite all the good news, some were left scratching their heads at the stick-to-the-script answers they received. "I can't remember the last time they guided above the consensus," says Shaw Wu, an analyst at American Technology Research in San Francisco. "Are they being aggressive or is this another conservative forecast?" Shannon Cross of Cross Research wondered whether "they're just getting better at predicting their numbers or what, but they're certainly setting the stage for an extremely strong quarter."
The Mac Leads the Way
The quarter just ended was notable for many other things: Mac sales were in record territory. Driven by yet another record-breaking performance in higher-education sales, Apple moved nearly 2.2 million Macintosh computers to generate $3.1 billion, or almost 50% of the quarterly total. Mac sales were up by more than a half-million units from a year earlier. For the year, Apple sold more than 7 million Macs, a surge of more than 3 million units over 2006. "To me this quarter was more about the Mac than anything else," including the iPhone, introduced on the eve of the fourth period, says Charles Wolf, head of Wolf Insights in New York. He said Mac sales are benefiting from rising interest in the iPod and Apple's decision to make it easier for Macs to run Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows operating system. "Forget the phone," he says. "The iPod is still providing the halo for the Mac, and the retail stores are still bringing in 100 million people a year—60 to 70 million of which are Windows users. Now that Macs can run Windows, the biggest barrier to switching is gone."
Sales of the iPod didn't break a record, for once, but came in at 10.2 million units—up 17% from a year earlier, for $1.6 billion in sales, or 26% of revenue. And the gadget no one can seem to stop talking about—the iPhone—did its part for Apple's results as well. Apple sold 1,119,000 iPhones during the quarter, bringing its cumulative total to 1.4 million units sold in 92 days on the market.
Apple also broke records through its retail stores, selling 473,000 Macs, a 46% increase. With 197 stores operating during the quarter, Apple said it expects to open 40 more this year, including one in Shanghai.
What to Do With All That Cash?
Even record-shattering quarters can leave questions unanswered for investors. Apple is finishing the year with more than $15 billion in cash and short-term investments, or more than $17 per share. That's going to cause some to wonder whether Apple ought to pay a dividend or buy back more stock. And the high share price may spark rumors of a split. "Sure, the pressure is going to continue to build for a dividend, but then, management has been taking money out and investing it in the business," Cross says.
That pile of cash will also make for a powerful hedge against supply constraints on the crucial components used in devices including the iPod, says AmTech's Wu. With flash-memory chips used so widely in iPods and the iPhone family and the likelihood that they'll soon be in mainstream personal computers, Apple could use its cash pile, as it has in the past, to negotiate supply contracts with companies like Samsung, Hynix, Micron Technology (MU), Toshiba, and others. "We don't exactly know what their next big component need is going to be," he says. "I think that's one reason they keep so much cash on hand. But it's also a very fiscally conservative company. Management remembers the bad times, when there wasn't enough cash around."
Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com .

Joey Bishop
OBIT By John Rodgers
LOS ANGELES — The Rat Pack once was the coolest group of entertainers on the planet _ Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr. Oh, yeah, and a stone-faced comedian named Joey Bishop.
Although not as widely appreciated, it was Bishop with his deadpan delivery, dead-on timing and bottomless pit of jokes, who was "the hub of the big wheel," according to Rat Pack leader Sinatra himself.
Bishop, who also starred on two TV shows throughout most of the 1960s, died Wednesday at age 89. He turned out to be the Rat Pack's last man standing, having outlived Sinatra, Martin, Davis and Lawford.
"People would go see Frank and Dean and Sammy and everybody would think these guys were going to chew him up on stage but that was never the case," fellow comedian Sandy Hackett said Thursday from Las Vegas, where he was to portray Bishop that night in the long-running stage revue "The Rat Pack is Back."
The Rat Packers were a show business sensation by the early 1960s, when they appeared together at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in shows that combined music and comedy in a seemingly chaotic manner.
"In reality, he wrote almost all the jokes they all did," Hackett said. "He'd come up with something funny and they'd go, `That was great, Joey,' and then the next night one of them would use it and he'd have to come up with another joke."
With his clever asides, Bishop was asked by Sinatra to be the master of ceremonies at President Kennedy's inaugural gala, where the Rat Pack performed. When the president arrived, he turned to him and said, "I told you I'd get you a good seat."
The Rat Packers, who worked together whenever they were free of their individual commitments, also appeared in the films "Ocean's Eleven" and "Sergeants 3."
"They were the ultimate in cool," said film historian Leonard Maltin. "I think guys admired and envied them, women wanted to be with them, and I think Joey Bishop's deadpan style of comedy suited that group well. He was a combination straight man and comedian."
Recent years have brought renewed attention to the Rat Pack. The group was depicted in a popular 1998 HBO movie and "Ocean's Eleven" was remade in 2003 with George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the lead roles.
Before the renaissance, Bishop defended his fellow performers' rowdy reputations in a 1998 interview.
"Are we remembered as being drunk and chasing broads?" he asked. "I never saw Frank, Dean, Sammy or Peter drunk during performances. That was only a gag. And do you believe these guys had to chase broads? They had to chase 'em away."
Away from the Rat Pack, Bishop starred in two TV programs, both called "The Joey Bishop Show."
In the first, a sitcom that aired from 1961 to 1965, he played a TV talk show host. In the second, he really was one.
The latter program, which aired on ABC, was started in 1967 as a late-night challenge to Johnny Carson's immensely popular "Tonight" show. Like Carson, Bishop sat behind a desk and bantered with a sidekick-announcer, a young Regis Philbin in his first prominent TV role.
"It was the thrill of my life to be chosen by Joey as the announcer," Philbin said Thursday. "It was my introduction to the highly competitive late-night show world. It was also an introduction to a show business I had never known, the Rat Pack era, the amazing talents of those performers who I probably never would have befriended without Joey."
The show was canceled after 2 1/2 years, and Bishop went on to become a popular substitute host for Carson, filling in 205 times.
He also played character roles in such movies as "The Naked and the Dead" ("I played both roles," he once joked), "Onion-head," "Johnny Cool," "Texas Across the River," "Who's Minding the Mint?" "Valley of the Dolls" and "The Delta Force."
His comedic schooling came from vaudeville, burlesque and night clubs.
While in his teens, he formed a music and comedy act with two other boys. They called themselves the Bishop Brothers.
When his partners got drafted, Joseph Abraham Gottlieb, now known as Joey Bishop, went to work on his own. He was appearing in New York's Latin Quarter in 1945 when Sinatra saw him and hired him as his opening act.
While most members of the Sinatra entourage treated the great man gingerly, Bishop had no inhibitions.
"He spoke to me backstage," he would say. "He told me 'Get out of the way.'"
Born in New York's borough of the Bronx, Bishop was the youngest of five children of two immigrants from eastern Europe.
When he was 3 months old the family moved to South Philadelphia, where he attended public schools before dropping out shortly before graduation. He recalled being an indifferent student, once remarking, "In kindergarten, I flunked sand pile."
Bishop is survived by son Larry Bishop; grandchildren Scott and Kirk Bishop; and longtime companion Nora Garabotti. Sylvia, his wife of 58 years, died in 1999.
___
Associated Press writer Bob Thomas contributed to this report.

Thompson makes it through his first debate.

By John Dickerson (SLATE)
If Fred Thompson is lazy, he sure didn't act it preparing for his first debate. Over two weeks, the former Tennessee senator and his aides held more than half a dozen question-and-answer sessions. Bush's first economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, was involved, as were Vice President Cheney's daughter Liz Cheney and GOP veteran Mary Matalin. There were also two full-blown rehearsals in which Liz Cheney's husband played John McCain, Rep. Adam Putnam stood in for Mitt Romney, and former New York Sen. Al D'Amato played Rudy Giuliani. To add verisimilitude to his character, D'Amato pretended to take a phone call in the middle of one session.
The preparation paid off. Thompson didn't win the night—Rudy Giuliani did—but he got through gaffe-free and at times seemed informed and in command. He came off as genuinely unaffected instead of irritatingly folksy. This may seem like a limited achievement, and it was, but Thompson has had such tough going recently that even a limited success is a win for him. Nervous staffers can now feel a little better about their boss, and disaffected GOP voters anxious to believe that Thompson is the candidate they've been looking for were given enough material to extend their dream.
The low expectations that Thompson cleared were a little phony. In retrospect, it shouldn't surprise us that an actor trained in memorizing short snippets of dialogue was able to perform in a setting where candidates are cut off if they speak in anything but short snippets of dialogue. But for those who watch debates like car races—only for the crashes—Thompson's first appearance had offered promise. He'd put together such a string of gaffes and lackluster performances on the campaign trail recently, it seemed possible he might slip and say something crazy like taxes should be raised or that the war in Iraq had been well managed.
During his first answer, Thompson ran into trouble when he paused to think, and it seemed like he might never return. The dead air was longer than some of his lines of movie dialogue. He got more comfortable over the two hours, though, and by the end of the debate, he was relaxed enough to answer the pop-quiz question about the prime minister of Canada, a piece of trivia that would have been devastating had he botched it.
Thompson offered plenty of the usual bromides, supporting free trade and tax cuts, but he showed that at least in some cases, he could think outside the party orthodoxy. As other Republican candidates strive to show how muscular they would be in office and continue Bush's policy of treating Congress like a nuisance, Thompson was more measured. He argued that if any president were to go to war again, he should seek Congress' permission to do so. He also offered specifics about how he'd solve the long-term solvency problems of Medicare and Social Security, which included hints of honesty about some of the choices that need to be made.
Just because Thompson did well for the evening doesn't mean he's cleared the hurdles that face his campaign. The recent gaffes weren't just some clever strategy to lower expectations. He's also created more work for himself by doing well. Romney and Giuliani had been carrying on a fight over the last few days over tax policy, largely ignoring Thompson—a spat they continued in a mildly heated exchange on stage. Though he's second to Romney in Iowa polls and threatening Giuliani's lead in South Carolina and Florida, both of Thompson's rivals assumed he would fall from his own stumbles. After the first debate, they can't do that any more

For The Thrill of it All!
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian man accused of murdering 49 people asked a court on Tuesday to add another eleven victims to his tally, and told a jury when he first strangled a man it was like falling in love for the first time.
Supermarket worker Alexander Pichushkin, 33, has been branded the 'chessboard murderer' by Russian newspapers because he hoped to put a coin on every square of a 64-place chessboard for each murder.
"A first killing is like your first love. You never forget it," he said from a cage in the courtroom, after explaining how he started killing at age 18 with the murder of a classmate.
Pichushkin said he had suggested to his classmate that they kill someone, but when his friend refused, "I sent him to heaven." He then smirked at the jury.
"The closer a person is to you, and the better you know them, the more pleasurable it is to kill them," he said.
"In all the cases I killed for only one reason. I killed in order to live, because when you kill, you want to live."
Often aggressive in court, Pichushkin gesticulated to show the jury how he strangled his victims and the marks his victims had left on his hands as they struggled.
Prosecutors have charged Pichushkin with 49 murders and three attempted murders, but he asked the court to take into account another 11 murders.
"I thought it would not be fair to forget about the other 11 people," Pichushkin told the court.
Prosecutors say he lured most of his victims to secluded parts of Moscow's Bitsevsky Park, where he plied them with vodka and then smashed their skulls with a hammer.
Other victims were strangled, drowned in a sewage pit or thrown off balconies. He said police interviewed him at the time of his first murder but let him go due to a lack of evidence.
"You should not credit the police with catching me. I gave myself up," he told the court.
If convicted, Pichushkin could be Russia's most prolific serial killer.
Andrei Chikatilo, the "Rostov Ripper", was convicted in 1992 and executed in 1994 for raping, butchering and in some cases eating as many as 52 people.
Pichushkin's trial is expected to be lengthy, with testimony scheduled from at least 41 relatives of the alleged victims and another 98 witnesses.