The Last Moonwalk
Michael Jackson's incredibly moving This Is It.

By Dana Stevens SLATE

The news in late summer about the plans to release This Is It (Sony Pictures), a movie documenting Michael Jackson's rehearsal process for the stage show he was preparing at the time of his death, didn't bode well. Given that the footage in question wasn't intended for a film but for Jackson's own archive, it seemed inevitable that the result would be an exploitative, thrown-together mishmash, a random bunch of murky home-video snippets padded out with sentimental talking-head interviews and montages of too-often-seen bits of old MTV videos and tabloid news headlines.
Cut to me in a screening room in late October, weeping my way through a stripped-down performance of "

Human Nature" that brings out a whole new meaning in the song. (The song's incongruous last line, "I like living this way," suddenly seems like an apologia for Jackson's baffling personal life.) Or, a few scenes later, marveling at the bizarre gestural Kabuki he brings to a showstopping duet version of "I Can't Stop Loving You." This Is It is one of the best documents of live performance that I've ever seen, a rehearsal diary that's more intimate and immediate than a traditional concert film. And more than any sitdown interview with the notoriously opaque and evasive Jackson, it gives you a sense of what he was like: a man inhabited so completely by his performing self that he's more at home moonwalking than walking down the street.
The most surprising thing about This Is It may be its purity of intent. The film, directed by the "billion-dollar maestro" Kenny Ortega (he was also the director of Jackson's stage show, as well as a long list of mega-spectacles including the opening ceremony of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics) makes no attempt to explore Jackson's offstage life, past or present—a brief montage of Jackson 5 clips during the song "I'll Be There" is the only nod toward biography. Instead, Ortega is interested in—obsessed by—showing us Jackson as a working artist.
Ortega methodically works his way through the concert, showing an unusual respect for the integrity of each song. (Even in good music documentaries, the tendency to cut away mid-song is endemic.) We see Jackson helping to cast dancers (out of 5,000 who auditioned, only 11 were chosen for the show), coaching his keyboardist on how to come in just behind the beat ("Like you're dragging yourself out of bed"), and encouraging a female guitarist to go all-out on a shredding solo: "This is your time to shine."
The portrait of Jackson that emerges is of a considerate and respectful collaborator, but also an iron-willed perfectionist who knew precisely what he wanted out of his crew and insisted on getting it. Tellingly, it's during a rehearsal of "I Want You Back," the Jackson 5 hit he may have sung more times than any other song in his life, that Jackson allows himself a moment of divadom, kvetching at length about the earpiece microphone that feels like "a fist inside [his] head." Jackson seems at home trotting out all the big hits from his own back catalog ("Billie Jean," "Beat It," "Thriller," and "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' " are all here), but watching this 50-year-old man return to the song he sang as a mass-marketed child prodigy, you have to wonder whether there's more going on inside his head than just pressure from an uncomfortable mic.
One thing is clear: If Jackson had lived to perform his planned 50-show run in London, his sold-out audiences would have gotten their money's worth. Though he's alarmingly thin, Jackson in no way looks or sounds like a washed-up, burned-out addict with a death wish. His voice, especially in the softer ballad songs, remains haunting (though he often resisted singing all-out in rehearsals in order to preserve his throat), and his dancing is mind-bendingly precise. In fact, Jackson's body moves with such otherworldly grace it's as if he's never not dancing. When he delivers a playfully spot-on imitation of the gesture of flight attendants everywhere ("Exits are located to the front and rear"), you realize what a student of bodily movement he really was: Whether from Mick Jagger, Bob Fosse, or a Delta Airlines stewardess, any move he liked was fodder to be incorporated into his signature style.
If, like me, you're a making-of geek who would rather watch rehearsal footage than the final polished performance, it's a thrill to see the stage of L.A.'s Staples Center (where Jackson and his crew were rehearsing before heading to London for their final dress rehearsals, and where his globally televised funeral would take place on July 7) scuffed and covered in tape marks. Dance, in particular, is a pleasure to watch in the process of being made. Witnessing dancers of this caliber stop in midexecution of some seemingly impossible move, only to repeat it again and again, makes what their bodies can do seem more, not less, amazing. "Dancers in a Michael Jackson show," Ortega lectures them at their first rehearsal, "are extensions of Michael Jackson." The show's choreography, by Jackson and his longtime collaborator Travis Payne, is rarely adventurous—there's lots of floor-humping, shoulder-twitching, and "Thriller"-style zombie arms—but the movement language Jackson created is so indelibly his that it's heartstopping to see it again for the last time.
As we watch Jackson working to perfect this final and never-finished show, we're keenly aware that he's performing for three audiences at once: the 20 or 30 fellow dancers, musicians, and crew members who were present at rehearsals; the imagined live audience for those London shows; and the worldwide audience that's watching this movie now. As members of that last group, we get just about everything that would have been available to the first two, except for the live presence of Michael Jackson. But as This Is It reminds us, that presence is irreplaceable.

Internet Turns 40 Today: First Message Crashed System
Ker Thanfor National Geographic News
Everyone surfing for last-minute Halloween costumes and pictures of black Lolcats today—what you might call the 40th anniversary of the Internet—can give thanks to the simple network message that started it all: "lo."On October 29, 1969, that message became the first ever to travel between two computers connected via the ARPANET, the computer network that would become the Internet. The truncated transmission traveled about 400 miles (643 kilometers) between the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Stanford Research Institute. (Watch video about the birth of the Internet.)The electronic dispatch was supposed to be the word "login," but only the first two letters were successfully sent before the system crashed.Still, that humble greeting marked the start of a phenomenon that has become such an important part of modern life that many experts argue access to it should be a right rather than a privilege.In fact, earlier this month Finland became the first country in the world to declare broadband Internet access a legal right for all of its 5.2 million citizens."I don't think it's quite on the level of food and water yet, but it's pretty close," said Jeffrey Cole, director of the Annenberg School for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California. Packet Technology and the Birth of the InternetCreated by the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, the original ARPANET was a network of just four computer terminals installed at universities and research institutions in California and Utah. Internet 40th Anniversary Video: Birth of the InternetWith its truncated missive 40 years ago today, ARPANET became the world's first operational packet-switching network."Packet-switching was the original transmission mechanism [for our network] in 1969 and is still the underlying technology of the Internet today," said Leonard Kleinrock, a UCLA computer engineer who was involved in ARPANET's creation.In a packet-switched connection, a message from one computer is broken down into chunks, or packets, of data and sent through multiple routes to another computer.Once all the packets arrive at their destination, they are pasted back together into the original message."It's as if a long letter were written on a series of small postcards, and each postcard was mailed separately," Kleinrock said.Packet-switching replaced a less efficient and less flexible transmission technology used by early telephone companies called circuit-switching, which relied on dedicated connections between two parties."When you and I talk over a circuit-switched connection, that connection is totally dedicated to our conversation," Kleinrock explained. "Even if we pause to take a coffee break, the connection is still ours and sits by idly while we are silent."By contrast, data packets in a packet-switched transmission have multiple routes open to them and will hop on to the one with the least amount of traffic. In this way, no route is idle for long.40 Years Later, No One Owns the InternetIn the years following ARPANET's deployment, other packet-switching networks were created, but they were internal networks that had only limited access to one other.It wasn't until the mid-1970s that engineers developed a way to merge networks to create the Internet.In 1984 the domain system that includes .com, .gov, and .edu was established. A decade after that, the first commercial web browser, Netscape, became available.Today the Internet is accessed by more than a billion users monthly. Several companies and organizations contribute to its upkeep and operation. But no one owns the Internet, since anyone with access to a computer can create Web content."If you put your PC out there and offer a news service or something … then you're considered a part of the Internet," Kleinrock said.Transformed World Marks Internet's 40th AnniversaryAlthough it's now hard to imagine life without Facebook, Google, and Wikipedia, the broad appeal of the Internet was something many of its inventors never predicted."I am surprised, and totally pleased, at how effective the Internet has been in allowing communities of people to form, communicate, exchange ideas, and enter their daily lives in so many ways," Kleinrock said.(Related: "Googling Fights Dementia, Study Suggests.")For the last decade, a team led by the University of Southern California's Cole has been tracking the effect of the Internet on societies around the world."When we started in 1999, it was already clear that the Internet was going to transform communications," Cole said."What we could never have imagined is that it would transform virtually every element of business and social activity."Cole predicts that in the future, more people will access the Internet through mobile devices such as the iPhone than via personal computers and laptops.Currently about four billion people around the world have mobile phones, but only about a billion people use PCs, Cole noted."We think the Internet is moving completely toward mobile."

Yoko Ono's life of love, war and Lennon
Have Beatles fans finally learnt to love Yoko Ono? She talks about building a tower of light for Lennon
Craig McLean Times of London
Yoko Ono was thinking ahead. That was the only way she could think. Like an art-shark — not one of this elaborate theoriser’s metaphors, but it could be — she has to move forward at all times. To think about the past would mean thinking about her upper-class, conservative upbringing and eventual disowning by a family with rarefied banking and imperial connections; about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose destruction happened when she was a 12-year-old in Japan; the firebombing of Tokyo by the Americans, which she actually lived through.
“I’m sure that’s part of me, of course,” the artist and musician says when asked if the horrors of the Second World War are reflected in her work. “The Holocaust? That is something I feel very close to and feel very badly about it, only because I was on the other end. I was experiencing not anything so terrible, but I witnessed a lot of things. It was terrible: there was the siren, and the American planes are coming over our heads, and we have to go down to the shelter and in the shelter all the kids are praying.” She clasps her hands together and mutters a quick, childish imprecation in Japanese. “And when that’s over we come out. Well,” she smiles, “another day. We lived another day. That’s the only reality we knew. In a way it wasn’t that horrible,” is her rather remarkable conclusion.
But in 1964, Ono was thinking ahead. After a stint as part of the Fluxus movement in New York, she was now an avant- garde artist working in London. She had drawn up a “sales list” — a catalogue of theoretical artworks she would like to make. One of these was entitled Light House — “a phantom house that is built by sheer light”. What was its purpose?
“I just thought it would be a cool idea! I was also into that idea of something that is not concrete and set in reality. Something that is between the reality and the conceptual; the physical and the metaphysical.”
Also on that list was a “wind house”, in which all of the rooms would make a different noise. Back then Ono had so many ideas that she didn’t know what to do with them — the technology hadn’t been invented — other than show them to friends. In 1967, for her show at the Lisson Gallery in London, she rewrote the Light House concept. That was the year she met John Lennon, and the Beatle invited her to lunch at his home in Weybridge, Surrey. He asked if she would build him a Light House for his garden. She replied: “Oh, that was conceptual. I’m convinced that one day it could be built, but I don’t know how to do it.”
“They were ideas you couldn’t create in one day,” Ono, now 76, reflects. “So it was better to just write it down.” Hence Grapefruit, “the book of instructions”, she says of her famous Sixties manual-cum-event. “In other words, I’m saying, ‘I can’t do it, I have this idea, please do it’.”
Another famous mid-Sixties work was No 4, aka Bottoms, a film that showed exactly what it said on the tin. Whose bums were they?
“Well, so many people,” Ono replies, laughing. “I don’t know if they’d want me to mention them! That was really the London Sixties bottoms.”
Famous Swinging Sixties bottoms?
“Yes! It was really like an incredible expression of energy.”
Is John Lennon’s bottom there?
“I don’t know,” she replies, giving a smile one feels obliged to describe as enigmatic.
Several years later, Ono would deploy nude body parts again, in an installation piece called My Mummy was Beautiful. It featured images of a breast and a vulva, and was made for the 2004 Liverpool Biennial. Did she expect the upset it caused?
“I was totally surprised! I said, ‘This is Liverpool, the birth of the Beatles and everything.’ Just a hip city, I thought. And I was dedicating it to John because John was so much into his mother, you know? And I thought people would love it. And I wanted to cover Liverpool with beauty. And they didn’t think it was beauty!”
Even when she tries to do right by the Beatles and their legacy, it seems that Ono will always be cast as the villain in some quarters. But it’s hard to square the antipathy of some cultural observers with the small, giggly, friendly woman sitting so close that our knees are almost touching. It is Friday, October 9, 2009 and we are in a Reykjavik hotel suite. This would have been John Lennon’s 69th birthday. It is also the birthday of Ono and Lennon’s son Sean, who turns 34.
Today — 42 years after Lennon first voiced his enthusiasm for Ono’s light tower — on the small island of Videy, just offshore from the Icelandic capital, the artwork will become reality. At 8pm, six mirrors and nine searchlights will be turned on, shooting a beam high into the sky. This is the Imagine Peace Tower. Inaugurated by Ono, Ringo Starr and Olivia Harrison (widow of George) in 2007, it will stay lit until December 8, the day of Lennon’s murder in New York in 1980.
Ono is dressed all in black; not widow’s weeds — the horizontal and vertical prominence of her frankly remarkable décolletage further belie that image — but the funky, utilitarian threads of the artist who still feels compelled to work, despite her years and the countless millions in the bank. Art work, peace work, memorial work: it’s what Ono does, and she can’t imagine life without it. Little wonder, perhaps, that in June she was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for Lifetime Achievement.
Musically, too, she’s super-busy: shortly after our trip she was coming to the UK to film a contribution to this week’s episode of Later ... with Jools Holland, she’s a guest vocalist on Basement Jaxx’s new album, and has just made an album produced by Sean Lennon and released on his label. She’s also had a hand in a key soundtrack component of Nowhere Boy, Sam Taylor-Wood’s forthcoming biopic of the teenage John Lennon. In the field of music, too, Ono has earned another lifetime achievement award this year, from Mojo magazine. All this while approving the myriad details involved in the release in September of The Beatles: Rock Band.
So many questions ... First, though: why are we in Iceland? “I wasn’t intending to, it just happened,” she says, her girlish and airy-fairy response at odds with a woman (in)famous for her steely business mind. “In the beginning I was incredulous, when they invited me to do a museum show here, why would I go to Iceland?” she continues in an English that is still heavily accented and still circuitous 60 years after leaving Japan. “And this curator was very intelligent — he said, ‘Well, two thirds of the Icelandic people have the experience of publishing their own writings.’ Two thirds!” she exclaims. “I come from a land with so many illiterate people you have to put them in a bag and drag them around . . .” I think she means, in her singular style, that this is — or was in the Fifties — how one makes the Japanese read books.
“And I came here,” she says, gesturing out of her window at Viday island and the mountains beyond, “and it was beautiful. The land was clean, the water was clean, the air was clean.”
Also, ’s a] totally different type of people here — sort of like a land of gnomes or a land of wizards!” Ono adds, with more affection and less patronising intent than it might seem from her words. “So I thought it was very interesting. And I fell in love with this place. And of course it’s the northernmost land on the map. And north is wisdom and power. You want to give that power and wisdom to the whole world from the north, you know.” She stretches out her arms and draws them down. “So that’s why I thought it was very good place to have the tower.”
Somebody up above must agree with her: just before our interview, there was a brief lull in the violent storm outside and a rainbow filled the horizon. It seemed to touch earth right on Viday. Ono was delighted by this, not least because she seems to have an affection for the sky. Her album is called Between My Head and the Sky. Her last UK exhibition, held at the Baltic Centre in Gateshead earlier this year after its debut in Germany, was entitled Between the Sky and my Head.
Why, I ask her, does she like the sky so much?
“My theories are so far-fetched that you are not gonna think it’s serious. But I think that we all came from another planet. Some of us were probably here. And the sky is the passageway. And so I feel like the sky is the passage to my home planet.”
This is similar to the theory of exogenesis, an idea that the cosmically inclined British rock band Muse also explore on their new album. Has she always believed this?
“Yes.”
Why does she believe in it?
“I don’t know. There was some proof — the things I was thinking, even when I was very young, about 4 or 5. I got inspired by all these ideas, which was not of this planet.” She clarifies, a bit. “I didn’t think they were coming from another planet, but coming from me who probably had different roots.”
So she’s an example of a kind of interstellar reincarnation? She nods.
A few hours later, just before the lighting of the Imagine Peace Tower, a small crowd, including the mayor of Reykjavik, gathers in the hotel’s eighth-floor function suite. Ono, unstinting activist that she is, is bolstering the Imagine Peace Tower message with the spreading of the “ONOCHORD” message. That is, “I LOVE YOU” blinked out, Morse-code style, using little torches that she is distributing.
Kyoko, Ono’s daughter by her second husband, the American film producer Anthony Cox, is also here, with her two children. After Ono and Cox split before her 1969 marriage to Lennon, Cox kidnapped Kyoko and raised her in a religious cult. Mother and daughter were estranged for years, reuniting in 1994, but “we have a very good relationship now”.
Of the ups and downs of her life, she says: “I thought it was strange that so many challenges were given to me.” Her losses, it seems — of her family, her daughter, of John Lennon — were channelled into her art. “I know. I’m so thankful that I have that, otherwise I would have gone crazy. That was the only thing I could do, if I wanted to survive. My back was up against the wall.”
Sean Lennon is here too, with a small group of hipster New York friends. Ono said she encouraged her children to accompany her as a show of solidarity with an Iceland bankrupted by the financial crisis.
I ask Sean how it was working with his mum on Between My Head and the Sky, which has received plaudits for its mixture of dance beats and more experimental, Ono-like textures. Mum and son both admit to liking being in control. “Sean’s a little bit more passive-aggressive [than me],” Ono had said. “John was really upfront. Aggressive-aggressive!”
Says Lennon Jr: “I respect her as a single parent, someone who’s been through a lot of things, so I didn’t want to be a brat any more.”
Between My Head and the Sky is, in a way, classic Ono: adventurous, daring, and not a little bonkers. It makes Madonna sound like Vera Lynn. Ono’s banshee wail encapsulates her Marmite nature: for Beatles luddites it will be torture; for the rest of us it makes for one of the albums of the year.
Do John’s fans like her? “I still don’t feel that John’s fans are accepting me. I don’t know who’s really John’s fans, and who’s really John and Yoko fans. The Beatles fans, some of them really denounced John in a way. So I don’t know who’s who. So whenever I create something I never think about who’s gonna listen to it.
“But then, I’m getting some beautiful letters. So they like the CD or something. It’s really great, but I’m not gonna ask, ‘Are you a Beatles fan?’”
Here in the hotel, Yoko Ono’s redoubtable New York lawyer is, as ever, on hand. He and Ono meet every Tuesday to discuss the latest issues pertaining to her work and the Lennon estate — with his other clients including the heirs to Bob Marley and Janis Joplin, her lawyer knows all about managing dead legends. Similar “eyes and ears” duties are provided by a middle-aged couple who have travelled from Liverpool — they are involved with the upkeep of Mendips, Lennon’s childhood home, which Ono bought and donated to the National Trust. It was opened to the public in 2003.
One thing that recently passed — fleetingly — across her lawyer’s desk was the script for Nowhere Boy. Written by Matt Greenhalgh, who captured the life of Ian Curtis in Anton Corbijn’s Control, Taylor-Wood’s film is an affectionate but gritty telling of the life of Lennon in the years leading up to the formation of the Beatles. Deprived of his mother Julia for much of his childhood and raised by his Aunt Mimi, he was reunited with Julia in his mid-teens, only to lose her again when she was killed by a car when he was 17.
Ono says she is asked to approve many scripts about her late husband. “It was hard for me — I didn’t want to say no to Sam, to another artist. And I was so glad when I saw it — I didn’t have to feel bad about it.”
Her involvement in the film was “nothing”. But she was impressed enough to agree to let them use the singularly appropriate song Mother.
Does she think that Aaron Johnson — a 19-year-old actor from Buckinghamshire, most recently seen in the teen movie Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging — makes a good John?
“Oh, isn’t he good?” she gushes. “Fantastic. The mannerisms were very accurate.”
Was it emotional watching the film?
“Yeah,” she nods slowly, before adding hastily, again, “well, I was looking at it from an objective point of view. But I thought, ‘My God, he’s doing a great job’.”
A few hours later I catch another glimpse into the strange world Ono has been forced to inhabit by the tragedy of her husband’s murder and his all-powerful legend. A concert is being held in a draughty Reykjavik art space to mark the switching on of the Imagine Peace Tower. On the VIP balcony some large-screen computers have been set up. The online community Second Life has set up a Viday section. Members can visit the peace tower and groove to Lennon’s music. Ono, swaddled in a black Puffa jacket, is controlling her own Second Life avatar. She spins the computer-generated likeness — Ono notes approvingly how skinny and tall it is — around the beam of light while fans dance with her.
Over in the main hall a selection of Icelandic pub bands are playing covers of Lennon songs. Huge black-and-white photographs of John’n’Yoko scroll through a screen behind the stage. Ono walks over to watch briefly, then wanders off again. One of the bands plays Jealous Guy. Then the MC, talking in Icelandic, says something about “the lost weekend”, the fabled 18-month period when Lennon and Ono separated and he embarked on a bender in Los Angeles, having an affair with May Pang in the process. Then the band play Woman. Even in a pub-rocky incarnation, it’s heartbreaking. How hard must it be for Ono to see and hear this stuff, still, constantly?
But she’s tougher than that. Ask her about her critics and, now, the plaudits coming her way for Between My Head and the Sky — and ask her about her still-youthful artistic exuberance — and she brushes it all away. “I don’t compare myself with anybody. But the point is, I feel physically good. And I think I’m given this opportunity to do something.”
A short while later she’s on stage, with Sean Lennon on drums, leading musicians and crowd in a performance of Give Peace a Chance. She may look like a groovy grandma, but the power and feeling in the room is incredible. “Iceland, I love you!” she yells before leaving the stage.
Earlier I had asked her what John Lennon, idealist and dreamer, would have made of the state of the world some 30 years after his death?
“He’d be angry. And he’s right to be angry. But you see, anger is not going to solve the problem. So we have to be extremely intelligent,” she nodded sagely. “And we will be.”
Between My Head and the Sky is out now on forte

Soupy Sales, Slapstick Comedian, Dies at 83
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN NY TIMES
Soupy Sales, whose zany television routines turned the smashing of a pie to the face into a madcap art form, died Thursday night. He was 83.
Mr. Sales’s former manager, Dave Usher, said the entertainer died in a hospice in New York City after suffering from multiple health problems.
Cavorting with his puppet sidekicks White Fang, Black Tooth, Pookie the Lion and Hobart and Reba, the heads in the pot-bellied stove, transforming himself into the private detective Philo Kvetch, and playing host to the ever-present “nut at the door,” Soupy Sales became a television favorite of youngsters and an anarchic comedy hero for teenagers and college students.
Clad in a top hat, sweater and bow tie, shuffling through his Mouse dance, he reached his slapstick heyday in the mid-1960s on “The Soupy Sales Show,” a widely syndicated program based at WNEW-TV in New York.
Some 20,000 pies were hurled at Soupy Sales or at visitors to his TV shows in the 1950s and ’60s, by his own count. The victims included Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis, all of whom turned up just for the honor of being creamed.
His memoir “Soupy Sez!” (M. Evans, 2001), written with Charles Salzberg, supplied the precise ingredients for successful pie-throwing: “You can use whipped cream, egg whites or shaving cream, but shaving cream is much better because it doesn’t spoil. And no tin plates. The secret is you just can’t push it and shove it in somebody’s face. It has to be done with a pie that has a lot of crust so that it breaks up into a thousand pieces when it hits you.”
But the key to his comedy went beyond the smashing of a pie.
“Our shows were not actually written, but they were precisely thought out,” he explained in his memoir. “But the greatest thing about the show, and I think the reason for its success, was that it seemed undisciplined. The more you can make a performance seem spontaneous, the better an entertainer you are.”
For all the staged mayhem, the truly unpredictable did occur. “I remember one time we were working with Pookie at the window,” Mr. Sales recalled. “He was doing a bit where he was breaking eggs and one of the eggs turned out to be rotten. My God, the smell was terrible! And I’m sure, watching us at home, everyone knew there was something wrong from the look on our faces.”
Soupy Sales was born Milton Supman in Franklinton, N.C., where his parents, Irving and Sadie Supman, owned a dry goods store. His last name was pronounced “Soupman” by neighbors, so he called himself Soupy as a youngster.
Drawing on the physical comedy of the Marx Brothers and Harry Ritz, he entered show business after graduating from Marshall College in Huntington, W.Va. Working as a teenage dance-show host and D. J. on television and radio, he appeared on stations in Cincinnati and Cleveland, then began “Lunch With Soupy” in 1953 on WXYZ-TV in Detroit. He took the name Soupy Sales in part from the old-time comic actor Chic Sale. After appearing on local TV in Los Angeles and on the ABC-TV network, he made his debut on WNEW in the fall of 1964.
Then came an infamous moment. On New Year’s Day 1965, Soupy Sales asked youngsters to go through their parents’ clothing and send him little green pieces of paper with pictures of men with beards. He later reported receiving only a few dollar bills and said he donated them to charity, but Metromedia, the station’s owner, suspended him briefly after a viewer complained to the Federal Communications Commission that he was encouraging children to steal.
That stunt only heightened Mr. Sales’s appeal to young people as a tweaker of authority, and when he headlined a rock ’n’ roll show at the New York Paramount the following Easter, perhaps 3,000 teenagers were snaking through Times Square hoping for seats at the morning performance. “He’s great, he’s a nut like us,” a 13-year-old boy told The New York Times.
Mr. Sales was later a longtime panelist on TV’s “What’s My Line” and he was host for a variety talk show on WNBC Radio in the 1980s.
Mr. Sales is survived by his wife, Trudy, and his two sons, Tony and Hunt.
For all the shenanigans, one episode remained etched in the Soupy Sales pie-throwing hall of fame. “One of my younger fans made the mistake of heaving a frozen pie at me before it defrosted,” he once wrote in The New York Journal-American. “It caught me in the neck and I dropped like a pile of bricks.”

A flawed philosophy that bolsters the BNP
The chatter of the chattering classes fades to a whisper whenever cultural difference comes up. That’s why extremists flourish
Antonia Senior Times of London
Philosophy, despite the best obfuscatory intentions of philosophers, occasionally seeps out of the ivory towers and informs our lives. We may not be able to cite the theorists whose theories we live by, but culture is shaped by great minds as much as by our collective will.
The dominant philosophical framework of the postwar era has been moral relativism; the notion that there are no universal truths. Truth, and moral worth, are entirely relative to a culture or society.
I think bacon is divine; you are a vegetarian; he thinks pig meat is an affront to God. Each of these positions is true, because truth is in the eye of the believer. I think Nick Griffin is a buffoon; you think he is a dangerous fascist; he thinks he is a fearless hero of the Right.
It is so easy to be a moral relativist. It means never thinking through an argument, never offending anyone, never feeling as if you are channelling the unsavoury views of a lunatic fringe. Relativism has a long tradition; the Greek historian Herodotus had some relativist sympathies in the 5th century BC.
It took off in the 20th century, prospering in a haze of post-colonial guilt, feeding off a desire to atone for our forefathers’ racism and assumptions of superiority.It is a moral code for those who do not want to be impolite or rude. It’s the ideology of holding hands in a circle or drinking tea together. Small wonder it has been so seductive within these shores. Moral relativism, as philosophies go, is just so nice.
It’s a shame, then, that it is also incoherent, logically flawed and utterly tired. Few philosophers take it seriously any more. Yet having escaped the ivory towers, it has taken on a life independent of the theorists. It sits at the heart of our society like a jolly, beaming tumour, eating away at our ability to take on the BNP and their ilk.
The incoherence is laughable. The relativist’s position is that all cultural views are equally valid, unless your culture is that of a white, male racist. In which case, you are wrong and the relativists are right, despite the fact there is no objective right and wrong, only cultural practices. Eh?
The logical flaws are also obvious. Take female genital mutilation. I think it is an abhorrent, evil crime. Yet the woman slicing out the clitoris of a child with a rusty knife thinks she is doing the right thing. Clearly, one of us is absolutely right and one of us is deluded. If your culture believes in genital mutilation and mine does not, then my culture is right and good and yours is wrong and bad.
This is an argument made persuasively by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch MP and political activist. Ali argues that Western feminists retreat into silence when faced with the subjugation of their Islamic sisters, hobbled by their unwillingness to criticise other cultures. Germaine Greer famously accused the critics of circumcision as launching attacks on “the cultural identity” of the circumcised. “One man’s beautification is another man’s mutilation,” she said.
But Greer’s defence of the indefensible was ten years ago now. Consciously or not, we have moved away from a world where she could say something so absurd and be taken seriously.
It’s impossible to be a cultural relativist when faced with daily examples of other cultures getting it wrong. There is no validity in any view of right or wrong expressed by the Taleban. There is no truth in any cultural creed that treats women as inferior, let alone those that mutilate them. There is no cultural excuse for child abuse disguised as exorcism.
Relativism is in retreat, but there is no coherent moral framework taking its place. It helped us move from the certainties of the imperial age into a more tolerant era, but it’s almost impossible to work out what comes next.
For those of us who grew up with a ubiquitous relativism, it is incredibly hard to break its bonds, even though we know we must. We are squeamish about dealing in moral absolutes. It feels counter-intuitive and unbearably arrogant to stand up and say: “I am right and you are wrong.” It feels embarrassingly strident to be vocal about the facets of British life that are better than elsewhere; such as women’s rights and freedom of speech and the fact that Mehmet Goren is on trial for the suspected honour killing of his daughter, where elsewhere the lack of a body would have been a convenient excuse to let it lie.
Part of this squeamishness comes from a fear of being accused of racism. My generation is terrified of being accused of racism, not because we’re all secret racists afraid of being outed, but because we find racism shocking and offensive. But the problem is also a more general unease with dealing with moral absolutes: fascists and fanatics have monopolised certainty.
There seems to be no middle ground between an absurd relativism and a shouty, strident nastiness. This poses a problem: the chattering classes stop chattering as soon as a culturally sensitive topic comes up.
The only way to decide if a proposition is true or not, or if an action is right or wrong, is to test it and debate it. This takes more rigour than a lazy assumption that all views are truth and rightness is relative. It’s also tricky if you are an atheist, as so many of us are. Religion is like a moral short-cut, providing a template against which you can test moral propositions. Without God, certainty is even harder to come by. Who am I to say what is right or wrong? A little divine back-up would be useful, if only I could find a scintilla of faith.
So, paralysed by our inherited relativism, fearful of seeming racist and adrift in a Godless world, we fall silent just when we should be debating and talking. Into this silence strides Nick Griffin, Britain’s own fascist hobgoblin. If he is the only one talking about immigration, or the role of women in Islam or the sense of alienation and disenfranchisement felt, rightly or wrongly, by some white Britons, then his voice will be amplified. He is shouting while we whisper. If his voice is heard above ours, we have only ourselves to blame.

London Times
Man wanted by Interpol found working as a guard in US prison
A simple Google search of Michal Preclik's name turns up an Interpol wanted poster from his native Czech Republic. So where was he arrested? In a maximum-security prison in the US, where he was not an inmate, but a guard.
Preclik, 32, had worked at the prison in the central US state of Nebraska for a year and his arrest came just two months after officials at Tecumseh State Correctional Institution promoted him to corporal. Prison officials learned last month that he was wanted on suspicion of drug and fraud crimes.
The electronic wanted poster, which shows his mug shot, went up on Interpol's website exactly a year before his arrest. The poster is the first weblink that appears when Googling Preclik's name.
“This is just unbelievable that the state of Nebraska is hiring international criminals,” said Heath Mello, a Nebraska state senator. “Who's minding the store?”
As a result of the embarrassing mistake, the Department of Correctional Services is now reviewing its hiring practices.
“Obviously, it’s a concern whenever we have anyone working at the facility ... who has any type of outstanding warrants,” said Dawn Renee Smith, a spokeswoman.
The situation is reminiscent of a 2005 incident that led to a Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services policy that Google searches of job candidates be conducted. The department offered a job to Wayne Richard McGuire, but rescinded the offer after it was reported that he had been convicted in absentia in Rwanda of the 1985 murder of Dian Fossey, whose research was the subject of the movie Gorillas in the Mist.
Preclik ended up in Nebraska in 2002 when he got a job at a pig farm through a company that recruited Eastern Europeans as labourers in violation of their tourist visas. The farm is about 30 miles from the Tecumseh prison.
Preclik later testified against Milan Matousek, who was convicted of transporting and harbouring illegal immigrants while helping the company. He was granted legal residency in return for his help in the prosecution, according to his wife, Kari Preclik, an American he married in 2005.
She said that the drug and fraud accusations stem from another prosecution he assisted with in the Czech Republic. She claims that he had become ensnared with organised crime while buying and selling cars and was kidnapped. While testifying in that case, he was accused of giving members of the group drugs.
But she had no idea of an outstanding warrant.
“We did not find out he was wanted until he was picked up,” Mrs Preclik said.
Interpol, which fosters police co-operation across the borders of 188 countries, and the US Marshals service, did not release any information about the accusations against Preclik.
“I was shocked when I found out,” said Patrick Barker, an officer at the prison who worked with Preclik. “Here we have a guy facing drug and fraud charges and we're dealing with contraband issues at the prison.”
Ms Smith said that she wasn't aware of any internal investigations because of Preclik's situation.
She said that the Corrections Department did a background check on Preclik before hiring him. But a national database that includes criminal records and warrants, the National Criminal Information Centre, apparently did not reveal any warrants for his arrest.
There is often a lag between the time Interpol lists someone as wanted and when an arrest warrant is issued in the country where the person is residing.
Preclik was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on September 8 and next month there is hearing to determine whether he can be released on bond. He has asked that the decision to send him back to the Czech Republic be reviewed.

Howard Unruh, 88, Dies; Killed 13 of His Neighbors in Camden in 1949
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN NY Times
Howard Unruh, who carried out one of America’s most infamous mass shootings, killing 13 people, three of them children, in a 20-minute, seemingly emotionless stroll through his neighborhood in Camden, N.J., in September 1949, died Monday at a nursing home in Trenton after 60 years’ confinement. He was 88.
His death was announced by Warren W. Faulk, the Camden County prosecutor. James Laughlin, a spokesman for the prosecutor, said Mr. Unruh had been in state custody since his arrest.
Mr. Unruh was found to have paranoid schizophrenia and never stood trial. He was confined to the high-security Vroom Building for the criminally insane at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital until 1993, when he was transferred across the grounds to less restrictive wards in a geriatric unit.
When Mr. Unruh gunned down his neighbors, the shootings were particularly shocking because no one could remember anything like that. And few of his neighbors, in the working-class Cramer Hill section of East Camden, had paid him much notice. An Army veteran who had seen extensive combat in Europe with the artillery in World War II, he lived in a three-room apartment in the 3200 block of River Road with his mother, Freda.
He had often accompanied her to St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church and was known to read his Bible frequently. A graduate of Woodrow Wilson High School in Camden, he entered Temple University’s pharmacy school in the fall of 1948 but soon dropped out. At age 28, he was unemployed and supported by his mother, who was estranged from her husband and worked as a packer for a soap company in Camden.
On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 6, 1949, Mrs. Unruh fixed her son a breakfast of fried eggs and cereal. Moments later, she was astonished to see him threatening her with a wrench. She ran from the apartment to a friend’s home.
At 9:20 a.m., Mr. Unruh, a slender 6-footer, wearing a brown tropical suit, white shirt and bow tie, stepped into the sun-splashed street and walked to a shoemaker’s shop on his block. He pulled out a 9 millimeter German Luger pistol he had purchased at a Philadelphia gun shop in January 1947 and pointed it at the owner, John Pilarchik, 27.
“I had leveled the gun at him, neither of us said nothing, and I pulled the trigger,” Mr. Unruh told a psychiatrist a month later. “He had a funny look on his face, staggered back and fell to the floor. I realized then he was still alive, so I fired into his head.”
Next, he went to a tailor shop looking for the owner, Thomas Zegrino, but instead shot the man’s wife, Helga, 28, who was there alone.
Then he entered a barber shop and shot Orris Smith, 6, who was astride a white hobby horse, getting his hair cut as his mother, Catherine, sat beside him.
The barber, Clark Hoover, 33, was the next victim. In his confession, Mr. Unruh told how the man had “dodged around the barber chair, making it difficult for me to get a clear shot, but I finally hit him, walked over and then shot into his head.”
Then Mr. Unruh approached a tavern, but the owner, Frank Engel, having heard the shots, locked the door and fled with his patrons to the rear as Mr. Unruh shot into the bar.
Next, Mr. Unruh fired into an apartment window and shot Thomas Hamilton, a 2-year-old, in the head. After shooting into a restaurant, he fired through the window of a passing automobile and hit Alvin Day, 24, a television repairman.
Mr. Engel, who owned a pistol, shot Mr. Unruh in the hip from an upper-floor window of the tavern building, but Mr. Unruh seemed not to notice the wound.
Having reloaded his pistol, he went to a drugstore owned by Maurice Cohen, 40, whose family had argued with Mr. Unruh over his using the Cohens’s gate to take a shortcut from his home to the street. As Mr. Unruh entered, James Hutton, 45, an insurance agent, was emerging. Mr. Unruh shot him in the head.
Mr. Cohen fled to the roof of his apartment above the drugstore as his wife, Rose, 38, hid in a closet and pushed their son Charles, 12, into another closet. Mr. Unruh shot Mr. Cohen in the back, sending him plunging to the street. He also shot Ms. Cohen, firing through the closet door, and Minnie Cohen, 63, the druggist’s mother, as she was trying to call the police from a bedroom. Charles Cohen was unharmed.
Over the next few minutes, Mr. Unruh shot Helen Matlack Wilson, 37; her son, John, 9; and her mother, Emma Matlack, 68, who were in a car stopped at a red light. He also wounded Charles Peterson, 18, who had approached Mr. Hutton’s body outside the drug store, unaware that the gunman was still on the scene.
On his final stop, Mr. Unruh broke into a home and wounded Madeline Harrie, 36, and her son Armand, 16.
“Children screamed as they tumbled over one another to get out of his way,” Meyer Berger wrote in The New York Times in a 4,000-word account, based on more than 50 interviews, that won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting under deadline pressure. (He gave the $1,000 prize money to Mr. Unruh’s mother.)
“Men and women dodged into open shops, the women shrill with panic, men hoarse with fear,” Mr. Berger wrote. “No one could quite understand for a time what had been loosed in the block.”
Mr. Unruh fled to his apartment. Some 50 police officers converged there and blazed away with machine guns, shotguns and pistols.
During an interlude, the assistant city editor of The Camden Courier-Post, Philip Buxton, phoned the house. Mr. Unruh answered his call.
Mr. Buxton asked Mr. Unruh how many people he had killed.
“I don’t know, I haven’t counted,” he said. “Looks like a pretty good score.”
“Why are you killing people?” Mr. Buxton asked.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Unruh replied.
After the police fired tear gas, Mr. Unruh came outside, his hands held high, his bow tie still in place.
A search of his room turned up 700 cartridges, a book called “The Shooter’s Bible” (he had used the building’s basement for target practice) and a New Testament Bible.
In his confession, Mr. Unruh said that the night before the killings, he made a list of people to be targeted: the shoemaker, the tailor, the barber, the druggist. He had nevertheless shot down strangers as well.
A psychiatric report found that Mr. Unruh had felt his neighbors were persecuting and belittling him, “that they were thinking of him as a homosexual.”
The report described him as “a master of suppressed rage” who harbored a “smoldering anger.”
Mr. Unruh’s brother, James, said later that “since he came home from the service, he didn’t seem to be the same.”
“He was nervous,” James Unruh said.
His father, Samuel, said Mr. Unruh had “built a shell around himself we could never penetrate.”
Moments after Mr. Unruh surrendered, a policeman said to him: “What’s the matter with you? You a psycho?”
“I’m no psycho,” Howard Unruh replied. “I have a good mind.”
Mr. Unruh’s years in confinement were largely without incident. In 1995, James H. Klein, the public defender who had represented him for two decades, said Mr. Unruh spent most of his time sleeping and watching television. For a while, Mr. Klein said, Mr. Unruh had collected stamps.

From The London Times
Discovery of ‘magnetricity’ marks important advance in physics
Hannah Devlin
Scientists have generated a magnetic version of electricity, which they have called magnetricity.
The discovery marks an important advance in theoretical physics. The existence of magnetic “charges” has been predicted for nearly 70 years but has never been observed in practice.
The study was led by Professor Steve Bramwell, of the London Centre for Nanotechnology. He said: “It is not often in the field of physics you get the chance to ask, ‘How do you measure something?’, and then go on to prove a theory unequivocally. This is a very important step to establish that magnetic charge can flow like electric charge.”
While electrical current is carried by electrons, magnetricity is based on atomic-sized “north” and “south” charges that flow through materials when placed in a magnetic field.
The idea that the north and south poles of a magnet can exist independently was first proposed by Paul Dirac, a physicist, in 1931.
However, in everyday life poles always seem to occur in north-south pairs: no matter how many times you break a bar magnet in half, it will always have a north end and a south end.
Dredging through the fallout from collisions in particle accelerators and straining to pick up cosmic rays from the early universe also failed to turn up elementary particles that have just one pole.
Now research, published today in the journal Nature, shows that “north” and “south” charges can be isolated and rove around independently in a crystalline material called dysprosium titanate. The crystals possess two unusual magnetic properties stemming from the way the atoms are arranged.
Each atom in the crystal acts as a little bar magnet, complete with a north and a south. But the geometrical layout of the atoms means that the norths and souths are never able to align in a satisfactory way and so the magnets continually flip up and down trying to find a stable position.
“It’s like having a sea of bar magnets. If you flip one then the next one will flip around as well,” said Dr Sean Glibin, of the ISIS particle accelerator at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford.
The second unusual property is that at regular intervals on the lattice the magnetic fields of individual atoms add up to produce essentially isolated north or south charges.
The combination of these two properties means that when the individual atoms flip the norths and souths move along the lattice. Without applying a magnetic field, the charges move around at random. But when a magnetic field is applied, the researchers showed that the charges flow through the crystal in exactly the same way that electrons flow through metallic conductors.
It is unlikely to become an immediate replacement for electricity because the crystals have to be cooled to below minus 272.15C — just above absolute zero — to be conducting. However, Professor Bramwell said that the discovery could have important applications in the emerging field of nanocomputing.

From The London Times
The barcode is nothing to celebrate
It killed off the traditional shop and gave us the checkout girl. And what’s with a 57th anniversary anyway?
Giles Coren
I think we are all well aware that Wednesday was the 57th anniversary of the invention of the barcode. It’s bizarre that we are, because it was hardly the most interesting thing about last Wednesday, which was also, as you probably know, the 438th anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto, Heinrich Himmler’s 109th birthday and the 97th anniversary (to the very day!) of the first transaction made on the Helsinki stock exchange. But it is the glorious 57th of the barcode that we know about.
And we know about it, of course, because Google decided to commemorate it in its “doodle” du jour. And that is how we come collectively to know things about our days now. Once, it was the church calendar that told us: everyone knew intuitively that it was Whitsuntide, Ash Wednesday or Michaelmas. Then it was newspapers, and we all knew what the headlines were. And then it was television, and we all knew that tonight we’d find out who shot JR. But now it’s whatever the hell some Korean kid in Silicon Valley feels like commemorating in a search engine logo doodle.
And so eight billion people, more or less, got up on Wednesday, logged on, saw a barcode where the multicoloured “Google” normally is, and thought: “Eh? What’s that? Oh, right, it must be the anniversary of the barcode. And that’s probably ‘Google’ written as a barcode.”
And how right we all were. And then I bet we all thought to ourselves: “I wonder when it was invented? 1970-ish? Maybe mid-1960s at a push?”; And were astounded when we clicked on the image for more information and found that it was invented, in fact, way back in 1952.
“1952?” we all probably screamed. “George VI was still alive! People in England barely had televisions, let alone barcode scanners! The very notion of the ‘shop’ was still pretty much in its infancy. Most people in England were still driving their geese to market on Saturday mornings, hoping to exchange some of the feathers for a turnip and a quill. And in America they already had barcodes!”
No doubt you, like me, have thought since last Wednesday of practically nothing but barcodes (unless you are Vladimir Putin, who was also 57 on Wednesday and was probably too excited about all the cake and presents to notice). First of all I thought: “What’s so big about the 57th anniversary? Has Google, with all its binary programming and innovative teccy numerical stuff, simply done away with base 10 and its hidebound gold, silver and diamond anniversarial demarcations, and now the big one is really the 57th, or beryllium, anniversary?”
And then, like me, I am certain that you gave a moment’s thought to the two chaps who (we learn) invented it, Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver. Such wonderfully evocative American names, so perfectly representative of opposite sides of the Dream. It’s so immediately obvious that good old Norman Woodland (“Norm!”) was the one who came up with the idea for writing words as a sequence of lines, but that he had no head for business and only thought that it might make a useful labelling system for Auntie May’s apple pie stall at the barn-raising.
And it was only when clever little Bernie Silver shuffled in on the act that they developed a plan to make money out of it.
It seems a rum thing to celebrate, though. Because what, after all, have we gained by the invention of the barcode (which, in the end, was first employed in a supermarket in Troy, Ohio, in 1974)?
As far as I can tell, the main thing that the barcode has achieved is to have brought an end to the old-fashioned scenario in one’s local shop, where the little man in the white overalls smiles as he takes down the flour tin from the shelf to weigh out your half-pound, and says: “Baking today, is it, Mrs Foskett? Not your famous fairy cakes? Hope there’s one left over for me!”
Good work, barcode. You’ve certainly seen off that nosey old bastard.
Yup, the barcode killed the shop. Nice one. Like all modernising inventions, it came along with a brief to speed things up and, where possible, eradicate people. A bit like the industrialised Nazi death camps (happy birthday, Heinrich!). And while that may be great as a model for business or genocide, it rather runs counter to the instinctive will of humanity.
I tell a lie. The barcode did give us something useful. It gave us the phrase “supermarket checkout girl” as a convenient shorthand for a girl of low status and minimal intellect — the sort of girl you don’t want to end up settling for, or, if you are a girl, end up being. Whichever it is, she’s waiting for you if you don’t get on with your homework.
Swipe, swipe, blip. Swipe, swipe, blip. It’s the sound of the end of the world. The final, total automation of the need to eat. The digitisation of the life instinct. Indeed, there are now supermarkets with no checkout staff at all, where you just swipe, swipe, blip the barcodes yourself and go home without speaking a word. Such places are generally full of lonely singletons buying frozen lasagne and soft porn, rapists and teenage muggers helping themselves to the booze. Good on you, Norman Joe! Hats off, Bernie!
And even if you are on the side of corporate rapine, and celebrate the bypassing of the human in all commercial transactions, wouldn’t you have been more excited about October 7 if barcodes actually worked? If it wasn’t always a case of some illiterate till popsy being unable to find the barcode on the egg box and turning it over and over and then banging it huffily down on the counter so that the omelette that you were going to have for lunch starts making itself right there in the shop, and then spending the next ten minutes trying to type in the numbers manually — tutting and sighing all the time — until she eventually hits “enter” and the display screen charges up a gross of Brussels sprout trees at £456?
It’s why I have never signed up for the airport retinal identification scheme, tempting thought it is. There’s always some smug bugger from your plane who doesn’t join the back of the immigration queue but strides airily past to the scanner, presses his eye up to the lens like Captain Kirk, and swans through to pick up his matching luggage and Louis Vuitton ski bag while you’re still rummaging through your duty free bags for a passport.
But I just know that if I ever got around to signing up to this human barcode system I’d end up flying into Heathrow in the middle of the night, sauntering up to the machine, pressing my eye to the scanner and being told that I can’t come into the country because I am four tins of skipjack tuna in brine, and did I know that if I take one more tin I get a free jar of Hellman’s?
? And if you thought computers didn’t have a sense of humour, today’s Nice Try of the Week award goes to Berry Bros and Rudd, vendors of pukka plonk to posh people since AD634. Ordering a case of Crozes Hermitage on their website yesterday, I was informed that it came to £199.80.
And then came the following helpful little suggestion: “Free delivery on all orders over £200.00. Spend an extra £0.20 to qualify for free delivery. Why not add 1982 Ch. Latour, Pauillac: £1,950.00?”

Questions Mount in India on Executions Attributed to the Police
By LYDIA POLGREEN NY Times
AHMEDABAD, India — The tableau was as improbable as it was grisly. The bullet-riddled bodies of four Muslims lay neatly lined up in the middle of a road. One of the dead cradled a machine gun. Bomb-making chemicals and a suitcase full of cash sat in the trunk of their car. Intelligence reports had identified the four as terrorism suspects.
It was a tidy crime scene with a story to match: four Islamic extremists who planned to assassinate the powerful chief minister of India’s richest state stopped cold by a fearless band of policemen early on the morning of June 15, 2004. The officers were hailed as heroes.
But the story was too good to be true, according to a recently released magistrate’s report. The supposed militants included a 19-year-old college student, a woman named Ishrat Jehan, who had no evident links to terrorist groups, the magistrate wrote.
The forensic evidence showed that the four had not died in a shootout but were shot at point-blank range, much earlier than the police had said. None of the four had actually fired a gun. They had been killed, the magistrate declared, in cold blood.
The sensational case has fed a heated national debate about the longstanding Indian police practice of killing suspects. Known euphemistically as “encounter killings,” such extrajudicial executions have been a tolerated and even celebrated method of dealing swiftly with crime in a country with a notoriously slow and sometimes corrupt judiciary. An officer in such cases invariably “encounters” a suspect and kills him, supposedly in self-defense.
In cities like Mumbai, which was for decades gripped by violent organized crime syndicates, officers who killed notorious gangland figures were often seen as dark folk heroes, selflessly carrying out the messy business of meting out justice. These officers, known as encounter specialists, became celebrities, even boasting about the number of gangsters they had killed.
But Indians have become increasingly wary of police officers crusading as judge, jury and executioner. Since 2006, 346 people have been killed in what seem to have been extrajudicial police killings, according to the National Human Rights Commission.
In many of these killings, investigations have found, the motive was not vigilante justice. The police often staged such killings for personal gain: bumping off a rival of a powerful politician in the hopes of a big promotion; killing a crime boss at the behest of one of his rivals; settling scores between businessmen.
Here in the state of Gujarat, the grim practice took on an even more sinister form. According to court documents, lawyers, human rights activists and the families of the victims, police officers seeking the favor of Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, began killing small-time Muslim criminals and framing them as big-time terrorists bent on mass murder. No evidence has been offered to show that Mr. Modi encouraged such killings.
Riots in Gujarat killed more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, in the aftermath of an attack on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims that killed 59 people in 2002. Mr. Modi, a prominent member of the Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has long been accused of fueling the anti-Muslim violence with inflammatory remarks.
Tensions between Hindus and Muslims here are high. The officers who carried out the killings hoped to win promotions and other favors from lawmakers, according to court documents and human rights workers here.
In Gujarat, the team of officers suspected of carrying out these killings usually chose their victims carefully. In all five cases pending in the courts so far, the main targets had shady pasts confirmed by an arrest or conviction, usually for a petty crime. Most were Muslims.
But in the killing of Ms. Jehan that formula went awry. She hardly fit the usual profile of encounter victims. She was a full-time college student who also worked to provide for her widowed mother and six siblings.
According to her family, she was on a trip with her employer to help him set up his marketing business. On June 15, she was shot, according to the police, along with her accomplices as they tried to evade capture.
But the Gujarat magistrate’s report shredded that claim. The food in the victims’ stomachs proved that they had been killed much earlier, the report said. Their wounds were consistent with point-blank shootings. Their hands showed no trace of gunpowder residue. The police had planted weapons on the victims and staged the crime scene.
Gujarat government officials dispute the magistrate’s report, and Gujarat’s High Court has stopped the authorities from arresting the officers it named as the court conducts an inquiry.
Jay Narayan Vyas, a spokesman for the state government, said that the four people killed had been identified by the central government as terrorism suspects. A government intelligence report said that the four were possible terrorism suspects, but the central government has said that these were merely suspicions and could not justify the killings. Mr. Vyas said that the magistrate had overstepped his authority. He dismissed the findings as “false propaganda” from political opponents who wished to discredit Gujarat’s leaders.
Lawyers had known for years that something strange was happening in the Gujarat police force and that the killings of terrorism suspects were dubious, said Mukul Sinha, a lawyer for the relatives of several victims. But hardly anyone thought the killers would be brought to justice.
Then in 2005, the brother of one victim — a small-time bandit named Sohrabuddin Sheikh — sent a letter to India’s Supreme Court demanding an inquiry into the death of Mr. Sheikh, who had been killed by the police and branded a terrorist and who, like the four killed in June 2004, had been accused of planning to kill the chief minister of Gujarat.
Under Indian law any citizen can petition the country’s highest court directly, and the Supreme Court demanded an investigation. In 2007, Gujarat’s government acknowledged that the killing did not happen as the police had claimed and that the police had also killed Mr. Sheikh’s wife to cover up the crime.
The revelation opened the floodgates. “People realized that something can be done, that it is not impossible to get justice in Gujarat,” Mr. Sinha said.
After the officers who made up the elite squad that had carried out these encounters were arrested in the death of Mr. Sheikh, the killings stopped.
“All of a sudden the terrorists have stopped coming to kill Modi,” Mr. Sinha said.
But families of the victims are still waiting for justice.
Ms. Jehan’s mother, Shamima Kausar, said that the charge that her daughter was a terrorist was ludicrous. “She was just a college girl,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “She was my right hand. I am lost without her.”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

Rupert to Internet: It’s War!
Rupert Murdoch is going to battle against the Internet, bent on making readers actually pay for online newspaper journalism–beginning with his London Sunday Times. History suggests he won’t back down; the experts suggest he’s crazy. Is he also ignoring his industry’s biggest problem?
By Michael Wolff Vanity Fair
November 2009 War is Rupert Murdoch’s natural state. When he launched the Fox Broadcasting Company, in October 1986, he went to war against the hegemony of CBS, ABC, and NBC. With Fox News he crossed swords with CNN’s Ted Turner. At Sky, his satellite-TV system in the U.K., he went up against the BBC. He’s battled China, the F.C.C., the print unions in Great Britain, and, recently, most of the journalism community in his takeover of The Wall Street Journal. He relishes conflict and doesn’t back down—one reason why he’s won so many of his fights and so profoundly changed the nature of his industry.
Now he’s going to war with the Internet.
Rupert Murdoch’s digital-technology savvy is a source of hilarity in his family. It hasn’t been a good year for Murdoch—the largest publisher of newspapers in the worst year in newspaper history. His purchase of The Wall Street Journal is widely seen as one of the worst moves of his career—News Corp. has already taken a $3 billion write-down on the purchase. His beloved New York Post, always a money loser for him, is now suffering such great losses that Murdoch is considering a partnership with or even sale to the Daily News, the Post’s arch-enemy. His once highly profitable newspaper groups in the U.K. and Australia are faltering. News Corp.’s share price has been among the hardest hit of any major media company.
And yet, Murdoch, at 78, would double-down in a heartbeat: he strategizes constantly about how he might buy The New York Times. But first he might have to save the newspaper business itself. As it happens, he, unlike almost everyone else in the business, believes newspapers are suffering not at the hands of technological forces beyond their control but at the hands of proprietors who are weaker than he is.
After fulminating for a year about how people on the Internet should pay for news, he made it official. Announcing in August the biggest losses his company has ever sustained, he added that he’d had enough and if people wanted to read his newspapers they could bloody well pay for them.
I should say I am not a neutral party here. Two years ago, I helped found Newser, a news aggregator that summarizes the stories of other news providers, which, along with the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, and Google News, has become a focus of the print world’s antipathy. (When I tried to explain Newser to Murdoch, he said, “So you steal from me.”)
The current battle for how the Internet will “monetize” news divides pretty cleanly between managers of established media properties and people who spend their working lives in the new-media business.
Traditional media managers, who once rushed into the Internet hoping to establish new businesses as well as their new-media bona fides, have all now been chastened by its economic realities and want to take back their free content. “Obviously we will all be closely following Rupert’s efforts in this direction,” said John Huey, Time Inc.’s editor in chief, when I contacted him—a curious throwing up of the hands from Time Warner, the world’s largest magazine publisher and the world’s largest media company, which has tried more strategies on the Internet than any other traditional media company.
Almost all Internet professionals, on the other hand, think that charging for general-interest news online is fanciful—“Rubbish … bonkers … a crock … a form of madness,” in the description of Emily Bell, who has long run the Guardian newspaper’s Web site, one of the industry’s most successful—and, in fact, it has been tried before and failed. “It’s Groundhog Day,” adds Bell. The New York Times tried to levy a subscription charge for its columnists but reversed course and declared itself free again. Even Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, the model of subscription content online, has made more and more of its site free.
I have—in nine months of conversation with Murdoch, writing his biography after he bought the Journal, in 2007— often argued the nature of Internet culture with him to little avail. Murdoch can almost single-handedly take apart and re-assemble a complex printing press, but his digital-technology acumen and interest is practically zero. Murdoch’s abiding love of newspapers has turned into a personal antipathy to the Internet: for him it’s a place for porn, thievery, and hackers. In 2005, not long after News Corp. bought MySpace, when it still seemed like a brilliant purchase—before its fortunes sank under News Corp.’s inability to keep pace with advances in social-network technology—I congratulated him on the acquisition. “Now,” he said, “we’re in the stalking business.”
Internet business strategies are often an intractable issue for media companies because they involve turf wars among contrary skill sets, business models, and corporate cultures. The result is usually bureaucratic stasis.
But News Corp. isn’t like other media companies. Murdoch can cut through and level all bureaucratic confusion and inaction. If he says it will be paid, then all the voices, which in other companies would tell you why this, logically, might not work, go silent at News Corp. The logic of the situation is remade around Murdoch’s logic. Where, in another company, Internet responsibilities might reasonably be given to those most enthusiastic about the medium, London is ground zero in Murdoch’s Internet war because the executives there are the ones most devoted to newspapers. (His 36-year-old son, James, who seems determined to do even more of whatever his father would have done, is responsible for the London operation.)
There has been, as it happens, a significant turf war in London, which might have produced a classic stasis, but which became a solution. The Times of London and The Sunday Times, historically separate papers, have long shared a Web site, controlled, to the consternation of the Sunday editor, by the daily. The decision (after a long political tug-of-war) to separate the two suddenly became an opportunity in the new Murdoch logic of making people pay. Because The Sunday Times has not had a Web site before, it would not, if it launched one with a pay wall, lose any users. Everybody who subscribed would therefore be a plus.
In Murdoch-think, there is, too, the magic of the Sunday paper. Murdoch believes people can’t do without a Sunday paper. (Two years ago, he personally supervised the makeover of the Sunday New York Post.) Ipso facto, if people can’t live without their Sunday paper, then they’ll buy it on the newsstand or pay for it online—no matter that it comes out once a week and the Web is a minute-by-minute medium.
And then, Thelondonpaper. Three years ago, Associated Newspapers—publishers of the all-powerful Daily Mail—launched the free afternoon paper Standard Lite (later London Lite), forcing News Corp. to launch its own free sheet, Thelondonpaper, which undermined News Corp.’s other papers. Murdoch never shuts a paper and never backs down from a war. Except now, with his new war against free, there was suddenly the logic to do what everybody had been begging him to do: close the damn free thing—which he did, suddenly, in August.
Still, saying that when Murdoch speaks things happen does not mean that anyone in the company has quite figured out what exactly he wants to happen. Will Fox News charge for its online content and cede the online market to CNN and MSNBC? What happens to the New York Post, whose site, because of its outdated technology, is often hard to access—even for free? And whither MarketWatch, the free financial-news site bought by The Wall Street Journal’s parent company precisely because it wanted a free site?
It is difficult not to sound catty when discussing News Corporation’s adventures with the Internet. But the litany of its failures—even more extreme than those of most other media companies that have struggled unsuccessfully online—is, I think, relevant to understanding exactly what Murdoch might really be trying to do.
From the failure of Delphi, one of the first public-access Internet providers, in 1993, to iGuide, the precursor to Yahoo and Google, which closed within months of its launch, to his son James’s aborted Internet-investing spree in the late 90s, to the great promise of MySpace, which was shortly flattened by Facebook, to the second launch of Pagesix.com, which Murdoch closed this year, after four months of operation, Murdoch’s Internet starts and stops have engendered at News Corp., in the description of Peter Bale, who once ran the Web site of The Times of London and now runs MSN in the U.K., a relative “fear or abhorrence of technology.”
In one of my favorite Murdoch stories, his wife, Wendi, who had befriended the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, told me about how the “boys” had visited the Murdochs at their ranch in Carmel, California. When I marveled at this relative social mismatch and asked what they might have talked about, Wendi assured me that they had all gotten along very well.
“You know, Rupert,” Wendi said, “he’s always asking questions.”
“But what,” I prodded, “did he exactly ask?”
“He asked,” she said, hesitating only a beat before cracking herself up, “‘Why don’t you read newspapers?’”
Murdoch’s son-in-law Matthew Freud—married to Elisabeth Murdoch, and one of the most well-known P.R. men in the U.K.—explained to me what he believes is the essence of Murdoch’s approach to business: Murdoch is not a modern marketer. He runs his business not on the basis of giving the consumer what he wants but through more old-fashioned methods of structural market domination. His world, and training ground, is the world of the newspaper war—a zero-sum game, where you wrestle market share from the other guy. Curiously, his newspaper battles have most often involved cutting prices rather than, as he now proposes to do on the Internet, raising them. (Murdoch has contributed as much as anyone, with his low-priced papers, to the expectation that news is a de-valued commodity.)
But more than being about cost, his strategy is about pain. What he is always doing is demonstrating a level of strength and will and resolve against which the other guys, the weaker guys, cower. He can take more pain than anybody else. While others persist in the vanity of the Internet, he will endure the short- or medium-term pain necessary to build a profitable business.
He is also a scold who can intimidate the market into doing what he wants it to do. Part of his premise now is to invite and scare other publishers and content creators into a self-created monopoly. If everybody charges, consumers will have no choice but to pay. If all publishers have the opportunity to get paid, why wouldn’t they take the money?
In the Murdoch view, media only really works as a good business if it achieves significant control of the market—through pricing, through exclusive sports arrangements, through controlling distribution (he has spent 20 years trying to monopolize satellite distribution around the world).
And, indeed, by announcing his all-paid-content intentions, he has, almost single-handedly, not just made the paid model the main topic of digital strategy in other traditional publishing companies but imbued it with nearly the force of a fait accompli.
“It’s a done deal,” says a journalist I know who’s suffered in the downturn, arguing that Murdoch, for so long journalism’s great debaser, is now its last protector.
The Murdoch plan is, however, in the estimation of almost anybody whose full-time job is occupied with digital business strategies, not just cockamamy but head-scratching.
It seems that Murdoch has, in a fit of pique, made certain pronouncements which may have to be humored by the people who work for him, but which will be impossible to implement and will have no business consequences. Or that Murdoch, a man with something of a divine gift for acting in his own self-interest, has a plan not yet quite evident to other, mere media mortals.
The position of Internet professionals is straightforward: while it’s possible to charge for certain kinds of specialized information—specifically, information that helps you make money (and that you can, as with an online Wall Street Journal subscription, buy on your company expense account)—there are no significant examples of anyone being able to charge for general-interest information. Sites where pay walls have been erected have suffered cuts in user traffic of, in many cases, as much as 95 percent as audiences merely move on to other, free options.
“What Murdoch seems to be talking about only has a logic if you don’t introduce the behavior of the audience into the equation,” says Emily Bell.
There is, alternatively, the compounding and intoxicating effect of free. While there may not yet be a way to adequately monetize free traffic, it has opened up, for many publications, great new audiences. The million-circulation New York Times has an audience of more than 15 million online. The U.K. paper The Guardian, with its 350,000 circulation, has become, online, with 10 times its print readership, a significant international brand. One theory about the decline in the fortunes of The Wall Street Journal (which allowed Murdoch to buy it) is that, because of its paid wall, the Journal was not a factor in Google searches, causing a fundamental decline in its importance, impacting its brand and standing with advertisers.
Murdoch believes that The Sunday Times has certain franchises so valuable that he will surely be able to capture a paying audience. Jeremy Clarkson is one of News Corp.’s strongest cases. Clarkson, who writes a column about cars, is a veritable British institution—everybody consults Clarkson before buying a car. He is, according to in-house estimates at the Times, now responsible for 25 percent of timesonline.co.uk traffic. The thinking is that, even if a pay wall cuts Clarkson’s traffic, there are enough fanatical Clarkson readers who will pay enough to make a paid Clarkson more valuable than a free, ad-supported one. But the problem is for Clarkson: Murdoch’s potential gain is Clarkson’s loss. It’s an almost intolerable loss—most of your readers (and their constant and addictive feedback). “When we opened the Times site to free international traffic,” says Peter Bale, “suddenly our columnists were getting speaking engagements in Milwaukee.” At The New York Times, it was the op-ed columnists themselves who objected most of all when a paid wall choked their readership and notoriety.
Murdoch has a larger problem still. It is, after all, not the Internet that has made news free. News in penny-newspaper or broadcast (or bundled cable) form has always been either free or negligibly priced. In almost every commercial iteration, news has been supported by advertising. This is, more than the Internet, Murdoch’s (and every publisher’s) problem: the dramatic downturn in advertising.
Or, in a sense, the plethora of advertising created the online problem. When Time Warner’s Pathfinder launched the first ad-supported site, in 1994, it quickly created a juggernaut of wild advertising growth online. It was a simple proposition: more traffic, more advertising money—and a free site got vastly more traffic than a paid one.
But the recession has, at least temporarily, dimmed advertising’s promise, creating something of an end-of-the-world panic.
And no one’s panic seems to be greater than that of Rupert Murdoch, who has a habit of finding himself with his back to the wall during times of recession (in the early-90s recession, he almost lost his company because of its great debt load).
It’s Chicken Little panic.
It is hard to imagine that when advertising growth resumes there will not once again be a rush to encourage traffic growth, but right now, the news business, supported for a hundred years by advertising, whose core skill has been selling advertising, believes it must right away, this second, re-create itself with a new business model where advertising is just the cream on top and where it’s the consumer who pays the true cost of newsgathering.
But what if Rupert isn’t really interested in a new business model? There may be earnest men trying to unlock the secret balance between the expectation of free content and the exceptions and the methods that might allow for micro or other incremental payments. But what if that’s not Rupert?
“Rupert isn’t very nuanced about this,” says Merrill Brown, the former MSNBC news chief, who is now a consultant to a venture trying to promote an online charge system.
Murdoch, at 78, doesn’t, practically speaking, have the time to see the online world into maturity—nor the intellectual interest to want to be part of the effort. Rather, his strategic effort may more logically be to slow it down.
The mordant joke among journalists is that, with any luck, the older among us will make it to retirement before the business entirely collapses. This may be part of Rupert’s own thinking.
It is not so much that he wants people to pay to read Jeremy Clarkson online; he wants them, or a portion of them who might otherwise have read a free Clarkson online, to return to the newspaper.
It is not, what’s more, merely that Murdoch objects to people reading his news for free online; it’s that he objects to—or seems truly puzzled by—what newspapers have become online. You get a dreadful harrumph when you talk to Murdoch about user-created content, or even simple linking to other sites. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t buy it. He doesn’t want it.
Every conversation I’ve had with him about the new news, about the fundamental change in how people get their news—that users go through Google to find their news rather than to a specific paper—earned me a walleyed stare.
The more he can choke off the Internet as a free news medium, the more publishers he can get to join him, the more people he can bring back to his papers. It is not a war he can win in the long term, but a little Murdoch rearguard action might get him to his own retirement. Then it’s somebody else’s problem.

Michael Wolff is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.