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.

With Him or Against Him
The black-and-white world of Clarence Thomas has nothing to do with race.

By Dahlia (From Slate)
Clarence Thomas' new autobiography, My Grandfather's Son, paints a stark picture of an America in which nothing but race matters. In his telling, virtually everyone who has ever wronged him has done so because of his race. Not surprisingly, in the eyes of many o Thomas' defenders, anyone who objects to this book must also do so because of his race. But the prism of Black vs. White in America is the wrong one through which to view this book. The real black/white problem Justice Thomas reveals is his own binary worldview. Everything is good or bad; everyone is either angel or devil. You might say the justice has produced the world's longest Santa Claus list: everything in America classified as either naughty or nice.
This memoir is a painstaking accounting of the people who have supported Thomas (painted in heroic terms) and those who have tried to destroy him (bigots, idiots, or both). It's a directory of journalists he likes and dislikes, judges he admires and mistrusts. It's a detailed ledger of Thomas' many shamings (by lighter-skinned schoolchildren, or law school interviewers) and of his equal number of academic and professional triumphs. Perhaps to symbolize all this, Thomas tots up the trophies he carries with him (a warm letter from a Missouri judge he's carried "from job to job, like an heirloom") against the symbols of his persecution (his diploma from Yale Law School, onto which he stuck a "fifteen-cent price sticker" because it bore the "taint of racial preference"). There is not an inch of gray area in the justice's personal landscape.
It's not hard to have great compassion for Thomas. He is brutally open about the hardship of his early life in the Jim Crow South, his abandonment by his parents, and the tough love of the grandfather who raised him and "control[led] every aspect of our lives." You can't help but wince at the slights and humiliations—whether real or perceived—that dogged him throughout his schooling, or to feel for his personal struggles with financial hardship, a ruined first marriage, and alcohol.
Nor is it difficult to understand how a man both deeply sensitive and deeply intelligent would have had difficulty reconciling the sheer contradiction of his grandfather's teachings: That hard work and self-reliance are the keys to success, but also that college and law school education are worthless endeavors, turning Thomas into an "educated fool." The message? Try and try but know you'll fail. Which helps illuminate why it is that almost everything Thomas has achieved in his life—from law school to the Supreme Court—he has promptly devalued and disdained. As he put it upon learning of his confirmation, "Whoop-de-damn-do."
Yet even when Thomas does see good in the world, he can't help but question the motives behind it. Whites who were kind to him were "condescending." Institutions that attempted to help him (like Yale) were "tricking" and "hurting" him. Everyone is a "rattlesnake" or a "water moccasin." Their approaches may be different, but they'll strike one way or another. Thomas expresses astonishment, upon meeting his second wife, Virginia, that anyone still "thought it was possible to make the world a better place." Having set himself up to hate his oppressors and mistrust his supporters, Thomas is left all alone, leading to repeated scenes in this book of an isolated Thomas, curled up and sobbing.
Thomas' tendency to see everything as black or white is perhaps most in evident in his discussions of his grandfather, for whom the book is named. There can be no doubt that Myers Anderson was an amazing man: strong, self reliant, acidly funny, and devoted to his family. But Thomas is also deeply scarred by his grandfather's cruelty—from tossing the young man out when he dropped out of seminary, to skipping his college and law-school graduations and wedding on some unspecified principle. Anderson may have saved him from a life of ruin, but the man hugged his grandson once in his lifetime. So Thomas alternates between raging at his grandfather and lionizing him as the "one hero in my life."
Perhaps it's unfair to wish Thomas might have decoupled the personal from the political in his life. His confirmation hearing was indeed humiliating, for everyone involved. But Thomas was hardly the first justice to endure humiliating questions around a confirmation hearing. Hugo Black had to answer for his involvement with the KKK, and William Rehnquist had to answer for being a Republican poll watcher in Arizona. Nor was Thomas the first justice to face discrimination. Sandra Day O'Connor couldn't parlay her degree into a job, either. But Thomas cannot seem to avoid linking unrelated personal events to political ones. His grandfather's death occurs while he is addressing a "roomful of angry white women in Chicago." Liberal opposition to him was "a high-tech lynching for uppity black folks" and not legitimate political concern over ideology.
And maybe because he can see no shades of gray, in the end, Thomas careens back and forth in this book between seeing himself as a victim or a self-actualized hero. There is precious little in between.
The problem with black-and-white portraits is also that they produce cartoons where there might have been nuance. Thomas can caricature Anita Hill as a "mediocre" self-entitled shrew, and Sen. Howell Heflin, D-Ala., as a "slave owner sitting on the porch of a plantation house." These portraits have all the subtlety of the worst a.m. radio. But then it appears that Thomas is either too angry or too hurt to for subtlety.
But though its author sees only in black-and-white, a careful reading of My Grandfather's Son reveals many gray areas. Clarence Thomas is more complicated than you might have believed, and readers must grapple with the contradictions between Thomas' personal warmth and public rage; the ambiguity with which he views his greatest achievements; the complexity of his love for his emotionally withholding grandfather; and his ambivalence about life in the public eye. For this reason alone the book deserves a careful and nuanced reading. The enduring travesty may well be that Justice Thomas can't think about the rest of us with that same degree of subtlety and care.Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

O.J. Simpson arrested in Vegas robbery
By RYAN NAKASHIMA, Associated Press Writer
O.J. Simpson was arrested Sunday and faces multiple felony charges in an alleged armed robbery of collectors involving the former football great's sports memorabilia, authorities said.
Prosecutors were planning to charge Simpson with two counts of robbery with use of a deadly weapon, conspiracy to commit robbery, burglary with a deadly weapon, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon and coercion, said Clark County District Attorney David Roger.
A conviction on the most serious charge, robbery with use of a deadly weapon, could bring a sentence of three to 35 years for each count, he said.
"He is facing a lot of time," Roger said.
Simpson was being transferred to a detention center for booking, Capt. James Dillon said. Dillon said he did not know whether Simpson would be able to post bail and be released Sunday.
"He was very cooperative, there were no issues," Dillon said.
At least one other person has been arrested and police said Sunday that they were searching for four others in connection with the alleged armed robbery that occurred in a room inside the Palace Station casino-hotel on Thursday.
Police Lt. Clint Nichols said Simpson invoked his right to an attorney immediately after being arrested.
Simpson, 60, has said he and other people with him were retrieving items that belonged to him. Simpson has said there were no guns involved and that he went to the room at the casino only to get stolen mementos that included his Hall of Fame certificate and a picture of the running back with J. Edgar Hoover.
Simpson told The Associated Press on Saturday that he did not call the police to help reclaim the items because he has found the police unresponsive to him ever since his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, were killed in 1994.
"The police, since my trouble, have not worked out for me," he said, noting that whenever he has called the police "It just becomes a story about O.J."
The Heisman Trophy winner, ex-NFL star and actor lives near Miami and has been a tabloid staple since his ex-wife and Goldman were killed in 1994. Simpson was acquitted of murder charges, but a jury later held him liable for the killings in a wrongful death lawsuit.
Police said two firearms and other evidence were seized at a private residence early Sunday.
Walter Alexander, 46, of Arizona, was arrested Saturday night on two counts of robbery with a deadly weapon, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, conspiracy to commit robbery and burglary with a deadly weapon.
He was released without bail on Saturday night, Dillon said.
Besides the two firearms, police said they seized other evidence during early morning searches of two residences, Lt. Clint Nichols said.
"It was evidence of a crime that was committed," Nichols said. "And I believe we recovered some clothing that the individual was wearing in the commission of the robbery."
Simpson said auction house owner Tom Riccio called him several weeks ago to say some collectors were selling some of his items. Riccio set up a meeting with collectors under the guise that he had a private collector interested in buying Simpson's items.
Simpson said he was accompanied by several men he met at a wedding cocktail party, and they took the collectibles.
Alfred Beardsley, one of the sports memorabilia collectors involved in the alleged robbery, has said he wants the case dropped and that he's "on O.J.'s side."
Nichols said police had a responsibility to investigate how the collectibles were taken, regardless of who they belong to.
"We don't believe that anybody was roughed up, but there were firearms involved in the commission of the robbery," he said.
Simpson's arrest came just days after the Goldman family published a book that Simpson had written under the title, "If I Did It," about how he would have committed the killings of his ex-wife and Goldman had he actually done it.
After a deal for Simpson to publish it fell through, a federal bankruptcy judge awarded the book's rights to the Goldman family, who retitled it "If I Did It: The Confessions of the Killer." On Sunday, the book was the hottest seller in the country, hitting No. 1 on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.
___
Associated Press Writer Ken Ritter in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

the spectator
The Return of the Doomsday Machine?
By Ron Rosenbaum
"The nuclear doomsday machine." It's a Cold War term that has long seemed obsolete.
And even back then, the "doomsday machine" was regarded as a scary conjectural fiction. Not impossible to create—the physics and mechanics of it were first spelled out by U.S. nuclear scientist Leo Szilard—but never actually created, having a real existence only in such apocalyptic nightmares as Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.
In Strangelove, the doomsday machine was a Soviet system that automatically detonated some 50 cobalt-jacketed hydrogen bombs pre-positioned around the planet if the doomsday system's sensors detected a nuclear attack on Russian soil. Thus, even an accidental or (as in Strangelove) an unauthorized U.S. nuclear bomb could set off the doomsday machine bombs, releasing enough deadly cobalt fallout to make the Earth uninhabitable for the human species for 93 years. No human hand could stop the fully automated apocalypse.
An extreme fantasy, yes. But according to a new book called Doomsday Men and several papers on the subject by U.S. analysts, it may not have been merely a fantasy. According to these accounts, the Soviets built and activated a variation of a doomsday machine in the mid-'80s. And there is no evidence Putin's Russia has deactivated the system.
Instead, something was reactivated in Russia last week. I'm referring to the ominous announcement—given insufficient attention by most U.S. media (the Economist made it the opening of a lead editorial on Putin's Russia)—by Vladimir Putin that Russia has resumed regular "strategic flights" of nuclear bombers. (They may or may not be carrying nuclear bombs, but you can practically hear Putin's smirking tone as he says, "Our [nuclear bomber] pilots have been grounded for too long. They are happy to start a new life.")
These twin developments raise a troubling question: What are the United States' and Russia's current nuclear policies with regard to how and when they will respond to a perceived nuclear attack? In most accounts, once the president or Russian premier receives radar warning of an attack, they have less than 15 minutes to decide whether the warning is valid. The pressure is on to "use it or lose it"—launch our missiles before they can be destroyed in their silos. Pressure that makes the wrong decision more likely. Pressure that makes accidental nuclear war a real possibility.
Once you start to poke into this matter, you discover a disturbing level of uncertainty, which leads me to believe we should be demanding that the United States and Russia define and defend their nuclear postures. Bush and Putin should be compelled to tell us just what "failsafe" provisions are installed on their respective nuclear bombers, missiles, and submarines—what the current provisions against warning malfunctions are and what kinds of controls there are over the ability of lone madman nuclear bombers to bring on the unhappy end of history.
As for the former Soviet Union, the possible existence of a version of a doomsday machine is both relevant and disturbing.
In the Strangelove film, the Soviet ambassador tells the president and generals in the U.S. war room that the device was designed to deter a surprise attack, the kind of attack that might otherwise prevent retaliation by "decapitating" the Soviet command structure. The automated system would insure massive world-destroying retaliation even if the entire Soviet leadership were wiped out—or had second thoughts. As a result, some referred to it as the "dead hand" doomsday device.
It is Dr. Strangelove himself, the madman U.S. nuclear strategist played by Peter Sellers, who detects the flaw in this plan. After being apprised of the system's existence by the Soviet ambassador, and the likelihood of its being triggered by a U.S. bomber on an unauthorized mission to nuke its Soviet target, Dr. Strangelove exclaims:
Yes, but the ... whole point of the doomsday machine ... is lost ... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?
In other words, a doomsday machine kept secret is no good for deterrence, only for retaliation by extinction.
Did the Soviets actually design a variation on a doomsday device and not tell us about it? And could an accidental or terrorist nuclear attack on Putin's Russia (by Chechens, for instance) trigger an antiquated automated dead-hand system and launch missiles capable of killing tens, maybe hundreds, of millions at unknown targets that might include the United States?
Up until Aug. 10 of this year, I would have thought these questions were best consigned to the realm of apocalyptic film fantasy. But on that day I came upon a startling essay in the London Times Literary Supplement. It was a review (titled "Deadly Devices") of a book recently published in the United Kingdom: Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon by nuclear-age historian P.D. Smith of University College London. (It will be out in the United States in December.)
The TLS reviewer, Christopher Coker (who is on the faculty of the London School of Economics), asserted that the book demonstrates that "only after the Berlin Wall had been breached and ... the Cold War began to thaw did military analysts realize the Russians had actually built a version of the [doomsday] device. The details of this top-secret Soviet system were first revealed in 1993 by Bruce G. Blair, a former American ICBM launch control officer, now one of the country's foremost experts on Russian arms. Fearing that a sneak attack by American submarine-launched missiles might take Moscow out in 13 minutes, the Soviet leadership had authorized the construction of an automated communication network, reinforced to withstand a nuclear strike. At its heart was a computer system similar to the one in Dr. Strangelove. Its code name was Perimetr. It went fully operational in January 1985. It is still in place."
Wait a minute. Still in place?! How is this possible?
In the endnotes of Smith's book (which turns out to be an illuminating portrait of the Doomsday weapon concept and its cultural implications), I found a reference to a further description of the Perimetr system in a 2003 Washington Post op-ed by Bruce G. Blair, the former Minuteman ICBM launch control officer who first revealed the existence of the program. (When he wrote the op-ed, he was a Brookings fellow; he is now head of the World Security Institute in Washington, a liberal think tank.)
The op-ed offers a far more detailed and chilling picture of Perimetr than the brief mention devoted to it in the book and review:
Die-hard [U.S.] nuclear war planners actually have their eyes on targets in Russia and China, including missile silos and leadership bunkers. For these planners, the Cold War never ended. Their top two candidates [i.e., targets] in Russia are located inside the Yamantau and Kosvinsky mountains in the central and southern Urals.
Both were huge construction projects begun in the late 1970s, when U.S. nuclear firepower took special aim at the Communist Party's leadership complex. Fearing a decapitating strike, the Soviets sent tens of thousands of workers to these remote sites, where U.S. spy satellites spotted them still toiling away in the late 1990s.
Blair sources his information on these command bunkers to "diagrams and notes given to me in the late 1990s by SAC [Strategic Air Command] senior officers," men in charge of targeting our missile and bomber forces.
From them, he paints a Strangelovian picture:
The Yamantau command center is inside a rock quartz mountain, about 3,000 feet straight down from the summit. It is a wartime relocation facility for the top Russian political leadership. It is more a shelter than a command post, because the facility's communications links are relatively fragile. As it turned out, the quartz interferes with radio signals broadcast from inside the mountain.
A quartz nuclear-war mountain! Something phantasmal about it, like a satanic big rock candy mountain. But the quartz mountain melts in comparison with the Perimetr dead-hand system at Kosvinsky.
"Kosvinsky," Blair tells us, "is regarded by U.S. targeteers as the crown jewel of the Russian wartime nuclear command system, because it can communicate through the granite mountain to far-flung Russian strategic forces using very-low-frequency (VLF) radio signals that can burn through a nuclear war environment. The facility is the critical link to Russia's 'dead hand' communications network, designed to ensure semi-automatic retaliation to a decapitating strike."
Of course, there's a world of difference between a "semi-automatic" doomsday device and the totally automatic—beyond human control—doomsday device in Strangelove, something that Blair is careful to note. The Soviet facility does require a human hand for the final fatal push of the button. But Blair believes that the human brain behind that hand has not been programmed to suddenly turn peacenik. And the details of the device are far from reassuring.
"This doomsday apparatus, which became operational in 1984, during the height of the Reagan-era nuclear tensions, is an amazing feat of creative engineering." According to Blair, if Perimetr senses a nuclear explosion in Russian territory and then receives no communication from Moscow, it will assume the incapacity of human leadership in Moscow or elsewhere, and will then grant a single human being deep within the Kosvinsky mountains the authority and capability to launch the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal.
"Kosvinsky came online recently," Blair wrote in 2003, "which could be one explanation for U.S. interest in a new nuclear bunker buster."
Blair also suggested that the Bush administration's recurrent interest in funding the development of nuclear "bunker buster" bombs was at least in some respects designed to give them the capacity to destroy the dead-hand device buried deep in a Kosvinsky bunker, an argument that, if true, would suggest the dead-hand doomsday device was still thought to be operational. And perhaps you've heard something about its deactivation, but I haven't found any evidence of it.
Blair, who has written previously on the extremely rickety structure of presidential nuclear decision-making, believes that the current U.S. contingency plan is itself a "doomsday strategy":
President Bush's nuclear guidance doubtless instructs the Pentagon to plan the destruction of Yamantau and Kosvinsky, along with 2,000 other targets in Russia and hundreds more in China. But such targeting requires very high-yield weapons, typically 10 to 100 times more destructive than the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. We are talking about a doomsday plan in which Yamantau and Kosvinsky are struck as part of an all-out nuclear exchange that would kill hundreds of millions of people.
There's some ambiguity in Blair's use of "doubtless": Does it imply that Bush's "nuclear guidance" includes only one all-out, 2,000-target response, or "merely" the capability of it? But shouldn't we know at least that in a genuinely "doubtless" way?
Blair's primary recent concern is not the prospect of a deliberate, ideological, Cold War-type nuclear war, but accidental war caused by the continued deadly presence of all-too-easily triggered Cold War arsenals. In four fascinating papers on the subject (all available online, and well worth reading), Blair describes the "launch on warning" bias built into our nuclear command structure, and foresees the possibility of a doomsday that results from our attempt to pre-empt their doomsday plan, all of which might be touched off by accident, mistake, or malfunction on either side.
Blair is not a wild-eyed Cassandra raising unsupported suspicions. Colleagues in his field regard him as a serious and cautious scholar raising real questions. Stephen M. Meyer, an expert on the Russian military at MIT, told the Times that Blair "requires of himself a much higher standard of evidence than many people in the intelligence community."
Blair's troubling papers, along with his book The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, serve as a reminder that the illogic, irrationalities, and vulnerability to catastrophic error of our Cold War nuclear war command and control mechanisms were never resolved or fixed, just forgotten when the Cold War ended. His analysis suggests that during the Cold War, we may have escaped an accidental nuclear war by luck rather than policy.
It was Blair who pointed out, in congressional testimony, another continuing problem with nuclear launch posture, this one involving the much-ballyhooed "de-targeting"—a process by which the United States and the former Soviet Union purportedly reduced the risk of accidental nuclear war by insuring that their missiles were—after the fall of the Soviet Union—not still targeted at each other. Blair told Congress that, especially on the Russian side, detargeting was only "cosmetic and symbolic," and easily reversible, implemented in name only.
What drove Blair? I was particularly fascinated by one of Blair's other papers, his more personal "Nuclear Recollections," which might have been called "Memories of a Minuteman Missile Crewman," and describes his period of service in a missile silo at the Malmstrom, Mont., Air Force Base, hundreds of feet beneath the Great Plains.
Especially because I'd been there! Down in one of those silos, under the bleak landscape of the Great Plains (this one in Grand Forks, N.D.), interviewing missile commanders like Blair (for a Harper's story), only a few years after Blair resumed life aboveground and retired.
In the course of talking to Minuteman commanders down in their underground launch capsules, I'd glimpsed what they might be called upon to do. They had the ability to launch from their underground pods up to 50 missiles able to kill 200,000 or 300,000 people each. You do the math.
They certainly had, and it showed beneath their black-humored jokes about coming above ground after a nuclear war and finding "only huge mutant bunny rabbits alive."
They were, thank God, not automatons. As Blair points out, their training system was designed to turn them into automatic button pushers, but the ones I spoke to retained a sharp sense of skeptical individuality. About the gravity of their "mission": killing that many people. And about the sketchy mechanics of it.
One crew member even disclosed to me a flaw in the "command and control" "permissive action" system that was supposed to prevent a madman missile commander from launching his "birds" and starting an apocalyptic nuclear war all by himself. The flaw: the system's susceptibility to the "spoon and string" improvisation.
So much focus has been placed—in film, fiction, and nonfiction—on our supposedly "failsafe" barrier to a lone-madman launch. We'd been told that to launch a missile, two keys must be inserted simultaneously into their slots by two separate launch officers, and that the slots for the keys were located at a sufficient distance from each other that one madman couldn't, say, shoot the other crewman and then use both his arms to twist both the keys simultaneously.
But the missile crewmen I talked to told me they'd figured out a way to defeat that impediment with a spoon and a string. Not that they were planning to do it, but that they knew someone could do it.
You just shoot the other guy and "rig up a thing where you tie a string to one end of a spoon," he told me, "and tie the other end to the guy's key. Then you can sit in your chair and twist your key with one hand while you yank on the spoon with the other hand to twist the other key over."
American ingenuity! Can't beat it for finding a new way to end the world.
I always wondered if I should follow up on what happened after I published this information. (In a piece reprinted in The Secret Parts of Fortune, I assumed the flaw had been fixed somehow, and have long credited myself with saving the world. Kidding!)
I actually turned down an invitation to lecture about such matters from the Army War College in Alabama (because of my peacenik inclinations at the time), and assumed that if they read the article, they must have taken action to save the world from a lone madman with a spoon and string, to whom I'd in effect given instructions for an unauthorized missile launch that could destroy the world. (Hmmm, maybe I'd come close to destroying the world, rather than saving it. Sorry about that.)
But it's clear from Bruce Blair's "Nuclear Recollections" that the experience of holding the lives of tens of millions in his hands when he held those keys left a profound mark on him. I know that when the missile crewmen I was interviewing let me hold the keys, even twist them into the (deactivated) locks, that it had a profound effect on me. The keys to Kingdom Come!
And while I may have abandoned my responsibility for too long, I was grateful that Bruce G. Blair was still on the case, raising the right questions. In fact, he's devoted his subsequent life to raising the alarm about our flawed nuclear alarm and launch system, using what an actual missile commander learned about its dysfunctions and biases.
Blair's work continues and I think it's urgent, now that Putin's "nuclear bombers" are flying again, that Congress re-examine the whole issue and take seriously Blair's warnings about the variations of doomsday we still face.
Pay attention to Blair. You can't count on me to save the world again.

By Ron Rosenbaum