JetBlue Attendant Held on Bail as Lawyer Cites Abuse on Flight
By ANDY NEWMAN AND MICK MEENAN NY TIMES
Mr. Slater on MySpace.Updated, 2:54 p.m. Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who activated an exit chute on a just-landed plane at Kennedy International Airport after a dispute with a passenger Monday and slid to notoriety, did not post the $2,500 bail set by a judge at his arraignment Tuesday morning and remains in custody.
Though friends were said to be trying to raise money for him and a Steven Slater Legal Defense Fund on Facebook has already attracted dozens of members, Mr. Slater was placed on a bus around 2:30 p.m. and driven from the courthouse in Queens towards Rikers Island.
At the arraignment on felony charges of reckless endangerment and criminal mischief in a packed room in the basement of criminal court, Mr. Slater’s court-appointed lawyer, Howard Turman, said that Mr. Slater’s activation of the slide was not reckless. He said Mr. Slater followed the proper procedure for activating the slide, checking out the window first to make sure no one was on the tarmac who could be struck by it.
Mr. Turman, of the Legal Aid Society, offered an account of the flight, JetBlue 1052 from Pittsburgh, that he said justified Mr. Slater’s actions. He told reporters that on the ground in Pittsburgh, a female passenger had been verbally and physically abusive to Mr. Slater when he intervened as she squabbled with a male passenger over access to the overhead luggage compartment.
“The woman initially at Pittsburgh slammed the overhead into his head,” Mr. Turman said of Mr. Slater.
A passenger on the flight, Greg Kanczes, said that he saw a large, fresh-looking gash on Mr. Slater’s forehead at the beginning of the flight. “It was about an inch-and-half long, and it was a big red mark or cut,” Mr. Kanczes said by phone Tuesday. “There was no bandage.”
In previous accounts offered by the authorities, Mr. Slater’s main altercation with the passenger had come at the end of the flight, not the beginning, with the passenger pulling a bag out of the overhead compartment that struck Mr. Slater in the head.
Update The law enforcement authorities have declined to identify the passenger and would not say if she had been interviewed. JetBlue said it could not release the passenger’s name because of privacy rules.
Meanwhile, in an interview on the celebrity-news Web site TMZ, a woman who says she was married to Mr. Slater in the 1990s and remains friendly with him said that she talked to Mr. Slater’s ailing mother after his arrest Monday. The woman, Cynthia Susanne, said that Mr. Slater’s mother told her that Mr. Slater said that the passenger had “maliciously” pulled the compartment door down to hit Mr. Slater in the head, but that the altercation had occurred at the end of the flight.
The version offered by Mr. Turman indicates a longer-simmering animus between the two parties.
Mr. Turman said that on the ground at Kennedy, the tension flared up again. When the female passenger tried to get her bag out of the overhead before the crew had given permission and Mr. Slater instructed her to remain seated, Mr. Turman said, the woman “was outraged and cursing” at Mr. Slater, who “wanted to avoid a conflict.”
Law enforcement officials said that after the passenger cursed at Mr. Slater, he grabbed the intercom, cursed her out, bid passengers goodbye, grabbed a beer and activated the inflatable exit chute. In court, an assistant district attorney, Benjamin Martell, said that Mr. Slater said over the plane’s intercom, “Those of you who have shown dignity and respect for 20 years, have a great ride,” before making his final exit.
When asked why Mr. Slater chose to avoid the conflict by taking the emergency slide, Mr. Turman replied, “It was right there.”

Leaving a Job With a Bus, Not a Slide

By MICHAEL WILSON
How thrilling the ride off the back of a jet and down that inflatable emergency slide must have been for Steven Slater, flight attendant — cold beer in his hand, wind in his hair, the seat of his JetBlue uniform gliding merrily toward the runway. Woo-hoo!
And yet, with his swift arrest at home later Monday, the whole caper has nothing on the infamous take-this-job-and-shove-it run of one William Cimillo. A Bronx bus driver fed up with the daily annoyances and nonsense of it all, Mr. Cimillo, 38, climbed behind the wheel of his bus one morning in 1947 and took a 1,300-mile detour.
“He disappeared for two weeks,” recalled his son Richard Cimillo, a retired firefighter who is now 75. “They picked him up in Hollywood, Fla.”
Mr. Cimillo was married with three sons. He had been working for 16 years at the Surface Transportation Corporation.
“He was tired of driving the bus and throwing the change in the changer and the monotony every single day,” Richard Cimillo explained in an interview on Tuesday. “It was a tough job back then. You had to make change, you had to give out transfers, you had to sweep out the bus. Today, they just sit behind the thing. They don’t touch a dime.”
(To be fair, today’s drivers do much more than sit behind the thing, but we defer to a proud son, whose father died in 1975.)
Back in 1947, there was an interstate all-points bulletin for the missing bus. But no one reported any Cimillo sightings until he himself did the honors. He had apparently run out of money. He sent the office a telegram asking for $50. “I think he was playing the horses down there,” his son said. “They sent down the detectives to pick him up.”
Asked why he did it, the busman would explain: “This New York traffic gets you. It’s like driving in a squirrel cage.” Elsewhere he was quoted in words that Mr. Slater, the flight attendant, would appreciate: He “wanted to get away from everything.”
Richard was 12 at the time. Watching the newsreel before an afternoon matinee with his pals, he got an unwelcome surprise. “All of a sudden this splashed up, my father with the handcuffs and two cops,” he said. “It was tough for me at school. I used to get ribbed a lot. ‘You know who this kid is? The bus driver’s son.’ I used to shy away.”
The elder Mr. Cimillo returned home to an indictment for grand larceny, but he got something else, too: a hero’s welcome. The boys at Surface Transportation voted to host a dance to raise money for his legal fees. The charges were later dropped.
“The public was enormously in his corner,” Richard Cimillo said. “He became a celebrity. He was walking around like a movie star. Networks flew him to California. He went on a couple of shows — ‘Can you guess who this is?’ ”
And, three years later, the highest of honors: a copycat. In 1950, another driver, George Geddes, “fed up with bus driving,” as he later explained, took his Bronx bus on a less extravagant holiday. He stopped off for a few drinks and drove around, winding up in Kingston, N.Y., where he “came to my senses” and hailed a passing priest, who advised him to turn himself in.
EIGHT years after that, in 1958, Elizabeth Taylor and her stepson Michael Todd Jr. announced plans to make a movie about the Cimillo adventure: “Busman’s Holiday.” Ms. Taylor was to play a beauty pageant winner who joined the bus driver on his journey, and was to make her singing debut in the picture. But whatever happens when deals like this fall apart happened — in one account, the script burned in an airplane crash — and the movie was never made. “It seemed to just peter out, and died,” Richard Cimillo said.
Sadie Cimillo, the busman’s wife, forgave him. “Out of the bad came a lot of good,” their son said. “She got a trip to California, which she’d have never had.”
As for William Cimillo, he wound up receiving what could be seen as the ultimate punishment — an outcome that might give Steven Slater chills. They gave him his old job back.
And he took it, without any more stunts.
“You tell somebody a joke the second time,” he told The New York Times in 1960, “and it’s not always so funny.”


Jim Dwyer is on leave.

Amid Heat and Smoke, Deaths Double in Moscow

By ANDREW E. KRAMER NY TIMES
MOSCOW — The daily mortality rate here has nearly doubled in recent days, the city’s chief health official said Monday, singling out the heat as the primary factor and not the culprit most people here suspected: the choking cloud of wildfire smoke.
The acknowledgment at once confirmed a flurry of rumors that bodies were beginning to pile up in morgues and gave rise to a new one in which the authorities, possibly trying to ward off a panicked exodus, were engaging in a Soviet-style whitewash of the health risks of the smoke.
In any event, people are leaving Moscow. By Monday, all train tickets to St. Petersburg, to the north and mostly out of the smoke, had been sold out, Vesti state television reported.
After denying statements from morgue workers and doctors last week that the morgues were filling, the health official, Andrei Seltsovsky, did an about-face. Speaking at a City Council meeting that was broadcast on national television, he said that the daily death toll had risen from an average of between 360 and 380 to “around 700.” Ambulance calls were up by about a quarter, he said, because of increases in heart and lung ailments and strokes.
“This is no secret,” Mr. Seltsovsky said, seeming to acknowledge that the previous official silence on the death toll had been setting off rumors of a cover-up. “Everybody thinks we’re making secrets out of it.”
“Abroad,” he added, “people drown like flies, and no one asks questions.”
The questions had been mounting in Moscow since Thursday, when the state Russian Information Agency reported a sharp rise in bodies arriving at city morgues. The Internet swirled with posts saying that the mortality rate had as much as quintupled.
Mr. Seltsovsky called those reports “outrageous” at the time, and he told the Interfax news agency that “there is no need to sow panic.” He said hospital admittances and ambulance calls were about normal.
On Friday, Russia’s chief public health official, Gennady Onishchenko, reinforced this message by denying any increase in Moscow’s mortality rates. “I am not going to confirm the alarmist data on the Internet,” he said.
But on Monday, a posting by a Russian doctor on a social networking site said that the refrigerator in the hospital’s morgue had run out of space, and that bodies were being laid out on the floor.
Throughout the day, ambulances could be seen weaving slowly through the eerily light traffic on Moscow’s thoroughfares, their emergency lights piercing the thick smoke, which had lifted somewhat by evening. And with the stultifying heat, conditions were reported to be deteriorating in hospitals. The Web site of the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper reported that one maternity ward provided air-conditioning in the doctors’ offices but not the delivery rooms.
Russia’s chief weather forecaster said there was no relief in sight from the hot weather, though an expected change in wind direction Wednesday might thin the smoke cloud.
To the east of the capital, meanwhile, Russian officials were compelled to declare a state of emergency at a nuclear research center, Snezhinsk in the Ural Mountains, where the surrounding forests were dry and fire-prone.
Earlier this month, they had cautioned that fires might stir up fallout from Chernobyl if they burned into contaminated areas, potentially lacing the smoke with radioactive particles.
Russian health officials said early on that the effect of the fine particles and carbon monoxide in Moscow’s smoky atmosphere was comparable to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. In other contexts, studies have shown that peat moss — the source of much of the smoke — concentrates heavy metals from the environment, which are released in its smoke, though it was unclear whether this was the case with the bogs burning outside Moscow.
Independent doctors said a rise in mortality was to be expected and was hardly exceptional for a heat wave in a northern city ill equipped for such temperatures, even without accounting for the deleterious effect of the smoke cloud. Temperatures have been in the high 90s for weeks.
But older Muscovites said the delayed official acknowledgment of the mortality rate recalled the Soviet tendency to whitewash bad news, tragedy or disaster. In 1986, for instance, Soviet health authorities denied for days that radiation had leaked from the Chernobyl nuclear plant, even allowing schoolchildren to march in nearby May Day parades so as not to depart from the approved story line.

Unemployment rate holds steady at 9.5 percent
Tom Abate, SF Chronicle
The United States lost 131,000 jobs in July, but the unemployment rate held steady at 9.5 percent as many Americans gave up looking for work, the Labor Department said Friday.
The weak report, along with data showing a continuing decline in credit card purchases, suggest that the consumer-driven U.S. economy is slowing in a way that threatens to undermine the recovery.
"A double dip (recession) is not likely, but not out of the question," said Sung Wohn Sohn, an economics professor at California State University Channel Islands.
Economist Nigel Gault from IHS Global Insight found a few positives in Friday's report. The average workweek increased one hour. Average earnings rose 4 cents to $22.59 per hour. These data indicate that the economy is still growing, just not fast enough to put 14.6 million jobless Americans back to work.
Sylvia Allegretto, an economist with the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley, noted that the economy has lost nearly 8 million jobs since the recession began, and 10 percent of those losses have occurred in California.
An Associated Press analysis of federal data suggests that the economy is creating not just fewer jobs but poorer jobs.
So far this year, the economy has created 117,000 high-paying jobs in fields such as construction, manufacturing, engineering and law, compared with 513,000 jobs for service-sector occupations like $9-per-hour cashiers and $13-per-hour hair dressers, AP reported.
With midterm congressional elections coming in November, the White House has been defending its economic record by arguing that its stimulus program prevented the mess that it inherited from the Bush administration from plunging the world into a second depression.
"That didn't happen," Labor Secretary Linda Solis said Friday, crediting "the strong and immediate action President Obama and Congress took."
House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, belittled Democratic spending programs "that have led to fewer jobs and more debt," and put pressure on Obama to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for high-income Americans, a category that includes many small-business owners.
The U.S. jobs deficit is stunning. Economists at the Brookings Institution said Friday that if the United States started adding about 200,000 jobs per month, it would take 11 1/2 years to bring total employment, as a fraction of the working-age population, back to where it stood before the recession.
The experts are divided about how to respond to these challenges, said Mark Zandi, chief economist with Moody's Economy.com.
He endorsed Democratic programs like the $34 billion extension of unemployment benefits and the proposed $26 billion in federal aid to save state jobs as measures that would pump important sums into the U.S. economy.
But Zandi agreed with Republicans that now is the wrong time to raise taxes on high-income earners as Obama has suggested will be necessary to fight the federal budget deficit.
Friday's report coincided with the resignation of Christina Romer, chairwoman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. The former UC Berkeley professor said she wanted to return to teaching, and friends said the Romers - her husband, David, is also a UC Berkeley economics professor - want their teenage son to attend high school in the Bay Area.
But Romer has also been the target of Republican ridicule for her prediction early in the administration that the stimulus program would keep unemployment below 8 percent.
More recently, Republicans cited an economics paper that she co-authored with her husband as vindicating the GOP contention that ending Bush-era tax cuts would dampen economic activity.
Romer has defended her stimulus position by saying the economy was worse than had been imagined before Obama took office, and said her tax paper did not oppose a tax increase for top earners.
Romer has been mentioned as a possible replacement for San Francisco Federal Reserve President Janet Yellen, who has been tapped to become vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve in Washington.
Chronicle Washington Bureau writer Carolyn Lochhead contributed to this report.
E-mail Tom Abate at tabate@sfchronicle.com.

Mitch Miller, Maestro of the Singalong, Dies at 99

By RICHARD SEVERO
Mitch Miller, an influential record producer who became a hugely popular recording artist and an unlikely television star a half century ago by leading a choral group in familiar old songs and inviting people to sing along, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 99.
His daughter Margaret Miller Reuther confirmed the death Monday morning, saying her father had died after a short illness at Lenox Hill Hospital. Mr. Miller lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Miller, a Rochester native who was born on the Fourth of July, had been an accomplished oboist and was still a force in the recording industry when he came up with the idea of recording old standards with a chorus of some two dozen male voices and printing the lyrics on album covers.
The “Sing Along With Mitch” album series, which began in 1958, was an immense success, finding an eager audience among older listeners looking for an alternative to rock ’n’ roll. Mitch Miller and the Gang serenaded them with chestnuts like “Home on the Range,” “That Old Gang of Mine,” “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”
When the concept was adapted for television in 1961, with the lyrics appearing at the bottom of the screen, Mr. Miller, with his beaming smile and neatly trimmed mustache and goatee, became a national celebrity.
By then he had established himself as a hit maker for Columbia Records and a career shaper for singers like Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, Johnny Mathis, Doris Day, Patti Page and Frankie Laine. First at Mercury Records and then at Columbia, he helped define American popular music in the postwar, pre-rock era, carefully matching singers with songs and choosing often unorthodox but almost always catchy instrumental accompaniment.
Mr. Bennett’s career took off after Mr. Miller persuaded him to record the ballad “Because of You,” backing him with a lush orchestral arrangement by Percy Faith. It reached No. 1 on the pop charts in 1951.
Ms. Clooney was making a mere $50 a recording session when Mr. Miller asked her to record “Come On-a My House,” an oddity based on an Armenian folk melody written by the playwright and novelist William Saroyan and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian, who later went on to create Alvin and the Chipmunks. Ms. Clooney was dubious. “I damn near fell on the floor,” she recalled.
They had a heated argument. But in the end Ms. Clooney agreed to record the song, and it became a giant hit, establishing her as a major artist.
“Nothing happened to me until I met Mitch,” she later said.
By the end of the 1950s Mr. Miller’s eye and ear for talent and songs had been critical in making Columbia the top-selling record company in the nation.
Mr. Miller was the Midas of novelty music, storming the charts with records like Jimmy Boyd’s “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus and providing singers with unusual instrumental backing: a harpsichord for Ms. Clooney, French horns for Guy Mitchell. One of his earliest hits, “Mule Train,” was recorded by the muscular-voiced Frankie Laine with three electric guitars, and Mr. Miller himself using a wood block to simulate the snapping of a whip.
Mr. Miller was a studio innovator. Along with the guitarist Les Paul and a few others, he helped pioneer overdubbing, the technique by which different tracks are laid over one another to produce a richer effect; he employed it memorably with Ms. Page, whose close-harmony “duets” with herself became her signature. He also achieved what he called a sonic “halo” on numerous recordings by the use of what came to be called an echo chamber — actually an effect an engineer produced by placing a speaker and a microphone in a tiled restroom.
One Miller specialty was developing crossovers from country to pop. He had particular success with Hank Williams’s songs: he transformed “Hey, Good Lookin’ ” into a hit for Mr. Laine and Jo Stafford and did the same for Mr. Bennett (“Cold, Cold Heart”), Ms. Clooney (“Half as Much”) and Ms. Stafford on her own (“Jambalaya”).
His touch was not always sure. When he had bagpipes accompany Dinah Shore on a song called “Scottish Samba” the result was, in Mr. Miller’s own words, “a dog.” And probably the nadir of Frank Sinatra’s recording career came after Mr. Miller left Mercury and took over pop production at Columbia in 1950.
Sinatra complained that Mr. Miller forced him to record inferior material like “Bim Bam Baby,” “Tennessee Newsboy” and, perhaps most notoriously, “Mama Will Bark,” a 1951 novelty duet with the television personality Dagmar that included dog imitations. Sinatra even sent a telegram to a Congressional subcommittee complaining that Mr. Miller had denied him “freedom of selection.” (Sinatra did sometimes veto Mr. Miller’s song choices. When he refused to record “The Roving Kind” and “My Heart Cries for You,” Mr. Miller replaced him in the studio with a young singer named Guy Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell’s versions of both those songs became hits and made him a star.)

Interviewed by Time magazine in 1951, Mr. Miller was less than enthusiastic about the kind of gimmicky pop records that had become his specialty. “I wouldn’t buy that stuff for myself,” he said. “There’s no real artistic satisfaction in this job. I satisfy my musical ego elsewhere.”
Mr. Miller came up with the idea for his singalong albums in 1958, drawing on a repertory that ordinary people had sung in churches and parlors for decades. By the time he recorded the first “Sing Along With Mitch” album, he had already had success with this approach on the singles chart, scoring a No. 1 hit in 1955 with an arrangement of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
Mitch Miller and the Gang eventually recorded more than 20 long-playing discs, many of which made the Top 40. By 1966 they had sold about 17 million copies.
In 1960 his singalong concept was given a one-time television test on NBC. The response was so favorable that “Sing Along With Mitch” became a mainstay of family television, running — every other week at first, then weekly — from 1961 to 1964, then returning in reruns in the summer of 1966. Viewers were encouraged to sing along and instructed to “follow the bouncing ball” — a large dot that bounced from word to word as the lyrics were superimposed on the screen. Among the singers featured, in addition to the male chorus, was a young Leslie Uggams.
The ratings were good, but the critics were mostly unimpressed. Brooks Atkinson, writing in The New York Times, suggested in 1962 that “Sing Along With Mitch” might best be viewed with the sound turned off.
Even at the singalongs’ height, many Americans considered them hopelessly corny. That sense only intensified as a younger generation came of age in the 1960s and musical tastes changed. There were news reports that shopping malls had begun piping Mitch Miller music on their sound systems as a way to discourage teenagers from congregating. Years later, in 1993, when David Koresh and members of his Branch Davidian cult were holed up in their compound in Waco, Tex., F.B.I. agents tried to flush them out by blasting “Sing Along With Mitch” Christmas carols.
By the time Mr. Miller’s television show left the air, his era of popular music had largely ended with the emergence of rock. He was sympathetic to blues and folk music and had one of his biggest hits in 1951 with Johnnie Ray’s “Cry,” a histrionic performance often cited as a rock ’n’ roll precursor. He had also tried to sign Elvis Presley for Columbia before being outbid by RCA. But he turned down an opportunity to sign Buddy Holly, and he was outspoken in his dislike of rock ’n’ roll in general. “It’s not music,” he was quoted as saying, “it’s a disease.” When Bob Dylan, soon to become one of rock’s most influential artists, joined the Columbia roster in 1961, it was not Mr. Miller but another label executive, John Hammond, who signed him.
Mr. Miller told Audio magazine in 1985 that his opposition to rock ’n’ roll had been based more on principle than on taste. The so-called payola scandal, in which record companies were found to have paid disc jockeys to play rock ’n’ roll records, had dismayed him, he said. He also complained about “British-accented youths ripping off black American artists and, because they’re white, being accepted by the American audience” — although that hardly explained his opposition to rock ’n’ roll in the ’50s, a decade before the advent of the Beatles and other British bands.
His wife of 65 years, the former Frances Alexander, died in 2000.
In addition to his daughter Ms. Miller Reuther, Mr. Miller is survived by another daughter, Andrea Miller; a son, Mitchell; two brothers, Leon and Joseph; two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Mitchell William Miller was born on July 4, 1911, in Rochester, one of five children of Abram Calmen Miller, an immigrant from Russia and a wrought-iron worker, and Hinda Rosenblum Miller, a former seamstress.
Mr. Miller’s own musical career began with the oboe. The composer Virgil Thomson called him “an absolutely first-rate oboist — one of the two or three great ones at that time in the world.”
He took up the oboe almost by chance. Seeking to join the orchestra at Washington Junior High School in Rochester, he showed up late for the tryouts and found it was the only one of the instruments, offered free to students, that had not been claimed.
By the age of 15 Mr. Miller was playing with the Syracuse Symphony. After high school he went to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, graduating cum laude in 1932.
He played with the Rochester Philharmonic and then made his way to New York City, where he played oboe for a season under David Mannes in concerts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He later got a job with the CBS Symphony, performing with it during the notorious Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in 1938.
He also played in orchestras under Andre Kostelanetz and Percy Faith and performed in another that accompanied George Gershwin on a concert tour as a pianist. When Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” opened on Broadway in 1935, Mr. Miller was in the pit orchestra. He continued to play the oboe after he became a record producer, most notably on the recordings the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker made with a string orchestra.
Mr. Miller went to work for Mercury Records in the late ’40s, initially as a producer of classical music and then as head of artists and repertory in the pop division. In 1950, at the invitation of a former Eastman classmate, Goddard Lieberson, executive vice president of Columbia Records, he took the equivalent position there. In the early 1950s he was also musical director of Little Golden Records, which made widely popular recordings for children.
After rock came to dominate the record business and the singalong craze ran its course, Mr. Miller left Columbia and ventured into the Broadway theater, with limited success. He produced “Here’s Where I Belong,” a 1968 musical based on John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden,” which closed after one performance. He was later involved in the production of several other Broadway shows, few of them hits. In the 1980s and ’90s he was a frequent guest conductor of symphony orchestras.
“What pleased me the most,” he said in an interview with The Times in 1981, “was a fellow who came up to me after a concert in Chicago and said, ‘You know, there’s nobody in this whole country who hasn’t been touched by your music in some way.’
“That really made me feel good.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 2, 2010
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the number of years Mr. Miller was married to his wife. It was 65 years, not 74.

Death toll rises to 33 as Russian wild fires continue to rage

Mikhail Metzel/AP
Russian authorities struggled to control hundreds of deadly wild fires across large swaths of Russia at the weekend.
With no sign of a let-up in record high temperatures, there were fears that the blazes would continue to spread.
Ekho Moskvy radio said that 770 fires were out of control in various regions. The discovery of two more bodies in a burnt-out village near Nizhny Novgorod, central Russia, brought the number of dead to 33, including three firefighters, the Ministry for Emergency Situations said.
Speaking at the weekend, President Medvedev called the heatwave and fires “a natural disaster of the kind that probably only happens every 30 or 40 years”.
Thousands of homes, many of them built of timber, have gone up in smoke and crops have withered in the fields.
Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, criticised regional officials for failing to foresee trouble after weeks of searing heat.
“Not everything was done in a timely way,” he said, “but now is not the time for squabbling.”
Mr Putin put the total loss of homes at 1,257 and assured evacuees their houses would be rebuilt by winter.
Yet the emergency looks set to get worse before it gets better. Russia, with its continental climate, always has hot summers but this year has seen freak temperatures. Temperatures of 40C (104F) are forecast for the coming week and the Emergency Situations Ministry is warning of an “extreme risk” of more forest fires.
Blazes in the Far East had tripled over the last 24 hours and covered 100,000 hectares, (247,000 acres) Itar-Tass news agency said.
Vladimir Stepanov, chief of the Emergency Ministry’s National Crisis Centre, told Mr Putin that fires had spread in the Urals, Volga and Central regions.
“The situation has worsened … because of dry and windy weather,” he said, adding that 240,000 firefighters and troops, backed by aircraft, were battling the flames.
Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, has called on Orthodox believers to pray for an end to the heat wave.
Reports said firefighters were experiencing the toughest conditions in the Voronezh, Ryazan, Vladimir and Moscow regions. These areas are more populated than the Far East and close to the capital itself. In the Moscow area, seven people have died so far.
Just as there is no smoke without fire, so there is no fire without smoke. Moscow is currently blanketed in smog, described by environmental health officials as being 10 times above usual pollution levels. The elderly and those with breathing problems have been advised to stay at home.
During the heatwave, scores of Russians have also drowned, in many cases after swimming in ponds or rivers while drunk.
In parks, Muscovites seek relief in the fountains. There are waiting lists to buy air conditioners and in most shops, electric fans have sold out.
“I never thought I would say this but I am praying for winter,” said one Muscovite. “This heat is like an illness. I crawl from the divan to the shower and back to the divan. I don’t have strength for anything more

A Sin and a Shame

By BOB HERBERT NY TIMES
The treatment of workers by American corporations has been worse — far more treacherous — than most of the population realizes. There was no need for so many men and women to be forced out of their jobs in the downturn known as the great recession.
Many of those workers were cashiered for no reason other than outright greed by corporate managers. And that cruel, irresponsible, shortsighted policy has resulted in widespread human suffering and is doing great harm to the economy.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Andrew Sum, an economics professor and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. “Not only did they throw all these people off the payrolls, they also cut back on the hours of the people who stayed on the job.”
As Professor Sum studied the data coming in from the recession, he realized that the carnage that occurred in the workplace was out of proportion to the economic hit that corporations were taking. While no one questions the severity of the downturn — the worst of the entire post-World War II period — the economic data show that workers to a great extent were shamefully exploited.
The recession officially started in December 2007. From the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009, real aggregate output in the U.S., as measured by the gross domestic product, fell by about 2.5 percent. But employers cut their payrolls by 6 percent.
In many cases, bosses told panicked workers who were still on the job that they had to take pay cuts or cuts in hours, or both. And raises were out of the question. The staggering job losses and stagnant wages are central reasons why any real recovery has been so difficult.
“They threw out far more workers and hours than they lost output,” said Professor Sum. “Here’s what happened: At the end of the fourth quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go down by $122 billion.”
That kind of disconnect, said Mr. Sum, had never been seen before in all the decades since World War II.
In short, the corporations are making out like bandits. Now they’re sitting on mountains of cash and they still are not interested in hiring to any significant degree, or strengthening workers’ paychecks.
Productivity tells the story. Increases in the productivity of American workers are supposed to go hand in hand with improvements in their standard of living. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work. That’s how the economic pie expands, and we’re all supposed to have a fair share of that expansion.
Corporations have now said the hell with that. Economists believe the nation may have emerged, technically, from the recession early in the summer of 2009. As Professor Sum writes in a new study for the labor market center, this period of economic recovery “has seen the most lopsided gains in corporate profits relative to real wages and salaries in our history.”
Worker productivity has increased dramatically, but the workers themselves have seen no gains from their increased production. It has all gone to corporate profits. This is unprecedented in the postwar years, and it is wrong.
Having taken everything for themselves, the corporations are so awash in cash they don’t know what to do with it all. Citing a recent article from Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Professor Sum noted that in July cash at the nation’s nonfinancial corporations stood at $1.84 trillion, a 27 percent increase over early 2007. Moody’s has pointed out that as a percent of total company assets, cash has reached a level not seen in the past half-century.
Executives are delighted with this ill-gotten bonanza. Charles D. McLane Jr. is the chief financial officer of Alcoa, which recently experienced a turnaround in profits and a 22 percent increase in revenue. As The Times reported this week, Mr. McLane assured investors that his company was in no hurry to bring back 37,000 workers who were let go since 2008. The plan is to minimize rehires wherever possible, he said, adding, “We’re not only holding head-count levels, but are also driving restructuring this quarter that will result in further reductions.”
There can be no robust recovery as long as corporations are intent on keeping idle workers sidelined and squeezing the pay of those on the job.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Germany and Japan, because of a combination of government and corporate policies, suffered far less worker dislocation in the recession than the U.S. Until we begin to value our workers, and understand the critical importance of employment to a thriving economy, we will continue to see our standards of living decline.

The Good News About Mel Gibson

By FRANK RICH NY TIMES
FOR Fourth of July weekend fireworks, even Macy’s couldn’t top the spittle-spangled eruptions of Mel Gibson. The clandestine recordings of his serial audio assaults on his gal pal were instant Web and cable-TV sensations — at once a worthy rival to Hollywood’s official holiday releases and a compelling sequel to his fabled anti- Semitic rant of 2006. A true showman, Gibson offered vitriol for nearly all tastes, aiming his profane fusillade at women, blacks and Latinos alike. The invective was tied together by a domestic violence subplot worthy of “Lethal Weapon.” There was even a surprise comic coda, courtesy of Whoopi Goldberg, who, alone among Gibson’s showbiz peers, used her television platform on “The View” to defend her buddy’s good character.
The Gibson tapes — in plain English and not requiring the subtitles of some of the star’s recent spectacles — are a particularly American form of schadenfreude. There’s little we enjoy more than watching a pampered zillionaire icon (Gibson’s production company is actually named Icon) brought low. The story would end there — just another tidy morality tale in the profuse annals of Hollywood self-destruction from Fatty Arbuckle to Lindsay Lohan — were it not for Gibson’s unique back story.
Six years ago he was not merely an A-list movie star with a penchant for drinking and boorish behavior but also a powerful and canonized figure in the political and cultural pantheon of American conservatism. That he has reached rock bottom tells us nothing new about Gibson. He was the same talented, nasty, bigoted blowhard then that he is today. But his fall says a lot about the changes in our country over the past six years. We shouldn’t take those changes for granted. We should take stock — and celebrate. They are good news.
Does anyone remember 2004? It seems a civilization ago. That less-than-vintage year was in retrospect the nadir of the American war over “values.” The kickoff fracas was Janet Jackson’s breast-baring “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl, which prompted a new crackdown against televised “indecency” by the Federal Communications Commission. By December Fox News and its allies were fomenting hysteria about a supposed war on Christmas, with Newt Gingrich warning of a nefarious secular plot “to abolish the word Christmas” altogether and Jerry Falwell attacking Mayor Michael Bloomberg for using the euphemism “holiday tree” at the annual tree-lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center. In between these discrete culture wars came a presidential election in which the Bush-Rove machine tried to whip up evangelical turnout by sowing panic over gay marriage.
It was into that tinderbox of America 2004 that Gibson tossed his self-financed and self-directed movie about the crucifixion, “The Passion of the Christ.” The epic was timed to detonate in the nation’s multiplexes on Ash Wednesday, after one of the longest and most divisive promotional campaigns in Hollywood history.
Gibson is in such disgrace today that it’s hard to fathom all the fuss he and his biblical epic engendered back then. The commotion began with the revelation that his father, Hutton, was a prominent and vociferous Holocaust denier and that both father and son were proselytizers for a splinter sect of Roman Catholicism that rejected the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, including the lifting of the “Christ-killers” libel from the Jews. Jewish leaders and writers understandably worried that “The Passion” might be as anti-Semitic as the Passion plays of old. Gibson’s response was to hold publicity screenings for the right-wing media and political establishment, including a select Washington soiree attended by notables like Peggy Noonan, Kate O’Beirne and Linda Chavez. (The only nominal Jew admitted was Matt Drudge.) The attendees then used their various pulpits to assure the world that the movie was divine — and certainly nothing that should trouble Jews. “I can report it is free of anti-Semitism,” vouchsafed Robert Novak after his “private viewing.”

Uninvited Jewish writers (like me) who kept raising questions about the unreleased film and its exclusionary rollout were vilified for crucifying poor Mel. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News asked a reporter from Variety “respectfully” if Gibson was being victimized because “the major media in Hollywood and a lot of the secular press is controlled by Jewish people.” Such was the ugly atmosphere of the time that these attempts at intimidation were remarkably successful. Many mainstream media organizations did puff pieces on the star or his film, lest they be labeled “anti-Christian” when an ascendant religious right was increasingly flexing its muscles in the corridors of power in Washington.
Both George and Laura Bush expressed eagerness to see “The Passion.” There were reports (spread by the film’s producer and never confirmed) that the very frail Pope John Paul II had given a thumbs-up after his own screening at the Vatican. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which would publish several encomiums to “The Passion,” ran a sneak preview likening the film to “a documentary by Caravaggio.” Even The New Yorker ran a deferential profile of Gibson — in which the star said he wanted to kill me and my dog (though, alas, I had no dog) and have my “intestines on a stick.” Far more troubling was the article’s whitewashing of Gibson’s father’s record as a Holocaust denier. In the America of 2004, Mel Gibson, box office king and conservative culture hero, was invincible.
Once “The Passion” could be seen by ticket buyers — who would reward it with a $370 million domestic take (behind only “Shrek 2” and “Spider-Man 2” that year) — the truth could no longer be spun by Gibson’s claque. The movie was nakedly anti-Semitic, to the extreme that the Temple priests were all hook-nosed Shylocks and Fagins with rotten teeth. It was also ludicrously violent — a homoerotic “exercise in lurid sadomasochism,” as Christopher Hitchens described it then, for audiences who “like seeing handsome young men stripped and flayed alive over a long period of time.” Nonetheless, many of the same American pastors who routinely inveighed against show-business indecency granted special dispensation to their young congregants to attend this R-rated fleshfest.
It seems preposterous in retrospect that a film as bigoted and noxious as “The Passion” had so many reverent defenders in high places in 2004. Once Gibson, or at least the subconscious Gibson, baldly advertised his anti-Semitism with his obscene tirade during a 2006 D.U.I. incident in Malibu, his old defenders had no choice but to peel off. Today you never hear conservatives mention their embrace of “The Passion” back then — if they mention Gibson at all. (Fox News has barely covered the new tapes.) But it isn’t just Gibson who has been discredited. Even as he self-immolated, so did many of the moral paragons who had rallied around him as a culture-war martyr.
Take, for instance, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals. During the “Passion” wars, he had tried to blackmail Gibson’s critics by publicly noting that Christians are “a major source of support for Israel” and that Jewish leaders would be “shortsighted” to “risk alienating two billion Christians over a movie.” That evangelical leader was Ted Haggard, the Colorado megachurch pastor since brought down by a male prostitute. Gibson’s only outspoken rabbinical defender in 2004, the far-right Daniel Lapin, would be sullied in the scandals surrounding the subsequently jailed Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. William Donohue of the Catholic League — who defended Gibson in 2004 by saying, “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular” — has been reduced these days to the marginal role of attacking The Times for reporting on priestly child abuse.
The cultural wave that crested with “The Passion” was far bigger than Gibson. He was simply a symptom and beneficiary of a moment when the old religious right and its political and media shills were riding high. In 2010, the American ayatollahs’ ranks have been depleted by death (Falwell), retirement (James Dobson) and rent boys (too many to name). What remains of that old guard is stigmatized by its identification with poisonous crusades, from the potentially lethal antihomosexuality laws in Uganda to the rehabilitation campaign for the “born-again” serial killer David Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”) in America.
Conservative America’s new signature movement, the Tea Party, has its own extremes, but it shuns culture-war battles. It even remained mum when a federal judge in Massachusetts struck down the anti-same-sex marriage Defense of Marriage Act this month. As the conservative commentator Kyle Smith recently wrote in The New York Post, the “demise of Reagan-era groups like the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority is just as important” as the rise of the Tea Party. “The morality armies have failed to inspire their children to join the crusade,” he concluded, and not unhappily. The right, too, is subject to generational turnover.
As utter coincidence would have it, the revelation of the latest Gibson tapes was followed last week by the news that a federal appeals court, in a 3-0 ruling, had thrown out the indecency rules imposed by the F.C.C. after Janet Jackson’s 2004 “wardrobe malfunction.” The death throes of Mel Gibson’s career feel less like another Hollywood scandal than the last gasps of an American era.

Young twins drown in Lynnfield
By John M. Guilfoil and Sydney Lupkin Boston Globe

LYNNFIELD — Two toddlers, identical twin sisters, fell into the swimming pool behind their family’s home and drowned yesterday morning, leaving their parents in shock and devastating rescuers and neighbors.
Firefighters arrived at 5 Stagecoach Lane minutes after receiving a 911 call at around 10:20 a.m. and administered CPR on Veronica and Angelina Andreottola. The 2 1/2-year-olds were taken to Union Hospital in Lynn, where they were pronounced dead, authorities said yesterday.
The circumstances surrounding the drownings are under investigation by Lynnfield police and the Essex district attorney’s office, but at a news conference yesterday afternoon, Police Chief Joseph Dunn said the drownings appear to be accidental. Dunn said the girls “tragically, somehow, some way,’’ got themselves where they shouldn’t have been.
Dunn said a retractable cover was on the pool but not all the way, leaving some of the water exposed.
In a phone interview, police Sergeant Sean Donovan said that an early review indicated that the toddlers may have pushed a button to open the electric pool cover, but that remained under investigation.
“A tragic accident occurred here where two little babies are now deceased,’’ he said.
Getting details on how the drownings occurred was difficult for police because family members were in shock, police said.
“As you can certainly imagine, we didn’t get very far,’’ Donovan said.
The twins’ father told police that “his world was ending,’’ and their mother appeared dazed, he said. The girls’ mother, Crystal Andreottola, was home at the time, but their father, Anthony, was not, according to a police statement.
The family lives in a mansion in a secluded part of town, set back from Route 1. The brick house is at the front of the lot, with a large yard to the side and rear. In the yard is a large jungle gym, with three slides and a basketball hoop. An inflatable ball sat on the grass near a tall metal fence surrounding the property.
A stream of people came and went from the home throughout the day yesterday, but two men turned away a Globe reporter and said the family would not be issuing a statement.
Neighbors said the family also has a young son.
“I can’t believe this. What a terrible tragedy,’’ said one neighbor, who lives a few houses down but did not want to give his name.
Other neighbors on the small street declined to comment or asked not to have their names published.
Lynnfield Fire Chief Thomas P. Bogart said yesterday that firefighters arrived within six minutes and had the toddlers in the ambulance, ready for transport, within three minutes of their arrival.
“This is painful. How do you prepare for 2 1/2-year-old girls?’’ Bogart said outside a firehouse near the home yesterday. “You can’t prepare for this.’’
The dozen or so firefighters, paramedics, and police officers who responded to the home were immediately taken off duty yesterday as stress and grief counselors from the Metro Boston Critical Incident Stress Management Team arrived in Lynnfield.
Bogart said the rescuers were heartbroken.
“Some are doing better than others,’’ Bogart said. “But you can’t always go by that. Some people seem OK, and they may be OK today and tomorrow, but maybe not at some point in the future.’’

John M. Guilfoil can be reached at jguilfoil@globe.com.

The Gospel of Mel Gibson

By DAVID BROOKS NY TIMES
Let us enter, you and I, into the moral universe of the modern narcissist.
The narcissistic person is marked by a grandiose self-image, a constant need for admiration, and a general lack of empathy for others. He is the keeper of a sacred flame, which is the flame he holds to celebrate himself.
There used to be theories that deep down narcissists feel unworthy, but recent research doesn’t support this. Instead, it seems, the narcissist’s self-directed passion is deep and sincere.
His self-love is his most precious possession. It is the holy center of all that is sacred and right. He is hypersensitive about anybody who might splatter or disregard his greatness. If someone treats him slightingly, he perceives that as a deliberate and heinous attack. If someone threatens his reputation, he regards this as an act of blasphemy. He feels justified in punishing the attacker for this moral outrage.
And because he plays by different rules, and because so much is at stake, he can be uninhibited in response. Everyone gets angry when they feel their self-worth is threatened, but for the narcissist, revenge is a holy cause and a moral obligation, demanding overwhelming force.
Mel Gibson seems to fit the narcissist model to an eerie degree. The recordings that purport to show him unloading on his ex-lover, Oksana Grigorieva, make for painful listening, and are only worthy of attention because these days it pays to be a student of excessive self-esteem, if only to understand the world around.
The story line seems to be pretty simple. Gibson was the great Hollywood celebrity who left his wife to link with the beautiful young acolyte. Her beauty would not only reflect well on his virility, but he would also work to mold her, Pygmalion-like, into a pop star.
After a time, she apparently grew tired of being a supporting actor in the drama of his self-magnification and tried to go her own way. This act of separation was perceived as an assault on his status and thus a venal betrayal of the true faith.
It is fruitless to analyze her end of the phone conversations because she knows she is taping them. But the voice on the other end is primal and searing.
That man is like a boxer unleashing one verbal barrage after another. His breathing is heavy. His vocal muscles are clenched. His guttural sounds burst out like hammer blows.
He pummels her honor, her intelligence, her womanhood, her maternal skills and everything else. Imagine every crude and derogatory word you’ve ever heard. They come out in waves. He’s not really arguing with her, just trying to pulverize her into nothingness, like some corruption that has intertwined itself into his being and now must be expunged.
It is striking how morally righteous he is, without ever bothering to explain what exactly she has done wrong. It is striking how quickly he reverts to the vocabulary of purity and disgust. It is striking how much he believes he deserves. It is striking how much he seems to derive satisfaction from his own righteous indignation. Rage was the original subject of Western literature. It was the opening theme of Homer’s “Iliad.” Back then, anger was perceived as a source of pleasure. “Sweeter wrath is by far than the honeycomb dripping with sweetener,” Homer declared. And the man on the other end of Grigorieva’s phone seems to derive some vengeful satisfaction from asserting his power and from purging his frustration — from the sheer act of domination.
And the sad fact is that Gibson is not alone. There can’t be many people at once who live in a celebrity environment so perfectly designed to inflate self-love. Even so, a surprising number of people share the trait. A study conducted at the National Institutes of Health suggested that 6.2 percent of Americans had suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, along with 9.4 percent of people in their 20s.
In their book, “The Narcissism Epidemic,” Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell cite data to suggest that at least since the 1970s, we have suffered from national self-esteem inflation. They cite my favorite piece of sociological data: In 1950, thousands of teenagers were asked if they considered themselves an “important person.” Twelve percent said yes. In the late 1980s, another few thousand were asked. This time, 80 percent of girls and 77 percent of boys said yes.
That doesn’t make them narcissists in the Gibson mold, but it does suggest that we’ve entered an era where self-branding is on the ascent and the culture of self-effacement is on the decline.
Every week brings a new assignment in our study of self-love. And at the top of the heap, the Valentino of all self-lovers, there is the former Braveheart. If he really were that great, he’d have figured out that the lady probably owns a tape recorder.

CNN Nears Deal to Fill King’s Slot

By BRIAN STELTER and BILL CARTER
Piers Morgan, the bad-cop judge on the hit NBC show “America’s Got Talent,” is poised to take over Larry King’s coveted time slot on CNN, a move smoothed by an imminent deal between the two media giants that own the channels, NBC Universal and Turner Broadcasting.
This week, NBC signaled that it was willing to share Mr. Morgan with CNN. That decision frees Mr. Morgan to negotiate directly with CNN, and according to three people involved in the delicate maneuvering between the companies, a contract could be signed within a few days.
If completed, the deal would vault Mr. Morgan, a native of Britain, into the top tier of television interviewers, alongside people like Oprah Winfrey, Barbara Walters and Katie Couric. It will also demonstrate that CNN thinks there is still room in prime time for long-form interviews with public servants and starlets, a stark contrast to the partisan pundits on its higher-rated rivals, Fox News and MSNBC.
Mr. King announced two weeks ago that he was ending “Larry King Live” this fall, creating a huge vacancy for CNN. Mr. Morgan had been rumored as a replacement even before then, a prospect that baffled many people inside CNN.
But what many people in the United States might not know is that Mr. Morgan, 45, is an A-list interviewer, and he has essentially been rehearsing for CNN for the past year by hosting “Piers Morgan Life Stories,” a series of well-received and high-rated interviews with figures like Gordon Brown and Simon Cowell, on the British network ITV.
A former creature of Fleet Street who edited The Daily Mirror for a decade, Mr. Morgan has all manner of critics, including the NBC viewers who dislike his mean-Brit persona and the television critics who despise his chilling self-confidence. But Mr. Cowell, his close friend, has demonstrated on “American Idol” that being disliked can be a shortcut to fame and fortune.
“Almost every other U.K. TV import has been hugely successful,” said Tammy Haddad, a former executive producer of “Larry King Live” who now runs a media consulting company.
For CNN, Mr. Morgan’s role on the talent show could be a promotional platform to attract desperately needed younger viewers — or it could be a source of awkwardness for a channel that calls itself “the most trusted name in news.” CNN has been trying to rebuild its low-rated prime-time lineup. Last month, it hired Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor, and Kathleen Parker, a newspaper columnist, to host an 8 p.m. discussion show.
Now it needs to rebuild the 9 p.m. slot Mr. King is vacating.
“The 9 p.m. hour is the linchpin of any success in cable news,” Ms. Haddad said. “As a cable channel, it tells viewers who you are and what you care about.”
CNN executives were clearly impressed by Mr. Morgan’s ITV interviews — and by his reputation for preparing scrupulously for them. For his part, Mr. Morgan has long told friends that Mr. King’s show was his dream job.
But NBC had full control over Mr. Morgan’s immediate future in television because his contract grants the network exclusive rights to all his work on American television. CNN had made its interest in Mr. Morgan clear, both to him and to NBC. In the usual course of contractual niceties in the entertainment industry, Mr. Morgan and his representative could listen to what CNN had to say, but had to steer clear of anything that might constitute a formal negotiation.
The main action has not directly involved CNN. It is taking place quietly between executives from NBC Universal and Turner Broadcasting, a unit of Time Warner. These talks centered on whether Turner had something to offer NBC Universal.
Neither side was prepared on Tuesday to announce what, if anything, Turner might have given in return. But whatever NBC gained, the decision seemed to indicate that NBC’s opinion of Mr. Morgan’s prospects as an interview host did not match CNN’s. If he does take the job, Mr. Morgan would be a chief rival to MSNBC, the news channel owned by NBC.
The companies declined to comment on Tuesday, and it is still possible that CNN could not sign Mr. Morgan.
One protection NBC secured in the apparent deal is that “America’s Got Talent” would be the priority for Mr. Morgan in any potential scheduling conflict with his role on CNN.
For the last two decades, Mr. Morgan has built a journalist-celebrity brand for himself in Britain by carefully cultivating both his relationships with celebrities and his own status as one.
He was fired by The Mirror in 2004, after it published faked photographs that purported to show abuse of Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers, and he set his sights on a full-time television future. He became a full-time host of BBC shows like “Tabloid Tales” and, in a nod to his embarrassing exit from The Mirror, “You Can’t Fire Me, I’m Famous.”
Then he whitened his teeth, tanned his body and came to the United States with the help of Mr. Cowell, who placed him on “America’s Got Talent” four years ago. The show now keeps NBC afloat during the summer months, routinely drawing 10 million to 15 million viewers per episode. Mr. Morgan recently extended his contract with the show through 2013.
Named after the race car driver Piers Courage, Mr. Morgan studied journalism in college and quickly found himself working at The Sun, running a column on entertainment, where he introduced his calling card: photos of himself with celebrities.
Now a celebrity himself, Mr. Morgan juggles “Got Talent” franchises in America and Britain; interview and travel shows on ITV; and a monthly interview column for GQ. Last year he found time to pose for an ad for a gimmicky Burger King body spray, and last week he popped up on the “Today” show interviewing Susan Boyle.
Dylan Jones, the editor of the British GQ, said in an e-mail message that he hired Mr. Morgan in part because he knew that people would be intrigued to meet him.
“Which they were,” he said. “Politicians, actors, singers, everyone. Piers has that amazing ability to tap you on the shoulder, and say, ‘It’s ok, you can tell me.’ Amazingly, people do.”

Barefoot Bandit Caught: Bahamas Police Arrest Colton Harris-Moore
JUAN McCARTNEY AP
NASSAU, Bahamas — For two years he stayed a step ahead of the law – stealing cars, powerboats and even airplanes, police say, while building a reputation as a 21st-century folk hero. On Sunday, Colton Harris-Moore's celebrity became his downfall.
Witnesses on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera recognized the 19-year-old dubbed the "Barefoot Bandit" and called police, who captured him after a high-speed boat chase, Bahamas Police Commissioner Ellison Greenslade said at a celebratory news conference in Nassau, the capital.
Greenslade said shots were fired during the water chase but he did not say who fired them. He also said Harris-Moore was carrying a handgun that he tried to throw away.
Another senior police official, however, said police fired to disable the motor on the suspect's stolen boat, and that Harris-Moore threw his gun in the water. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case, also said that police recovered a laptop and a GPS locator from the suspect.
Police flew Harris-Moore in shackles to Nassau. True to his nickname, the teen with close-shorn hair was shoeless as he walked off the plane wearing short camouflage cargo pants, a white long-sleeved shirt and a bulletproof vest.
Harris-Moore is blamed for several thefts in the Bahamas in the week since allegedly crash-landing a stolen plane there, and Bahamian authorities said he will be prosecuted for those crimes before the start of any U.S. extradition proceedings.
The 6-foot-5-inch Harris-Moore had been on the run since escaping from a Washington state halfway house in 2008. He is accused of breaking into dozens of homes and committing burglaries across Washington, as well as in British Columbia and Idaho.
He is also suspected of stealing at least five planes – including the aircraft he allegedly lifted in Indiana and flew more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) to the Bahamas, despite a lack of formal flight training.
Some of his alleged actions appeared intended to taunt police: In February, someone who broke into a grocery store in Washington's San Juan Islands drew cartoonish, chalk-outline feet all over the floor.
Through it all, his ranks of supporters grew. Some of his more than 60,000 Facebook fans posted disappointed messages Sunday, while others promoted T-shirts and tote bags with the words "Free Colton!" and "Let Colton Fly!"
Even someone in the Bahamas had mixed feelings about his arrest.
"I feel like it would have been good if he got away because he never hurt anybody, but then he was running from the law," said Ruthie Key, who owns a market on Great Abaco Island and let Harris-Moore use her wireless Internet connection July 5.
"He seemed very innocent when I spoke with him at the store. I don't think he'd hurt anybody," Key said.
Island police had been searching for the teen since he allegedly crash-landed the plane on Abaco, where he was blamed for at least seven burglaries. The search expanded to Eleuthera after police there recovered a 44-foot (13-meter) powerboat reported stolen from Abaco.
Police said several people reported seeing the teenager Wednesday night in the waters between Eleuthera and Harbour Island, a nearby tourist destination known for its art galleries, but did not know about the Barefoot Bandit until after discovering a series of break-ins the next day. Harris-Moore's mistake was to return to the same area.
James Major, who rents cars on Eleuthera opposite Harbour Island, said a witness on his side of the channel reported a sighting of Harris-Moore to police early Sunday. He said locals had been on the lookout since the fugitive was blamed for trying to steal four boats and breaking into two buildings at the ferry landing.
"He might have been dangerous to the public," Major said. "Everybody is glad he was caught."
Greenslade said the high-speed chase began around 2 a.m. Sunday after police received tips from members of the public that the suspect was on Harbour Island.
The chase ended in the waters off the Romora Bay Resort & Marina on Harbour Island, where security director Kenneth Strachan reported seeing a young man running through the bush barefoot with a handgun, according to Anne Ward, who manages the property.
"When Kenny spotted him, he had a knapsack over his shoulder and a gun and he was yelling, 'They're going to kill me. They're going to kill me.' He was running up the dock," Ward said.
Ward said the fugitive ran back to the water and stole another boat but ran aground in the shallows, where police shot out his engine.
"At one point, the boy threw his computer in the water and put a gun to his head. He was going to kill himself. Police talked him out of it," Ward said.
Police declined to comment on whether Ward's account was accurate.
Harris-Moore is a skilled outdoorsman who honed his abilities growing up in the woods of Camano Island in Puget Sound about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Seattle.
Harris-Moore's mother, Pam Kohler, has said that he had a troubled childhood. His first conviction, for possession of stolen property, came at age 12. Within a few months of turning 13, he had three more.
Kohler has defended her son, saying the allegations against him are exaggerated. She previously told the AP that she hoped he would flee to a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the United States.
Reached early Sunday at her Camano home, Kohler said she'd heard the news about the arrest but had no comment.
Victims of the crimes Harris-Moore is accused of were happy to see him in custody.
"These people that support him, they've never been violated by having him break into their homes or businesses," said Joni Fowler, manager of a cafe on Orcas Island north of Seattle where Harris-Moore is accused of taking as much as $1,500. "Just knowing he has a huge network of supporters makes me really worry about the state of this country."
Fowler said she hopes Harris-Moore's arrest and upcoming court appearances will pop his mystique and fame – "once everybody figures out he's no God."
Emily Langlie, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle, said that once Harris-Moore faces charges in the Bahamas, her office would seek to extradite him to Washington state and coordinate with local jurisdictions about how his case would proceed.
"There are obviously many jurisdictions that would like to prosecute him," she said.
Shauna Snyder, a private investigator on Whidbey Island near Camano, said she set up a legal defense fund for Harris-Moore at the request of his mother. She said that although she didn't know how much had been raised so far, the fund has been getting donations.
Associated Press Writers Gene Johnson in Seattle and Anna Jo Bratton in Phoenix contributed to this report.

Westin Peachtree window replacement a high wire act

By Leon Stafford
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At 73 floors above downtown Atlanta, you can’t hear much except the wind.
In fact, for the guys who’ve spent the past nine months replacing the glass that sheathes the Westin Peachtree Plaza hotel, there have been times when they couldn’t even see each other -- or the ground -- because of clouds as dense as mashed potatoes.
“It was eerie,” Pete Casciano, 49, said of the pervasive silence that was occasionally interrupted by a bird or a passing helicopter.
Standing 31 floors above International Boulevard on Wednesday on a swing stage -- a steel platform about two feet wide that supports the workers outside the building -- Casciano and Bud Jones were the model of calm in a job that would have most people on edge. They leaned casually over the protective railings to ready the next glass panel, even as the platform wiggled and squeaked in response to the movement.
They are part of a team slowly working its way down the cylindrical landmark, replacing each window panel as they go. Their muscular forearms are telltale signs of men who hoist 280-pound glass panels into place all day, every day. At this time of year they drink water like camels preparing to cross the desert, trying to stay hydrated while working on steel that gets as hot as 104 degrees in the Georgia sunshine.
Crews from Skanska USA Building and subcontractor Harmon Glass started the job last October. Their task is to replace all 6,350 of the hotel’s windows, many of which were damaged in the freak March 2008 twister that tore through downtown. Instead of only replacing damaged panels, hotel management decided to replace all the glass.
As of Wednesday the workers had replaced more than 4,700 panels on the hotel, the world’s tallest when it opened in 1976 but now merely the tallest hotel in the southeast.
The crews have worked through cold snaps, rain, heat and dense fog. The project is expected to be finished in early October.
“We’ll do something big to celebrate,” Westin general manager Ed Walls said.
There are 75 workers on the project, 55 of whom are replacing the glass, officials said. They hail from all over the nation, but most are Georgia-based. Officials said the poor economy worked in the project’s favor because the workers’ specialized skills normally keeps them in high demand.
“These are pretty unique individuals,” said Graeme Kelly, Skanska USA vice president of operations and project executive on the Westin job. “And there are not many of them. These are guys who have to be able to work at great heights comfortably and safely.”
Standing on the platform above International on Wednesday, Jones, a California native, was relaxed. The heat had not quite hit him by Noon, but he was drinking plenty of water anyway.
He shrugged when asked if the height gives him pause. After more than 10 years dangling from the outside of buildings, being hundreds of feet in the air is second nature.
“You have to respect the height,” he said. “You have to make sure you are have taken all the safety precautions. After that, you just get out there and do your job.”
The installers work in groups of six. Jones and Casciano work from the outside, while their four partners work from inside. Window panels are lifted into place with large suction cups.
Jones, 48, began installing glass after losing a trucking job for Coca-Cola. Prior to working on the Westin, the tallest building he had worked on was 25 floors.
“It’s all the same if you fall from it,” he said with a smile.
There are challenging moments, he said. The biggest on this project has been setting up the pulleys and ropes on the hotel roof that hold the swing stage in place. To do that, he had to climb over a wall on the roof and dangle from the other side to add hooks to hold equipment and workers.
Fortunately, the wind was calm that day, so he wasn’t swinging in the harness that was the difference between him and an 800-foot drop.
“A lot of guys don’t want to do what we do,” he said. “They are smarter than us.”
“My mom doesn’t want to hear about it,” he laughed.
Casciano, a native of New Jersey who has been living in Atlanta since 1991, began working in the industry in the early 1980s after leaving the Marines.
“Ironically, when I first got into this, I was scared to death of heights,” he said.
What changed?
“Repetition,” he said, leaning nonchalantly against the railing high above downtown. “At first, I worked white-knuckled.”
The more he worked on the platforms, the more comfortable he became. And that was in the days when the platforms had only one railing at the back. Today, mutiple steel rails crisscross the platform to ensure safety. Crews also wear harnesses and are connected by ropes.
There have been no accidents on the Westin Peachtree job, officials said.
“The biggest problem we have now is being complacent,” Casciano said. “When we were at the top, we could barely see anyone. Now that we are 31 floors up, it feels like we’re on the ground.”
The project is expected to be completed in early October.