BEIJING (AFP) — Oussama Mellouli shattered Australian Grant Hackett’s Olympic treble dream and put behind him his own drugs nightmare with an upset triumph in the 1500-metres freestyle at the Beijing Olympics on Sunday.

Mellouli, 24, killed off Hackett’s bid to become the first man to win three Olympic titles in the same event and also claim Tunisia’s first-ever Olympic swimming gold medal.

Mellouli, planning on swimming a strong final 800m, took over the lead with 300m left and held off Hackett’s spirited finish to win in 14 minutes 40.84 seconds.

It was Olympic heartbreak for the world record holder and four-time world champion Hackett, who was bidding to add the Beijing crown to the titles he won in Sydney and Athens.

The 28-year-old Australian had to be satisifed with the silver medal in 14:41.53, just 0.69secs separating him and Mellouli after 30 gruelling laps of the Water Cube pool.

Canadian Ryan Cochrane, who led up to the 1000m, finished third in 14:42.69.

Just two days earlier, world record-holder Hackett had posted the second-fastest 1,500m in history in the heats.

While Hackett reflected on what might have been in his last Olympic Games, Mellouli saw his surprise victory as redemption.

The Tunisian served an 18-month doping ban after becoming his country’s first swimming world champion with a come-from-behind win in the 800m freestyle with Hackett trailing in seventh at last year’s world championships in Melbourne.

He was subsequently stripped of the title after testing positive for amphetamines and only completed his ban in May in time to swim in Beijing.

“I’ve been waiting for this moment for two years. It’s the redemption I wanted and I got it,” Mellouli said.

“This year was difficult because of the (drugs) penalty, but I thank God for the talent I’ve been given. At the Olympic Games anything can happen. It was a miracle and for once the miracle was for me.”

Mellouli plotted to steal the race from the middle stages and go for broke and hang on.

“I felt good in the first 400m of this race and at the 800m and 900m I started believing that I could win,” he said.

“It was all calculated. I slowed down in the penultimate 100m to save my energy and attack in the final 50m.

“I knew I had a lot of speed, But I wasn’t 100 percent sure. I knew this was going to be a challenge. I had a pretty good race in the 400 freestyle, but it didn’t happen for me.”

Mellouli’s shock triumph ended an Australian domination of the Olympic 1500m final, stretching back to Kieren Perkins’s double victory in Barcelona in 1992 and Atlanta in 1996.

Although no man has ever won three consecutive Olympic titles, Australian sprinter Dawn Fraser and Hungarian backstroker Krisztina Egerszegi have achieved the feat in women’s swimming.

“It’s disappointing, yet so close,” Hackett said. “To get second is great, but three in a row would have been nice.

“I have certainly no regrets in my preparation and what I’ve been able to do here. It was certainly a good race.

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BEIJING – Like the best of showmen, Jamaica’s Usain Bolt left us wanting more.

Twenty meters from the finish line, his celebration began. He relaxed his arms, looked toward the crowd and slapped his chest. And despite those theatrics, he still covered 100 meters faster than any man ever has.

He did it in 9.69 seconds, and immediately one had to wonder how much faster he could go. Faster than a speeding bullet?

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NEW YORK —  Jennifer Love Hewitt is showing off her slimmed-down figure after losing 18 pounds in 10 weeks.

“I am in a pretty good workout regimen that I like, so it inspired me to keep it up,” the “Ghost Whisperer” actress, 29, tells Us Weekly. “The energy level and the way I feel now is great.”

In December of last year, an angry Hewitt defended her curves after photos of her in a bikini were ridiculed on the Internet.

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 NEW YORK - Britney Spears tells OK! magazine she’s focused on family life these days, looking forward to her two sons meeting their new cousin, daughter of her sister, Jamie Lynn Spears.

“She’s going to come out here for the kids’ birthdays,” Spears, who lives in Beverly Hills, Calif., says of Jamie Lynn in the Aug. 25 issue of OK! “It will be the first time the cousins meet. I’m sure the boys will be like big brothers to Maddie,” who was born June 19.

[full read]

 WASHINGTON - White people will no longer make up a majority of Americans by 2042, according to new government projections. That’s eight years sooner than previous estimates, made in 2004.

The nation has been growing more diverse for decades, but the process has sped up through immigration and higher birth rates among minority residents, especially Hispanics.

It is also growing older.

[full read]

When we put our Dallas house on the market for $490,000 in February, we thought it would sell in weeks with little discounting.

Talk about being delusional.

We ended up lowering the price of our house five times before it finally sold last month. We didn’t get our first offer until late June, and it was $102,000 below where we had started.

All the uncertainty made us delay buying a new home near New York City, and we’ve been scrambling to find a place before the school year starts. During my 28 years as a journalist, I’ve moved 11 times for my job. This was in some ways the hardest one.

The whole experience made me a tiny part of a huge story — the collapse in housing prices — affecting millions of Americans. It was humbling for me, your typical know-it-all reporter, to find myself caught up in a situation where I had no ready answers.

In previous columns, I’ve waxed about my penny-pinching approach on everything from restaurant meals to vacations to buying new books. But all that pales in comparison to the stakes during a home sale. In our case, we needed to extract as much money as possible from our Dallas home so we could afford the higher prices in the Northeast.

My wife, Clarissa, and I were on the same page for some decisions. But we quarreled early on how much to spend fixing up the house — and later on how quickly to chop the price when it wouldn’t sell.

Whereas Clarissa has always been the generous one, and I the one who sweats every last dollar, she wanted to hold out for a higher price, convinced the house was worth it. I became haunted by the belief that the market was tanking, and that we needed to get our price down as quickly as possible and get the house sold now.

Our odyssey began last fall when The Wall Street Journal named me its personal-finance editor, a New York-based job. For the previous three-plus years, I had been its Dallas bureau chief. The plan was that I would move the family to northern New Jersey in June when the school year ended.
HAVE YOU HAD TROUBLE SELLING YOUR HOME?

Has today’s tough real estate market forced you to cut your price or take your home off the market altogether? Share your tale of woe.

It soon became clear that Clarissa and I had different visions for getting the house ready for sale. I simply wanted to paint it and correct obvious defects, such as exterior wood that rotted during heavy rains last year. Clarissa wanted to redo the kitchen, install new fixtures in at least one of the bathrooms and much, much more. I fretted we wouldn’t get that money back when we sold.

So we compromised. We spent $2,000 putting granite countertops and a new sink in the kitchen, and we merely painted the bathrooms.

But Clarissa didn’t stop there. She paid a carpenter to put inlaid patterns on the wooden mantle. She spent hundreds on plants. She put in new lighting fixtures and new curtains and replaced a tattered awning.

Periodically, I would try to get her to slow down the spending, and she would tell me to buzz off. I was the one forcing the family to move yet again, and this time she was going to do the things to get top dollar for her house so she could afford a decent house in New Jersey.

We had paid about $360,000 for the house in 2004. Now, with all the things we’d fixed or improved over the years, I figured our total investment was more like $390,000.

We had reason to believe we could come out way ahead. Our 1937 brick-and-stone house sat in a pretty neighborhood of older homes and towering trees about five miles from downtown Dallas. The city’s real-estate market had remained relatively strong, and we lived in one of the strongest submarkets.

Based on selling prices the previous fall, our Realtor, Gia Marshello of the local Coldwell Banker office, predicted our three-bedroom house would fetch $485,000. We put the asking price at $490,000, and waited for the buyers to line up. They didn’t.

After a month, only 10 had visited our house, and I was beginning to panic. We had planned a March home-buying trip to New Jersey, but I put it on hold — indefinitely.

Gia suggested that we discount the house by $10,000 or perhaps $15,000. I pushed for the bigger discount. Clarissa reluctantly agreed, even though she saw comparable houses priced the same or higher in our neighborhood. The problem was that they weren’t selling either.

The feedback from people visiting our house was worrisome. Too many said the layout didn’t work for them. Our house had two bedrooms and one bathroom upstairs, and one bedroom and one bathroom downstairs. Parents with small children wanted all the bedrooms on one floor.

A couple of buyers complained the kitchen wasn’t open enough. I sputtered to Gia: “This is a 1937 house — they didn’t make open kitchens back then. We’re not getting the right buyers.”

At one point, Gia left me a voicemail on the latest developments. She sent out postcards about our house to everyone in the neighborhood and buried a statue of St. Joseph in our yard, which some believe brings good luck to home sellers. “Oh my gosh,” I thought to myself. “This is our marketing plan?”

As the months stretched on, we kept lowering our price, first to $469,000, then to $455,000, then to $448,000 with another $4,000 in “credits.” We thought we had a buyer with that last price. A young woman made three visits to the home and told us to let her know if any other offers came in. But her father was paying for the home, and he didn’t like the house, and that was that.

Gia left no stone unturned to sell our house. She held open house after open house. Each time we lowered our price, she would contact anyone who had expressed interest in the house. Nothing worked.

I talked to a real-estate agent friend of mine in New Jersey, and he advised us to cut the house to its bare-bones price. “If only three houses sell in your neighborhood, you’ve got to make sure you’re one of the three homes,” he told me.

Gia advised the same. Clarissa finally caved in, and we priced the home on a Monday afternoon in late June at $429,900, putting it thousands of dollars below most comparable houses in our neighborhood. Almost immediately, buyers flocked to check it out. Gia got word an offer was coming. On Thursday, she called me. The offer was for $388,000 — more than $40,000 below our last asking price.

How could this be, we asked ourselves. We just made this the best bargain in the neighborhood, and now this guy wants another 40 grand off. Clarissa wanted to reject the offer, but I felt we had to make it work. After all, we’d had the house on the market for more than four months, and this was our first offer. There was no guarantee there’d be another one.

So we exchanged a series of offers and counteroffers with the buyer. It was like pulling teeth. After three days, he offered $399,310. Clarissa found this insulting and wanted to counter with $412,666, to send a message. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I told her.

Finally, on Monday, the buyer raised his offer to $409,000. I got him up to $410,000, and I was resigned to sign a contract later that day. Clarissa, who had to sign off on any deal, was convinced that would be a big mistake and we ought to wait for another buyer. She called Gia to say, “Don’t let him give away the house.”

While all this was playing out, a new offer rolled in that afternoon from another buyer.

“Are you sitting down?” Gia asked me. “They want to offer full price,” or $429,900. Gia then went back to the first buyer to say we had a higher offer, in case he wanted to improve his bid. He didn’t. We signed the $429,900 contract.

We soon met the buyers, a young couple expecting their first baby. They said they were thrilled to get the house. And they seemed to appreciate the unusual plants Clarissa had picked out and all her touches inside the house. Her strategy had worked after all.

Our selling price amounted to a 12% discount from our starting price. I don’t expect any violins for us. Some regions of California have seen home prices decline more than 30% from their actual selling prices a year earlier. We got off very lightly by comparison.

Our house went on the market when there were few homes for sale in our neighborhood. That’s no longer true. When I took my last drive through my old neighborhood, the streets were beginning to bristle with “for sale” and “open house” signs — though many were above our price range. I shudder to think.

[Source]

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - Morgan Freeman was discharged Thursday from a Tennessee hospital after the Oscar-winning actor was treated for broken bones and other injuries sustained in a weekend car crash in Mississippi.

Kathy Stringer, a spokeswoman for the Regional Medical Center, said Freeman was discharged but gave no other details.

The 71-year-old actor was hospitalized after the accident Sunday left him with a broken arm, broken elbow and shoulder damage.

Demaris Meyer, 48, of Memphis, a passenger in the car driven by Freeman, was also injured in the crash.

“Access Hollywood” reported Wednesday that Freeman’s lawyer, Bill Luckett, said Freeman and his wife of 24 years, Myrna Colley-Lee, had been separated since December and are getting a divorce. Luckett was also quoted in several newspapers Thursday, but did not give further details.

There was no answer Thursday at phone numbers for Luckett or for Freeman’s publicist, Donna Lee.

No divorce papers have been filed in Tallahatchie County where Freeman owns a home with Colley-Lee, according to Tallahatchie County Chancery Clerk Anita Mullen Greenwood.

[Source]

By MIKE MELIA, Associated Press Writer
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - A sentencing hearing for Osama bin Laden’s former driver resumed Thursday morning, and the detainee from Yemen — now convicted of a war crime — was expected to ask the Pentagon jury to spare him from life in prison, his lawyers said.

Salim Hamdan wiped tears from his face as the panel of six military officers delivered a split verdict Wednesday at the first U.S. war crimes trial since World War II, declariguilty guilty of aiding terrorism but acquitting him of conspiracy.

The tribunals’ chief prosecutor, Army Col. Lawrence Morris, said the failure to convict Hamdan of both charges will factor into the sentence his team recommends Thursday inside the hilltop courthouse on this U.S. Navy base. Hamdan is eligible for a maximum life sentence.

“We of course have to prepare our sentence recommendation consistent with what the jury found,” Morris said.

A psychiatrist hired by the defense told jurors that Hamdan has the potential to be rehabilitated.

The verdict will be appealed automatically to a special military appeals court in Washington. Hamdan can then appeal to U.S. civilian courts as well.

Deputy White House spokesman Tony Fratto applauded what he called “a fair trial” and said prosecutors will now proceed with other war crimes trials at the isolated U.S. military base in southeast Cuba. Prosecutors intend to try about 80 Guantanamo detainees for war crimes, including 19 already charged.

But defense lawyers said Hamdan’s rights were denied by an unfair process, hastily patched together after Supreme Court rulings that previous tribunal systems violated U.S. and international law.

“History and world opinion will judge whether the government proved the system to be fair,” Hamdan’s lawyers said in a statement.

Hamdan did not testify before the jury during his trial, but defense attorney Harry Schneider said the prisoner planned to ask for leniency at the sentencing hearing in either live testimony or a written statement to the jurors.

Hamdan has been held at Guantanamo since May 2002. The military has not said where he would serve a sentence, but the commander of the detention center, Navy Rear Adm. David Thomas, said last week that convicted prisoners will be held apart from the general detainee population.

Under the military commission, Hamdan did not have all the rights normally accorded either by U.S. civilian or military courts. The judge allowed secret testimony and hearsay evidence. Hamdan was not judged by a jury of his peers and he received no Miranda warning about his rights.

Hamdan’s attorneys said interrogations at the center of the government’s case were tainted by coercive tactics, including sleep deprivation and solitary confinement.

All that is in contrast to the courts-martial used to prosecute American troops in Iraq and Vietnam, which accorded defendants more rights.

The five-man, one-woman jury convicted Hamdan on five counts of supporting terrorism, accepting the prosecution argument that Hamdan aided terrorism by becoming a member of al-Qaida in Afghanistan and serving as bin Laden’s armed bodyguard and driver while knowing that the al-Qaida leader was plotting attacks against the U.S.

But he was found not guilty on three other counts alleging he knew that his work would be used for terrorism and that he provided surface-to-air missiles to al-Qaida.

He also was cleared of two charges of conspiracy alleging he was part of the al-Qaida effort to attack the United States — the most serious charges, according to deputy chief defense counsel Michael Berrigan.

Berrigan noted the conspiracy charges were the only ones Hamdan originally faced when his case prompted the Supreme Court to halt the tribunals. Prosecutors added the new charges after the Bush administration rewrote the rules.

“The problem is the law was specifically written after the fact to target Mr. Hamdan,” said Charles Swift, one of Hamdan’s civilian lawyers.

The military judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, gave Hamdan five years of credit toward his sentence for the time he has served at Guantanamo Bay since the Pentagon decided to charge him.

Source:

By Marco R. della Cava, USA TODAY

Paris for president?

That’s the spoofy gist of a video starring Paris Hilton that’s taken off on Will Ferrell’s comedy site, FunnyorDie.com. The short is pushing 4 million views since Tuesday.

“Paris totally got the joke,” says Adam McKay, Funny or Die co-founder and film director (Step Brothers), who conceived and wrote the Hilton spot. “I thought it was ludicrous that (John) McCain was trying to bring Barack Obama down just because he was popular. If (McCain) is going to step into the pop world, we’ll respond.”

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee played the celebrity card in a recent campaign ad that transitioned from images of Hilton and Britney Spears to those of the presumptive Democratic nominee. Obama is popular, the spot observes, “but is he ready to lead?”

Hilton agreed to do the video rebuttal within hours of hearing the director’s pitch. It was filmed Sunday on Long Island. Lounging in a skimpy swimsuit and high heels, Hilton says she is, “like, totally ready to lead.” She lays out her energy plan — a blend of both candidates’ proposals — but only after leafing through a travel magazine to find the best places in the world to get a tan.

McKay’s political sentiments are laid bare in a voice-over: “He’s the oldest celebrity in the world … but is he ready to lead?”

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds says the candidate thinks the video is “hilarious,” adding that “Hilton might not be as big a celebrity as Obama, but she obviously has a better energy plan.”

Hilton is on vacation in Denmark. But the family’s sentiments are voiced in a posting by matriarch Kathy on Huffingtonpost.com: McCain’s ad is “a complete waste of the country’s time … when millions of people are losing their homes and their jobs.”

Contributing: David Jackson

[source:usatoday]

ACKSON, OHIO: Presumed Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain says he’s glad Paris Hilton has a sense of humor.

While traveling in southern Ohio on Wednesday, the Republican presidential candidate said the new online video from Hilton adds some fun to the campaign.

Hilton’s video spoofs McCain’s recent TV ad that compares the celebrity status of Democratic rival Barack Obama to that of Hilton and Britney Spears.

The video from the blonde celebrity was posted Tuesday on the comedy Web site Funny or Die. It shows Hilton lounging in a pool chair in a bathing suit. She mentions ”that wrinkly, white-haired guy” who used her in his campaign ad, then she goes on to discuss energy policy.

McCain says he has not seen the video, but has been briefed about its contents.

[Source:ohio]