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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 WASHINGTON - Famed chef Julia Child shared a secret with Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and Chicago White Sox catcher Moe Berg at a time when the Nazis threatened the world.

They served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt.

The secret comes out Thursday, all of the names and previously classified files identifying nearly 24,000 spies who formed the first centralized intelligence effort by the United States. The National Archives, which this week released a list of the names found in the records, will make available for the first time all 750,000 pages identifying the vast spy network of military and civilian operatives.

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NDIANAPOLIS - A woman who grew to be 7 feet, 7 inches tall and was recognized as the world’s tallest female died Wednesday, a friend said. She was 53.

Sandy Allen, who used her height to inspire schoolchildren to accept those who are different, died at a nursing home in her hometown of Shelbyville, family friend Rita Rose said.

The cause of death was not yet known. Allen had been hospitalized in recent months as she suffered from a recurring blood infection, along with diabetes, breathing troubles and kidney failure, Rose said.

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ASHINGTON - 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.

“The white population is older and very much centered around the aging baby boomers who are well past their high fertility years,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “The future of America is epitomized by the young people today. They are basically the melting pot we are going to see in the future.”

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 SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - A maroon-striped marauder with venomous spikes is rapidly multiplying in the Caribbean’s warm waters, swallowing native species, stinging divers and generally wreaking havoc on an ecologically delicate region.

The red lionfish, a tropical native of the Indian and Pacific oceans that probably escaped from a Florida fish tank, is showing up everywhere — from the coasts of Cuba and Hispaniola to Little Cayman’s pristine Bloody Bay Wall, one of the region’s prime destinations for divers.

Wherever it appears, the adaptable predator corners fish and crustaceans up to half its size with its billowy fins and sucks them down in one violent gulp.

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 WASHINGTON - BMW AG is recalling 200,000 vehicles over concerns that the front passenger air bag may not deploy in a crash.

The German automaker says the recall involves the 2006 3 Series, the 2004-2006 5 Series, and the 2004-2006 X3 compact sport utility vehicle.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a posting on its Web site Wednesday that small cracks could develop in a seat detection mat and lead to the front passenger air bags to be deactivated.

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GENEVA (Reuters) - The world’s most powerful particle accelerator, aimed at unlocking secrets of the universe, will be launched on September 10, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on Thursday.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), housed in an underground tunnel 27 kilometers (17 miles) in circumference, will recreate conditions just after the Big Bang which many scientists believe gave birth to the universe.

It will seek to collide two beams of particles at close to the speed of light.

“The first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be made on September 10,” the Geneva-based CERN said in a statement.

The LHC will study a new frontier of physics, producing beams with seven times more energy than any previous machine.

But starting it up is not as simple as flipping a switch.

Each of its eight sectors must be cooled to their operating temperature of minus 271 degrees Celsius (minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit), colder than outer space. This phase is reaching a successful conclusion but electrical testing must follow.

“We’re finishing a marathon with a sprint,” said LHC project leader Lyn Evans. “It’s been a long haul and we’re all eager to get the LHC research program underway.”

Scientists hope the experiment will help explain fundamental questions such as how particles acquire mass. They will also probe the mysterious dark matter of the universe and investigate why there is more matter than antimatter.

Some 10,000 scientists from around the world have worked on the complex 10 billion Swiss franc ($9.5 billion) apparatus since construction began in 1994, a spokesman said.

(reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Jonathan Lynn and William Schomberg)

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MIAMI - A man who authorities said was keeping weapons and military-style gear in his hotel room and car appeared in court Thursday on charges he threatened to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Raymond Hunter Geisel, 22, was arrested by the Secret Service on Saturday in Miami and was ordered held at Miami’s downtown detention center without bail Thursday by a federal magistrate.

A Secret Service affidavit charges that Geisel made the threat during a training class for bail bondsmen in Miami in late July. According to someone else in the 48-member class, Geisel allegedly referred to Obama with a racial epithet and continued, “If he gets elected, I’ll assassinate him myself.”

Obama was most recently in Florida on Aug. 1-2 but did not visit the South Florida area.

Another person in the class quoted Geisel as saying that “he hated George W. Bush and that he wanted to put a bullet in the president’s head,” according to the Secret Service.

Geisel denied in a written statement to a Secret Service agent that he ever made those threats, and the documents don’t indicate that he ever took steps to carry out any assassination. He was charged only with threatening Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, but not for any threat against President Bush.

Geisel’s court-appointed attorney declined comment. The charge of threatening a major candidate for president or vice president carries a maximum prison sentence of five years.

The Obama campaign declined comment Thursday on the alleged threat.

In the interview with a Secret Service agent, Geisel said “if he wanted to kill Senator Obama he simply would shoot him with a sniper rifle, but then he claimed that he was just joking,” according to court documents.

A search of Geisel’s 1998 Ford Explorer and hotel room in Miami uncovered a loaded 9mm handgun, knives, dozens of rounds of ammunition including armor-piercing types, body armor, military-style fatigues and a machete. The SUV, which has Maine license plates, was wired with flashing red and yellow emergency lights.

Geisel told the Secret Service he was originally from Bangor, Maine, and had been living recently in a houseboat in the Florida Keys town of Marathon, according to court documents. He said he used the handgun for training for the bail bondsman class, had the knives for protection and used the machete to cut brush in Maine.

Authorities in Maine said Geisel pleaded guilty to a charge of criminal threatening after a 2007 incident and spent 48 hours in a Bangor jail.

Police in Hampden, a town just outside of Bangor, received a complaint from Geisel’s brother on Oct. 18, 2007 that Geisel had threatened him with a knife, Hampden police Sgt. Dan Stewart said. Geisel was charged with criminal threatening and terrorizing; the second charge was later dropped.

The Secret Service affidavit said Geisel told agents that he suffered from psychiatric problems including post-traumatic stress disorder, but he couldn’t provide the names of any facilities where he sought treatment.

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