Armstrong Tearful Over Telling Kids Truth

Lance Armstrong, 41, began to cry today as he described finding out his son Luke, 13, was publicly defending him from accusations that he doped during his cycling career.

Armstrong said that he knew, at that moment, that he would have to publicly admit to taking performance-enhancing drugs and having oxygen-boosting blood transfusions when competing in the Tour de France. He made those admissions to Oprah Winfrey in a two-part interview airing Thursday and tonight.

"When this all really started, I saw my son defending me, and saying, 'That's not true. What you're saying about my dad? That's not true,'" Armstrong said, tearing up during the second installment of his interview tonight. "And it almost goes to this question of, 'Why now?'

"That's when I knew I had to talk," Armstrong said. "He never asked me. He never said, 'Dad, is this true?' He trusted me."

He told Winfrey that he sat down with his children over the holidays to come clean about his drug use.

"I said, 'Listen, there's been a lot of questions about your dad, about my career and whether I doped or did not dope,'" he said he told them. "'I always denied that. I've always been ruthless and defiant about that, which is why you defended me, which makes it even sicker' I said, 'I want you to know that it's true.'"

He added that his mother was "a wreck" over the scandal.

Armstrong said that the lowest point in his fall from grace and the top of the cycling world came when his cancer charity, Livestrong, asked him to consider stepping down.

George Burns/Harpo Studios, Inc.

Lance Armstrong-Winfrey Interview: How Honest Was He? Watch Video

Lance Armstrong-Winfrey Interview: Doping Confession Watch Video

After the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency alleged in October that Armstrong doped throughout his reign as Tour de France champion, Armstrong said, his major sponsors -- including Nike, Anheuser Busch and Trek -- called one by one to end their endorsement contracts with him.

"Everybody out," he said. "Still not the most humbling moment."

Then came the call from Livestrong, the charity he founded at age 25 when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer.

"The story was getting out of control, which was my worst nightmare," he said. "I had this place in my mind that they would all leave. The one I didn't think would leave was the foundation.

"That was most humbling moment," he said.

Armstrong first stepped down as chairman of the board for the charity before being asked to end his association with the charity entirely. Livestrong is now run independently of Armstrong.

"I don't think it was 'We need you to step down,' but, 'We need you to consider stepping down for yourself,'" he said, recounting the call. "I had to think about that a lot. None of my kids, none of my friends have said, 'You're out,' and the foundation was like my sixth child. To make that decision, to step aside, that was big."

In Thursday's interview installment, the seven-time winner of the Tour de France admitted publicly for the first time that he doped throughout his career, confirming after months of angry denials the findings of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which stripped him of his titles in October.

He told Winfrey that he was taking the opportunity to confess to everything he had done wrong, including for years angrily denying claims that he had doped.

READ MORE: Armstrong Admits to Doping

WATCH: Armstrong's Many Denials Caught on Tape

READ MORE: 10 Scandalous Public Confessions

Read More..

Earl Smith is the man behind a military patch that President Obama prizes

AUSTIN, Tex. — That February morning in 2008 found Barack Obama decidedly out of sorts.

He was locked in one battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination that showed no signs of ending — and another with a vicious cold that felt the same way.

As he rode the service elevator in the backway of a convention hotel here, the snowy-haired African American operating it turned suddenly. He held out a black-and-gold bit of fabric embroidered with a screaming eagle.

“Senator Obama, I have something I want to give you,” the man said. “I’ve carried this military patch with me every day for 40 years, and I want you to carry it, and itwill keep you safe in your journey.” Obama tried to refuse, but the older man persisted.

Big endeavors can find their meaning in small moments.

Later that day, Obama and his aides discussed the encounter. The future president pulled the patch from his pocket, along with about a dozen other items people had pressed upon him.

“This is why I do this,” he said. “Because people have their hopes and dreams about what we can do together.”

Two American stories intersected that morning in that elevator. The more famous, of course, is the one that begins its next chapter on Monday, as the nation’s first black president takes the oath of office for a second term.

But the other story also tells a lot about where this country has been and how far it has come.

No one in Obama’s small party that day noticed the man’s name tag or, if anyone did, the fact that it said Earl Smith was quickly forgotten.

No one knew how much of Smith’s life had been woven into a patch that, over four decades, found its way from the shoulder of an Army private to the pocket of a future commander-in-chief.

It was the only shred of cloth he had saved from the uniform of a nightmarish year in Vietnam. Smith fired artillery with a brigade that suffered 10,041 casualties during the course of the war. The brigade’s soldiers received 13 Congressional Medals of Honor.

The patch was waiting among his possessions when Smith was pardoned by the state of Georgia in 1977 after spending three years in prison for a crime he claimed was self-defense.

Smith kept it close as his lucky charm while he rebuilt his life and his reputation, starting with a job vacuuming hallways and changing sheets in an Atlanta Marriott. He carried it with him as he traveled halfway around the world again, to positions in hotels far from home, Riyadh in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

Along the way, as he tended to travelers and made sure VIP gatherings went smoothly, he met three U.S. presidents.

His instincts told him Obama would make it four.

Like just about anyone else who was alive on Nov. 22, 1963, Smith can describe exactly where he was when he heard the horrific news: He was coming off a high school football practice field in his home town of San Benito, Tex.

Though not yet old enough to have voted for the man slain in Dallas, “I was devastated — a lot of us young people were — because John Kennedy was the young president,” recalled Smith, now 68.

Read More..

Kim Dotcom poised for return with Megaupload successor

WELLINGTON: Internet tycoon Kim Dotcom will launch a new file-sharing site at his Auckland mansion on Sunday, exactly a year after armed police arrested him at the same venue in the world's largest online piracy case.

Dotcom's new venture, mega.co.nz, aims to recreate the success of his Megaupload empire, which boasted 50 million daily visitors and accounted for four percent of all Internet traffic before it was shut down after the police raid.

The 38-year-old, who changed his name from Kim Schmitz, remains free on bail in New Zealand as US authorities seek his extradition on a range of charges including money laundering, racketeering and copyright theft.

They allege Megaupload sites netted more than US$175 million in criminal proceeds and cost copyright owners more than US$500 million by offering pirated copies of movies, TV shows, music and other content.

Dotcom denies any wrongdoing and the charges, which carry jail terms of up to 20 years, have not discouraged him from launching the new Mega service, which he has enthusiastically promoted on Twitter in recent weeks.

"I think you will be very happy with the new #Mega," he tweeted Friday, "It's like time travel. We'll take you to the future!!!"

The tech entrepreneur has promised an "epic" launch for the new site and even impersonated Willy Wonka to promote it at an Auckland shop on Thursday, handing out tubs of ice cream with golden tickets to the event hidden in them.

Details of the planned service are scarce, but the site promises to use state-of-the-art encryption methods that mean only users, not the site's administrators, know what they are uploading.

That would theoretically stop authorities from accusing administrators of knowingly aiding online piracy, the central allegation facing Dotcom.

Dotcom has said Mega will offer users 50GB of free storage, significantly more than similar sites such as Dropbox and Google Drive, but most details remain under wraps until they are unveiled Sunday at the Dotcom Mansion.

The German national was preparing for his birthday party at the lavish Auckland property in January last year when armed police staged a dawn raid, tracking him down in a hidden panic room running off his bedroom.

Officers seized more than a dozen luxury cars, including a 1959 pink Cadillac, along with valuable artworks and a sawn-off shotgun, while Dotcom's bank accounts were frozen and he spent more than a month in jail.

Eventually freed on bail, his legal team have enjoyed a number of successes challenging the prosecution case, including a ruling that the police raid was illegal and a government admission that Dotcom was illegally spied upon before his arrest.

The extradition hearing is due to be heard in August.

-AFP/fl

Read More..

Opinion: Lance One of Many Tour de France Cheaters

Editor's note: England-based writer and photographer Roff Smith rides around 10,000 miles a year through the lanes of Sussex and Kent and writes a cycling blog at: www.my-bicycle-and-I.co.uk

And so, the television correspondent said to the former Tour de France champion, a man who had been lionised for years, feted as the greatest cyclist of his day, did you ever use drugs in the course of your career?

"Yes," came the reply. "Whenever it was necessary."

"And how often was that?" came the follow-up question.

"Almost all the time!"

This is not a leak of a transcript from Oprah Winfrey's much anticipated tell-all with disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, but instead was lifted from a decades-old interview with Fausto Coppi, the great Italian road cycling champion of the 1940s and 1950s.

To this day, though, Coppi is lauded as one of the gods of cycling, an icon of a distant and mythical golden age in the sport.

So is five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil (1957, 1961-64) who famously remarked that it was impossible "to ride the Tour on mineral water."

"You would have to be an imbecile or a crook to imagine that a professional cyclist who races for 235 days a year can hold the pace without stimulants," Anquetil said.

And then there's British cycling champion Tommy Simpson, who died of heart failure while trying to race up Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour de France, a victim of heat, stress, and a heady cocktail of amphetamines.

All are heroes today. If their performance-enhancing peccadillos are not forgotten, they have at least been glossed over in the popular imagination.

As the latest chapter of the sorry Lance Armstrong saga unfolds, it is worth looking at the history of cheating in the Tour de France to get a sense of perspective. This is not an attempt at rationalisation or justification for what Lance did. Far from it.

But the simple, unpalatable fact is that cheating, drugs, and dirty tricks have been part and parcel of the Tour de France nearly from its inception in 1903.

Cheating was so rife in the 1904 event that Henri Desgrange, the founder and organiser of the Tour, declared he would never run the race again. Not only was the overall winner, Maurice Garin, disqualified for taking the train over significant stretches of the course, but so were next three cyclists who placed, along with the winner of every single stage of the course.

Of the 27 cyclists who actually finished the 1904 race, 12 were disqualified and given bans ranging from one year to life. The race's eventual official winner, 19-year-old Henri Cornet, was not determined until four months after the event.

And so it went. Desgrange relented on his threat to scrub the Tour de France and the great race survived and prospered-as did the antics. Trains were hopped, taxis taken, nails scattered along the roads, partisan supporters enlisted to beat up rivals on late-night lonely stretches of the course, signposts tampered with, bicycles sabotaged, itching powder sprinkled in competitors' jerseys and shorts, food doctored, and inkwells smashed so riders yet to arrive couldn't sign the control documents to prove they'd taken the correct route.

And then of course there were the stimulants-brandy, strychnine, ether, whatever-anything to get a rider through the nightmarishly tough days and nights of racing along stages that were often over 200 miles long. In a way the race was tailor-made to encourage this sort of thing. Desgrange once famously said that his idea of a perfect Tour de France would be one that was so tough that only one rider finished.

Add to this the big prizes at a time when money was hard to come by, a Tour largely comprising young riders from impoverished backgrounds for whom bicycle racing was their one big chance to get ahead, and the passionate following cycling enjoyed, and you had the perfect recipe for a desperate, high stakes, win-at-all-costs mentality, especially given the generally tolerant views on alcohol and drugs in those days.

After World War II came the amphetamines. Devised to keep soldiers awake and aggressive through long hours of battle they were equally handy for bicycle racers competing in the world's longest and toughest race.

So what makes the Lance Armstrong story any different, his road to redemption any rougher? For one thing, none of the aforementioned riders were ever the point man for what the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has described in a thousand-page report as the most sophisticated, cynical, and far-reaching doping program the world of sport has ever seen-one whose secrecy and efficiency was maintained by ruthlessness, bullying, fear, and intimidation.

Somewhere along the line, the casualness of cheating in the past evolved into an almost Frankenstein sort of science in which cyclists, aided by creepy doctors and trainers, were receiving blood transfusions in hotel rooms and tinkering around with their bodies at the molecular level many months before they ever lined up for a race.

To be sure, Armstrong didn't invent all of this, any more than he invented original sin-nor was he acting alone. But with his success, money, intelligence, influence, and cohort of thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyers-and the way he used all this to prop up the Lance brand and the Lance machine at any cost-he became the poster boy and lightning rod for all that went wrong with cycling, his high profile eclipsing even the heads of the Union Cycliste Internationale, the global cycling union, who richly deserve their share of the blame.

It is not his PED popping that is the hard-to-forgive part of the Lance story. Armstrong cheated better than his peers, that's all.

What I find troubling is the bullying and calculated destruction of anyone who got in his way, raised a question, or cast a doubt. By all accounts Armstrong was absolutely vicious, vindictive as hell. Former U.S. Postal team masseuse Emma O'Reilly found herself being described publicly as a "prostitute" and an "alcoholic," and had her life put through a legal grinder when she spoke out about Armstrong's use of PEDs.

Journalists were sued, intimidated, and blacklisted from events, press conferences, and interviews if they so much as questioned the Lance miracle or well-greased machine that kept winning Le Tour.

Armstrong left a lot of wreckage behind him.

If he is genuinely sorry, if he truly repents for his past "indiscretions," one would think his first act would be to try to find some way of not only seeking forgiveness from those whom he brutally put down, but to do something meaningful to repair the damage he did to their lives and livelihoods.

Read More..

Lance Armstrong Admits to Doping

Lance Armstrong, formerly cycling's most decorated champion and considered one of America's greatest athletes, confessed to cheating for at least a decade, admitting on Thursday that he owed all seven of his Tour de France titles and the millions of dollars in endorsements that followed to his use of illicit performance-enhancing drugs.

After years of denying that he had taken banned drugs and received oxygen-boosting blood transfusions, and attacking his teammates and competitors who attempted to expose him, Armstrong came clean with Oprah Winfrey in an exclusive interview, admitting to using banned substances for years.

"I view this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times," he said. "I know the truth. The truth isn't what was out there. The truth isn't what I said.

"I'm a flawed character, as I well know," Armstrong added. "All the fault and all the blame here falls on me."

In October, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency issued a report in which 11 former Armstrong teammates exposed the system with which they and Armstrong received drugs with the knowledge of their coaches and help of team physicians.

George Burns/Courtesy of Harpo Studios, Inc./AP Photo

Lance Armstrong Admits Using Performance-Enhancing Drugs Watch Video

Lance Armstrong's Oprah Confession: The Consequences Watch Video

Lance Armstrong's Many Denials Caught on Tape Watch Video

The U.S. Postal Service Cycling Team "ran the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen," USADA said in its report.

As a result of USADA's findings, Armstrong was stripped of his Tour de France titles. Soon, longtime sponsors including Nike began to abandon him, too.

READ MORE: Did Doping Cause Armstrong's Cancer?

Armstrong said he was driven to cheat by a "ruthless desire to win."

He told Winfrey that his competition "cocktail" consisted of EPO, blood transfusions and testosterone, and that he had previously used cortisone. He would not, however, give Winfrey the details of when, where and with whom he doped during seven winning Tours de France between 1999 and 2005.

He said he stopped doping following his 2005 Tour de France victory and did not use banned substances when he placed third in 2009 and entered the tour again in 2010.

"It was a mythic perfect story and it wasn't true," Armstrong said of his fairytale story of overcoming testicular cancer to become the most celebrated cyclist in history.

READ MORE: 10 Scandalous Public Confessions

PHOTOS: Olympic Doping Scandals: Past and Present

PHOTOS: Tour de France 2012

Armstrong would not name other members of his team who doped, but admitted that as the team's captain he set an example. He admitted he was "a bully" but said there "there was a never a directive" from him that his teammates had to use banned substances.

"At the time it did not feel wrong?" Winfrey asked.

"No," Armstrong said. "Scary."

"Did you feel bad about it?" she asked again.

"No," he said.

Armstrong said he thought taking the drugs was similar to filling his tires with air and bottle with water. He never thought of his actions as cheating, but "leveling the playing field" in a sport rife with doping.

Read More..

Uncle of young Newtown shooting victim turning tragedy into action

On Dec. 14, Alexis Haller was on the phone working on a legal brief for the Vatican when his mother texted him to say that there had been a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. His nephew was missing.

Haller, a litigator in Washington state, monitored the news and felt his stomach drop when reports emerged that an entire classroom of children had been killed. Confirmation of the worst came later that day. His nephew, Noah Pozner, 6, had been shot 11 times at close range with a semiautomatic weapon, making him the youngest of the 26 people slain that day at the school.

One month later, Haller found himself in Washington, D.C. On Wednesday, the soft-spoken 39-year-old with rimless glasses and exhausted eyes sat in the front row of an auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building as the president and vice president announced new gun-control measures. Haller had crafted and forwarded several proposals to prevent future gun violence that were shaped by his experience as a lawyer for the Holy See. He also had publicly criticized the administration for what he considered an initial failure to reach out to victims and their families. In a political environment in which victims are often used as backdrops for a photo opportunity, Haller decided to use his awful status as an opportunity for advocacy.

“The thing my whole family on my sister’s side latched on to right away was we have to make something positive come out of it,” he said.

Before heading to the office building on Wednesday morning, Haller grabbed a pair of socks off the wall of clothier Jos. A. Bank. He had flown in late the night before, and the airline had lost his luggage in Burbank, Calif. An aide to Vice President Biden had offered to lend the visiting lawyer her husband’s blazer, but Haller preferred to shop for his own clothes. While sifting through suits and ties (“My nephew’s favorite color was blue”), he talked about his family’s “nightmare” month.

On the night of the shooting, Haller arrived in Connecticut to help lighten the logistical load for his sister, coordinating with a state trooper assigned to meet the family’s needs and establishing a Web site to collect donations to pay for counseling and education for Noah’s siblings, including his twin sister. He received an expression of support from the Holy See, met President Obama at Sandy Hook (“He was devastated”) and eulogized Noah at his funeral (“He would have become a great man”). When Haller’s wife, an active blogger, learned that a fake account had been set up in Noah’s name, the Princeton- and Stanford-educated Haller decried the scam on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.” The FBI thanked him, Haller said, for preventing more fraudulent activity.

Haller returned to Seattle on Dec. 28 to meet a deadline on the Vatican brief, but made time to talk to school-safety experts and read the Secret Service report on the shootings at Columbine High School. As he pored over research, he kept finding incidences of “leakage,” a term describing when a person intentionally or unintentionally reveals clues that may signal an impending violent act.

Read More..

Punggol East 5-year plan won't cost much: RP's Jeyaretnam

SINGAPORE: The Reform Party's candidate for Punggol East, Mr Kenneth Jeyaretnam, said the five-year plan he has in mind for residents of the ward will not cost a lot of money.

He said this in response to questions from reporters on Thursday on how he intends to fund the plan, which will include a legal clinic to help those in debt, as well as a tuition club.

Mr Jeyaretnam, who is Secretary-General of the party, intends to unveil the plan next week.

He announced the plan on Nomination Day on Wednesday.

Mr Jeyaretnam said he will be discussing the plan with his grassroots team. He added that several residents of Punggol East are in the team as his primary advisers in this by-election.

The Reform Party chief said that he will not hold more than two rallies. The first will probably be held this weekend.

-CNA/ac

Read More..

Coast Guard identifies vessel which rammed fishing boat off Kozhikode coast

KOCHI: The Coast Guard on Thursday identified the Panama flag merchant vessel which rammed a fishing boat off Kozhikode coast injuring three fishermen.

According to Coast Guard officials, the vessel has been identified as M V Isumo. ''We have directed the vessel to come to Kochi for further inquiry in connection with the incident," the Coast Guard officials said.

Officials said that the vessel immediately fled the scene after the accident and the vessel was traced after the Coast Guard launched a Dornier aircraft and two fast patrol vessels to track it.

It was on Wednesday afternoon that three fishermen were injured when their boat collided with the merchant vessel off Beypore coast near Kozhikode. The fishing boat sank in the collision and the fishermen were rescued by another fishing boat which was in the vicinity.

According to the coastal police officials, the fishermen jumped into the sea on seeing the ship approaching towards their boat.

Read More..

6 Ways Climate Change Will Affect You

Photograph by AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

The planet keeps getting hotter, new data showed this week. Especially in America, where 2012 was the warmest year ever recorded, by far. Every few years, the U.S. federal government engages hundreds of experts to assess the impacts of climate change, now and in the future.

From agriculture (pictured) to infrastructure to how humans consume energy, the National Climate Assessment Development Advisory Committee spotlights how a warming world may bring widespread disruption.

Farmers will see declines in some crops, while others will reap increased yields.

Won't more atmospheric carbon mean longer growing seasons? Not quite. Over the next several decades, the yield of virtually every crop in California's fertile Central Valley, from corn to wheat to rice and cotton, will drop by up to 30 percent, researchers expect. (Read about "The Carbon Bathtub" in National Geographic magazine.)

Lackluster pollination, driven by declines in bees due partly to the changing climate, is one reason. Government scientists also expect the warmer climate to shorten the length of the frosting season necessary for many crops to grow in the spring.

Aside from yields, climate change will also affect food processing, storage, and transportation—industries that require an increasing amount of expensive water and energy as global demand rises—leading to higher food prices.

—Daniel Stone

Published January 16, 2013

Read More..

Notre Dame: Football Star Was 'Catfished' in Hoax

Notre Dame's athletic director and the star of its near-championship football team said the widely-reported death of the star's girlfriend from leukemia during the 2012 football season was apparently a hoax, and the player said he was duped by it as well.

Manti Te'o, who led the Fighting Irish to the BCS championship game this year and finished second for the Heisman Trophy, said in a statement today that he fell in love with a girl online last year who turned out not to be real.

The university's athletic director, Jack Swarbrick, said it has been investigating the "cruel hoax" since Te'o approached officials in late December to say he believed he had been tricked.

Private investigators hired by the university subsequently monitored online chatter by the alleged perpetrators, Swarbrick said, adding that he was shocked by the "casual cruelty" it revealed.

"They enjoyed the joke," Swarbrick said, comparing the ruse to the popular film "Catfish," in which filmmakers revealed a person at the other end of an online relationship was not who they said they were.

"While we still don't know all of the dimensions of this ... there are certain things that I feel confident we do know," Swarbrick said. "The first is that this was a very elaborate, very sophisticated hoax, perpetrated for reasons we don't understand."

Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images

Notre Dame's Athletic Director Discusses Manti Te'o Girlfriend Hoax Watch Video

Notre Dame Football Star Victim of 'Girlfriend Hoax' Watch Video

Eddie Lacy, Barrett Jones Discuss 'Bama Win Watch Video

Te'o said during the season that his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, died of leukemia in September on the same day Te'o's grandmother died, triggering an outpouring of support for Te'o at Notre Dame and in the media.

"While my grandma passed away and you take, you know, the love of my life [Kekua]. The last thing she said to me was, 'I love you,'" Te'o said at the time, noting that he had talked to Kekua on the phone and by text message until her death.

Now, responding to a story first reported by the sports website Deadspin, Te'o has acknowledged that Kekua never existed. The website reported today that there were no records of a woman named Lennay Kekua anywhere.

Te'o denied that he was in on the hoax.

"This is incredibly embarrassing to talk about, but over an extended period of time, I developed an emotional relationship with a woman I met online," Te'o said in a statement released this afternoon. "We maintained what I thought to be an authentic relationship by communicating frequently online and on the phone, and I grew to care deeply about her."

Swarbrick said he expected Te'o to give his version of events at a public event soon, perhaps Thursday, and that he believed Te'o's representatives were planning to disclose the truth next week until today's story broke.

Deadspin reported that the image attached to Kekua's social media profiles, through which the pair interacted, was of another woman who has said she did not even know Te'o or know that her picture was being used. The website reported that it traced the profiles to a California man who is an acquaintance of Te'o and of the woman whose photo was stolen.

"To realize that I was the victim of what was apparently someone's sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating," Te'o said.

Read More..