Fugitive Fundraiser Captured

GRAND JUNCTION, COLORADO -- Fugitive political fundraiser Norman Hsu, who skipped out on San Mateo County authorities this week rather than face sentencing for a 1992 fraud conviction, was apprehended Thursday night by federal and local lawmen in Grand Junction, Colo.

Captured at Hospital

Authorities said Hsu was taken into custody at St. Mary's Hospital in Grand Junction at 7 p.m. local time. He had been on the lam for almost two days after failing to appear in a Redwood City courtroom Wednesday to surrender his passport.

Sick on Train

Hsu was taken off an eastbound passenger train at the Grand Junction train station earlier in the day by paramedics who requested a backboard to move him, said Sgt. Lonnie Chavez with the Grand Junction Police Department. The exact nature of Hsu's condition was unclear, Chavez said.

Disappearing Act Deja Vu

Hsu's disappearing act seemed to be a reprise of a move he pulled 15 years ago, when he failed to show up for sentencing in the same grand theft case. Hsu was facing up to three years in state prison, a $10,000 fine and restitution payments after pleading no contest to a single count of grand theft in what prosecutors described as a $1 million fraud scheme.

But while free on bail after his plea, Hsu dropped from sight for 15 years, apparently spending time in Hong Kong, the Philippines and Taiwan, only to emerge in recent years as a seemingly wealthy New York resident who donated generously to Democratic political campaigns, regularly attended fundraisers and was photographed with party leaders.

Two Million Dollar Bail

A week ago, Hsu, 56, surrendered to San Mateo County sheriff's deputies in Redwood City after press accounts linked him to the earlier grand theft case. He spent a few hours in county jail before posting $2 million bail and agreeing to surrender his passport.

After Hsu posted bail, his attorney, Jim Brosnahan, sent a legal assistant to Hsu's New York condominium Monday to retrieve the passport but was unable to find it after a 90-minute search.

'Hillraiser'

Hsu, listed as a "Hillraiser" committed to bringing in $100,000 or more to the presidential campaign of New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, has given an estimated $600,000 of his own money to candidates ranging from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Assemblywoman Fiona Ma to presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

The size and scope of Hsu's contributions made him one of the party's largest individual contributors. While he gave $23,000 to Clinton and $7,000 to Obama, he also gave $62,000 to New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, $50,000 to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, and $50,000 to the New York State Democratic Party.

Ponzi Scheme

In the 1991-92 grand theft case, Hsu was charged with bilking about 20 investors, including his ex-girlfriend, out of about $1 million in connection with a business that was supposed to provide latex gloves to another firm - only no gloves were ever bought or sold, prosecutors said.

Prosecutor Ron Smetana said at a preliminary hearing . .

"What Mr. Hsu was in the business of was running a Ponzi scheme. He was taking money and spending part of it on himself and returning it as it was available. As with any Ponzi scheme, the first ones in and the first ones out always do quite well. Those (who) hope that their investment will continue and stay to the end tend to lose their shorts."

Kidnapped and Rescued

After the glove business collapsed in April 1990, Hsu was kidnapped four months later in San Francisco by a Chinatown gang leader in an effort to collect a debt from him, police said. The abduction was foiled after the car they were riding in ran a red light in Foster City and was pulled over by police, who rescued Hsu, authorities said.

Adapted from a story appearing in The San Francisco Chronicle by Jaxon Van Derbeken and John Coté on September 7, 2007

Female Elvis Dies

Janis Martin rose to fame in the 1950s as Elvis Presley’s label mate at RCA Victor, which promoted her as the Female Elvis. Her first record and biggest hit, “Will You Willyum,” was released in 1956, when she was just 15. The song made the Billboard Top 10 for one week and sold about 750,000 copies.

She appeared on the “Tonight” show and “American Bandstand” and toured with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Faron Young, Hank Snow, Porter Wagoner and Jim Reeves. She became a star in Europe, where she is still popular, Mr. Whitt said.

Ms. Martin was voted Billboard’s most promising female artist in 1956. She formed her own band, the Marteens, and played clubs and fairs before retiring from show business in 1958. She remained largely inactive in the business until the late 1970s, when the rockabilly revival led to extensive tours in Europe and introduced Ms. Martin to a new generation of fans.

She had been scheduled to perform at the Americana, an international rockabilly show in Britain, on July 4, but had to cancel because of her illness, Mr. Whitt said.

Along with performing, Ms. Martin managed the Danville Golf Club.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by a sister, Geraldine Connor of South Boston, Va.; a granddaughter; and a great-granddaughter. She had a son, who died, by a previous marriage.

“She was a free-spirited lady who was devoted to her fan base,” Mr. Whitt said in a telephone interview. “She would stay for hours after a show and never leave a person standing, taking pictures and signing for them for four or five hours.”

The cause was cancer.

adapted from an Associated Press report

Ooops

Time to redraw humanity's evolutionary path

An international team of researchers say their new fossil discovery disproves the notion that over the last two million years ancestral humans followed a straight evolutionary trail from Homo habilis to Homo ergaster to Homo erectus and finally to us, Homo sapiens.

Instead, the team - including geochronologist Ian McDougall with the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra - wrote overnight in the journal Nature that H. habilis and H. erectus lived side-by-side in the same park of Kenya for nearly half-a-million years.

“Their co-existence makes it unlikely that Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis,”

concluded author Maeve Leakey of Stony Brook University in New York State and co-director the Koobi Fora Research Project in Kenya.

adapted from an article appearing in The Australian by Leigh Dayton on August 09, 2007

Perhaps They Should Have Signed Him

Before becoming a most notorious murderer, Charles Manson was known as just another hippie singer/songwriter. The original freak-folk – the Manson family – would sit around and listen to Charlie interpret Revelations, regale them with his philosophy of Helter Skelter, and play his psych-folk guitar music.

Taught by a Gangster

Manson was taught by a gangster how to play a steel guitar during one of his many prison stints before the Tate-LaBianca murders. Once outside, he felt his playing and songwriting needed to be heard. He fell in with the Beach Boys and Neil Young and even convinced Young and Dennis Wilson to pitch his songs to their record executives.

Eventually the Beach Boys did record a Manson composition called 'Cease To Exist. The title was changed to 'Never Learn Not To Love"' and was released as the 'B' side of the single 'Bluebirds Over The Mountain', which climbed to number 61 in early 1969, giving Manson a hit record on Billboard's Hot 100. It took a while for Dennis to catch on that Manson was a "hanger on" and by the time Dennis ended the friendship, Manson had soaked him for over $100,000.

Repeatedly denied recording contracts, Manson unleashed his most vitriolic threats and hatred upon the producers who turned him down. It became clear during the trial that Manson chose the Polanski/Tate house as the primary target because he believed Terry Melcher, the last record exec to refuse to release Manson’s music and previous owner of the home, still lived there.

Separating the Man from the Music

Thirty six years after the murders, with Manson refusing to appear at his latest parole hearing, we are finally approaching the time when we can separate the music from the man. In a time when the hippie-collective aesthetic is enjoying a renaissance, it is more than a little fascinating to hear the Manson family sing, play and improvise.

A Real Knack for Songwriting

Manson’s song structures come from pop, rock and blues, and he plays a lot of major seventh chords, creating drones that are always on the verge of resolution. His voice is not terrible, and in the wake of some recording today, it sounds comparably great. Tracks such as "Look At Your Game, Girl," "Arkansas," "Garbage Dump," and "Devil Man" display a real knack for songwriting. The really eerie parts of this album come in the form of family sing-alongs like "I’ll Never Say Never To Always," and Manson’s life-lessons, that one can picture being ingested by half-naked teenage girls on LSD.

Adapted from an article written by Ben Weiss Friday, 28 April 2006 on
KBGA 89.9FM Missoula website.

10,000 Year-Old Camel Found in Arizona

MESA, ARIZONA--Workers digging at the future site of a Wal-Mart store in suburban Mesa have unearthed the bones of a prehistoric camel that is estimated to be about 10,000 years old.

Arizona State University geology museum curator Brad Archer hurried out to the site Friday when he got the news that the owner of a nursery was carefully excavating bones found at the bottom of a hole being dug for a new ornamental citrus tree.

"There's no question that this is a camel; these creatures walked the land here until about 8,000 years ago, when the same event that wiped out a great deal of mammal life took place," Archer told The Arizona Republic.

"In my 15 years at ASU doing this work I can think of six or seven times when finds this important have been made. This is the first camel. Others have been horses, once a mammoth on Happy Valley Road. This sort of thing is extremely rare."

© From an article appearing April 28, 2007 in the English-language version of Pravda.