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(01/17/08 3:48am)
An angry judge doubled O.J. Simpson’s bail to $250,000 on Wednesday for violating terms of his original bail by attempting to contact a co-defendant in the armed robbery case against him.\nSimpson, clad in jail attire, grimaced as the amount was announced and meekly acknowledged that he understood.\n“I don’t know Mr. Simpson what the heck you were thinking – or maybe that’s the problem –you weren’t,” District Judge Jackie Glass told Simpson during the hearing.\n“I don’t know if it’s just arrogance. I don’t know if it’s ignorance. But you’ve been locked up at the Clark County Detention Center since Friday because of arrogance or ignorance – or both.”\nGlass said that the order to not contact other defendants was clear and she warned that if anything else happened Simpson would be locked up. She warned him against contacting anyone else in the case, and barred him from leaving the country.\nSimpson’s attorney, Yale Galanter, said he did not know how long it would take for Simpson to post bail, but it could be a few days. Tom Scotto, a Simpson friend who owns an auto repair shop in Florida, said he and several other people were trying to get him freed by the end of the day.\nThe former football star was picked up Friday in Florida by his bail bondsman, Miguel Pereira of You Ring We Spring, and was brought back to Nevada for violating terms of his release.\nThe district attorney charged that Simpson left an expletive-laced phone message Nov. 16, telling Pereira to tell co-defendant Clarence “C.J.” Stewart how upset Simpson was about testimony during their preliminary hearing.\n“I just want, want C.J. to know that ... I’m tired of this (expletive),” Simpson was quoted as saying. “Fed up with (expletives) changing what they told me. All right?”
(08/30/06 2:41am)
LAS VEGAS - The leader of a polygamist breakaway Mormon sect who was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List has been arrested and faces sexual misconduct charges for allegedly arranging marriages between underage girls and older men, authorities said Tuesday.\nWarren Steed Jeffs, 50, was taken into custody after he and two other people were pulled over late Monday by a Nevada Highway Patrol trooper on Interstate 15 just north of Las Vegas, FBI spokesman David Staretz said.\nThe leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was wanted in Utah and Arizona on suspicion of sexual misconduct for allegedly arranging marriages between underage girls and older men.\nHe assumed leadership of the sect in 2002 after the death of his 98-year-old father, Rulon Jeffs, who had 65 children by several women. Jeffs took nearly all his father's widows as his own wives. He is said to have at least 40 wives and nearly 60 children.\nSince May, Jeffs has been on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, with a $100,000 reward offered for information leading to his capture.\nThe other two people in the vehicle were identified as one of Warren Jeffs' wives, Naomi Jeffs, and a brother, Isaac Steed Jeffs, both 32, Staretz said. They were being interviewed by the FBI in Las Vegas but were not arrested.\nIsaac Jeffs was driving a red Cadillac Escalade that was stopped for having no visible registration, said state Trooper Kevin Honea. An FBI agent was summoned to confirm Jeffs' identity, Honea said.\nWarren Jeffs was in federal custody in Las Vegas awaiting a court hearing on a federal charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, Staretz said.\nArizona Attorney General Terry Goddard told KTAR-AM of Phoenix that Jeffs' arrest is "the beginning of the end of ... the tyrannical rule of a small group of people over the practically 10,000 followers of the FLDS sect." He predicted that it will inspire more people to come forward with allegations of sexual abuse.\nMost of the church's members live in Hildale, Utah, and nearby Colorado City, Ariz.\nJeffs was indicted in June 2005 on an Arizona charge of arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old girl and a married man and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. He is charged in Utah with two felony counts of rape as an accomplice, for allegedly arranging the marriage of a teenage girl to an older man in Nevada.\nThe FLDS Church split from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when the mainstream Mormon Church disavowed plural marriage more than 100 years ago.\nJeffs has been called a religious zealot and dangerous extremist by those familiar with his church.\nDuring his four-year rule, the number of underage marriages -- some involving girls as young as 13 -- escalated into the hundreds, church dissidents said. They said that although the sect has long practiced the custom of arranged marriages, young girls were rarely married off until Warren Jeffs came to power.\nPeople expelled from the community said young men were sent away to avoid competition for brides. Older men were cast out for alleged disobedience, and their wives and children were reassigned by Jeffs to new husbands and fathers, the former members said.\n"If this will bring an end to that, that will be a good thing," said Ward Jeffs, an older half brother of Warren. "We're excited for the people down there, but we're very concerned about who might step up and take the leadership role."\nIt remained unclear Tuesday what would happen to the leadership of the church while Jeffs was incarcerated.\nFederal and state law enforcement agencies will determine whether Jeffs should be extradited first to Utah or Arizona, said Steve Sorenson, a federal prosecutor in Salt Lake City. Utah's charges are more serious, and the federal unlawful flight charge was for leaving Utah, which could influence the decision, Sorenson said.
(03/11/05 4:09am)
LAS VEGAS -- It's chilling to walk by a dented Army helmet with big tinted goggles on the brim, a frayed "atomic cocktail" recipe book and then come face to face with a family of mannequins, frozen in time in a fallout shelter.\nBaby boomers will recognize the Civil Defense character Bert the Turtle and know by heart the instructions droning in black-and-white on the family's boxy Packard Bell TV: When sirens sound, find shelter. Don't look at the light. Duck and cover.\nA digital countdown across the way tells when the steel doors of a cement-walled Ground Zero Theater will open.\nCurators of the new Atomic Testing Museum hope the setting stirs the imagination for those with no memory of mushroom clouds and the role the Nevada Test Site played in the development of nuclear deterrence.\n"Nuclear weapons aren't gone," museum Director William Johnson said as he leads the way through the $3.5 million facility that opened last month just east of the Las Vegas Strip. "The world is just a different place now."\nThe museum traces a half-century of nuclear weapons testing in a nation that grew to love or hate the bomb. It describes developments that let scientists peer into the first millionth of a second of a nuclear blast before instruments vaporized, and it charts research that continued after earthshaking explosions ended in 1992 at the test site.\nIt also has drawn criticism as revisionist history among advocates who call it a forum for nuclear apologists, and it has reopened wounds for "downwinders" sickened by fallout from atmospheric atomic blasts.\n"Once you've been a victim of nuclear weapons you're less enthusiastic about it," said Michelle Thomas, 52, a lifelong resident of St. George, Utah. "I don't hate or fear anyone bad enough to want to see happen to them what happened to us."\nJohnson doesn't deny that testing caused problems. He points to exhibits describing the plight of downwinders and of test site workers sickened by silicosis, and to a reading room and nuclear testing archive containing more than 310,000 documents.\n"I want people to come here and learn," he said. "But if there's only one message taken away, it's that the Cold War was a war. It was a struggle with the Soviet Union."\nThe story is told with a timeline, artifacts, interactive and touch-screen displays and several films, including the 10-minute presentation in the Ground Zero Theater.\nVisitors sit on varnished wooden seats modeled after the warped, weathered benches still on News Nob, a rocky outcrop overlooking Yucca Flat where journalists observed atmospheric nuclear tests beginning with "Charlie" in April 1952.\nLight bursts as the big screen shows a nuclear test. The room rumbles with embedded speakers. Air blasts tousle the hair, imitating a shock wave.\n"It's almost like you're sitting there. That's real stuff to me," said Mike Margalski, 49, a maintenance engineer who wants to experience what his father did as an Army soldier exposed to more than one nuclear test in the early 1950s. Eugene "Geno" Margalski died of prostate cancer in 1996, at age 65.\n"My dad never ever talked about it until just a few days before he passed away," Margalski said. "He talked about going out and walking in it while they came around with Geiger counters."\nBut this is no theme park. It is as somber as the 230,000 deaths and injuries in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945; as sober as the concept of "mutually assured destruction" that shadowed the world for half a century afterward.\nThe entry to the 8,000-square-foot museum resembles a guard gate. Up a gentle ramp is a copy of Albert Einstein's August 1939 letter to President Franklin Roosevelt suggesting that uranium might yield "a new and important source of energy."\nAn inert model of the most common B61 nuclear bomb 12-feet-long, gray, unimposing rests on its side next to displays of the "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" devices dropped on Japan.\nThrough a 10-foot diameter steel "decoupler" portal and down a tunnel lined with faux rock is the underground testing gallery. Visitors whisper when they stop to reflect or remember.\nSome exhibits have a "gee-whiz" element chronicling how scientists tested nuclear rocket engines, shrank the size of nuclear devices and measured the effects of radionuclides on plants, animals and food.\nThis being Las Vegas, the museum also chronicles how tourists sipped cocktails on casino rooftops, gazing at blast clouds on the horizon at the test site, 65 miles to the northwest.\nThe museum, a partnership between the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation and the Desert Research Institute, is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution.\nAdministrators foresee schoolchildren marveling at the column of instruments used to measure underground nuclear explosions, working a manipulator arm like the one scientists used to handle radioactive materials and hearing the clicks of a Geiger counter measuring low-level radioactivity.\n"I would hope they come away with an understanding of what is radiation and why we did testing," said Loretta Helling, a former Energy Department public affairs specialist who spent eight years curating the collection. "We try to have a balanced view in there."\nPreston Truman foresees the museum ignoring unpleasantries while teaching "that everything was good and beneficial and that America won the Cold War."\n"In 50 years, when all the people who had a negative opinion are dead, it will be just that one-sided history," said Truman, who founded and directs an advocacy group called Downwinders.\nThe 53-year-old Truman's first memory as a child is sitting on his father's knee in Enterprise, Utah, watching a mushroom cloud at the Nevada Test Site. He figures that was 1955, a year in which the government conducted 18 atmospheric tests.\n"We're children of the bomb. We saw the flash. We heard the bangs. A couple of times, the shock waves broke out windows that they paid for," he said. "We got radiated and we got lied to."\nThomas remembers a fine ash falling like snow across St. George. When fallout warnings sounded, her mother would don an old straw hat, pull on rubber dish gloves and tie a dish towel around her own mouth to pluck laundry from the outdoor drying line.\n"She would wash the sheets twice in hot water so her kids wouldn't have to sleep with radioactive fallout," Thomas said.\nBut Thomas began to develop maladies as a junior in high school: ovarian cysts, breast cancer, a benign salivary gland tumor. She was diagnosed in 1974 with polymyositis, an autoimmune system disease similar to lupus. She and two siblings each received a one-time "downwinder" payment of $50,000 under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990.\n"I think we've learned that the government is fallible and may not be entirely upfront," Thomas said. "But it was considered unpatriotic in those days to question the government."\nJohnson, 47, recalled hearing the wail of Friday morning Civil Defense sirens as a child in Miami.\nHe says the museum tried to put the nation's 1,054 above- and below-ground nuclear tests in context. Of the 928 detonated at the test site, 100 were atmospheric tests. Seven tests were exploded elsewhere in Nevada, three each in New Mexico and Alaska, two each in Colorado and Mississippi and 106 on Pacific islands. Three tests were conducted on South Atlantic islands.\nThe number of nuclear tests peaked at 96 in 1962 the year the United States and the Soviet Union stared each other down with their fingers on the button during the Cuban missile crisis.\n"The paradigm of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was that the Northern Hemisphere was going to be blown to bits," Johnson recalls. The scientists, technicians and administrators at the test site, he says, "were thinking they were saving the world"
(11/17/04 4:21am)
LAS VEGAS -- Forty-three members of a Cuban dance troupe performing at a Las Vegas casino asked for asylum in the United States Monday in the one of the biggest mass defections of entertainers from the communist country.\nMembers of the cast said they took the step because they feared they would be forced to quit performing if they returned to Havana. They said Cuban authorities did not want them to perform in the United States in the first place.\n"This is a brave and bold action by my young artists," Nicole Durr, the German creator of the Havana Night Club show, said of the dancers, singers, musicians and stagehands. "It's done with sorrow, leaving family behind, but with resolve."\nArriving by bus to submit asylum paperwork at the federal courthouse in Las Vegas, the performers responded in unison when Durr asked in Spanish if they were frightened by the action they were taking.\n"No!" they said.\nThere was no immediate reaction from Fidel Castro's communist government.\nFor more than 40 years, Cuban refugees have routinely been given asylum in the United States. Applicants usually receive a response in less than two months.\nSeven other cast members, now in Germany, had applied earlier and were granted U.S. asylum Monday, said Pamela Falk, a City University of New York professor advising the troupe. They were expected to arrive in Las Vegas Tuesday, she said. At least two cast members have decided to return to Cuba, and one was wavering, Falk said.\nGroup members entered the country months ago and performed in Las Vegas from Aug. 21 to Sept. 6, with a short encore engagement last month. The troupe's show is due to reopen Monday at the Stardust Resort and Casino and run until Jan. 11.
(11/03/03 5:06am)
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. -- A second wave of residents displaced by Southern California's wildfires returned home Sunday as a weekend of cooler, calmer weather helped firefighters begin to get the upper hand.\nAs the threat began to diminish, authorities also sent home some of the thousands of firefighters who have been battling blazes scattered from San Diego County to the suburbs of Los Angeles.\nSome evacuees got the go-ahead Saturday to check on their homes. Among them were JoDee Ewing and her husband, Steve, who found little standing of their 1920s-era house but the stone chimney, the foundation and -- for some inexplicable reason -- their rose bushes.\n"I still have roses blooming," said Ewing, 40. "But there's no toilets. They disintegrated."\nThe fire that started Oct. 25 just up the road from the Ewings' place, in Upper Waterman Canyon on the edge of the San Bernardino National Forest, consumed 91,285 acres. In the last week, that blaze and a half-dozen others across Southern California have burned about 750,000 acres, destroyed nearly 3,400 homes and killed 20 people.\nIn San Bernardino County, some firefighters were beginning to head to home, said U.S. Forest Service spokesman Bob Narus, although he couldn't say exactly how many. In San Diego County, firefighters were expected to begin leaving after spending a few hours resting on Sunday morning, said California Department of Forestry spokeswoman Barb Daskoski.\nThough fog, lower temperatures and even snow slowed the spreading flames, more than 12,000 firefighters were still on the lines early Sunday.\nThe fire that destroyed the Ewings' house came to a standstill Saturday, and firefighters allowed them and other homeowners to survey the damage. Residents of nearby Big Bear Valley were given the go-ahead to return Sunday.\n"It's lying there right now not doing anything," Big Bear City Fire Chief Dana VanLuven said of the fire, which was 72 percent contained Sunday. "The threat is still very real, but we are confident we can hold it off."\nNot everyone was allowed home. Eligio Miglia, 51, lives in Crestline, an area hit particularly hard by the fire.\nSunday, he pushed his grandmother Regina Fyffe, 80, in a wheelchair through the breakfast line at a San Bernardino shelter. They have been living in a mobile home with four other family members.\n"They're saying it's going to be another week to get up there," said Miglia, who believes his home survived. "I'm happy we are safe; I'm satisfied we've got food. I'm hopeful we'll get up there soon."\nFyffe, however, was tired of being away from home.\n"It's the worst," she said. "That's all I can say."\nAuthorities say an arsonist started that fire on Old Waterman Canyon Road, a winding two-lane leading from San Bernardino to Upper Waterman Canyon, a community of 66 homes and a seasonal fire station. All but eight of those homes and the fire station were destroyed.\nDespite a reward of $110,000 and the distribution of a composite sketch, the arsonist has not been caught.\nFirefighters across the region took advantage of the weather to build firebreaks near communities that could be threatened again next week with the expected return of hot Santa Ana winds. Firefighters near Sugarloaf burned piles of dead trees and dry brush.\n"With this inclement weather, they feel they can burn that stuff safely, which will provide increased fire safety for communities later on this week when the wind and weather conditions are expected to change," said U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman Anne Westling.\nThe weather has also brought drawbacks. Snow and rain that fell overnight Friday caused a mud and rock slide that closed Highway 18. One firefighter, part of a team that cuts down burnt trees, suffered a broken arm and leg when a large branch fell on him.\nIn San Diego County, the 281,000-acre Cedar Fire -- the largest individual blaze in California history -- was 90 percent contained Sunday after burning for six days in the mountains northeast of San Diego.\nIn all, six fires were still burning across four California counties.\nHomeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, who visited a relief center in Claremont on Saturday, said he was unsure if the nation had ever seen such destructive wildfires. The major blazes alone have cost more than $50 million to fight.\n"We have our work cut out for us," Ridge said.\nThe secretary also defended a Bush administration decision not to declare Southern California forests an emergency tree-removal zone before the current fires erupted into one of the state's worst disasters.\nRidge, speaking with Gov. Gray Davis, said it was understandable that California asked for $430 million in emergency aid to rid forests of trees killed by bark beetles. But he said it was equally understandable that the Bush administration, after allocating $43 million, declined to provide any more.\n"This finger-pointing is not going to do anybody any good anymore," Ridge said.\nIn Upper Waterman Canyon, Ewing and her neighbors donned gloves and sifted through the ashes of their homes, finding coins and an occasional undamaged piece of china.\nSome, like Dr. Roger Smith, were incredibly lucky. The retired neurosurgeon returned to find two windows broken by the fire's heat but little other damage.\n"Miraculous," the 81-year-old physician said.\nThe Ewings, although they lost practically everything, said they have no intention of leaving the area.\n"Of course, you're sad that things are gone," said JoDee Ewing. "But it's a great place up here. We'll be back"