Los Angeles (E! Online) – Mark Spitz has been vanquished. But not so Dorothy, Rose, Blanche and Sophia.
Michael Phelps’ Spitz-sinking swim on Saturday elevated NBC to its best ratings on the once-mighty, now-dead night in about a generation.
Still, the golden boy of the Beijing Games couldn’t topple The Golden Girls, which held on to its title as NBC’s most-watched Saturday-night show of the last 18 years.
HOUSTON (AP) — East Texas jurors wrongly used a Bible during deliberations in a capital murder case, but there isn’t enough evidence to show they were prejudiced when they decided to send the perpetrator to death row, a federal appeals court said.
The ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals comes in the case of Khristian Oliver, who was condemned by a Nacogdoches County jury in 1999, a year after he and three companions were involved in a break-in in which Joe Collins, 64, was fatally shot and bludgeoned.
Oliver’s three accomplices received prison terms ranging from five to 99 years. He got the death penalty. In his appeals, his lawyers contended that jurors improperly consulted Bible verses that called for death as punishment for murder.
In its ruling posted Aug. 14, the New Orleans-based appeals court said that using the Bible “amounts to a type of private communication, contact or tampering that is outside the evidence and law.”
But the court said it didn’t see enough evidence to overturn decisions from the trial court and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that upheld the jury verdict.
In this interactive USA TODAY graphic, you’ll find medicine’s best-kept secret revealed: death rates for heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia for every hospital in the nation.
USA TODAY created this graphic using data compiled by the federal government’s Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The agency also has supplied the information to the more than 4,000 hospitals included and posted them on a government website called Hospital Compare.
BEIJING — Two weeks before leaving to compete in the Olympics, the archer Brady Ellison waded into a pool not far from the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, Calif., and was baptized in the Christian faith.
In the water with him was Kisik Lee, the head coach of the United States archery team and a Christian who has become a spiritual guide for Ellison, 19, and the larger group of athletes who train and live full time at the Olympic Training Center. He has also served as a sponsor in the baptism of three other resident archers.
During the Olympics, Lee and at least three of the five United States archers who qualified to compete in Beijing met every morning to sing hymns and read from the Bible, and to attend church together in the chapel at the Olympic Village. Lee believes having a strong faith makes for better archers because it helps quiet their minds. To that end, he tailored Ellison’s Olympic schedule to include spiritual and athletic objectives.
“I give him six tasks a day, including reading the Bible and education,†Lee said. “And he’s doing it.â€
But Lee’s advocacy has raised concerns in the United States Olympic Committee, and some in the elite archery community feel uncomfortable with his proselytizing. The mother of a teenage archer who lived at the center said she worried that complaining about it might jeopardize her daughter’s future in the sport.
Lee said coaching was more of a challenge for him when members of the team did not share his beliefs.
“I don’t want to have any favorites,†he said. “I would love to be fair for everyone. But sooner or later, if they can see through me God, that’s what I want to try to do. I’m not God, and I can’t drive them to God, but I can pray for them.â€