USA today august 21 2016

SUNDAY

AN EDITION OF USA TODAY

IN MONEY

IN LIFE

Doll doubles as
civil rights icon

The original Cyrus still
keeps time to own beat

08.21.16
AMERICAN GIRL

Simone
Biles led the
Americans
to a second
consecutive
team gold
medal.
ROBERT DEUTSCH,
USA TODAY

Biles to wave flag in Rio finale
Is only 2nd U.S.
gymnast to earn
role of honor

Rachel Axon

@RachelAxon
USA TODAY Sports

As if
winning five Olympic
medals and meeting Zac
Efron didn’t do enough to
make
a
memorable
Games for Simone Biles,
she adds one more experience to her time in Rio.
Biles was chosen as the
Team USA flag bearer for
the closing ceremony
RIO DE JANEIRO

TODAY ON TV
uABC’s This Week:
Kellyanne Conway, campaign
manager for
Republican
presidential
nominee Donald Trump;
Republican
National Committee Chairman Reince
AP
Priebus; Robby

Kellyanne
Mook, camConway
paign manager for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton; Green Party presidential
candidate Jill Stein
uNBC’s Meet the Press:
Pre-empted by Olympics
coverage
uCBS’ Face the Nation:
Priebus; Mook; Sen. Jeff
Sessions, R-Ala.
uCNN’s State of the Union:
Conway; Mook; Gov. John Bel
Edwards, D-La.
uFox News Sunday: Conway; Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md.

DONN JONES, INVISION, VIA AP

Sunday, capping off a whirlwind
two weeks that have seen the
gymnast emerge as one of the
most successful athletes in Rio.
“It’s an incredible honor to be
selected as the flag bearer by my
Team USA teammates,” Biles said
in a statement. “This experience
has been the dream of a lifetime
for me and my team and I consider it a privilege to represent my
country, the United States Olympic Committee and USA Gymnastics by carrying our flag. I also
wish to thank the city of Rio de
Janeiro, and the entire country of

Brazil, for hosting an incredible
Games.”
Biles is only the second American gymnast to carry the flag in
an opening or closing ceremony

“This experience has
been the dream of a
lifetime for me and
my team.”
Simone Biles, U.S. gymnast
and five-time Olympic medalist

after Alfred Jochim in 1936.
Though it was largely expected
given her dominance in the sport
over the past three years, Biles’
competition here was a resounding success. She led the Americans to a second consecutive
team gold medal by an eye-popping eight points before winning
the all-around title, gold medals
on vault and floor exercise and
bronze on balance beam.
Her five-medal feat matches

HOOPLA FOR GOLD
Team USA guard Diana Taurasi, who scored 17 points, wraps herself around
teammate Angel McCoughtry after the team beat Spain 101-72 in Saturday’s
women’s basketball gold-medal match. It’s the team’s sixth straight gold medal.

marks set by Nastia Liukin in
2008, Shannon Miller in 1992 and

Mary Lou Retton in 1984.
Her success here only added to
the consensus that she’s the best
gymnast of her time and probably
the best ever. Biles, 19, entered
these Games as the three-time
defending world all-around
champion. Her 10 gold medals
earned over that span is a record
for any gymnast, and she has 14
total medals from world championship competition.
After Biles finished competition Tuesday, she met Efron, her
celebrity crush, whom NBC invited to Rio to meet her. After the
Games, Biles and the Final Five
embark on a 36-city Kellogg’s
Tour, starting in New York.

Texans
on Zika
front
lines

Researchers gather
intel on mosquito
M.O. to fight disease
Rick Jervis
@mrRjervis
USA TODAY

SAN ANTONIO A few days each

week, students and volunteers
from Texas A&M University-San
Antonio stroll into the front
yards of homes across this city,
pull a black sticky trap from a
bucket and carefully peer at the
mosquitoes glued there.
The researchers are tracking
travel patterns of the Aedes aegypti, the tiny human-feeding
mosquito and main carrier of the
Zika virus. Much is known about
the Aedes aegypti, including how
it prefers human blood and lives
in close proximity to humans. But
frustratingly little is known about
the insects’ day-to-day movements and precise locations, said
Megan Wise de Valdez, an associate professor of biology at Texas
A&M-San Antonio leading the
study.
“What’s novel about this research this summer is that we are
using these (traps) across the seventh-largest city in the United
States,” she said. “We’re looking
at distribution of Aedes aegypti
across the city, and we are sharing these data with our metropolitan health districts.”
As Zika continues to spread
both in and out of the USA, any
intel about its carrier’s whereabouts is increasingly valuable.
Health officials fear Zika,
which can cause devastating birth
defects, could spread quickly in

cities with large populations of
foreigners, such as Houston, San
Antonio or Miami. Miami’s Wyn-

WEEKEND SPECIAL
This is an edition of USA TODAY
available to subscribers as an
e-Newspaper every Saturday and
Sunday. It contains the latest
developments in News, Money, Life
and Sports along with the best of USA
TODAY’s reporting, photography and
graphics. Expanded content from USA
TODAY can be found at our website,
usatoday.com, on our free apps for
Apple and Android devices, and in
print Monday through Friday.

USA SNAPSHOTS©

Vacationers want
smart technology

60%

of guests would pay more
for a vacation rental with
a smart-home feature.
SOURCE August Home survey of 751 consumers
BOB ROSATO, RVR PHOTOS, USA TODAY SPORTS

MICHAEL B. SMITH AND VERONICA BRAVO, USA TODAY

v STORY CONTINUES ON 2T

Save the date: Great American eclipse is a year off

Get in line now for
‘mind-blowing’ event
Doyle Rice

@usatodayweather
USA TODAY

Got eclipse fever? You’re going
to need to wait a bit.
The biggest and best solar
eclipse in American history arrives a year from today, and plans
for celebrations, parties and festivities are well underway.
Organizers of the Oregon SolarFest are calling it “a rare,
mind-blowing cosmic experi-

ence,” while Nashville promises
visitors “a once-in-a-lifetime celestial event.”
On Aug. 21, 2017, a total solar
eclipse will be visible from coast
to coast, according to NASA. It
will be the first total eclipse visible only in the USA since the
country’s 1776 founding.
It will also be the first total solar eclipse to sweep across the entire country in 99 years, NASA

says. And not since 1970 has there
been an opportunity to see a total
solar eclipse in such easily accessible and widespread areas.
A total solar eclipse occurs
when the moon gets in the way of
the sun, turning day to an eerie

2010 PHOTO BY MARTIN BERNETTI, AFP/GETTY IMAGES

A total solar eclipse occurs when the
moon gets in the way of the sun.

twilight. Barring pesky clouds,
more Americans should be able
to see this one than ever before as
it passes through 12 states.
The eclipse will start on the
West Coast in Oregon and trace a

67-mile-wide path east, finally exiting the East Coast in South Carolina. At any given location, the
total eclipse will last for around 2
or 3 minutes.
It will pass directly over cities
such as Salem, Ore., Idaho Falls,
Lincoln, Neb., Kansas City, Nashville and Columbia and Charleston, S.C. Places within a one- or
two-hour drive of the eclipse include Portland, Ore., Boise, Cheyenne, Rapid City, Omaha, Topeka,
St. Louis, Louisville, Knoxville,
Chattanooga,
Atlanta
and

Charlotte.
An estimated 12 million people
live within the path of totality, according to Space.com. The num-

ber of people within just one
day’s drive of the totality zone is
around 200 million.
Outside the narrow shadow
track, a partial eclipse will be visible from all of North America,
parts of South America, western
Europe and Africa, according to
eclipse expert Fred Espenak.
Nashville, the largest city directly in the eclipse path, is gearing up with special programs and
activities. Check its slick website
devoted to the eclipse, nicknamed “Music City Solar
Eclipse.” After this one, the next
total solar eclipse, visible across
portions of the southern and
eastern U.S., occurs April 8, 2024.


2T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

ON POLITICS
Cooper Allen
@coopallen
USA TODAY

With Hillary Clinton’s lead in
polls looking increasingly difficult
to overcome, Donald Trump tried
to revitalize his White House bid
last week, bringing in Breitbart
News’ Stephen Bannon as campaign CEO and promoting adviser Kellyanne Conway to
campaign manager. While the
campaign initially said chairman
Paul Manafort was not being
pushed out, by the end of the
week he stepped down. Meanwhile, the GOP nominee sought
to re-emphasize his message of
restoring “law and order.”
Will it work? Time will tell. In
the meantime, more news from
the world of politics:

Super PAC supporting Clinton
notched $9.3 million for July

Ad ammo tops $38M
for August as Trump
aims to catch up
Fredreka Schouten

@fschouten
USA TODAY

WASHINGTON Priorities USA Action, the leading super PAC backing Democrat Hillary Clinton’s

presidential campaign, said it collected nearly $9.3 million last
month and began August with
more than $38 million in available cash to continue its advertising barrage against Republican
rival Donald Trump.
Priorities’ July haul is a drop
from the $11.9 million the group
raised in June. In all, Priorities
has raised more than $110 million
during the election cycle, including nearly $1 million through a
joint fundraising arrangement
with EMILY’s List, which backs

female candidates.
And officials say Democratic
donors have pledged an additional $44 million.
Clinton and outside groups
supporting her have dominated
the airwaves since the generalelection campaign kicked off in
early June, spending a combined
$104 million to promote the former secretary of State and to blister Trump, data compiled by NBC
News shows.
Priorities alone has underwritten about $43 million of the television ads aiding Clinton.
Top donors to Priorities in July
included Slim-Fast founder Daniel Abraham and financier Donald
Sussman. Each gave $3 million,
records show.
Trump and his allies are playing catch-up.
On Friday, the Republican began airing his first ads of the general
election,
spending

$4.8 million on commercials that
will run in Ohio, Pennsylvania,

LAS VEGAS NEWS BUREAU VIA EPA

Clinton and outside groups
backing her have dominated
the airwaves since June.

North Carolina and Florida, battlegrounds where Trump needs
to close the gap with Clinton.
Some of the Republican Party’s
biggest donors have shunned the
Republican nominee and instead
are plowing money into helping
imperiled congressional incumbents.
Paul Singer, a hedge-fund billionaire who has been one the

party’s largest benefactors, donated a total of $2 million last month
to two groups focused on preserving the Republican majority in
the Senate: the Senate Leadership Fund and Freedom Partners
Action Fund, a super PAC aligned
with industrialist Charles Koch.
The first Trump ad, called
“Two Americas: Immigration,”
paints an image of a country
overrun by rule-breaking immigrants during a Clinton presidency and argues Trump will make
“America safe again.”
The Senate Majority Fund, a
super PAC focused on seizing

control of the Senate for Democrats, had its best fundraising
month of the election, collecting
$7.3 million in July. Its seven-figure donors included Thomas
Murphy, the father of Rep. Patrick Murphy, a Democrat vying to
face Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., in
November.
The senior Murphy gave the
group $1 million on July 13.

GERALD HERBERT, AP

Trump shifts tone in Charlotte?

REGRETS, HE’S HAD A FEW
... TOO FEW TO MENTION
In his first speech after the shakeup, Trump stood at a podium in
Charlotte and apologized for
sometimes being abrasive.
“Sometimes, in the heat of
debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose
the right words or you say the
wrong thing,” Trump said. “I have
done that — and, believe it or
not, I regret it. ... And I do regret it
— particularly where it may have
caused personal pain.”
Trump didn’t offer an apology
for any specific insult, and Democrats said they doubted his sincerity. The question is whether
this marked a shift in the candidate’s tone or just a short detour
from his usually combative tone.

CLINTON-KAINE UNVEIL
TRANSITION TEAM
The next president won’t take
office for nearly five months, but
the transition teams for both
nominees are taking shape.
John Podesta, chairman of
Hillary Clinton’s campaign, announced Tuesday that Ken Salazar, a former Interior secretary,
will chair the transition team for
Clinton and her running mate,
Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine.
The Clinton-Kaine Transition
Project was formed this month
and will be based in Washington.
Rounding out the hierarchy of
the transition team are co-chairs
Tom Donilon, a former national
security adviser to President
Obama; Jennifer Granholm, a
former Michigan governor; Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress; and
Maggie Williams, director of
Harvard University’s Institute of
Politics, who was Clinton’s chief
of staff as first lady.
Trump unveiled the chairman
of his transition effort months
ago: New Jersey Gov. Chris
Christie.

CHARLES DHARAPAK, AP

Ken Salazar joins Clinton camp.

GOP SEEKS TO BOOST ITS
APPEAL TO HISPANICS
Following its Republican loss in
2012, boosting the party’s appeal with Hispanics was a top
priority for the next presidential
election. That task has been,
shall we say, a bit complicated
given their nominee’s often provocative rhetoric on immigration.
Still, the Republican National
Committee last week made clear
it’s determined to engage Hispanic voters with a new social
media campaign.
“As we at the RNC continue to
deepen our commitment to
engaging with the Hispanic
community, we are expanding
our efforts in social media to
generate greater conversation
and understanding of what the
Republican Party stands for,”
party Chairman Reince Priebus
said in a statement.
Contributing: Eliza Collins

PHOTOS BY RICK JERVIS, USA TODAY

Jessica Buitron, a recent graduate from Texas A&M University-San Antonio, checks a mosquito trap for signs of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the main carrier of the Zika virus. The research team is tracking the mosquito’s movements across San Antonio.

Building a better mosquito trap
“(Controlling Zika)
can be done, but it
takes a lot of
manpower and
government coercion
to do it.”

v CONTINUED FROM 1T

wood neighborhood has been
dealing with a Zika outbreak and,
on Friday, Florida health officials
announced a new batch of cases
in touristy Miami Beach.
Around 2,200 Zika cases have
been reported in the continental
U.S. and more than 13,000 in
Puerto Rico, according to the
Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. Most of the cases
within the continental U.S. involved individuals who contracted the virus while traveling in
another country, while most of
the Puerto Rico cases were locally
acquired, according to the CDC.
Though the Aedes aegypti is
found in abundance in Gulf Coast
states and resides alongside humans, little is known about its
movements because it tends to

reside on private property, said
Kacey Ernst, an epidemiologist at
the University of Arizona. Besides
Zika, this species of mosquito is
known to spread dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.
“In the United States, we don’t
know precisely where it is,” she
said of the mosquito, adding the
San Antonio study is “really
valuable.”
Tracking and studying the
mosquito in the U.S. has been
mostly left up to local municipalities, said Joe Conlon of the
American Mosquito Control Association. Past global efforts to
corral the virus involved mass
government interventions.
In the late 1950s, health officials in South America eradicated
the Aedes aegypti and the diseases the species carried in 21
countries through a widespread
program that included going onto
people’s property and uprooting
nesting areas, he said. Cuban officials, in the early 1980s, deployed
military troops into neighborhoods to help stem a dengue outbreak by the mosquito after more
than 300,000 cases were reported
on the island, he said.

Joe Conlon, American Mosquito
Control Association

Corrections & Clarifications

USA TODAY is committed
to accuracy. To reach us,
contact Standards Editor
Brent Jones at 800-8727073 or e-mail
Please indicate whether
you’re responding to
content online or in the
newspaper.

Americans are donating their lawns for the grass-roots study
that corrals Aedes aegypti mosquitos in San Antonio.
Those obtrusive measures,
however, wouldn’t be particularly
popular or even allowed in the
U.S., Conlon said. “(Controlling
Zika) can be done, but it takes a
lot of manpower and government
coercion to do it,” he said.
For now, the task of stemming
and studying Zika’s spread is falling to local officials and researchers like Wise de Valdez. Her team
of researchers have so far counted more than 15,000 mosquitoes.
Ferried to the U.S. on slave
ships 500 years ago, the Aedes
aegypti prefers human environments and human blood and has
populated the southern Gulf
States, she said.
Wise de Valdez launched her
study in June but needed permission to place traps on private
property. She went on TV asking
for volunteers: 420 homeowners

offered their front lawns. She
placed traps on 120 of those
yards and dispatched research
students to start tracking them.
One thing the study has
shown: The Aedes aegypti doesn’t
care much for the traps used in
the research, known as “autocidal

gravid ovitraps.” The traps consist of a length of sticky paper inside a bucket with waterlogged
hay, to lure pregnant females, and
were given to Wise de Valdez free
of charge by the CDC. The traps
are widely used in Puerto Rico.
Instead, the Zika-carrying
mosquitoes much prefer the BG
Sentinel traps, which are batteryoperated and omit a human-like
scent to draw hungry Aedes aegypti. Those are costlier, scarcer
and more labor-intensive, she
said. “The big take-home message I’m seeing is that trap type
really matters,” Wise de Valdez
said.
As classes start this month, the
research project will likely scale
back to 60 homes and conclude
in September, she said. She’ll be
sharing study results at the Society for Vector Ecology meeting in
Alaska next month and hopes the
tracking methods are picked up
across the country.

“This was a grass-roots thing.
This fell in our lap and we just
said, ‘Hey we’re going to go for
it,’ ” she said. “I think it’s going to
be easy to replicate anywhere.”

PRESIDENT AND PUBLISHER

John Zidich

EDITOR IN CHIEF

Patty Michalski
CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER

Kevin Gentzel

7950 Jones Branch Dr., McLean, Va. 22108,
703-854-3400
Published by Gannett
The local edition of USA TODAY is
published daily
in partnership with Gannett Newspapers
Advertising: All advertising published in
USA TODAY is subject to the current rate
card; copies available from the
advertising department. USA TODAY may
in its sole discretion edit, classify, reject or
cancel at any time any advertising
submitted.

National, Regional: 703-854-3400
Reprint permission, copies of articles,
glossy reprints:
www.GannettReprints.com or call
212-221-9595
USA TODAY is a member of The
Associated Press and subscribes to other
news services. USA TODAY, its logo and
associated graphics are registered
trademarks. All rights reserved.


3T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

USA Gymnastics’ abuse policy criticized
Kellogg’s, Indiana legislators
say group sets bar too high
on reporting of allegations
Mark Alesia, Tim Evans,
Marisa Kwiatkowski
and Tony Cook
USA TODAY Network

“We are
deeply
troubled
by the

report.
We
have expressed
our
concerns
to USAG,
and we
will
continue
to watch
this
situation
closely.”
Kellogg’s
spokeswoman
Kris Charles, in
an email.

INDIANAPOLIS The U.S. women’s
gymnastics team leaves the Rio
Olympics with a record nine
medals, a legion of fans and a legal trademark on the nickname
“The Final Five.”
USA Gymnastics, which governs the sport at all levels nationally, will come home to questions
about its handling of sexual abuse
allegations.
After an investigation by The
Indianapolis Star, breakfast-food
maker Kellogg Co., a key USA
Gymnastics sponsor, has added

its voice to a chorus of state and
federal lawmakers seeking assurances that the organization is doing enough to protect young
gymnasts from sexual predators.
The investigation, first published Aug. 4, revealed that officials of the Indianapolis-based
non-profit routinely dismiss allegations of child abuse unless they
receive a complaint signed by a
victim or a victim’s guardian. The
investigation uncovered four instances in which USA Gymnastics
was warned about abusive coaches but did not forward the allegations to authorities.
All four coaches went on to
abuse underage gymnasts.
“We are deeply troubled by the
report,” Kellogg’s spokeswoman
Kris Charles said in an email. “We
have expressed our concerns to
USAG, and we will continue to
watch this situation closely.”
The company sponsors the lucrative Kellogg’s Tour of Gymnastics Champions, which starts
Sept. 15. Tax forms for USA Gymnastics do not break out how
much the 36-city tour brings in.
But USA Gymnastics revenue increased significantly in 2012, the
previous Olympic year.
USA Gymnastics did not respond to questions for this story.

ROBERT HANASHIRO, USA TODAY

Four coaches abused gymnasts after USA Gymnastics did not report allegations
to authorities, an investigation by the Indianapolis newspaper revealed.

KELLOGG'S

On the day the women’s team
won the Olympic gold medal,
USA Gymnastics filed for the
trademark “The Final Five.”
Kellogg’s did not elaborate on
its concerns.
In addition to Kellogg’s, state
and federal lawmakers also have
asked USA Gymnastics for an-

Chinese hospital caught
regulating pregnancies

IN BRIEF
‘TERROR ATTACK’ KILLS 22
AT WEDDING IN TURKEY

GODSEND AMID FLOODS

An explosion at a wedding ceremony hall late Saturday in Turkey’s southeastern city of
Gaziantephas left at least 22 people dead and injured 94, government officials said.
The governor of Gaziantep, Ali
Yerlikaya, called the explosion a
“terror attack,” and other officials
said it could have been the work
of either Islamic State or Kurdish
militants. One called it a suicide
bombing.
Gaziantep is about 76 miles

from Aleppo, Syria.
— Laura Mandaro
BROTHER OF SYRIAN BOY IN
ICONIC ALEPPO PHOTO DIES

Ali Daqneesh, the older brother of a Syrian boy whose face has
become a symbol of the horror of
the country’s civil war, died Saturday of injuries sustained in the
same airstrike that destroyed the
family’s home, according to the
Aleppo Media Center.
Ali, 10, had been in critical condition since Wednesday, when
the blast hit the apartment in the
Qaterji neighborhood of the
northern Syrian city of Aleppo,
the anti-government opposition
group confirmed to USA TODAY
by email.
Photos of Ali’s 5-year-old
brother, Omran, quickly spread
worldwide after the media center
posted a YouTube video showing
him, dazed and bloodied, being
put into an ambulance.
Omran suffered head wounds
but no brain injury, and was later
discharged.
The boys’ mother remained in
critical condition.
— Doug Stanglin

ARIZONA SHERIFF MAY FACE
CRIMINAL CONTEMPT CHARGE
PHOENIX A federal judge said
Friday that he will refer Maricopa
County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to the
U.S. attorney’s office to be
charged with criminal contempt
of court.
The decision comes after U.S.
District Judge G. Murray Snow
found that Arpaio intentionally
violated various orders rooted in
an 8-year-old racial-profiling

The U.S.
women’s gymnastics team
won a gold
medal in
team competition Aug. 9
at the Rio
Olympics.

Telling
women
when
they
could
conceive
was once
common

MAX BECHERER, AP

case. The ruling additionally refers Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan,
Arpaio’s former defense attorney
Michele Iafrate, and Capt. Steve
Bailey for criminal contempt
prosecution as well.
— Megan Cassidy
The Arizona Republic
JUDGE DISMISSES CIVIL SUITS
AGAINST CLERK KIM DAVIS

A federal judge has
dismissed three lawsuits filed
against Kentucky’s Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis for refusing to
issue marriage licenses to gay
couples last year.
Davis drew international attention in 2015 when she said her
Christian religious beliefs prevented her from providing marriage licenses to same-sex
couples despite the U.S. Supreme
Court ruling that said the right to
marry is guaranteed to same-sex
couples by the U.S. Constitution.
And Davis was jailed briefly for
contempt of court by U.S. District
Judge David Bunning.
Couples who were denied licenses filed the federal lawsuits
claiming a violation of civil rights.
On Thursday, Judge Bunning
issued an order dismissing the

lawsuits. Bunning noted that last
January Gov. Matt Bevin signed
an order removing names of
county clerks from marriage licenses, and that the General Assembly later passed legislation
creating a new marriage license
form that does not require the
county clerk’s signature.
— Tom Loftus
The (Louisville) Courier-Journal
LOUISVILLE

swers and called for tighter reporting laws. Two key Indiana
lawmakers said they want to
know whether USA Gymnastics
broke child-abuse reporting laws.
Greg Steuerwald, chairman of
the Indiana House Judiciary
Committee, criticized USA Gymnastics’ policy for handling of
complaints.
“If they have reason to believe
it happened, then it’s their job to
report,” said Steuerwald, a Republican. “Law enforcement
should investigate what happened and whether USA Gymnastics followed the law. Both
aspects should be turned over to
law enforcement immediately.”
He added: “It certainly appears
they did not act reasonably.”
Steuerwald, who played a key
role in the recent rewrite of Indiana’s criminal code, said the
state’s reporting threshold does

not require firsthand knowledge
of a crime.
“We have one of the lowest
standards requiring them to report,” he said. “It doesn’t get any
lower than that.”
David Long, the state Senate’s
top lawmaker, said, “I’m not calling for a witch hunt, but if the law
has been broken, we need to
know, and there should be conse-

quences. I trust local law enforcement to handle this case and
respond as they deem necessary.”
However, federal, state and local law enforcement officials either declined to say if they intend
to investigate or would not answer the question directly.
Josh Minkler, U.S. attorney for
the Southern District of Indiana,
said in a statement that he
couldn’t comment directly on
USA Gymnastics but added a
warning.
“I would strongly recommend
that anyone with knowledge of a
crime immediately report that
crime to law enforcement,”
Minkler said. “Further, it is a serious federal crime to knowingly
conceal evidence of a federal
crime or obstruct the investigation of a federal crime. Such a
crime would be fully investigated
by the United States Attorney’s
Office and the Federal Bureau of

Investigation.”
Capt. David Bursten, spokesman for the Indiana State Police,
also did not comment directly
about USA Gymnastics but said
his agency “aggressively investigates crimes against children.”
Concerning USA Gymnastics’
policy of forwarding complaints
only with the signature of a victim or victim’s guardian, Randall
Taylor, assistant chief of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, said, “We don’t require
a signature for us to investigate
anything.” The department tries
to make it as easy as possible for
people to report allegations of
child abuse, he said.
“We, of course, encourage people to make that call even if
they’re not sure,” Taylor said.
Indianapolis police did address
USA Gymnastics’ handling of one
of the cases that the Star uncovered. They praised USA Gymnastics for reporting former coach
Marvin Sharp in 2015, but the
Star revealed that USA Gymnastics had received allegations
about Sharp four years earlier. By
then, he had made more than 125
pornographic images of six of his
underage gymnasts, the 2015 police investigation revealed.
Sharp committed suicide in jail
last year.

Daniel
Stover, 17,

wipes his
head as he
helps Laura
Albritton
rescue
personal
belongings in
Sorrento, La.,
on Saturday.
Louisiana
continues to
dig itself out
from devastating floods,
with search
parties going
door-to-door
looking for
survivors or
bodies
trapped by
flooding.

“A fine is
not too
bad. At
least they
didn’t
force you
to get an
abortion.”

Shuzong2878,
writing on Weibo,
China’s Twitter
equivalent

Hannah Gardner

Special for USA TODAY

Even though China
ended its controversial one-child
policy last year, Chinese women
aren’t free to get pregnant when
they choose.
Last week, a maternity hospital
in Beijing was caught trying to
control when its female staff
could have babies, the latest in a
string of Chinese companies that
set so-called fertility schedules.
The Tongzhou Maternity and
Child Health Institute required
female doctors and nurses to apply for permission to become
pregnant, then fined them if they
failed to conceive in the threemonth window allotted to them,
the Beijing News reported.
Public outrage prompted the
hospital to cancel the policy as of
Friday, and authorities said all
fines would be paid back to the

employees.
“We get the right to have another baby but we do have the
freedom to have it when we
want,” a woman by the name of
OuNiDou wrote on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter.
Another, by the name of Shuzong2878, put the policy in the
context of China’s long, brutal attempt to control population
growth. “A fine is not too bad,”
she said. “At least they didn’t
force you to get an abortion.”
In May, staff at a hospital in the
southern city of Dongguan were

BEIJING

told they would have their salary
docked and would not be considered for promotion if any had a
baby out of turn. Also in May,
teachers in the central Henan
province were told there would
be a quota for the number of
women who could be pregnant at
one time.
Such moves may stem from the
sudden lifting of a decades-old
policy that limited most families
to one child. Many families
rushed to have a second.
“In schools, 90% of the teachers are female. If the school does
not set a timetable, some classes

might simply have to be
scrapped,” the People’s Daily
quoted an unnamed education official as saying in May.
Even before the one-child policy was lifted, setting pregnancy
schedules was common in industries with mostly female employees. The Beijing hospital had
been setting reproductive schedules for about a decade.
In July 2015, before all families
were given permission to have a
second child, a bank in Henan
dictated when its female cashiers
could have children.
“An employee birth plan has
been established and will be
strictly enforced,” the bank said
in a notice that was widely circulated online. “Employees who do
not give birth according to the
plan and whose work is impacted
will face a one-time fine of 1,000
yuan ($150) and will not be considered for promotion,” it said.
A Chinese
woman helps
her child
with a water
bottle in a
park in Beijing on June
15, 2012,
when China's
one-child
policy was
still in effect.

HOW HWEE YOUNG, EPA


4T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

Woodworker
was Trump’s
first key backer
Former
political
activist
thought
he’d be a
good
president
in 1980s
—and
still does

Rick Hampson
@rickhampson
USA TODAY

HAMPTON, N. H . The longestrunning striptease in presidential
politics began Oct. 22, 1987, when
Donald Trump’s big, black helicopter touched down here.

A local Republican named
Mike Dunbar had started a
“Draft Trump for President”
movement and arranged for
the developer to speak at a
Rotary luncheon in this
early primary state. So was
planted a seed that would
flower with a vengeance 28
years later.

MARY SCHWALM FOR USA TODAY

WINDSOR CHAIR KING

Dunbar, now 69, is known
to woodworkers as a master
craftsman, teacher and author
and a key figure in the late-20thcentury revival of the handmade
Windsor chair.
Dunbar discovered his passion
when, trying to cheaply furnish
his college apartment, he bought
a wooden chair for $15. It turned
out to have been made around
1800 by a craftsman on Boston’s
North Shore. It was worth hundreds. It was beautiful.
He’d planned to get a Ph.D. and
teach French. But now, “I had to
re-create how this guy made this

chair,” he recalls.
Dunbar had gotten into politics
as a neighborhood preservationist in nearby Portsmouth. He
worked on several successful congressional campaigns.
In the mid-1980s, he started
reading about Trump. He became
entranced by the businessman’s
success at bringing projects in before schedule and under budget.
He was brash. He made things
happen. He should be president.

COURTESY MIKE DUNBAR

Mike Dunbar and
Donald Trump in New
Hampshire in 1987.

Dunbar had met all the 1988
candidates, including George
H.W. Bush, Bob Dole and Pat
Robertson. None impressed him
as a winner. He raised money to
start a Draft Trump campaign
and collected 1,000 signatures to
put Trump on the primary ballot,
and arranged for the Portsmouth
Rotary Club speech.
On Oct. 22, Dunbar picked
Trump up at the landing field and
whisked him to the restaurant.

Trump began his speech by announcing he was not interested in
running for president.
“It was sort of like,
‘ohhhhh ... ’ ” Dunbar sighs, his
voice dipping. But he insists he

did not feel betrayed by
Trump, who knew he wasn’t
going to run and had other
things to promote, including his soon-to-be-released
book The Art of the Deal.
Trump extemporaneously delivered a speech that
would be familiar to audiences now: America’s allies
don’t pay a fair share of their
own defense; America is being
ripped off in trade deals by an
Asian nation (then Japan, now
China); America is pushed
around and laughed at.
In the White House, “I want
someone who is tough and knows
how to negotiate,” Trump said. “If
not, our country faces disaster.”
A TIE IS FORMED

Trump flew back to New York,
but the two men stayed in touch.
He invited Dunbar to visit his estate in Palm Beach and ordered
some Windsor chairs. Dunbar declined both offers; the chairs
would be out of place at Trump

Tower and he’d be out of place at
Mar-a-Lago.
At
Christmas,
Trump mailed Dunbar a copy of
The Art of the Deal, inscribed:
“You have created a very exciting
part of my life. On to the future.”
Dunbar eventually ran for
Portsmouth City Council. He got
a contribution from Trump (he

says he doesn’t recall how much)
and a note of congratulations
when he won his first term.
After his second term, Dunbar
dropped out of politics. He didn’t
like what politicians do — “divide
people and make problems worse
by exaggerating them” — or what
politics does to politicians: “It
creates an alternate reality in
which you’re so important the
world can’t run without you.”
But when Trump announced
his candidacy in June 2015, Mike
and his wife, Sue, watched on TV.
“I said, ‘My word, he finally did
it!’ That’s when I began to think
again about what it (1987) was all

about.”
Dunbar’s disenchantment with
politicians does not extend to
Trump. He voted for him in the
primary and will vote for him in
November. His reason is simple:
Trump’s not a politician. “He’s
never talked the political speak
we all hate,” he says.
Recent polls indicate Trump’s
language has lost some magic.
But Dunbar says he’s struck by
the similarity between Trump’s
message now and in 1987.
“He was America First then
and America First now. It’s a
form of nationalism that’s not
dangerous like the kind in the
1930s. It’s a nationalism every
politician should have.”

Mike Dunbar,
the man who
claims to
have first
pitched the
idea of a Donald Trump
presidential
campaign in
1987 and

recruited him
to New
Hampshire
for a visit,
poses for a
photo as he
leans over a
handcrafted
Windsor
chair in his
home.

London suburb a haven for many N. Koreans

Defection
of envoy
to South
puts town
where
hundreds
have
settled
back in
the news

Jane Onyanga-Omara

DIPLOMAT WHO
DEFECTED CALLED
‘HUMAN SCUM’

USA TODAY

LONDON The southwestern suburb of New Malden has emerged
as the North Korea of the West.
That’s because hundreds of North
Korean defectors live there —
more than anywhere outside of
South Korea.
New Malden’s community of
residents who escaped the isolated nation thousands of miles
away was in the news again
Wednesday because of a report
that Thae Yong Ho, the deputy to
North Korea’s ambassador to
Britain, defected with his family
to South Korea.
Thae, the highest-ranking
North Korean official to defect to
the South, was “sick and tired” of
the regime of Kim Jong Un,
South
Korean
government
spokesman Jeong Joon Hee told
reporters Wednesday.
Nearly 700 North Koreans live
legally in the United Kingdom,
along with several hundred who
are here illegally, said Michael

Glendinning, director of the U.K.based European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea, a
charity that supports North Korean refugees.
Glendinning said most of the
North Koreans in Britain live in
New Malden, joining at least
20,000 South Koreans who live
there. The popularity of the area
with Koreans can be traced to the
1970s, when people followed the
lead of the South Korean ambassador to Britain in moving to the
area. The U.K. headquarters of
the South Korean electronics
firm Samsung also was in New
Malden until 2005.
The U.K. government tries to
disperse North Korean refugees
to other parts of the country but
most eventually make their way
back to New Malden, Glendinning said. “Political reasons for
defections are pretty rare,” he
added. “More often, people leave
North Korea because of a lack of
food and for better economic opportunities elsewhere.”
He said many of those who end
up in the U.K. are “double defectors” who may have first gone to
South Korea before deciding to
come here.
Those who come straight to

Doug Stanglin

@dstanglin
USA TODAY

JANE ONYANGA-OMARA, USA TODAY

New Malden’s main retail street is a mix of English and North Korean businesses. Many signs are in both languages.
the U.K. do so because of traditionally neutral relations with
North Korea. Family members
left behind are less likely to be
persecuted by the North’s government than if they had defected to
countries with tense relations
with the totalitarian regime, such
as South Korea, the United States
and Japan.
New Malden’s main shopping
street is dotted with Korean restaurants, a Korean supermarket
and several other Korean shops,
as well as the usual British chain
stores. Many signs are in both
English and Korean and a free
Korean newspaper — The Hanin
Herald — can be picked up from a
display bin.
Sophie Kim, who works at a
real estate company on the high
street called Residential Seoul,
told USA TODAY that all the staff
there are South Korean.
She said the firm caters to everyone, but has a number of clients from both North and South
Korea. “Mostly (our Korean clients) have lived here for a long

time. Some people are from the
north of the U.K.,” she said.
“Many people would like to live
here or (nearby) Wimbledon.
Most of them are families.”
Jihyun Park, 48, who lives in

JIHYUN PARK

Jihyun Park
escaped from
North Korea
twice. She
now lives in
the United
Kingdom.

Manchester in northwestern
England and works for Glendinning’s charity, has lived in the
U.K. since 2008, after fleeing
twice to China. She first escaped
because of hunger and economic
problems in 1998, but was reported to the Chinese authorities in
2004 and returned to North Korea. As many as 3 million North
Koreans died of hunger in a famine in the 1990s.
Park escaped a second time because she had left her son behind
in China and had grown disillusioned with the North’s oppression. “I lost all my family,” she
said in an interview. “My father
died. My brother left but I didn’t
know what happened to him.”

After Park returned to China in
2007, she was was introduced to a
United Nations officer, who asked
her where she wanted to go.
“They asked me — America,
South Korea and England,” she
said.
“When I learned about America in North Korea, (we were told)
it was an enemy country,” Park
said. “I never heard that in China.
I wanted to go to South Korea but
it’s a dangerous journey, so I
chose Europe. It’s also a difficult
journey, but better than the
South Korea journey.”

North Korea, in its first response to the defection of a
senior diplomat to South Korea, branded the deputy envoy
as an embezzler, child rapist
and all around
“human scum.”
The Londonbased diplomat, Thae Yong
Ho, whose job
was to burnish
the image of
AFP/GETTY IMAGES
North Korean
The Korean
leader Kim
Central News

Agency calls
Jong Un, arThae Yong
rived in South
Ho a fugitive.
Korea last
week.
Seoul’s Unification Ministry
said Wednesday that he was
the second-highest North
Korean official at the embassy
and the most senior North
Korean diplomat ever to defect
to South Korea.
In 1997, the North Korean
ambassador to Egypt fled but
resettled in the United States,
the Associated Press reported.
The ministry said Thae
decided to defect because of
his disgust with the Kim Jong
Un regime, his yearning for
South Korean democracy and
concerns about his children’s
future, Yonhap, the South
Korean news agency, reported.
In its commentary Saturday,
the North’s Korean Central
News Agency (KCNA), without
mentioning Thae by name,
said the diplomat had been

recalled to Pyongyang because
of a long list of transgressions.
“The fugitive was ordered in
June to be summoned for
embezzling a lot of state funds,
selling state secrets and committing child rape,” KCNA said.
“This one clearly deserves
legal punishment for crimes he
has committed but he proved
that he is human scum that has
no basic loyalty as a human
and no conscience and morality by running away to survive
and abandoning the homeland and parents and siblings
that raised and stood by him.”


5T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

SEEKING A RENDEZVOUS
WITH AN ASTEROID

ASTEROID
BENNU

OSIRIS-REx

An unmanned spacecraft about the size of a household

toolshed will travel 4.4 billion miles to bring back
samples from Bennu, an asteroid orbiting our sun.
OSIRIS-REx's seven-year mission will tell us more
about the asteroid's composition and the creation
of the solar system.

Surface
debis

TAGSAM

OSIRIS-REx SPACECRAFT
TOTAL COST:
$800 million
excluding launch vehicle.

OSIRIS-REx
OSIR
OS
IRIS
IR
IS-R
IS
-REx
-R
Ex iiss
expe
ex
expected
pect

pe
cted
ct
ed tto
o br
brin
bring
ing
in
g
home 4.4
home
4.4 pounds
poun
po
unds
un
ds
of Bennu’s
Ben
B
ennu
en
nu’s
nu
’s ssur
surface
urfa
ur
face

fa
ce
debr
de
debris.
bris
br
is..
is

BENNU
SURFACE
SAMPLING

LENGTH:
20 feet, 3 inches
with solar panels
deployed
WIDTH:
8 feet

WEIGHT:
4,650 pounds
(with fuel)

HEIGHT:
10 feet,
4 inches

Return sample of Bennu surface for

analysis

EMPIRE
STATE
BUILDING

Spacecraft
size to
human
6 feet

Compare asteroid data with
Earth-based data

ASTEROID
BENNU

1,454
feet

Map asteroid surface
Measure deviations in asteroid’s orbit

4.5 billion
years old

SIZE COMPARISON

TAGSAM SAMPLE
ARM LENGTH:

11 ft.

THE MISSION

AGE:

The OSIRIS-REx will fly in
formation with the Bennu
asteroid in August 2018. The
TAGSAM arm will deploy and
make contact with the surface
of Bennu for five seconds. The
TAGSAM will release a burst
of nitrogen gas, causing loose rocks
and surface soil to be collected.

Approximate

1,640 feet
diameter

tall

BENNU FACTS
Probability of the
asteroid Bennu
hitting Earth in late
22nd century is
1 in 2,500

Travels around the sun at
the speed of 63,000 mph.
It could travel from
Los Angeles to New York in
2 minutes and 19 seconds.

Comes
close to Earth
every
6 years

Orbits the
sun every
1.2 years
(432.6 days)

WHERE ASTEROIDS AND COMETS COME FROM
Asteroids and comets are debris fragments left over from the formation of the planets and moons about 4.6 billion years ago.
Shifts in gravity can cause them to pass the Earth. As some of these asteroids travel near Earth, scientists seek to learn more about their composition.

Comets
usually come
from the
Kuiper Belt, which
is 3 billion to 5
billion miles
from Earth

Asteroids
in the asteroid

belt can range in
size from 20 feet
to about
583 miles
across.

SUN
MERCURY

VENUS

EARTH

Every day,
the Earth is
bombarded with
more than
100 tons of dust
and sand-sized
particles.

MARS

JUPITER

SATURN

ASTEROID
BELT

URANUS

NEPTUNE

PLUTO

KUIPER
BELT

In 1801, the
Ceres asteroid
was first
discovered by
Giuseppe
Piazzi

NOTE Not to scale.

OSIRIS-REx LAUNCH

ORBITS OF ASTEROID BENNU

Beginning Sept. 8, OSIRIS-REx has 34 days to launch.
The craft will be carried into space atop an Atlas V
rocket from Cape Canaveral. Once in space, the craft
will orbit the sun for a year, then head toward its
rendezvous with Bennu.

OSIRIS-REx will match Bennu's speed and orbit the
asteroid and begin a months-long survey in October

2020. Extensive mapping, from an altitude of about
3 miles, will determine where the sample will be taken.

WHAT ASTEROIDS
ARE MADE OF
When parts of an asteroid crash into Earth,
they’re called meteorites.

MARS
METAL
ASTEROID

OSIRIS-REx
spacecraft

Iron 91%
Nickel 8.5%
Cobalt 0.06%

EARTH
Atlas V
vehicle

SUN
Oxygen 36%

MERCURY

Iron 26%
VENUS

STONY
ASTEROID

ASTEROID
BENNU

SOURCE NASA; Space.com; Theplanets.org
RAMON PADILLA, GEORGE PETRAS AND JANET LOEHRKE, USA TODAY

Silicon 18%
Magnesium 14%
Aluminum 1.5%
Nickel 1.4%
Calcium 1.3%


6T

NEWS
MONEY
SPORTS
Latest American Girl
LIFE
doll tells civil rights tale
AUTOS
TRAVEL

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

MONEYLINE

PATRICK ERNZEN, RM SOTHEBY'S

BUT FOR $22M, DOES IT COME
WITH A CASSETTE DECK?
A historic Jaguar that won the
famed Le Mans race in the 1950s
— a 1955 D-Type — sold for $21.78
million at auction Friday in Monterey, Calif., setting a record for
the most ever paid for a British
car, according to auctioneers.
While it was the most ever
paid for a British car at auction,
it still was under RM Sotheby’s
estimates that it could go for as
much as $25 million, reports our
Chris Woodyard. RM Sotheby’s
says it was only the fourth British
car to sell for more than $10 million at auction.

TASIA WELLS, WIREIMAGE

ROCK LEGEND: YOU CAN KEEP
YOUR DRIVERLESS CAR
Jeff Beck, 72, is contemplating a
future filled with self-driving cars.
But the prospect leaves the
guitar legend and life-long

hot-rod aficionado steaming
mad, reports our tech reporter
Marco della Cava.
“There’s driverless cars all over
the place right now — with drivers in them!” says Beck, cooling
off before a sound check in Santa Rosa, Calif., the latest stop of a
tour he’s co-headlining with his
blues idol, Buddy Guy, 80 (Beck
plays Sunday at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo Amphitheater).
“Cruise control is bad enough.
If you can’t pay attention for
long, you should not be driving,”
says Beck, on the heels of news
last week that Ford and Uber are
both pushing aggressively to
deliver self-driving vehicles.

USA SNAPSHOTS©

Too public on
public Wi-Fi

17%

of consumers have
provided their credit card
details using public Wi-Fi.
SOURCE Norton Wi-Fi Risk Report of 1,025
U.S. consumers
JAE YANG AND JANET LOEHRKE, USA TODAY

Based in Detroit in
1960s, she resonates
with new movement
Kristen Jordan Shamus

@kristenshamus
Detroit Free Press

DETROIT She’s got that Motown
sound and that Detroit swagger.
Melody Ellison, American
Girl’s newest historical BeForever
doll, is set to make her debut on
Saturday in Detroit. The character is a 9-year-old Detroit girl and
aspiring singer who finds her
voice amid the civil rights movement in the 1960s, according to
the company.
It’s fitting that the story American Girl chose to tell to define the
mid-1960s is based in Detroit, according to Gloria House, professor emerita of African-American
studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, who was active
during the civil rights movement.
“Why not have her be a little
Detroit girl?” she said. “Detroit
was so much the mecca of civil
rights and movement activities
during that period from the ’60s
right until the ’80s.”
House notes that Martin
Luther King Jr. did a trial run

of his “I Have a Dream”
speech in Detroit in 1963
and that many families with
Southern roots migrated to
Detroit.
At the time, Detroit also
had one of the nation’s largest
NAACP branches and it had the
most black-owned businesses in
the country along with a growing
black middle class.
Yet, said Juanita Moore, president and CEO of the Wright Museum, “there were still these
significant issues around race
and discrimination, even in Detroit, with all of that progressiveness that was happening here.”
Moore said the story of Melody and her family, written by
Denise Lewis Patrick, shows
that discrimination wasn’t a
problem only in the South during the ’60s, but also an issue in
the North.
Through historical fiction,
the books “really show what
democracy is all about — that
one voice and one person can
work for change and to make
things better,” Moore said.
To ensure local children
will be able to read Melody’s
story and learn the lessons in
her books, American Girl donated $100,000 worth of
books — its two paperback

volumes, No Ordinary Sound
and Never Stop Singing — to
Detroit’s 22 public library
branches, said Julie Parks, a
company spokeswoman. Any
child who visits the library can
get a free copy of either book until the end of the year. Branches

AMERICAN GIRL PHOTOS

Doll designers fussed with the texture of the doll’s hair.
Many “little girls want to play with their doll’s hair,” says
Juanita Moore, president and CEO of the Wright Museum.

Melody Ellison, the new doll,
has straightened hair in keeping with the mid-1960s style.

American Girl released three
books tied to its latest historical BeForever doll.

will stock copies of the books
to loan to patrons with a library card.
Free dolls will be awarded to
winners of the library’s summer
reading program, said Jo Anne
Mondowney, executive director
of main Detroit Public Library
branch.
Parks said American Girl was
concerned about the historical

accuracy of Melody and her
story. So the company consulted with an advisory
board that had a rich knowledge of Detroit’s history and
the history of the civil rights
movement. The board included Moore, House, civil
rights leader Julian Bond and
JoAnn Watson, a former Detroit city councilwoman who
also served as executive director of the Detroit Branch
NAACP, Parks said.
Together, they helped determine how Melody should look,
deciding details about her
clothing, accessories and the
texture of her hair.
“In the late ’60s, the majority of African Americans did
have straight hair,” said Moore.
“It may not have been bonestraight, but it was straightened.
In addition to our own recollections growing up as ’60s girls,
there also was historical
research.”
Moore said they changed the
texture of the doll’s hair several

“Detroit was so
much the mecca
of civil rights and
movement
activities ... from
the ’60s right
until the ’80s.”
Gloria House, professor at the

University of Michigan-Dearborn

times. She noted that Melody
could have had ponytails or
braids, but many “little girls want
to play with their doll’s hair.”
“I can’t wait to see a little girl
playing with this doll, and I can’t
wait to see them connect and interact with her story,” she said.
Melody joins 15 other historical American Girl dolls the company has issued over the past 30
years. The doll, which sells for
$115, comes with a hound’s-tooth
tricolored dress, matching headband, patent blue shoes, white
socks and underwear, along with
a paperback book.
Melody’s story has resonance
today, House said.
“There is a very lively movement of young African Americans
and their allies who come from
various races and cultures, Black
Lives Matter and other movements on the scene now that ...
pick up from where the movement and organizations of the
’60s and ’70s left off,” she said.

Are Dow transports a caution signal for economy?
Mark Hulbert

Special for USA TODAY

The stock market’s recent

surge to new all-time highs may
be nothing more than the silver
lining in a very dark cloud: weakness in the transportation sector.
Many advisers consider that
weakness to be ominous, on the
theory that the sector is a leading
economic indicator. If so, then
the sector is warning us of imminent economic trouble.
Consider the Dow Jones
Transportation Average, one of
the lesser-known Dow Jones indexes that consists of a basket of
stocks from the airline, trucking,
railroad and shipping industries
with stocks such as Delta Air
Lines, FedEx, Norfolk Southern
and Ryder System. Even as the
better-known Dow Industrials
were recently hitting another
high, the Dow Transports were
trading 15% below their all-time
high set in December 2014.
Over the same period, the

broad stock market — as measured by the S&P 500 index —
gained 4.4%. Such a wide divergence is rare — and significant.
It certainly seems plausible
that the transportation sector
would be a leading indicator of
the economy as a whole. The
Committee on National Statistics

of the National Research Council
explained why in a 2002 book entitled Key Transportation Indicators: Not only are transportation
industries “major economic activities in themselves,” the committee wrote, transportation also
“is a cost, to a greater or lesser extent, of virtually every other good
or service in the economy.”
This theory was confirmed statistically by the U.S. Department
of Transportation. In a December
2014 study, that Department’s
Bureau of Transportation Statistics reported that trend changes
of the transportation sector between 1979 and 2013 led trend
changes in the economy by an average of approximately four
months. The bureau based its
study on the Transportation Services Index, which it calculates itself; that index hit its all-time
high in July of last year.

GANNETT

Weakness in the Dow Jones Transportation Average could
signal economic weakness down the road.
To be sure, the U.S. economy
has not entered a recession, at
least as measured by gross domestic product, but other broad
measures of economic activity
paint a less sanguine picture. Total revenue at publicly traded corporations reached a peak in 2014
and has been declining ever since.
Corporate profits have plunged:
Earnings per share of S&P 500

companies over the past 12
months were 18% lower than

where they stood two years ago.
The reason the broad stock
market averages have been able
to reach all-time highs even as
earnings were declining: Investors have been willing to pay
more per dollar of earnings than
they were before. Two years ago,
for example, the S&P 500’s price-

to-earnings ratio — based on
trailing 12-month, as-reported
earnings — was below 19. The
comparable ratio today is above
25. The average over the past 100
years has been 16.1.
Higher P/E ratios, of course,
mean the stock market is that
much more vulnerable to any unexpected economic weakness.
Richard Moroney, editor of the
Dow Theory Forecasts service, is
one adviser who is paying close
attention to the transportation
sector’s weakness. He notes that
the Dow Transportation Average
has been unable to surpass its
high from this past April, much
less its all-time high from late
2014.
Until and unless that average
can jump over even that lower

hurdle, he argues, investors
should brace themselves for a
market decline by keeping at least
some portion of their equity portfolios in cash or a short-term
bond fund.
Hulbert, founder of the Hulbert Financial Digest, has been tracking
investment advisers’ performances for
four decades. For more information,
email him at go to www.hulbertratings.com.


USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

PERSONAL FINANCE
RETIREMENT

EVEN RETIREES
NEED TO WATCH
CREDIT SCORES
AND REPORTS
Stay on guard
to keep your
credit card
and loan
interest rates
low and block
identity theft

Robert Powell

Special for USA TODAY

Few would debate the need for
people to become familiar with
their credit reports and their credit scores during their working
years. But what about retirees? Do
they need to worry about such
things?
Yes, indeed, says Gerri Detweiler, head of market education for
Nav, which provides free business
and personal credit scores. “It is a
mistake to think that retirees don’t
need to stay on top of their credit
reports or credit scores,” she says.
QUALIFY FOR
LOWER RATES

According to Detweiler and
others, a significant portion
of retired Americans still
have debt. For instance,
the Urban Institute reported in a 2013 study that the
share of adults 65 and older
with outstanding debt increased from 30% to 46%
from 1998 to 2010; the inflation-adjusted median value of debt grew
56% over the period; and the average ratio of
total household
debt
over total

household

7T

assets more than doubled.
signs of identity theft, such as new
Another report, an AARP Public accounts that they did not open,
Policy Institute/Demos paper and resolve these cases before the
published in 2013, showed that theft has an impact on their nest
more than half of those age 50 and egg.”
up carry medical expenses (including prescription drugs and dental CREDIT FOR CREDIT’S SAKE
expenses) on their credit cards. Bernardo says retirees should
Plus, one-third of older Americans monitor their reports and scores
use credit cards to pay for
and “work to maintain
basic living expenses such
their credit health so
as rent, mortgage paythey can live their retirements, groceries and utiliment years to the
ties, according to that
fullest.”
report.
For example, she says,
Given all that debt, Detmany older Americans
weiler says good credit
don’t want to fully retire,
scores can help older
and instead they may
Americans qualify for lowwant to finally start their
er rates, which in turn can
own business. “Unless

allow them to pay off debt “Changes they want to risk drainfaster.
ing their retirement savin your
“With strong credit
ings, many will need to
credit
scores you’ll be able to get
apply for a small-busiscores
low-cost financing so you,
ness loan to get started,”
hopefully, don’t end up on
Bernardo says. “Of
can be
the minimum-payment one of the course, one of the major
treadmill,” she says.
factors in qualifying for a
fastest
loan is your credit score.
ways to Your credit score will
WATCH OUT FOR
not only determine if
IDENTITY THEFT
catch
Although the likelihood of
you qualify, but also
identity
identity theft decreases
what interest rate you
theft.”
with age, Detweiler says, it
pay. Maintaining credit

can be a significant conhealth so they can qualicern for older Americans. Gerri Detweiler, fy for better loans can
head of market
For instance, Bureau of education
for Nav mean monetary savings
Justice Statistics reported
post-retirement.”
the number of retirement-age victims of identity theft increased to THE REWARDS
2.6 million in 2014.
Many Americans plan on traveling
“Changes in your credit scores once they retire. And this, says
can be one of the fastest ways to Bernardo, is certainly another reacatch identity theft,” she says.
son to worry about credit. “Travel
Others agree.
rewards credit cards can save trav“The No. 1 reason retirees elers a ton of money and offer
should be concerned about their valuable perks,” she says. “But recredit report/score is identity tirees must first qualify for these
theft,” says Sandra Bernardo, man- cards, and without a good credit
ager of consumer protection at score they likely will not be able to
Experian.
secure the best cards and rewards.”
According to Bernardo, most retirees probably do not use credit as THE BOTTOM LINE
they did when they were younger, “Credit health is important at evand thus aren’t paying as close at- ery age, and retirees and young
tention to their accounts. “This people alike should always work to
makes retirees especially vulner- maintain a healthy credit report
able to identity thieves, who and score and watch their report
know these account holders as well as all financial accounts for
are likely not monitoring any sign of identity theft,” Bernartheir accounts and are easi- do says.
er targets,” she says. “By
monitoring their credit re- Powell is editor of Retirement Weekly
ports on a regular basis, Got questions? Email Bob at
retirees can watch for

ROBERT LERICH, GETTY IMAGES

FOR CO-WORKERS LEFT BEHIND
uManage your relationships. There’s a good chance you’ll run into
the leaver again. In addition, LinkedIn has made the professional
world truly tiny. Also, one of those “bright young things” could end up
being the founder of a multimillion-dollar start-up or, who knows,
your manager at some point.
uLet bygones be bygones. During your time together with the
leaver, you may have had arguments or just disliked how they operated. When they quit, it is too late to correct this. So be graceful. You
gain nothing from settling old scores.
uA shout-out. If you enjoyed working with the leaver or they
achieved a lot for your organization, acknowledge it and let them
know they will be missed.
uKeep the faith. A friend or manager who leaves your company
may trigger the thought of “If they leave then I should, too.” Hold
tight. People leave companies for all types of personal reasons. That
doesn’t mean you should follow. No company is perfect. Stick where
you are until you’re sure you need to try another option.
u Goodbye drinks. Turn up for them! This is not just a chance to
celebrate and respect the work a
co-worker did but is also a way
to lift the whole of the team’s
spirits.

A friend or manager who leaves your
company may trigger the thought of “If they
leave then I should, too.” Hold tight.
uHow about a goodbye gift? It doesn’t need to be extravagant, but

a nice mug — or, for extra credit, a goodbye video — could be an amazing send-off. I recently left my company after a fantastic experience
with an amazing group of people, and they made a wonderful goodbye
video. It was humbling.
uDon’t speak ill of the departed. Try your best not to blame the
“absent friend” for any issues that come up later. It is not professional.

THEY
QUIT!
HOW TO
HANDLE A
WORKER’S
DEPARTURE
GRACEFULLY

Fergus Mellon

Special for USA TODAY

Dealing with the
person who just
said “I quit” can be
really tough if you
enjoyed working
with them and
feel let down by
their leaving.
That said,
in the same
way that
there are

best practices
for leaving
your job, so there
are for dealing with
the short-timer or
the “soon to be
departed.”
Mellon is author of “Early Stage
Professional: Starting Off Right,”
a book for professionals in their
early career years.

FOR MANAGERS IN MOURNING
It can feel as if you are being deserted. But don’t take it personally.
There are many, many reasons why people leave their roles.
uBe positive. If they were good, let them know you will miss them
and even that you would welcome them back in the future. In my first
real job out of college, my CEO said I could come back anytime, and he
gave me a bonus to help pay for business school. It was an amazing
gesture. If I ever have the chance to refer a client to his company I will.
uBe realistic. If you make a counteroffer, know it is unlikely to be
successful. Once an employee says they are leaving it is really difficult
to change their mind. Do not feel rejected for a second time.
uAsk for feedback. Take the opportunity to see what you can improve on. You will get a more candid version of the truth from the
leaver. You may learn you need to tweak your communication style for
Early Stage Professionals, for example, and this will help you become a
better leader. And if you get the feedback directly, it could take the
sting out of any formal exit interview your company conducts.

GETTY IMAGES/

ISTOCKPHOTO


8T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

TECH

Alexa, please boss around my new car
Amazon’s personal
assistant is hitched to
the Hyundai Genesis

Chris Woodyard
@ChrisWoodyard
USA TODAY

Hyundai announced last week
that it has partnered with Amazon to let motorists use their
home digital assistant Alexa to
boss around their new Genesis
luxury car.
From inside their homes, owners of Hyundai’s Genesis G90 sedan will able to use voice
commands through their Amazon Echo speakers to command
the Alexa system to have their
cars perform certain basic functions, Hyundai says.

So, for instance, the customer

who wants the car running and
air conditioning blasting for a daily commute need only say something like, “Alexa, tell Genesis to
start my car at 70 degrees.” Or an
owner might bark, “Alexa, tell
Genesis to lock my car” from the
comfort of their living room.
In addition, Alexa can flash the
car’s headlights, honk the horn or
turn off a running engine.
The feature, which went live
Thursday, shows that Hyundai is
serious about setting Genesis
apart since it announced last year
that it would become a standalone luxury division, much like
Toyota’s Lexus or Nissan’s Infiniti. The automaker’s officials say
they are first with the feature,
which is an accomplishment given how makers of prestige cars
compete vigorously for any edge

2017 Genesis G90 will be first to get the Amazon system.
when it comes to technology.
Plus, they say the feature is a
perfect fit for Genesis. Being able
to order basic functions by voice

GENESIS

remotely will keep owners from
having to run outside to do it
themselves.

“The Genesis brand is about

convenience for the owner,” says
Barry Ratzlaff, executive director
of digital business planning and
connected operations. “Time is
the ultimate luxury.”
Amazon’s Echo has proved to
be a hit and is believed to be forcing rivals to scramble to create
their own home digital assistants.
The system works much like Siri
on Apple iPhones: Ask a question,
get an answer. Alexa can field trivia questions or play music from
a playlist. The Genesis function
takes it into a new realm.
An Amazon spokesperson
could not be reached for
comment.
To sign up, owners of the new
Genesis G90 need only link their
Amazon account to their Genesis
connected services account, Ratzlaff says. Connected service
comes free for three years.

New plans
to end data
overages
at AT&T
Eli Blumenthal
@eliblumenthal

USA TODAY

SPENCER PLATT, GETTY IMAGES

Customers shop at the new Apple Store at the 350,000-square-foot World Trade Center shopping mall on opening day Tuesday in New York City. Historically, Apple introduces new iPhones shortly after Labor Day.

APPLE’S IPHONE BUZZ FADES
AS OLD MODELS KEEP TICKING
Some analysts say
Apple may wait until
2017 for big upgrade
Jefferson
Graham

@jeffersongraham
USA TODAY

BEACH ,
For half a
decade, the launch of
an Apple iPhone
triggered the same
kind of global hysteria once reserved for beloved music groups
— customers camping for days in
front of a store, often in Applethemed costumes.
That may be changing. Low expectations for major changes to
the next upgrade, and data showing consumers are holding onto
their smartphones longer, suggest the Apple buzz is fading.
Apple has reached the point
where “the phone is so good,

I’m just not as stoked to get
the new version,” says
Blake Rose, who recently
moved west from Kettering, Ohio. He owns
the iPhone 6S, released
last September.
Sales of Apple products dropped more
than 20% at Target
Corp. during the retailer’s quarter ended July
30, Target CEO Brian Cornell said Wednesday, contributing to a 7% drop in total sales.
Apple historically introduces
new iPhones shortly after Labor
Day, and if it follows past years’
patterns, it would launch a phone
with a major redesign and upgrade, say the iPhone 7.
This fall, however, some analysts, including Tim Bajarin of
Creative Strategies, expect Apple
to hold off on a major upgrade,
waiting for 2017 and the 10th anniversary of the phone instead.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if next
year, Apple skips 8 and 9 and introduces the iPhone 10, for the
anniversary,” Bajarin says.
Apple didn’t respond to USA
TODAY’s request for comment.
Analysts expect three key add-

TALKING
TECH

VENICE

CALIF.

MICHEL KOFSKY

Blake Rose,
right, says
the current
iPhone is so
good that he’s
“just not as
stoked” for a
new one.

MICHAEL KOFSKY

Ryan Seron
left, of Boynton Beach,
Fla., plans to
get the new
iPhone when
it first goes
on sale.

ons for the next iPhone:
uA dual-camera sensor that is
designed to dramatically improve
low-light images and make it easier to zoom in on photos.
uMore internal storage, at 32
gigabytes, up from the standard
16 GB.

uRemoval of the headphone
jack port, which will require consumers to plug their phones and
earbuds into the Lightning
charging port. This will
probably cause them to
buy new headphones and
buds.
How does Apple sell
a new edition with
minimal new features?
If the camera is really
good, “consumers will
respond,” Bajarin says.
“It depends upon the
quality.”
Sales for the latest
iPhone, the 6S and 6S Plus,
didn’t catch fire with consumers
as did previous models. Apple has
reported slumping sales for the
previous two quarters, a first for
the company, which sent revenue
down 15% for the June quarter.
iPhone unit sales fell to 40.4 million in the recent quarter, down
15% year over year.
Earlier this year, Apple introduced the smaller iPhone SE,
which introduced no new features but carried a lower price in
a smaller body. Although Apple
says sales have been strong for
the SE, they haven’t been enough

to push iPhone unit numbers
higher than previously.
The last major redesign for the
iPhone was in 2014’s iPhone 6

and 6 Plus models, which remain
Apple’s best-selling iPhone models. Consumers loved the larger
screens and improved camera.
But 2015’s 6S and 6S Plus
failed to impress in an equal way,
with new features such as 3-D
Touch shortcuts and the ability to
add short seconds of video clips
to your photos.
“They don’t really change anything except the camera and
speed,” Lala O’Malley of Los Angeles said. “It ended with the 4S.”
For the next version, Maya
Borski of Riverside, Calif., doesn’t
mind losing the headphone jack.
“Now you’ll only have to worry
about one hole in the phone getting wet instead of two and ruining the whole phone,” she says.
Many of the consumers we
spoke to here on Ocean Front
Walk said they would love to see a
100% waterproof iPhone — such
as the new Samsung Galaxy Note
7, unveiled this week.
“Where’s Apple with that?”
Rose asks.
But even though the innovation from Apple over the past few

years has slowed, Apple fans are
still out there.
Ryan Seron of Boynton Beach,
Fla., says he’ll be “standing online” on opening day to get the
latest iPhone.
“Everyone always wants the
newest thing,” he said.
And O’Malley, though she
seemed ho-hum about a new
iPhone’s prospects, admitted that
she, too, would probably opt for
the new model. How often does
she get a new one? “Sadly, every
year,” she says.

NEW YORK The era of telecommunication carriers charging you
once you top the data limit is
coming to a close.
Last week, AT&T announced
Mobile Share Advantage plans
that won’t charge you extra for
going over your data limit, instead slowing down your data for
the remainder of your billing
month. The plans come with other changes — they strip out the
cheapest, offering more data for
higher prices, while lowering the
cost for some higher-data plans.
AT&T is likely betting consumers will switch to get rid of annoying charges when they go over the
limits. They’re following in welltrodden footsteps: T-Mobile,
Sprint and most recently Verizon

have eliminated what’s known as
overages for consumers in new
plans. Verizon is the only one to
charge for the feature, with a $5
fee to enable “Safety Mode.”
The change
comes amid a
renewed
increase in competition among
wireless carriers, led by aggressive plays
by
T-Mobile
and Sprint to
lure customers.
Those moves
have worked. In
the most recent quarter T-Mobile
added 1.12 million phone customers, and AT&T added 185,000.
Similar to the other carriers,
AT&T will slow users’ speeds to
anemic, 2G-like speeds of
128kbps — on par with other carriers — until the end of the customer’s billing cycle or until the
user decides to upgrade to a larger plan. With those speeds, users
can check email or do light
browsing on the Web, but video
watching and other data hungry
tasks will be painfully slow. AT&T
declined to comment further.
AT&T now charges customers
more if they use more data than

they’ve signed up for under their
tiered plans. For instance, under
AT&T’s current Mobile Share Value plans, the company charges
$20 for an additional 300 MB on
its 300 MB plan or $15 per additional 1 GB on its larger plans.
AT&T will still send text messages
to alert users when they are at
75%, 90% and 100% of their
monthly data bucket (or at 90%
and 100% for businesses).
As part of the new Mobile
Share Advantage, AT&T is revamping its data offerings. The
smallest and cheapest 300 MB
and 2 GB plans ($20 and $30 per
month, respectively) will be going
away. They’ll be replaced by 1 GB
plan for $30 per month and a 3
GB plan for $40 per month. The 5
GB for $50 plan will be replaced
by a new 6 GB for $60 option.
Users happy with existing
plans don’t need to switch to the
new plans, though they won’t get
the benefit of avoiding charges for
exceeding data allowances.

Change
comes
amid a
renewed

increase in
competition
among
wireless
carriers

FLICKR

Similar to the
other carriers, AT&T
will slow
users’ speeds
until the end
of the customer’s billing cycle or
until the user
decides to
upgrade to a
larger plan.


9T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

TRENDING
Doctors, hospitals prepping
Student
journalists for tough talk on mistakes
ON CAMPUS

on Olympic
beat in Rio

Going beyond the
headlines, they have
freedom to dig, grow
Anjali Bhat

USA TODAY College

There are more than 11,000
athletes at the Rio 2016 Olympics
and almost three times as many
journalists. Among these 30,000
storytellers are a group that are
not professionals but hope to be
soon — student journalists that
prepared rigorously while at their
campuses in the U.S. to find stories in Brazil.
“The Olympic Games have
been something close to my heart
my whole life, and to be able to
experience it firsthand is emotional,” said Ella Fox, a senior at
Queens University of Charlotte, who traveled with a group
of peers to cover the Games.
There are two types of stories
at the Olympics: obvious ones —
Simone Biles emerging as the
best gymnast in the world, for

example. And those like the ones
Queens students are working on
— about the impact of the Olympics on low-income communities
in Rio or on taxi and Uber drivers
that drive spectators to events.
While these journalists have
done their share of athlete and
team profiles, they often wake up
with no idea what to write about
until later that day.
“I have never been in an environment where I didn’t have a
plan, but it’s been a lot of fun,”
said Robby General, a junior at
Ball State University. “As a
sports writer, I normally cover
games and have exclusive access
to post-game interviews and
press box or sideline seats. But
that’s not true here.”
General is a part of the blog
“Ball State at the Games.” He is
simultaneously a writer, photographer and videographer and
does not have a fixed set of duties.
As website designer and managing editor of “Queens in Rio,”
Queens University senior Hiwot
Hailu directs a team of writers,
provides technical support and is
responsible for managing all the

They are finding

honesty is best policy,
despite fear of suits
Zhai Yun Tan

Kaiser Health News

It was a Fourth of July weekend, but Sharon O’ Brien, an intensive care physician, was not
celebrating. A medical error earlier landed a patient in her ICU.
The patient eventually died —
and she had to decide what to tell
the patient’s family.
Should she apologize? How
much detail should she share
about the mistake? Would a frank
discussion put the hospital at risk
of a lawsuit?
“I had never really been in that
situation before,” said O’Brien,
recalling the 2004 incident. She
decided to tell the patient’s family
about the error, bracing herself to
face their anger. Although the
family was stricken by grief, they
appreciated her honesty.
“I spent a lot of time with the
patient’s family supporting them

and explaining what had happened, and yet I felt so unsupported in that experience,” said
O’Brien, a physician at MedStar
Georgetown University Hospital.

Hospitals have traditionally
been reticent to disclose to patients or relatives the specifics of
how a medical procedure didn’t
go as planned for fear of malpractice lawsuits. In recent years,
though, many are beginning to
consider a change. Instead of the
usual “deny-and-defend” approach, they are revamping policies to be more open.
To help them move in this direction, the federal Agency for
Healthcare Research and Quality
released in May an online toolkit.
Hospitals’ interest in the approach has been fueled by studies
showing that patients want to
know when an adverse event has
occurred and that doctors suffer
from anxiety when there are restrictions and concerns about
what they are allowed to discuss.
Some studies have found that patients are more likely to sue when
they perceive a lack of honesty.
MedStar Health, which is

MOLLY RILEY, AP

MedStar Health has been a
pioneer setting up programs
to deal with medical mistakes
— and discussing them.

among the largest health providers in Maryland and the Washington, D.C., region, was a pioneer
in setting up such programs at its
10 hospitals, starting in 2012.

O’Brien was among the first to
sign up as a volunteer, at Georgetown University Hospital.
A team of physicians — called
the “Go Team” — complete a
four-hour initial training program and then annual booster
courses every six to eight months
to prepare for these tough conversations. After that, Go Team
members are on call 24/7 to pro-

content posted to the website.
In the past week or so, professional journalists have been
heavily criticized for allowing
sexist or racially biased coverage
of athletes to slip through the
cracks. Hailu said she doesn’t experience the same pressures.
“I think that our situation allows us to feel that pressure differently,” said Hailu. “As student
journalists, we are producing the
stories that we want and find interesting. That allows us the freedom to focus on the impact of the
Games, rather than the news of
the Games itself.”
While many of these student
journalists will have spent only a
little over a month in Rio de Janeiro by the end of the Olympics,
several consider their experience
to be a glimpse into their lives as
professional journalists.
They are reminded that if it is
possible to report at an international event where cultural differences can complicate stories, it is
most definitely possible back at
home. The students who have

ventured into Rio’s slums or told
the stories of those who felt burdened by the Olympics feel especially rewarded in their work.
“This experience really has
helped me to see that journalism
can change lives by telling the
stories of those around you,” said
Fox. “And I know for a fact this
experience is changing my life.”

JOHN EHLKE, AP

TRUMP THE MEDIA BASHER
TURNS TO MEDIA FOR HELP
@remrieder
USA TODAY

JAMES LANG, USA TODAY SPORTS

Kaiser Health News is a health policy
news service, part of the non-partisan
Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump concludes a speech at a campaign rally Tuesday in West Bend, Wis.

Rem Rieder

Some students have ventured
into Rio’s slums or told the
stories of locals who felt
burdened by the Olympics.

vide guidance. Another program,
“Care for the Caregiver,” provides
psychological support for staff.
Training involves role-playing
exercises with professional actors
who simulate patient scenarios.
O’Brien remembers clearly one
session when she had to confront
actors portraying a patient’s family almost hysterical with anger.
The patient had suffered from severe burns due to a fire in the operating room.
“It’s scary to be in that room
even though I knew it was a simulation,” she said.
David Mayer, vice president of
quality and safety for MedStar
Health, said by creating an open
environment, the doctors have
been able to learn from past
events and improve their performance. He has seen a 60% reduction in serious safety events in
four years. But openness has a
cost. The hospital might have to
pay for remedies, such as waiving
medical bills.

Donald
Trump
loves to batter the
media, the corrupt
media, the pathetic
media that’s forever

distorting what he’s saying and
underreporting the size of his tremendous crowds.
While the Republican presidential candidate often seems to
lump together the diverse media
as a miserable monolith, he clearly makes some distinctions.
So when he needed to reboot
his faltering campaign last week,
he turned to a media figure. Meet
Stephen Bannon, Team Trump’s
newly minted CEO.
But not just any media figure.
Bannon has been executive
chairman of Breitbart News, as
enthusiastic and consistent a
booster of The Donald as can be
found. A local Breitbart is probably what Trump’s running mate,
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, was
looking for when he briefly tried
to set up a state-run news service
that was quickly dubbed “Pravda
on the prairie.”
What’s more, there is word
Trump will be trained for his crucial debate confrontations with
Democratic rival Hillary Clinton
by none other than Roger Ailes,
the all-powerful CEO of Fox
News until he was brought down
last month by a sexual harassment lawsuit. You can’t get much
more media than that.
When I read about the new

Trump-Ailes alliance, I thought
for a moment I must be reading
The Onion. In what cosmos could
a candidate by far trailing with
women in the polls think it was a
MEDIA

2013 PHOTO BY DANNY MOLOSHOK

GERALD HERBERT, AP

good idea to bring on a man who
has been the target of a wide array of sexual harassment allegations?
But it turned out I was reading
The New York Times, which said
it had been told about Ailes’ new
gig by “four people briefed on the
move,” none of them named in
the Times story. Trump says Ailes
has “no role” and suggests he
doesn’t need any help preparing
for the debates.
While Fox News long has
served as a Full Employment Act
for failed GOP presidential hopefuls, I wouldn’t expect a huge influx of media people joining the
Trump campaign. Particularly
unlikely to come on board are
conservative columnists such as
David Brooks, George Will and
Michael Gerson, who have been

fulminating against Trump for
months.
It’s no wonder the TrumpAiles story brought to mind The
Onion, because this whole campaign has had an Onion-like feel
to it. A blustery billionaire with
no political credentials running
the table in the GOP primary?
Never happen, right? Walls on
the border, Muslim bans, blood
coming out of wherever, a candidate feuding with Gold Star parents, calls for help from the
Russians (the Russians!), Second
Amendment people to the rescue,
President Obama inventing the

Islamic State? Then there’s the
campaign chairman who, handwritten ledgers indicate, was to
receive $12.7 million in cash from
a pro-Russian Ukrainian political
party.
You really can’t make this stuff
up. And it’s not even Labor Day.
And while candidate Trump
truly is in a class by himself, it
could only be in a parallel universe where someone thought it
was a good idea for a secretary of
State to exclusively use a private
email server, not to mention
evade and obfuscate when that
fact came to light.
Hillary Clinton, blindsided by

the Obama juggernaut in 2008,
has been an exceedingly lucky
candidate this time around. With
her high negatives and lack of excitement and vision, it’s hard to
imagine her with a clear lead at
this point against a candidate
who didn’t specialize in self-inflicted wounds and unforced errors.
Trump’s steady stream of outrages have totally overshadowed
the Clinton email albatross, and
not because of that crooked
media. Often when there is a
damaging email development,
Trump emerges with another
I-didn’t-really-say-that outburst
that sucks up all the oxygen.
In the extraordinary weeks of
Trump self-immolation since the
conventions, Clinton has been

Team Trump CEO Stephen Bannon and campaign manager
Kellyanne Conway are devotees of letting Trump be Trump.

content to play rope-a-dope,
largely staying out of the
limelight.
If you like your elections heavy
on policy debates, there’s no
doubt this one has been a disappointment for you. Trump, as is
his wont, has made it about
Trump.

And all that wishful thinking
by the GOP about a Trump — you
should excuse the expression —
“pivot” to a more traditional campaign stance has been just that.
Every old-school teleprompter
speech is followed by fireworks.
And the new Trump leaders —
Bannon and campaign manager
Kellyanne Conway — are big devotees of “Let Trump Be Trump,”
of all guns blazing. Not that the
now back-burnered campaign
chairman Paul Manafort, he of
the Ukrainian millions, has had
much success keeping him on the
straight and narrow.
But there is one development
that is really encouraging for
those who care about the public
debate. For too long, the press
was content to stick to the comfort of he-said-she-said — candidate X said this, candidate Y
responded, and that’s that.
In recent years, thanks largely
to FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and
The Washington Post Fact Checker, we’ve seen a dramatic rise of
political fact-checking, of going
the extra mile and sorting out
who is telling the truth and who
isn’t.
This time around, as Duke professor and former PolitiFact head
honcho Bill Adair points out,

we’re seeing much more factchecking in real-time political reporting. Adair points to a number
of examples of news outlets calling out Trump for the preposterous, I mean “sarcastic,” claim that
Obama and Clinton founded
ISIL.
That’s a vital, if long overdue,
step in the right direction.


10T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

SHARE THE NEWS
THAT MATTERS TO YOU.

/yourtake

Be part of the news. Upload a video or photo with Your Take,
and you could get published in USA TODAY.
yourtake.usatoday.com


11T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

SUNDAY

A long
look at
thighhigh
boots,
13T
DEMI LOVATO
BY DANIEL BOCZARSKI,
FILMMAGIC

Send us down to Tucson
for some great food, 14T
ASHLEY DAY, USA TODAY

MUSIC

BILLY RAY
CYRUS’ FULL
CIRCLE TO
‘THIN LINE’

More
than 20
years
after his
breakout
stardom,
he still
follows
his own
path

Bob Doerschuk

Special for USA TODAY

For more than 20
years, Billy Ray Cyrus has called
Singing Hills home. That’s the
name he gave to his spread deep
in Middle Tennessee farm country. Passing through his front gate,
visitors cross a bridge over a small
creek, pass stands of oak, hickory,
a few weeping willows and incongruous evergreens
and flowering cacti
and end up at his
pillared, two-story
place, a motorcycle
parked nearby and
Cyrus
himself
grinning from the
front door.
“I’m sorry it’s
such a mess,” he
says while leading
through an entryway whose only
apparent litter is a
couple of dog toys.
His wife, Tish, is
in California with

their daughter Miley, who is taping
her debut season
as a judge on The
Voice. The first
season of his new
show, Still the
King, has just finCOURTESY OF
ished airing on
ARISTOMEDIA
CMT. His next album, Thin Line, is out Sept. 9.
So until Tish returns, Cyrus
has plenty of time and room on
his hands.
Round bales of hay populate
the landscape outside his kitchen
window. A circular Native American artwork hangs on the wall,
overlooking a wooden table, also
round, where Cyrus seats himself.
“We’ve had this table since I
moved here in 1994,” he says.
“That chair by the wall? That’s
where Waylon Jennings always
sat when he came to visit. He was
right there one day when he told
me, ‘Cyrus, do you not realize
that every 10 years Nashville
throws out one person that’s not
exactly like everybody else because it makes them feel better?’
So you’re not the Chosen One? So
NASHVILLE

v STORY CONTINUES ON 12T

USA SNAPSHOTS©

Pack up and go
3 essential items for

travel bag
1. Camera
(beyond cellphone’s)
2. Noise-canceling
headphones
3. Portable charger

SOURCE Hotwire consumer survey July 13-15
TERRY BYRNE AND VERONICA BRAVO, USA TODAY

ON STAGE AT THE 2016 CMT MUSIC AWARDS BY C FLANIGAN, FILMMAGIC

CALENDAR

TUESDAY

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

Plan your week in entertainment
with these highlights and popculture milestones:

READ: Literary Starbucks:

GO: Kanye West’s Saint Pablo

LISTEN: Barbra Streisand’s

MONDAY
REVISIT: Today

marks the the
30th anniversary of the release of Stand
By Me. Go back
in time and rewatch
UNIVERSAL
FILMS
this classic comingof-age film, or check
out Stephen King’s novella The
Body, on which the plot is based.

Fresh-Brewed, Half-Caf,
No-Whip Bookish Humor by
Nora Katz, Wilson Josephson
and Jill Poskanzer is out today.
Inspired by the authors’ Tumblr
site, it features chance encounters of authors and famous
characters at Starbucks.

Tour kicks off today in Indianapolis. The tour, his first in North
America in three years, will include stops in Boston, New York,

Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, Seattle
and Los Angeles.

WEDNESDAY
WATCH: Get back into the glitz,

glamour and backstage drama
of child beauty pageants with
the return of TLC’s Toddlers and
Tiaras at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

MATT SAYLES,
AP

Encore: Movie Partners
Sing Broadway, in which she
pairs up with Hollywood heavyweights, is released today. The
album features duets
with, among others,
Anne Hathaway,
Alec Baldwin,
Melissa McCarthy,
Chris Pine and
Jamie Foxx.
Compiled by
Mary Cadden
STEVE JENNINGS,
WIREIMAGE

12T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

CELEBRITY SUPERLATIVES

Billy Ray
Cyrus turned
country
music on
its ear when
he arrived
on the scene
in the early
1990s.

The gold medal for love
goes to Leslie Jones
USA TODAY’s Jaleesa Jones digs through the latest
celebrity news for highlights ... and lowlights. Think
high school yearbook superlatives — if Leslie Jones
and Adele were classmates.
SWEETEST CELEBRITY ADVOCATE:
LESLIE JONES

Jones is paying it forward. When the Ghostbusters star was targeted in a racist, sexist Twitter
harassment campaign, fans expressed solidarity with the entertainer, rallying under the
banner #LoveForLeslieJ. And after
catching wind that 2012 Olympic darling and 2016 all-around gold medalist

Gabby Douglas also was caught in an
online hailstorm, Jones encouraged her
followers to extend that same love to
Douglas. “Yo I just heard Gabby getting
attacked on her page,” Jones tweeted. “Show her the same love you
showed me #Love4GabbyUSA.”
Douglas has since been met with
an outpouring of support.

MOST GRACIOUS SHANIA
TWAIN TRIBUTE: DRAKE

MARK HUMPHREY, AP

Long way from ‘Achy Breaky’
v CONTINUED FROM 11T

what? Welcome to the club.’ ”
In those days, with his mullet
cut, sulky good looks and his stupendously successful platinumselling 1992 single Achy Breaky
Heart, Cyrus alarmed many oldguard country artists and critics.
He has completed a full circle of
sorts since then, moving from his
initial perception as an outsider,
through mainstream adulation
playing Miley’s dad on the Disney
Channel series Hannah Montana
and back to where he began, a
star who doesn’t fit easily into any
category other than his own.

On Thin Line, Cyrus, who turns
55 Thursday, honors his musical
heroes by covering such classics
as Help Me Make It Through the
Night, Sunday Morning Coming
Down and Going Where the Lonely Go, always bringing something
of his own to the performance.
He also teams up with Waylon’s
son Shooter Jennings on two
tracks whose darkness and intensity stand out from the rest of the
album, his 14th.
“I was in my darkest hour
when I recorded those two,” says
Cyrus, whose last studio release
was 2012’s Change My Mind.
“Tish and I were coming out of
some tough times. I wasn’t exactly sure of how things were going
to go. But I got this crazy email
from Shooter that he wanted to
record this song Killing the Blues
with me. I go down to L.A., thinking we’ll be working in a nice studio. Dude, it was a meat locker.
I’m not making that up: It was an
old butcher place where they
used to gut cows. But when we
started rolling, I didn’t care.
Things went so well that we decided to do one more.”
Cyrus looks again at the chair
where his best friend felt most at
home. “Waylon sat right there
and told me that he had a dream

that I had recorded I’ve Always
Been Crazy,” he says, referencing
the title cut of a Jennings album
released in 1978. “At the time I
was with Sony Records. When I
went in and told them I wanted
to do that song, they said, ‘Nobody wants to go back to that
stuff.’ But that day with Shooter,
he mentioned that (their friend
and fellow outlaw) Lee Roy
Parnell was in town. I said,
‘Let’s bring him in and complete your daddy’s dream.’
We did it in that dark little
studio, which gave it something a little spooky.”
Perhaps the spookiest
moments on Thin Line are
the last, a ghostly duet
with Miley, accompanied
only by the drone of a
Buddhist bowl she had
given her dad the day after
his birthday last year.
“She tapped it with this
stick and it made this
amazing sound,” he recalls.
“When she left, I made maybe
a five-minute version of just
that bowl.
“The next day, Miley came
back. I said, ‘You’ve got to

LATEST ACTOR TO GET
POLITICAL: TIM MATHESON

He may be the self-proclaimed
“6 God,” but even Drake can’t
help but praise fellow Canadian
artists. During his stop in Tennessee, Drake was greeted backstage by the country star — who
has been working on new music
in Nashville. The Views artist
later shared a photograph of
himself and Twain and dedicated
part of his set to her. “I grew up a
fan,” Drake told the audience. “I
just want to say that, like, Shania
Twain came to my show tonight.
... So this next set, right here, I’m
doing this for Shania. This is my
love set for Shania.”

Ronald Reagan may not be here
to express his thoughts on GOP
presidential nominee Donald
Trump, but the actor playing the
conservative icon in a forthcoming TV movie offered his
frank opinion to USA TODAY. “I
just think the man is a very troubled, emotional mess,” says the
actor, who will play Reagan in an
adaptation of Bill O’Reilly and
Martin Dugard’s best-seller Killing Reagan. “I don’t think Ronald

Reagan would have had any trouble dismissing him as a terrible
candidate. ... The basis of Ronald
Reagan was his humanity.”
MOST LIKELY TO CRUSH SUPER
BOWL FANS’ HOPES: ADELE

The singer won’t be saying Hello
to fans at the 2017 Super Bowl —
at least not from the halftime
stage. At her tour stop in Los
Angeles’ Staples Center this
month, the 25 singer said
she declined an invitation to headline one of the
biggest gigs in the
industry, saying the show did
not align with who she is as an
artist. “First of all, I’m not doing
the Super Bowl,” Adele said
from the stage. “I mean, come
on, that show is not about music.
And I don’t really — I can’t
dance or anything like
that. They were very
kind, they did ask
me, but I did say no. I’m
sorry, but maybe next time.”
COURTESY OF ARISTOMEDIA

Cyrus revisits the legendary Music Mill Studio in Nashville,
where he cut his debut album, Some Gave All, in 1992.

hear this!’ I started playing what I
had, and suddenly she grabbed
the microphone and started
singing. Every bit of it came in
that moment. She evidently had
some stuff she wanted to say,
and this gave her the space to say
it without the pressure of a song
or a melody. When she left again,
I listened to what she’d said
and threw in some bloodier,
darker stuff.”
The results — Cyrus calls it a
prayer, not a song — appear as
a surprise bonus track. But the
story of this music, which they

call Angels Protect This Home,
doesn’t end there.
“The next day, the 28th, a guy
came over to install a new TV system,” Cyrus says. “And he
knocked my bowl onto the floor.
It shattered into a thousand
pieces! I was in tears, to be honest. All I had left was this recording. But when I told Miley about
it, she said: ‘I think that was supposed to happen. It had to break.
Daddy, it’s complete.”
It was another circle, one of
many in Cyrus’s life. “Part of my
Cherokee religion is that everything is round,” he says. “The
Earth is round. The sky is

round. The stars are round.
The wind at its greatest fury,
a hurricane or a tornado, goes
around. A bird builds its nest
in a circle because her religion is the same as ours.”
He smiles and spreads
his hands on the table.
“Trust me, Tish has
tried to throw this out
a thousand times. But
maybe because it’s round
too, I’m like, ‘Anything
but this table. It has to
stay.’ ”

Cyrus, with his famous
daughter, Miley, and his
wife, Tish Cyrus, arrive
for a beneflit gala last
summer in New York.
NEILSON BARNARD, GETTY IMAGES

BEST KENNY BAKER
REMEMBRANCE: MARK HAMILL

After the news broke Saturday that
the beloved Star Wars actor had
died at 81, the Star Wars community and its fans lit up Twitter with
remembrances of Baker’s spellbinding screen presence. But perhaps the most magical tribute
came courtesy of Hamill, who

played Luke Skywalker in the first
Star Wars film, Episode IV: A New Hope, released in 1977. “Goodbye
Kenny Baker,” Hamill wrote on Twitter in a final salute to his “lifelong
loyal friend,” who played R2-D2. “I loved his optimism and determination. He WAS the droid I was looking for!” Hamill continued, a reference to Obi Wan’s famous Jedi mind trick from Episode IV.
JONES BY GREGG DEGUIRE, WIREIMAGE; DOUGLAS BY GEOFF BURKE, USA TODAY SPORTS;
DRAKE BY CHARLES SYKES, INVISION/AP; MATHESON BY HOPPER STONE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
CHANNELS/SMPSP; ADELE BY SASCHA STEINBACH, GETTY IMAGES; HAMILL BY MIKE MARSLAND, WIREIMAGE

Corrections & Clarifications

PRESIDENT AND PUBLISHER

John Zidich

EDITOR IN CHIEF

USA TODAY is committed
to accuracy. To reach us,
contact Standards Editor
Brent Jones at 800-8727073 or e-mail
Please indicate whether
you’re responding to
content online or in the
newspaper.

Patty Michalski
CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER

Kevin Gentzel

7950 Jones Branch Dr., McLean, Va. 22108,
703-854-3400
Published by Gannett
USA TODAY LIFE is published weekly.
Advertising: All advertising published in USA
TODAY is subject to the current rate card; copies
available from the advertising department. USA
TODAY may in its sole discretion edit, classify, reject
or cancel at any time any advertising submitted.
National, Regional: 703-854-3400
Reprint permission, copies of articles, glossy
reprints:
www.GannettReprints.com or call 212-221-9595
USA TODAY is a member of The Associated Press
and subscribes to other news services. USA TODAY,
its logo and associated graphics are registered
trademarks. All rights reserved.

PUZZLE ANSWERS


13T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

FASHION

ALL EYES ON
THE THIGHS

Thigh-high boots, beloved by dominatrixes and drag
queens, are all around this summer, despite the soaring
temps. But at least their thighs are bare as celebs galore
don strut-worthy boots. USA TODAY’s Maria Puente
and Mary Cadden take a look at this steamy trend.

ARIANA
GRANDE

DANIA
RAMIREZ

Beverly Hills in August —
perfect boot weather, right?
Still, over-the-knee black
suede suited Grande as she
promoted her upcoming
Hairspray Live! with Derek
Hough Aug. 2 at the Television Critics Association
press tour.

Why wear black
when you can
rock purple?
That’s what the
actress did at the
Bad Moms premiere July 26 in
Los Angeles,
where her Le Silla

mulberry suede
over-the-knee
boots were luscious.
She had several
trends going: Check
out her Valkyrie
Cape Jacket from
Meena for a superhero vibe that is
super-haute.

SHENAE
GRIMES-BEECH

At the Hollywood premiere of Amateur Night
July 25, GrimesBeech’s monochromatic boho look of
leather shorts and
thigh-high boots hit
the right notes, while
a silky, long-sleeve
pullover blouse kept
the focus on
the actress’
legs.

DEMI LOVATO

MEREDITH
MICKELSON AND
BELLA HARRIS

The young models were spotted
at the Teen Choice Awards July
31 in shorts, thigh boots and
turtlenecks, but their overall
vibes were different: Mickelson’s
super-high shorts and long flowing locks gave the model an almost
’60s go-go look, while Harris’
pleated skort and up-do were
sweet and playful.

She, too, knows the
prancing value of thigh
boots on stage, here
performing at the 2016
Honda Civic Tour Aug. 2
in Rosemont, Ill.

MICKELSON AND HARRIS BY FRAZER HARRISON,
GETTY IMAGES; LOVATO BY DANIEL BOCZARSKI,
FILMMAGIC; GRANDE BY RICHARD SHOTWELL,
INVISION/AP; GRIMES AND RAMIREZ BY JON
KOPALOFF, FILMMAGIC; FERGIE BY JONATHAN
LEIBSON, GETTY IMAGES; DELEVINGNE BY JOEL
RYAN, AP; BEYONCÉ BY LARRY BUSACCA, PW AND
13TH WITNESS/INVISION

BEYONCÉ

FERGIE

She went for an
all-PVC look
Aug. 13 at the
Pandora Summer Crush in
Los Angeles in
black thigh-highs
and a one-piece
that featured
white racing
stripes.

She practically lives
in thigh boots,
especially on stage.
She strutted an
animal-print pair
during her Formation World Tour in
New York in June,
then went for a pale
gray pair of suede
lace-up boots by
Olivier Rousteing
Aug. 3 in Barcelona.

CARA
DELEVINGNE

Tall boots are perfect
to show off her long,
long legs and her

comic book-queen
style. Promoting
Suicide Squad, she
paired thigh-high
Christian Louboutin black
leather boots
with an Anthony
Vaccarello dress
for the New York
premiere Aug. 1;
then, two days later
at the London premiere (pictured), she
went with an Alexander McQueen leather
jacket and black lace
slip dress.

HEALTH

Mapping genes can help plot your future
But
experts
disagree
on
whether
we know
enough
yet for
the info
to be
useful

“You’re
going to
find a lot
of things
you don’t
know
what to
do with.
Most of it
is noise.”
Muin Khoury
of the CDC

life history.
He’s hopeful the research
eventually will justify screening
for everyone.
Church, who was the fourth
person in the world to have his
genome sequenced, says that day
already is here. His own genome
did not save him from an avoidable cancer or midlife health crisis — but for somewhere between
two and 20 people per thousand,
it might, he says.
“What’s the justification for
waiting?” he asks.
Church argues that we do
many things for the benefit of
equally small fractions of people.

If people don’t want to know
about their risk for conditions
they can’t do anything about —
such as Alzheimer’s — they can
ask their doctors not to share that
information, Church says.
Jehannine Austin, president of
the National Society of Genetic
Counselors, says the decision to
screen is “not necessarily right
for everyone.”

Karen Weintraub

Special for USA TODAY

Harvard geneticist George
Church is convinced everyone
should have his or her genomes
sequenced. Such tests would reveal the rare diseases and handful
of cancers for which we’re all at
some risk, even if our family
members don’t have them.
But many others in the field
say we still don’t know enough
about genetics to justify getting
the test done.
“The evidence is not there yet
for that balance to be tilted more
toward population screening,”

says Muin Khoury, director of the
office of public health genomics
at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The first human genome sequence was completed in draft
form in 2000 for $3 billion. The
cost has come down so much —
to about $1,000 — that it’s now
conceivable for people to get all
their genetic information read
out without help from insurance,
which usually won’t cover the
procedure.
The problem is it’s still easier
to get the data than to know what
to do with it.
Right now, Khoury says, studies reveal variations in the genome that might not cause
problems but could lead to unnecessary medical tests, anxiety
and treatments.
“You’re going to find a lot of
things you don’t know what to
do with,” Khoury says. “Most of it
is noise.”

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW?

HOPE VS. FALSE HOPE

Genetic sequencing can help solve
diagnostic mysteries, finding
causes for rare diseases. It also can

be incredibly useful for some
cancer patients by identifying
therapies their doctors wouldn’t
otherwise have considered.
That approach saved Eric
Dishman’s life.
Dishman was diagnosed with
kidney cancer at 19 and struggled
for 23 years on various treatments. Five years ago he was out
of options and near death when
he got his own and his tumor’s
genomes sequenced. The tests re-

MAGGIE BARTLETT, AP

vealed his cancer had a mutation
commonly found in pancreatic
tumors. Treatment with a medication targeted for pancreatic
cancer got him healthy enough
for a kidney transplant, and he’s
now cancer-free.
But Dishman concedes he was
lucky to have such a useful result.
And he worries people will build
unrealistic expectations that gene
sequences inevitably lead to successful treatments.
“False hope is not a good

thing,” he says. “I lived through
decades of ‘This is the drug that’s

going to cure your cancer,’ and
then they put me on it and it almost killed me.”
Dishman now heads President
Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative, which plans to sequence
the genomes of 1 million Americans over the next few years and
then follow them over time to see
how genes interact with their
physical environment, socioeconomic status, body chemistry and

Some
geneticists
say everyone
should have
their
genomes
sequenced.

A lot of the patients and families
she works with want answers to
“why” they have particular problems, Austin says.
But most genes are not deterministic. They may increase
someone’s chances of disease, but
they also interact with the person’s environment. Someone
with a genetic risk who lives a
healthy life and doesn’t have any
additional risks might well avoid
what looks like genetic destiny in
someone else with a less-healthy
way of living or who simply has
bad luck.

“Any genomic test results are
only going to be able to provide a
partial answer for ‘Why did this
happen to me?’ ” she says.
Austin says she hasn’t yet had
her own genome sequenced.
Even though she knows genetics
aren’t destiny, she’s concerned
about how she’d react to any bad
news she might hear.
“I know myself well enough to
know that if I did have genetic
testing that revealed an increased
risk, this would exacerbate my
anxiety and decrease my quality
of life,” she says. “That’s a risk I’m
not prepared to take.”


14T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

TRAVEL
DISPATCHES

ETHAN MILLER, GETTY IMAGES

The Riviera’s 22-story Monte Carlo

tower comes to a spectacular end.

End of an era
in Las Vegas

The final tower of the legendary Riviera Hotel and Casino in
Las Vegas came down in cinematic fashion early Tuesday.
It was a fitting ending for a
property that was known as
much for its early mobster ties as
its appearances in several Hollywood movies, including the original 1960 Ocean’s 11 movie and the
James Bond film Diamonds are
Forever. It now serves as a backdrop in the new movie Jason
Bourne starring Matt Damon,
perhaps its final film appearance.
2,100-room
Riviera
The
opened in April 1955 as the first
high-rise on the Strip and shut its
doors in May 2015. In its 60 years
it played host to Liberace, Elvis
Presley, Dean Martin, Barbra
Streisand, Harry Belafonte and
Louis Armstrong, along with regulars such as the Rat Pack.
Tuesday’s event marked the
second of two implosions on the
property, owned by the Las Vegas
Convention and Visitors Authority. The Monaco Tower was
leveled in June.

Tuesday’s toppling is the last in
a series of demolitions to make
way for the Las Vegas Convention
Center District.
Now that the Riviera is gone,
the existing Las Vegas Convention Center can be renovated and
expanded by 1.2 million square
feet. Included in that will be
600,000 square feet of additional
exhibit space.
The Southern Nevada Tourism
Infrastructure Committee recently recommended funding for
the $1.4 billion expansion and
renovation. That recommendation will now be forwarded to the
governor and state legislature for
approval.

DELTA AIR LINES

The Delta One suite will debut on
Delta’s first Airbus 350 in fall 2017.

Suite seating
at 35,000 feet

Suites on planes, with doors or
curtains offering an extra layer of
privacy, have become the most
coveted spots in the cabin.
Emirates Airlines started the

trend, and now Etihad Airways,
Singapore Airlines, Asiana Airlines and Air France are among
the international airlines that
have these super-swank spaces for
passengers who can afford them.
With Tuesday’s introduction of
its Delta One suite, Delta Air
Lines is boasting that it will be the
world’s first airline to have an allsuite business cabin with a door
for each suite. Thirty-two suites
will be on Delta’s first Airbus
A350, due for delivery in fall 2017.
Delta plans to put it into service
primarily on routes between the
U.S. and Asia. After that, Delta
says, it will begin adding the suites
to its Boeing 777 fleet.
In addition to entry doors,
amenities in the suites will include customizable ambient
lighting; an 18-inch, high-resolution in-flight entertainment monitor; power outlets and USB ports
at each seat; multiple stowage
compartments; and sliding privacy dividers between center suites.
“Bigger screens, wider seats
and more privacy should all appeal to premium passengers,”
says industry analyst Seth Miller.
“It shows the company is willing
to invest some of its profits in a
manner that benefits customers.”
Harriet Baskas

PHOTOS BY ASHLEY DAY, USA TODAY

Locals including Isabel Montano and her family have integrated Mexican fare into the Tucson food landscape. The family has
made traditional pastries and tortillas (14,000 a day now) at La Estrella Bakery since 1986.

Tucson heats up the
Southwest food scene
Locals work to
make the city a
gastronomic star
Ashley Day

Special for USA TODAY

S

TUCSON

canning the menu of
the restaurant I’ve
stumbled into and
snacking on my third
order of housemade
chips and salsa in as many days,
I’m as relieved to see a sandwich
called The Tucson as I was to find
air conditioning. Nook’s garden
entryway drew me from a scorching walk along Congress Street.
As I bite into the stack of green
chilis, chili chicken and burnt

cheese that makes this sandwich
so Tucsonan, I recognize the
plates stacked in the open kitchen as being from HF Coors, the
33,000-square-foot dinnerware
factory where I just took an indepth tour. Talk about local:
Coors makes everything on site,
from the clay and glaze to the
molds and handpainted wares.
The virtually indestructible dishes are used in restaurants (and
homes) around the country.
When the cook across the
counter tells me Nook sources
coffee from Exo Roast Co. down
the road, I imagine I can trace my
way back through this culinary
community with the simplest of
tasting trails, and I take off.
Exo is a 10-minute walk. The café has a rustic, warehouse feel with
coffee roasting right next to the
long counter. The coffee shop
sources teas from nearby Maya
Tea, which has a Prickly Pear herbal tea made from local ingredients,
and Seven Cups Fine Chinese
Teas, which has a local teahouse.
Next door, Tap & Bottle offers
local beer and wine, including
Iron John’s ale and sour beer and
Pueblo Vida’s Barrel-Aged Brown.

Tucson Tamale Company made

1.3 million tamales last year.

HF Coors has been making dinnerware since 1925. Shoppers
can tour the factory and stock up at the factory store.

“In a border
city, you get to
introduce and
incorporate
your
traditions.”
Isabel Montano of La Estrella Bakery

Iron John’s ages beer in southern
Arizona wine barrels and Whiskey Del Bac barrels from local
Hamilton Distillers.
“The continuity and community here is real deep,” says Iron
John’s co-founder and head
brewer John Adkisson. “Once
you take that step (to sell your
product), everyone reaches out to
try each other’s new stuff or collaborate. Rather than split up the
pie, we want to grow the pie.”

Try an authentic Sonoran hot dog made with a bacon-wrapped
frank, beans, onion, tomato, mayo, mustard and jalapeño sauce.

Adkisson and Hamilton Distillers’ Stephen Paul are just two of
the city’s prominent food and
beverage entrepreneurs, most

with Tucson roots, who are building the city into a budding gastronomy destination.
Paul sold mesquite furniture
for more than two decades and is
using the desert tree’s scraps to
malt his own barley now. His Arroyo Design has converted to
Hamilton Distillers, where visitors can sip Whiskey Del Bac and
even help bottle it.
The community has embraced
these makers to such an extent
that the local Whole Foods carries Iron John’s beers, Whiskey
Del Bac and Tucson Tamale
Company’s frozen tamales.
Todd Martin learned to make
traditional tamales while visiting
his then-girlfriend Sherry’s family and started experimenting
with flavor combinations. Now
married, the Martins opened a
tasting room with six tamales on
the menu in 2008. Today, they
have three restaurants and produce 1.3 million tamales a year.
Combination bakery, restaurant and grocery Time Market
stocks a slew of local products as
well. Here, I’m meeting Noel Patterson, wine distributor turned
accidental beekeeper, for a honey
tasting. Patterson’s Dos Manos
Apiaries is sold inside because
owner Peter Wilke (his friend and
neighbor) insisted.
Patterson started with one hive
— a surprise birthday gift — and

couldn’t produce enough honey
to meet demand. But locals want-

ed local, so they bought him more
hives and lent backyards. Today
he’s hosting honey tastings and
teaching beekeeping classes at
Miraval Resort, and recommending all the other people I have to
meet while he runs late to a class.
“I’m very proud of what’s happening in Tucson right now,” Patterson says. “I’m a native, and in
the past five years it’s been dramatically different. There are
some really smart people doing
really cool things.”
Patterson references Mission
Gardens, where a group of locals
is preserving and re-creating native agriculture. The project is
one of many reasons the city
earned the UNESCO designation
as a World City of Gastronomy —
the only U.S. city to hold the title.
Only about 60 miles from the
U.S./Mexico border, Tucson’s also
the self-proclaimed Mexican food
capital of the country. Natives like
Isabel Montano and her family integrate Mexican fare into the food
scene, where they’ve made traditional pastries and tortillas at La
Estrella Bakery since 1986.
“In a border city, you get to introduce and incorporate your traditions,” Montano says. “What’s
awesome about Tucson is they’ve
embraced it and made it their

own.”
Patterson asks what adventure
I’m up for, and moments later
we’re in the Sonoran Desert,
where his bees feed off cactus
flowers and produce distinct local
honey that you simply have to
taste when you’re here. This is
the only place you can taste it.
Land a seat beneath lush green
vines on Time Market’s whimsical, airy patio; grab the fresh baguette and soft brie you picked up
inside, and spread the Sonoransourced honey on top while bees
from Patterson’s backyard (two
blocks away) buzz by. Perhaps
pair with a house-roasted Exo
coffee, and somewhere in between bites and sips, ask someone nearby where you should
head next.


15T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

10BEST: Tee up to celebrate mini-golf
Miniature golf turns 100 this year, and the
puttable pastime is still going strong. A new
generation of pop-up and artist-designed
courses is bringing a modern sensibility to
the game, while lovingly maintained vintage

courses still attract families as they have for
decades. “I’m seeing a resurgence in minigolf,” says Amanda Kulkoski, producer and
director of Through the Windmill (minigolf
movie.com), a documentary scheduled for
release this fall. The film professor, whose
first job was at a course in Green Bay, Wis.,
shares some of her favorite miniature golf
links with Larry Bleiberg for USA TODAY.
AROUND THE WORLD
LAKE GEORGE, N.Y.

The two 18-hole courses are
based on the builder’s global
travels, complete with a huge
German beer stein, a Mexican
sombrero and a giant Paul Bunyan thrown in for good measure.
“One hole I got a kick out of was
the Napoleon hole with a guillotine, and you have to time the
putt just right,” Kulkoski says.
aroundtheworldgolf.com
URBAN PUTT SAN FRANCISCO

Mini-golf isn’t just limited to
vacation towns and suburbia.
This indoor Mission District
course delights visitors with a
Steampunk sensibility, using
mechanical lifts and elaborate
theming. “It’s just really full of
surprises,” Kulkoski says.

“There’s one hole that simulates a
submarine. It vibrates the floor
and you look out a porthole and
see fish going by.” It also has a bar
and restaurant. urbanputt.com
HAWAIIAN RUMBLE
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C.

Myrtle Beach claims to have
more miniature golf courses than
any other city, with imaginative
links like Hawaiian Rumble,
which hosts the annual Masters
of Miniature Golf tournament.
It’s built around a giant volcano
that belches smoke and appears
to erupt every 20 minutes.
Nearby is astonishing Mount
Atlanticus, which was built in
and around a former department
store and parking deck.
hawaiianrumbleminigolf.com;
myrtlebeachminigolf.com

VITENSE GOLFLAND
MADISON, WIS.

Named for former PGA player
George Vitense, this indooroutdoor course combines playground equipment with miniature golf. “They have an obstacle
where you putt on one level and

you have to slide down to another,” says Kulkoski, who played the
course when she was a college
student. “It was good when I was
in school, but now it’s fantastic.”
vitense.com

PHOTOS BY AMANDA KULKOSKI

The holes at Around the World in Lake George, N.Y., are based on the original builder’s world
travels, complete with a Napoleon hole that has a guillotine you must putt through.
MATTERHORN MINI GOLF
CANTON, CONN.

Kulkoski’s movie follows a woman building this new course,
which emerges as a puttable
Swiss wonderland. “The Heidi
hole has you golfing around little
goat poop. My favorite hole is the
bobsled track or ski moguls. It’s
just really fun. You hear a lot of
yodeling on the course.”
matterhornminigolf.com

WALKER ART CENTER
MINNEAPOLIS

Across the country, museums
have embraced mini-golf for its
cultural (and kitschy) possibilities. One of the best examples is
the Walker, which opens a course

every summer with holes designed by artists. This year it
takes putters to the museum’s
rooftop and remains open until
Sept. 4. Nearby is Kulkoski’s
favorite course, Big Stone in
Minnetrista, Minn., which is
built in and around a sculpture
garden. Walkerart.org;
bigstoneminigolf.com
MAGIC CARPET GOLF
RENO

When Kulkoski thinks of minigolf, she first pictures vintage
courses, like this family-run operation where she found four generations at work. “It has tons of
dinosaurs, and a big, monster
birthday-cake hole,” she says. “It
also has one of my favorite holes,
with a giant spider web and a
mechanical spider going up and
down.” magiccarpetgolfreno.com

EXPERIENCE

PUTT-PUTT AUGUSTA, GA.

Par-King Skill Golf, a 1950s-era course in suburban Chicago,
creates new mechanical holes every few years.
PAR-KING SKILL GOLF
LINCOLNSHIRE, ILL.

This 1950s-era course in suburban Chicago has been called
the Taj Mahal of miniature golf.
“Every few years, they create
new, amazing holes,” Kulkoski
says, citing a rocket with an
elevator that lifts the ball in the
air, and a roller coaster that
moves the ball in a little car.
“It’s truly a mechanical vintage
course in immaculate condition.”
par-king.com

TRAVEL
EUROPE

COUNTRY CLUB AT THE
BAND BOX NASHVILLE

This new course appeals to fans
of both mini-golf and minor
league baseball. It’s the latest
addition to a dining and entertainment area called Band Box
at First Tennessee Park, home
to the Nashville Sounds. The
course features holes designed
by area artists and is open
only during baseball season.
thebandboxnashville.com

While people often use the

phrase “Putt-Putt” to describe all
mini-golf, the term actually is
trademarked, referring to courses
franchised through a Fayetteville,
N.C., company. Kulkoski likes this
location because it’s more elaborate than the standard courses,
which are flat and often short on
decoration. “It has multiple levels
and giant animals.” It also stands
out for the two 20-foot putters in
a pond surrounded by bumper
boats. puttputt.com/augusta
MORE 10BEST
TRAVEL.USATODAY.COM

See lists for travel ideas online.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
USATODAY.COM/TRAVEL

In Berlin, illuminating art confronts a dark past
Nancy Nathan

Special for USA TODAY

Berlin is a city of tragic memory. In its post-Wall years, it has
also been a city in a rush to confront that dark past with a dramatic energy.
For the traveler, enjoying Berlin’s art scene is to discover the
art in public and private spaces
often linked to the Third Reich or

the Cold War.
In a visit of just a few days, and
with a little planning, you can
enjoy world-class contemporary
installations in a converted Nazi
bunker, walk the heart of a prewar Jewish neighborhood now
lined with the most prominent
small contemporary galleries,
visit a palatial home housing a
noted Picasso collection given
to the city by a Jew who had
fled the Nazis, and see the city’s
two dramatic architectural attempts to get the collective mind
around the Holocaust through
public art.
The converted Nazi air raid
bunker holds the Boros Collection, right in the center of Berlin.
It requires an online reservation
(sammlung-boros.de) for the
small-group English or German
tours. Once an East German prison, then an S&M fetish nightclub,
the bunker was bought in 2012 by
the Boros family to house just
part of a mammoth personal collection of avant garde contemporary sculpture and spatial
installations in 80 cell-like cement rooms. There are works by
23 internationally prominent
artists, including Damien Hirst
and Ai Weiwei. Visitors go from
one cell to another — suddenly
you might be at nose level with

a maze of black inner tubes
knotted in bunches and hanging
from the low ceiling, in a work
titled Clouds of Berlin, or enter
another cell where the installation is a motion-activated pop-

MARKUS SCHREIBER, AP

American architect Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum is famous for its gleaming angular wings.
corn machine.
Not far away is the Oranienburger
Strasse-Auguststrasse
area, once a heart of Jewish life
from the late 19th century up till
the Nazi era. Just look for the
gilded dome of New Synagogue,
which was rebuilt after allied
bombing. Nearby streets are lined
with prominent private galleries,
many extremely cutting-edge
(some with works some visitors
might call pornographic). A visit
to the neighborhood can be
capped by dinner at one of Berlin’s hottest restaurants, Pauly
Saal, housed in a former Jewish
girls school.
On the opposite end of the city,
and in many ways at the opposite
end of the modern-art spectrum,
is the Berggruen Museum. Across

a wide avenue from the 17thcentury Charlottenburg Palace is

ADAM BERRY, GETTY IMAGES

Among the early-20th-century
masterpieces housed at the
Berggruen are works by
Henri Matisse.

an elegant mansion housing
early-20th-century masterpieces
owned by the late art collector
and dealer Heinz Berggruen, a
Jew who fled to America in 1936
and then donated his enormous
collection of Picassos to his beloved native city. The Picassos
date from the artist’s student days
up to 1972. The Berggruen collection includes other standout
paintings and sculptures of the
period, including works by Klee,
Matisse and Giacometti.
Berlin’s most important public
attempt to come to terms with
the Holocaust is architect Peter
Eisenman’s Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe, also
called the Field of Stelae (headstones). Berlin debated for decades how and where to erect a
public memorial, and this vast
work of public art opened in 2005

on this central site very near the
Brandenburg Gate, near where
the Reich Chancellery stood and
the underground bunker where
Hitler died. It confronts the visitor as Eisenman said he intended.
Initial impressions of the many
rows of sharp-edged large blocks
of dark gray concrete change as
you move from looking at it from
outside to venturing into the narrow stone paths among the rows.
You realize the unevenness of the
ground, the almost threatening,
claustrophobic feeling standing
among the stones of many different heights and aligned in sharp
rows on paths that gradually
slope on several planes.
Visit the former West Berlin to
see American architect Daniel Libeskind’s enormous zinc-clad
Jewish Museum. It is famous for
its angular wings that appear like
a shining, deconstructed Star of
David and its uneven floors and
corners, all meant to express the
chaos of the Holocaust. Libeskind
created five voids inside to express the vacuum left by the
absence of Jewish life. He explained that no usual museum
exhibit could portray humanity
reduced to ashes, so the voids
were his artistic answer. One of
them, at the intersection of wings

called the Memory Void, is a
trapezoid 66 feet high with one
narrow shaft of light; its angular
floor is covered by thousands of
metal discs with eyes and mouths
cut into them, a work of art titled
Fallen Leaves.
And just around the corner
from the Jewish Museum is the
Berlinische Galerie, devoted to
works by Berliners since the 19th
century. It includes paintings by
such noted early-20th-century
Berlin artists as Max Liebermann
and George Grosz and is known
for its contemporary collection of
works since the Berlin Wall came
down. Keep your eyes peeled for
the two-story-high pickle sculpture on the curb.


16T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

BOOKS
NEW IN PAPER
CRITIC’S PICK

Purity by Jonathan Franzen
(Picador, fiction, reprint).
USA TODAY called Franzen’s
novel about a Julian Assangelike “Internet outlaw” “wildly
entertaining”; Daniel Craig is
signed for a Showtime adaptation. eeeg out of four.
ALSO NEWLY RELEASED

X by Sue Grafton (Putnam,
fiction, reprint). P.I. Kinsey
Millhone must stop a man
who’s killing women before she
becomes his next victim.

‘Heiress’: The strange,
sad saga of Patty Hearst

COURTESY OF THE FBI, 1975

Gene Seymour

Special for USA TODAY

It would appear, from the publication of American Heiress by
Jeffrey Toobin (Doubleday, 384
pp., eeeE out of
four) that the court
REVIEW
of public opinion is
once again being

asked to judge Patricia Hearst.
For whatever it’s worth, I think
the court has far better things to
do with its time than go back
42 years to this “wild saga” of
“kidnapping and crimes,” as the
subtitle calls it.
One night in February 1974, the
then-19-year-old granddaughter
of a newspaper publishing magnate was taken from the Berkeley,
Calif., apartment she shared with
her fiancé by an armed and motley gang of self-styled revolutionaries whose bloody cause she
ended up joining two months later as a gun-toting urban guerrilla
nicknamed “Tania.”
“Or did she?” asks Toobin, a
lawyer and CNN consultant
whose best-selling body of work
includes The Run of His Life, the
basis for the Emmy-nominated
FX dramatic series, The People v.
O.J. Simpson: American Crime
Story. The new book’s core issue,
as it was in Hearst’s trial after
her September 1975 arrest, is
the extent to which Hearst either
jumped or was coerced into joining her captors.
Hearst, now a 62-year-old widow and grandmother living what
Toobin characterizes as “an intensely private life,” did not cooperate with the author, who
relied on her 1980s memoir,
Every Secret Thing, along with

testimony at her trial, media interviews, letters and FBI summaries of her interviews. He also
had access to testimony, court
transcripts, evidence reports and

Reckless: My Life as a
Pretender by Chrissie Hynde
(Anchor, non-fiction, reprint).
The ultimate cool rock chick
tells her life story.
Slade House by David Mitchell
(Random House, fiction, reprint).
A fresh twist on the haunted
house genre.
Bream Gives Me Hiccups by
Jesse Eisenberg (Grove, fiction,
reprint). The actor’s fiction debut
includes three new stories for the
paperback edition.
Find a Way by Diana Nyad
(Vintage, non-fiction, reprint).
Memoir charts journey that
ended with Nyad’s successful
swim between Cuba and Florida.
Voices in the Ocean by Susan
Casey (Anchor, non-fiction,
reprint). Subtitle: A Journey
Into the Wild and Haunting
World of Dolphins.
The Nature of the Beast by
Louise Penny (Minotaur, fiction,

reprint). In a small Quebec
village, a 9-year-old boy disappears; part of the best-selling
Inspector Gamache series.

AP

ROBERT
ASCROFT

Jeffrey
Toobin

This photo was found in the
burned-out ruins of the house
in Los Angeles where six
Symbionese Liberation Army
members died in a shootout
with police May 17, 1974.
Hearst is at bottom left.

other files used in investigating and prosecuting members
of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the outlaws who
kidnapped Hearst.
Toobin skillfully frames
all this raw material in the
historic context of the San
Francisco Bay Area in the
1970s, a time and place when
the “politics and music” that
characterized the city’s relatively halcyon 1960s had

“yielded in significant measure to drugs and violence,”
while its citizenry’s nerves were
on edge from such harrowing
mass murders as those associated

with the Zodiac and Zebra killers.
Only in such a jittery and dispirited time could the strange story of
the SLA and Patty Hearst seem
commonplace.
And that strange story still galvanizes, mystifies and infuriates.
Toobin presents vivid renderings
of all its personalities, from
Hearst’s tormented parents and
feckless fiancé, Steven Weed, to
the SLA members and FBI investigators and attorneys in her trial,
especially the flamboyant and (in
Toobin’s view) egomaniacal F. Lee
Bailey, who represented Hearst.
So, did Hearst willingly participate in the SLA’s activities, including three bank robberies? Or was
she a helpless victim compelled to
act against her better judgment?
If Toobin’s book is sure of anything, it’s that the available evidence has too many conflicting
stories to arrive at a clear or satisfying answer. All that’s certain is
that many people needlessly died
because of rash and regrettable
decisions. It’s those casualties
that haunt the reader, far more
than what went on inside the
mind of the “American heiress”
who gives this book its title.

Villa America by Liza Klaussmann (Back Bay, fiction, reprint).
Historical fiction revolves around
expats Sara and Gerald Murphy
and their inner circle, including
F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
The Misadventures of
Awkward Black Girl by
Issa Rae (37 Ink/Atria, nonfiction, reprint). Debut collection
of humorous essays.
Home by Nightfall by Charles
Finch (Minotaur, fiction, reprint).
In 1876, London detective
Charles Lenox returns to the
Sussex countryside, where
strange crimes are unsettling
the locals; author Finch reviews
books for USA TODAY.
The Gratitude Diaries by
Janice Kaplan (Dutton,
non-fiction, reprint). Subtitle:
How a Year Looking on the Bright
Side Can Transform Your Life.
Bennington Girls Are Easy by
Charlotte Silver (Anchor, fiction,
reprint). Two college friends
graduate and navigate adulthood
in New York City.
Jocelyn McClurg

New Moriarty is not as ‘Truly Madly Guilty’ as we’d hoped

Liane Moriarty is a big tease.
Not there’s anything wrong
with that.
Who can resist a prolonged
buildup, with the tantalizing
promise of a scintilREVIEW
lating payoff? It has
JOCELYN
seduced many a
MCCLURG
reader,
Moriarty
turning tasty treats
such as The Husband’s Secret into literary
hotcakes.
Even Reese Witherspoon and
Nicole Kidman aren’t immune to
Moriarty’s Aussie charms: They
star in a forthcoming HBO adaptation of Big Little Lies, Moriarty’s highly entertaining tale of
helicopter moms caught up in
what may be murder.
Which brings us to Truly Madly Guilty (Flatiron, 432 pp., eeg

out of four). Moriarty’s latest novel
sports yet another sexy title.
Guilty of what?
We’re dying to
know.

Truly
Alas,
Madly Guilty is a
bit of a letdown, a
UBER
summer bummer, if
PHOTOGRAPHY
you will.
Author
The story’s mysLiane
Moriarty tery — strung out for
hundreds of pages —
is what awful thing happened at a
backyard barbecue in the Sydney
suburbs. Did a barbie blow up?
Was (shudder) a child seriously
injured, or worse? Or did somebody just disappear upstairs with
somebody else’s hubby?
I won’t tell, promise. But the

real sin of Truly Madly Guilty is
that it’s simply not as much fun as
The Husband’s Secret or Big Little
Lies.
The central problem resides
with the two main characters, Erika and Clementine, childhood
“best friends” who aren’t even
sure they like each other now that
they’re all grown up. Believe me,
this is not a duo I’d want to invite

to my cookout.
Clementine carries a lifelong
grudge because as a kid her mother forced her to befriend poor
lonely Erika, whose own mom is a
serious hoarder. Erika is married
to Oliver; they have no children,
which saddens sweet Oliver.
Chilly Clementine, a cellist
with a terror of auditions, is married to affable Sam, and they have
two little girls, Holly and toddler

Ruby. When Truly Madly Deeply
opens, we learn right off the bat
that something terrible happened, because Clementine is
giving a cautionary community
talk in penance for the events of
“One Ordinary Day” that wasn’t
so ordinary.
Moriarty is a talented talespinner and a sharp, witty social
observer, and this book certainly
has its moments. Many are supplied by Erika’s hilariously eccentric hoarder mom, and barbecue
hosts Vid and his va-va-voom
younger wife, Tiffany, are priceless. Then there’s the weird old
guy next door, Harry.
So sure, Moriarty fans, pack
Truly Madly in your beach bag.
But don’t be surprised if this
isn’t quite the Guilty pleasure
you’d hoped for.

17T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

BOOKS

Dogs, cats and
other neurotic
animals get
their own
time in the
psychiatrist’s
office in
Pets On the
Couch.

New and
noteworthy
USA TODAY’s Jocelyn
McClurg scopes out the
hottest books on sale
each week.

1

Kranish and Fisher

Trump Revealed

2

Behold the
Dreamers

by Imbolo Mbue (Random House,
fiction, on sale Tuesday)
WHAT IT’S ABOUT: A

by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher
(Scribner, non-fiction, on sale
Tuesday)

Cameroonian immigrant
couple working for a
WHAT IT’S ABOUT: BiograLehman Brothers
phy of the Republican
executive and his
presidential candidate is
family struggle after
subtitled “An American
the economic
Journey of Ambition,
collapse.
Ego, Money, and Power.”
THE BUZZ: Features a
THE BUZZ: The Washington
jacket blurb by Jonathan
Mbue

Post — which Trump has banned
Franzen (Purity): “Imbofrom his campaign rallies — used
lo Mbue would be a formia team of more than two dozen
dable storyteller anywhere,
reporters and researchers to
in any language. It’s our
assemble this portrait of Trump,
good luck that she and her
written by two senior staffers.
stories are American.”

3

4

Pets on
the Couch

by Nicholas Dodman, DVM
(Atria, non-fiction,
on sale Tuesday)

The 15:17 to Paris

WHAT IT’S
ABOUT: A

by Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos,
Spencer Stone and Jeffrey E. Stern
(Public Affairs, non-fiction,

on sale Tuesday)

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Memoir by the

three young American men who
thwarted a terrorist attack last
year aboard a Brussels train
bound for Paris.
THE BUZZ: Sadler, Skarlatos and
Stone were greeted as heroes by
President Obama at the White
House.

veterinary
behaviorist
shares his
philosophy for
treating neurotic pets with a
“new science of
Dodman
animal psychiatry”
that sees close links between
animal and human biology.
THE BUZZ: Makes a
“compelling and
succinct case,” says
Publishers Weekly.

‘Hillbilly’ chic: During this

charged election cycle, J.D. Vance
has found himself becoming a
spokesman for a disaffected
group — America’s working-class
whites — and in the process has
racked up a best seller. Vance’s
very personal book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and
Culture in Crisis, released on
June 28, has gained steam this
month, landing on USA TODAY’s
Best-Selling Books list at No. 62
on Aug. 4, bumping up to No. 28
last week, and now surging to No.
10. Vance has
appeared on
CNN, MSNBC
and NPR, talking about Republican
presidential
nominee Donald Trump’s
appeal to what
NAOMI MCCOLLOCH
The American
Author
Conservative
J.D. Vance
called “poor
white people.” Positive reviews in
outlets such as The Washington
Post and The New York Times
also have helped raise the book’s

profile. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance,
32, recounts his journey from
Appalachia to Yale Law School,
including a stint in Iraq with the
Marines. Today he is a Silicon
Valley executive.

Inspiring women: Two

Christian/inspirational/self-help
titles, both released on Aug. 9,
are appealing to
the faithful.
Uninvited: Living Loved When
You Feel Less
Than, Left Out,
and Lonely by
Lysa TerKeurst
lands at No. 4,
while Shauna
Niequist’s Present Over Perfect:
Leaving Behind Frantic for a
Simpler, More Soulful Way of
Living makes its debut at No. 8.
It’s the highest showing for TerKeurst, who hit No. 33 in 2014
with Unglued. This is the first
time Niequist has made USA
TODAY’s list.
Jocelyn McClurg

The Dollhouse

by Fiona Davis (Dutton, fiction,
on sale Tuesday)

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: The famed

Barbizon Hotel for Women in
Manhattan stars in
this story about a
present-day
journalist
investigating a
deadly skirmish
in the building
back in 1952.
THE BUZZ: “Davis’
debut novel … (is) a
Davis
lively one, tripping
along at a sprightly clip,” says
Kirkus Reviews.
FISHER BY BILL O’LEARY, THE WASHINGTON POST;
MBUE BY KIRIKO SANO; SKARLOTOS, STONE, OBAMA
AND SADLER BY MANDEL NGAN, AFP/GETTY IMAGES;
DAVIS BY KRISTEN JENSEN; DODMAN BY KELVIN MA,
TUFTS UNIVERSITY, DOG ON COUCH
BY JANIE AIREY, GETTY IMAGES

President Obama met with Alek Skarlatos, left, Spencer

Stone and Anthony Sadler last September. The men
stopped a gunman on the Brussels train a month earlier.

BOOK BUZZ
NEW ON THE LIST
AND IN PUBLISHING

5

WHAT
AMERICA’S
READING®

BOOKLIST.USATODAY.COM
n Rank this week

THE TOP 10

n Rank last week (F) Fiction (NF) Non-fiction (P) Paperback (H)Hardcover (E) E-book

Publisher in italics

1

1

Harry Potter and
the Cursed Child/
J.K. Rowling, et al.

Albus Potter and Scorpius Malfoy try to
find their places in Hogwarts the way their
fathers did (F) (H) Scholastic

6 10 The Underground
Railroad
Colson Whitehead

2

—

Insidious
Catherine Coulter

FBI agents Savich and Sherlock look into
who is trying to kill Venus Rasmussen;
20th in series (F) (E) Gallery Books

7

2

Bullseye
James Patterson,
Michael Ledwidge

Michael Bennett hunts down assassins
who want to kill the president and reignite
the Cold War (F) (E) Little, Brown

3

5

The Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins

Psychological thriller about the disappearance of a young married woman (F) (P)
Riverhead

8

—

Present Over Perfect
Shauna Niequist

Subtitle: “Leaving Behind Frantic for a
Simpler, More Soulful Way Of Living”
(NF) (H) Zondervan

4

—

Uninvited
Lysa TerKeurst

Subtitle: “Living Loved When You Feel Less

Than, Left Out, And Lonely” (NF) (P)
Thomas Nelson

9

—

Three Sisters,
Three Queens
Philippa Gregory

Catherine of Aragon competes for power
in the Tudor court with Henry VIII’s sisters
Margaret and Mary (F) (E) Touchstone

5

4

Truly Madly Guilty
Liane Moriarty

Aussie frenemies Clementine and Erika
must cope after a summer barbecue goes
terribly wrong (F) (E) Flatiron Books

10 28 Hillbilly Elegy
J. D. Vance

Teenage slave Cora moves between safe

havens in a bid for freedom in the 1850s
(F) (H) Doubleday

Subtitle: “A Memoir of a Family and Culture
in Crisis” (NF) (H) Harper

The book list appears
every Thursday.
For each title, the format
and publisher listed are
for the best-selling
version of that title this
week. Reporting outlets
include Amazon.com,
Amazon Kindle, Barnes &
Noble.com, Barnes &
Noble Inc., Barnes &
Noble e-books,
BooksAMillion.com,
Books-A-Million, Costco,
Hudson Booksellers,
Joseph-Beth Booksellers
(Lexington, Ky.; Cincinnati,
Charlotte, Cleveland,
Pittsburgh), Kobo, Inc.,
Powell's Books (Portland,
Ore.), Powells.com, R.J.
Julia Booksellers
(Madison, Conn.), Schuler
Books & Music (Grand

Rapids, Okemos,
Eastwood, Alpine, Mich.),
Sony Reader Store,
Target, Tattered Cover
Book Store (Denver).

THE REST

11 — Outlander/Diana Gabaldon
12 — Random Acts/J.A. Jance
13 — Close to You/Kristen Proby
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

Me Before You/Jojo Moyes
A Man Called Ove/Fredrik Backman
See Me/Nicholas Sparks
Rogue Lawyer/John Grisham
The Black Widow/Daniel Silva
After You/Jojo Moyes
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children/
Ransom Riggs
21 22 The Woman in Cabin 10/Ruth Ware
22 — Family Tree/Susan Wiggs
23 — Behind Closed Doors/B.A. Paris

12
21
15
11
13
16
19

24 6 It Ends With Us/Colleen Hoover
25 3 Sweet Tomorrows/Debbie Macomber
26 — Reaper’s Fire/Joanna Wylde
27
28
29
30
31

34
14
38
65
—

To Kill a Mockingbird/Harper Lee
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone/J.K. Rowling
StrengthsFinder 2.0/Tom Rath
The Light Between Oceans/M.L. Stedman
A Beautiful Funeral/Jamie McGuire

32 24 Bossman/Vi Keeland

33 31 The Nightingale/Kristin Hannah
34 35 When Breath Becomes Air/Paul Kalanithi
35 26 The Sister/Louise Jensen
36 — Inferno/Dan Brown
37 36 Milk and Honey/Rupi Kaur
38 45 Night/Elie Wiesel
39 18 Hillary’s America/Dinesh D’Souza
40 39 Before the Fall/Noah Hawley
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50

61
72
30
29
—
37
50
—
—
25

The Alchemist/Paulo Coelho
The Great Gatsby/F. Scott Fitzgerald
Armageddon/ Dick Morris, Eileen McGann
The Girls/Emma Cline
Every Beat of My Heart/Bella Andre
Alexander Hamilton/Ron Chernow
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up/M. Kondo
The Inn at Eagle Point/Sherryl Woods
It’s Not Okay/Andi Dorfman
Crisis of Character/Gary J. Byrne

Claire Randall is hurled back in time; first in series; basis for Starz series (F) (E) Dell
Sheriff Joanna Brady and investigator Ali Reynolds wonder if the deaths of Joanna’s mother and stepfather really
were an accident (F) (E) Witness Impulse
Landon Palazzo finally begins to pay attention to Cami LaRue, his little sister’s best friend; second in series (F) (E)
William Morrow Paperbacks,
An unlikely love story in which a young woman helps care for a 35-year-old quadriplegic (F) (P) Penguin
A man finds his solitary world shattered when a family moves in next door (F) (P) Washington Square Press
A chance encounter will alter the lives of Colin Hancock and Maria Sanchez (F) (P) Grand Central Publishing
Lone-wolf “street lawyer” Sebastian Rudd takes on a motley crew of clients (F) (P) Dell
Art restorer, assassin and spy Gabriel Allon faces a terrifying opponent, an ISIS mastermind (F) (E) Harper
In this sequel to “Me Before You,” grieving caretaker Louisa Clark looks for happiness (F) (P) Penguin
Jacob, 16, discovers the crumbling ruins of an old home that may still be inhabited (F) (P) Quirk Books
Lo Blacklock sees a woman thrown overboard on a luxury cruise, but no one believes her (F) (E) Gallery/Scout Press
Annie Harlow retreats to her old family farm in Vermont after a tragic life-altering event (F) (E) William Morrow
Jack and Grace are a young, successful married couple, but not everything is right with their relationship (F) (E)
St. Martin’s Press
Ryle Kincaid’s relationship with Lily becomes complicated when a man from her past shows up (F) (E) Atria Books
Innkeeper Jo Marie Rose and school teacher Emily Gaffney try to move on from failed relationships (F) (E) Ballantine
Gage develops feelings for Tinker Garrett, but his secrets prevent him from opening up to her; sixth in series (F) (E)

Berkley
1960 coming-of-age classic about racism; Pulitzer winner; 1962 movie (F) (P) Grand Central Publishing
An English boy named Harry goes to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry; first in series (F) (P) Scholastic
Lifetime strategies for using your talents (NF) (H) Gallup
A lighthouse keeper and his wife find a baby washed up in a boat and decide to keep her (F) (E) Scribner
Special Agent Travis Maddox puts his family in harm’s way when he takes down a Vegas mob boss; fifth in series
(F) (E) Jamie McGuire LLC
Reese Annesley discovers her new boss, Chase Parker, is the same man she met a month earlier on a bad blind date
with someone else (F) (E) Vi Keeland
Historical fiction about the choices two sisters must make in Nazi-occupied France (F) (E) St. Martin’s Press
An essay by the late neurosurgeon confronting his terminal illness is expanded into a book (NF) (H) Random House
Grace Matthews finds out secrets about her best friend, Charlie Fisher, when she opens a memory box after Charlie’s
death (F) (E) Bookouture
Robert Langdon enters a mysterious world centered on Dante’s “Inferno” while trying to retrace his past few days
(F) (E) Knopf/Doubleday
Poetry collection that is divided into four chapters that explore four pains (F) (P) Andrews McMeel Publishing
Memoir: Nobel Peace Prize winner’s classic about the Holocaust is based on the late author’s experience at Nazi
concentration camps (NF) (P) Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Subtitle: “The Secret History of the Democratic Party” (NF) (H) Regenry Publishing
A painter and the 4-year-old heir of a wealthy media family are the only survivors of a plane crash (F) (E)
Grand Central Publishing
Shepherd boy searches for buried treasure; 10th anniversary edition (F) (P) HarperOne
Classic: Ambition, love and betrayal in the 1920s (F) (P) Scribner
Subtitle: “How Trump Can Beat Hillary” (NF) (H) Humanix Books
In 1969, a teenage girl is seduced into a dangerous cult by an older girl (F) (E) Random House
Two Sullivan brothers celebrate their weddings on the same day; 16th in series (F) (E) Oak Press
Bio of first treasury secretary: Maker of friends and enemies (NF) (P) The Penguin Press
Subtitle: “The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing” (NF) (H) Ten Speed Press
Busy career woman returns to her hometown and faces family woes and an ex-lover (F) (E) Harlequin MIRA
Subtitle: “Turning Heartbreak Into Happily Never After” (NF) (E) Gallery Books

A critical account by a former Secret Service agent who worked in the Clinton White House (NF) (H) Center Street


18T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

SCREEN CHECK
TONIGHT ON TV

THE NIGHT OF
HBO, 9 ET/PT

The defense makes its case in this tense outing as
this excellent series prepares for next week’s finale —
and the expected solution to the murder mystery at
Night’s center. As good as the series has been, there’s
little doubt that it’s sometimes guilty of overreach:
Despite the sad prevalence of anti-Muslim feeling,
it seems unlikely this completely apolitical murder
would have fueled widespread attacks on the Muslim
community. But there are worse sins than tackling
one issue too many, particularly when Night’s exploration of the costs and foibles of our justice system
have been so powerful and compelling. It’s easily
the highlight of a lackluster TV summer.
AMARA KARAN, RIZ AHMED AND JOHN TURTURRO BY CRAIG BLANKENHORN, HBO

CRITIC’S
CORNER

Robert Bianco
@BiancoRobert
USA TODAY

SUMMER OLYMPICS
CLOSING CEREMONY
NBC, 8 ET/PT

All good (taped) things
must come to an end, and
Rio’s Summer Games are
closing Sunday with one
more ceremony and a few
more packaged reports from
NBC. But the network isn’t
shutting off the lights when the
Olympic flame goes out. The
closing ceremony will be followed
by a special edition of The Voice
(10:30 ET/PT), introducing a new
set of spinning-chair judges consisting of holdovers Adam Levine
and Blake Shelton and newcomers Miley Cyrus and Alicia
Keys.

FEAR THE
WALKING
DEAD/
INSPECTOR
LEWIS
AMC/PBS,

9 ET/PT

Shows come,
shows go.
Fear returns
to launch a
new season
as Lewis exits
for good.

DAMIEN MEYER,
AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The Olympic
cauldron will be
extinguished
as the Games
come to a close.

RICHARD FOREMAN JR., AMC

PUZZLES

CHAT WITH ROBERT

Danay Garcia,
Carlos Segura,
Alfredo Herrera
and Fear The
Walking Dead

carry on.

Answers placed on Life page 2
Play more puzzles at puzzles.usatoday.com
Puzzle problems? Contact us at

CROSSWORD
BY Fred Piscop

NEIGH SAYERS

Robert Bianco chats with readers Mondays
at 2 p.m. ET at facebook.com/USATODAY.
Read edited excerpts below, email questions
to or tweet them
to @biancorobert and visit him live online.
How is it that Lucy Liu
has never been nominatQ
ed for best supporting actress

for Elementary? Actually,
I think she has played the
lead female role, but for
years, I have been unable
to determine how the judges
distinguish one from another.
And why isn’t her co-star
Jonny Lee Miller nominated
every year?
First, the easy part: In general, actors are in charge of

submitting themselves for Emmy
nominations and choosing for
themselves between supporting
and lead. That’s how all the Modern Family actors end up in the
supporting categories, and why
the Friends bounced between
supporting and lead. As to why
Lucy Liu and Jonny Lee Miller
have never been nominated, it’s
basically because they’re giving
excellent performances in a good
CBS show in an era where so
many other actors are giving
excellent performances in excel-

A

lent, “prestige” shows. Miller
faces a particularly tough road:
No man has been nominated for a
broadcast show in the lead drama
category since Hugh Laurie’s nod
for House in 2011. But male or
female, it’s almost impossible
to get nominated for a show
like Elementary, no matter how
good you may be in it.
Is there a remake of
Dirty Dancing coming
to TV? If so, nooooo!!!

I’m afraid the answer is
Yeeeessssss. ABC has a remake in the works, with Abigail
Breslin and Colt Prattes in the
roles created by Jennifer Grey
(who turned down an offer to
appear in the remake) and Patrick Swayze. Like you, I’m unexcited — but then, I was equally
unexcited about Fox’s Rocky
Horror Picture Show remake
until Fox showed an extended
preview that turned out to be
pretty terrific. So fingers crossed
on both accounts.

Q
A

JEFF NEUMANN, CBS

Holmes
(Jonny Lee
Miller, left)
and Watson
(Lucy Liu)
are on the
case in
Elementary.

ACROSS
1 Lose one’s cool
6 “Jabberwocky”

opener
10 “Heads ___, tails . . .”
14 Honshu port
15 Help for a guesser
16 City near Lake Tahoe
17 Fertile triangle
19 In times gone by
20 Mary ___ (cosmetics
name)
21 Mucky stuff
22 Word before block or
health
24 Sub captain’s
command
25 Project detail, briefly
26 Port city where the
Maine blew up
29 Explores caves
33 In a blaze
34 Cattle prod
35 Muddy up
36 Policy guru
37 Word that can
follow the first
parts of 17- and
55-Across and 10and 24-Down
38 Pledge drive gift
39 Movie ape, for short
40 Electron’s home
41 Zapped with a stun

gun
42 Salon pros
44 Public announcers
of old
45 Antioxidant-rich
berry
46 Uppercut target
47 Slobs’ milieux
50 Hotel freebie
51 The ___ Four (The
Beatles)
54 Nile bird
55 Casino’s big spender
58 Paper-and-pencil
puzzle
59 Catch ___
(comprehend)
60 Nantes’ river

8/21

© Universal Uclick

61 Coals, on Frosty
62 Nastassja Kinski title
role
63 Being pulled along
DOWN
1 Bits in fried rice
2 Home to billions

3 SEALs’ branch
4 1950s campaign
nickname
5 Purplish-red shade
6 Start of many a
limerick
7 Cartoondom’s ___ E.
Coyote
8 Hobby farm bug
9 Run wild on the
range
10 Cold War barrier
11 Took one’s turn
12 Conquistador’s victim
13 Caroler’s tune
18 Operatic superstar
23 Sushi bar fish

24 They may conceal
shiners
25 Muscle cramp, e.g.
26 Doves’ antitheses
27 In the works
28 1992 Joe Pesci title
role
29 Hungarian-born
philanthropist
George
30 Oater “necktie”
31 Check falsifier

32 Mushers’ vehicles
34 John, “The Teflon
Don”
37 Is still in the running
41 “The Marines’ Hymn”
city
43 Bartender’s stock
44 Blacken on a grill
46 Salmon also called
“silvers”
47 Silent performer
48 “Buy It Now” site
49 Colossal, for an olive

Answers: Call 1-900-988-8300, 99 cents a minute; or, with a credit card, 1-800-320-4280.

50 Cpls.’ superiors
51 Move like a
hummingbird
52 Prefix with dynamics
53 Make Pilsner
56 Suffix with elephant
or serpent
57 Chaney of horror
movies

CROSSWORDS
ON YOUR PHONE
mobilegames.usatoday.com

19T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

QUOTE OF THE DAY
JUST THINKING ABOUT ALL
THE INVESTMENTS THEY’VE
PUT INTO ME AND THINKING
ABOUT THE FOUR YEARS, AND IT
ALL CAME DOWN TO ONE DAY.
TO BE ABLE TO ACTUALLY EXECUTE ON THAT DAY IS PRETTY
AMAZING.”
The USA’s Gwen Jorgensen, on the sacrifices by her husband and her coach, after she won the Rio women’s triathlon. She was 38th in London after a flat tire in the bike race.

SPORTSLINE
FIRST WORD
SOMEWHERE IN MY
HEART, AFTER I MADE
THE DECISION TO PLAY, I REALLY BELIEVED IN MYSELF THAT I
CAN DO IT. IF I DIDN’T HAVE A
TRUST IN MYSELF, I WOULDN’T
BE PLAYING THIS WEEK.”
Inbee Park, who overcame a
damaged left thumb, wind gusts
and trouble in the final round to
win the Rio Games women’s golf
tournament by five strokes. The
South Korean hadn’t finished a

tournament since April and had
not played an LPGA tour event in
two months because of the injury.
NUMBER OF THE DAY

900

Victories by Valdosta (Ga.), the
first high school in the nation to
achieve that mark in football
after its team rallied to defeat
rival Lowndes 38-13 Friday. Only
the University of Michigan with 915
has won more games at any
level. The Bears at 741 are the
most in pro football.
TWEET OF THE DAY
@ZacEfron
Congrats! You deserve it Simone! Had to head home for
work, but I’ll be there in spirit.
Carry that #GoTeamUSA
American actor and singer Zac
Efron, with a shout-out tweet to
women’s gymnast Simone Biles,
who will carry the U.S. flag during
the closing ceremony Sunday.
Biles met her celebrity crush Efron
on Tuesday in Rio after earning
her fourth gold medal of the
Games.

GETTY IMAGES

USA TODAY SPORTS

ALMOST LAST WORD
“I THINK THE AMERICANS ARE
MORE FOCUSED ON BEATING
US THAN RUNNING A PROPER
RACE. SO YES, IT IS THE PRESSURE OF BEATING JAMAICA.”
Leadoff man Asafa Powell, taunting the USA, after Jamaica won
the gold medal in the men’s
4x100-meter relay. The USA was
disqualified from third place to
fourth for a baton passing violation. Jamaicans Usain Bolt,
Yohan Blake and Nickel Ashmeade all giggled delightedly
during Powell’s comments.
LAST WORD
“I’M NOT GOING TO THE PROS
WITH A GOLD MEDAL LIKE I
WANTED, BUT, HEY. THEY
SHOULD EXPECT ME TO BE
ONE OF THE BEST BOXERS
COMING UP.’’
U.S. boxer Shakur Stevenson,
19, who lost to
Cuba’s Robeisy
Ramirez on
Saturday in a
split decision in

the gold medal
match of the
STEVENSON BY
bantamweight
USA TODAY SPORTS
division. Ramirez is a 22-year-old pro; Stevenson plans to turn pro.
Compiled by Joe Rayos

USA SNAPSHOTS

©

Endurance test

10

Olympic medals won
by the USA in the men’s
marathon through the
2012 London Games

SOURCE Sports-reference.com/Olympics
ELLEN J. HORROW AND KARL GELLES, USA TODAY

KIRBY LEE, USA TODAY SPORTS

U.S. FOE SERBIA MODELS
OFFENSE AFTER SPURS
Ball movement,
screens require

top-notch defense
Jeff Zillgitt

@JeffZillgitt
USA TODAY Sports
RIO DE JANEIRO Serbia did what
it had to do in group play to advance, losing to the USA, Australia and France by a combined
19 points and beating Venezuela
and China.
But in the knockout round,
Serbia beat Croatia, the top team
from Group B, in the quarterfinals and hammered Australia in
the semifinals, advancing to the
men’s basketball gold medal game
against the USA on Sunday.
“When you talk about Serbia,
you’re talking about a team with
incredible pride, a team that has a
tremendous basketball IQ and a
team that’s led by a great leader,
who happens to be one of its
country’s national heroes in
coach Sasha Djordjevic,” said international basketball expert
Fran Fraschilla, who works for
ESPN and is analyzing Olympic
games for NBC.
“Although there’s only one
NBA player on the roster, it’s
clear that these guys are high-level basketball players.”
This is a rematch of the 2014

World Cup final, which the USA
won 129-92. But in Group A play,
the USA struggled against Serbia’s
creative offense and hung on for a
94-91 victory.
Four things to know about Serbia headed into the final:

MILOS TEODOSIC

Teodosic is one of the best guards
in Europe over the last decade,
and he might explore an NBA
deal at some point.
Teodosic, 29, is a master in
pick-and-roll offense and averages 12.6 points and 5.7 assists.
“A great pick-and-roll player
like Teodosic creates indecision
for the defense because, in part,
he holds on to the ball long

Serbia guard Milos Teodosic, right, is averaging 12.6 points and 5.7 assists.
enough for the defense to break
down,” Fraschilla said.
Look for the USA to put a big
defender on the 6-5 guard.
SASHA DJORDJEVIC

As a player, Djordjevic was a star,
earning Mr. Europa honors in
1994 and 1995, and he won silver

in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. He
is a no-nonsense, defense-first
coach who took over in 2013 and
took a young and talented roster
and turned it into a strong international team.
Offensively, he believes in ball
movement, player movement and
sharing the basketball, and Djordjevic made headlines after the
U.S. game when he complimented
the San Antonio Spurs’ style of
play.
“San Antonio’s game the last
decade showed us how the game
should be played,” he said.

POST PLAY

Serbia has two solid big men: 7-0,
270-pound Miroslav Raduljica
who plays in Italy and 6-10, 250pound Nikola Jokic, who is 21 and
made the All-NBA rookie first
team with the Denver Nuggets in
2015-16. Teodosic called Jokic
one of Europe’s biggest talents.
Adept around the basket, Raduljica is averaging 15.9 points.
While Teodosic runs the offense,
Serbia is comfortable getting the
ball to Jokic in the low post
where he can shoot or pass. Denver guard Will Barton calls Jokic
the third Gasol brother.

“They have just as much confidence in their playmaking as they
do when the ball is in the hands
of a guard,” Fraschilla said.
OFFENSIVE STYLE

Serbia gave the USA trouble in
group play, and it runs a very ac-

JEFF SWINGER, USA TODAY SPORTS

tive offense. There is constant
movement, and when the ball
goes into the low post, the perimeter players continue to move
and set screens rather than watch
the ball.
Serbia runs false actions, making it look like it is going to do
one thing but do another.
The Serbians have three-point
shooters in Teodosic, Bogdan
Bogdanovic, Stefan Markovic and
Nikola Kalinic.
Serbia is difficult to defend.
However, Fraschilla likes the
way the USA has improved its defense in the quarterfinals against
Argentina and the semifinals
against Spain.
“I think you’re going to see the
locked-in defense you saw in the
first two games of the knockout,”
he said. “I think Serbia is going to

have a little more trouble the second time around.”

Marathoner, 41, ready for good run
Rachel Axon

@RachelAxon
USA TODAY Sports

The joy of aging
is reaping the benefits of experience. Meb Keflezighi knows that.
After 25 years running, the U.S.
marathoner has learned a thing
or two that has him competing in
his fourth Olympics at 41. He’s
also gained a perspective that has
him enjoying the experience with
his family as he prepares for his
final Games.
Keflezighi will run his 24th career marathon Sunday, joining
Galen Rupp and Jared Ward as
the U.S. team members vying for
the country’s first medal since
Keflezighi claimed silver in 2004.
“Don’t get me wrong, I would
love to win a medal for our country. I will strive my best,” Keflezighi says. “But if I am not on the
podium, if I finish the top 10, if
I can’t finish in the top 10 and
have a good energy to be able to
just, for the sport of running,
finish strong, for me that’s good

enough.”
That Keflezighi has at least a
decade between him and his
teammates and is still competitive is a testament to the lessons
learned over years of running and
the care that goes into maintaining his body.
Nutrition counts for more now,
so Keflezighi asks himself if he
needs something or wants it. So
efficient is his body after more
than 100,000 miles running that
RIO DE JANEIRO

JOE SCARNICI, GETTY IMAGES

“The race is for me and our country,” Meb Keflezighi says.
he doesn’t burn as many calories
as he used to. He aims to be about
125 pounds, and he weighs himself daily.
He manages sleep and travel.
After a 10-day trip to his native
Eritrea, Keflezighi opted not to
compete in the Rock ’n’ Roll San
Diego Half-Marathon and instead
ran with the 1:30 pace group. It
was a cautious move meant to
serve him in Rio.
At this point in his career, he
knows being smarter on the front
end can prevent injury on the

back end. If he was aiming for 125
miles a week and saw himself at
129, the younger man would have
run the extra mile.
Now, Keflezighi knows it’s not
worth it.
“You’d rather be undertrained

than overtrained because in an
Olympic year, especially, most
people overdo it. Because it’s no
different than another 26.2 miles,
but you have more obligations,”
he says. “Half of the battle is getting to the start line healthy.”
Gratefully, he is that.
There was a point eight years
ago when Keflezighi thought he
might be done.
Keflezighi broke his hip during
the 2008 trials, causing him to
miss the Olympics that year and
contemplate retirement.
“I wanted to leave on a better
note,” he says, looking back on
that time, “and I couldn’t be happier to have my family here to experience it.”
To be sure, that’s part of his
perspective. Keflezighi and his

wife, Yardonos, have three daughters — Sara, Fiyori and Yohana —
who have all made the trip and

will be old enough to remember
their father’s final Olympic race.
They’ll remember visiting USA
House, where their father spoke
Thursday on behalf of Bridgestone, which sponsors him and
helps support The MEB Foundation. They’ll remember getting
gelato in Italy when he ran there.
As Keflezighi winds down his
racing career, he’ll be able to
share those memories with his
girls.
“I should be in zero pressure
whatsoever, because I am completely satisfied with my career,”
Keflezighi says. “Nothing more
that I could do.”
That’s why Keflezighi is content going into the race Sunday.
He has an Olympic medal. He
won the New York City Marathon
in 2009 and the Boston Marathon in 2014.
Retirement looms. He’ll run
two more races to get to 26. He
doesn’t know what the next one
will be, but he’d like to end in
New York. He’ll be 42 then, a fitting nod to the marathon distance in kilometers.
Rio comes first, and Keflezighi
is not the favorite. A podium finish would be great, but years of
running have taught Keflezighi
there’s more to marathon racing
than a top-three finish.
“And the race is for me and our

country and memory for them,”
he says, “and I hope to give it a
good run.”


20T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

RIO OLYMPICS
Trio’s last Games a golden ride

USA’s Catchings,
Taurasi, Bird win
fourth gold medal

Jeff Seidel

Jeff Zillgitt

@seideljeff
USA TODAY SPORTS

@JeffZillgitt
USA TODAY Sports

With 5:44 left in
the U.S. women’s gold medal
game against Spain on Saturday,

Tamika Catchings, Sue Bird and
Diana Taurasi checked out for the
last time as a group in a USA
Olympic uniform.
Catchings is 37 and won’t be
back for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. At 35 and 34, respectively,
Bird and Taurasi might not be
back either.
It was perhaps the final Olympic game for all of them, and they
will leave Rio the way they expected to: with their fourth gold
medal after a 101-72 victory
against Spain.
Catchings, Taurasi and Bird
joined Lisa Leslie and Teresa Edwards as the only U.S. basketball
players to win that many gold
medals.
“The players that you’re with,
that’s what makes it so special,”
Catchings said. “Winning the
gold is awesome. But when we
think about the sweat and tears
and hard work, looking to the
right, looking to left on the podium, seeing the flag go up, hearing
the national anthem being
played, it never gets old.”
Catchings, Bird and Taurasi
will be forever linked to one of
the greatest and most-dominant
runs in Olympic history amid a
streak of six consecutive golds for

the USA.
“It’s hard to quantify with
words,” U.S. coach Geno Auriemma said of the trio’s impact and
importance. “There are some
things that they do that you just
RIO DE JANEIRO

BOB ROSATO, USA TODAY SPORTS

The U.S. women’s team beat Spain 101-72 to win its sixth consecutive Olympic gold medal.
can’t describe.
“They set an example that today that is missing a lot. There’s a
lot (of ) entitlement out there in
sports today, and you’ve got three
Hall of Famers that don’t think
they’re entitled to anything and
they feel they have to work hard
every day and have to earn it.”
When the three arrived in Rio
and as recently as Thursday, they
tried to say it wasn’t about them.
“It’s been the elephant in the
room that we’re ignoring,” Taurasi said. “We want to be in the
moment.”
Yes, it’s a team sport. Yes, it
took a team to win. But it was
about them, too. Catchings said
she did things she usually doesn’t
do at the Olympics: shopping,
trips to the beach.

Taurasi said she treated it like

her first Olympics. Soaked up every bus ride, dinner and practice.
“It’s been hard,” Taurasi said.
“All I keep hearing is, ‘This is your
last Olympics.’ You have to put
that aside and just enjoy every
moment. You don’t want to get
caught up and forget all those
good times.”
They weren’t exactly kids in
2004. But they were just out of
college having won NCAA titles
and playing in the WNBA.
“It seems a really long time
ago, and it some ways it is,” Bird
said. “We knew the three of us
were on that team to learn, to see
what it meant to represent the
United States at an Olympic
event and take the torch and run
with it. We were lucky to have
veteran players show us with
their play and their words.”

They joined in on an Olympic
team in 2004 filled with stars
they grew up watching and emulating: Leslie, Dawn Staley, Sheryl
Swoopes, Tina Thompson.
“Ninety-six was the first time I

watched the Olympics, and I said,
‘I want to be like them when I
grow up,’ ” Catchings said. “We
probably never thought we would
be where we are.”
After the game, they hugged,
smiled and cried.
“It’s one of these bittersweet
moments where you work so
hard and the buzzer rings and it’s
just over. It’s done,” Taurasi said.
“Right now, we’re all just feeling
that, because tomorrow we all go
our separate ways and it’s over.
“But it’s been amazing what
we’ve done. … Let me tell you, tonight I’m really going to enjoy it.”

As planned, Jorgensen wins triathlon gold
After London
disappointment,
focus was Rio gold
Nancy Armour


USA TODAY Sports

For the last four
years, every day of Gwen Jorgensen’s life has been planned.
Vacations, trips home to see
family, those days when lazy

mornings turn into lazier afternoons and even lazier evenings —
everything took a back seat to her
single-minded pursuit. That’s the
way it has to be when your eyes
are locked on the top of the podium, when an Olympic gold medal
is the only thing that will satisfy
those gnawing feelings of disappointment.
And now, nothing. She has no
plans — other than staring at the
gold medal that hangs around her
neck, that is.
“Thinking about the four years,
and it all came down to one day,”
Jorgensen said Saturday after
winning the women’s triathlon title and giving the USA its first
gold medal in the sport since
triathlon became an Olympic
sport in 2000. “To be able to actually execute on the day is pretty
amazing.”
So, too, the way it all unfolded.
Jorgensen came to Rio as the
overwhelming favorite, a twotime world champion who had
won all but two individual races
since April 2014. But she didn’t
have the strongest swim and
found herself in 24th place, 12
seconds back, after she made the
transition to the bike.
If competitors were looking for
an opening, here it was.

“Her
competition
knows
they’ve got one or two critical
moments to put Gwen on the
ropes and put the nail in the coffin,” said Patrick Lemieux, Jorgensen’s husband and a member
of her support team. “And Gwen
knows she can anticipate. ‘I know
if (I) give an inch, they’re going to
try and take a mile.’ She knew
that was coming.”
As the lead pack began its first
climb of a brutal, lung- and legbusting hill, Jorgensen made her
move. By the end of the second

Confident
Shields sets
stage for
another gold

RIO DE JANEIRO

KIRBY LEE, USA TODAY SPORTS

Gwen Jorgensen’s gold medal is the first won by an American in the triathlon since it became an
Olympic sport. Nicola Spirig, left, won the silver medal, and Vicky Holland won bronze.
bike lap, she had moved up to
10th place, a second behind the
leader. After the sixth of the eight
laps, she was in the lead. She

would cede it to 2012 Olympic
champion Nicola Spirig of Switzerland, but it was a formality.
With as good as Jorgensen is
on the run, the race was over and
it was only a question of when
she would drop the hammer.
For the first three laps in the
10-kilometer race, Spirig tried to
hang on Jorgensen’s right shoulder for protection from the head
winds. But after a slight exchange
of words at the beginning of the
last lap — “Neither one of us
wanted to lead,” Jorgensen said.
“She said, ‘I already have a (gold)
medal,’ which is fair enough.” —
Jorgensen ended the discussion
by taking off.
Within seconds, she had
opened a gap on Spirig, one that
would grow to 40 seconds by the
end of the race.
“She’s really deserving of the
gold,” Spirig said. “I tried everything to get her out of her rhythm
and to make it hard for her. I
tried everything to still beat her,
but she was just too good.”

As she neared the finish line,
Jorgensen broken into a big
smile. Then the enormity of what

she had done, an achievement
four years in the making, hit.
She covered her mouth with
her hand to hold back the tears,
making it across the finish line
before she began sobbing.
“I keep crying for some reason,” she said. “I’m just really
happy after everything we’ve
done after this past four years.”
Jorgensen came late to triathlon, a swimmer and runner at
Wisconsin who was recruited to
the sport by USA Triathlon. Despite being only three years into
her career, she was considered a
medal contender in the London
Olympics in 2012.
But a flat tire resulted in a disappointing 38th-place finish.
Knowing she had the talent to
be an Olympic champion, Jorgensen put her entire focus on Rio.
She began training with Jamie
Turner, even though it’s meant
she and Lemieux are nomads,
spending nine months in Wollongong, Australia, and Vitoria,
Spain. Lemieux gave up his career
as a professional cyclist and now

handles everything for Jorgensen
but the racing.
“I’ve been pretty vocal about
my goal for the past four years,”
Jorgensen said. “After London I

said I wanted to go to Rio and
wanted to win gold.”
But plenty of athletes put their
goals out there, and not all deliver
on them.
For Jorgensen, though, there
was no other option.
“That’s the most amazing
thing, because she was very clear.
There was nothing that was going
to stop her these last four years,”
Lemieux said.
“Everything has been an investment toward today, and she
wasn’t going to let anything hold
her back.”
Now it is done, her all-consuming goal accomplished.
Asked what she’ll do now, Jorgensen smiled.
“Right now I’m just trying to
enjoy this moment,” she said. “I
don’t really have any plans.”
FOLLOW COLUMNIST
NANCY ARMOUR

@nrarmour for commentary and
analysis from the Olympics in Rio.

RIO DE JANEIRO Claressa Shields
was relaxed and having fun.
She danced through the ring,
putting on a show, head weaving,

feet bopping, her hands a blur, firing like powerful pistons —
wham, wham, wham.
Afterward, it dawned on her.
She forgot to do the Ali Shuffle.
“I didn’t do it?” she asked reporters after beating Kazakhstan’s Dariga Shakimova by
unanimous decision in the women’s middleweight (75 kilograms;
165 pounds) semifinals. “I did the
jabbing part. I did the jab. OK,
well, I’m going to do the shuffle in
my last fight, if I can. You know,
depends how tough my opponent
comes at me.”
Yes, this boxer from Flint,
Mich., is that good, that confident, that dominant, that she can
fight and put on a show at the
same time, while trying to give a
tribute to Muhammad Ali.
Shields will fight Nouchka Fontijn of Netherlands on Sunday afternoon, trying to become the
first American boxer to win backto-back gold medals. Shields beat
Fontijin in May to win her second
consecutive Women’s World
Championship.
“The Netherlands?” Shields
asked. “She’s a great fighter. I
don’t think she has the tools to
beat me, but I’m sure she went
home and worked on a few
things. And I worked on a few
things, as well.”
There is no doubt in Shields’

mind that she will win, and that’s
part of the reason for her success.
“She believes she is the best in
the world,” coach Billy Walsh
said. “She believes she is the
greatest of all time. Muhammad
Ali was telling people all of his
life. Who was he telling first and
foremost? Himself.”
Behind that shield of confidence, Shields has amazing tools
and skill. “Her hand speed is phenomenal,” Walsh said. “Her head
movement is phenomenal. And
her power, for a woman, she
hurts you every time she hits
you.”
Shields had a much stronger
performance in the semifinals
Friday than she did in the quarterfinals Wednesday. But that
might have been because she is so
sick and tired of the food.
“The day before my last fight, I
didn’t eat or drink the right way,”
she said. “It wasn’t that I was underweight; I just can’t stand the
food in the cafe anymore at the
Olympic Village. So yesterday I
made sure that I ate two or three
whole meals. I drank a lot of water and Powerade. I woke up today, and my body was feeling
great.”
It should be pointed out that
Powerade is one of her sponsors.

So she is learning the art and
craft of salesmanship, in the ring
and out.
In the second round, Shields
realized something. “I was like,
‘You know what? She isn’t as fast
as me, she can’t hit as hard as me,
she thinks she can, but she is
about to find out real soon that
she can’t.’ ”
That unshakable belief is at the
core of who Shields is, and it
came from her struggles in Flint.
“There was so much darkness
around me,” she said. “But I still
have a few good people around
me. That’s how I was able to see
things and become the person I
am. ... I just want to help people.
What I grew up with, what I had
to overcome, it was difficult, but
look at where I am now.”
Where is she?
On the way to grabbing her
second consecutive Olympic gold
medal.

Seidel writes for the Detroit Free Press,
part of the USA TODAY Network.

JOHN DAVID MERCER, USA TODAY SPORTS

Claressa Shields, right, fights
for the gold medal Sunday.


21T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

NFL

Shutdown talk often can get testy

Term divides
cornerbacks, other
defensive experts
Lorenzo Reyes

@LorenzoGReyes
USA TODAY Sports

How exactly does one define a
shutdown cornerback?
USA TODAY Sports posed that
query to several of the NFL’s top
corners in an attempt to answer a
few other questions: Why is the
term still around? Should people

even use it?
But first, here’s what today’s
top lock-down pass defenders
had to say.
Patrick Peterson of the Arizona
Cardinals: “If you’re going to have
that label, you should at least
show that it’s you and that particular receiver with no help. At all.
Going with a guy when he’s in
slot. Going with a guy when he’s
on the right side. Taking that
No. 1 receiver out of the game.
Let’s slug it out.”
Richard Sherman of the Seattle
Seahawks: “A guy who makes
enough plays. A guy who gives his
team a chance to win. A guy who
needs to be game-planned for. A
guy who is on the scouting report.
That’s a shutdown corner.”
Josh Norman of the Washington Redskins: “Best on best. If
that receiver comes in averaging
100 yards and however many
touchdowns, he better not get
100 yards. He better not get a
touchdown.”
Other players interviewed offered similar versions of those
answers. There’s just one issue:
The term is nebulous.
“Shutdown corner” is to a defense what “franchise quarterback” is to an offense. Fans and

the news media use the phrases,
but there’s no quantifiable way to
categorize a player as such with
absolute finality. It leads to inconclusive debates. It also causes
bruised pride, swollen egos and
social media takedowns.
Perhaps that is because of the
biggest hang-up that always
comes up in these discussions:
Does a shutdown cornerback
need to shadow his opponent’s
No. 1 receiver?
“I wouldn’t stick your hat all
on that, because there aren’t
many guys that can do that,” Denver Broncos corner Chris Harris
tells USA TODAY Sports. “I can
only name a handful that travel
anyway.”
Just to show how far opinions
vary, all you have to do is look at

JEFF CURRY, USA TODAY SPORTS

A shutdown cornerback “needs to be game-planned for,” allpro Richard Sherman says.
the other side of the field.
“It requires you to travel with
him,” cornerback Aqib Talib, Harris’ teammate, tells USA TODAY
Sports. “Because I don’t think you
can be a shutdown corner if you
line up on the left and the guy on

the right has 500 yards receiving
and four touchdowns and you’re
just watching him. You’re not
shutting nothing down. You’re
just doing your job. You’re a doyour-job corner.”
Based on several conversations
with former and current players,
coaches and analysts, the traditional definition of a shutdown
corner was a player who operated
in a man-to-man scheme — with
little or no help — and was assigned the opposing team’s top
receiver from whistle to whistle.
But zone coverages have become much more popular in recent years. In 2016, 14 teams are
planning to operate out of a base
defense primarily employing
man-to-man coverage, 11 will use
zone-based schemes and seven
will run hybrid concepts that mix
in man and zone.
Based on the traditional definition of a shutdown corner, that
means more than half of the 32
teams wouldn’t be eligible.
But should a player be penalized because of the scheme in
which he plays? This brings up
one of the most interesting questions that arose during the interview process, and it is the one
argument that would alter the
way we talk about cornerback
play in the NFL: Was there ever a
shutdown corner?
Based on numerous conversations with current and former

DALE ZANINE, USA TODAY SPORTS

Josh Norman says a shutdown cornerback defends the opponent’s best receiver and keeps him in check.

BILL STREICHER, USA TODAY SPORTS

It’s tough to argue against the Cardinals’ Patrick Peterson being labeled a shutdown cornerback.
players and coaches, Hall of Famer Deion Sanders is the man who
is credited with the creation of
the term ... even if he isn’t sure
what it means now.
“We’ve got to figure out what
the term really means,” Sanders
tells USA TODAY Sports by
phone. “It should be a guy that
nullifies the big plays of an opposing receiver. He shuts that down.
You might as well go somewhere
else. But isn’t that what all corners should do?”
And, yes, Sanders says he
thought he was a shutdown corner.
But Sherman says it is a misnomer and false rhetoric to consider

Sanders a cornerback who blanketed a No. 1 receiver.
“Deion was a right-side corner,” Sherman says. “He didn’t
travel anywhere.”
This is where the debate becomes complicated.
Sanders played from 1989 to
2000 with the Atlanta Falcons,
San Francisco 49ers, Dallas Cowboys and Redskins. He returned

for two seasons in 2004 and 2005
with the Baltimore Ravens.
Greg Cosell, an analyst and
senior producer at NFL Films,
says the digitization of archived
coaches’ film through the league’s
Game Rewind software goes back
only to 2006.

“There were times (Sanders)
did travel and times he didn’t, but
it wasn’t automatic,” Cosell tells
USA TODAY Sports. “I remember
times later in his career where he
would definitely play on one side.
There were times he didn’t even
go into the huddle. He just stayed
on the right side.
“But I do remember other
times where he did match up. As
is the case with everything in
football, nothing is 100%. People
talk about it at times as if it is, but
nothing is 100%.”
By the conventional label, Peterson and the New York Jets’
Darrelle Revis are the closest fans
will get to that man-to-man
matchup/shutdown corner. But
that doesn’t minimize the impact
of players such as Sherman who

operate primarily out of a zone
scheme, even if they play man
coverage concepts out of that
foundational defense. That would
cheat Sherman out of the credit
he deserves as one of the top defenders in the league.
Much like talk of elite quarterbacks, the argument about shutdown corners will never reach an
end. That’s part of what makes it
so compelling. But that’s all it will
ever be: endless and unresolved
sports-talk fodder.
“It’s overrated to me,” Talib
says. “Four receivers, five guys
out there that can catch the ball,
there’s five DBs, so who is the
shutdown? Let’s start a new topic
and talk about who are the shutdown secondaries.
“Who is shutting down every
pass that you throw?”
Contributing: Lindsay H. Jones

BOXING

Hardy achieves television
breakthrough for women
Boxer has been
fighting for equal
time entire career
Bob Velin

@BobVelin
USA TODAY Sports

For years, Heather Hardy has
fought for equality for women in
boxing, taking her lumps inside
and outside the ring.
Where other, less mentally
strong women would have long
since given up the dream, the 34year-old Brooklyn native, businesswoman, single mother and
stubbornly persistent practitioner of the sweet science has been
something of a one-woman show
pushing for a proper place for
women in a predominantly male
sport.
Hardy’s persistence in pushing
for a women’s bout on TV finally
paid off big time, thanks to her
longtime promoter Lou DiBella.
In a Premier Boxing Champions card Sunday at Ford Amphitheater at Coney Island in New
York (NBC), top welterweight
contender Errol Spence Jr. (20-0,
17 knockouts) takes on Leonard
Bundu (33-1-2, 12 KOs) in the
main event.
Sunday night on NBC Sports
Network, Hardy (17-0, 4 KOs)
faces bitter rival Shelly Vincent
(18-0, 1 KO) in a tape-delayed, 10round battle for the vacant WBC

international women’s featherweight belt.
It’s a minor belt, but it’s a major deal for Hardy.
“It’s really epic,” Hardy told
USA TODAY Sports last week. “I
think it definitely is a breakthrough. To have (PBC boss) Al
Haymon put us on one of his
shows really, really opens the
door for us, and I’m going to go
out and do exactly what I’ve done
17 times. I’m going to win and put
on (such a good) show that all the
people there are going to want to
see me fight again. Every time I
fight, I wind up with more fans.”
That is why if anybody deserves this somewhat historic
shot, DiBella says, it’s Hardy.
“Heather has really paid her
dues. She’s been a big ticket seller
in New York for years,” DiBella
says. “She’s been on local television in New York. She’s appeared
on the undercard of more major
shows at Barclays Center than
any woman ever.
“She’s not like a stylist, a
pound-for-pound girl. She’s like
an Arturo Gatti. She just lays it
out there. She throws down. She’s
an attractive girl, but she doesn’t
care about bleeding. She just
loves to fight, and she’s good at it

and incredibly fun to watch.”
Spence concurs. “I think it’s a
great for Heather to get this opportunity,” he says. “It’s not common that we see women’s boxing
on television, but there are a lot
of women who deserve it. This is
great for them, and it’s great for

the sport.”
To say Hardy has paid her dues
is an understatement. The blonde
boxer, nicknamed The Heat, has
had to hit the pavement and sell
tickets just to get on a card
throughout her six-year professional career.
“The only way a woman could
get on a show was to guarantee an
exorbitant amount of ticket sales
so that the promoter felt like we
were a good enough short-term
investment,” Hardy says. “And
that’s kind of how I’ve built my
career so far. And Lou has been
trying to get us on Showtime,
really anywhere that will take us.”
Hardy scoffs at the idea that
men don’t like to see women fight
and get punched in the mouth.
She cites the popularity of UFC
mixed martial arts fighters such
as Ronda Rousey and former boxer Holly Holm as proof that men

will watch women fight.
“I think Ronda Rousey just
blasted open the door for us. And
you really can’t congratulate her
without giving a high-five to Dana
White,” Hardy says. “As the
(president) of the UFC, he’s the
one who took the chance and exposed Rousey to the world. And it
was successful.”
Hardy, who started her combat
sports career as a kickboxer and
has won kickboxing and Muay
Thai titles, seriously considered
crossing over to MMA before this
latest opportunity fell in her lap.
“I had started doing some
American wrestling and (kick-

ED MULHOLLAND, GETTY IMAGES

“It’s really epic,” Heather Hardy, left, says about her bout vs.
Shelly Vincent airing on NBC Sports Network on Sunday.
boxing) because I was so frustrated,” Hardy said. “I had done six
shows in a row at Barclays Center
last year and I fought in June on
the Porter-Thurman card. I’m
sure you remember Abner Mares
was the co-main event, before
that fell out.
“But when I had gotten myself

on the card, I said to Lou, ‘Fight
for me. Get Heather Hardy on the
card between Shawn Porter and
Abner Mares. People are not going to turn their TVs off.’ This was
the opportunity for (fans) to see
what women can do. But they
couldn’t do it. And then after that
fight, Lou’s like, ‘Take the rest of
the summer off.’ So I started
grappling and kickboxing because
I thought, I don’t know where I’m
going with this. And I’m not getting any younger.

“Then Lou called with this opportunity, and I jumped right
back into boxing. But it’s not farfetched that I would do it. Those
girls are making, for their debuts,
more money than I’ve ever made
before.”
But times are changing, and
Hardy knows that equality for
women, especially in sports, is
part of the national conversation.
“It’s a big deal because people
are making it part of the conversation,” she says. “The media, and
female athletes, and even male
athletes are standing up for us.
That’s what’s making the difference.
“As long as we keep it relevant,
things will change. It might not
change tomorrow, but that’s what

keeps me going, knowing that if
you keep at it things will change.”


22T

USA TODAY
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2016

WEATHER

WEATHER ONLINE
USATODAY.COM

TODAY’S FORECAST
Seattle
75/55s

Helena
90/54s

Portland
82/56s

Bismarck
84/56s
Mpls-St. Paul
72/59s
Rapid City
82/55s

Casper
87/51s

Sacramento
89/59s

Denver
88/57pc
Wichita
83/58s

Phoenix
102/80pc

PRECIPITATION

Kansas City
80/59s

Little Rock
83/68pc
Dallas-Fort Worth
83/71t
Houston
89/74t

El Paso
87/68t

Detroit
76/57pc Cleveland
78/61t
Chicago
Pittsburgh
75/56pc Indianapolis
78/60t
75/57pc
St. Louis
Washington
81/63s
Cincinnati 89/68t
77/58pc

San Antonio
83/73t

Charlotte
92/67t

Nashville
83/62pc

Memphis
84/69pc

Tulsa
85/63pc

Albuquerque

84/61t

Albany
84/61t
Milwaukee
77/57pc

Omaha
80/63s

Salt Lake City
95/70s

Las Vegas
101/80s
Los Angeles
83/63pc

San Diego
79/68pc

Portland
77/63pc

Billings
90/58s

Boise
95/63s

San Francisco
70/58pc

NATIONAL FORECAST

Birmingham
85/70t

New Orleans
90/77pc

Tampa
90/78pc

Precipitation
c Cloudy
dr Drizzle

10s

20s

Thunderstorms

f Fog
h Haze

i Ice
pc Partly cloudy

Rain

r Rain
s Sunny

30s

Showers

sf Snow flurries
sh Showers

Hilo
85/74sh

Juneau
64/52c

40s

50s
Snow

Miami
92/77pc

Honolulu
87/76pc

Anchorage

61/56r

Below 10

Baltimore
86/63t

Charleston
96/77pc

Atlanta
88/69t

Hawaii

Temperatures (°F)

New York
84/68pc
Philadelphia
87/68t

Orlando
92/75t

Alaska

Forecasts and
graphics provided by
AccuWeather Inc.

©2016

Boston
81/68pc

60s

70s

Snow flurries

sn Snow
w Windy
t Thunderstorms

80s

90s

100s

110+

Ice / wintry mix
Note: The forecast highs are for the 24-hour
period of that day. Low-temperature forecasts
are for the upcoming night.

MON
79/57pc

Providence

Albany, N.Y.

MON
74/53pc

Raleigh, N.C.

92/67t

86/63s

Allentown, Pa.

85/62t

78/51s

Reno

93/64s

88/59t

Atlantic City

84/68pc 81/65s

Richmond, Va.

90/66t

84/61s

Augusta, Ga.

95/71t

91/69s

Rochester, N.Y.

77/58t

74/56pc

Austin

78/71t

85/73t

San Jose, Calif.

78/59pc

77/58s

Bakersfield, Calif.

100/73s

98/71s

Sarasota, Fla.

91/77pc

92/77t

Baton Rouge

88/73t

89/73t

Savannah, Ga.

97/76pc

95/75pc

Boise

95/63s

87/55s

Shreveport, La.

86/71t

85/73t

Buffalo

76/57t

73/57pc

South Bend, Ind.

73/56pc

76/57s

Cedar Rapids

72/52s

80/59s

Spokane, Wash.

91/55s

74/51s

Colorado Springs

81/55pc

86/58s

Springfield, Mo.

80/58s

83/66s

Columbia, S.C.

92/73t

90/68s

Syracuse, N.Y.

78/60t

71/57pc

Columbus, Ohio

77/58t

78/60s

Toledo, Ohio

73/55pc

76/56s

Dayton, Ohio

77/56pc

77/59s

Tucson

95/74t

97/73t

Daytona Beach

94/74pc

94/75t

Des Moines

77/59s

83/66s

Duluth, Minn.

68/53pc 79/64s

Athens, Greece

93/75s

94/77s

Fort Myers, Fla.

92/76t

93/76t

Baghdad

114/77s

115/81s

Fresno

100/69s

96/68s

Beijing

93/74s

89/73pc

Grand Rapids

72/55pc 75/57s

Berlin

74/56pc

70/56pc

Greensboro, N.C.

89/65t

85/61s

Buenos Aires

55/41pc

68/45s

Greenville, S.C.

88/66t

85/64s

Cairo

96/77s

96/78s

Harrisburg, Pa.

81/63t

80/56s

Caracas, Ven.

88/76pc

87/76pc

Hartford, Conn.

85/63t

78/54pc

Freeport, Bahamas

91/77pc

91/77pc

Huntsville, Ala.

85/65pc

85/66pc

Hong Kong

89/80t

87/80pc

Jackson, Miss.

88/72t

90/72t

Jerusalem

88/70s

87/69s

Jacksonville

97/74pc

96/74t

Kingston, Jamaica

93/79pc 93/80pc

Knoxville, Tenn.

84/62t

84/61s

London

73/61c

77/58pc

Lexington, Ky.

78/58t

79/59s

Madrid

93/65s

97/69s

Louisville

81/62pc

82/61s

Manila

88/79r

87/78t

Lubbock, Texas

82/61pc

83/65t

Mexico City

73/54t

74/55t

Madison, Wis.

71/51pc

77/62s

Montreal

83/58t

70/56pc

WORLD FORECAST

McAllen, Texas

100/80pc 102/80pc

Moscow

76/60pc

80/63pc

Mobile, Ala.

90/73t

88/74t

Nassau, Bahamas

92/78s

92/78s

Myrtle Beach, S.C.

95/75t

89/72t

New Delhi

93/80pc 94/81c

Nags Head, N.C.

89/76t

85/74s

Paris

71/57pc

79/60s

Norfolk, Va.

90/75t

84/73s

Rome

83/66s

86/67s

Oklahoma City

85/62pc

81/68pc

Sydney

67/49s

66/50r

Palm Springs

106/80s

105/76pc

Tokyo

88/80t

86/78r

Pensacola, Fla.

89/76t

88/76t

Toronto

79/55c

74/59pc

YOUR SAY
SECOND LOOK

TODAY
80/66pc

TODAY
84/61t

Tracking the nation’s conversation

TOON TALK

NEW VIEWS
ON TALKERS

REPEAL FREEDOMS
As an attorney, I never thought
that I would consider repealing
the First Amendment, which was

instituted to safeguard our most
precious freedoms: religion,
speech and press. We apparently do not need it anymore.
Under the present administration, no honor or respect is given to deeply held faith. Freedom of speech has been dispatched in favor of political
correctness on college campuses and is spreading elsewhere
in society, soon to be universally
ignored. Freedom of the press
was instituted to hold government and those in power accountable. The press is now so
incredibly dishonest that it has
forfeited its right to constitutional protection. Sorry to say,
this valued amendment has
outlived its usefulness, is no
longer applicable to our society,
and is abused and scoffed at by
a mostly dishonest press. Let’s
get rid of it. Sad (sigh).

DOUG MACGREGOR, THE (FORT MYERS, FLA.) NEWS-PRESS

GARY VARVEL, THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR

Daniel D. Connor
Columbus, Ohio

FIX OBAMACARE
I’m not surprised Aetna has
decided to opt out of Obamacare next year. According to the
company, it is losing $300 million a year, so it has become a
liability to continue providing
care under the Affordable Care

Act. But Aetna’s losses represent
a tiny fraction of the company’s
overall financial picture. Is Obamacare perfect? No. Is it worth
fighting to keep Aetna in the
program? Yes. My hope is that
industry and government leaders can find common ground.
After all, there is more to life
than making a buck, especially
when it comes to health care.
Denny Freidenrich
Laguna Beach, Calif.

TO COMMENT
@EdBaig

ANDY MARLETTE, PENSACOLA (FLA.) NEWS JOURNAL

ROGER HARVELL, THE GREENVILLE (S.C.) NEWS

Have Your Say at , facebook.com/usatodayopinion and @USATOpinion on Twitter. All comments are edited for length and clarity. Content submitted to USA
TODAY may appear in print, digital or other forms. For letters, include name, address and phone number. Letters may be mailed to 7950 Jones Branch Drive, McLean, VA, 22108.

THEY CALL HIM
THE TECH WHISPERER.
When it comes to the latest gadgets, USA TODAY’s personal tech columnist Ed Baig
sorts through the dizzying details so you can decide what to buy, what to wait for,
and when to walk away.
usatoday.com/edbaig

Smarter. Faster. More Colorful.