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Ed McMann's Final "Goodnite"

By Robert Bianco, USA TODAY
Now, Tonight truly feels like an irretrievable yesterday.

The show's era as an icon ended with the death of Johnny Carson, but as long as his "hi-yo" sidekick, Ed McMahon, was still with us, some part of the era was as well. Tuesday, at age 86, McMahon died, taking what was left of the old Tonight Show with him.



McMahon put himself through college pitching products on the Atlantic City boardwalk, which may have been a more useful education than college itself. In a way, that's what McMahon did with startling success for 30 years: He pitched Carson to the public. His laugh made Carson's jokes seem funnier; his straight-man cluelessness in the Carnac routines made Carson seem smarter; and his booming, much-imitated "Here's Johnny" made Carson seem like the most important person on American TV.

On his own, McMahon was not a great talent. As a sidekick, he made the star not just brighter but better. His gregariousness was a perfect complement to the notoriously private Carson's button-down approach, providing a reflected warmth the host might have otherwise lacked.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Johnny Carson | The Tonight Show | Ed McMahon

And indeed, much of what we learned about Carson as a person on air came from his exchanges with McMahon. Fans knew about the pair's divorces, not because they gave interviews to the tabloids but because they discussed them with each other — rarely, but with revealing frankness.

McMahon first worked with Carson as his announcer on the game show Who Do You Trust in the late '50s. The pair obviously clicked, because they moved together to The Tonight Showwhen Carson took it over in 1962.

McMahon set the sidekick mold most all would follow, and indeed for years made a sidekick seem essential. He mostly served to flatter the star, laughing with sometimes exaggerated gusto even when the joke didn't particularly merit a laugh. (McMahon did honestly what Paul Shaffer now does ironically.) But at crucial times, he could also serve as a foil, puncturing pomposity before it could grow.

His star status on Tonight enabled McMahon to have a career outside its confines, hosting Star Search and TV Bloopers and Practical Jokes, and pitching various products, from magazine sweepstakes to mobility chairs.

In his later years, McMahon's appearances on TV were less fortunate — and often tied to a how-the-mighty-have-fallen fascination with his financial woes. But today, we can remember him young and laughing, welcoming us to the greatest night-time party TV has ever thrown.

Goodnight, Ed. We had a blast.

4800 Calorie Burger: More than Just a Heart Attack Waiting to Happen
By MjrHkr, Community Contributor -- Published: May 19, 2009

A recent trend seems to be developing in the restaurant world. Whether this practice has always been in place, or is just coming more to the forefront due to America’s increasing problem of obesity, one thing is clear: it’s a dangerous following. What I’m talking about is “larger-than-life” foods.

A couple of examples:
In Michigan, the West Michigan Whitecaps minor league baseball team has created a promotional 4,800-calorie burger with 300 grams of fat. If you are able to consume the whole thing, you get a T-shirt.

CBS recently covered a story on a restaurant called, "Heart Attack Grill" in Tempe, Arizona. They offer the “Quadruple Bypass Hamburger," which boasts a whopping 8,000 calories. You won’t get a T-shirt for finishing it, but they will offer you a ride to your car in a wheelchair if you’re just too full and bloated to walk.

Keep in mind that the average number of calories that an active, healthy man should get on a daily basis is 2,500; for a woman it’s no more than 2,000. For the whole day.

Ok, ok. We’ve all heard that foods like these – larger-than-life steaks and burgers – are just “a heart attack waiting to happen.” But recent research indicates that a diet rich in red meat may do much more than that.

A study performed by the United States National Cancer Institute has recently linked Alzheimer’s and stomach ulcers to have a red meat diet. The study also showed staggering numbers when an individual reduced their meat consumption altogether to that taken in by the bottom twenty percent. It showed that it would save 11 percent of men’s lives and 16 percent of women’s lives.

This study justifies the findings of the World Cancer Research Fund, American Institute for Cancer Research, and the American Cancer Society. Those organizations highly recommend reducing the consumption of red meat. It is believed that this is something new in the sense of mortality. As with previous studies these too have found that red meat is often associated with cancer incidence. This was confirmed by a study conducted by vegetarian groups.

A study conducted last year by the United States Cancer Institute showed that eating a quarter pound hamburger or a small pork chop each day could easily put you are an increased risk of getting a variety of cancers. The American Meat Institute negatively reacted to the results claiming that they were notoriously unreliable. They also went on to state that meat was an excellent source of B12, zinc, iron, and other essential vitamins and minerals.

Another study showed that individuals eating the highest amount of red meat were thirty one to thirty six percent more likely to die from any cause than those individuals eating the least amount of red meat. That study stated that the causes of death could be any of the following: diabetes, ulcers, pneumonia, liver disease, HIV, influenza, Alzheimer’s, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and tuberculosis. The research also determined that the chances of dying from cancer were twenty two percent higher for men who ate the highest amount of red meat and twenty percent for women who ate the most amount of red meat.

The lesson? By eating such a diet rich in red meat, and indulging in mammoth burgers and steaks, you’re certain to get much more than a T-shirt. In fact, you may just be solidifying your death sentence.

Bodies Of Air France 447 Found

Saturday, June 06, 2009

The first bodies of passengers of the doomed Air France flight that plummeted into the sea have been found, Brazil's air force said Saturday.

The Brazilian military said search crews scanning the Atlantic Ocean located two male bodies of passengers aboard Flight 447 — which crashed midway through a trip from Rio de Janeiro to Paris before dawn Monday morning.

Air force spokesman Col. Jorge Amaral said searchers also recovered a leather briefcase with an Air France ticket for the flight inside of it.

"It was confirmed with Air France that the ticket number corresponds to a passenger on the flight," he told The Associated Press.

Amaral said the bodies were recovered Saturday morning and were picked up roughly 400 miles northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil's northern coast.

All 228 passengers and crew perished in the accident, which is believed to have occurred when the Airbus 330's systems failed during a violent storm about four hours into the flight. There were no survivors, officials said.

Air France acknowledged on Saturday that speed monitors on some of its Airbus planes have proven faulty, icing up at high altitude, and that recommendations to change them were first made in September 2007.

Air France issued a statement with details about the monitors hours after the French agency investigating the disaster of Flight 447 said the instruments were not replaced on that aircraft — an A330 — before it crashed last week.

Air France said it began replacing the monitors on the Airbus A330 model on April 27 after an improved version became available.

Pitot tubes, located on the exterior of the aircraft, are used to help measure aerodynamic speed.

Aviation officials have said the crash investigation is increasingly focused on whether external instruments may have iced over, confusing speed sensors and possibly leading computers to set the plane's speed too fast or slow — a potentially deadly mistake in severe turbulence.
Related Stories

* Air France Ignored Recommendation to Change Speed Instruments on Doomed Flight 447
* Probe: Flight 447 Autopilot Not on Before Crash
* Air France to Replace Flight-Speed Sensors After Crash of Flight 447
* Air France Crash Investigation Eyes Speed Instrument Malfunction
* Four Travelers Missed Doomed Air France Flight 447
* Air France: Jet Likely Broke Apart in Sky, No Hope of Survivors
* Expert Says Air France Black Boxes May Be Lost Forever
* Pilots Saw 'Fire on Ocean' Where Jet Vanished
* Air France Jet Carrying 228 Vanishes Over Atlantic Ocean
* RAW DATA: The Airbus A330-200
* How Dangerous Is Lightning to a Jetliner?



An Air France statement said that icing of the monitors at high altitude has led at times to loss of needed flying information.

However, the Air France statement stressed the recommendation to change the monitor "allows the operator full freedom to totally, partially or not at all apply it." When safety is at issue the aircraft maker issues, rather than a recommendation, a mandatory service bulletin followed up by an airworthiness directive.

Air France said that only a "small number" of incidents linked to the monitors had been reported.

Airbus has said the French agency investigating the crash found the doomed flight received inconsistent airspeed readings by different instruments as it struggled with turbulence in a massive thunderstorm.

Earlier in the week, French investigators said debris reported to have been from Flight 447 was in fact not from the crashed Air France plane, despite Brazil's assertion that it was.

In Brazil, visibility and weather conditions improved Saturday in the area searchers are focusing on but debris earlier spotted on the ocean's surface may have sunk by now.

"Debris doesn't indefinitely float, and when it sinks we will not have the means of finding them," Air Force Brig. Gen. Ramon Cardoso told reporters late Friday.

Cardoso has insisted that the debris spotted — an airplane seat, a slick of kerosene and other pieces — was from the plane. But he confirmed that Brazilian searchers had yet to recovered any of the material.

He said searchers did not pursue the reports of debris — the first sighting was reported on Tuesday — because priority was given to the hunt for survivors or the remains of victims.

Meanwhile, a German government-owned satellite spotted debris in the Atlantic on Wednesday, a German Aerospace Center spokesman said, but he added it was unclear whether the material came from the plane.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

How Do You Like Owning GM ??

By John Hughes, Caroline Salas, Jeff Green and Bob Van Voris

June 1 (Bloomberg) -- General Motors Corp., the world’s largest automaker for 77 years, began filing for bankruptcy by putting a New York affiliate into Chapter 11, a landmark for an industry that defined American economic might.

Chevrolet-Saturn of Harlem Inc., sought bankruptcy protection today, the first of many filings in the bankruptcy process. While GM hasn’t yet filed, the affiliate called the parent company a “debtor in possession under Chapter 11,” in court documents, a reference to the main U.S. bankruptcy law.

The move follows the bankruptcy filing of Chrysler LLC and represents the Obama administration’s attempt to remake a 100- year-old company that became burdened by higher costs than competitors and a reliance on fuel-guzzling light trucks as gasoline prices rose. Japan’s Toyota Motor Corp. surpassed Detroit-based GM last year as the world’s largest automaker.

“Our objective is to make sure we’re limiting our involvement to the minimum necessary, and that we get out of those involvements as quickly as we can,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said today in Beijing. “We want to have a quick, clean exit as soon as conditions permit.”

The “new GM” will get $30.1 billion in bankruptcy financing from the government, and the Treasury “does not anticipate providing any additional assistance” after that, the Obama administration said yesterday in a statement. The federal government will have a 60 percent equity stake in the retooled automaker, and 12 percent will be held by the Canadian government, which is lending $9.5 billion to the company.

Restructuring Chief

Al Koch, a managing director at the advisory company AlixPartners LLP in New York, will be the company’s chief restructuring officer, reporting to Chief Executive Officer Fritz Henderson, according to the Harlem affiliate filing. The unit filed to give federal courts in New York jurisdiction over the case.

“Any suggestion that an American corporate icon like GM could file for bankruptcy would have been laughable a few years ago,” said Lynn Hiestand, a partner specializing in restructuring with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP.

Bondholders are owed about $22.76 billion, the affiliate filing said. The United Auto Workers are owed about $20.56 billion, excluding “approximately $9.4 billion corresponding to the GM Internal VEBA,” the filing said.

“GM going through bankruptcy is a very positive thing for the auto industry: They should emerge as a reasonable competitor,” said Len Blum, managing director at investment- banking firm Westwood Capital LLC in New York. “The only thing that’s been holding GM back is labor contracts and relationships with debtors and franchisees. All that should be cleansed in a bankruptcy.”

GM Shares

GM plunged 33 percent to 75 cents on May 29, the lowest level in 76 years, and less than the $1 minimum price normally needed for a New York Stock Exchange listing. The stock was valued above $40 less than two years ago. GM shares traded in Germany fell 19 percent to the equivalent of 65 cents as of 10:16 a.m. in Frankfurt.

GM intends to close 11 factories and idle an additional three, while attempting to reopen one idled facility to build a new small car, the administration said, without estimating how many jobs would be eliminated. The automaker has said it aims to reduce its U.S. hourly workforce to about 40,000 next year from 61,000 at the end of last year.

The company has lost almost $88 billion since 2004.

The government is “a reluctant equity owner” that “will protect the taxpayers’ investment by managing its ownership stake in a hands-off commercial manner,” the Obama administration said yesterday in a “statement of principles” for its management of private firms.

Ousting Wagoner

President Barack Obama’s administration finds itself in control of an icon of American industry after rejecting a recovery plan filed in February and ousting Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner.

The terms of the filing were hammered out by a government task force led by Quadrangle Group LLC co-founder Steven Rattner, which demanded concessions by the company, the United Auto Workers and bondholders.

“The resulting agreement is tough but fair,” the administration said in the statement.

The administration expects the new GM to emerge from bankruptcy in 60 to 90 days, said administration officials, who asked not to be identified in advance of the filing, on a conference call yesterday with reporters.

New Leadership

The U.S. Treasury and GM prepared the way for the bankruptcy filing by getting 54 percent of bondholders to agree to the revised reorganization plan, bondholder representatives said yesterday. GM also got approval in the past week from the United Auto Workers union for an agreement that may save the company $1.3 billion annually.

The process for picking the new board majority is already under way, as chief executives, former chief executives and people with business experience are being examined, one of the Obama administration officials said. The new members will join the revamped company as GM’s desirable assets emerge from bankruptcy, one of the officials said.

GM, which has already received $19.8 billion in U.S. Treasury loans, will be the largest manufacturer to file for bankruptcy, surpassing Chrysler LLC. A bankruptcy judge would supervise the sale or liquidation of unprofitable brands, such as Saturn and Hummer, and the 14 factories that would be closed or idled.

The new GM would emerge armed with vehicles from its Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buick and GMC units. It will be built to survive in a market of 10 million annual U.S. car sales, down from 16 million, the Obama administration said.

United Auto Workers

New cars and light trucks probably sold at an annual rate of 9.9 million vehicles in April, based on the average of 7 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Sales totaled 13.2 million in 2008 and averaged 16.8 million this decade through 2007.

The UAW health trust fund for retirees, which is owed $20 billion by GM, will be replaced by a new entity that will own 17.5 percent of the new company with warrants to purchase an additional 2.5 percent. Bondholders and other creditors would get a 10 percent stake in the new GM, with warrants for an additional 15 percent, in exchange for $27.1 billion unsecured debt.

Administration officials said GM will have to comply with executive compensation limits the Treasury announced in February for financial institutions that receive more than $500 million in federal funds, as well as the so-called Dodd Amendment. The provision is named after Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, who attached the pay restrictions to the $787 billion economic stimulus bill Congress passed on Feb. 13.

Those restrictions place a $500,000 salary cap on the top five executives at banks, and the 20 most highly paid employees below them, and require them to forgo cash bonuses.

To contact the reporters on this story: John Hughes in Washington at jhughes5@bloomberg.net; Caroline Salas in New York at csalas1@bloomberg.net; Jeff Green in Southfield, Michigan, at jgreen16@bloomberg.net; Bob Van Voris in New York at rvanvoris@bloomberg.net.

Susan Boyle hospitalized

Susan Boyle hospitalized after losing 'Britain's Got Talent'
On Saturday, Susan Boyle lost "Britain's Got Talent" and on Sunday she lost her way. She was admitted into a clinic suffering from exhaustion. All of the attention finally proved to be too much for this 48-year-old spinster from a small Scottish village. She came to fame a mere seven weeks ago when her first audition for "Britain's Got Talent" became a You Tube sensation.

"Britain's Got Talent" judge Piers Morgan told the BBC that Susan Boyle was feeling "physically and mentally drained" prior to her admission to the Priory clinic. That private facility is well known for helping celebrities deal with mental health issues. In the week leading up to Saturday's final, Susan Boyle's behavior came under fire by the notorious British press.

On Saturday night, Susan Boyle was gracious in defeat. Dance group Diversity bested her in the public vote, receiving 24.9% to her 20.2% of the nearly 4 million votes cast. The third-place finisher, saxophonist Julian Smith, earned 16.4% with the other seven finalists, splitting the remaining 40%. Unlike "American Idol," it costs money to vote in "Britain's Got Talent" — 50 pence (about 80 cents) for each call.

When the shock result was announced, Susan Boyle beamed with delight and told show hosts Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, "The best people won. They are very entertaining lads," before turning to Diversity to say, "Lads, I wish you all the best."




And on the follow-up "Britain's Got More Talent," she reiterated, "I think the best people won — I really do." When that show's host, Stephen Mulhern, asked Boyle about her own plans, she said, "I hope to get an album out. I'll just play it by ear." And when asked to sum up the experience, she said, "What a journey. Unbelievable, and very humbling. Thank you for everything."

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Air France Flight 447 disappears from air, presumed to have crashed


Air France Flight 447 flying from Brazil to France lost contact after its takeoff, reported to have crashed with 228 aboard

Jessica Lutjemeyer



According to Reuters, Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330-200, went missing early Monday after disappearing from the skies and is presumed to have crashed into the Atlantic Ocean.

On board of the missing Air France plane were 216 passengers and 12 crew members, according to Air France company spokeswoman Brigitte Barrand.

Reuters reported that Air France expressed condolences to passengers’ families, implying that the airline did not expect to find any survivors from the alleged crash.

According to an Air France spokesman who relayed the information to press, several plane mechanisms had malfunctioned, and that “a combination of circumstances” caused the plane to crash into the Atlantic Ocean

According to the BBC, Air France Flight 447 left Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s Galeao International Airport at 7 p.m on May 31st. It was scheduled to land at Paris Charles de Gaulle at 11:10 a.m., but reportedly entered a “thunderous zone with strong turbulence,” according to an official Air France statement.

The jet had last contact with Brazil’s Air Force around 9:30 p.m. May 31, but Air France Flight 447 did not state where the plane was, according to Yahoo! News.

About four hours after its takeoff, the plane sent out an automated message specifying that there was an “electrical circuit malfunction” on board.

Though the Air France spokesman said that a lightning strike could be conceivably responsible Air France Flight 447’s crash, most experts said that the likelihood that lightning brought the plane down is slim.

Bill Voss, president and CEO of Flight Safety Foundation, told the Associated Press that while issues surrounding lightning have been discussed since aviation’s dawn, lightning issues “were far more prevalent when aircraft operated at low altitudes.”

Additionally, Voss told the AP that lightning strikes “are less common now, since it’s easier [for planes] to avoid thunderstorms.” Since Planes have specific measures built in to dissipate electricity if a plane is struck, Voss told the AP that he could not “recall in recent history any examples of aircraft being brought down by lightning.”

Additionally, the fact there was no reported mayday call means that the cause of the crash came quick;y. Chris Yates, who is an analyst for Jane’s Aviation, told the AP that “something catastrophic happened on board that has caused this airplane to ditch in a controlled or an uncontrolled fashion.”

A Pentagon official in Washington, D.C. said he hadn’t seen any indication of terrorism or foul play, Yahoo! News reported.

Seven hours after the automated message was received, Paris airport officials declared the plane to be missing, according to BBC News. Shortly thereafter, Brazil’s Air Force confirmed a search and rescue operation near the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha.

The head of investigation for Brazil’s Civil Aeronautics Agency, Douglas Ferreira Machado, that the plane could have been near the coast of Africa by the time contact was lost, based upon the plane’s speed.

Machado told Globo TV that carrying out the search would “take a long time,” adding that the plane’s “black box will be at the bottom of the sea.”

French President, Nicolas Sarkozy expressed his “extreme worry” and planned to visit the Charles de Gaulle airport later Monday, according to Yahoo! News.

The aircraft, registered F-GZCP, had been in operation since April 2005, according to BBC News.

Our Take:
At this time, while the cause of the plane’s disappearance remains unknown, we can remain only hopeful that something soon will be found out. Similarly, our thoughts are with the plane’s passengers and their families. Hopefully, everyone will be all right. This is a sad and troubling incident.

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Nikki Catsouras Accident Pictures

By Jessica Bennett | NEWSWEEK
Published Apr 25, 2009
From the magazine issue dated May 4, 2009


This is a story about a photo—an image so horrific we can't print it in NEWSWEEK. The picture shows the lifeless body of an 18-year-old Orange County girl named Nikki Catsouras, who was killed in a devastating car crash on Halloween day in 2006. The accident was so gruesome the coroner wouldn't allow her parents, Christos and Lesli Catsouras, to identify their daughter's body. But because of two California Highway Patrol officers, a digital camera and e-mail users' easy access to the "Forward" button, there are now nine photos of the accident scene, taken just moments after Nikki's death, circulating virally on the Web. In one, her nearly decapitated head is drooping out the shattered window of her father's Porsche.

The Web is full of dark images, so perhaps the urge to post these tragic pictures isn't surprising. But for the Catsouras family, the photos are a daily torment. Just days after Nikki's death, her father, a local real-estate agent, clicked open an e-mail that appeared to be a property listing. Onto his screen popped his daughter's bloodied face, captioned with the words "Woohoo Daddy! Hey daddy, I'm still alive." Nikki's sisters—Danielle, 18, Christiana, 16, and Kira, 10—have managed to avoid the photos, but live in fear that they'll happen upon them. And so the Catsourases are spending thousands in legal fees in an attempt to stop strangers from displaying the grisly images—an effort that has transformed Nikki's death into a case about privacy, cyber-harassment and image control.

The Catsourases are by no means the first to suffer at the hands of cyber-aggressors. But their story is unique in that it touches on so many of the ways the Web has become perverted: as an outlet for morbid curiosities, a space where cruel behavior suffers little consequence and an uncontrollable forum in which things that were once private—like photos of the dead—can go public in an instant. The case also illustrates how the law has struggled to define how legal concepts like privacy and defamation are translated into an online world.

For the Catsouras family, calling attention to the case has obvious drawbacks: they realize some who read this story may seek out their daughter's death photos, though they desperately hope you won't. But the family decided that sharing its story with NEWSWEEK was worth that risk, to raise awareness of the real suffering caused by their dissemination—and of the need for America's legal system to better protect privacy in the Internet age. "The fact is that we will never get rid of the photos anyway," says Lesli, Nikki's mother. "So we have made a decision to make something good come out of this horrible bad."

From the beginning, Nikki's death had all the makings of a sensational story. She was gorgeous; it was Halloween, and she was driving a $90,000 sports car. She was from Orange County; the Beverly Hills 90210 of the housewives-filled suburbs. And from the outside, the Catsourases seemed to have it all: Christos and Lesli and their four beautiful girls lived in a planned community with man-made parks and multimillion-dollar homes. The family ate dinner together almost every night; their best friends lived next door.

But the family's life wasn't as idyllic as it seemed. In third grade, Nikki was diagnosed with a brain tumor that doctors didn't think she'd survive. It turned out to be benign, but 8-year-old Nikki had to undergo intensive radiation, and doctors told her parents the effects of that treatment on her young brain might show up someday—perhaps by causing changes in her judgment, or impulse control. Her family believes that's why, the summer before the accident, Nikki tried cocaine and ended up in the hospital in a cocaine-induced psychosis. She used cocaine again the night before the accident, her family says. Lesli and Christos discussed checking her into a hospital, but decided against it: she was to visit a psychiatrist the next day, a specialist on brain disorders. So they let her sleep it off, and the next day, the three of them ate lunch together.

Afterward, as Christos left for work, he waved goodbye to his daughter, and Nikki flashed him a peace sign from the couch, smiling. Lesli went to fold laundry. About 10 minutes later, Lesli heard the door slam, and footsteps out the back door. She walked toward the garage, hesitantly, and locked eyes with Nikki, who was backing out of the driveway in Christos's Porsche 911 Carrera—a car she was never allowed to drive. Lesli called out to her, but Nikki looked away, accelerating out the cul-de-sac. Lesli phoned Christos, who began driving around trying to find his daughter and called 911. As he waited on hold, two police cars raced past him, sirens blaring, headed toward the toll road. "Has there been an accident?" he asked. "Yes," the dispatcher told him. "A black Porsche."

nikki catsouras accident pictures

By Jessica Bennett | NEWSWEEK
Published Apr 25, 2009
From the magazine issue dated May 4, 2009

At the accident site, a crane was lifting the remains of a car so crumpled it was hard to tell what it had been. But Christos recognized a hubcap, barely attached, and collapsed onto the pavement. Later, two coroners told the family Nikki had been driving at close to 100mph when she clipped another vehicle, tumbled over the median and smashed into the concrete tollbooth. An autopsy would later reveal that she still had cocaine in her system.

Two weeks later, Lesli's brother, Geoff, got a call from a neighbor. "Have you seen the photos?" he asked. Apparently, photos of the crash scene were circulating around town, via e-mail. Soon they showed up on Web sites, many of them dedicated to hard-core pornography and death. A fake MySpace page was set up in Nikki's name, where she was identified as a "stupid bitch." "That spoiled rich girl deserved it," one commenter wrote. "What a waste of a Porsche," announced another.

The family filed a formal complaint about the photos' release, and three months later, they received a letter of apology from the California Highway Patrol. An investigation had revealed that the images, taken as a routine part of a fatal accident response, had been leaked by two CHP dispatchers: Thomas O'Donnell, 39, and Aaron Reich, 30. O'Donnell, a 19-year CHP veteran, had been suspended for 25 days without pay. Reich quit soon after—for unrelated reasons, says his lawyer. Both men declined requests for comment, but Jon Schlueter, Reich's attorney, says his client sent the images to relatives and friends to warn them of the dangers of the road. "It was a cautionary tale," Schlueter says. "Any young person that sees these photos and is goaded into driving more cautiously or less recklessly—that's a public service."

nikki catsouras accident pictures

By Jessica Bennett | NEWSWEEK
Published Apr 25, 2009
From the magazine issue dated May 4, 2009


While the specifics of the Catsouras case are unique, the broader issue—of how current laws seem impotent when faced with the viral spread of malicious Internet content—is becoming a widespread concern. Until it was shuttered last year, a site called Juicy Campus stirred controversy by spreading rumors about college students' alleged sexual escapades. Sites like DontDateHimGirl leak dirty allegations about unsuspecting men. And two Yale Law School alumnae have spent years going after the perpetrators of nasty gossip about them, posted on a legal-discussion board.

But while libel and slander are regulated by law in the real world, in the cyberworld almost anything goes. In 1996, Congress passed legislation—Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—that immunizes Web sites from liability for the speech of individuals, under the rationale that companies like AOL shouldn't be responsible for the actions of each user. As a consequence, victims of a damaged reputation have little legal recourse. A person could try to sue the individuals who post on a Web site—as the Yale women have done—but in the world of anonymous postings and shared public computers, just finding a person's real name can be next to impossible. Even if you do identify them, and they agree to remove the content, it's unlikely the content is contained to that Web site alone. "We have created a deck that is so stacked against private individuals who want to protect their name and privacy that you don't even have a fighting chance," says Fertik of Reputation Defender.

That's why, legally, anyone can post bloody images of Nikki Catsouras—but it doesn't explain why so many people feel compelled to look. Some are driven by simple curiosity, psychologists say—the same urge that causes passing motorists to gawk at accidents. But online, anonymity allows us to go further, without the fear of public judgment. "It's like having a mask," says John Suler, a cyber-psychologist at Rider University. That mask can cause us to behave in ways we normally wouldn't—fueled by a kind of mob mentality. "The people looking at these photos don't have to face this family, and it disconnects them from the victims they're hurting," says Solove, the author of a book about Web privacy, "The Future of Reputation."

Two and a half years after Nikki's death, her loss hangs over the Catsouras family. They've made her room into a makeshift music studio, but there are still folders with her schoolwork, a closet full of clothes and her posters of Jim Morrison, Radiohead and the Beatles line the walls. Danielle, the daughter closest to Nikki in age, and Kira, the youngest, both study from home now, afraid to face the rumor mill at school. Christiana, the middle daughter, is finishing up her sophomore year, but memories of her sister pop up when she least expects it, like when a firefighter mentioned Nikki in a driver-safety lecture; Christiana fled the room crying.

Lesli and Christos forbid their daughters from using social-networking sites like MySpace, and have enabled computer settings that prevent photos from popping up on their screen. But Nikki's story is pervasive: Google delivers 246,000 results for "Catsouras." Recently, Christiana needed the address to a local hair salon called "Legends." She typed "Legends Ladera Ranch," the name of their town, into Google, and Nikki's name, as the "legend" of "Ladera Ranch," popped up. "It's the simple things you never expect," says Christos. "We live in fear of the pictures. And our kids will never Google their name without the risk of seeing them."

Today the entire family is in therapy, and they've taken out a second mortgage to cover the costs of their legal battle. They still eat dinner as a family each night, but Nikki's seat sits empty. At times, they wish they could put it all behind them. But for the moment, they're focused on the June 1 deadline for a California appeals court to rule on their case. "In a perfect world, I would push a button and delete every one of the images," says Lesli. In the real world, she finds some comfort in working to change the laws, so that photos of some future family's dead child might stay locked away, leaving only smiling, lively images to remember.