From The Associated Press

SEATTLE – Authorities believe the man sought in the slaying of four police officers is still alive and has been aided by a network of friends and family, a police spokesman said Monday night.

Officers believe Maurice Clemmons was shot in the abdomen during the attack on the officers at a Parkland coffee shop, and had speculated he might have died.

But Ed Troyer, a spokesman for the Pierce County Sheriff, said investigators have questioned several people who had provided assistance to Clemmons since the Sunday morning shootings.

“We think his network of people helping him is running out.” Troyer said. “He’s probably on his own.”

Police are also certain Clemmons, 37, was in a Seattle house on Sunday night, but was able to flee before police could contain the area. Police staked out the house overnight before SWAT team members determined early Monday that Clemmons wasn’t there.

Clemmons has had access to handguns, rifles and shotguns, Troyer said.

“It’s unfortunate he’s been a step or two ahead of us.”

Monday morning’s realization that the suspect had not been cornered after all prompted police to fan out across the city, looking for any sign of Clemmons. Authorities posted a $125,000 reward for information leading to his arrest in the Sunday morning shooting rampage.

The manhunt came as authorities in two states took heat for the fact that Clemmons was allowed to walk the streets despite a teenage crime spree in Arkansas that landed him a 95-year prison sentence. He was released early after then-Gov. Mike Huckabee commuted his sentence.

“This guy should have never been on the street,” said Brian D. Wurts, president of the police union in Lakewood, where all four slain officers worked. “Our elected officials need to find out why these people are out.”

Police said they are not sure what prompted Clemmons to assassinate the officers as they worked on their laptop computers at the beginning of their shifts. He was described as increasingly erratic in the past few months and had been arrested earlier this year on charges that he punched a sheriff’s deputy in the face.

Sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer told the Tacoma News-Tribune that Clemmons indicated the night before the shooting “that he was going to shoot police and watch the news.”

Authorities said the gunman singled out the officers and spared employees and other customers at the coffee shop in a suburb about 35 miles south of Seattle. He then fled, but not before he was apparently shot in the torso by one of the dying officers.

Police later learned he may have been holed up at the house in Seattle. After an all-night siege in which they tried to get him out using loudspeakers, explosions and a robot sent into the house, a SWAT team stormed the place and discovered he was not there.

Police spent the rest of the day frantically chasing leads, visiting hundreds of locations as they followed up on tips, at one point cordoning off a park where people thought they saw Clemmons. They also alerted hospitals to be on the lookout for a man seeking treatment for gunshot wounds.

University of Washington officials alerted students by e-mail and text messages to an unconfirmed report that Clemmons might have gotten off a bus on or near the campus.

Investigators also examined the coffee shop for clues. Sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Dave McDonald said that authorities found a handgun carried by the killer, along with a pickup truck belonging to the suspect with blood stains inside.

Killed were Sgt. Mark Renninger, 39, and Officers Ronald Owens, 37, Tina Griswold, 40, and Greg Richards, 42.

Clemmons has an extensive violent criminal history from Arkansas.

On Sunday, Huckabee issued this statement on his Web site: “Should he be found to be responsible for this horrible tragedy, it will be the result of a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington state.”

In seeking leniency from Huckabee, Clemmons wrote the parole board that he was a “misguided fool” when he committed the crimes and “learned through the school of hard knocks to appreciate and respect the rights of others.”

Huckabee cited Clemmons’ youth in granting the request. But Clemmons quickly reverted to his criminal past, violated his parole and was returned to prison. He was released again in 2004.

Clemmons was charged in Washington state earlier this year with assaulting a police officer and raping a child, and investigators in the sex case said he was motivated by visions that he was Jesus Christ and that the world was on the verge of the apocalypse. But he was released from jail after posting bail with the assistance of Jail Sucks Bail Bonds.

Documents related to those charges indicate a volatile personality. In one instance, he is accused of punching a sheriff’s deputy in the face. In another, he is accused of gathering his wife and young relatives and forcing them to undress.

“The whole time Clemmons kept saying things like trust him, the world is going to end soon, and that he was Jesus,” a Pierce County sheriff’s report said.

Neighbors said Clemmons had surveillance cameras installed along the bushes in front of his house, and had mostly kept his blinds shut since he was accused of throwing rocks through the windows of his neighbors’ cars and houses earlier this year.

Neighbor Ken Dietiker said he initially thought Clemmons’ cameras were there to prevent crime. “But now I’m starting to think he’s just paranoid,” he said.

Dietiker said he was frustrated to learn about Clemmons’ record and releases from custody.

“There were all these indicators. Who didn’t see them?” he asked. “That’s what I want to know.”

From The Associated Press

GENEVA –

The world’s largest atom smasher broke the world record for proton acceleration Monday, firing particle beams with 20 percent more power than the American lab that previously held the record.

The power of the Large Hadron Collider’s proton beams is essential to the project’s ultimate goal: smashing particles into each other with enough force to shatter them into the smallest building blocks of matter.

The early-morning test continues a recent sequence of successes that have elated scientists who were disappointed by the $10 billion machine’s collapse last year during its opening in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel under the Swiss-French border. The breakdown required extensive repairs and improvements.

The collider fired two particle beams at 1.18 trillion electron volts early Monday, surpassing the previous high of 0.98 1 TeV held by the Chicago-area Fermilab since 2001, according to the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Physicists measure the energy of the hair’s-width beams, not their speed, because the protons are already traveling close to the speed of light and cannot go much faster.

One proton at 1 TeV is about the energy of the motion of a flying mosquito. When a beam is fully packed with 300,000 billion protons with 7 TeV energy — the goal of the LHC — it is like an aircraft carrier traveling at 20 knots. That is why the scientists are carefully learning how to run it and make sure all protection systems are working, said James Gillies, spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The power level reached Monday isn’t significantly higher than Fermilab’s. More significant advances are expected during the first half of next year when the LHC plans to raise each beam to 3.5 TeV in preparation for experiments create conditions like those 1 trillionth to 2 trillionths of a second after the Big Bang.

Physicists hope that will help them understand suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and supersymmetry and, ultimately, the creation of the universe billions of years ago.

CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer said the early advances have been “fantastic.”

“However, we are continuing to take it step by step, and there is still a lot to do before we start physics in 2010,” he said. “I’m keeping my champagne on ice until then.”

It may take several years before the LHC will in theory be able to detect the elusive Higgs boson, the particle or field believed to give mass to other particles. The discovery would rank among the greatest in physics.

Physicists have used smaller, room-temperature colliders for decades to study the atom. They once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of the atom’s nucleus, but the colliders showed that they are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles.

The LHC operates at nearly absolute zero temperature, colder than outer space, which allows some 2,000 superconducting magnets to guide the protons most efficiently.

More than 8,000 physicists from labs around the world also have work planned for the Large Hadron Collider. The organization is run by its 20 European member nations, with support from other countries, including observers from Japan, India, Russia and the United States, which have made big contributions.

From pc-World

Where there is no app for that on the iPhone, there now is for porn on the competing Android mobile operating system. A Seattle-based company named MiKandi (pronounced “my candy”) has released an app store specifically geared towards porn. The application attempts to create a red light district for adult Android apps allowing adult content providers to set up shop within a MiKandi app (see SFW video).

Boasting only one previous app (an app called Dildroid), MiKandi’s emergence brings with it game-changing potential for smut peddlers on smartphones. In June 2009 the iPhone app called Hottest Girls snuck by Apple’s notoriously fickle approval process and saw the light of day . . . for a very brief period of time before Apple banned it.

“[MiKandi LLC] wanted to find a niche that was not currently being served and adult applications were at the top of the list,” Jennifer McEwen, one of the company’s founders, told Good Gear Guide. “There are no other adult app stores out there to meet this need of users and developers. So we entered the market with MiKandi to provide value to the mobile application ecosystem.”

According to reports, the MiKandi top brass consist of former employees of Microsoft, T-Mobile, Comverse, and adult industry veterans. These executives promise little to no censorship when it comes to “controversial” apps, except in cases when the law is being broken.

“Unfortunately, there will always be someone who doesn’t believe the law applies to them,” McEwan told Good Gear Guide. “If illegal content is uploaded we will take it down immediately and if necessary take legal action against the developer in question.”

The developer kit is currently invite-only, but MiKandi plans on an e-mail marketing campaign to get the word out. MiKandi representatives say it has plans to port its app to BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices as well as Java-compatible mobile phones in early 2010.

From The Associated Press

LYNDON, Kan. – A former Missouri city official previously accused of assaulting his wife was charged Monday with capital murder in the shootings of her and their two teenage daughters in eastern Kansas.

James Kraig Kahler, 46, also was charged with one count of attempted first-degree murder in the shooting of his estranged wife’s 89-year-old grandmother and one count of aggravated burglary. Authorities suspect he broke into the grandmother’s home near Topeka, where the shootings occurred.

During Kahler’s first appearance in Osage County District Court, Judge Phillip Fromme set bail at $10 million and scheduled another hearing for Dec. 10.

Kahler declined to comment as sheriff’s deputies escorted him in handcuffs from jail to the courthouse. He had been scheduled to appear in court in Columbia, Mo., on Wednesday on a domestic assault charge stemming from an altercation with his wife in March that led to the loss of his job as director of Columbia’s Water & Light Department.

A divorce trial for Kahler and his 44-year-old wife, Karen, was scheduled to start Dec. 21, but a settlement hearing was planned for Friday. Court records showed that James Kahler complained of financial pressures and the couple had been sparring over their children.

The Kahlers’ daughters, Emily, 18, and Lauren, 16, were killed Saturday, along with their mother. Karen Kahler’s grandmother, Dorothy Wight, 89, was injured. The couple’s 10-year-old son, Sean, was at Wight’s house south of Burlingame on Saturday but was uninjured.

Dan Pingelton, a Columbia attorney representing Karen Kahler in the divorce, described James Kahler as “controlling.”

“From the facts I heard, I think he was a misogynist,” Pingelton said.

He said James Kahler refused to see his daughters. Emily attended the St. Louis College of Pharmacy and Lauren was an honors student at a Columbia high school.

Pingelton said James Kahler set up a visit with his son over the Thanksgiving holiday.

“He never was interested in his daughters — only his son,” Pingelton said. “And I think that is the reason that little boy is alive today.”

A single capital murder count covers the three killings; Kansas law allows the death penalty for multiple murders arising from a single “scheme or course of conduct.”

But the Kansas attorney general’s office also filed three alternative charges of premeditated first-degree murder in what Deputy Attorney General Barry Disney called a “fallback position” should jurors fail to convict James Kahler of the capital charge.

James Kahler and his family had moved to Missouri from Picker County, Texas, in July 2008 when he took the job in Columbia. His $150,000 annual salary made him the city’s highest paid employee.

But he was asked to resign in September and was paid two months’ salary and one month of severance. In an Oct. 9 court filing, he asked for relief from the temporary monthly payments of $2,030 in child support and $1,500 in maintenance he was required to provide his family.

James Kahler said he expected to remain unemployed “for a substantial period of time,” adding that he was prevented by court order from withdrawing money from his retirement account pending the divorce.

In court on Monday, Fromme asked James Kahler whether he could afford an attorney and Kahler responded that he had “some funds.” Nevertheless, the judge appointed the state’s death penalty defense unit in Topeka to represent him.

James Kahler lived in Columbia until several weeks ago, according to neighbors. On Nov. 25, he notified the Missouri court of his new address in Meriden, Kan., northeast of Topeka.

In her court petition, Karen Kahler described a “history of controlling force” throughout the couple’s 23-year marriage. She recounted a New Year’s Eve 2008 fight in Weatherford, Texas, during which James Kahler pushed her hard enough that she banged her head on the street.

“I’m afraid it will escalate so far that someone is going to be seriously hurt,” she wrote.

Pingelton said Karen Kahler believed her husband was hacking into her e-mail and committing minor acts of vandalism around her home.

“Karen was fearful of him, but really she was honestly more afraid he was going to kill himself,” he said. “Nobody had any idea he would consider doing this.”

From The Associated Press

ORLANDO, Fla. – A German tourist has been arrested on charges of making a false bomb threat while visiting Walt Disney World.

A report from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office says 37-year-old Jochen Naumann of Leipzig, Germany, was going through the security checkpoint at the entrance of the Magic Kingdom Sunday when he told a Disney employee he had two bombs in his back pack.

The report says the Disney employee questioned Naumann and he repeated the threat.

A sheriff’s deputy had a bomb-sniffing dog check Naumann’s bag and no explosive devices were found.

The report says Naumann claimed he was only joking. He was arrested on a charge of making a false report of a bomb and taken to the Orange County Jail.

Jail records show bond was set at $10,000. They do not list an attorney.

From The Associated Press

Churchill Downs, the home of the Kentucky Derby, will host music stars including Bon Jovi and Kenny Chesney during a three-day festival that officials hope can boost the track’s income.

Officials said Monday that the festival will feature more than 65 bands playing everything from classic rock to country to bluegrass.

Officials with Churchill Downs Inc., the race track’s parent company, says the festival is called “HullabaLOU” and is set for July 23-25. Five stages will be set up throughout the sprawling 147-acre facility. If it’s successful, it could become an annual event.

The Rolling Stones and other huge rock ‘n’ roll acts have played at the track in recent years to augment its income from horse racing.

From The Associated Press

ABC says Chris Brown will appear on its “20/20″ newsmagazine Dec. 11.

In what’s billed as an in-depth interview, the singer will discuss his assault of ex-girlfriend and recording superstar Rihanna in February. He is on probation for the beating.

Robin Roberts, anchor of ABC’s “Good Morning America,” conducts the interview. It was taped last weekend.

ABC spokesman Jeffrey Schneider says clips may also air on “Good Morning America.” He says Brown will not perform live.

Brown is scheduled to release his album “Graffiti” on Dec. 8. He has previously spoken about the attack on MTV News and “Larry King Live.”

Rihanna was interviewed this month by ABC’s Diane Sawyer.

From The Associated Press

Al Alberts, a founding member of the singing group, The Four Aces, and a longtime TV talent show host in Philadelphia, has died. He was 87.

Chris Alberts says his father died Friday at home in Arcadia, Fla. He says the apparent cause of death was complications from kidney failure.

Alberts featured child singers and dancers on his “Al Alberts Showcase” for more than three decades in Philadelphia.

He was a founding member of The Four Aces, which recorded such hits as “Three Coins in the Fountain,” and “Love is a Many Splendored Thing.”

Chris Alberts says everyone in Philadelphia seems to know someone who appeared on his father’s show.

Al Alberts, born Al Albertini, is also survived by wife Stella and son Al Jr.

From The Associated Press

NEW YORK – Giant balloons, floats, marching bands and clowns with confetti brought smiles to hundreds of thousands of revelers eager to catch a glimpse of a parade as steeped in Thanksgiving Day tradition as turkey and pumpkin pie.

Crowds six to seven people deep lined the streets of Manhattan on Thursday for the 83rd annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as merrymakers gathered nationwide for massive parades in cities such as Detroit and Philadelphia.

Soldiers in war zones received phone calls of appreciation from President Barack Obama, while astronauts hovering above the Earth’s surface feasted on turkey smuggled aboard the space shuttle Atlantis.

In New York City, Miss America Katie Stam waved to crowds from a Statue of Liberty float she shared with Meb Keflezighi, the first American in 27 years to win the New York City Marathon.

Shailesh Dighe and his family came to the fabled parade to snap pictures of celebrities including rapper Jay Sean and singer-actress Keke Palmer. Despite the crowds, Dighe said the parade is “totally worth it.”

“When you watch it on TV, you don’t get that feeling,” said Dighe, who splits his time between Manhattan and Princeton, N.J.

For the first time, the parade route bypassed Broadway, which cuts a diagonal slice through Manhattan, as it made its way south from the Upper West Side to the finish at Macy’s flagship store in Herald Square.

The new route traverses the grid of the city’s streets and avenues, includes turns around five corners, and is slightly longer than in previous years — 2.65 miles compared with 2.5 miles.

Johanna Castillo, 38, of Guttenberg, N.J., said the new route seemed to better accommodate the crowds.

“I was very blessed to get here at the time I did and find a spot” a half-hour before parade time, said Castillo, who arrived with her two children.

Maryann Alonzo, 48, of Queens, N.Y., has been coming to the parade since she was a baby. She showed up Thursday with her daughter and friends to cheer on her father, who’s been performing in the parade for 25 years as a clown.

“This is our Thanksgiving,” Alonzo said. “More than the food.”

Celebrity entertainment included Italian tenor Andrea Boccelli, comedian Jimmy Fallon, former “American Idol” star Katharine McPhee and singers Gloria Gaynor and Carly Simon.

Elsewhere, tens of thousands gathered in the streets of downtown Detroit for the 83rd annual America’s Thanksgiving Parade. The country’s longest-run Thanksgiving Day parade was held in Philadelphia for its 90th year.

In Detroit, where the September unemployment rate was 17.3 percent, parade organizers set up three locations where revelers could drop off donations of canned food for the area food bank.

Eugene Peterson, 35, an unemployed construction worker from Detroit, said he had plenty to be thankful for.

“I’m thankful we have a president who understands we’re going through a hard time,” Peterson said. “I’m thankful they extended unemployment (benefits) because there ain’t no jobs around here. It’s kind of like government showing yeah, they care.”

Aboard Atlantis, astronauts expecting to give thanks with pantry leftovers were surprised by turkey dinners with candied yams, freeze-dried cornbread stuffing and green beans — just add water. NASA suspected the station’s new skipper was responsible for the Thanksgiving feast.

Obama enjoyed a quiet holiday at the White House with his family and telephoned 10 members of the U.S. military stationed in war zones to thank them for their service.

As daylight faded in Afghanistan, soldiers huddled inside a crude wooden hut to tuck into Thanksgiving turkeys the unit itself had fattened and to give thanks for having survived a year of combat.

Dense fog delayed some flights Thursday for Thanksgiving travelers headed to the Washington and Baltimore areas.

The Federal Aviation Administration says the fog prompted a ground stop for flights arriving Thursday morning at all three Washington-area airports. Departing flights were apparently not affected. The FAA lifted its ground stop by 10:30 a.m.

From The Associated Press

Julie Andrews is to perform in London, 30 years after her last appearance on the British stage.

Concert promoters AEG Europe said Wednesday the star of such musicals as “Mary Poppins” and “The Sound of Music” will appear at London’s 02 Arena on May 8.

Andrews had non-cancerous throat nodules removed in 1997. The operation initially left her unable to sing.

Andrews has since starred in “The Princess Diaries” and was the voice of Queen Lillian in the “Shrek” film series.

Tickets go on sale Thursday.

Andrews says in a statement “to perform once again in my homeland on the London stage will be a wonderful moment — it is where it all began for me.”