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‘Bridezillas’: Windermere bride chides kids, gets unusual payback

President Obama’s speech to rearrange Wednesday schedule

President Barack Obama’s speech on Afghanistan will receive wide coverage Wednesday night and rearrange the prime-time schedule.

The speech starts at 8 p.m. ET.

ABC, CBS and NBC have announced they will carry Obama’s speech. Diane Sawyer will be joined by George Stephanopoulos on ABC. Scott Pelley anchors for CBS. Brian Williams will be joined by David Gregory on NBC.

You can expect coverage from cable channels CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC and Fox Business Network. Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper will anchor for CNN. After the speech, MSNBC will pick up “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” and air an updated version of “The Last Word” at 11 p.m. Neil Cavuto will anchor for Fox Business Network.

When I have information on more channels, I’ll pass that along.

Casey Anthony: lost day in court, but who’s to blame?

The short day in the Casey Anthony trial had everyone talking. The jury never entered the courtroom, no defense witnesses took the stand, and Chief Judge Belvin Perry chewed out bickering attorneys.

What was going on? WESH-Channel 2 offered a fascinating conversation that spread the blame for the stalemate among the defense, the prosecution and Perry.  

Attorney Richard Hornsby told WESH’s Bob Kealing that  Judge Perry is partly responsible, because Cheney Mason should be acting as lead attorney for the defense.

“Judge Perry should be asking Cheney Mason: Why aren’t you handling more important aspects of this case?” Hornsby said. ”He [Perry] has Jose Baez, the inexperienced attorney, who’s commanding the trial and setting the schedule. Clearly, Jose isn’t ready for prime time.”

Attorney Jeff Deen, also on WESH, expanded on that idea: “Jose Baez stepped into the big leagues. He can’t step into the batter’s box and ask people to throw it underhanded.”

Hornsby added that Perry “should not be yelling at Jose Baez but be yelling at Cheney Mason. At the end of the day, Cheney Mason is the one who will be looked at as the lead attorney on appeal.”

Baez always comes up with excuses, and that’s the wrong way to respond to a judge, Hornsby said.

WKMG-Channel 6 legal analyst Mark NeJame compared Baez’s complaints to being caught speeding and saying that everyone is doing it. “Too bad, you got caught,” NeJame said.

NeJame added that Jeff Ashton is “a smart, able prosecutor who you don’t mess with. He does it by the rules.”  

And NeJame said that Perry was guided by one issue above all.  “The biggest thing here is to make sure she receives a fair trial,” NeJame said.

WOFL-Channel 35 legal analyst Diana Tennis said that Perry is at the end of his rope and predicted that the judge would make both sides miserable. ”I think there’s enough blame to go around,” she said. “I’m hoping they took the afternoon and got their acts together and we can see some evidence tomorrow in this murder trial.”  

Deen told WESH’s Amanda Ober that the dislike between Baez and Ashton was affecting the trial. “They don’t talk to each other, and that venom and that vitriol is becoming apparent now, and it’s really affecting Miss Anthony’s due process rights,” Deen said.

Anthony is charged with first-degree murder in the death of her daughter, Caylee.

“The profession is going to demand they do better than this, and I think it’s both sides,” Deen said. “I understand Mr. Baez has been the focus, but he didn’t get there by himself.”

WFTV-Channel 9’s Kathi Belich quoted the station’s legal analyst, Bill Sheaffer, as saying he had never seen anything like it. “The jury is suffering because of the delays, and so are taxpayers,” she said.

Judge O.H. Eaton Jr., a legal analyst for WESH, said the trial was at a serious point. Eaton explained that Perry could strike witnesses, which probably would be reversible and would set up a claim of ineffective counsel.

China Beat on Break

We’re going to put China Beat on hiatus from now until early July so I can get settled in Shanghai (where I’ll be based for the next couple of months) and all of our consulting editors and contributors can enjoy some summer vacation.

If you’re looking for something to read while we’re on break, check out Danwei, which has recently relaunched with a new format; it’s now “A web magazine about China,” with the first issue featuring an in-depth look at Chinese musical instruments.

For readers trying to find a good China-focused summer book, allow me to recommend Alan Paul’s Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues, and Becoming a Star in Beijing, released in March by Harper Collins. I devoured this very funny, very touching book last week in a couple of marathon Starbucks visits while I fought jet lag, then ventured over to M on the Bund yesterday afternoon to hear Paul talk about his music (as head of the Beijing blues band Woodie Alan) and writing. But, as LeVar Burton used to say on Reading Rainbow, you don’t have to take my word for it—I was led to add Big in China to my Kindle by Jeremiah Jenne’s great review over at Jottings from the Granite Studio.

We’ll be back in a few weeks; until then, you can always follow our occasional Twitter updates and links to suggested readings at @chinabeat.

Jon Stewart tells Fox News: I don’t want to be a political player

Jon Stewart turned fierce this morning on “Fox News Sunday,” saying he is a comedian first and not an activist.

“Being a comedian is harder than what you do,” Stewart tersely told Chris Wallace. “What I do is much harder. I put material through a process, a comedic process.”

Wallace said he thought that Stewart wanted to be a political player.

“You’re dead wrong,” the host of “The Daily Show” said. “Do I want my voice heard? Absolutely.”

Stewart asked: “Am I an activist in your mind, an ideological, partisan activist?” 

Wallace said yes. Stewart shot back, “You can’t understand, because of the world you live in, that there is not a designed, ideological agenda on my part to affect partisan change because that’s the soup you swim in.”

It was quite an unusual interview, because Stewart took so many swipes at Fox News Channel, saying its viewers are the most consistently misinformed. He happily owned up to calling Fox News Channel “a relentless agenda-driven 24 hour news opinion propaganda delivery system.”

It is “quite easy” to deliver such criticisms, Stewart said, because he feels them in his soul. But he doesn’t feel that other news organizations, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and ABC, are propaganda systems pushing liberal views.   

Rather, Stewart told Wallace that news organizations have “a bias toward sensationalism and laziness,” citing the Rep. Anthony Weiner scandal as an example.

Stewart sees Wallace as a counterweight to Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck at Fox News Channel, “because otherwise it’s just pure talk radio.” Stewart said he had no beef  with Wallace, calling him a tough and fair interviewer. 

Stewart said he was perfectly placed on Comedy Central and acknowledged that he only tells parts of stories. “It’s about absurdity and corruption, and that is the agenda we push,” Stewart said.

Wallace saw a political comment in Stewart’s comparing the style of a Sarah Palin video with the technique of a herpes drug commercial.

“You really think that’s a political comment?” Stewart said. “You’re insane.”

‘60 Minutes’ repeats report on Marilu Henner, others who can remember every day

CBS’ “60 Minutes“ tonight repeats one of its most memorable reports from last season: Lesley Stahl’s look at people with superior autobiographical memory.

Stahl realized that one of her friends, “Taxi” star Marilu Henner, had the gift and introduced her to others who have it.

“It’s like putting in a DVD and it cues up to certain places. I am there again … seeing things visually as I would have that day,” Henner says.

Dr. James McGaugh, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine, tested Henner and announced that she is the sixth person known to the scientific world to have the ability.

“They can do with their memories what you and I can do about yesterday … and they can do it every day,” McGaugh tells Stahl. “It could be a new chapter. … These people come and display a kind of memory we’ve never seen before, and we have to say, ‘Woo, what is that about?’ So we’re going to take a look and see if we can figure that out.  And it could be very important.”

Henner meets four others who have superior autobiographical memory, but a fifth person, Jill Price, declined to join the gathering. Price complains of being haunted by the stream of memories, but said the ability has forced her to strive for a more meaningful life.

The CBS newsmagazine airs at 7 p.m. tonight on WKMG-Channel 6.

Excerpt: The Tree That Bleeds: A Uighur Town on the Edge

By Nick Holdstock

Nick Holdstock, whom readers might remember from a piece on the 2009 riots in Xinjiang he posted here last month, has a new book coming out later this week from Luath Press. In The Tree That Bleeds: A Uighur Town on the Edge, Holdstock recounts the story of his year teaching English in Yining, a border town that in 1997 saw an outbreak of violence, and his efforts to discover the truth about what happened there. Here, in two excerpts from the book’s introduction, Holdstock explains what brought him to Yining and describes his journey to and first encounters with the city.

I was looking at the dome of a mosque when I heard the soldiers. The bark of their shouts, the stamp of their feet. I turned and saw rifles, black body armour, a line of blank faces. We were on Erdaoqiao, a busy shopping street in Urumqi, where a moment before the main concerns had been the prices of trousers and shirts. But the crowd did not scatter in fear at the sight of these armed men. They parted in a calm, unhurried manner, as if this were a routine sight, almost beneath notice. For a moment the street was quiet but for the soldiers’ marching chant. As soon as they passed, the salesmen lifted their cries; haggling resumed. But there were more soldiers on the other side of the street, another black crocodile marching through. Policemen stood in twos and threes every hundred metres, outside a bank, a kebab stall, in front of the pedestrian subway. A riot van drove up and stopped at the intersection.

Although this display of force was disconcerting, it wasn’t a surprise: nine months before, on 5 July 2009, this street had seen some of the worst violence in China since the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Urumqi is the capital of Xinjiang, China’s largest province. There has been a long history of unrest in the region, between Uighurs (Turkic?speaking Muslims who account for about half the region’s 23 million people) and Han Chinese (the ethnic majority in China). The events of July 2009 marked an escalation in the conflict. During the afternoon of 5 July, around 300 Uighur students gathered in the centre of Urumqi. By late afternoon, the crowd had swelled to several thousand; by evening they had become violent. Official figures put the number of dead at 200, with hundreds more injured. News reports on state television showed footage of protesters beating and kicking people on the ground. Video shot by officials at the hospital the previous night showed patients with blood streaming down their heads. Two lay on the fruit barrow that friends had used to transport them. A four?year?old boy lay on a trolley, dazed by his head injury and his pregnant mother’s disappearance. He was clinging to her hand when a bullet hit her.

By the following morning the streets were under the tight control of thousands of riot officers and paramilitary police, who patrolled the main bazaar armed with batons, bamboo poles and slingshots. Burnt cars and shops still smouldered. The streets were marked with blood and broken glass and the occasional odd shoe. Mobile phone services were said to be blocked and internet connections cut.

There were two main explanations for what had caused these riots. On the one hand, a government statement described the protests as ‘a pre?empted, organized violent crime’ that had been ‘instigated and directed from abroad, and carried out by outlaws in the country’. Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency, reported that the unrest ‘was masterminded by the World Uighur Congress’ led by Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur businesswoman jailed in China before being released into exile in the US. Wang Lequan, then leader of the Xinjiang Communist Party, said that the incident revealed ‘the violent and terrorist nature of the separatist World Uighur Congress’. He said it had been ‘a profound lesson in blood’.

He went on to claim that the aim of the protests had been to cause as much destruction and chaos as possible. Although he mentioned a recent protest in the distant southern province of Guangdong, he dismissed this as a potential cause.

But according to the WUC, this incident was the real cause of the protest. They claimed that the clash in Guangdong province was sparked by a man who posted a message on a website claiming six Uighur boys had ‘raped two innocent girls’. This false claim was said to have incited a crowd to murder several Uighur migrant workers at a factory in the area. Rebiya Kadeer claimed that the ‘authorities’ failure to take any meaningful action to punish the [Han] Chinese mob for the brutal murder of Uighurs’ was the real cause of the protest.

The WUC’s version of the events of 5 July was that several thousand Uighur youths, mostly university students, had peacefully gathered to express their unhappiness with the authorities’ handling of the killings in Guangdong. They claimed that the police had responded with tear gas, automatic rifles and armoured vehicles. They alleged that during the crackdown some were shot or beaten to death by Chinese police or even crushed by armoured vehicles.

The WUC also reported widespread violence in the wake of the protests. Their website claimed that Chinese civilians, using clubs, bars, knives and machetes, were killing Uighurs throughout the province: ‘they are storming the university dormitories, Uighur residential homes, workplaces and organizations, and massacring children, women and elderly’. They published a list of atrocities – ‘a Uighur woman who was carrying a baby in her arms was mutilated along with her infant baby… over one thousand ethnic Han Chinese armed with knives and machetes marched into Xinjiang Medical University and engaged in a mass killing of the Uighurs… two Uighur female students were beheaded; their heads were placed on a stake on the middle of the street’ – none of which could be confirmed. This post was later removed.

There is still much that is unclear about what actually happened during that violent week in July 2009. But however terrible its cost – whether it was a massacre of peaceful protestors, an orchestrated episode of violence, or something in between – it was not without precedent. In Xinjiang, there have been many protests which were either ‘riots’ or ‘massacres’, depending on who you believe. The largest of these took place on 5 February 1997, in the border town of Yining. This too was perhaps a protest, possibly a riot, maybe even a massacre. There were certainly shootings, injuries, and deaths.

As for what happened, and why, it was hard to say. At the time there was an immediate storm of conflicting accounts, of accusation and counter?claim. The only chance of learning what had happened was to actually go there. And so in 2001, I did. I got a job teaching English. I stayed for a year. I uncovered a story that is still happening now.

But all of this must wait a moment. First, you must arrive.

The Journey

Your train waits in Beijing West one thick September night. The air crowds close around, pressing on your head and chest, desperate to transfer a fraction of its heat.

It will be a long journey. Thankfully you’ll be travelling in relative luxury: a padded compartment known as a ‘soft sleeper’. You slide open its door and find the other three berths already occupied. You heave in your suitcases. You climb into bed. Beijing lapses into haze and you are far from here.

In the morning you wake to yellow valleys honeycombed with caves. Crops crowd the plateaus, anxious not to waste the space. It’s a rehearsal for the desert and it is Shanxi. Or Shaanxi. But certainly not here.

You prowl the train in search of food. The restaurant car is full of people eating fatty meat. You find a seat opposite a middle?aged Han couple. The man is wearing a dark blue suit; the woman’s pink sweater is embroidered with flowers in silver thread.

They ask where you’re from and going. When you say ‘England,’ they smile. They frown when you say, ‘Yining.’

‘That is not a good place,’ he says. ‘It has a lot of trouble,’ she adds.

‘What kind of trouble?’

He shakes his head, mutters, looks out the window. Then your food arrives. You eat a plate of oily pork. You go back to bed.

When you wake the plain is a vast grey sheet stretched taut between the mountains. It is such a vacant space that every detail seems important: a man walking on his own, without a house or car in sight; ruined buildings; jutting graves; men in lumpen uniforms who salute the train.

Grey slowly shifts to black; sand firms into rock. Then, in place of monochrome, the space is bright with colour. Purple, yellow, red, and orange, mixed like melted ice cream.

Moving on and further westwards. The sun refuses shadow. You pull into the oasis of Turpan, a green island in a wilderness, its shores lapped by grit. You buy a bunch of grapes from a Uighur woman wearing a pink headscarf. They are almost too sweet.

Hours pass, you slip through mountains, speed through a tunnel of rock. You emerge onto to a plain of blades, white and turning, harvesting wind, chopping it into power.

Now, after 2,192km, you are getting close: this is Urumqi, the provincial capital of Xinjiang. From here it is only another 500km. But this is the end of the train.

During the trip your luggage must have bred with the other bags for now there are more than you can carry. It takes two trips to get your bags from the train, and after this, as you stand on the platform, you wonder what you are doing. Why have you come so far, on your own? What if something happens?

But there is no time for worry. You must move your bags. You grunt and heave, to no avail. They are just too heavy. Then you see a man in faded blue jacket and trousers, a flat cap perched on his head. He catches your eye and comes over. He says he will help.

Staggering through the streets, every building that you pass is either half-built or half?collapsed. Dirt is the principal colour. There is a street where the shops only sell engine parts and the pavement is stained with oil. The shops are cubes that flicker, fade as men spark engine hearts.

You stop to rest. The sky is grey. Two boys approach with a bucket. In it, a kitten is curled.

‘How much will you give me?’ says one.

‘I don’t want it,’ you say.

‘You can’t have it,’ says the other, who swings the bucket and laughs.

Two more streets and you reach your hotel. The stone floor of the lobby is wet, as is the stairs, the corridors, where men wander in vests.

In your room the man names a price 10 times too high. After you threaten to call the room attendant, he settles for five times too much.

The room has two beds. The other bed is occupied by an old Japanese man. He sits in bed reading a book of Go problems, smoking cheap cigarettes. His underpants hang on a line at head height. At night the breath whistles out of his mouth like the wind through a crack in a door.

Next morning you go to the bus station. They refuse to sell you a ticket because you don’t have a work permit.

‘We can’t give you a ticket without it,’ says a woman in a baggy black uniform.

‘But I can’t get the permit until I go there.’

‘Not my problem.’

‘How I am supposed to get there?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘I’ll report you.’

She shrugs. ‘Go ahead.’

You raise your voice. You plead. You do not get a ticket.

After an hour of angry wandering you find a car willing to take you. You haggle, fix a price, then wait for two hours while the driver tries to find other passengers.

It is midday when you leave. For the first few hours the road is smooth motorway and all but deserted. Exhaustion segues to sleep; potholes bring you back. Straw?coloured hills rise on both sides, at first distant, then slowly converging, until they funnel the road. You wind between them, seeing only their slopes; then abruptly there is a vista. You are on the edge of a lake so blue and vast you cannot see its far shore. The road follows its edge, till mountains loom, and you begin a hairpin descent. The last of the light straggles into the valley below, lingering in jars of honey on shelves by the side of the road.

You assume the crash position as the car hurtles toward lorries. All you get are panic flashes of the countryside: cotton fields, sheep?speckled hills, tough-looking men on horses. It is three days since you left Beijing. You have the feeling that you are on the frontier of another land, that you have come to the end of China.

It is dark when you reach the teachers’ college. A small woman you at first mistake for a child lets you into your flat. The strip light shows worn linoleum, concrete floors, a kitchen with a sink on bricks, no pots or any stove. There are no curtains. The toilet is a hole in the floor.

‘What do you think?’ she squeaks.

You look around, consider your verdict.

‘Very nice,’ you say.

Now, at last, you have arrived. Welcome to Yining.

* * *

For all its remoteness, Yining is a place that people have heard of. It has been in the Lonely Planet guide since the first edition.

In Yining you won’t know whether to laugh or cry. Nothing seems to work and half the population seems permanently drunk.

The guide had mellowed slightly by its fifth edition.

Yining is a grubby place with a few remnants of fading Russian architecture.

Despite these ringing endorsements, there were already 10 other foreigners in Yining when I arrived. Eleanor was the first I met. She was tall, friendly and from Derbyshire, and had already been teaching in the college for two years. She introduced me to some people.

*

The bus crawled down Liberation Road, stopping, starting, presenting tableaux: nicotine?coloured apartments; muffled road sweepers waking dust; a donkey pulling a cart of red apples; a crowd gathered round an argument, one man pointing at a crushed bicycle, another leaning against a taxi, slowly shaking his head.

We veered right at a roundabout topped by a stone eagle. A soldier stood outside a concrete gate, a rifle by his side. More turns later we arrived at the town square, which was paved in pink and white tiles.

Two Uighur men were waiting for us, one very tall, one short, both with thin moustaches. The smaller smiled, and said in English, ‘Welcome to Ghulja. I’m Murat.’

‘Does he mean Yining?’ I whispered to Eleanor, but Murat nonetheless heard. He snorted. ‘That’s what the Chinese call it. We say “Ghulja”. It means a wild male sheep.’

Ismail was the taller of the two. He and Murat ran an English course in a local school. We had lunch in a restaurant called King of Kebabs. A fat man sat outside threading lumps of meat onto skewers. A cauldron of rice and carrots steamed next to him. When he saw us he stood and boomed a greeting. He shook hands with Murat, Ismail and me, nodded to Eleanor.

Inside was dim and noisy with the sounds of eating. Ismail gestured for us to sit then said, ‘This is a good place, very clean. You know, Uighur people are Muslims. We shouldn’t smoke or drink. What would you like to eat? Have you had polo? It is traditional Uighur food.’

Polo turned out to be the rice and carrot dish I’d seen steaming outside. In addition, there were soft chunks of mutton and a tomato and onion salad dressed in dark vinegar.

‘Is it good?’

‘Very.’

Ismail grinned and said, ‘You must stay for a long time!’ After that we ate in silence until Murat said, ‘Many Han people make a noise when they eat.’

Ismail chimed in, ‘That’s just them speaking!’

I kept eating, quietly, a little shocked by the vehemence of their dislike. It also surprised me that they were saying such things to someone they had only just met.

After lunch we strolled through the square. Huge propaganda posters towered overhead. A composite photo loomed above, showing three generations of Chinese leaders: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin (the then?current leader). Next to it was a 20?foot poster showing all 57 ethnic groups in China. They were smiling and wearing brightly coloured costumes. They seemed about to launch into song.

There was a sense of transition on crossing the square. The bright cubes of the Han shops, their handbags, shoes and machine parts, quickly faded into market stalls – to scarves, carpets, glassware, packs of henna, crystal sugar, dried grapes, black tea and other products more reminiscent of a Central Asian bazaar. Bare heads were replaced by a hundred hats, by homburgs, trilbies, flat caps, pork pies, baseball caps and most of all, a boxy, stiffened skullcap called a doppa.

Murat turned and whispered, ‘Don’t tell anyone, but I MUST go to the toilet.’

‘OK. Isn’t that one, over there?’

‘Yes, but I must go home.’

As we watched him scamper off, Ismail cleared his throat.

‘It takes him a long time. He has this problem. With his…’

He didn’t know the word. Eventually we settled on ‘kidney’. Eleanor chose this moment to mention that she thought our phones were bugged. She said that sometimes she heard noises from the other end, and that there had been some dubious coincidences, like going to make a complaint about something and finding that the person in question had already taken steps to nullify her criticisms. At the time I thought she was being paranoid. After a few weeks in Yining, I was not so sure.

When Murat returned he looked pleased with himself, as if he had performed some difficult task well. He suggested looking round the market. As we drew near the entrance – a large faux?Islamic gate – three men selling pictures of Mecca started shouting at us.

‘What are they saying?’

Murat laughed. ‘They are saying ‘Hello Russians!’

There has been a long history of Russian involvement in Yining: Russia occupied the valley from 1871–81; after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviets were granted special trading rights in the area and had a consulate in the town. Following the Sino?Soviet pact of 1924, Russian involvement in the province increased to the point where 80% of the region’s trade was with Russia. Sheng Shicai – the warlord ruler of the province from 1934–44 – relied heavily on Soviet military aid. Russia was forced to withdraw from the province in 1943, after Sheng Shicai shifted his allegiance to the Nationalists. Following their withdrawal, inflation rose and trade virtually stopped. But they were soon presented with an opportunity to reestablish their influence when a revolt broke out among the Kazakhs, who had been especially dependent on trade with Russia. Direct Soviet military aid on the side of the rebels led to the capture of Yining in 1944, and the founding of the East Turkestan Republic (ETR). The Russian presence in Yining remained strong until the Communists took power in 1949. Relations between Russia and China worsened throughout the 1950s, culminating in the Sino?Soviet rift of 1960 and the eradication of Soviet influence from the region.

Today there are few traces of the city’s Russian past. Apart from the Russian consulate, which is now a restaurant, there are only a few scattered buildings, some within the teachers’ college. Only a handful of Russians still live in the city, running a bakery that makes perfect cakes.

So given that most foreigners in Yining had previously been Russian, it was logical that Eleanor and I should be Russian too. I didn’t mind; it made a change from everyone thinking I was American.

The market was dim and busy, full of rows of traders selling leather jackets, wraps and hats, doppas, stiff suits, thick jumpers, sensible shoes, armoured trench coats, various fur things. The traders whistled at me, trying to get my attention. Ismail and Murat shook hands with many of them. I asked how they knew them.

‘Ismail and I used to do business. We used to sell leather.’

‘Why did you stop?’

‘Things are difficult now. Business is bad.’

Ismail sighed. ‘Many people don’t have jobs. Especially Uighur people. Maybe 80% are unemployed now.’

‘Why’s that?’

Ismail looked at the floor while Murat said, ‘In this city, there are some problems. Maybe you don’t know. It is difficult.’ He coughed then said, ‘Please excuse us. We must go and pray.’

It was their third prayer of the day. Eleanor and I drifted round the back streets while they went to the mosque. A group of kids took time from booting a ball around to giggle at us; the braver ones ventured a hello. Two men sat playing chess, their stillness broken by sudden aggression as one slammed a bishop down. Peace returned, and then was broken. The sky showed no sign of being bored with blue.

From The Tree That Bleeds: A Uighur Town on the Edge, © 2011 by Luath Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Casey Anthony: Dr. Werner Spitz takes some big hits

Dr. Werner Spitz, the renowned forensic pathologist, had a rough day as a defense witness at the Casey Anthony trial. Did he remind you of Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men” or Humphrey Bogart in “The Caine Mutiny”?

It was painful to watch Spitz, who has had a long, distinguished career. A friend said that prosecutor Jeff Ashton did what he had to do in cross examining Spitz. Might the jury sympathize with Spitz? Some TV analysts certainly weren’t.

“Did I want to see Dr. Spitz come here and possibly end his career on this note?” WFTV-Channel 9 legal analyst Bill Sheaffer asked. “No, I did not. You want to see a distinguished gentleman like himself end his career on a high note.”

Sheaffer said Spitz offered  a ”ridiculous hypothesis” that duct tape was put on the dead Caylee Anthony. Casey Anthony is charged with first-degree murder in the death of her daughter, Caylee.

Sheaffer decried Spitz’s implication that the medical examiner or her office had staged a photo of the remains. “A couple of jurors laughed and smirked” at Spitz’s comments, Sheaffer noted, a bad sign for the defense.

Richard Hornsby, offering analysis for WESH-Channel 2, was equally frank. “Dr. Spitz did not come across as very well versed in the facts of this case, which is what’s important,” Hornsby said. “They might have been better off with not even putting him on” because “the jury is probably looking at the defense theory and finds it completely incredible.”

Hornsby praised Ashton for a thorough job of cross examining Spitz. “I don’t think there’s an attorney in this town that really thinks that Dr. Spitz convinced that jury of much of  anything except that he’s an old guy,” Hornsby said.

I admire that blunt talk. What did you think?

But attorney Hal Uhrig, offering analysis on WOFL-Channel  35, said Spitz did some damage by saying that Dr. Jan Garavaglia, the medical examiner, made a mistake in not opening Caylee’s skull for the autopsy. “The point’s pretty well taken: If you’re going to do an autopsy, do an entire autopsy,” Uhrig said. “For it not to have been done certainly seems like a failure.”

Still, WFTV’s Sheaffer complained that Garavaglia and the medical examiner office joined a list of people the defense has “thrown under the bus,” including meter reader Roy Kronk and George Anthony, Casey’s father.

What do you think?

Casey Anthony: Did Jeff Ashton impress or go overboard?

Prosecutor Jeff Ashton’s fierce cross examination today of a defense bug expert dazzled or bothered legal analysts following the Casey Anthony trial.

“Great moment for the state, great cross examination,” WFTV-Channel 9 legal analyst Bill Sheaffer said. Sheaffer said Ashton ”neutralized” bug expert Dr. Tim Huntington and later upped the description by saying Ashton ”assassinated” the witness. 

Anthony is charged with first-degree murder in the death of her daughter, Caylee, and the testimony focused on what was found in Anthony’s car trunk. WKMG-Channel 6’s Tony Pipitone quickly explained that Huntington “testified that the lack of fly evidence in that trunk indicates to him that the body was not in the trunk. ”

WKMG legal analyst Mark NeJame said Huntington came off as qualified when defense attorney Jose Baez questioned him, but Ashton was prepared on cross examination. Ashton “came in there and knew where he was going .. he brought out the facts,” NeJame said. “He goes ahead and hits him strong.”

But attorney Diana Tennis of WOFL-Channel 35, criticized Ashton’s style. “The cross examination went well, and then it went too far, and I think Jeff Ashton came off looking like a jerk,” she said.  Huntington made some good points and the defense did a good job, Tennis added.

Attorney Richard Hornsby, on WESH-Channel 2, said Ashton ”went a little bit overboard” and “looked like a bully” in cross examining Huntington.  ”But when you put that aside, Jeff Ashton made it very clear that this expert made a lot of assumptions that were defense friendly,” Hornsby said. Huntington “was making his conclusions based on the way Jose Baez presented the facts to him, not upon a thorough review of the actual facts,” Hornsby said.

Judge O.H. Eaton Jr., a legal analyst for WESH, said Ashton could cost the state if he sticks to his style today. “The jury will get tired of it after a while if he’s not a little more circumspect,” Eaton said. 

Attorney Brad Conway, doing analysis for WOFL, said Ashton’s skilled cross examination caused the defense to lose ground on critical issues.

But attorney Hal Uhrig, also on WOFL, saw problems with both the state and defense today. He called the questioning of Huntington “excruciating,” said both sides could have wrapped up their work in half the time and “may have the lost the jury’s attention.” 

The reporters weighed in on the Ashton-Huntington match-up.

WKMG’s Pipitone described “an eviscerating cross examination” by Ashton.

WFTV’s Kathi Belich said that Huntington “was no match” for Ashton and “destroyed the defense theory that meter reader Roy Kronk found Caylee’s body somehow, added duct tape and then moved it for some reason.”

WESH’s Bob Kealing said that Ashton tried “to take this young Nebraska entomologist to the woodshed.” WESH’s Amanda Ober called Ashton’s cross examination “pretty brutal and somewhat successful.”  

WKMG’s NeJame liked Ashton’s use of humor when asking the bug expert about wrapping pigs in a blanket. “You want to use humor at times, even in a case this serious,” NeJame said. “As long it’s not disrespectful to the child, to the victim, in this instance, Caylee, then it’s not inappropriate.”

WFTV’s Sheaffer saw something else he didn’t like: He said it was inappropriate that Casey Anthony laughed heartily a couple of times at  Ashton’s quip.

‘The Amazing Race’: CBS will give us two editions next season

Need some happy TV news? CBS announced today that it had ordered a second edition of “The Amazing Race” for next season.

We knew that the 19th edition will start in the fall. And now we know there will be a 20th edition next year hosted by the underrated Phil Keoghan.

The show’s 18th edition, “Unfinished Business,” wrapped up May 8.

The CBS announcement means a lot to the show’s fans, because “The Amazing Race” sets the standard for reality television with its global travels, stunning photography and first-rate editing. The show has won the Emmy as best reality series seven times.

“The Amazing Race” will air at 8 p.m. Sundays on WKMG-Channel 6 in the fall.