DETROIT (AP) Ex-U.S. Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick of Detroit and six other former Congress members are presiding over hearings on the existence of extraterrestrials.

The 30 hours of congressional-style hearings kicked off Monday and are scheduled to run through Friday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Those testifying hope to prove that aliens contact Earth and that the government is trying to keep it secret.

Kilpatrick tells The Detroit News (http://bit.ly/Y8HUMc ) she's been researching the topic and is "looking forward to the week's activities."

The News says Kilpatrick, who is being paid $20,000 plus expenses, will chair the panel on Tuesday.

Kilpatrick is a Democrat who served in Congress from 1997-2011. Her son, ex-Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, is awaiting sentencing after being convicted on two dozen counts of corruption.

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Information from: The Detroit News, http://detnews.com/

By Alex Dobuzinskis

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - An attorney for the concert promotion company AEG Live warned jurors they would see a very different view of the charismatic Michael Jackson as the company seeks to prove it was not liable for the pop star's death.

Marvin Putnam, making his opening statement in what is expected to be an emotional wrongful death trial, said AEG officials had no idea that Jackson was taking the surgical anesthetic that led to his death.

He said the three-month civil case would bring to light "some ugly stuff" about the singer's private behavior.

"The public Michael Jackson was very different from the private Michael Jackson," Putnam said. "He erected a wall between himself and his family. Even his family wasn't sure what was going on at the house. He kept those who might have been able help him at a distance."

He said Jackson had been using the powerful anesthetic propofol for years to help him sleep "and almost no one knew."

"AEG, like everyone else, was an outsider," Putnam said. "They had no idea. It was going on behind locked doors."

The "Thriller" singer's mother, Katherine, is suing privately held AEG Live, promoters of a never-realized series of comeback concerts by Jackson, for negligence in hiring Dr. Conrad Murray as his personal physician.

Murray, convicted in 2011 for the involuntary manslaughter of Jackson with a propofol overdose, was caring for the singer as he rehearsed in Los Angeles for a series of 50 "This is It" shows in London in 2009.

Brian Panish, representing Jackson's family, said AEG Live ignored red flags when it hired Murray and should have been aware that the singer had addiction problems years before he agreed to perform the concerts.

Jackson, 50, drowning in debt and seeking to rebuild a reputation damaged by his 2005 trial and acquittal on child molestation charges, died in Los Angeles in June 2009.

In his opening argument, Panish said AEG Live failed to do proper background checks on Murray, who asked for $5 million to care for the singer. Background checks would have revealed Murray was in debt and was a cardiologist even though Jackson had no known heart issues, Panish said.

"When a red flag comes up, do you turn away or do you look into it?" Panish said. "AEG ignored the obvious red flags and they hired Dr. Murray."

AEG Live contends that it did not hire or supervise Murray, saying that a proposed contract with him was never executed. The concert promoters also have said they could not have foreseen that Murray posed a danger to Jackson.

"This case is about the choices we make and the personal responsibilities that go with that," Putnam said on Monday.

Katherine Jackson, 82, along with her children Randy and Rebbie, were among family members attending Monday's packed opening of the trial. Jackson's three children, who could be called as witnesses later, were not there.

Panish said Jackson had known problems with prescription drug addiction dating back to use of the painkiller Demerol following a burn injury when he was shooting a Pepsi commercial in 1984.

Jackson in 1993 announced he was canceling a world tour to seek treatment for his painkiller addiction.

In the days before the trial began, Panish denied the Jackson family is seeking $40 billion in damages from AEG Live, as some media had reported this month.

The final amount will be determined by the jury should it hold AEG Live liable for negligence.

A handful of Jackson fans gathered outside the court, saying they were hoping for justice for the "King of Pop."

Jackson fan Julia Thomas, 40, an office worker from Colton, California, said she hoped the trial would demonstrate what she said were the wrongs AEG Live committed against Jackson.

"They're about to be exposed because they bullied Michael, they stressed him into the grave to the point that he needed sedatives to sleep," Thomas told Reuters.

(Editing by Jill Serjeant, Andrew Hay, David Gregorio and Bill Trott)

BOZEMAN, Mont. (AP) At Montana State University, final exams stress is going to the dogs. The Bozeman Daily Chronicle reports (http://bit.ly/11pDoHV ) Intermountain Therapy Animals is bringing dogs to campus this week and next to help students take a break from the stress of studying for and taking semester exams. Jacqueline Frank is the Renne Library commons assistant who started the "Paws to de-Stress" program this semester. She says research shows that animals can help reduce stress and lower blood pressure. Frank says over a two-hour period on Thursday afternoon, 261 people stopped by to meet Ellie, a 6-year-old golden retriever and Sophie, a 4-year-old Maltese. Sophomore Rebecca Johnson from Ferndale, Wash., said: "This is the best idea ever." Butte sophomore Kaitlyn Okrush agreed, noting she has an organic chemistry final on Monday. ___ Information from: Bozeman Daily Chronicle, http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com

LOS ANGELES (AP) Whether she's hopping off cliffs, battling rogue bandits or surviving in the post-apocalyptic wilderness, Tracy Spiridakos makes roughing it in the futuristic wild west of NBC's "Revolution" look easy.

That's partly because the self-described tomboy feels right at home playing the intrepid heroine in J.J. Abrams' latest sci-fi offering about a world without electricity.

"She's definitely a rough and tough, can rumble kind of chick," said Spiridakos. "I can relate."

Spiridakos grew up in Greece and Canada climbing trees, playing street hockey and making mud pies with her two older brothers.

"I think this is the most feminine that I've ever been," she said in a recent interview. "I bought a dress a little while ago ... and it was just for fun. I was like 'I don't even know who this person is anymore!'"

Not surprisingly Spiridakos lives for stunt days on set. She's often begging the crew to let her take a stab at the more challenging feats, even relishing the occasional injury.

"Bruises are the good war wounds. I'll go show my fianc afterward, I'm like 'look!' He's like 'Oh god, Trace.' And it will be a nice, big bloody wound," she explained beaming with pride.

Spiridakos is engaged to Canadian actor Jon Cor.

She calls her brothers her "heart and soul" and credits them with keeping her grounded. And when she's not filming she's still expected to pick up shifts at the family-owned Greek restaurant in Winnipeg.

"I love that because it's easy to get wrapped up in the world you're in," she said. "So when I go home I get to go back to the basics."

"Revolution" is Spiridakos' first lead role for American television and she's still pinching herself.

"I literally came to L.A. like every actor does from this little town with this big dream and I'm living in it now," she said. "It's mind-blowing."

___

Online:

www.nbc.com/revolution

___

Follow Nicole Evatt at http://twitter.com/NicoleEvatt

The Rise of the Term 'Glasshole,' Explained by Linguists

With all the lucky first Google Glass owners now starting to receive their wearable face computers in the mail, we are already seeing a rise in the "glasshole"—an endearing term used to describe people who do not use the gadgets in socially acceptable ways. Even before there were so many Glass wearers out in the wild, "glasshole" had started to catch-on beyond the tech-set. After first appearing in TechCrunch in January, it was selected as the Urban Dictionary word of the day in March. Then, just the other day Business Insider sanctioned it as the "new word to describe inconsiderate Google Glass users." Or, in the words of Bruce Schneier the legendary computer security expert: "We're seeing the birth of a new epithet, 'glasshole.'" But, how did "glasshole" get the honor of representing all the terrible Glass wearing humans out there, why not glasswipe or glasshat or, something completely different, like Google Jerkbots?

RELATED: Google Glass Will Be Out Just in Time for a Very Expensive Christmas Present

"There's a reason 'glasshole' came first — it's more intuitively obvious," linguist Ben Zimmer told The Atlantic Wire. Asshole is a much more common term than asswipe, asshat, or assface. Even as I type, the little red typo line appears under those other terms, but even my spellchecker is familiar with the a-word. Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg chronicled the rise of the term above the rest in his book Ascent of the A-Word. "Within a generation the asshole had become a basic notion of our everyday moral life, replacing older reproaches like phony, lout and heel with a single inclusive moral category," he writes on his site. First used as GI slang during World War II, the term became ubiquitous in just a few decades. "By 1970 it was found across the culture, in country and western songs, the movies of Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen, the plays of Neil Simon, and the essays of Tom Wolfe," writes Nunburg.

RELATED: Google's Futuristic Glasses Have 'Potential'

Asswipe, on the other hand, didn't appear until 1953 in the Saul Bellow novel The Adventures of Augie March. "You little asswipe hoodlum!" wrote Bellow. And it still doesn't quite have the pervasiveness of asshole, despite being the punchline of an Saturday Night Live skit about people who have it as their unfortunate last name. ("Uh.. listen.. that's 'Os-wee-pay,'" Nicholas Cage says at the end of the skit.) That's perhaps because it's a wussy version of the word. "The endings '-wipe' and '-hat' are just alternate ways of pronouncing 'asshole' when you can't say it," Nunberg, who teaches at the UC Berkeley School of Information. That also explains why glasshole and not glasshat took off. "You can say 'glasshole' without violating the taboo on saying 'asshole,' so why go to '-hat' or '-wipe?'" he added. "Why be coy about it?" (Nunberg also points out that the same phenomenon happened with devotees of the cultish EST seminars. People used to describe them as estholes—not estwipes.)

RELATED: These Google Glass Early Adopters Will Warm Your Heart

Further, there is a linguistic reason to chose glasshole: all the glass + ass profanity mixtures are what linguists call satisfying blends because they derive from two words whose sounds overlap, as another linguist explained back when we pondered the hatred toward the word "phablet," which is an unsatisfying blend. All the Glass + wipe, hat, hole, etc work as these blends. But glasshole is more obvious than the others because it has been used in other blend compinations before. "'Asshole' has already generated other similar blends, notably 'Masshole' as an epithet for an inconsiderate Massachusetts driver," Zimmer explained.

RELATED: Reports That Google Glass Will Be American-Made Complete Viral Marketing Campaign

But, this most recent linguistic phenomenon isn't just about familiarity: Asshole so perfectly encapsulates what it means to be a Glass wearing freak. The a-hole term denotes a certain inauthenticity, as Nunberg explains in his book:

Inauthenticity is implicit whenever we speak of a 'sense of entitlement,' another phrase that entered the American idiom around the time asshole did. ... The connection is intrinsic to the idea of the asshole, who imagines that his role or status gives him privileges that aren’t really his to claim

Glasshole fits right into that: There is nothing less "authentic" than someone with the cyborg-looking things on their faces. (Trust me, I saw a guy with them sitting outside at a cafe: He looked different in a not-human kind of way.)

RELATED: Fake Google Glass eBay Auction Pulled After Bids Soar Past $15,000

But even more than that, the glasses bestow "status" and "privileges that aren't really to his claim." First of all, the technology is a status symbol in and of itself, since only a limited number of people "won" the the opportunity to buy the $1,500 devices. The first person to use the term loosely defined a glasshole as "that know-it-all guy you've always hated, only now he's got 4G and Google+ connected to his face." In other words, the type of person who would want to wear Glass is a know-it-all—who probably does not know it all—and now he or she has access to the Internet, thus making an otherwise entitled person that much more entitled. In another example, Schneier invoked the term to describe someone using the glasses to cheat in Scattergories. Glass specifically gave this person "privileges" (ie. a database for cheating) that he did not deserve.

There seems to be another reason, though, that people want to call Glass users a dirty name: the device is designed to allow even more of the kind of online interaction that has already reduced actual human social interaction. That's why Ryan Lawler employed the term over at TechCrunch earlier this year—he suggested glassholes would watch YouTubes while pretending to have conversations, which would clearly be rude. It turns out, however, that's not exactly what has happened. Rather, people just zone out while wearing glass. There's even a name for it, as The New York Times's Jenna Wortham explained on her Tumblr. "People in the Valley have coined a term for the weird, half-conscious expression that Google Glass wearers get on their faces when they are concentrating on doing things with the tiny little screen inside their glasses," she writes. "They call it glassed out," she continues.

That behavior doesn't sound evil or anything. But it's potentially rude and mostly just distasteful because having a computer attached to our faces differs so much from social norms, as explained here and here. Because of the need to explain the general weirdness that will emerge with the Glass wearing culture, I suspect, the glasshole derivatives, such as glasswipe and glasshat and glassface et. al might start to catch on, too. Plus, writers are going to need synonyms for all the jerks running around with Glass on their heads.

One of the main complaints some conservatives have against immigration reform is that a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants would create millions of moochers living off federal benefits. And what is the No. 1 symbol of American moocherdom? The Obamaphone. And so on Wednesday Shark Tank's Javier Manjarres unearthed its immigration counterpart: The MarcoPhone. Named for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Manjarres thought he spotted a provision in the 855-page immigration bill that gives free cell phones to undocumented immigrants. Breitbart News reposted the story. Talk radio host Laura Ingraham picked it up. MofoPolitics.com led with the image at right. The only problem was that the MarcoPhone is even less real than the Obamaphone. The immigration bill gives cell phones to ranchers so they can report illegal immigrants and violence on the border. It was inspired by a rancher who was killed by illegal immigrants. Breitbart's Matthew Boyle posted a clarification.

RELATED: GOP Finds a Way to Woo Latinos Without Angering the Tea Party

Despite Obama never proposing free cell phones for anyone, the notion of Obamaphones has been latched onto by conservative media as a shorthand for government dependency. The meme broke out after the Drudge Report posted a video of a black woman in Cleveland yelling about getting an Obamaphone in the last weeks of the presidential campaign. In fact, President Obama didn't create the "Obamaphone" -- Ronald Reagan created a program for poor people to get phone service, and George W. Bush expanded it after Hurricane Katrina. Those facts swayed some conservatives, but not all, as The Washington Post's Karen Tumulty noted last week. House Speaker John A. Boehner tweeted in February, "Nobody should be talking about tax hikes when govt is spending taxpayer dollars on free cell phones." In a response to Obama's State of the Union address, Sen. Rand Paul said," For those who are struggling, we want to you to have something infinitely more valuable than a free phone." Arkansas Rep. Tim Griffin and Wisconsin Rep. Michele Bachmann are working on legislation to eliminate the program. "Should the federal government be giving people cellphones?" Griffin said. "What about iPads? Where do we draw the line on this stuff?" (Currently the line is drawn at a crappy flip phone with very few minutes of free service.)

RELATED: Why is Immigration Reform So Hard If It Looks So Unanimous?

One of the arguments that conservatives who oppose immigration reform have made is that giving undocumented immigrants legal status will create a new class of moochers. But so far, those warnings have been vague. In November, The National Review's Jillian Kay Melchior wrote an article titled, "Immigrant Welfare: The New Colossus." Subtitle: "Are the huddled masses yearning to breathe free or eat free?" During his 2012 reelection campaign, Iowa Rep. Steve King compared immigrants to dogs, saying one should "pick the one that’s the friskiest, the one that’s engaged the most, and not the one that’s over there sleeping in the corner." Republicans on the Senate budget committee issued a press release in April saying the immigration bill might contain "a major flaw that could allow millions of illegal immigrants to access federal welfare benefits and poverty programs." In an April letter to the "gang of eight" proposing immigration reform, Sens. Jeff Sessions, Chuck Grassley, and Pat Roberts demanded to know the true cost of the bill when immigrants qualify for "approximately 80 different means-tested welfare and low-income assistance programs."

RELATED: The Bipartisan Immigration Plan Is 20 Years of Torture

Some think immigrants are already coming here to be moochers. "You're not supposed to be admitted to America if you're likely to be a charge on the public -- if you're going to need government aid to take care of yourself," Alabama's Sessions said in January. Sessions complained that in 2011, the State Department denied "only 0.0033 percent of net applications for admission to the United States" because they might not be able to support themselves. But Bloomberg's Shikha Dalmia explained that that was because "the system is set up to prevent people who are likely to become wards of the state from applying in the first place." And people aren't coming here just to get on the dole: The 10 states with the fastest-growing populations of immigrants spent much less on public benefits than the 10 states with the slowest-growing immigrant populations, Dalmia noted.

RELATED: Marco Rubio Still Can't Slip Away from Obama on Immigration

All those warnings sound so vague compared to the perfect single symbol of the MarcoPhone. Here at last was the knock-out blow to Rubio's amnesty. You can imagine Laura Ingraham's disappointment when she asked Rubio about it Wednesday, and he replied, "That's false." The phones are for people living in border areas who might not have cell phones. It's inspired by the 2010 death of Robert Krentz, a 58-year-old rancher from a well-known Arizona family, who was shot to death. Footprints at the scene traced to the Mexican border. His last words were reportedly "illegal and hurt."

RELATED: Jeb Bush Not Sure Where Jeb Bush Stands on Immigration

Alas, he would still be a moocher, according to MofoPolitics:

I know what you’re thinking: “But the free cellphones aren’t for illegal immigrants! They’re for U.S. citizens!”

Uh, you realize the Obamaphone lady is a U.S. citizen right?

COCOA BEACH, Fla. (AP) Al Neuharth changed the look of American newspapers when he founded USA Today, filling the newspaper with breezy, easy-to-comprehend articles, attention-grabbing graphics and stories that often didn't require readers to jump to a different page. Critics dubbed USA Today "McPaper" when it debuted in 1982, and they accused Neuharth, of dumbing down American journalism with its easy-to-read articles and bright graphics. USA Today became the nation's most-circulated newspaper in the late 1990s. The hard-charging founder of USA Today died Friday in Cocoa Beach, Fla. He was 89. The news was announced by USA Today and by the Newseum, which he also founded. Jack Marsh, president of the Al Neuharth Media Center and a close friend, confirmed that he passed away Friday afternoon at his home. Marsh said Neuharth fell earlier this week and never quite recovered. Sections were denoted by different colors. The entire back page of the news section had a colored-weather map of the entire United States. The news section contained a state-by-state roundup of headlines from across the nation. Its eye-catching logo of white lettering on a blue background made it recognizable from a distance. "Our target was college-age people who were non-readers. We thought they were getting enough serious stuff in classes," Neuharth said in 1995. "We hooked them primarily because it was a colorful newspaper that played up the things they were interested in sports, entertainment and TV." USA Today was unlike any newspaper before it when it debuted in 1982. Its style was widely derided but later widely imitated. Many news veterans gave it few chances for survival. Advertisers were at first reluctant to place their money in a newspaper that might compete with local dailies. But circulation grew. In 1999, USA Today edged past the Wall Street Journal in circulation with 1.75 million daily copies, to take the title of the nation's biggest newspaper. "Everybody was skeptical and so was I, but I said you never bet against Neuharth," the late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham said in a 2000 Associated Press interview. The launch of USA Today was Neuharth's most visible undertaking during more than 15 years as chairman and CEO of the Gannett Co. During his helm, Gannett became the nation's largest newspaper company and the company's annual revenues increased from $200 million to more than $3 billion. Neuharth became CEO of the company in 1973 and chairman in 1979. He retired in 1989. As Gannett chief, Neuharth loved making the deal. Even more so, the driven media mogul loved toying with and trumping his competitors in deal-making. In his autobiography, "Confessions of an S.O.B.," Neuharth made no secret of his hard-nosed business tactics, such as taking advantage of a competitor's conversation he overheard. He also recounted proudly how he beat out Graham in acquiring newspapers in Wilmington, Del. He said the two were attending a conference together in Hawaii, and he had already learned that Gannett had the winning bid, but he kept silent until he slipped her a note right before the deal was to be announced. During the mid-1980s, Gannett unsuccessfully attempted to merge with CBS in what would have been the biggest media company at the time. The deal fell apart, something that Neuharth considered one of his biggest failures. Neuharth was proud of his record in bringing more minorities and women into Gannett newsrooms and the board of directors. When he became CEO, the company's board was all white and male. By the time he retired, the board had four women, two blacks and one Asian. He also pushed Graham to become the first female chairman of the American Newspaper Publishers Association. "He was a great leader," said former AP president and CEO Tom Curley, who worked closely with Neuharth for many years. "He certainly was one of the pioneers on moving women and people of color into management positions. He was a very strong manager who commanded respect, I think, throughout the industry as well as from those who worked with him. His hardscrabble life, poverty in South Dakota and fighting in World War II prepared him for any battles in a competitive arena, and he loved to compete and he loved to win." Before joining Gannett, Neuharth rose up through the ranks of Knight Newspapers. He went from reporter to assistant managing editor at The Miami Herald in the 1950s and then became assistant executive editor at the Detroit Free Press. Allen H. Neuharth was born March 22, 1924, in Eureka, S.D. His father died when he was 2. He grew up poor but ambitious in Alpena, S.D., and had journalism in his blood from an early start. At age 11, he took his first job as a newspaper carrier and later as a teenager he worked in the composing room of the weekly Alpena Journal. His ambition already was noticeable. "I wanted to get rich and famous no matter where it was," Neuharth said in a 1999 Associated Press interview. "I got lucky. Luck is very much a part of it. You have to be at the right place at the right time and pick the right place at the right time." After earning a bronze star in World War II and graduating with a journalism degree from the University of South Dakota, Neuharth worked for the AP for two years. He then launched a South Dakota sports weekly tabloid, SoDak Sports, in 1952. It was a spectacular failure, losing $50,000, but it was perhaps the best education Neuharth ever received. "Everyone should fail in a big way at least once before they're forty," he said in his autobiography. "The bigger you fail, the bigger you're likely to succeed later." Neuharth married three times. His first marriage to high school sweetheart Loretta Neuharth lasted 26 years. They had a son, Dan, and daughter, Jan. He married Lori Wilson, a Florida state senator, in 1973; they divorced in 1982. A decade later, he married Rachel Fornes, a chiropractor. Together, they adopted six children. After he retired from Gannett, Neuharth continued to write "Plain Talk," a weekly column for USA Today. He also founded the The Freedom Forum, a foundation dedicated to free press and free speech that holds journalism conferences, offers fellowships and provides training. It was begun in 1991 as a successor to the Gannett Foundation, the company's philanthropic arm. Jim Duff, president and chief executive officer of the Freedom Forum, said, "Al will be remembered for many trailblazing achievements in the newspaper business, but one of his most enduring legacies will be his devotion to educating and training new journalists," according to the post on the Newseum website. Duff added, "He taught them the importance of not only a free press but a fair one." With his entrepreneurial flair, Neuharth put the Freedom Forum on the map with Newseum, an interactive museum to show visitors how news is covered. The first museum in Arlington, Va., was open from 1997 to 2002. It was replaced by a $450 million facility in Washington that opened in spring 2008. There was also the Newscapade, a $5 million traveling exhibit. In a June 2007 interview in Advertising Age, Neuharth was asked about the future of printed newspapers amid the upheavals of the news business. "The only thing we can assume is that consumers of news and information will continue to want more as the world continues to become one global village," he said. "The question is how much will be distributed in print, online and on the air. I don't know how much will be delivered on newsprint. Some will be delivered by means we can't even think of yet." ___ Associated Press Writer Kristi Eaton in Sioux Falls, S.D., contributed to this story.

By Belinda Goldsmith LONDON (Reuters) - The price of fame can be high with an international study on Thursday finding that people who enjoy successful entertainment or sporting careers tend to die younger. Researchers Richard Epstein and Catherine Epstein said the study, based on analysing 1,000 New York Times obituaries from 2009-2011, found film, music, stage performers and sports people died at an average age of 77.2 years. This compared to an average lifespan of 78.5 years for creative workers, 81.7 for professionals and academics, and 83 years for people in business, military and political careers. The Australian-based researchers said these earlier deaths could indicate that performers and sports stars took more risks in life, either to reach their goals or due to their success. "Fame and achievement in performance-related careers may be earned at the cost of a shorter life expectancy," the researchers wrote in their study published in QJM: An International Journal of Medicine. "In such careers, smoking and other risk behaviors may be either causes of effects of success and/or early death." Britain's most high-profile celebrity publicist, Max Clifford, said the pressure that celebrities and sports stars put on themselves to succeed had to play a part, and even at the top they were always worried about who could replace them. "People assume that fame and success is all about riches and happiness but as someone who has worked with famous people for 45 years I know that is not the case," Clifford told Reuters. "The success becomes like a drug to them that they have to have and they are always worried about losing it so they push and push and work harder and harder. You have to be competitive in these fields otherwise it will not work." WARNING TO ASPIRING STARS For the study the researchers separated the obituaries by gender, age, and cause of death as well as by occupation, with anyone involved in sports, acting, singing, music or dance put into a performance category. Others were split into creative roles such as writing and visual arts, into a business, military and political category, or a group of professional, academic and religious careers. The study found that the list was heavily skewed towards men who accounted for 813 of the obituaries and the main causes of earlier deaths were linked to accidents, infections including HIV, and cancer. Lung cancer deaths - which the authors considered a sign of chronic smoking - were most common in performers. Richard Epstein, a director at the Kinghorn Cancer Centre at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital, acknowledged that the one-off analysis could not prove anything but raised interesting questions. "If it is true that successful performers and sports players tend to enjoy shorter lives, does this imply that fame at younger ages predisposes to poor health behaviors in later life after success has faded?" he said. He suggested maybe psychological and family pressures favouring high public achievement could lead to self-destructive tendencies or that risk-taking personality traits maximized the chances of success, with the use of cigarettes, alcohol or illicit drugs improving performance output in the short-term. "Any of these hypotheses could be viewed as a health warning to young people aspiring to become stars," he said. (Reporting by Belinda Goldsmith)