Student shot at Calif. high school by classmate

Updated at 8:33 p.m. ET

TAFT, Calif. A 16-year-old student armed with a shotgun walked into class in a rural California high school on Thursday and shot one student, fired at another but missed, and then was talked into surrendering by a teacher and another staff member, officials said.

The teen victim was in critical but stable condition, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood told a press conference. The sheriff said the teacher suffered a minor pellet wound to the head but declined treatment.

The gunman had as many as 20 rounds of ammunition in his pocket, the sheriff said.

The attack there came less than a month after a gunman massacred 20 children and six women at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, then killed himself.

That shooting prompted President Barack Obama to promise new efforts to curb gun violence. Vice President Joe Biden, who was placed in charge of the initiative, said he would deliver new policy proposals to the president by next week.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, said in a statement that her father had attended Taft Union and she has visited the school over the years.

"At this moment my thoughts and prayers are with the victims, and I wish them a speedy recovery," Feinstein said. "But how many more shootings must there be in America before we come to the realization that guns and grievances do not belong together?"

When the shots were fired, the teacher tried to get the more than two dozen students out a back door and also engaged the shooter in conversation to distract him, Youngblood said. A campus supervisor responding to a call of shots fired also began talking to the gunman.

"They talked him into putting that shotgun down. He in fact told the teacher, `I don't want to shoot you,' and named the person that he wanted to shoot," Youngblood said.

"The heroics of these two people goes without saying. ... They could have just as easily ... tried to get out of the classroom and left students and they didn't," the sheriff said. "They knew not to let him leave the classroom with that shotgun."

The shooter didn't show up for first period then interrupted the class of 28 students.

Investigators had not yet had a chance to interview the student and so had no immediate word on a motive or whether the attacker had a previous disciplinary record. Nor did they know where he got the shotgun.

The wounded student was flown to a hospital in Bakersfield. Officials said a female student was hospitalized with possible hearing damage because the shotgun was fired close to her ear, and another girl received minor injuries during the scramble to flee when she fell over a table.

Officials said there's usually an armed officer on campus but the person wasn't there because he was snowed in. Taft police officers arrived within 60 seconds of first reports.

The shooting happened on the second floor of the school's science building around 9 a.m., according to CBS affiliate KBAK in Bakersfield.

As word spread, Dayna Hopper rushed to the school to pick up her son Joseph Sorensen, 16, and daughter, Cheryle Pryor, 15, who had called from Cheryle's cellphone.

"I panicked. I wanted to puke and just get here," Dayna Hopper told The Bakersfield Californian.

KERO-TV Bakersfield reported that the station received phone calls from people inside the school who hid in closets.

The bell had just rung at a nearby school when teachers began shouting for students to get inside buildings, and the principal used an intercom to tell students to stay inside, Felicity Reich, 13, a student at Lincoln Junior High School, told the newspaper.

Shaken, she held the hand of her mother, Ellie Reich, as she spoke.

About 900 students are enrolled at the high school, which includes 9th through 12th grades. Authorities went room by room through the school and expected to spend the day checking backpacks to make sure no other weapons were on campus.

Masses of parents headed to the school football field to find their children, and officials at other schools took action to protect their students as well, the newspaper said.

Wilhelmina Reum, whose daughter Alexis Singleton is a fourth-grader at a nearby elementary school, got word of the attack while she was about 35 miles away in Bakersfield and immediately sped back to Taft.

"I just kept thinking this can't be happening in my little town," she told The Associated Press.

"I was afraid I was going to get hurt," Alexis said. "I just wanted my mom to get here so I could go home."

The Taft shooting came less than a month after a gunman massacred 20 children and six women at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., then killed himself.

That shooting prompted President Barack Obama to promise new efforts to curb gun violence. Vice President Joe Biden, who was placed in charge of the initiative, said he would deliver new policy proposals to the president by next week.

At the state Capitol, Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles, said the thoughts and prayers of legislators were with the people at the Taft school.

"It really is just another very sad moment as we deal with the ongoing reality of gun violence that has captured so much of our attention this last year," Perez said.

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Hero Teacher Talks Shooter into Dropping Gun

A California high school teacher is being hailed a hero for talking a 16-year-old shooter into putting down his gun and turning himself in after opening fire on a classroom and wounding another student, police said.

The student victim was taken to a nearby hospital and remains in critical but stable condition, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood told reporters on Thursday.

The teacher, whose name has not yet been officially released by authorities, helped evacuate nearly two dozen students out a door at Taft Union High School in Taft, Calif., while calmly engaging the young gunman, who is a student at Taft Union, in conversation.

Chris McCullah/The Californian/ZUMA

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The teacher and a campus supervisor, who responded to the gunfire and arrived at the classroom, helped convince the teenager to stop shooting.

"They talked him into putting the shotgun down," Youngblood said.

The shooting began around 9 a.m. in the school's science building and sheriff's deputies were on the scene within one minute of the call. An armed security guard who is typically at the school was not on campus because he had been snowed in, the sheriff said.

Two other students received minor injuries: One reported hearing loss and the other fell over a table. The teacher was shot with a pellet, but refused medical treatment, according to police.

The school's 900 students were evacuated from the building and many of them were met by parents within minutes of the first 911 calls.

Today's shooting comes less than month after 20-year-old Adam Lanza opened fire on an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. killing 20 children and six adults.

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Hints of new dark force seen in galactic smash-ups

Colliding clusters of galaxies may hold clues to a mysterious dark force at work in the universe. This force would act only on invisible dark matter, the enigmatic stuff that makes up 86 per cent of the mass in the universe.

Dark matter famously refuses to interact with ordinary matter except via gravity, so theorists had assumed that its particles would be just as aloof with each other. But new observations suggest that dark matter interacts significantly with itself, while leaving regular matter out of the conversation.

"There could be a whole class of dark particles that don't interact with normal matter but do interact with themselves," says James Bullock of the University of California, Irvine. "Dark matter could be doing all sorts of interesting things, and we'd never know."

Some of the best evidence for dark matter's existence came from the Bullet cluster, a smash-up in which a small galaxy cluster plunged through a larger one about 100 million years ago. Separated by hundreds of light years, the individual galaxies sailed right past each other, and the two clusters parted ways. But intergalactic gas collided and pooled on the trailing ends of each cluster.

Mass maps of the Bullet cluster showed that dark matter stayed in line with the galaxies instead of pooling with the gas, proving that it can separate from ordinary matter. This also hinted that dark matter wasn't interacting with itself, and was affected by gravity alone.

Musket shot

Last year William Dawson of the University of California, Davis and colleagues found an older set of clusters seen about 700 million years after their collision. Nicknamed the Musket Ball cluster, this smash-up told a different tale. When Dawson's team analysed the concentration of matter in the Musket Ball, they found that galaxies are separated from dark matter by about 19,000 light years.

"The galaxies outrun the dark matter. That's what creates the offset," Dawson said. "This is fitting that picture of self-interacting dark matter." If dark matter particles do interact, perhaps via a dark force, they would slow down like the gas.

This new picture could solve some outstanding mysteries in cosmology, Dawson said this week during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, California. Non-interacting dark matter should sink to the cores of star clusters and dwarf galaxies, but observations show that it is more evenly distributed. If it interacts with itself, it could puff up and spread outward like a gas.

So why doesn't the Bullet cluster show the same separation between dark matter and galaxies? Dawson thinks it's a question of age – dark matter in the younger Bullet simply hasn't had time to separate.

New window

The idea complements a previous study that saw evidence for dark forces at work in the Bullet cluster. In 2007 Glennys Farrar of New York University and colleagues said that the smaller cluster was moving too fast for gravity alone to be responsible. They suggested that some mysterious force related to dark matter might be hurrying it along.

Still, two clusters is not a lot to go on. Dawson, Bullock and colleagues are following up with about 20 more galactic collisions to see if they show any unusual behaviours. "I really think that we're almost to the point where we have enough observational data in hand," Dawson said. "We could close the book on self-interacting dark matter."

If the new force does exist, we might soon be able to see its effects on things influenced by dark matter, such as the behavior of black holes or the masses of the first stars, says Douglas Finkbeiner of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the new study.

"The simple thing isn't always the right thing, so I really appreciate that Will is trying to look into these other possibilities," he says.

Louis Strigari of Stanford University in California agrees. "Self-interacting dark matter is worth pursuing because we're still very ignorant," he said. "We're desperate to understand what dark matter is, so any new window is welcome."

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SIA to recruit & train intern cabin crew from polys

SINGAPORE: Singapore Airlines (SIA) is working closely with three polytechnics to recruit and train cabin crew, as part of efforts to attract the best talent.

It has special programmes with Nanyang Polytechnic, Republic Polytechnic and Temasek Polytechnic, covering recruitment activities.

It's also starting an internship-recruitment programme to hire and train selected students to become full-time cabin crew.

These are provided under Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) that the carrier signed with the three polytechnics on Thursday.

Besides recruitment, the MOUs also cover areas of potential cooperation such as curriculum development in service, operations, safety and security.

SIA will also work with the polytechnics on continued education programmes for cabin crew.

SIA employs about 7,500 cabin crew. New crew undergo an extensive 15-week training programme in areas such as service delivery, customer relations, deportment, security and safety.

- CNA/ck

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Latino should have played lead in 'Argo'

Ben Affleck plays the lead role of Tony Mendez in "Argo," which he also directed.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Oscar nominations on Thursday, and Ben Affleck expected to get one for "Argo"


• Affleck plays real-life Latino who helped diplomats escape in Iran hostage crisis


• Ruben Navarrette: Affleck should have used a Latino actor to play role


• He says it cheats actor out of a job, and the Latino community out of a hero's story

San Diego, California (CNN) -- The upcoming Oscars are no stranger to causes or controversy. And this year, there is a strong dose of both surrounding the film "Argo" -- and its star and director, Ben Affleck.

This controversy bubbled up when the buzz started that Affleck could get an Academy Award nomination for best director when the announcements are made Thursday.

"Argo" tells how an ingenious and daring CIA agent helped orchestrate the rescue of six U.S. diplomats from Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1980. In November 1979, about 300 Islamic students stormed the U.S. Embassy and 66 Americans were taken hostage. But six U.S. diplomats escaped and were hidden at the Canadian Embassy by the Canadian ambassador and his wife.

Ruben Navarrette Jr.

The CIA agent -- Antonio "Tony" Mendez, played by Affleck -- successfully led the mission to evacuate the Americans, which involved Mendez and his associates posing as a Canadian film crew that was eager to make a movie in Iran.

The real Tony Mendez was awarded the Intelligence Star for Valor, and other honors, for leading the rescue. He later wrote a memoir, detailing the events in Tehran.

"Argo" is loosely based on Mendez's book. Better make that, very loosely based. As movie critics and others have pointed out since the movie opened a few months ago, the filmmakers took lots of dramatic license with the story. Mendez's role is played up, while that of the Canadians who helped hide and protect the Americans is played down. Some scenes depicted in the film never happened. Some characters are composites of several real people.

In other words, it's what you would expect from a Hollywood feature film based on a historical event. It's not a documentary. It's meant to be taken with a grain of salt, and to be entertaining.

Still, there are some Latinos -- in and out of Hollywood -- who think that, in this case, the filmmakers, and especially Affleck, pushed the concept of creativity too far. They say Affleck missed an opportunity to put more Latinos on screen. Moreover, they say, Affleck improperly claimed, for himself, the choice role of Mendez when he should have cast a Latino actor instead. They insist that the director didn't just cheat a Latino out of an acting job but the Latino community out of a feel-good story about one of their own who won acclaim for a heroic deed.

The critics are right, and their cause is just. Affleck should have tried to cast a Latino to play Mendez. That's common sense, and it would have made "Argo" a better movie. Affleck also didn't do himself any favors by trying to dismiss the criticism with a glib remark that essentially said that it really doesn't matter that the actor playing Mendez isn't Latino since Mendez himself isn't, shall we say, overtly Latino.

At a recent forum intended to publicize the film, Affleck responded to a question from the audience about the controversy by noting that "Tony does not have, I don't know what you would say, a Latin/Spanish accent" and that "You wouldn't necessarily select him out of a line of 10 people and go 'This guy's Latino.' "

Ouch. At least Affleck didn't slip and say "line up."

"So I didn't feel as though I was violating something," he said, "where, here's this guy who's clearly ethnic in some way and it's sort of being whitewashed by Ben Affleck the actor."

Johnny Depp set a better example. Several months ago, Depp turned down the role of Mexican revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa in another film. He said that the role should go to a Latino. I praised Depp at the time for showing that, besides being a great actor, he is also a person of character.

The exclusion of Latinos from Hollywood is an old story. This is still a black and white world, where Latinos rarely get cast in the leading role. We're the gardeners and housekeepers, the gang leader and drug dealers, the nannies and farm workers. That's it. There has been some progress, of course. But not enough -- not when you have a Latina in the Supreme Court, three Latinos in the U.S. Senate, and Latinos heading Fortune 500 companies.

I could blame the environment of Southern California, in which most Hollywood writers, producers and directors live and spend most of their time. When they get up in the morning and drive to work, most Latinos they encounter are subservient. We clean their homes, cook their breakfast, trim their hedges, park their cars and otherwise help them get through the day.

Still, you can push this argument too far, and wind up going down a dangerous path -- one that ultimately sets back the greater cause of trying to get television networks and film studios to create a broader range of meatier roles for Latino actors and actresses.

After all, it's a short walk from saying that a director should have cast a Latino to play a Latino to arguing that only Latinos can play Latinos. And, if that's the argument, then on what moral high ground do Latinos stand to also push -- as we should -- for Latino actors and actresses to be considered for generic and mainstream roles that could have gone to white actors? We can't have it both ways.

Even if Latinos succeed in making their point about this one director and this one movie, it could backfire. We could win this battle, and still lose the war.

But before Latinos can be fully integrated into America and not considered outsiders, we have to take every opportunity to push for inclusion and fairness. And acknowledging that Latinos have the skills to play themselves is a good start.

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The opinions in this commentary are solely those of Ruben Navarrette.

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FBI probes cyber threats against Steubenville sheriff

Jefferson County Sheriff Fred Abdalla talks about how the FBI is investigating cyber threats in the eastern Ohio city that include a death threat received by the sheriff in his office on Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2013, in Steubenville, Ohio. / AP Photo/Keith Srakocic

STEUBENVILLE, OhioThe FBI is investigating cyber threats in an eastern Ohio city that include death threats against the local sheriff's family and an email that apparently shut down the police chief's computer.

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Steubenville rape case: Officials go on the defense

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Leaked video shows teens joking about Ohio rape case

The threats are part of a series of online messages that have targeted individuals and authorities in Steubenville amid increased attention over two high school football players who are facing rape charges.

Jefferson County Sheriff Fred Abdalla said Wednesday he'd provided the FBI a copy of an anonymous Facebook post in which someone threatened to kill his family.

Steubenville Police Chief William McCafferty said he gave the FBI an email that he had opened Wednesday morning, which then disabled his computer.

FBI spokesman Todd Lindgren said he could not immediately comment.

The two teenage boys are set for trial next month in juvenile court on charges they raped a 16-year-old in August. Their attorneys have denied the charges in court.

Much of the evidence in the case played out on social media, in which the photos of the seemingly unconscious girl were posted online. A video published and then deleted from YouTube shows a third freshman, Michael Nodianos, joking about the alleged rape.

The hacking collective Anonymous has staged rallies in support of the alleged victim, and hackers were able to dig up and re-post the deleted YouTube video online.

According to the Steubenville Herald Star, Nodianos' attorney said someone hacked into his client's email and social media accounts, as well as the email accounts of his family members. He has since dropped out of Ohio State University, where he was slated to attend on a scholarship.

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Pruney fingers give us better grip underwater

WHY do our fingers do prune impressions when soaked? It could be an adaptation that gives us better grip underwater.

Fingers and toes wrinkle in water after about 5 minutes due to the constriction of blood vessels. This reduction in volume pulls the skin inward, but as the skin's surface area cannot change, it wrinkles. A study in 2011 showed that wrinkles form a pattern of channels that divert water away from the fingertip – akin to rain treads on tyres. The team thought that this could aid grip.

To find out, Tom Smulders and his team at Newcastle University, UK, timed people as they transferred wet or dry objects from one box to another with and without wrinkled fingers.

With wrinkles, wet objects were transferred about 12 per cent faster than with unwrinkled fingers. The time it took to transfer dry objects was the same regardless of wrinkles.

So why aren't our digits always prune-like? "With wrinkles, less of your skin surface touches the object, so there may be issues of sensitivity," Smulders suggests.

Journal reference: Royal Society Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2012.0999.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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Football: Liga-dominated FIFPro World XI raises eyebrows

LONDON: With Spanish clubs having supplied all 11 members of the FIFPro World XI for 2012, La Liga's claim to be considered the world's best league appears stronger than ever.

Barcelona and Real Madrid may have missed out in last season's Champions League, losing to Chelsea and Bayern Munich respectively, but they still supplied 10 of the players voted into FIFA's all-star team by over 55,000 professional footballers around the world.

Atletico Madrid's Colombian striker Radamel Falcao completed the line-up, meaning that for the first time in the eight-year history of the selection, all 11 players were drawn from teams playing in the same country.

In recent years, coinciding with Spain's dominance of both club and international football, the make-up of the FIFPro World XI has crystallised around a small coterie of players.

Serial Ballon d'Or-winner Lionel Messi has been a mainstay of the side since 2007, Iker Casillas and Xavi since 2008, and Andres Iniesta and Cristiano Ronaldo have been included in the team for the past four years.

In fact, so enduring is the appeal of the players at Spain's top two clubs that there were only two changes to the 11 voted into the FIFPro World XI in 2011.

Manchester United pair Wayne Rooney and Nemanja Vidic were the men to make way, for Falcao and Madrid's Brazilian left-back Marcelo, as the English Premier League had its grip on the team prised away finger by finger.

England has at least mustered representation in recent years, which is more than can be said for the German Bundesliga and France's Ligue 1, while the leading lights from Italy's Serie A have been ignored since 2010.

Amid criticism that the FIFPro selection amounts to nothing more than a glorified popularity contest, dissenting voices have emerged.

Germany captain Lothar Matthaus, present at the Ballon d'Or ceremony in Zurich, claims "people were shaking their heads" when the line-up was announced, while Chelsea left-back Ashley Cole jokingly tweeted: "#iwantspanishpassport."

Given the Spanish national team's stellar achievements in 2012 and the enduring brilliance of Messi and Ronaldo, it is difficult to quibble with much of the team, but there is room for conjecture.

Xabi Alonso won the league with Madrid and scored twice against France in the Euro 2012 quarter-finals, but his performances in Poland and Ukraine were eclipsed by those of Italy's Andrea Pirlo.

The elegant Juventus midfielder narrowly missed out to Iniesta in the voting for the player of the tournament and UEFA technical director Andy Roxburgh described his displays as "magnificent".

His Italy and Juve team-mates Gianluigi Buffon and Giorgio Chiellini also enjoyed excellent years, including success in Serie A, although both were members of the back line pierced four times by Spain in the Euro 2012 final.

In attack, Manchester United striker Robin van Persie, Zlatan Ibrahimovic of Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea's Champions League hero Didier Drogba all presented strong cases for inclusion as well, albeit not with a Spanish accent.

FIFPro World XI 2012:

Iker Casillas (ESP/Real Madrid); Dani Alves (BRA/Barcelona), Gerard Pique (ESP/Barcelona), Sergio Ramos (ESP/Real Madrid), Marcelo (BRA/Real Madrid); Xabi Alonso (ESP/Real Madrid), Xavi (ESP/Barcelona), Andres Iniesta (ESP/Barcelona); Lionel Messi (ARG/Barcelona), Radamel Falcao (COL/Atletico Madrid), Cristiano Ronaldo (POR/Real Madrid)

-AFP/ac

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Why 'Django' stirs race debate

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Gene Seymour: Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino spatting over "Django Unchained"


• Seymour says film, which upends slavery narrative, is classic comic-book Tarantino


• He says debate is over whether white artists have right to tell any part of black American story


• Seymour notes James Baldwin's sound advice: "If you don't like their alternative, write yours"

Editor's note: Gene Seymour is a film critic who has written about music, movies and culture for The New York Times, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly and The Washington Post.

(CNN) -- Spike Lee says he's never going to see Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained" because he's certain it is "disrespectful of my ancestors." Tarantino says he doesn't need to waste time responding to Lee's accusation. That, as they say, is that.

So why do we insist on staring at two egomaniacs staring down each other?

Race. Again. The subject that never fails to provoke, antagonize, alienate -- and fascinate rubber-necking onlookers from sea to shining sea. Fixating on race is an absurdity that has no rational reason to exist, yet no one quite knows how to eliminate it from humankind. The only thing dumber than race is underestimating its importance.

Gene Seymour

"Django Unchained" is Tarantino's latest exercise in genre-bending audacity, an antic ripsnorter folding in most of what its director knows and loves about spaghetti westerns, 1970s blaxploitation thrillers and his own ribald, recklessly violent body of work. Its title character, played by Jamie Foxx, is a slave bought and freed by a drolly effective German bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz), who agrees to help Django emancipate his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from a decadent plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio).

"Django" makes no pretense of being anything other than a phantasmagoric pseudo-western, rife with calculated vulgarity, anachronism and impropriety. Its body count rivals that of Tarantino's 2003 martial-arts epic, "Kill Bill Vol. 1" (to whose messily operatic set pieces of slaughter "Django" bears an uncanny resemblance).

Marquee blog: What's the verdict on "Django Unchanied"?

The movie has so far grossed more than $100 million since its Christmas Day nationwide release. Critics' reactions have ranged from wild-eyed enthusiasm (The Boston Globe's Wesley Morris: "Corkscrewed, inside-out, upside-down, simultaneously clear-eyed and out of its mind") to wary detachment (The Detroit News' Tom Long: "(Y)ou may leave ... wishing for both more and less") to borderline outrage (Slate's Dana Stevens: "There's something about (Tarantino's) directorial delectation in all these acts of racial violence that left me not just physically, but morally queasy.")

Given advance hype for the movie as extravagant as its violence, I doubt that audience members, whatever their race or age, bought tickets with the expectation of seeing some historically faithful saga of antebellum life, and neither did I. We were buying a comic book. Many people have a grievance against the very notion of comic books, but I don't. Expect a movie or a comic book to explain everything about anything and all you earn is surplus sadness that you don't really need.

Nevertheless, there are many who, unlike Lee, have seen the movie and carry the same grievances as he does. The most scathing attack came from that novelist-satirist-poet Ishmael Reed, writing in The Wall Street Journal: "To compare this movie to a spaghetti western and a blaxploitation film is an insult to both genres. It's a Tarantino home movie with all the racist licks of his other movies." He aimed this laser shot at the Oscar-nominated actor who plays the treacherous "house slave" to DiCaprio's character: "Samuel L. Jackson ... plays himself."

I doubt Jackson felt the blow. He has, in fact, further provoked the movie's antagonists by running straight at an interviewer asking about the movie's prolific use of the "N-word," refusing to answer the question unless the reporter, who is white, actually says the dread epithet aloud. (He didn't.)

Still, Reed's condemnation discloses what may lie at the heart of Lee's objection: the debate over whether white artists have the right to tell any part of the black American story -- which, as Reed writes, is as old as Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 abolitionist novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

It is also as recent as 1967 when the white Southern novelist William Styron published, "The Confessions of Nat Turner," a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel told in the first-person voice of the brilliant-but-doomed leader of an 1838 slave rebellion. The outcry from African-American novelists was so intense that a collection of essays, "William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond" was published a year later. James Baldwin, a friend of Styron's who was one of the few African-American authors speaking out on the book's behalf, put his position as succinctly as possible: "I will not tell another writer what to write. If you don't like their alternative, write yours."

It's still sound advice -- and in the intervening years, black authors have taken it, from Alex Haley's 1976 blockbuster, "Roots," to Toni Morrison's haunting "Beloved" from 1987. Both were adapted for the screen, and while "Roots," the television miniseries, delivered a resounding national impact, the 1998 movie adaptation of "Beloved," even with Oprah Winfrey as producer and co-star, earned about $26 million, roughly half of its $50 million budget.

I remember many of my African-American relatives and friends who told me they were not going to see "Beloved," no matter how good it was or who was in it, because they simply did not want to watch a movie about slavery's legacy. Some of these same folks, on the other hand, tell me they were psyched about seeing a movie, however "incorrect" on several levels, in which a black ex-slave secures freedom for his wife, kills every white man who stands in his way -- and gets away with it.

Exasperated? If you're not, you should be.

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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Gene Seymour.

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USADA head: I got death threats during Armstrong probe

(CBS News) Travis Tygart is the head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which polices U.S. Olympic sports. Lance Armstrong won the world's most grueling event, the Tour de France, seven times. But after Tygart's investigation, Armstrong lost all of his titles. In his first interview, Tygart spoke with us for the premier of a new program, "60 Minutes Sports" on Showtime. Tygart says Armstrong was doping in his very first win at the Tour de France in 1999. The drug was EPO, which boosts endurance.

TRAVIS TYGART: Six samples that were taken from Lance Armstrong were retested in '05. And they were positive.

SCOTT PELLEY: In '99, when the tests were originally taken, was it reported that they were negative?

TYGART: There was no test for EPO. They were not tested for EPO at that time.

PELLEY: And when you tested for them in 2005, you discovered that they were --

TYGART: All six were flaming positive.

PELLEY: Flaming positive?

TYGART: Flaming positive.

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Tygart told Pelley that throughout the investigation, witnesses were intimidated to try to keep the code of silence from breaking.

PELLEY: Was Lance Armstrong personally involved in intimidating these other riders to keep them quiet?

TYGART: He was. It was tough. All -- all these witnesses were -- were scared of the repercussions of them simply telling the truth.

PELLEY: What could Lance Armstrong do to them?

TYGART: Incinerate them.

Former teammate Levi Leipheimer felt the heat. In his sworn affidavit, he says he came to a cycling dinner after he testified to the grand jury. Leipheimer says Armstrong was there and sent Leipheimer's wife a text that read, "Run don't walk."

PELLEY: What did she take it to mean?

TYGART: It's a veiled threat. Knowing her husband had just testified, truthfully, in front of the grand jury and had told citizens of this country about this great fraud. It was a message: You better run.

PELLEY: Your investigation showed that there were personal threats made against riders who had decided to come clean. I wonder if there were any threats against you.

TYGART: There were, Scott.

PELLEY: These threats came from where?

TYGART: Emails, letters.

PELLEY: Anonymous?

TYGART: Yeah.

PELLEY: Can you remember any of the lines from the emails or the letters?

TYGART: The worst was probably putting a bullet in my head.

PELLEY: Did you take that seriously?

TYGART: Absolutely.

To hear the rest of Travis Tygart's story, tune into the premiere edition of "60 Minutes Sports" tomorrow at 10:00 p.m. on the Showtime Network.

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