Nation roundup for Aug. 14

Officer among
3 killed in Texas

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (AP) — The family of a gunman killed in a shootout near the Texas A&M campus that also left two other people dead Monday afternoon say they are “distraught by the havoc that he has caused.”

Police say Thomas Alton Caffall, 35, opened fire on Brazos County Constable Brian Bachmann just after noon as the lawman brought an eviction notice. Both men were later pronounced dead at a hospital.

A 51-year-old man was the third person killed in the shootings at an off-campus home not far from the university’s football stadium, College Station Police said. Three other law enforcement officers and a 55-year-old woman were wounded, he said.

Officers responding to reports of an officer down saw Bachmann wounded on the ground in the front yard, then got into an extended shootout with Caffall.

JFK’s $100M security breached

NEW YORK (AP) — In an era when airline passengers can’t get past a checkpoint with a bottle of shampoo, security experts were shocked Monday by the case of a man who swam ashore, scaled a fence and walked dripping wet into Kennedy Airport despite a $100 million system of surveillance cameras and motion detectors.

“Thank God it wasn’t a terrorist, but we have to look at it as if we had another attack,” said Isaac Yeffet, former chief of security for Israeli airline El Al. “That’s the only way we’ll improve the system.”

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees JFK, quickly added police patrols to the airport perimeter and said it is investigating the security breach.

Longtime Cosmo editor dies at 90

NEW YORK (AP) — The sexual revolution, Helen Gurley Brown declared 50 years ago, was no longer just for men.

Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and an author who encouraged women not to save it for the wedding night, died Monday at a hospital in New York after a brief hospitalization, Hearst CEO Frank A. Bennack Jr. said in a statement. She was 90.

“Sex and the Single Girl,” her million-selling grab-bag book of advice, opinion and anecdote on why being single shouldn’t mean being sexless, made a celebrity of the 40-year-old advertising copywriter in 1962 and made her a foil for feminists who believed that women’s rights meant more than sleeping around.

Three years later, she was hired by Hearst Magazines to turn around the languishing Cosmopolitan, and it became her playtime pulpit for the next 32 years.

She said at the outset that her aim was to tell a reader “how to get everything out of life — the money, recognition, success, men, prestige, authority, dignity — whatever she is looking at through the glass her nose is pressed against.”

“It was a terrific magazine,” she said, looking back when she surrendered the editorship of the U.S. edition in 1997. “I would want my legacy to be, ‘She created something that helped people.’ My reader, I always felt, was someone who needed to come into her own.”

Along the way, she added to the language such terms as “Cosmo girl” — hip, sexy, vivacious and smart — and “mouseburger,” which she coined first in describing herself as a plain and ordinary woman who must work relentlessly to make herself desirable and successful.

Her motto: “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.”

She put big-haired, deep-cleavaged beauties photographed by Francesco Scavullo on the magazine’s cover, behind teaser titles like “Nothing Fails Like Sex-cess — Facts About Our Real Lovemaking Needs.”

Male centerfolds arrived during the 1970s — actor Burt Reynolds’ (modestly) nude pose in 1972 created a sensation — but departed by the ’90s.

Brown and Cosmo were anathema to some feminists, who staged a sit-in at her office. One of them, Kate Millet, said, “The magazine’s reactionary politics were too much to take, especially the man-hunting part. The entire message seemed to be ‘Seduce your boss, then marry him.’”

Another early critic was Betty Friedan, who dismissed the magazine as “immature teenage-level sexual fantasy” but later came around and said Brown, “in her editorship, has been a rather spirited and gutsy example in the revolution of women.”

“Bad Girls Go Everywhere,” the 2009 biography of Brown by Jennifer Scanlon, a women’s studies professor, argued that her message of empowerment made Brown a feminist even if the movement didn’t recognize her as such.

There was no disputing that Brown quickly turned a financial turkey into a songbird.

Within four issues, circulation, which had fallen below the 800,000 readers guaranteed to advertisers, was on the rise, even with the newsstand price increasing from 35 cents to 50 and then 60.

Sales grew every year until peaking at just over 3 million in 1983, then slowly leveled off to 2.5 million at $2.95 a copy, where it was when Brown left in 1997. (She stayed on as editor-in-chief of the magazine’s foreign editions.)

She was still rail thin, 5 feet 4 and within a few pounds of 100 in either direction, as she had kept herself throughout her life with daily exercise and a careful diet.

“You can’t be sexual at 60 if you’re fat,” she observed on her 60th birthday. She also championed cosmetic surgery, speaking easily of her own nose job, facelifts and silicone injections.

An ugly duckling by her own account, Helen Gurley was a child of the Ozarks, born Feb. 18, 1922, in Green Forest, Ark. Growing up during the Depression, she earned pocket money by giving other kids dance lessons.

Her father died when she was 10 and her mother, a teacher, moved the family to Los Angeles, where young Helen, acne-ridden and otherwise physically unendowed, graduated as valedictorian of John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in 1939.

All the immediate future held was secretarial work. With typing and shorthand learned at a business college, she went through 18 jobs in seven years at places like the William Morris Agency, the Daily News in Los Angeles, and, in 1948, the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency. There, when finally given a shot at writing ad copy, she began winning prizes and was hired away by Kenyon & Eckhardt, which made her the highest-paid advertising woman on the West Coast.

She also evidently was piling up the experience she put to use later as an author, editor and hostess of a TV chit-chat show.

“I’ve never worked anywhere without being sexually involved with somebody in the office,” she told New York magazine in 1982. Asked whether that included the boss, she said, “Why discriminate against him?”

Marriage came when she was 37 to twice-divorced David Brown, a former Cosmopolitan managing editor-turned-movie producer, whose credits would include “The Sting” and “Jaws.”

Her husband encouraged Brown to write a book, which she put together on weekends, and suggested the title “Sex and the Single Girl.” A working title of “Sex for the Single Girl” had been rejected as a little too permissive, even for Gurley Brown.

They moved to New York after the book became one of the top sellers of 1962. Moviemakers bought it for a then-very-hefty $200,000, not for the nonexistent plot, but for its provocative title. Natalie Wood played a character named Helen Gurley Brown who had no resemblance to the original.

According to Hearst, “Sex and the Single Girl” has been translated into 16 languages and published in 28 countries. She followed up her success with a long-playing record album, “Lessons in Love,” and another book, “Sex in the Office,” in 1965.

That year she and her husband pitched a women’s magazine idea at Hearst, which turned it down, but hired her to run Cosmopolitan instead.

In 1967 she hosted a TV talk show, “Outrageous Opinions,” syndicated in 19 cities and featuring celebrity guests willing to be prodded about sex and other risque topics.

She also went on to write five more books, including “Having It All” in 1982 and in 1993, at age 71, “The Late Show,” which was subtitled: “A Semiwild but Practical Survival Plan for Women Over 50.”

“My own philosophy is if you’re not having sex, you’re finished. It separates the girls from the old people,” she told an interviewer.

The Browns were childless by choice, she said.

House files suit against Holder over gov’t records

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Republican-run House on Monday asked a federal court to enforce a subpoena against Attorney General Eric Holder, demanding that he produce records on a bungled gun-tracking operation known as Operation Fast and Furious.

The lawsuit asked the court to reject a claim by President Barack Obama asserting executive privilege, a legal position designed to protect certain internal administration communications from disclosure.

The failure of Holder and House Republicans to work out a deal on the documents led to votes in June that held the attorney general in civil and criminal contempt of Congress. The civil contempt resolution led to Monday’s lawsuit.

Holder refused requests by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to hand over — without preconditions — documents that could explain why the Justice Department initially denied in February 2011 that a risky tactic was used to allow firearms to “walk” from Arizona to Mexico.

Federal agents lost track of many of the guns. The operation identified more than 2,000 illicitly purchased weapons, and some 1,400 of them have yet to be recovered.

The department failed to acknowledge its incorrect statement for 10 months.

“Portentously, the (Justice) Department from the outset actively resisted cooperating fully with the committee’s investigation,” the lawsuit said.

“Among other things, the department initially declined to produce documents; later produced only very limited numbers of documents in piecemeal fashion; refused to make available to the committee certain witnesses; and limited the committee’s questioning of other witnesses who were made available,” it said.

The Justice Department previously said that it would not bring criminal charges against its boss. Democrats have labeled the civil and criminal contempt citations a political stunt.

In response to the lawsuit, Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said, “We were always willing to work with the committee. Instead the House and the committee have said they prefer to litigate.”

Numerous lawmakers said this was the first time a Cabinet official had been held in contempt.

The lawsuit asked that:

—The executive privilege claim by Obama be declared invalid.

—Holder’s objection to the House records subpoena be rejected.

—The attorney general produce all records related to the Justice Department’s incorrect assertion in early 2011 that gun-walking did not take place.

The administration’s position reciting the words “executive privilege” rests entirely on a common law privilege known as the “deliberative process privilege” and “is legally baseless,” says the lawsuit.

Historically, there are two main types of executive privilege. One privilege, for “presidential communications,” only covers the president and the work of top aides preparing advice for the president.

The other, known as “deliberative process privilege,” covers a much wider category of administration officials, even if they weren’t working on something for the president specifically. Presidents are required to have a stronger argument to justify keeping secrets under this broader authority, which can involve documents they never saw or were even intended to see.

A federal appeals court has ruled that this broader privilege is easier for Congress to overcome and it “disappears altogether when there is any reason to believe government misconduct has occurred.”

The lawsuit said the documents “would enable the committee (and the American people) to understand how and why the department provided false information to Congress and otherwise obstructed the committee’s concededly legitimate investigation.”

It challenged the executive privilege claim on several legal grounds, contending it was asserted indirectly by the deputy attorney general in a letter to Congress, and that the documents do not involve any advice to the president. The department’s actions do not involve core constitutional functions of the president, the suit said.

The suit contended the administration’s position, if accepted, “would cripple congressional oversight of executive branch agencies….”

In past cases, courts have been reluctant to settle disputes between the executive and legislative branches of government.

Given recent experience, the Republican-controlled committee’s lawsuit could result in a compromise or an appeal by the losing side.

In 2008, a federal judge rejected the George W. Bush administration’s position that senior presidential advisers could not be forced to testify to the House Judiciary Committee. The decision was regarded as vindication of Congress’s investigative powers.

But the ruling also said that Congress’ authority to compel testimony from executive branch officials was not unlimited. The Bush administration appealed, but after Barack Obama became president in 2009, the newly elected Congress and the administration reached a settlement. Some of the documents at issue in the case were provided to the House and former White House counsel Harriet Miers testified.

The battle over congressional subpoenas for documents and testimony arose when Congress looked into whether political motives and White House involvement had prompted the dismissal of U.S. attorneys.

Gun-walking long has been barred by Justice Department policy, but federal agents in Arizona experimented with it in three investigations during the George W. Bush administration before Operation Fast and Furious. The agents in Arizona lost track of several hundred weapons in the three earlier operations.