Suzy Favor Hamilton, a three-time U.S. Olympian, has revealed that she has spent much of the past year working as a $600-an-hour escort. It's a stunning admission, and a decision that Hamilton now calls a "huge mistake," according to The Smoking Gun.

Since last December, Hamilton has, according to TSG, worked with Haley Heston's Private Collection in Las Vegas, and has gone on engagements in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston. The 44-year-old married mother of one worked under the name "Kelly Lundy," but apparently revealed her true identity to several male clients.

Hamilton responded to Thursday's story with a lengthy response and apology on Twitter:

    I realize I have made highly irrational choices and I take full responsibility for them. I am not a victim here and knew what I was doing. I was drawn to escorting in large part because it provided many coping mechanisms for me when I was going through a very challenging time with my marriage and my life. It provided an escape from a life that I was struggling in. It was a double life.

    I do not expect people to understand, but the reasons for doing this made sense to me at the time and were very much related to depression. As crazy as I know it seems, I never thought I would be exposed, therefore never hurting anybody. I have been seeking the help of a psychologist for the past few weeks and will continue to do so after I have put things together. I cannot emphasize enough how sorry I am to anyone I have hurt as a result of my actions and greatly appreciate the support from family and those closest to me. I fully intend to make amends and get back to being a good mother, wife, daughter, and friend.

A special screening of Tom Cruise's new film "Jack Reacher" has been postponed in the wake of the Newtown, Conn. shooting that left 20 children dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

"Out of respect for the families who lost loved ones in Newtown, CT, we are postponing tonight's fundraising event with Tom Cruise to benefit the 50th anniversary fund, which supports K-12 education and new artist programs," Rose Kuo, executive director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, said in a statement. "We extend our love and condolences to our neighbors. Our community grieves with yours."

The event was going to be held at the Rose Theater in New York's Lincoln Center. Cruise was expected to attend.

Of all the movies coming out before the end of the year, "Jack Reacher" is the one that has been affected most by the massacre in Newtown. On Saturday, the film had its U.S. premiere in Pittsburgh canceled out of respect for the victims and their families.

Based on the novel series by author Lee Child, "Jack Reacher" focuses on an ex-military police officier who tries to solve the murder of five people at the hands of a sniper.

While it is a painful truism that brutality and violence are at least as old as humanity, so, it seems, is caring for the sick and disabled.

And some archaeologists are suggesting a closer, more systematic look at how prehistoric people — who may have left only their bones — treated illness, injury and incapacitation. Call it the archaeology of health care.

The case that led Lorna Tilley and Marc Oxenham of Australian National University in Canberra to this idea is that of a profoundly ill young man who lived 4,000 years ago in what is now northern Vietnam and was buried, as were others in his culture, at a site known as Man Bac.

Almost all the other skeletons at the site, south of Hanoi and about 15 miles from the coast, lie straight. Burial 9, as both the remains and the once living person are known, was laid to rest curled in the fetal position. When Ms. Tilley, a graduate student in archaeology, and Dr. Oxenham, a professor, excavated and examined the skeleton in 2007 it became clear why. His fused vertebrae, weak bones and other evidence suggested that he lies in death as he did in life, bent and crippled by disease.

They gathered that he became paralyzed from the waist down before adolescence, the result of a congenital disease known as Klippel-Feil syndrome. He had little, if any, use of his arms and could not have fed himself or kept himself clean. But he lived another 10 years or so.

They concluded that the people around him who had no metal and lived by fishing, hunting and raising barely domesticated pigs, took the time and care to tend to his every need.

“There’s an emotional experience in excavating any human being, a feeling of awe,” Ms. Tilley said, and a responsibility “to tell the story with as much accuracy and humanity as we can.”

This case, and other similar, if less extreme examples of illness and disability, have prompted Ms. Tilley and Dr. Oxenham to ask what the dimensions of such a story are, what care for the sick and injured says about the culture that provided it.

The archaeologists described the extent of Burial 9’s disability in a paper in Anthropological Science in 2009. Two years later, they returned to the case to address the issue of health care head on. “The provision and receipt of health care may therefore reflect some of the most fundamental aspects of a culture,” the two archaeologists wrote in The International Journal of Paleopathology.

And earlier this year, in proposing what she calls a “bioarchaeology of care,” Ms. Tilley wrote that this field of study “has the potential to provide important — and possibly unique — insights into the lives of those under study.” In the case of Burial 9, she says, not only does his care indicate tolerance and cooperation in his culture, but suggests that he himself had a sense of his own worth and a strong will to live. Without that, she says, he could not have stayed alive.

“I’m obviously not the first archaeologist” to notice evidence of people who needed help to survive in stone age or other early cultures, she said. Nor does her method “come out of the blue.” It is based on and extends previous work.

Among archaeological finds, she said, she knows “about 30 cases in which the disease or pathology was so severe, they must have had care in order to survive.” And she said there are certainly more such cases to be described. “I am totally confident that there are almost any number of case studies where direct support or accommodation was necessary.”

Such cases include at least one Neanderthal, Shanidar 1, from a site in Iraq, dating to 45,000 years ago, who died around age 50 with one arm amputated, loss of vision in one eye and other injuries. Another is Windover boy from about 7,500 years ago, found in Florida, who had a severe congenital spinal malformation known as spina bifida, and lived to around age 15. D. N. Dickel and G. H. Doran, from Florida State University wrote the original paper on the case in 1989, and they concluded that contrary to popular stereotypes of prehistoric people, “under some conditions life 7,500 years ago included an ability and willingness to help and sustain the chronically ill and handicapped.”

 Wal-Mart longed to build in Elda Pineda’s alfalfa field. It was an ideal location, just off this town’s bustling main entrance and barely a mile from its ancient pyramids, which draw tourists from around the world. With its usual precision, Wal-Mart calculated it would attract 250 customers an hour if only it could put a store in Mrs. Pineda’s field.

After years of study, the town’s elected leaders had just approved a new zoning map. The leaders wanted to limit growth near the pyramids, and they considered the town’s main entrance too congested already. As a result, the 2003 zoning map prohibited commercial development on Mrs. Pineda’s field, seemingly dooming Wal-Mart’s hopes.

But 30 miles away in Mexico City, at the headquarters of Wal-Mart de Mexico, executives were not about to be thwarted by an unfavorable zoning decision. Instead, records and interviews show, they decided to undo the damage with one well-placed $52,000 bribe.

The plan was simple. The zoning map would not become law until it was published in a government newspaper. So Wal-Mart de Mexico arranged to bribe an official to change the map before it was sent to the newspaper, records and interviews show. Sure enough, when the map was published, the zoning for Mrs. Pineda’s field was redrawn to allow Wal-Mart’s store.

Wal-Mart de Mexico broke ground months later, provoking fierce opposition. Protesters decried the very idea of a Wal-Mart so close to a cultural treasure. They contended the town’s traditional public markets would be decimated, its traffic mess made worse. Months of hunger strikes and sit-ins consumed Mexico’s news media. Yet for all the scrutiny, the story of the altered map remained a secret. The store opened for Christmas 2004, affirming Wal-Mart’s emerging dominance in Mexico.

The secret held even after a former Wal-Mart de Mexico lawyer contacted Wal-Mart executives in Bentonville, Ark., and told them how Wal-Mart de Mexico routinely resorted to bribery, citing the altered map as but one example. His detailed account — he had been in charge of getting building permits throughout Mexico — raised alarms at the highest levels of Wal-Mart and prompted an internal investigation.

But as The New York Times revealed in April, Wal-Mart’s leaders shut down the investigation in 2006. They did so even though their investigators had found a wealth of evidence supporting the lawyer’s allegations. The decision meant authorities were not notified. It also meant basic questions about the nature, extent and impact of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s conduct were never asked, much less answered.

The Times has now picked up where Wal-Mart’s internal investigation was cut off, traveling to dozens of towns and cities in Mexico, gathering tens of thousands of documents related to Wal-Mart de Mexico permits, and interviewing scores of government officials and Wal-Mart employees, including 15 hours of interviews with the former lawyer, Sergio Cicero Zapata.

American Idol alumna Kelly Clarkson and her boyfriend of 1-year Brandon Blackstock (a.k.a. Reba McEntire’s stepson) are gettin’ hitched!

The 30-year-old singer made the announcement via her Twitter account yesterday saying,

    I’M ENGAGED!!!!!  I wanted y’all to know!! Happiest night of my life last night! I am so lucky and am with the greatest man ever.

Awww.  We could not be happier for the “Catch My Breath” singer, who totally stole our hearts during the very first season of Idol, back in 2002.

The singer also posted a pic of the giant rock she’s now sporting on her left ring finger, along with the caption:

    Everyone has been asking about my engagement ring, so here it is :) … It’s a yellow canary diamond with diamonds around.


During an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show last month, Clarkson revealed that while Blackstock hadn’t proposed just yet, she knew it was coming.

    … We are totally going to get married. We love each other. We are totally going to get married one day…

Well Kel, that day is finally here!  Congrats to the happy couple!

In Gujarat assembly elections the question was hardly about whether Narendra Modi would win a third term in office, it was always about the margin. And, it was about the X factor in the elections this time: Keshubhai Patel of the Gujarat Parivartan Party.

If Modi manages an emphatic victory here —

seats in the region of 130 or beyond — the intra-party challenge to his ascendance in national politics withers away. If the tally falls behind 117 seats, which the BJP won in 2007, it won’t hurt his prospects at the national level but it would certainly leave him a bit insecure. This way, it was always a Modi vs Modi battle in Gujarat in 2007.


The Congress going to the polls with a 11 per cent vote share deficit did not stand much of a chance. It could only have hoped to increase its tally of 2007 — in the sub-60 territory — by a few more seats and wait for the GPP to cause the damage to Modi, bringing down his strike rate. The large voter turnout in a situation where the electorate has no anti-incumbency axe to grind could only have made the writing on the wall clearer for it. As the post-poll surveys of the first phase of polls indicate the party’s electoral standing has not changed a bit.

The biggest challenge for Modi, at least in the Saurashtra region, was Keshubhai, the old BJP hand-turned principal Modi baitor and a former chief minister. The leader of politically influential Leuva Patels, Keshubhai threatened to bring down the seat tally of the BJP in the Saurashtra region by at least 12 seats. However, as the post-poll survey conducted by Delhi-based conducted by Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), he has failed to cause any damage to the BJP. In fact, he might have worked to the disadvantage of the Congress.

Polls for the Saurashtra region were held in the first phase. As many as 87 seats — including 48 in Saurashtra — went to polls in that phase and as the survey suggests the BJP is likely to win anywhere between 53 and 63 seats with 45 percent vote share. The Congress is likely to have a vote share of 33 per cent and win anywhere between 19 and 27 seats. Others, including the GPP, would manage 22 percent of vote share but would end up with 3-9 seats. Keshubhai’s party would manage a vote share of 12 percent.

The survey, conducted between 13-14 December at 120 polling booths across 29 assembly seats, had a sample size of 1,805 voters. An overwhelming 41 percent of respondents felt Modi was the best choice for chief minister while eight percent felt Keshubhai was a better bet. The same number of contestants rooted for Congress’s Shankersinh Vaghela.

After India's crushing series defeat against England on Monday, former chief selector Krishnamachari Srikkanth called for MS Dhoni's removal as Test captain, stating that he is no more effective as the leader of the team.

"Dhoni's become stale and doesn't know what to do when things go out of the way. He shouldn't be the Test captain anymore. Had I been the chairman of selectors, I would have picked Dhoni as a wicketkeeper batsman but it is time to look beyond him as a Test captain," Srikkanth said while speaking to CNN-IBN.

 "I will pick Dhoni as a keeper/batsman because his contribution has to be considered. I think he will be better off without captaincy and add more value to the Test team," he added.

Srikkanth also believed the time has come when seletors should analyse the future of Sachin Tendulkar, who failed miserably against England. "Sachin needs to take an honest call about what he wants to do. If he thinks he can play against the Australians then he should be given another series. The best way forward will be to have a conversation with Sachin and I guess the selectors will be talking to him and making him feel comfortable," he said.

 Long before Christopher Chaney made headlines by hacking into the email accounts of such stars as Scarlett Johansson and Christina Aguilera, two other women say he harassed and stalked them online.

The women, who both knew Chaney, say their lives have been irreparably damaged by his actions. One has anxiety and panic attacks; the other is depressed and paranoid. Both say Chaney was calculated, cruel and creepy: he sent nude photos they had taken of themselves to their family members.

Their accounts as cybervictims serve as a cautionary tale for those, even major celebrities, who snap personal, and sometimes revealing photos.

Chaney, 35, of Jacksonville, Fla., is set to be sentenced Monday and could face up to 60 years in prison after pleading guilty to nine felony counts, including wiretapping and unauthorized access to a computer, for hacking into email accounts of Aguilera, Johansson and Mila Kunis.

Aguilera said in a statement that although she knows that she's often in the limelight, Chaney took from her some of the private moments she shares with friends.

"That feeling of security can never be given back and there is no compensation that can restore the feeling one has from such a large invasion of privacy," Aguilera said.

Prosecutors said Chaney illegally accessed the email accounts of more than 50 people in the entertainment industry between November 2010 and October 2011. Aguilera, Kunis and Johansson agreed to have their identities made public with the hopes that the exposure about the case would provide awareness about online intrusion.

The biggest spectacle in the case was the revelation that nude photos taken by Johansson herself and meant for her then-husband Ryan Reynolds were taken by Chaney and put on the Internet. The "Avengers" actress is not expected to attend the hearing, but she has videotaped a statement that may be shown in court.

Some of Aguilera's photos appeared online after Chaney sent an email from the account of her stylist, Simone Harouche, to Aguilera asking the singer for scantily clad photographs, prosecutors said.

Chaney forwarded many of the photographs to two gossip websites and another hacker, but there wasn't evidence he profited from his scheme, authorities said.

For the two women, who were only identified in court papers by their initials, their encounters with Chaney went from friendly to frightening.