plus 3, Many on City Council know it's time for radical change in how ... - Cleveland Plain Dealer

Many on City Council know it's time for radical change in how ... - Cleveland Plain Dealer
Alabama shooter's fury kept just below the surface - Chattanooga Times Free Press
Alabama shooting suspect brilliant, but social misfit - Chicago Sun-Times
Davis, Vonn, Ohno Win More ... But No Gold - Channel 3000

Many on City Council know it's time for radical change in how ... - Cleveland Plain Dealer

Posted: 21 Feb 2010 05:01 AM PST

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By Brent Larkin

February 21, 2010, 8:00AM

John Kuntz / The Plain Dealer"Look at it — covered in snow. No roof. You talk about mistakes," says Cleveland Councilman Michael Polensek about Cleveland Browns Stadium.

The four of them have represented the city of Cleveland in elected office for a combined 106 years, 98 of them as members of City Council.

As a group, they have lived in the city for two centuries.

One needn't be fans of Councilmen Michael Polensek, Ken Johnson, Jay Westbrook and Jeff Johnson to appreciate that these four have forgotten more about daily life in Cleveland than those of us in the suburbs will ever know.

And every one of them thinks this: Cleveland is a city in desperate trouble.

Polensek: "We've got affordable housing, great lakefront possibilities and cultural institutions second to none. But if we don't get our act together in a hurry, we're toast."

Ken Johnson: "If we don't do something soon, I think we'll be worse than Youngstown."

Westbrook: "We're in dire straits."

Jeff Johnson: "We're getting into such a hole that it will be very difficult to get out. Yet there's no sense of urgency here."

Polensek walks to the window in his second-floor City Hall office, jabbing an angry finger in the direction of Cleveland Browns Stadium.

"Look at it -- covered in snow. No roof. You talk about mistakes. In the summer I sit here and look at Voinovich Park. There's nobody down there. I'm a senior member and I see my city disintegrating."

Elected in 1977, the 60-year-old Polensek is the council dean. A lifelong Collinwood resident, he is tough, plain-spoken, rough around the edges. A decade ago, he was council president, before losing the job to Frank Jackson.

Since Polensek took office, Cleveland has lost about half of its population. He predicts this year's federal census "will be like the shot heard round the world." A decade ago, Cleveland's population was 478,403. Today, Polensek thinks it might be 325,000.

"We're out of time," he said. "We need something dramatic or Cleveland will be like East St. Louis or Gary."

Polensek's "dramatic" fix is metropolitan government. He wants one county, one city -- soon.

And if that doesn't happen? "Then we're done."

Ken Johnson isn't a major player at City Hall. Instead, Johnson, 63, prefers to work from his ward office in the Woodland and Buckeye neighborhoods. Johnson's obsession with constituent service has kept him in office for 30 years. But that obsession has become a fight he's now losing.

"My neighborhood is devastated," he said. "It's not even close to what it used to be. Drugs, foreclosures, crime, schools that are in shambles. It's just a big mess."

Like many of his East Side colleagues, Johnson long opposed metropolitan government, in large part due to fears that it would dilute black political power.

Johnson now believes "we have to start thinking about it. It may be the only answer."

Another 30-year veteran, Westbrook represents the Cudell and Edgewater neighborhoods. Council president for most of the 1990s, Westbrook, 62, is one of council's best and most conscientious members.

Westbrook agreed that Cleveland could benefit from a "thoughtful regional agenda," but worried that "quick and simplistic fixes" won't solve problems a half-century in the making. "But I do believe we need more of a sense of urgency. We have to act as if our future depends on it."

Two decades ago, Jeff Johnson was a star in the making. But after six years on council and eight in the Ohio Senate, Johnson's career seemingly ended in 1998 with a conviction on federal corruption charges -- and the 15-month prison sentence that came with it.

Now he's back in council, representing the Glenville and St. Clair-Superior neighborhoods. And though his reputation is forever tarnished, Johnson's intellect and street smarts make him one of council's most gifted members.

Johnson said the "uncontrollable increase in abandoned homes" and the escalation of crime are destroying his ward. "At any given moment, anyone walking down the street can get shot."

Although he's no fan of metropolitan government, Johnson said it's essential that the city explore "more creative ways" of economic collaboration.

"Glenville used to be a leader," he said. "Now it's a community on the brink."

Last year, voters approved the most dramatic governmental reform in Cuyahoga County's 202-year history. Come January, Mayor Frank Jackson and City Council leaders should begin talks with newly elected county officials and suburban leaders about an idea that would dwarf last year's in significance: changing the way this entire community governs itself.

No more tinkering on the margins. All that's accomplished is to hasten the city's demise.

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Alabama shooter's fury kept just below the surface - Chattanooga Times Free Press

Posted: 21 Feb 2010 05:58 AM PST

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By SHAILA DEWAN, STEPHANIE SAUL and KATIE ZEZIMA

c.2010 New York Times News Service

Not long after Amy Bishop was identified as the professor who had been arrested in the shooting of six faculty members at the University of Alabama in Huntsville on Feb. 12, the campus police received a series of reports even stranger than the shooting itself.

Several people with connections to the university's biology department warned that Bishop, a neuroscientist with a Harvard Ph.D., might have booby-trapped the science building with some sort of "herpes bomb," police officials said, designed to spread the dangerous virus.

Only people who had worked with Bishop would know that she had done work with the herpes virus as a post-doctoral student and had talked about how it could cause encephalitis. She had also written an unpublished novel in which a herpes-like virus spreads throughout the world, causing pregnant women to miscarry.

By the time of the reports, the police had already swept every room of the science building, finding nothing but a 9-millimeter handgun in the second-floor restroom.

But the anxious warnings reflected the fears of those who know Bishop that she could go to great lengths to retaliate against those she felt had wronged her.

Over the years, Bishop had shown evidence that the smallest of slights could set off a disproportionate and occasionally violent reaction, according to numerous interviews with colleagues and others who know her. Her life seemed to veer wildly between moments of cold fury and scientific brilliance, between rage at perceived slights and empathy for her students.

Her academic career slammed to a halt with the shooting rampage nine days ago against her colleagues. Bishop, 45, is accused of killing three fellow biology professors, including the department's chairman, at a faculty meeting. Three others were wounded.

Her lawyer says she remembers nothing of the shootings and that he plans to have her evaluated by psychiatrists.

The shootings took place after Bishop learned that she had lost her long battle to gain academic tenure at the university. But they were hardly the first time that she had come to the attention of law enforcement because of an outburst or violent act.

In 2002, she was charged with assault after punching a woman in the head at an International House of Pancakes in Peabody, Mass. The woman had taken the last booster seat, and, according to the police report, Bishop demanded it for one of her children, shouting, "I am Dr. Amy Bishop!"

In 1986, not long after a family argument, Amy Bishop shot and killed her brother, Seth, 18, with her father's 12-gauge shotgun, putting a gaping hole in his chest and tearing open his aorta, according to the police report. She was 21 years old and, like her brother, a student at Northeastern University.

But Amy Bishop was not charged with a crime, and the shooting was never fully investigated by the police. She and her family said it was an accident, and the authorities accepted their version.

And in 1994, she and her husband were questioned in a mail bomb plot against a doctor at Harvard, where she obtained her Ph.D. and remained on and off for nearly a decade to conduct postdoctoral research.

In her earlier brushes with the law, Bishop emerged unscathed, and the University of Alabama in Huntsville never knew of them. But she left behind a trail of neighbors, colleagues and acquaintances who were mystified by her mood swings and volatility.

She yelled at playing children, neighbors said, and rarely kept her opinions to herself. She rejected criticism and fudged her resume. Her scientific work was not as impressive as she made it seem, according to independent neurobiologists, some of whom said she would have been unlikely to even get the opportunity to try for tenure at major universities.

She was known to have cyclical "flip-outs," as one former student described them, that pushed one graduate student after another out of her laboratory. On the day she shot and killed her brother, she ran out into the street with the shotgun and demanded a car at a local dealership.

Dr. Hugo Gonzalez-Serratos, now a professor of physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, collaborated with Bishop on a 1996 paper while both were working in the cardiology department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, affiliated with Harvard. When the paper was completed, Gonzalez-Serratos said, Bishop flew into a rage.

"She was very angry because she was not the first author," he recalled, referring to the more prominent position. "She broke down. She was extremely angry with all of us. She exploded into something emotional that we never saw before in our careers."

Her contract in the department was not renewed.

Even those who worked with her on fiction writing in Massachusetts described the experience as painful and said they always had a feeling she was about to explode.

"When I worked with her, I found she was always within striking distance of the edge," said Lenny Cavallaro, a writer who said he collaborated with Bishop on "Amazon Fever," the unpublished novel about the virus.

A SHELL IN HER POCKET

On the morning of Dec. 6, 1986, there was an argument at the home of Judith and Samuel Bishop, a Victorian house among the grandest in Braintree, Mass., a middle-class suburb of Boston.

Judy, active in local politics and well known around town, was out horseback riding. Seth was outside washing his car. Sam Bishop, a film professor at Northeastern, was heading to the mall before lunch to do some Christmas shopping. But before he left, he and his daughter, Amy, had some kind of dispute, according to police records. It was over something Amy had said.

Amy went upstairs to her room and would later tell the police that she had decided to load her father's shotgun. She wanted to learn how it worked, she said, because there had been a break-in at the house not long before.

Sam Bishop had bought the gun a year earlier in Canton, Mass., and he and his son joined the local Braintree rifle club. He had left the gun, unloaded, on the top of a trunk in his bedroom, enclosed in a case. The shells were in a nearby bureau.

Amy had never used the shotgun before.

She loaded it and a blast went off in her room. Police later found evidence that she had tried to conceal the results of that blast, using a Band-Aid tin and a book cover to hide holes in the wall.

Carrying the shotgun, she descended the stairs to the kitchen, where her brother and mother were standing.

"I was at the kitchen sink, and Seth was standing by the stove," Judy Bishop told the police. "Amy said, 'I have a shell in the gun, and I don't know how to unload it.' I told Amy not to point the gun at anybody. Amy turned toward her brother and the gun fired, hitting him. Amy then ran out of the house with the shotgun."

Judy Bishop said the shooting had been an accident.

As police officers and emergency medical technicians tended to Seth, who was bleeding to death on the floor, another group of officers went in search of Amy, who had headed toward Braintree's commercial district.

Tom Pettigrew, who was working in the body shop of a Ford dealership, said he and his friends saw a young woman walking around, looking into cars, carrying a shotgun.

"I kind of stepped back and said, 'What's going on, what are you doing here?"' Pettigrew said in an interview. "She said, 'Put your hands up.' I put my hands up and repeated the question."

He continued: "She was distraught. She was hyperaware of everything that was going on. She said: 'I need a car. I just got into a fight with my husband. He's looking for me, and he's going to kill me."'

Minutes later, the police found Amy Bishop, still holding the gun, near a village newspaper distribution agency, where workers were busy unloading Sunday papers. According to Officer Ronald Solimini's report, she appeared frightened, disoriented and confused, but she refused his orders to drop the gun until another officer approached her from the other side.

When the police took her into custody they found one shell in the shotgun and another in her pocket.

As Solimini and a partner drove Amy Bishop to the police station, she made a remark that surprised him, according to the report. "She stated that she had an argument with her father earlier," Solimini wrote. "(Prior to the shooting, she stated!)"

Police officers began to question Amy, but her mother arrived and told her not to answer any more questions. Paul Frazier, the current police chief of Braintree, said that Amy Bishop's release "did not sit well with these officers," and that the lieutenant in charge of booking that night told him a higher-up had given instructions to stop the booking process.

In an interview on Wednesday, the area's current prosecutor, William R. Keating, district attorney of Norfolk County, was highly critical of the handling of the shooting 24 years ago, particularly because it appears that Amy Bishop's actions after her brother's shooting — demanding a car at gunpoint and refusing an officer's orders to drop the gun — were not conveyed to state authorities who investigated the case.

"It's not a minor thing that would be omitted," Keating said.

Keating said Amy Bishop could have been charged with weapons and assault felonies, which would probably have prompted a psychiatric evaluation. Had such a charge, or any of the others that followed, been on her record, it could have changed the course of Bishop's career, and the fate of those who died in Huntsville.

Instead, the investigation was stopped.

Did someone intervene to save Amy Bishop from prosecution? Her mother served on the town committee, an elected legislative panel of 240 members that set the town's spending. Or was Amy's release merely a town's way of caring for its own, the way small towns do?

That night, after the gory mess in the kitchen had been cleaned up by helpful neighbors, one of the investigating officers, Billy Finn, stopped by to see if the family needed food.

"You cannot imagine how kind the Braintree police were to us," Judy Bishop told The Braintree Forum and Observer a week later.

Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts has ordered the State Police to review its role in the case, and the district attorney is also conducting an inquiry.

GRIEVANCES AND APPEALS

The job application for the University of Alabama in Huntsville asked, "Have you ever been convicted of an offense other than a minor traffic violation?" Amy Bishop, who took a tenure-track job there in 2003, answered the question with a simple "no."

Technically, she was correct. She was never charged with her brother's death, and though she was sentenced to probation in the IHOP incident, she was never officially found guilty. She and her husband, James E. Anderson, were questioned in connection with the mail bomb sent in 1993 to one of her mentors at Harvard, Dr. Paul A. Rosenberg, a professor of neurology, but nothing came of it. A law enforcement official has said federal agents are now going back over the case. Anderson initially insisted to The New York Times that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had sent him and his wife a letter clearing them in the pipe bomb case, but the law enforcement official said it was extremely unlikely the bureau had sent such a letter. Anderson later produced a letter from his lawyer, Robert Harrison, dated June 2000, saying that the U.S. Postal Service was "closing the file" on its separate investigation. Bishop also arrived in Huntsville with a padded resume, giving the impression that she had worked at Harvard two years longer than the university's records indicate.

Still, as a new professor with recommendations from Harvard and two other universities, Bishop did not attract scrutiny. She, her husband, a computer engineer who now works at a startup company, and their four children settled into a house in a quiet subdivision, and she began her new job in the biology department.

At first, colleagues and students said, she came across as funny and extroverted, enthusiastic and knowledgeable about campus issues. She became the biology department's representative to the Faculty Senate — not necessarily a coveted job, but one she seemed to enjoy.

She was, however, not universally liked. Some students say they found her so unresponsive that they signed a petition complaining that, among other things, her test questions went beyond what was covered in class. Bishop would say, "Well, my daughter took it and she got an A, so you should be able to do it," said Caitlin Phillips, a junior studying nursing.

Graduate students did not last long in her laboratory, and those familiar with the department said that most transferred to a different one before completing their degrees. In May 2006, she dismissed a graduate student from her lab. The student promised to return some notebooks and a set of keys the next day, a person familiar with the incident said, but Bishop called the campus police that night, according to a campus police report. The student filed a grievance against her.

But in 2008, Bishop seemed to be riding high. She and her husband had developed an automated cell incubator that was supposed to keep finicky cells, like nerve cells, alive longer and make experiments easier. The university, which would share in any proceeds, was trying to market the device, and the university president, David B. Williams, predicted that it would "change the way biological and medical research is conducted," according to The Huntsville Times. In the winter of 2009, a smiling Bishop was shown on the cover of The Huntsville R&D Report.

Prodigy Biosystems, where Anderson now works, ultimately raised $1.25 million to develop the product.

In March 2009, however, Bishop received word that her bid for tenure had been denied because her research and publication record was not strong, colleagues said. Such denials are rare, faculty members said, because the university reviews tenure-track professors annually, alerting them to areas that need improvement. Even though faculty members, including her department chairman, counseled her to look for another job, Bishop appealed the decision.

"Her attitude was not, 'I'm going to have to go find another job,' " said Eric Seemann, an assistant professor of psychology. "It was more like, 'When are these idiots going to clear this up?"'

She lobbied for a revote in the department, badgering people for support, her colleagues said. They disputed an assertion by her husband after the shooting that Bishop had won the appeals process and the provost had overruled the decision. The appeals process identified only a minor procedural problem, which was remedied, they said. Last November, a university spokesman said, her appeal was finally denied. Increasingly expressing concern about her family's finances, Bishop hired a lawyer, her husband said, and filed a discrimination complaint against the university. He said she also began going to a firing range. In the weeks leading up to the shooting, he told reporters, he had gone with her to the range once. He said she claimed to have borrowed the gun she used.

Her lawyer said Friday that Bishop did not remember what happened next. But the police and witnesses say that on Feb. 12, Bishop went to a routine faculty meeting with a plan. And a loaded handgun.

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Alabama shooting suspect brilliant, but social misfit - Chicago Sun-Times

Posted: 21 Feb 2010 05:30 AM PST

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BOSTON -- Amy Bishop's intelligence was never debatable. Even as a child, she didn't hesitate to tell people when they were wrong. As she grew older, earned a Harvard Ph.D and claimed a genius IQ of 180, her brilliance could come with a bluntness, condescension and volatile self-righteousness.

It was all on display in 2002 when she yelled, "I am Dr. Amy Bishop!" as she belted a woman at a Massachusetts restaurant in a fight over a child's booster seat.

Eight years later, the neurobiologist was denied tenure at an Alabama university, a failure her husband and her attorney said played a role in a shooting rampage that left three of Bishop's colleagues dead and three others injured.

Bishop's lawyer, Roy W. Miller, said his client was part of the "intelligentsia," so smart she has trouble relating to the world.

"Her history speaks for itself," he said. "Something's wrong with this lady, OK?"

Bishop, 45, grew up in suburban Braintree, about eight miles south of Boston. Her mother, Judith, was active in local politics as one of 240 elected town meeting members. Her father, Samuel Bishop, was a Northeastern University art professor whose former students include David Bushell, a producer on films including the Academy Award-winning "Sling Blade."

The Bishops were friendly and academically minded parents, often urging their children, both gifted students and violinists, to get their work done, Dan Shaw said. He was frequently over at their house as a child visiting the Bishops' son, Seth.

Shaw didn't know Amy Bishop well but remembered her "exceptional intelligence" and that she wasn't shy about giving her opinion.

"If somebody was talking about something and she felt they were incorrect, she'd (say) to the person, this is this or that is that," he said.

Shaw also recalled the funeral for Seth Bishop. The 18-year-old was killed in 1986 when his sister fired a shotgun blast into his chest, then fled. She was arrested at gunpoint but never charged in the death, which was ruled accidental.

That killing is getting new scrutiny since the rampage at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Shaw, 40, remembered waiting in a line of mourners to give condolences to the family and finding Amy Bishop being propped up by her parents, weeping hysterically.

Shaw said no one in Braintree, where Shaw has lived most of his life, ever thought she meant to kill her brother, whom Bishop named her only son after. Shaw's opinion hasn't changed, despite implications by the current police chief that she was protected by a cover-up.

"The Bishops had no political clout in town," Shaw said.

Amy Bishop was at Northeastern University when she shot her brother, and there was no interruption to her schooling. She graduated cum laude in 1988 with a biology degree, completing an honors thesis titled, "The effect of temperature on the recovery of sea lamprey from full spinal cord transection."

She earned her Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard in 1993. It was also that year that she was questioned by police when a doctor she worked with at Children's Hospital received a mail bomb that never went off. No one was ever charged in the case.

After earning her doctorate, she began an academic career that took her from Harvard to Huntsville. Bishop co-authored 17 published papers and also invented a new kind of cell incubator. In the meantime, she had three daughters and a son with her husband, James Anderson, whom she met at a gathering to play the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy game.

She moved in 2003 to Huntsville, where students gave her mixed reviews. Some found her obsessed with her Harvard pedigree, while others hailed her brilliance. Despite her prodigious intellect, she was denied tenure. Her job was about to end this semester.

Dr. Keith Ablow, a forensic psychiatrist from Tufts University in the Boston suburb of Medford, said the tenure denial could have been like "a kind of deadly assault on her ego" if her self-worth was wrapped up in her academic credentials.

"In that way, firing a gun at those people could feel like self-defense in a twisted way," he said.

Bishop's friend Rob Dinsmoor said she was frustrated over her tenure battle, but never let on how furious she was. There were other things she hid during their regular conversations, including that she once had a brother.

"I felt we could talk about anything," Dinsmoor said. "But obviously there were things that she would not talk to me about."

Dinsmoor said that amid her career problems, Bishop dreamed about a literary escape. One of her three unpublished novels, "Amazon Fever," has pieces of her real life. One character was tortured by the death of his brother. Bishop takes some shots at Harvard, including the line, "At Harvard even the bar tenders are snotty." Her main character, a female researcher, is frustrated about her stalled career and literally dreams about tenure.

"She felt warm, happy, fulfilled and yet she knew it was just a dream," wrote Bishop, a second cousin of novelist John Irving.

Bishop is being held without bond on capital murder charges. She's under suicide watch, and her attorney said she's remorseful but can't recall the shooting -- which is exactly what she told police after she shot her brother.

Bishop's husband said she calls to check on their children, but he can't tell how's she doing. There are other things he's said he doesn't know about his wife, including her birthday or how she got the gun she used recently at a practice range. It's also beyond him how a brilliant woman with a violent past and uncertain future may have snapped.

"She basically loved everyone," Anderson said. "That's why I can't explain anything. I don't know what happened."

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Davis, Vonn, Ohno Win More ... But No Gold - Channel 3000

Posted: 21 Feb 2010 05:37 AM PST

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More Skiing, Bobsledding On Tap Sunday

Posted: 2:15 pm CST February 20,2010Updated: 7:39 am CST February 21,2010

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- More medals -- but no gold -- for Shani Davis, Lindsey Vonn and Apolo Anton Ohno.

One couldn't "man up," one "backed off the gas pedal" and one had to "crank it up" to make history.

Ohno's bronze in the 1,000-meter short-track final broke a tie with Bonnie Blair as the most decorated U.S. Winter Olympian. Ohno has seven career medals, including a silver in the 1,500 from earlier in these games. His medals are the most of any short-track skater.

Lee Jung-su of South Korea won the gold medal, and teammate Lee Ho-suk earned the silver.

Ohno appeared relieved as he crossed the finish line, having skated near the back of the pack early in the nine-lap race. Ohno briefly moved up to second, then dropped to last with three laps to go, forcing his rally near the end.

"When I moved up into second place, in my head I thought that the race was mine and I felt great," he said. "Then I slipped and lost all my speed again. I saw everybody flying by me and I'm like, 'Oh boy, there's not a lot of time. I'm going to have to kind of crank it up.'"

Davis won silver in 1,500-meter speedskating for the second straight Olympics to go with the two consecutive golds he's earned in the 1,000.

His expected duel with fellow American Chad Hedrick -- an unexpected bronze medalist in the 1,000 -- never materialized. Hedrick faded on his last lap and was sixth in a race won by Mark Tuitert of the Netherlands.

"I just couldn't man up and do it," Davis said. "I wasn't strong enough for the victory."

Vonn settled for bronze in the super-G. Austria's Andrea Fischbacher pulled off the upset, and Tina Maze of Slovenia was the surprise silver medalist. Vonn won the downhill to open her Olympics, then wiped out in the slalom leg of the super-combined.

Tuitert, skating in the third pair from the end, posted a time of 1 minute, 45.57 seconds, then watched nervously as it stood up.

Davis, the world record holder at this distance, went last but had to settle for silver in 1:46.10. Havard Bokko of Norway took the bronze in 1:46.13.

Tuitert came in ranked only fifth on the World Cup circuit at this distance.

"It all came together in this race," he said.

In the 1,500 in Turin, Italy's Enrico Fabris ruined another Davis-Hedrick showdown by winning gold, leaving the Americans to settle for silver and bronze.

"It's the second time in a row that Shani and I have gotten this race stolen from us," Hedrick said. "We go in as heavy favorites each time, and it is some special skater every time that comes in."

___

SUPER-G

Vonn conceded she let up at the end -- and it cost her.

While many of the favorites struggled with a sharp right turn midway down, Vonn made it through that section without a problem. She then lost nearly half a second on the bottom section.

"Once I got past those difficult sections, I kind of backed off the gas pedal," Vonn said. "I felt like I just didn't ski as aggressively as I could have, and I think that's where I lost the race."

The Austrians, who won 14 Alpine medals including four golds in Turin, had gotten off to a slow start. Elisabeth Goergl's bronze in the downhill had been their only medal. Fischbacher was reduced to tears after placing fourth in the downhill, finishing 0.03 seconds behind Goergl.

"At first I was really sad," Fischbacher said. "Then I was just saying, 'OK, maybe I make it in the super-G.'"

Her coach, Juergen Kriechbaum, set the super-G course according to International Ski Federation rules that rotate the job to correspond with the higher-ranked super-G skiers. Fischbacher navigated her way down Franz's Run in 1 minute, 20.14 seconds. Maze was 0.49 behind, and Vonn was 0.74 back.

Vonn had already wrapped up the season-long World Cup super-G title by winning three of the five races so far; Fischbacher was third in the event standings.

On Saturday, she was denied a sweep of the speed events. Depending on how her bruised right shin holds up, the American still has two events remaining in Vancouver -- giant slalom and slalom.

___

SHORT TRACK

Zhou Yang of China easily won the gold medal and set an Olympic record in women's 1,500-meter short track speedskating.

Zhou breezed to the finish line in 2 minutes, 16.993 seconds, well ahead of Lee Eun-byul of South Korea, who earned the silver in 2:17.849. Park Seung-hi of South Korea took the bronze, finishing in 2:17.927.

American Katherine Reutter finished fourth.

___

SKI JUMPING

Switzerland's Simon Ammann won the large hill to become the first ski jumper with four individual Olympic titles.

Ammann put down the best jump in both rounds. He used his disputed bindings again, beating four Austrians who weren't happy about his equipment.

Polish veteran Adam Malysz took silver, and 20-year-old Austrian Gregor Schlierenzauer earned bronze -- the exact same finish as in the normal hill jump a week ago.

___

CROSS-COUNTRY SKIING

Marcus Hellner of Sweden won the men's 30-kilometer pursuit, pulling away from three rivals after entering the ski stadium and building enough of a lead to sprint alone to the finish.

He was timed in 1 hour, 15 minutes, 11.4 seconds. Germany's Tobias Angerer finished 2.1 seconds behind for the silver medal. Sweden's Johan Olsson took the bronze, 2.8 back.

___

BOBSLED

Germany's Andre Lange was the leader at the halfway point of the two-man bobsled event.

Lange completed his two runs down the menacing Whistler Sliding Center track in 1 minute, 43.31 seconds. The three-time gold medalist and longtime brakeman Kevin Kuske led by 0.11 seconds over countrymen Thomas Florschuetz and Richard Adjei. Russia-1, driven by Alexander Zubkov, was third in 1:43.81 entering Sunday's last two heats.

American Steve Holcomb was in fourth place, just 0.12 from medal contention.

There were four crashes on the first day of bobsled competition, including one involving Canada's top sled.

___

CURLING

Both American teams are on winning streaks after rough starts.

The women have won two straight matches after opening 0-3. Debbie McCormick's U.S. team beat Britain 6-5 in an extra 11th end.

The men also won in an extra end, beating Sweden 8-7. A loss would all but have eliminated the Americans from medal contention.

___

FREESTYLE

The finals for women's freestyle aerials will be missing defending champion Evelyn Leu of Switzerland.

Leu fell on her second of two jumps in the qualifying round and did not make the final 12. Alla Tsuper of Belarus won the qualifying, followed by China's Li Nina, the 2006 silver medalist.

No American had advanced past qualifying since 1998. This time, three made it to the Wednesday's final: Emily Cook, Lacy Schnoor and 16-year-old Ashley Caldwell.

___

MEN'S HOCKEY

Romano Lemm scored 2:28 into overtime to lift Switzerland to a 5-4 victory over Norway. Tore Vikingstad's third goal of the game had sent Norway into overtime. Norway and Switzerland will have to win their next games to reach the quarterfinals.

Marian Hossa scored early in the second period, helping Slovakia rout winless Latvia 6-0. The Slovaks will have to win Tuesday to earn a quarterfinal spot.

Belarus, meanwhile, won its first Olympic hockey game since upsetting Sweden in 2002. The team beat winless Germany 5-3, helped by Alexei Kalyuzhny's two goals. Germany had been held scoreless in its first two games in Vancouver, but broke that streak by getting two goals 21 seconds apart from John Tripp and Marcel Goc.

___

LUGER'S DEATH

Thousands of mourners flocked to the yard of Nodar Kumaritashvili's family for a traditional funeral in Bakuriani, Georgia. Inside the two-story brick home, the body of the 21-year-old luger lay in a coffin, surrounded by Orthodox Christian icons and burning candles. A choir sang chants and a portrait of the Olympian hung on the wall. His father, David Kumaritashvili, stared at the picture.

"I wanted to throw a wedding feast for you," he said. "Instead, we have a funeral."

The 21-year-old luger died in a crash hours before the opening ceremony. He is to be buried in the cemetery of a tiny church in the snowy Alpine village.

IOC president Jacques Rogge promised to do "everything in my power" to prevent a repeat of the crash. Rogge said in an interview with The Associated Press that the IOC would work with the luge federation to "take all the steps that might be needed."

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