Letterman wants to call sunset for late-night gig

David Letterman wants to stick with CBS' "Late Show" through his contract — and maybe longer — as rival Jay Leno prepares to surrender the "Tonight" reins next year.

"The way I feel now, I would like to go beyond 2010, not much beyond, but you know, enough to go beyond. You always like to be able to excuse yourself on your own terms," Letterman said in an interview in Rolling Stone magazine.

"If the network is happy with that, great. If they wanna make a change in 2010, you know, I'm fine with that, too," Letterman said.

Letterman, along with Chris Rock and Tina Fey, is featured on the comedy-focused cover of the Rolling Stone issue out Friday.

Letterman, 61, questioned why NBC is proceeding with its plan to remove Leno, who consistently tops the late-night ratings. Conan O'Brien will take over "Tonight" in June 2009, with Jimmy Fallon moving into O'Brien's "Late Night" chair.

"Unless I'm misunderstanding something, I don't know why, after the job Jay has done for them, why they would relinquish that," Letterman said, adding, "I have to believe he was not happy about it."

Letterman speculated whether "that's actually what's going to happen," while acknowledging NBC might be too far down the road to retreat.

NBC is angling to keep Leno, 58, with NBC Universal but the late-night king has indicated he's ready to jump ship. Eager NBC competitors, including other networks and syndicators, are prepared to help him make the leap.

Letterman, who called O'Brien "a very funny guy," was asked about facing him as the new "Tonight" host. A cautious Letterman said he couldn't predict the outcome.

"It will be weird to see Conan at 11:30, don't you think? Which is not to say he can't succeed, but, no, I don't know what the competition will be like. I hope we're able to do OK."

In the Rolling Stone article, Letterman discusses guests including Madonna, Oprah Winfrey and Howard Stern, with the most moving remarks about musician Warren Zevon, who appeared on "Late Show" shortly before his 2003 death from cancer.

Letterman recalled his "heartbreaking" meeting with Zevon in a dressing room after the show.

"Here's a guy who had months to live and we're making small talk. And as we're talking, he's taking his guitar strap and hooking it, wrapping it around, then he puts the guitar into the case and he flips the snaps on the case and says, `Here, I want you to have this, take good care of it.' And I just started sobbing.

"He was giving me the guitar that he always used on the show. I felt like, `I can't be in this movie, I didn't get my lines.' That was very tough," Letterman said.

Living off the sewers of gold

By Mark Dummett
BBC News, Dhaka

Men panning for gold in Dhaka's sewers

The sewers of Dhaka, Bangladesh's overcrowded and polluted capital city, are as unpleasant as you could imagine.

But they are also an incredible source of income for a small group of men who do not mind getting their hands dirty.

They earn their living by finding tiny specks of gold that are accidentally brushed into the open sewers that run alongside the narrow streets of Dhaka's historic gold bazaar.

With the price of gold hitting $1,000 an ounce for the first time earlier this year, these specks are worth more than ever before.

The men pan for gold in the drains in exactly the same way as the treasure-seekers of the legendary Californian gold rush of the 1850s.

Mohammed Harun gave me a demonstration. He swirled his pan around, full of dirty black water, stones, sand and other matter. Then, he gently isolated bits he wanted a closer look at, using his orange-brown stained fingers.

'Some luck'

"I used to think that this work was really nasty," he said. "But I'm used to it now, its just my job, and it brings me money."

The morning I met Harun, he reckoned that he and his two friends, who all work together as a team, had found about $50 worth of gold, as well as some small bits of silver and even a tiny red jewel.

It is no fortune, but it is enough for the three men to feed their families for several days.

There are 350 gold shops and workshops in Dhaka

"Today we've had some luck. We cannot work much during the monsoon as when it rains the sewers are washed clean," he said.

Further along the street, Salahuddin, an older man with white hair, was working alone. He crouched low over the stinking drain, and with one hand scooped out mud in a small metal bowl, and with the other took rapid puffs on a cigarette.

"I earn about $12 a day looking for gold like this, and if I'm lucky I'll also find some ear-rings or something else that people have dropped down here," Salahuddin said.

As he worked, a pipe carrying waste from somebody's bathroom emptied into the sewer and upstream a man urinated.

Meanwhile, over the road, boys in white caps gathered at the door of their religious school, men walked past with baskets of pineapples on their heads, and Hindu shopkeepers lit incense and muttered prayers.

The street is called Tanti Bazaar, and it is the centre of Dhaka's gold market.

Swept out

It is lined with shops selling gold jewellery, and there are dozens of small alleyways leading to workshops where the jewellery is made.

According to the local trade association, there are about 350 gold shops and workshops here in all, employing about 20,000 people.

They are mostly old family businesses, and little about them seems to have changed in centuries. The gold is softened over charcoal fires or gas burners, and then fashioned into necklaces and ear-rings by men bent over low wooden desks.

Because of the rising prices, jewellery sales have dipped

"Every morning all the workshops and gold shops are swept clean," Salahuddin, the elderly gold panner, explained.

"And somehow or other bits of gold and other precious things are swept out too. That is how it all ends up in our drains."

But the record high price of gold has been more of a curse than a blessing for Tanti Bazaar.

Fewer customers are now buying gold than before, even though no Bangladeshi wedding is truly complete without gold jewellery for the bride.

People are already worse off because the price of their staple food, rice, has doubled in the past year, and fuel costs have soared.

As a result, businessmen estimate that as many as two-thirds of all workers in the market have been sacked this year.

"We've had to lay off many of our employees because the high price of jewellery is scaring off our customers," shop owner Prodip Ghosh said. "This business is just no good anymore."

This means that much less gold is now finding its way into the sewers, so Mohammed Harun and Salahuddin complain that they are earning less than last year.

The streets of Dhaka are not, after all, paved with gold.

Original here

Sudden death after arrest may be new syndrome

By Ben Hirschler

MUNICH (Reuters) - Young men who die suddenly after being arrested by the police may be victims of a new syndrome similar to one that kills some wild animals when they are captured, Spanish researchers said on Tuesday.

Manuel Martinez Selles of Madrid's Hospital Gregorio Maranon reached the conclusion after investigating 60 cases of sudden unexplained deaths in Spain following police detention.

In one third of the cases, death occurred at the point of arrest, while in the remainder death was within 24 hours, Selles told the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology.

All but one of the casualties were male and their average age was just 33 years, with no previous history of cardiovascular disease.

"Something unusual is going on," Sells said.

Just why they died remains a mystery but he believes young men, in particular, may experience surges in blood levels of chemicals known as catecholamines when under severe stress.

Adrenaline is one of the most abundant catecholamines.

"We know that when a wild animal is captured, sometimes the animal dies suddenly," he said.

"Probably when these young males are captured it is very stressful and their level of catecholamines goes very high and that can finish their life by ventricular fibrillation (cardiac arrest)."

Selles compiled his study -- the first of its kind in any country -- by scouring Spanish newspapers for cases of unexplained death after police detention over the past 10 years.

Only sudden deaths with no clear causes were included and autopsy reports were checked to exclude the possibility of mistreatment or past serious medical conditions.

Twelve of the victims were drug users but Selles said this was not thought to have contributed to their deaths.

Jonathan Halperin of the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, who was not involved in the research, said the concept of a heart stress syndrome triggered by a flood of adrenaline or other chemicals was "a reasonable hypothesis".

"We all know stress is bad for you and this may be stress in the extreme," he said.

Original here