Sharon gained custody of their minor child Ashley, who for a while was estranged from her father.

(meta data) TITLE: The Inconvenient Sharon Bush | Vanity Fair

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At 11 a.m. on Friday, January 30, a petite blonde woman with large blue eyes and a nervous expression waited outside Houston's old Cotton Exchange building, now used as an extension to the Harris County District Court system, as proceedings got under way in the 157th District Court up on the 11th floor.

It's a room one local attorney compares to a dungeon because of its low ceiling and cramped atmosphere.

Inside, Judge Randy Wilson heard a motion filed for the hearing of Cause No. 2003-49885 in the District Court of Harris County, Texas: Thomas Alexander Andrews v. Sharon Bush.

Sharon Bush, 51, was the woman waiting anxiously outside.

Her snowy-haired veteran trial lawyer, David Berg, had told her she didn't need the stress of the courtroom, even though the hearing that day would be rapier-quick, taking just over an hour.

Sharon is both physically and emotionally the shell of the woman she was two years ago.

Then she was a legitimate Bush—and all that that meant.

She was known for her charity work, her winning smile, and her devotion to her three children, Lauren, 19, Pierce, 17, and Ashley, 15.

Last April, when her divorce was finalized, she had been married for 23 years to Neil Bush, 49, a younger brother of the president.

Until her separation from Neil, nine months earlier, most people had described Sharon as a sunny, upbeat sort of person.

One friend recalled her as "always so sweet and friendly," the type of person to "ask me about my mother or sister or the children."

Now, as she hovered by the courthouse, she was being sued by Thomas Andrews, known as Alexander, a two-year-old boy whose Mexican-born mother, Maria Andrews, 41, had been a volunteer in the Houston literacy-foundation office of Barbara Bush.

Following Maria's amicable divorce from oil entrepreneur Robert Andrews, she had become engaged to Neil Bush.

If all goes according to plan, they will have wed on March 6 at the house of Neil's friend Jamal Daniel in Houston.

That Friday little Alexander (whose petition had been made on his behalf by Robert, though neither father nor son was present in court) was alleging that Sharon had gone around town speculating that Neil Bush might be his father.

Sharon denied she had done this, but nonetheless had asked the court for DNA samples from Neil, Robert, and Alexander.

The judge granted her request for Robert and Alexander, but let stand a pre-existing test from Neil.

A sprinkling of reporters had come to cover the proceedings, and the dueling lawyers had each promised a good spectacle.

Where's the most dangerous place to be?" Andrews's lawyer, Dale Jefferson, a trim, youthful, dark-haired man, had asked this reporter the week before.

At the time he was sitting in his airy office in downtown Houston.

Jefferson is known for having worked with the family of Anna Nicole Smith's late husband, J. Howard Marshall II, during the dispute over his estimated $1.6 billion estate.

"Answer: Between David Berg and a TV camera."

The lawyers may have been enjoying the tussle, but at this point they seem to be the only ones with anything left to gain after as acrimonious a divorce case as anyone can remember.

As a result of depositions leaked to the press, we now know humiliating details about Neil Bush, the fourth of Barbara and George H. W. Bush's six offspring, and they have served to darken his already tarnished reputation as the black sheep of the Bush family.

We know, for instance, that Neil has had extramarital sex several times with strange women who knocked on his hotel door during business trips in Thailand and Hong Kong for Interlink, a small investment firm.

We also know that, despite an admitted ignorance in the field of semiconductors, he was hired as a consultant to the Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, a Chinese company, for which he was to be paid $10,000 for every board meeting he attended, plus $2 million worth of stock over five years.

Grace was founded by Jiang Mianheng, the son of the former president of China, Jiang Zemin, and Winston Wong, the son of plastics magnate Wang Yung-ching, thought to be Taiwan's top tycoon.

Critics have been swift to point out how Grace might benefit from a relaxation in U.S. export laws.

Neil has also been receiving a $60,000 annual fee from the Crest Investment Corporation, an investment firm run by Syrian-American businessman Jamal Daniel, a longtime friend of the Bushes' who also happens to be a principal of New Bridge Strategies, which helps clients win contracts to rebuild Iraq.

Neil's duties are mainly, according to Neil, "answering phone calls when Jamal Daniel . . . called and asked for advice."

In other words, Neil Bush is back in the public arena, reminding people that in 1990, while his father was president, he went from being a blond-haired, blue-eyed political hopeful—he is arguably the best-looking of the Bush men—to the family embarrassment, thanks to his position as a director on the board of the Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan Association.

Silverado was a Denver-based thrift that went belly-up in 1988, accounting for $1 billion of the approximately $150 billion that the larger S&L implosion cost American taxpayers.

Silverado collapsed partly because of two Denver real-estate tycoons, Ken Good and Bill Walters, who could not repay money borrowed from Silverado.

The two had supplied virtually all the money for Neil Bush's flailing oil-drilling company, JNB Exploration.

Along with other members of the Silverado board, Bush—then only 35—was investigated by the U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision, which found that he had engaged in "breaches of his fiduciary duties involving multiple conflicts of interest."

Neil and 12 associates settled a separate, $200 million negligence lawsuit filed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation against the Silverado board and others for $49.5 million, of which Neil contributed $50,000.

(Most of the settlement was covered by insurance.)

He has consistently denied any wrongdoing, claiming that he was caught in a political battle, thanks to his father's presidency, but his political aspirations were over.

In 1990, posters of his face were pasted up throughout Washington as a symbol of all that was perceived to be corrupt in American business.

Sensibly, given the political ambitions of his two older brothers, George W. and Jeb, Neil kept a low profile.

In 1989 he began drawing a $160,000 salary as the head of Apex Energy, a gas-exploration company he founded with $2.3 million from two companies run by Bush-family friend Louis Marx Jr., heir to the Marx toy fortune.

When Apex went broke, Bill Daniels, a cable-TV baron who had raised more than $300,000 in 1987 for George H. W. Bush, hired Neil at TransMedia Communications.

The pay was $60,000, even though TransMedia president Dick Barron admitted that Neil's first duty was to learn the business.

In 1993 or so, Nijad Fares, the son of another Bush friend, Lebanese deputy prime minister Issam Fares, employed Neil for a year selling oil-storage-tank covers.

In 1994, Neil joined forces with investment banker Tim Bridgewater, a tall, charismatic, dark-haired Mormon who had grown up in a trailer park and is currently running for Congress in Utah.

Together they ran Interlink, which acted as a consultant on deals, many between Asian and American companies; in addition, they sometimes invested in U.S. start-ups, such as the biotech companies EluSys and Sensatex, the brainchildren of a 37-year-old New York–based entrepreneur named Jeff Wolf.

Under Interlink's auspices, Neil also did several deals with one of Asia's leading business dynasties, the Chearavanont family, which had made its considerable fortune in markets such as telecommunications and agribusiness.

Bridgewater says Neil tried to avoid deals that might look as though he was using his name.

"He avoided doing a deal in Kuwait that people wanted him to do," says Bridgewater.

Throughout this period, according to Sharon, Neil's annual salary ranged from $180,000 or so to, one year, more than $1 million.

"We weren't mega-rich," says Bridgewater, "but we thought we did well."

In 2000, when his brother George announced his candidacy, Neil was careful to state that he would resign from the board of EluSys if George won, because the company's product—a drug to clean pathogens from the blood in just hours—may be bought by the army.

But more recently he has not always managed to avoid getting into hot water.

In November 2003, Neil found himself embroiled in Taiwanese politics when James Soong, the leader of a Taiwanese opposition party, charged that Neil had been paid $1 million to meet with President Chen Shui-bian in New York.

(Since relations between Washington and Beijing were normalized in 1979, formal meetings between American and Taiwanese officials have been prohibited.)

Neil has denied that the meeting was set up by an intermediary, that he was paid, and that there was any official aspect to the discussion, but his photograph made its way into the Taiwanese press.

Meanwhile, critics in the American press were swift to point out how Neil is apt to put his foot in his mouth—citing a speech he made to the Jeddah Economic Forum, in Saudi Arabia, in the wake of September 11, in which he stated that the "U.S. media campaign against the interests of Arabs and Muslims and the American public opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be influenced through a sustained lobbying and P.R. effort."

The White House refused to comment on the speech, but Douglas Wead, a former special assistant to George H. W. Bush, acknowledges that the president has a way of signaling his disapproval.

From [Karl Rove]—telling them not to do this, that, or the other.

Rove has mixed up their names … calling Marvin Neil and Neil Marvin," he says.

(Rove did not respond to a request for comment.)

Wead adds, however, that all the Bush siblings are close, and that the others do not consider Neil a loser in the style of Jimmy Carter's brother, Billy (who was the subject of a 1977 book, Redneck Power, and who accepted $200,000 from the Libyan government), or Bill Clinton's brother, Roger, who served more than a year in prison for dealing cocaine.

"The family has this rule that whoever is the lead guy, that's the guy and you sacrifice your life for him," says Wead, who points out that Neil refused to take his advice and write a book on Silverado explaining his point of view, because he did not want to do anything to detract from his father's presidency or Jeb's and George W.'s ascending political careers.

"So Neil has gone on hold and he really can't do anything with his life," says Wead.

Many of the messy, personal details would never have surfaced to humiliate Neil and his family had Sharon decided to go quietly after he told her he wanted a divorce in a heartfelt e-mail written while he was on a business trip for his new company—Ignite! Learning—in Dubai in May of 2002.

"Your comment at our pool-side dinner with the kids that you and I should race to see who will make a million dollars faster, your belief expressed in different ways that I have not made adequate money, your belief that it was easy to make money and that Jamal [Daniel]'s plotting or Dad's influence will be the magic answer to our financial woes all cause me consternation and reflect the bitterness and anger that has come from the loneliness you described Friday," he wrote, adding: "It is very clear that we . . . are failing to meet each other's core needs.

We're almost out of money and I've lost my patience for being compared to my brothers, for being put down for my inability to make money, and tired of not being loved.

I'm sure you've lost your patience and that you have felt abandoned and a deep sense of loneliness."

The marriage, according to almost everyone who knew the couple, had been happy for the first 11 years.

Neil had married Sharon Smith in 1980, after a year's courtship.

She was a perky elementary-school teacher from New Hampshire, and they had met while he was campaigning there for his father.

She had already been married once, briefly.

They were wed in the summer at St. Ann's Episcopal Church in Kennebunkport, Maine.

In her 1994 memoir, Barbara Bush, the former First Lady refers to Sharon as "darling" and remembers the wedding reception, held on the lawn at Walker's Point, the Bush-family summer compound, as "a very happy time."

Neil and Sharon moved to Colorado in 1980 in part because the plan was that Neil could build a political base there, while Jeb worked on Florida and George W. on Texas.

(Marvin and Dorothy, known as Doro, the two youngest Bush children, opted out of the family career path.

Marvin, 47, preferred a life under the radar as a businessman; Doro, 44, lives in Maryland with her husband, wine-industry lobbyist Robert Koch, and four children.)

In 1983 in Colorado, Neil formed JNB Exploration with $150,000 from flamboyant Denver real-estate developer Bill Walters, who was once described as the Donald Trump of Denver, $150,000 from a Denver oil company, and just $100 of his own money.

Ken Good, another real-estate developer, invested $10,000 in JNB and obtained two lines of credit worth $1.75 million for the company from a bank owned by Walters.

Later, he developed a plan to pump $5 million into the company by absorbing it into a Florida real-estate company he owned.

There were perks to being Good's friend; for instance, the developer lent $100,000 to Neil to put in an investment pool.

If the investment prospered, Neil would repay the loan; if not, he didn't have to.

(Neil stayed in the pool too long and lost whatever money he had initially made.

In accordance with the deal, he never repaid the loan.)

The Bushes often appeared in the society columns, thanks, one Denver socialite thought, more to Sharon's efforts than to Neil's.

"Sharon was a big deal in Denver," says Houston public-relations man Rex John, Neil's best friend in Denver back then.

But once Silverado went bust, things changed.

Neil was called to explain to an administrative-law judge his support of huge loans to Walters and Good at the same time they were investing in his company.

According to Steven Wilmsen's 1991 book, Silverado, Neil voted at a June 1986 board meeting to extend a $16.5 million line of credit for a Silverado real-estate subsidiary to buy raw land from Walters.

In the same deal, Silverado lent Walters $18.5 million, $7 million of which was to be used to buy Silverado stock, upon the purchase of which Walters would immediately be paid $1.5 million in dividends.

In another instance Neil sent a letter asking Silverado to extend a $900,000 line of credit to one of Good's companies, Good International Inc., which was formed specifically to fund a plan by Neil to drill for oil in Argentina—a fact Neil neglected to mention in the letter.

(Neil did abstain from the vote that approved the line of credit.)

Once the scandal broke, Neil maintained his innocence and tried to put a brave face on things, using the newspaper coverage as reading practice for his children.

Outwardly, Sharon, too, behaved stoically, according to her friend Missy Mayne, but privately she found their new impecunity hard to accept.

"I just had a hard time understanding how the President's grandchildren couldn't have enough food," she says in her deposition, explaining that she had to put groceries back on the shelf because she could not afford them.

She felt that the president should "maybe mail us some money so we could buy food for the children," because "I assume we were in the spot . . . because of his father being President—it was a political thing."

As the years rolled by and Neil found it difficult to recover professionally from the Silverado fallout, the marriage came under increasing pressure.

"Money," according to a friend of Neil's, was the crux of the discord.

"She didn't feel that he made enough money.

Sharon's divorce deposition seems to confirm this.

"The weak link," she admitted having called him—although she also said it was a mistake to infer that she envied Jeb and George W.

These two, she felt, were "engaged in the public arena to such an extent that they neglected their families."

"I was frustrated that he wasn't home . . . and he wasn't making money," she told the lawyers.

"I said, 'Why can't you figure it out like Marvin has?' "

(Marvin, the youngest Bush brother, runs a private-equity business in Virginia, and Sharon has described him as "very rich.")

Sharon's deposition paints a picture of a family uncomfortably straddling two worlds.

On the one hand, there's no shortage of free hotel rooms, dinners, clothes, and holidays on other people's boats.

In the year preceding her divorce, Rick Flowers, Neil's attorney, pointed out, Sharon had managed to travel—pretty much for free—on a Mediterranean cruise, to London, to the Bahamas, to Galveston, to New York, to Maine, and to Princeton, New Jersey.

(Sharon says she uses frequent-flier miles to travel abroad.)

Her hosts varied from financier Fouad Said, who invited her up to New York and onto his yacht in the Mediterranean, to Florida couple Nancy and Peter Brown, to Tilman Fertitta, the owner of the San Luis Resort in Galveston, to the Daniels and Texan socialite Theresa Ranzau.

For lunch with this reporter in New York, Sharon arrived in a black stretch limo that "belonged to a friend."

When in New York she often stays for free or virtually so at such hotels as the Waldorf-Astoria, courtesy of wealthy friends such as the carpet tycoon John Stark and his wife, Andrea.

For Christmas she took her daughters to Palm Beach, where she stayed at the luxurious Breakers and was spotted several mornings breakfasting with Gerald Tsai, a 75-year-old financier.

(Sharon denies she and Tsai are romantically involved.)

Even Sharon and Neil's $380,000 cottage near the Bush compound in Kennebunkport was bought for them by Jamal Daniel—at Sharon's request.

"There's a family bungalow, and the families all get to stay there, but you rotate through.

It's hard to allot it, sometimes," Sharon told this reporter.

"So I said to Jamal, 'I'd love to be able to have our own little place.' …

And so he said, 'Why don't I just buy something?

A friend of Neil's says that Neil was embarrassed by Sharon's "end runs" to his friends, to ask for things.

Sharon has also been sought after by a host of organizations, presumably delighted to get the Bush name on their invitations.

Last year the American Ireland Fund hired her to put together a dinner.

In 1997 and again in 1998 she was paid almost $50,000 by the Texas Alliance Against Alcohol Abuse to organize seminars in schools.

And the Brae Capital Corporation paid her $36,000 in 1998 and again in 1999 to consult on selling products in gift shops.

Yet when Sharon returns from the free holidays and dinners, she turns the light on in a four-bedroom ranch-style house that is probably the smallest on the street in a pleasant residential area in Houston.

There's a swimming pool out back, and the interior is comfortable and homey.

On the walls are plaques with religious mottoes, quotes about the value of children, and, mostly, photograph after photograph of the Bush family: Neil, Sharon, their three kids with their grandparents; with the president and First Lady; on Air Force One; meeting Michael Jackson—and on and on and on.

Sharon says it's because a real-estate agent told her the pictures would increase the value of the house.

Sharon says she feels robbed by the Bushes—not just by her ex-husband, but also by her in-laws, in particular her mother-in-law, who she feels rules the family with an iron fist.

Sharon's argument is that she gave up 22 years of her life to be a good family foot soldier, but when she faced a turbulent time with Neil, she maintains, they deserted her financially and emotionally.

Sharon has repeatedly told the story of how, when she asked her mother-in-law for help after Neil sent the e-mail requesting a split, Barbara declined, saying, "That's for you and Neilsie to work out."

(Barbara and George H. W. Bush declined to comment for this story.)

At one point, Sharon says, George H. W. Bush e-mailed her that they would always be there for the grandchildren and that she would be the same type of relative as Billy LeBlond (Doro's first husband) is to them.

Sharon responded by stating that she was "insulted" to be put in the same class as LeBlond, who had been married to Doro for only seven years and had been arrested on drunk-driving and drug charges.

An e-mail she sent to her in-laws at the beginning of her separation from Neil shows how desperately she wanted to stay part of the Bush clan:

This is a very difficult time in my life, as you know.

remiss if I did not write you both to tell you the deep and abiding

respect and gratitude that I have for you. . . . The past 22 years

have been the most incredible years as a member of the Bush family,

personally that I will uphold the honor and respect associated with

Slowly, she began to realize her longing to maintain a close connection was not being reciprocated.

The month after Neil sent the e-mail from Dubai, he asked Sharon to stay in Houston to talk things through.

She turned up instead with the children at the Kennebunkport cottage.

She says she was traumatized when none of the Bush family, including the president and First Lady, came over to see her.

George H. W. Bush asked Lauren and Ashley to go look at his new hot tub.

Sharon knew Neil had fallen for another woman, and suspected that Pierce knew her identity.

(He did, having inadvertently read one of his father's e-mails.)

Evidence given at the deposition in the form of Maria Andrews's testimony and Neil's letters to her shows that, though the two had met and felt an instant attraction, they had not slept with each other—mainly, according to Rex John, Neil's good friend, because "Neil wanted to be honest with his children about that relationship."

John says Neil didn't trust himself even to see Andrews that summer or fall, which was why he ended up writing her frequent letters that have a teenage fervor.

The general tenor is as follows: "My heart is breaking with solitude.

I can't wait to be free to dedicate all of my passion to love you.

I hurt to have you in my arms, to make love with you and to be a part of your life."

The relationship allegedly was not consummated until January 2003, when Maria's divorce had been finalized and Neil's was about to be.

They met in Las Vegas by chance, and one thing led to another.

Maria Andrews is a small, soft-spoken, dark-haired woman, who is described by a friend as "more comfortable with women than men."

Her marriage to Robert Andrews had in some ways been a lonely one.

"She and Robert were great friends and great parents but lived completely separate lives," says Laura Spalding, her attorney and one of her closest friends.

"The break of their marriage was a very, very, very long time coming.

A self-made multi-millionaire who runs his own oil and gas exploration firm, Andrews Technologies, Robert, 48, is seldom seen on the Houston social scene.

He was in financial trouble when Maria, who grew up in North Carolina, first met him in San Antonio.

The couple married in 1988, and Robert turned his fortunes around by running an oil company that had dealings with Telmex, the Mexican conglomerate owned by that country's biggest tycoon, Carlos Slim Helú.

Maria worked alongside her husband, keeping the books.

They had two children—Elizabeth, now 13, and Robert junior (called Pace), 10—and ultimately Maria stopped working so she could spend more time with them.

Robert was often abroad, frequently in Asia.

By the time they had their third child, Thomas Alexander, in 2001, Maria was often left alone.

The family lived most recently in a $4 million mansion on Little John Lane, just two miles or so from Barbara Bush's office and not far from Neil and Sharon's home.

It was humorously called Swankienda by some of their friends.

Given its tall, black iron gates, security cameras, and infinity pool that flowed into a stream alongside a woodland trail, the nickname was apt.

Maria spent $1 million decorating it in the French 18th-century style.

("She was heartbroken when they had to sell it because of the divorce," says Spalding.

Maria started volunteering in Barbara Bush's office and ran into Neil there, but the two did not really talk until one night in January 2002, when both were invited to a Houston fund-raiser for Jeb Bush at the St. Regis Hotel.

"From what I understand, the sparks kind of started flying there, but it didn't develop until much later," remembers Spalding.

Pierce Bush, according to many people, is a "brilliant young man" with his father's charm and his uncles' ambition.

Back in 1999, however, Pierce was having trouble in school.

Neil and Sharon visited his teachers at the Kinkaid School and were aghast when they suggested, among other things, Ritalin.

Neil in particular was reminded of his high-school traumas at St. Albans, a private boys' school in Washington, D.C., where he struggled with dyslexia.

Not wanting to see his son suffer as he had, Neil decided he had to take a more active role not only in Pierce's education but also in the educational system in general.

In 1999 he decided to found his software company, Ignite!, which would help students who, like himself—and like Pierce—didn't always respond to textbooks.

Ignite!'s mission was to bring studies alive through animated and interactive programs.

With his new company Neil feels more energized than he has for years.

Finally, he has told people, he is fulfilling his destiny.

Even so, he chose a difficult time to do a start-up, with the market turning in 2000.

Neil—and his C.F.O., Ken Leonard—occasionally stopped taking a salary when the business ran short on money.

"They went to a prototype of a pre-school product … and then realized there's a bigger opportunity in the middle-school field," says Kevin Moran, the former chief technology officer.

They switched direction, says Leonard, choosing social studies as their first software subject.

Fortuitously, that subject is not part of the testing program required by the No Child Left Behind policy instituted by George W. Bush.

Otherwise, they'd be criticized for benefiting from White House policy.

"If the president's brother was trying to do something just to benefit from some legislation … he would be doing something a lot different than what this company's doing," says Gary Bisbee, a Lehman Brothers education analyst.

"He would be working on the testing and the system that tracks how the students do and who needs help at what."

Bisbee points out that some of Ignite!'s competitors are doing just that.

Ignite! has had four rounds of financing to date and has yet to break even.

Its numerous investors include Jamal Daniel, Winston Wong, Tim Bridgewater, Les and Anne Csorba, Hamza al Kholi, Mohammed al Saddah, and Hushang Ansary.

Maria and Robert Andrews invested $100,000 in Ignite! after Neil paid a visit to their home in the spring of 2002 and lobbied both of them over dinner.

Maria and Neil got to know each other better during a trip to Mexico in April 2002, to find investors for Ignite!

Eventually the company struck a deal in which Grupo Carso, the parent company of Carlos Slim Helú's Telmex empire, would take on many of Ignite!'s production duties.

That weekend Maria and Neil also realized they were falling for each other.

In the spring of 2002, Neil moved out of the house to an apartment in Austin and in the fall went back to Houston to a small apartment lent by Nijad Fares.

Sharon begged Neil's friends, including Rex John, to get him to come home.

John told Sharon that he could not in good conscience do that, since he'd seen how happy Neil now was.

"It was a cruel thing to say to Sharon, but it was the truth," John says.

Desperate to salvage the situation, Sharon embarked on some behavior that, she admitted in her deposition, she was later ashamed of—and that many people who have been through acrimonious divorces will perhaps recognize as the result of shock and depression.

This included asking 13-year-old Ashley to steal her father's keys when he came for a visit.

Ashley was directed to leave them on a paint can in the garage.

Sharon would then sneak in around midnight, get them, have them copied, and return them.

(According to Sharon's deposition, Ashley told her father, thereby foiling the plan.)

Sharon says, "I needed to know what was going on."

Sharon also tried to get into Neil's apartment in late 2002 and, by her own admission, "lost it" when the security guard refused to admit her.

Ashley, who was with her, burst into tears.

"I'm not perfect," Sharon says when asked about this.

Almost one year after the divorce was finalized, it's hard to have a conversation with her about her marriage without her crying.

Sharon finally ran into Maria one morning when she walked into a smoothie shop and found her and Neil "all dressed up," having breakfast.

"I may have called Maria some names," Sharon says now, admitting she went overboard during the scene that followed.

According to her deposition, she called Maria a "Mexican whore" and "Mexican trash."

"I asked Maria, 'How do you sleep at night, breaking up a family?'

On August 26, 2002, both Neil and Maria filed for divorce.

Sharon hired Donn Fullenweider, a respected Texas lawyer, but after five months she replaced him with Marshall Davis Brown Jr., a conservative attorney, who claimed to be "unconcerned with the Bush family name."

Brown, in turn, approached forensic accountant Jeannie McClure, a dynamic and striking blonde who has been around the Texas divorce courts for 14 years and who admits she was nervous about "taking on the Bushes."

In Texas, divorce is normally settled through mediation.

When McClure met Neil on March 7, the morning of the first mediation, she found herself liking him.

"I resented what all those guys got away with [in Silverado] because I was from West Texas, where blood ran in the street when banks closed and good people were put down.

I very much resented what they got away with."

She had been brusque with Neil in mediation, but when she was stuck in an elevator with him she decided to break the ice.

"My tax returns better so not get audited," she told him, and she remembers that he laughed before entering the parking lot.

He stood beside her car and said, "I really want you to try and help Sharon, if you can.

I really think you can do a lot for her."

"He always struck me as somebody who really didn't care if she got 75 percent of anything he might have," she says.

"I really didn't get the idea Neil was trying to hide anything from her.

I'm telling you, this is a guy in love who wanted to move on."

In the first half of 2003 Neil, Ken Leonard, Maria, and Sharon all gave their depositions.

The highlight of Neil's deposition was the revelation of the three or four different occasions when during business trips in the Far East he had slept with strange women.

The now infamous exchange, leaked to the press months later, went as follows:

Marshall Davis Brown: "Mr. Bush, you have to admit that it's a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her."

According to Neil's testimony, his marriage was by then loveless and already over in his mind.

Jeannie McClure was amazed that Neil testified about the women in the first place.

In her experience, men in his situation volunteer only the bare minimum.

Nobody had hotel receipts, nobody had flight plans."

McClure was equally surprised by Neil's candor about his business affairs.

"I've heard the best of them . . . make it seem like they have more business experience than they have.

Winston Wong was the first one that tried to legitimize what Neil was going to do for the company [Grace Semiconductor].

Neil didn't try to legitimize it at all."

When Brown observed, "You have absolutely no educational background in semiconductors," Neil replied, "That's correct."

During the reporting of this piece, Neil Bush turned up for part of a dinner at a restaurant in Houston I had arranged with lawyers John and Laura Spalding.

Laura has represented Maria during her deposition; John represents Neil in the defamation suit.

During the evening Neil refused to discuss Sharon, his children, or any aspects of the divorce.

He pointed out that he had not sat down with a journalist since the Silverado fiasco.

He has since agreed that I may report the gist of our talk, but without direct quotes.

Neil is attractive, trimmer than his brothers, and younger-looking than his 49 years.

He was wearing a navy blazer, gray flannels, a tie, and a starched shirt.

He drank two glasses of Merlot and ate only an appetizer, since he'd already had his supper with Pierce—at McDonald's.

It was the night of the State of the Union address; Neil looked for a television in the restaurant, shrugged when he saw there wasn't one, and carried on talking.

The conversation ranged over many issues in his life—and the world at large.

He wanted to talk about who would be the Democratic nominee; he wondered what we had thought of Howard Dean's overheated speech in Iowa the night before.

We discussed the plight of women in Saudi Arabia (he believes we shouldn't impose our values on the country), the current instability in Iraq, and the American education system.

Neil was articulate and funny—and not afraid to disagree with his brother in the White House, particularly about the education system.

(Tim Bridgewater describes Neil as a "very moderate Republican.")

Neil was generally defensive about his business decisions.

He says that if he could relive his Silverado years he'd do nothing different.

He feels that he was offered up as the poster boy for the savings-and-loan implosion for political rather than ethical reasons.

(Bridgewater says he thinks that Neil's father "feels badly" about what happened to his son.)

At the first divorce mediation, Sharon was offered $1,000 a month in alimony, plus 75 percent of all cash and liquid assets, and residency in a house worth approximately $500,000.

Sharon would also be given 75 percent of the proceeds of the sale of the current home, off Memorial Drive, likely to go for no less than $850,000.

According to Jeannie McClure, Neil didn't have much to give her except the house.

Several people suggested at this point that Sharon write a lighthearted book looking back on her life, giving little tidbits such as Laura smoking on the porch at Camp David.

McClure told Sharon straight-out that to do a full-on tell-all would seem opportunistic at best.

"I said, 'If my husband had cost the government $1 billion in a savings-and-loan failure, I guarantee he'd be in prison.

You took advantage of all kinds of things.

And now that he's leaving, you want to tell all?

Sharon agreed with her, saying, "You're the only one who will tell it to me straight."

A few days later, Sharon changed her mind, doing something that was complete anathema to the Bush family.

She hired New York public-relations man Lou Colasuonno, the former editor in chief of the New York Post and the Daily News.

Colasuonno quite cheerfully admits he loathes President Bush's politics and went to visit Sharon, hoping to facilitate a tell-all.

However, he found her emotional and tricky to deal with.

He told her quite bluntly to stop talking about Maria Andrews and her young son.

"She was calling her a Mexican whore all over town," he says.

"I told her to stop that and to stop talking about the kid as if he might be Neil's."

Colasuonno listened to a tape Sharon had made of a phone conversation with Barbara Bush, which Sharon thought highlighted her mother-in-law's cruelty, but which Colasuonno felt was an "embarrassment for Sharon."

In it, Sharon begged Barbara to prevail upon Neil to come home, but the former First Lady kept saying, "My husband and I have done everything we could for the children.

Colasuonno advised her to write an outline for a book, as leverage for the next mediation.

"Look, here's a woman who's been connected to the Bush family since 1980.

I mean just hanging around in Kennebunkport with your feet up and in shorts and a T-shirt—what do they all talk about?"

Colasuonno orchestrated an article to appear in The New York Observer on April 16, the day of the second mediation.

There it was leaked that, "in addition to writing her own book," Sharon had had lunch in New York with Kitty Kelley, who is writing a book about the Bushes due out in September.

In fact, literary agents Sharon and Colasuonno had visited were unimpressed.

"I thought she was flaky," says one of New York's top agents.

At times, says a publisher, she wanted to do a tell-all; at others, she felt she had to protect her children.

At the time of this writing, a friend of Sharon's in Houston, Cindi Rose, has drafted a couple of chapters of a "self-help" book, with a promised blurb from spiritual writer Marianne Williamson.

"We're thinking of doing a book about women," says Rose.

"What happens when things don't work exactly like you want them to."

The day of the second mediation, emotions were running high, and initially the mediator, Judge Ruby Sondock, walked into the room where Neil and Rick Flowers were sitting and said that, given Sharon's state of mind, nothing was going to get sorted out that day, and that she'd refund their fee.

McClure, within earshot of Neil, begged the judge to reconsider, and the parties went back to the table, working until late that night.

They came to a settlement that was significantly better for Sharon than the first offer.

She would get $2,500 a month in alimony and for the next four years $1,500 a month in child support, plus 75 percent of the proceeds from the sale of the house and half of all other property—i.e., stocks.

Colasuonno felt that the Observer piece had worked.

"Everybody agreed, it made a big difference," he says.

On April 28, 2003, Neil and Sharon and their lawyers met in the courtroom of Judge Frank Rynd in Houston and were legally divorced.

Sharon stated that she did not want the divorce and that, furthermore, she wanted a DNA sample taken from Maria Andrews's youngest child.

The judge denied her request and told her she'd have to take separate legal advice on that matter.

Her first move was to hire a new lawyer, later claiming Marshall Davis Brown had lost a tape in which, Sharon says, Neil threatened she'd find herself in an alley (charges both Brown and Bush deny).

She hired another Texas lawyer, Wally Mahoney, who presented a motion for a new divorce trial.

First and foremost, she said, she wanted to stay in her house off Memorial Drive, claiming it would be disruptive to move the children.

In June she faxed George H. W. Bush from the New York City offices of Elite, the agency that represents Lauren Bush, and asked him to lend her $467,000 to pay off the balance on the house's mortgage.

She believed the property would rise in value over the next four years to at least $1.5 million.

From the proceeds, she would repay the loan, and then they'd split what remained.

Her former father-in-law wrote back saying that he "could not enter into any deal with which Neil did not agree, especially if it appeared to overturn an agreement already reached and approved by the court."

I think the offer made by me and Jamal should enable you to find a

bought 3–4 bedroom houses at a cost of less than $300,000. . . .

Sharon, I know this divorce has been very difficult for you and for

But the divorce is final, and in my judgment the best

thing is for you to get on with your life.

with Neil, find a job, and look to the future not the past

sure you are thinking "This is easy for you to say, but it won't be

have to start over to find true happiness.

happily adjust to a new house, even if it is not as grand a house as

He assured her that he and Barbara would always be there for the children if a special need arose, and concluded, "Sharon, I really hope your life ahead is full of happiness—I really do.

Sharon responded by appearing on the local CBS affiliate and saying that she really felt the Bush family was not living up to its family-values ideals.

Meanwhile, she was determined to prove that Neil was the father of Alexander Andrews.

She did not believe the letters given as evidence in the divorce depositions that Maria and Neil had waited to have sex.

Sharon called a friend of Maria's so often, begging to meet, that she eventually "couldn't even answer her phone."

When they did get together for coffee at Starbucks, the woman was appalled when Sharon got out an envelope and some Q-Tips, and asked her to take a swab from inside the boy's cheek so she could have his DNA tested.

The woman immediately told Maria what had occurred.

Sharon admits now the request was improper and says at the time she believed there was no way to do it through the courts.

By this time both Maria and Robert Andrews had had enough, and Robert took it upon himself to defend his son's legitimacy.

Back in March he had met with Sharon and told her to desist from "slandering" his son.

He also told her to let Neil go and to move on with her life.

She replied that she had "a hard time understanding how Neil could leave us with no money and move into his four and a half million dollar house with her."

She claims she asked Robert if he minded that Neil would effectively be living off Robert's money.

Over the summer, while visiting the Hamptons, Sharon met the Houston-based trial attorney David Berg, who looms large not just in legal but also in Democratic circles in Texas.

On the morning of September 3, Robert Andrews sued Sharon for $850,000 for defamation.

"It was," says his lawyer, Dale Jefferson, "a figure plucked out of thin air."

By an extraordinary coincidence $850,000 was the same figure that someone had lent Sharon to buy her house.

When she came up with the money, Rick Flowers says, Neil saw it as breaking the divorce agreement.

At mediation, both sides had cited the $850,000 figure as the lowest price at which they'd sell it to an outside party, says Flowers.

Sharon saw the lawsuit as a direct attack on her efforts to buy the house, although Jefferson points out that under Texas law it cannot be taken from her if she loses the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of theories as to where Sharon procured the money for the house.

One person thought it came from an advance for a tell-all book.

Another thought it must be from Gerald Tsai.

When asked, Sharon will say only that she has to pay the money back.

By this time, newspapers had started printing the embarrassing stories that came from Neil's deposition.

In addition to the details about the Asian women and Neil's relationships at Grace Semiconductor, the Associated Press later ran a story scrutinizing a $171,370 profit Neil had made from a stock trade on July 19, 1999.

According to Neil's tax returns, he'd bought and sold stock in the Kopin Corporation, a company that manufactures display panels, on the same day that it announced a new client, JVC, a Japanese electronics company.

Neil had previously brokered a deal whereby Telecom Holdings, another Asian company, invested $27 million in Kopin.

Prior to July 19 he'd been awarded stock options by Kopin.

Neil stated to the A.P. that he had no inside information, and that he had been told by his financial adviser to exercise options that day and to sell some of the stock.

"Any increase in the price of the stock on that day was purely coincidental," he wrote to the A.P. in an e-mail, pointing out that he later lost $287,722 on Kopin.

After Sharon's TV interview, the Bush team fought back: John Spalding told the Houston Chronicle that Sharon had been practicing voodoo.

In an interview with this reporter, Spalding said that not only had Sharon pulled some hair out of Neil's head one day as he was helping Ashley with her homework, but Neil had found a strange doll that had been placed under the bed where he used to sleep.

On January 30 in court, David Berg was triumphant when the judge agreed to test the DNA of Neil and both Robert and Alexander Andrews.

Spalding says, "Unfortunately, no one is thinking, Here's this pitiful woman attacking the lineage of this two-year-old; instead, they're thinking, Is Neil the father?"

Sure enough, the next day newspapers across America ran with headlines in the vein of the Houston Chronicle's: DNA TEST ORDERED FOR SON OF BUSH FIANCÉE.

After the hearing, Spalding was standing in the lobby talking to Berg when Sharon approached the men.

He noticed immediately that she'd lost weight.

"I just want you to know I pulled Neil's hair out because I wanted to get it tested for cocaine, not because of voodoo," she said coldly.

Sharon says now, "I was worried about Neil.

He was looking so thin and acting so weird.

According to Sharon, the tests had come back "inconclusive."

Spalding says, "Accusing Neil of using cocaine is just as preposterous as accusing him of being Alexander's father."

Berg told her to wait a little ways off so the men could finish their "lawyers' conversation."

As she hovered in the distance, Spalding, despite himself, felt sorry for her.

At that moment he knew that Neil was traveling from London to Paris to see Maria, now living in France for a time.

Once they got married, they'd be comfortably settled in Houston.

Maria had already purchased a lot on the same street as George H. W. and Barbara's home.

Given the friendly relations between Maria and Robert Andrews, there'd probably be plenty more weekends at Andrews's ranch in Brenham, an hour's drive outside of Houston, where all three of them had spent Christmas.

In fact, Spalding need not have been so concerned: as this article was going to press Sharon told this reporter that she felt she was finally getting over her divorce.

In February 2004 she had attended a counseling session with Ashley and Neil that was supposed to help Ashley deal with the new family situation.

"Neil started yelling at me about the DNA lawsuit, asking me to apologize," says Sharon.

"As he was shouting, I suddenly thought, Thank God, I'm no longer married to you.

I thought, I'm dating, I'm blessed with three wonderful children, I've got my house, endorsements for health products are on the horizon, as is a speaking engagement …

Vicky Ward was a Vanity Fair contributing editor from 2001 to 2012.

### "Clinton and Ghislaine Became Super Close": As the Epstein Scandal Spirals, a New Focus on Old Names

### Trump Inaugural in the Crosshairs of New Subpoena

### Powerful Men, Disturbing New Details in Unsealed Epstein Documents

### "He Was Like Boo Radley": The Mysteries of Jeffrey Epstein's Black Book

Bush was married to Sharon Bush (born May 19, 1952) for 23 years. The couple have three children: Lauren Pierce Bush (born June 25, 1984), Pierce Mallon Bush (born March 11, 1986) and Ashley Walker Bush (born February 7, 1989). The couple divorced in April 2003. Bush's divorce deposition gained public attention when he admitted to several sexual encounters in Thailand and Hong Kong.


When constructed in 1882, the route was originally part of the D&RGW's transcontinental line to Salt Lake City and remained so until more direct routes were built in the early 20th Century.

(meta data) TITLE: Narrow Gauge Railroad Through Black Canyon - Curecanti National Recreation Area (U.S. National Park Service)

When the first Denver and Rio Grande train passed through the upper reaches of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in August 1882, the passengers gazed with wonder at the steep walls above them, the cascading waterfalls and the towering granite point of Curecanti Needle.

As the little train found its way out of the canyon and the passengers set their thoughts toward the open vistas ahead, few could imagine the human and monetary cost of constructing this "Scenic Line of the World" through some of the most rugged country in the West.

DENVER AND RIO GRANDE NARROW GAUGE RAILROADWilliam Jackson Palmer's Denver and Rio Grande Railroad was built toward Gunnison in hope of tapping the wealth and traffic pouring in and out of the booming gold and silver mines of the area.

The steep mountain passes and narrow canyons made the 4' 8 1/2" standard rail width too expensive and time consuming.

So Palmer decided to go with the narrower 3' gauge.

The Denver and Rio Grande was not the only narrow gauge railroad to cross the Rocky Mountains, but it soon became the most successful.

When the D&RG reached Gunnison in August 1881, it was greeted with cheers from leaders of the fledgling town.

Palmer and his men, however, were already looking ahead.

They planned to continue to survey and lay track in two directions.

North was the prized coal veins and silver mines near Crested Butte.

West was an outlet to Montrose, Grand Junction and the lucrative route to Salt Lake City.

Yet, between Gunnison and Montrose was land Captain John W. Gunnison described in 1854 as the "roughest, most hilly, and most cut-up" he had ever seen.

Palmer and his railroad were committed to find a way through.

Actually, Palmer was not satisfied with 15 miles of his railroad through the Black Canyon.

He wanted the Denver and Rio Grande to travel the entire 53-mile length, and depth, of the canyon, including through what is today Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.

But Palmer's surveyors, who under the leadership of Bryan Bryant endured an incredibly hazardous exploration through the lower, steeper and narrower canyon in 1881, convinced him that 15 miles of railroad through the Black Canyon was quite enough.

SURVEYING A ROUTEThe first 20 miles of track building west of Gunnison to the entrance of the Black Canyon was fairly easy.

As the line was surveyed and graded, and hundreds of mostly Italian and Irish railroad workers began to lay track, "terminal cities" were created along the way.

The new settlements of Kezar, Cebolla, and Soap Creek (later changed to Sapinero) began with numerous saloons, and little else.

These rail stations were later buried under the waters of Blue Mesa Reservoir.

At the junction of the Lake Fork and Gunnison Rivers, the Denver and Rio Grande officials had a decision to make: build a tortuous and expensive route up and over the top of several steep mesas or go right through the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.

It was decided that the route along the river would be cheaper and would have a better chance of remaining snow free throughout the rough Rocky Mountain winters.

Little attention seems to have been paid to the hazards future train employees and passengers would face.

CONSTRUCTION THROUGH THE BLACK CANYONConstruction of the fifteen miles of Denver and Rio Grande Narrow Gauge Railroad through the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, from Sapinero to Cimarron continued throughout the winter of 1881-82.

Carving a railroad bed from the steep, rugged and extremely hard rock walls made for some of the most difficult and hazardous work.

While blasting rock just west of Sapinero (near today's Blue Mesa Dam), a crew was using an unfamiliar explosive called nitroglycerine.

The nitroglycerine accidentally detonated and the foreman, Sweeny, was blown into the stream, his body disappearing forever.

An African-American worker on the grading crew had his head, left shoulder and side so mangled, he died within an hour.

Another African-American worker by the name of Cunningham was blown fifty feet away, but was unharmed.

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison had begun to take its toll.

Once the grade was finished, it was then up to the mostly immigrant track layers to lay the rails through the canyon and up the Cimarron River to the new town site of Cimarron.

While working in the canyon the men often used rail cars as combination mess hall, sleeping quarters, and social club.

The final cost of building the narrow gauge railroad through the Black Canyon was $165,000 a mile.

But the real costs were only just beginning.

editor of the Gunnison Review-Press newspaper was on that first train through the canyon in August 1882.

He commented that this was "the largest and most rugged canon in the world traversed by the iron horse."

Thousands of passengers were thrilled by the ride.

According to Rudyard Kipling , who rode through the canyon in 1889: " We entered a gorge, remote from the sun, where the rocks were two thousand feet sheer, and where a rock splintered river roared and howled ten feet below a track which seemed to have been built on the simple principle of dropping miscellaneous dirt into the river and pinning a few rails a-top.

There was a glory and a wonder and a mystery about the mad ride, which I felt keenly…until I had to offer prayers for the safety of the train."

The engineers that took trains through the Black Canyon for the next 67 years may have agreed to the beauty of the canyon, but were extremely fearful of the route - especially during winter.

Avalanches and rock falls were common and an engineer and his crew never knew if or when their train would be the next to be swept into the icy waters of the Gunnison River.

Despite the dangers and constant repair work, the Denver and Rio Grande made its Black Canyon route the cornerstone of its "Scenic Line of the World" passenger promotions and featured the Curecanti Needle on its emblem.

CIMARRONAt the western end of the narrow gauge's route through the Black Canyon was Cimarron.

During the construction, Cimarron was a tent city, but soon became a little town of up to 250 people whose livelihood and schedule revolved around the trains.

Here were housed the train relief crews, the roundhouse with the engines that would push the trains west up the steep Cerro Summit toward Montrose, the restaurant that would have 20 minutes to feed passengers, and the railroad's hotel for those staying longer.

After mining decreased in the Gunnison region, stockmen continue to gather at Cimarron to ship their cattle and sheep to market via the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad.

Today at Cimarron, an outstanding exhibit displays authentic railroad cars and interprets those bygone railroad days.

A short drive north of Cimarron brings one to the remains of a trestle across the Cimarron River on which sits the genuine Engine 278, tender and caboose actually used on trips through the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.

THE END OF RAILROADING THROUGH THE BLACK CANYONThe

decrease of mining activity, the increase of standard gauge routes through the Colorado Rockies, and the rising use of automobiles and trucks led to the gradual demise of narrow gauge railroads beginning in the early 20th century.

The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad ran regularly, although decreasing freight and passenger service through the upper Black Canyon of the Gunnison until 1940, when scheduled passenger traffic was diverted north to the standard gauge track over Tennessee Pass or through the Moffat Tunnel.

Freight trains continued until 1949 when the line from Gunnison to Montrose was finally abandoned and the rails torn up.

The route through the canyon, including its nine bridges, became a public road, used primarily by fishermen until construction of the Blue Mesa Dam in the early 1960s.

Most of the old Denver and Rio Grande Narrow Gauge railroad bed is now submerged beneath the waters of Morrow Point Reservoir.

A short section of the old railroad bed, complete with interpretive displays, is accessible from the Pine Creek Trail.

At the end of this one-mile trail is the launch point for the Morrow Point Boat Tours.

REFERENCESGordon Chappell and Cornelius Hauck, Narrow Gauge Transcontinental: Through Gunnison County and Black Canyon Revisited, Colorado Railroad Museum, 1971

Cornelius Hauck, ed, Colorado Rail Annual, 1970, Colorado Railroad Museum, 1970

Duane Vandenbusche, The Gunnison Country, B&B Printing, Gunnison, CO 1980

Cerro Summit (el. 8,042 ft.) is a mountain pass in the State of Colorado, located about 14 miles east of Montrose, Colorado. It divides the watershed of the Cimmaron River to the east and the Uncompahgre River to the west, both of which eventually flow into the Gunnison River.
 The summit is traversed by U.S. Route 50.   Until 1949, Cerro Summit was part of the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad's Black Canyon line which ran between Gunnison and Montrose.


Several of Hønneland’s books have appeared in new editions and translations, including to Chinese and Russian.

(meta data) TITLE: More Arctic politics in China - fni

FNI's director Geir Hønneland together with translators Wang Chuanxing, Su Ping and Tang Yao.

Two FNI books on Arctic politics have been translated and are now available for the Chinese market.

Both books are written by FNI's Director, Geir Hønneland, who attended the book launch at Tongji University in Shanghai earlier this week.

The first book started its journey in Norwegian language in 2013, under the title 'Hvordan skal Putin ta Barentshavet tilbake?' ('How will Putin take the Barents Sea back?'), as a response to Russian criticism of the 2010 Barents Sea delimitation agreement between Norway and Russia.

"I wrote the book to put the Russian reactions to the delimitation agreement in a cultural context," says Hønneland, "but I never expected it to attract much interest outside our own backyard, so to speak.

But it was picked up by the global academic publisher Palgrave Macmillan and was published in a revised edition for an international readership in 2014 under the title 'Arctic Politics, the Law of the Sea and Russian Identity'.

When Chinese scholars wrote to me and asked if it could be translated into Chinese, I first thought the subject matter would be too narrow, but then, as they say, Norway and China have one thing in common – Russia is neighbour to us both.

The second book, 'Making Fishery Agreements Work', looks at half a century of Norway and Russia working successfully together to maintain the rich fish resources in the Barents Sea at a sustainable level.

The Chinese edition was selected for inclusion in China's 13th 5-year plan in the section on academic publications on ocean governance.

Director / Research Professor+47 99796020geir.honneland@fni.no

Post-Agreement Bargaining in the Barents Sea Fisheries: Strategies for Coping with OverfishingPast

Geir Hønneland (born 1966 in Mandal in Norway) is a Norwegian political scientist, Director of the Fridtjof Nansen Institute (FNI) (2015–) and professor II at the Arctic University of Norway (University of Tromsø). Hønneland has been Deputy Director (2014-2015) and Research Director (2006-2014) at FNI and he has previously worked as an Officer for the Norwegian Coast Guard.
 Hønneland took his doctoral degree at the University of Oslo in 2000, with the PhD dissertation "Compliance in the Barents Sea Fisheries". He was given full professor competence in 2004, and has worked as a visiting scholar at several universities, including Rutgers (the State University of New Jersey) (2002-2003), Aalborg University (2010) and the Royal Danish Defence Academy (2013).
 Hønneland has worked and published extensively on issues related to international ocean governance, East-West relations in the Arctic, Russian politics, and the role of identity in international relations. He has been ranked the most publishing scientist the Norwegian institute sector (48 institutes) from 2012-2016, and he also ranks high on the list of Norway’s most published scientists across all disciplines.


Martin Newland was editor of the "Daily Telegraph" from 2003 to 2005, and he took with him many former "Telegraph" employees, most notably Colin Randall (former "Telegraph" executive news editor), Sue Ryan (former managing editor) and senior photographer Stephen Lock (who covered domestic and foreign news and the international fashion circuit during 20 years on "The Daily Telegraph").

(meta data) TITLE: Daily Mail showbiz reporter Tahira Yaqoob heads to Abu Dhabi | Media | The Guardian

(meta data) AUTHOR: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/stephenbrook

(meta data) PUBLISHER: https://www.facebook.com/theguardian

(meta data) PUBLISHED DATETIME: 2008-02-06T12:25:57-0500

Available for everyone, funded by readers

# Mail showbiz reporter off to Abu Dhabi

First published on Wed 6 Feb 2008 12.25 EST

The Daily Mail's deputy showbusiness editor, Tahira Yaqoob, is joining Martin Newland's Abu Dhabi newspaper.

Yaqoob, number two to Richard Simpson on the Mail's showbusiness desk, will be part of the national news reporting team on the unnamed newspaper, set to launch within months in the United Arab Emirates.

Newland, the newspaper's editor in chief, said Yaqoob's fluency in Urdu and Punjabi and her deep knowledge of Muslim society would be "invaluable".

Burhan Wazir, a former deputy features editor of the Times's T2 section, will edit the Arts and Life section, while feature writer Philippa Kennedy, who edited UK Press Gazette from 1998 to 2002, will contribute regularly to the new paper.

"The quality of these appointments speaks for itself, and there is more to come," said Newland, a former Daily Telegraph editor.

Former Daily Telegraph managing editor Sue Ryan, a consultant on the new paper, has appointed Julia Robson, previously the Telegraph's deputy fashion editor, as London-based fashion director.

"Sue is aiming to recruit another top feature writer and I am looking for one more senior reporter to lead our bright, young team by example," said Newland.

Travel writer Rosemary Behan, who wrote on travel for the Telegraph, joins Ryan's team as a writer.

Photographer Stephen Lock, who covered domestic and foreign news and the international fashion circuit during 20 years on the Daily Telegraph, has arrived in Abu Dhabi as a senior photographer.

Karen Davies, a former deputy picture editor of the Sunday Telegraph, has also joined as a photographer.

They join executive editor Colin Randall, formerly the Daily Telegraph's chief reporter and Paris correspondent.

James Langton, former New York correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph, is news features editor and Alam Khan is sports editor.

· To contact the MediaGuardian newsdesk email editor@mediatheguardian.com or phone 020 7239 9857.

For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 7278 2332.

· If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

The government-owned media company ran the newspaper along with other publications, including "Aletihad, Zahrat Al Khaleej, Majed" and "National Geographic Al Arabiya" (in partnership with "National Geographic"). In 2016, "The National" was acquired by International Media Investments, a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Media Investment Corporation, a private investment company owned by Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan that is also part-owner of Sky News Arabia. "The National" has had three previous editors-in-chief: Mohammed Al Otaiba served from February 2014 to October 2016; Hassan Fattah from June 2009 to October 2013; and Martin Newland, who was the launch editor, from April 2008 until June 2009.
 With its pledge to emulate Western newspaper standards and to "help society evolve", "The National" claims to be an anomaly in the Middle East, where most media are tightly controlled by the government. Before "The National" moved to private ownership there were several high-level resignations across the editorial team regarding spiked stories and the newspaper's impotency when covering stories on Abu Dhabi. However, a major goal in establishing the paper was to have respect from the international community on the part of the government.
 During the initial launch "The National" built its staff levels up to 200, recruiting from newspapers around the world, including the "Wall Street Journal", the "New York Times" and "The Daily Telegraph" of Britain.


Land has a son Kai (b. 2001) with former wife Sharon Leal.

Collection: Wikipedia Outlinks March 2016

Crawl of outlinks from wikipedia.org started March, 2016.

These files are currently not publicly accessible.

It has been several years since the last time we did this.

For this collection, several things were done:

This collection will be complete, as there is a

good chance we will share the data, and sharing data with pointers to random

other collections, is a complex problem.

2. For the first time, did all the different wikis.

This one, the seed list was built from all 865 collections.

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20160304040906/http://bostonpublic.tktv.net/news.html

8.31.06 - Michael Rapaport will be on Jimmy Kimmel Live the night of Friday, September 1st.

8.31.06 - Michael Rapaport will be on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson the night of Tuesday, September 12th.

7.28.06 - Rashida Jones will guest star on The Office next season, and may possibly become a recurring character.

Jeri Ryan is engaged to her business partner and boyfriend, French chef Christopher Eme.

Ryan announced her engagement during the Television Critics Association press tour to promote her new TV series, Shark.

5.5.06 - From TVGuide.com: Loretta Devine will costar in the Lifetime Original movie "Life is Not a Fairy Tale: The Fantasia Barrino Story," as Fantasia's grandmother.

Jeri Ryan will guest-star on the May 16 season finale of ABC's Boston Legal, playing a reality-series host charged with shooting dead a member of the paparazzi.

David E. Kelley has a new project at ABC called Life on Mars, based on the BBC sci-fi drama that launched this past January.

The story is about a detective who lives in the 21st century, tho following a car accident inexplicably finds himself living and working in the 1970's.

Kelley will write and exec produce the pilot, which is targeting a Fall 2007 debut.

Jeri Ryan joins James Woods in the new CBS drama project Shark from Spike Lee.

Chi McBride has been cast in the ABC drama project formerly called Nine Lives about a lengthy hostage crisis from the point of vieew of the hostages.

Loretta Devine recently appeared on ABC's Grey's Anatomy as Adele Webber.

She will also be a recurring guest star on the WB's new show, Supernatural, where she plays a psychic who may be able to shed some light on the mystery of the two boys' mother's death.

Michael Rapaport's new sitcom, The War at Home, has been picked up by FOX for a full season.

Rob Estes has replaced Nicky Katt as a lead in ABC's new series, The Evidence.

9.9.05 - From TV Guide Online: Rapaport Armed for The War at Home

Fox's Simpson, Hill, Griffin and Smith families are getting a funny new neighbor: the Golds of The War at Home (premiering Sunday at 8:30 pm/ET).

Playing pop to a trio of challenging teens (blossoming Hillary, sexually misunderstood Larry and videogamer Mike) is Michael Rapaport (Small Time Crooks, Hitch), whose previous TV run was as a firebrand teacher on Boston Public.

TVGuide.com got a few minutes during the busy actor's lunch break to discuss fatherhood, films and his real-life friend in need.

TVGuide.com: What did your three-season stint as Boston Public's Danny teach you?

Michael Rapaport: It taught me that good work is good work, and having the opportunity to act every day is a really special thing.

Did it give you an appetite for further episodic series such as War at Home?

I liked the consistency of the work and, as I said, I enjoy acting a lot.

So often in this business, you rarely get to act; you spend time trying to get jobs and that kind of thing.

But what's great about doing a TV show, especially one that I like, is that you do get to act every day, as opposed to chasing work, which is a real pain in the ass.

Some liken War at Home to Married... with Children.

Rapaport: I think it's more like a Roseanne or an All in the Family.

Although Married... with Children was an extraordinarily funny show, this show is based in a stronger sense of reality.

TVGuide.com: Are you excited about Sunday's premiere?

I'm so proud of this show and so proud of the cast.

I think once people see it they're going to enjoy it.

How do you like Anita Barone (The Jeff Foxworthy Show) as your TV wife?

Dave and Vicky have a good, healthy, fun and playful relationship — they're friends and still very attracted to and sexually into each other.

TVGuide.com: Where are you coming from to play a father of teens?

A big inspiration for me is always my father, and I also sort of take from [creator/executive producer] Rob Lotterstein's inspiration, which is his father.

But the fact that I am a father of two boys — Julian, who's 5, and Maceo, my 3-year-old — is obviously the best firsthand experience I have.

TVGuide.com: What do you make of the pseudo-"controversy" of a show titled The War at Home's debuting on 9/11?

TVGuide.com: Not that you are averse to controversy, which you experienced much of as a cast member of Bamboozled.

It dealt with a lot of stereotypes in the black community and the way they are exploited by Hollywood — the television industry, more specifically — and it didn't pull any punches.

[Writer/director] Spike [Lee] took incredible risks making it, and because of the controversy and all that, it didn't get a chance.

But it's a very, very important movie that people should be able to enjoy for a long time.

TVGuide.com: Are there any new films coming up that you're particularly proud of?

Rapaport: Special, which is going to premiere at the [January 2006] Sundance Film Festival, I'm really excited about.

It's a little independent movie about a guy who is sort of depressed and sheltered and he winds up taking an antidepressant and starts to [experience] adverse reactions — he starts to think he has supernatural powers because the medication doesn't really work properly.

It has a dark, comedic element to it, but it's really a dramatic portrayal of a guy who is suffering from depression and is desperate to try to fix it.

I'm enormously proud of it, and I'm looking forward to people getting a chance to see it.

Lastly, I'd like to ask if you have heard any updates regarding Natasha Lyonne (American Pie).

[Rapaport's longtime friend/Comic Book Villains cast mate was recently in a New York City hospital ICU with hepatitis C, a collapsed lung and a heart infection.]

I've been thinking about her a lot lately and I care about her....

I saw somewhere that her father was threatening the hospital with a lawsuit for violating confidentiality and letting her admittance be leaked out.

The thing about her father that hasn't been put out there is... she doesn't speak to her father — she has a restraining order against him — so he's just trying to get his face into the papers for some reason.

I don't know why a sixtysomething-year-old man would be so interested in getting in the press when his daughter is so sick.

Natasha knows how I feel about her, aside from all the stuff that we went through [when her unruly behavior forced Rapaport to evict Lyonne from an apartment building he owns].

She's a very, very good person, and I'm hoping that she's able to get better.

6.8.05 - Jessalyn Gilsig is being promoted to cast regular on Nip/Tuck.

3.16.05 - Chi McBride has been cast in the Fox drama pilot Deviant Behavior.

Nicky Katt has been added to the cast of The Evidence, a new show from Warner Bros. TV/John Wells Productions starring Martin Landau and Orlando Jones.

It's a procedural drama about two homicide detective, and is being produced for ABC.

Boston Public repeats will premiere on WE on Monday, September 27th, and will be airing at 7pm and 1am on weekdays.

Women's Entertainment has acquired the off-net cable rights to Boston Public.

Boston Public comes with 81 episodes and is scheduled to begin airing on WE this fall.

Jeri Ryan accused her former husband, Republican Senate candidate Jack Ryan, of trying to coerce her into performing sex acts at various clubs while others watched.

The charges -- first leveled during the couple's bitter child-custody battle back in 2000 -- were made public on Monday.

In the documents the actress also acknowledged infidelity on her part, but only after the marriage was irretrievably broken.

David E. Kelley will develop his own reality show that will include real lawyers.

In creating a real firm, the lawyers/players will handle civil cases with binding arbitration presided over by sitting or former judges (the same type of binding arbitration as used in various syndicated court shows), and at the same time be vying for a partnership position within the lawfirm.

NBC has ordered up 8 episodes which will be produced by Kelley and Renegade 83.

Kristin at E!Online reports that when Chi McBride was asked if there was a chance that Boston Public would ever return, McBride just laughed.

"Boston Public is as dead as fried chicken.

There's about as much hope of it returning as a drumstick attaching all the other pieces together and running in your yard."

5.11.04 - Michael Rapaport and wife Nichole are going their separate ways after four years of marriage.

4.7.04 - Zap2It.com: Gilsig Subs for Ross on 'NYPD Blue' -

Charlotte Ross' departure from "NYPD Blue" has opened the door for former "Boston Public" star Jessalyn Gilsig to join the cast....

3.17.04 - From the March 20th issue of TV Guide: Graduation Day

Fox has yet to officially dismiss Boston Public, but there's every indication that school is out for the gang at Winslow High.

"The cast has been released from their contracts, and the show's sets have been torn down," sniffs a Boston native.

Two unaired episodes won't give fans much closure; creator-producer David E. Kelley was not given enough notice to script an appropriate farewell.

Jeri Ryan is in final talks to star opposite Kim Delaney in the pilot for Sudbury, a CBS drama that revolves around two sisters who also happen to be witches.

3.1.04 - Chi McBride will join the cast of Countdown (Fremantle Media/Vertikal/Touchstone) as the SWAT team leader.

McBride's fellow cast members include Jason O'Mara, Louis Mandylor, Salli Richardson, and Adam Beach.

This show was previous known as 43 Minutes.

1.24.04 - Zap2It.com: School Year Ends Early for 'Boston Public' -

While most shows typically complete 22 episodes per season, FOX has halted production on "Boston Public," which was in the middle of shooting its 15th episode this past week.

David E. Kelley's drama, which centers around the lives of students and faculty at a high school, is currently in its fourth season.

Many suspected it would be the show's last since FOX had originally only ordered 13 episodes before tacking on an additional two....

12.15.03 - Zap2It.com: R.E.M. Unplugs for 'Boston Public' -

So many people are crowded into Doyle's Cafe on the set of FOX's "Boston Public" that, if it were a real pub, the place might be in violation of the fire code.

The occasion is the filming of "Chapter Seventy-Six," the Friday, Dec. 19, episode of the high-school drama, and it's far from business as usual on the soundstages in Manhattan Beach, Calif....

10.29.03 - R.E.M. will perform an acoustic version of "Losing My

Religion" during Boston Public's Christmas-themed episode Dec. 19.

of the deal, producers agreed to play the group's new single "Bad Day" in

10.10.03 - From TV Guide Online: "Idol Star Goes Gay for Pay" by Michael Ausiello

American Idol lullababe Tamyra Gray is going from thespian to lesbian.

The Boston Public grad will play a sapphic singer who develops a crush on Rachel True's Mona character on the Nov. 3 episode of UPN's Half & Half.

The 24-year-old crooner admits she had some reservations about making her sitcom debut with such a "challenging" role.

"In the beginning [I was a little apprehensive], but mostly because I didn't know the other actress, Rachel, who I was playing side-by-side with," she tells TV Guide Online.

"But it's kind of lighthearted, so it wasn't so bad.

It wasn't bad at all, actually; it was pretty easy."

In the story, Mona tries to sign a hot new singer named Zora (Gray) to Delicious Records, but the hetero-leaning exec quickly realizes that the artist is sporting designs on more than just a lucrative album deal.

"My character on Boston Public was a little shy," Gray says.

"[Zora] is much more outgoing and aggressive."

Um, just how aggressive are we talking here?

"There are no kissing scenes," laughs Gray.

"That probably would have been my [deal]breaker, because I don't know if I'm ready for it just yet."

When Gray is not pursuing girls, er, acting gigs, she's busy putting the finishing touches on her debut album, which is due out in the spring.

"For the most part, I will have written most of my album except for one song," says the Maryland native, who describes the CD as "a blend of old school and new school, with alternative pop and R&B."

And if Gray has it her way, her album's release will coincide with another big career development.

"Hopefully by the time my album is about to drop, then I'll be back on Boston Public," she says with a smile, "because [my character] ended with a record deal.

Sounds like Gray may have a future in marketing, too.

Milo Ventimiglia: Neither Bad Nor a Boy -

"My manager makes fun of me," says Milo Ventimiglia.

"He's like, 'Since you started in the business, you've aged eight years, but on television, you've only aged two or three.'

10.1.03 - NBC is looking at a sitcom with Michael Rapaport, currently titled First Comes Love, which was also written by Rapaport along with Les Firestein, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

9.23.03 - Variety reports that David E. Kelley will be writing a big-screen remake of Agatha Christie's classic mystery "Witness for the Prosecution."

Anxious to maintain its audience after a move to Friday night, David E. Kelley's "Boston Public" is filling up with guest stars like so many over-crowded public school classrooms.

Dennis Miller was already slated to begin a multi-episode arc on Friday, Oct. 24 and he'll be joined by former "Twin Peaks" gal Sherilyn Fenn.

Fenn has signed on to do at least two episodes of the FOX drama, starting with Oct. 24 show....

9.22.03 - Michael Rapaport will be on Last Call with Carson Daly the night of Thursday, September 25th.

Fox has ordered a pilot script for a comedy from David E. Kelley Prods. called Five Finger Discount, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

The script will be penned by Kerry Ehrin, a consulting producer on Boston Public.

Dennis Miller has signed on for a 3-episode arc the will begin Friday, October 24th.

For more information on his role, see the previews page.

8.25.03 - Lyndsy Fonseca (The Young and the Restless) will guest star on three episodes of Boston Public.

8.14.03 - FOX has changed the premiere date of Boston Public from September 26th to Septmeber 19th.

Milo Ventimiglia, who was last seen as Jess on Gilmore Girls will appear in three episodes of Boston Public, Variety reports.

He'll play a bad boy with a hidden agenda.

Kristin at E!Online reports that James Van Der Beek could be headed back to the big screen.

He's in talks to star in "Standing Still," described as a "Big Chill" for Gen Y, which also stars Michael Rapaport and Estella Warren.

'Angel' Brings in Fresh Face, Old Friend -

As the only currently active outpost in the know Buffy-verse, "Angel" is swelling its cast to include even more familiar faces, as well as one or two new characters to replace departed Charisma Carpenter and Vincent Kartheiser.

As has long been rumored, Mercedes McNab will join the show on a recurring basis, revisiting her Harmony character.

This will allow Harmony, a somewhat bumbling vampire whose attempts at self-empowerment rarely end well, to reunite with former flame Spike (James Marsters, who has already been announced as a new series regular).

McNab made appearances as Harmony on both "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel."

McNab's other credits include appearances on "Dawson's Creek" and "Boston Public."

The WB has also confirmed that another "Boston Public" alum, Sarah Thompson, will join "Angel" for at least six episodes as Eve, a new assistant to David Boreanaz's Angel at Wolfram & Hart.

Those in the know are coy about Thompson's character, who may or may not provide temptation for the show's undead hero.

Thompson, who played high school seductress Dana Pool in the first season of "Boston Public," appeared on episodes of "The District" and "Touched by an Angel" last season.

She also was in the feature "Malibu's Most Wanted."

7.29.03 - TV Guide Online: Meet Boston Public's "Spicy Latina" -

This fall, Natalia Baron joins the cast of Boston Public as Miss Carmen Torres.

"I'm a spicy Latina student teacher," the newbie tells TV Guide Online.

"She's still in college and she comes in speaking Spanish the whole way, even though she's teaching physics, not Spanish!"

What gives with Carmen livin' la vida loca en Español?

"She believes that all the kids should learn Spanish — as well as all the teachers — because we're fighting in a bilingual job market," Baron smiles.

7.29.03 - FOX has schedule the season premiere of Boston Public for Friday, September 26th.

7.22.03 - From TV Guide Online: Former New Kid Joey McIntyre and That '70s Show's Mila Kunis

are taking the plunge, signing on to star in a big-screen adaptation of the

interactive stage show Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding.

7.17.03 - Boston Public received one Emmy nomination for Outstanding Choreography.

The Emmy Awards will be presented live on Fox from the Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium on Sunday, September 21st.

Tamyra Gray was nominated for a Teen Choice Award as Breakout Female TV Star for her recurring role on Boston Public.

The awards are scheduled to air Wednesday, Aug. 6 on FOX.

Teens can vote on several categories at TeenPeople.com (a subscription is required).

6.3.03 - Couple of program changes coming to Fox's Friday night schedule next month: as of July 11th The Bernie Mac Show will air back to back episodes from 8-9pm and Boston Public moves to 9pm.

As of August 8th, Wanda at Large slides into the 8:30pm time slot, displacing the second Bernie Mac.

5.28.03 - TV Guide gives JEERS to Whitney Houston's unlikely appearance on Fox's Boston Public.

As if it weren't stretching credibility that Houston would play a high school prom, the pop diva further challenged reality by showing up for the gig on time!

5.27.03 - Joey McIntyre, Jon Abrahams, Cara DeLizia and China Jesusita Shavers will not be returning next year.

Bianca Kajlich (Lisa Grier, first season) and Joey Slotnick's new comedy, Rock Me Baby, has been picked up by UPN for the fall season.

Boston Public has been renewed for another season by FOX, but will now be airing on Fridays at 9pm ET.

David E. Kelley's new drama, The Brotherhood of Poland, N.H. (starring, among others, Cleo King, the "smell that shoe" woman), has been picked up by CBS for the fall and will air on Wednesday nights.

5.13.03 - Indigo's (Cheyenne) new cop drama, 10-8, has been picked up for the fall season by ABC, and will air on Sundays at 8pm ET.

5.3.03 - From the May 3rd issue of TV Guide:

It wasn't jealousy over Tamyra Gray's rendition of "I Will Always Love you" that convinced Whitney Houston to play herself in the May 12 season finale of Fox's Boston Public but rather a plea from series creator David E. Kelley.

He phoned Houston and asked if she'd play a student's superstar prom date.

To sweeten the deal, Kelley is letting the diva sing a track from her latest CD.

3.7.03 - Indigo (fka Alyssa Ashley Nichols, who plays Cheyenne) has been signed to play Officer Graves, a trainee at the Sheriff's Dept., in the ABC crime drama 10-8.

Cleo King (the "smell this shoe" woman) has been cast in David E. Kelley's CBS pilot, The Brotherhood of Poland, New Hampshire.

Tamyra Gray Signs for More 'Boston Public' -

Former "American Idol" contestant Tamyra Gray has received an extended hall pass from the producers of "Boston Public."

Gray has signed to appear in three more episodes of the FOX drama, bringing her total to seven.

She made her prime-time acting debut on Monday's (Feb. 24) episode of the series.

"We are extremely excited about the acting debut of Tamyra Gray," executive producer Jason Katims says.

"She has done an amazing job in portraying a sensitive character...."

Tonight's Boston Public revolves around a closeted teen named Devon who comes to terms with his same-sex feelings after witnessing a gay bashing.

There's just one problem – Matt Lutz, the actor playing Devon, is about as pro-gay as Jesse Helmes.

"I think homosexuality is a sin," the conservative Christian tells The Advocate.

"I think that it is a lifestyle that I don't necessarily...

Tamyra Gray Sings Her Heart Out for 'Boston Public' -

Since losing out to Kelly Clarkson in the first season of FOX's "American Idol," 23-year-old Tamyra Gray has gone on to prove that, sometimes, winning isn't about coming first.

A favorite of the show's judges -- in particular the acerbic Simon Cowell -- Gray has now embarked on an acting career, with a four-episode stint (and perhaps more) on FOX's high-school drama "Boston Public...."

Writers Guild To Honor David E. Kelley, John Gay -

The Writers Guild of America, west (WGAw) will honor John Gay and David E. Kelly with awards for excellence.

The awards will be presented at the 55th Annual Writers Guild Award ceremony on March 8, 2003....

10.14.02 - Jeri Ryan was #41 on TV Guide's list of the 50 Sexiest Stars of All Time.

Of all the wonders of the sci-fi universe, few compare to Seven of Nine (1997-2001) in UPN's Star Trek: Voyager.

Only Jeri Ryan could have made this icy Borg such a voluptuous, red-blooded woman.

In a catsuit so tight it must have made breathing difficult, Ryan could always be counted on to heat up the cold vacuum of outer space.

'Idol' Contestant Gray Enrolls in 'Boston Public' -

"American Idol's" assault on the world of entertainment continues.

The latest salvo comes in the form of Tamyra Gray, "Idol's" fourth-place finisher.

She'll be appearing on several episodes of FOX's "Boston Public" beginning in February.

"We're thrilled to have Tamyra join the cast for four episodes later this season," executive producer Jason Katims says.

"She gave a very impressive audition, and while it's possible her character will sing, we are most interested in helping to launch her as a dramatic actress...."

Fox is confirming that American Idol standout Tamyra Gray will appear in four episodes of Boston Public beginning in February.

American Idol loser Tamyra Gray may prove to be the show's biggest winner after all.

The up-and-comer is in talks to join the cast of Boston Public for a multi-episode arc.

If a deal is finalized, Gray -- who landed a record contract with the producers behind Idol -- could debut by November sweeps.

David E. Kelley is stepping down as executive producer and

head writer of Fox's Boston Public in order to focus his attention on ABC's The

Practice and his new Fox drama, girls club.

will replace him behind-the-scenes -- which may mean that aliens are about to

Boston Public's New Kid on the Block - Fresh from doing tick, tick...

off Broadway, Joey McIntyre has moved to L.A. to join the cast of Boston Public.

It's a culture shock for the New Kids on the Block star to leave his beloved Boston for the Santa Monica beach.

But hey, he still gets to play a Beantown boy on TV....

7.22.02 - Boston Public will have its third season premiere on Monday, October 21st at 8pm ET.

7.17.02 - TV Guide Online: Halloween's New Ghoul Girl - Could Halloween: Resurrection boost unknown Bianca Kajlich to full-fledged starlet status?

So far, she's done perky pom-pom duty as a cheerleader in Bring It On.

Plus, she spent a year on Boston Public as Lisa...

7.10.02 - Jon Abrahams (Scary Movie, Meet the Parents) will be joining the cast as a new faculty member.

6.7.02 - Former New Kids on the Block singer Joey McIntyre will be guest starring next fall.

5.30.02 - David E. Kelley is in the process of casting one or more male teachers for Boston Public.

FOX unveiled their official fall schedule today, and Boston Public will be keeping its 8pm ET Monday time slot, followed by David E. Kelley's new show, Girls Club.

5.6.02 - Chicago Sun-Times: A 'Public' role with principles -

It was two years ago this month, in a Manhattan theater packed with ad execs, that Fox first trotted out "Ally McBeal" and "The Practice" auteur David E. Kelley along with the cast of his new high school drama for the following fall....

4.29.02 - FOX has officially renewed Boston Public for a third season.

4.24.02 - Don't miss Nicky Katt in the new movie, "Insomnia," in theaters everywhere May 24th.

4.1.02 - Girls Club, a new pilot for FOX from David E. Kelley, has cast Giancarlo Esposito as its first cast member.

Esposito will play a senior partner at the law firm headed and owned by three women attorneys.

3.30.02 - TV Guide mentions Michael Rapaport in "Great Performances" on page 10 of the March 30th issue.

As Danny Hanson, the brash and boyish new teacher on Fox's Boston Public, Michael Rapaport earns an A for attitude.

Although Danny is reckless and impishly confrontational–he urged his students to sue a fellow teacher for defamation of character–Rapaport's working-class charm keeps the chracter blissfully free of the mannered quirks that define so much of the faculty.

He was quite moving in a recent episode in which he defied authority and risked his career by analyzing the racially charged N-word during classroom "talk time."

By not being afraid to show that Danny doesn't have all the answers, Rapaport moves to the head of his class.

3.13.02 - Bianca Kajlich (Lisa Grier) has been cast in the WB sitcom In My Opinion, along with Nat Faxon, Richard Trapp, Stacy Francis, and Peter McKenzie.

3.12.02 - Thomas McCarthy (Coach Kevin Riley) can currently be seen in the Broadway production of "Noises Off."

Chi McBride is named one of TV's MVP actors in the March 9th issue of TV Guide.

At 6-foot-5, McBride is an automatic authority figure, whether battling racial unjustice, policing horny faculty members or impersonating Ralph Kramden in a play.

"He brings enormous weight to the series, and I don't mean this as a pun," says Anthony Heald, who plays administrator Scott Guber.

"His character has an enormous heart and a very strong set of priciples.

2.13.02 - Fox has given a 13 episode commitment to a new David E. Kelley drama focusing on three women (guess what? they're lawyers!) who live together in San Francisco.

2.7.02 - Zap2It.com: Advocacy Groups Target 'Boston Public' -

A coalition of 15 family and child advocacy groups have sent the Federal Communications Commission a letter complaining that FOX's "Boston Public's" is too racy for the eight o'clock hour....

12.18.01 - Chi McBride has been nominated for an American Film Institute Award for AFI Male Actor of the Year in a Series.

The awards ceremony will be broadcast on CBS on Saturday, January 5th, at 8pm ET.

Loretta Devine has been nominated for two NAACP Image awards.

One is for her supporting role in the motion picture "Kingdom Come" and the other is for Oustanding Actress in a Drama Series.

Rashida Jones and Vanessa Bell Calloway also received nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series.

Boston Public itself received a nomination for Outstanding Drama Series.

The awards will be presented on February 23rd in Los Angeles.

Boston Public gets Jeers in the November 17th issue of TV Guide.

The hiring of actress Jeri Ryan by executive producer David E. Kelley to spice of Fox's Boston Public all but guaranteed an endless supply of tawdry double entendres.

And the only disappointment in Ryan's first episode on October 29 was that the entendres didn't even aspire to the level of double.

Kelley, who seems increasingly incapable of creating female characters who are not miniskirted sexpots, gave Ryan a truly inauspicious welcome.

In one commercial for the series, Ryan, as teacher Ronnie Cooke, was asked by an inquisitive student whether she was a "a real teacher."

Her response–"Yes, are you a real student?"– was only slightly wittier than "I know you are, but what am I?"

But the real indignity came when, in Ryan's first episode, a student asked to see her breasts.

We've seen old Van Halen videos with more class.

David E. Kelley is developing a new series for Fox, but he's not writing it.

The new show is called The Understudy and will be supervised and exec prod by Kelley, produced via David E. Kelley Prods. and 20th.

But he won't be writing the pilot or any of the presumed subsequent episodes.

That task will be left to Ivan Menchell, current writer/producer on Ally McBeal.

Along with Menchell, The Understudy was co-created by Bill D'Elia who is also the showrunner on Ally, and will direct The Understudy.

The show is about a 21 year old in NYC trying to make a career for herself on Broadway.

10.31.01 - TV Guide Online reports that Fox's Monday night dramas returned to mixed results: Boston Public debuted strongly with 13.8 million viewers, but Ally McBeal

averaged a disappointing 10.8 million viewers.

10.30.01 - Don't miss the full-length article in the October 27th issue of TV Guide on new cast member Jeri Ryan.

The November 6th issue of Soap Opera Digest reports that Sharon Leal and fiancé Bev Land welcomed their first child, Kai Miles Land, into the world on September 13th.

9.9.01 - Boston Public won one Creative Arts Emmy for Outstanding Art Direction for a Single-Camera Series ("Chapter One").

8.6.01 - TV Guide Online: Jeri Ryan's New Boss -

When Boston Public begins its sophomore year this September, Winslow High's male pupils won't be the only ones ogling former Star Trek: Voyager bombshell Jeri Ryan - who's enrolling as curvaceous corporate-lawyer-turned-teacher Ronnie Brooks...

7.12.01 - Boston Public received 2 Emmy nominations including Outstanding Art Direction for a Single-Camera Series ("Chapter One") and Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series (Kathy Baker as Mrs. Peters).

The June 19th issue of Soap Opera Digest reports that Sharon Leal is pregnant.

Although in the past, she had been linked with Grayson McCouch (Another World, All Souls), with whom she worked on Legacy, sources indicate that the child is not his.

5.8.01 - TV Guide gives Jeers to spelling trouble.

"We'd like to think the April 16 episode of Fox's Boston Public was making a sly comment about the state of American education, but we suspect plain old carelessness was the culprit.

During a conversation between teachers Harry and Lauren, a chalkboard in the background listed the day's assignment.

Boston Public has received a Prism Commendation for the episode "Chapter Eight."

Prism recognizes work in which members of the entertainment community take an active role in addressing drug abuse in America.

The 5th annual Prism awards, hosted by Jamie Lee Curtis and Richard Lewis, were taped April 4th.

No word yet when or where they will air.

3.8.01 - At the TV Guide Awards, which aired on Fox last night, Peter MacNicol, Chi McBride and Lara Flynn Boyle presented the first annual Brandon Tartikoff Award to David E. Kelley for incredible achievement in television.

3.6.01 - Zap2It.com: Boston Public Hits Close to Home

3.5.01 - TV Guide Online: Boston Public Star Stands Tall - Chi McBride takes great pride in his role as formidable principal Steven Harper...

2.10.01 - Chi McBride was named one of the MVP actors of TV in the February 10th issue of TV Guide.

In addition, David E. Kelley was named one of the MVP writers of TV.

David E. Kelley will take home the newly minted Brandon Tartikoff Award at the third annual TV Guide Awards, which will air on March 7 on Fox.

Named for the legendary network executive, Tartikoff's award honors other creative movers and shakers behind the scenes.

Fox has renewed "Boston Public" for a second year, giving it a full season order.

"Boston Public" has earned to date an average of 12.1 million viewers, a 5.6 among A18-49, and the show's audience has been building.

After the November sweep when repeats became regular fare on the competing networks, the opportunity came to much of the audience to see "Boston Public" for the first time.

Now the question is how many are hooked and will stay hooked through the February sweep.

12.29.00 - "Boston Public" has been nominated for two TV Guide Awards: New Series of the Year and Actor of the Year in a New Series (Chi McBride).

11.30.00 - "Boston Public" was nominated for a People's Choice Award as Favorite New Television Dramatic Series.

11.4.00 - Matt Roush in the November 4th issue of TV Guide: "I'm the principal.

I'm entitled to a tone," says the formidable Chi McBride as Steven Harper, the exasperated yet dedicated principal on Fox's high school melodrama Boston Public.

McBride, best known for comedy (including UPN's notorious The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer), sets the dramatic tone for this often over-the-top series, projecting a powerful aura of quiet, steely authority, even when his fractious faculty and rebellious students wear him down.

Both rational and explosive, McBride's Harper is a stern general who nonetheless inspires loyalty among his troops.

In this role, McBridge shows he's an actor of, yes, principle.

Dania dated "Soul Plane" director Jessy Terrero until 2008. She became engaged in September 2011 to director John Beverly "Bev" Land. The couple married on the beach in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic on February 16, 2013.