Experts

The radical cleric contacted by accused Ft. Hood gunman Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan has such unmistakable connections to past terrorist plots that his e-mail exchanges with the American should have triggered an all-out investigation, a number of officials and experts now believe. Anwar al Awlaki is an extremist whose sermons have helped radicalize terrorists from Atlanta to New Jersey to London, including cases in which the U.S. military was targeted. A well-spoken Yemeni American, Awlaki has emerged as the leading ideologue for a homegrown generation of young militants who conspire over the Internet.

As master brewers have done for 13 centuries before him, the sake factory boss is everywhere at once in his rustic timbered building along Japan's rugged northern coastline: helping to drag sacks of rice, gently issuing instructions to his four brewing assistants, consulting with his own boss, a fifth-generation owner.

In pool it's called a re-rack, in cards it's a re-shuffle, in the wilderness it's retracing your tracks and in college football, well, it's just ridiculous. Toss your preseason magazines in the recycle bin because it's time to reconsider just about everything. September put Phil Steele back on his heels and had Jeff Sagarin staggering. Steele didn't include Oregon in his preseason magazine's top 50, which looked prescient after the opener against Boise State but not so smart after the Ducks improved to 3-1 with a 39-point win over Jeff Tedford's team: California Dreaming.

Why keep things? They only take up space -- physical, mental, emotional. Einstein may have griped about what an empty desk might signify, but if he was around today, he wouldn't even be able to get a job as an expert on a reality TV show with that attitude. "Clutter is the symptom, but hoarding is the disease," asserts David Tolin, the expert assigned to help Jill, a 60-year-old woman on the verge of eviction from her Milwaukee home on this week's premiere episode of "Hoarders" (A&E, 10 p.m. Monday)

When it came to hiring expert witnesses for his murder defense, Phil Spector went for the top of the line. The scientists he retained to analyze evidence in the fatal shooting of an actress are a who's who of American forensics, the men who wrote the textbooks for their fields and whose faces stare out from the television when a criminal case goes national.