A Saudi man arrested at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after federal agents accused him of lying about why he was traveling with a pressure cooker wants to be released on bond.

Thirty-three-year-old Hussain Al Khawahir (HOO'-sayn ahl chah-WAH'-heer), was arrested May 11, charged with giving false statements to federal agents and possessing an altered passport.

Federal defender James C. Howarth asked a Detroit federal judge Monday to set bond for Al Khawahir, who initially didn't seek release.

Howarth says his client didn't know pressure cookers were used in the Boston Marathon attack and was bringing it for a nephew.

The lawyer says his client contacted Saudi diplomats after the arrest and his government "pledged its support."

The Associated Press emailed federal lawyers asking if they oppose the release.

Monday's powerful tornado in suburban Oklahoma City loosely followed the path of a killer twister that slammed the region in May 1999.

The National Weather Service estimated that the storm that struck Moore, Okla., on Monday had wind speeds of up to 200 mph, and was at least a half-mile wide. The 1999 storm had winds clocked at 300 mph, according to the weather service website.

Kelsey Angle, a weather service meteorologist in Kansas City, Mo., said it's unusual for two such powerful tornadoes to track roughly the same path.

The weather service has tentatively classified the Moore twister's wind speeds as an EF-4 on a 5-point scale. Angle said less than 1 percent of all tornadoes reach a EF-4 or EF-5.

People who falsely claim they have received a military medal in order to obtain money or government benefits could face up to a year in jail under legislation that easily passed the House Monday.

The Stolen Valor Act, sponsored by Nevada Republican Joe Heck, is a second attempt by the House to revive a law on fraudulent claims to medals that was struck down by the Supreme Court in June last year. The legislation is identical to a measure that passed the House overwhelmingly last September but saw no Senate action before the last session of Congress ended. The vote Monday was 390-3.

The Supreme Court, in invalidating the Stolen Valor Act of 2006, ruled that while making false statements about receiving a military medal might be contemptible, such lies were protected by First Amendment free speech rights. The case involved a former California politician who lied about being a decorated military veteran. It has long been a crime to wear, manufacture or sell military declarations or medals without proper authorization.

As rewritten, the bill more narrowly focuses on those who lie about receiving medals "with intent to obtain money, property or other tangible benefit." That could include those who claim medals in order to receive veterans benefits, land a government contract or get a job reserved for veterans. Offenders face fines and up to a year in prison.

The bill, said Heck, "resolves these constitutional issues by clearly defining that the objective of the law is to target and punish those who represent their service with the intent of profiting personally or financially."

After the Supreme Court ruling, the Pentagon announced it would establish a database of military valor awards and medals, making it easier to validate claims.

The site, http://valor.defense.gov/, lists individuals who were awarded the Medal of Honor or a Service Cross prior to or after Sept 11, 2001. It also lists Silver Star recipients for actions since Sept. 11.

Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., has similar legislation pending in the Senate.

Thousands of people took to the streets of Manhattan to protest the killing of a gay man who had been taunted with homophobic slurs.

Some of the marchers carried signs and rainbow flags as they marked the death of 32-year-old Mark Carson.

Many chanted: "We're here! We're Queer!" and "Homophobia's got to go!"

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn marched along with Edie Windsor, whose case to win the same rights as heterosexual couples is before the Supreme Court.

Carson was killed early Saturday as he walked with a companion through a Greenwich Village neighborhood.

Police say a man charged with murder as a hate crime shot Carson in the head. The killing occurred near the site of 1969 riots that helped give rise to the gay rights movement.

Ten young scholars have made it to the finals of the National Geographic Bee, where they'll compete for a $25,000 college scholarship.

The preliminary rounds of the national competition were held Monday, narrowing the field of 54 state-level winners to the final 10.

The field for Wednesday's finals includes one repeat participant, 14-year-old Neelam Sandhu of Bedford, N.H. Asha Jain of Minocqua, Wis., the younger sister of last year's runner-up, also made the finals. Other states represented will be California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon and Virginia. The participants range in age from 11 to 14.

They'll answer questions about history, world cultures, landmarks and climates. Alex Trebek of "Jeopardy!" will host the finals, which will be broadcast Thursday on the National Geographic Channel.

Authorities say a Kentucky teenager known as a jokester was strangled by a dog lead he put around his neck while playing with friends at the start of summer vacation.

Estill County Coroner Tony Murphy said Monday that 16-year-old Tony Conley died near his home in eastern Kentucky when he apparently jumped off an outdoor deck staircase and the dog lead tightened around his neck. He called it a freak accident and a terrible tragedy.

Murphy says friends tried but were unable to cut the metal cable and Conley was pronounced dead at the scene Friday evening.

Conley had just finished his freshman year at Estill County High School hours before his death.

Football coach Mike Jones called him a good kid who was a jokester.

Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley has skipped Boston College's commencement because of the involvement of Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who supports of a bill in his country that would allow abortion.

A few dozen protesters, some playing bagpipes, demonstrated at the college during Monday morning's graduation ceremony. They held signs with messages that included: "Boston College Keep Your Pro Life Values."

Kenny will address undergraduates and accept an honorary degree from the Jesuit-run college.

Kenny says the legislation simply clarifies when a doctor can perform an abortion to save a woman's life.

Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn says the school respects O'Malley and regrets he didn't attend graduation, but that the school's commitment to Catholic values isn't eroding in the least.

Two suspects arrested for breaking into a car in Central California accidentally called 911 on a cellphone, which led police to them.

KXTV in Sacramento reports a dispatcher was able to hear a rambling 35-minute conversation between the men as they discussed buying drugs and what implements to use to break into vehicles in Fresno.

The dispatcher listened in as the suspects smashed a car's window and found prescription drugs.

The men drove off, but the dispatcher picked up clues about where they were headed. A police officer pulled them over and arrested the two 20-year-olds.

At the end of the call the men learned how they were caught. One of them can be heard asking, "We really called 911?"

How about a tat tax?

The City Council in Berkeley, Calif., is expected to raise fees Tuesday on tattoos and homemade cupcakes, among other fun stuff, in an attempt to offset the city's $5.1 million deficit over the next two years.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the taxes, if approved, would go into effect July 1, making the summer a bit more expensive.

Tattoo artists, the paper reports, will see an increase in registration fees from $44 to $85 annually.  Cupcake-makers, and others who prepare food in their homes, will face fees for the first time: from $170 to $425 for permits, registration and inspection.

"I don't see what the money is going toward," Kellen Gauthier, of Zebra Tattoo and Body Piercing, told the Chronicle. "It's not toward helping the industry."

The tattoo fees would go to paying city staff to issue health permits and register body art practitioners, which is required under a law the City Council passed a year ago.

But not only the little people will pay the taxes.

The paper reports that developers choosing to forgo parking requirements on downtown building projects will see a fee. A developer would have the option of paying $15,000 to $30,000 per parking space to get around the parking requirements, with the funds going toward pedestrian improvements and other projects. And boaters will face new berth fees at the marina, ranging from $7.74 to $13.03 per foot, depending on the size of the berth.

Click for more from the San Francisco Chronicle.

 

Two suspects arrested for breaking into a car in Central California accidentally called 911 on a cellphone, which led police to them.

KXTV in Sacramento reports (http://on.news10.net/14xiYik ) a dispatcher was able to hear a rambling 35-minute conversation between the men as they discussed buying drugs and what implements to use to break into vehicles in Fresno.

The dispatcher listened in as the suspects smashed a car's window and found prescription drugs.

The men drove off, but the dispatcher picked up clues about where they were headed. A police officer pulled them over and arrested the two 20-year-olds.

At the end of the call the men learned how they were caught. One of them can be heard asking, "We really called 911?"

___

Information from: KXTV-TV.

Police are searching for a missing University of Rhode Island student who was traveling home to southeastern Pennsylvania last week, but never made it.

Investigators say 21-year-old Collegeville resident Matthew Royer was last seen leaving his apartment in Rhode Island on Thursday.

State police in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island are attempting to locate him and family members tell WFMZ-TV that Royer's cellphone registered activity early Friday near Interstate 78 and Route 309 in Lehigh County.

Authorities say he was driving a silver 2008 Chevrolet Cobalt with Pennsylvania registration.

A central Pennsylvania teenager has been cited for disorderly conduct after authorities say he swore at school officials who wouldn't let him into his school prom, from which he'd been banned for failing to serve detention.

State police say 18-year-old Colin Mitchell Ocker tried to go Saturday's prom despite being told by Shippensburg Area High School officials he couldn't attend.

Pennlive.com reports officials say he cursed at school officials who wouldn't let him in. State police say he also threatened to break in the back door at The Meadowlands Mall, where the prom was being held, and began tapping on the windows.

Authorities say he knew he wouldn't be able to attend because of the detention issue.

A telephone listing for Ocker couldn't immediately be found.

It could be an anxious wait of up to two months for people in a small Florida city to find out who won the highest Powerball jackpot in history: an estimated $590.5 million.

The lucky ticket was bought sometime Saturday or earlier at a Publix supermarket in Zephyrhills, a city of about 13,000 people best known around the state for its brand of spring water with the same name.

The winner has 60 days to claim the lump-sum cash option, estimated around $376.9 million, at the Florida Lottery's office in Tallahassee. Under Florida law, lottery winners in the state cannot remain anonymous; their names and city of residence must be made publicly available to anyone who asks, according to the state's lottery website. No one had come forward as of Sunday afternoon.

"It never happens this quickly," lottery spokesman David Bishop said. "If they know they won, they're going to contact their attorney or an accountant first so they can get their affairs in order."

The winner wasn't Matthew Bogel. On Sunday, he loaded groceries into his car after shopping at the Publix. He shook his head when asked about the jackpot.

"It's crazy, isn't it?" he said. "That's so much money."

It's an amount too high for many to imagine. Compare it to the budget for the city of Zephyrhills: This year's figure is just more than $49 million. The winning Powerball jackpot is 12 times that.

Publix spokeswoman Maria Brous said there are a lot of rumors about who won, but the store doesn't know. "We're excited for the winner or winners," she said.

Plenty of people in Zephyrhills are wondering whether it's someone they know.

Joan Albertson drove to the Publix early Sunday morning with her camera in hand, in case the winner emerged. She said she bought a ticket at a store across the street, and the idea of winning that much money was still something of a shock.

"Oh, there's so much good that you could do with that amount of money." Albertson said. "I don't even know where to begin."

Zephyrhills is a small city in Pasco County, about 30 miles northeast of downtown Tampa. Once a rural farming town, it's now known as a hotbed for skydiving activity, and the home to large retiree mobile home parks and the water bottled from the natural springs that surround the area.

And now, one lucky lottery ticket.

"I'm getting text messages and messages from Facebook going, `uh, did you win the lottery?"' Sandra Lewis said. "No, I didn't win, guys. Sorry."

Sara Jeltis said her parents in Michigan texted her with the news Sunday morning.

"Well, it didn't click until I came here," she said, gesturing to the half-dozen TV live trucks humming in the Publix parking lot. "And I'm like, `Wow I can't believe it, it's shocking!' Out of the whole country, this Publix, in little Zephyrhills would be the winner."

With four out of every five possible combinations of Powerball numbers in play, lottery executives said Saturday that someone was almost certain to win the game's highest jackpot, a windfall of hundreds of millions of dollars -- and that's after taxes.

The winning numbers were 10, 13, 14, 22 and 52, with a Powerball of 11.

Estimates had earlier put the jackpot at around $600 million. But Powerball's online site said Sunday that the jackpot had reached an estimated $590.5 million.

The world's largest jackpot was a $656 million Mega Millions jackpot in March 2012.

Terry Rich, CEO of the Iowa Lottery, initially confirmed that one Florida winning ticket had been sold. He told The Associated Press that following the Florida winner, the Powerball grand prize was being reset at an estimated jackpot of $40 million, or about $25.1 million cash value.

The chances of winning the prize were astronomically low: 1 in 175.2 million. That's how many different ways you can combine the numbers when you play. But lottery officials estimated that about 80 percent of those possible combinations had been purchased recently.

The longshot odds didn't deter people across Powerball-playing states -- 43 plus Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands -- from lining up at gas stations and convenience stores Saturday.

Clyde Barrow, a public policy professor at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, specializes in the gaming industry. He said one of the key factors behind the ticket-buying frenzy is the size of the jackpot -- people are interested in the easy investment.

"Even though the odds are very low, the investment is very small," he said. "Two dollars gets you a chance."

Lewis, who went to the Publix on Sunday to buy water, said she didn't play -- and she isn't upset about it.

"Life goes on," she said, shrugging. "I'm good."

Authorities say a 52-year-old man died when he fell from a cliff while rappelling in southeastern Ohio over the weekend.

The Ohio Department of Natural Resources said the man died in the fall Saturday in Hocking Hills State Park near Logan.

Agency spokeswoman Mark Bruce said man -- who is from Centerville, in the Dayton area -- fell from the top of a 130-foot cliff. His name has not been released.

Bruce said the man had accompanied a Boy Scout troop to the state park. He was rappelling at about 5 p.m. Saturday in the rock-climbing area of the park when he fell.

It was the second fatal fall in the park so far this year.

Tourists are crowding onto a Bronx bus tour that promises "a ride through a real New York City 'GHETTO' " — and local politicians are furious.

Three times a week, Real Bronx Tours takes riders — mainly white Europeans and Australians — on a trip that includes stops at food-pantry lines and a "pickpocket" park.

Last week, on the first stop of the $45 tour, guide Lynn Battaglia, from Pittsburgh, pointed out a housing project. She then mocked the Grand Concourse, modeled after a Parisian boulevard.

"Do you feel like we're on the Champs-Elysées?" she teased a couple from Paris.

As the bus idled across from historic St. Ann's Episcopalian Church, Battaglia launched into a description of the crime, poverty and violence that plagued the South Bronx during the 1970s recession.

As she spoke, a line of two dozen poor people — including one man visibly agitated by the onlookers — waited for handouts from the church pantry.

Click for more from The New York Post. 

Just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, stands a dormitory-style shelter filled with people recently deported from the U.S. and other migrants waiting to cross the border.

The long rows of bunk beds offer immigrants a place to rest on their long journey. But the shelter is no safe haven in a town controlled by the Gulf cartel. Armed men once showed up and took away 15 men, who were probably put to work as gunmen, lookouts or human mules hauling bales of marijuana into the United States.

As Congress takes up immigration reform, lawmakers may have to confront the reality of this place and others like it, where people say the current system of immigration enforcement and deportation produces a constant flow of people north and south that provides the cartel with a vulnerable labor pool and steady source of revenue.

"This vicious circle favors organized crime because the migrant is going to pay" for safe passage, said the Rev. Francisco Gallardo, who oversees immigrant-assistance efforts for the Matamoros Catholic diocese.

If Congress sends more resources to the border, the government will also need to account for shifting patterns in immigrant arrests.

The cartel controls who crosses the border and profits from each immigrant by taxing human smugglers. At the shelter, the cartel threat was so alarming that shelter administrators began encouraging immigrants to go into the streets during the day, thinking they would be harder to round up than at the shelter.

There have been record numbers of deportations in recent years and tens of thousands landed in Tamaulipas already this year, the state that borders Texas from Matamoros to Nuevo Laredo. Arizona is often singled out as the busiest border crossing for immigrants entering the U.S., but more and more migrants are being caught in the southernmost tip of Texas, in the Border Patrol's Rio Grande Valley sector.

Apprehension statistics are imperfect measures because they only capture a fraction of the real flow, but the arrest numbers are definitely shifting.

Arrests in the Tucson, Ariz., sector dropped 3 percent last year, while Rio Grande Valley arrests rose 65 percent. In March alone, the Border Patrol made more than 16,000 immigrant arrests in the Rio Grande Valley sector, a 67 percent increase from the same month last year, according to the agency.

Immigrant deaths are also up. The sector reported last month that about 70 bodies were found in the first six months of the fiscal year, more than twice as many as the previous year.

The makeup of the immigrants apprehended here is changing, too, driven by people flowing out of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. The Border Patrol made 94,532 arrests of non-Mexican immigrants along the Southwest border last year, more than double the year before. And nearly half of those came in the Rio Grande Valley sector.

The Border Patrol is responding by redirecting personnel, including sending most new graduates from its academy to the Rio Grande Valley, according to senior Border Patrol officials.

When immigrants from Central America and Mexico arrive in Matamoros ahead of their trip to America, they are met by smugglers who have to pay the cartel tax for every person they take across the border.

Attempts to cross alone are met with violence. Some immigrants are kidnapped and their families extorted by the organization.

Reported murders in Tamaulipas, the state that borders Texas from Matamoros to Nuevo Laredo, increased more than 250 percent in the past four years, according to the Mexican government. Official statistics are generally thought to undercount the real toll. Soldiers recently killed six gunmen in a clash in Matamoros.

And yet, even with the high-degree of danger for immigrants crossing this part of the border, they keep coming.

Central American migrants continue to use the route up the Gulf Coast side of Mexico and through Tamaulipas because it's the shortest to the U.S., said Rodolfo Casillas Ramirez, a professor at Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales in Mexico City. The smugglers choose the route, and even if immigrants have heard about the violence in Tamaulipas, "they trust that the premium they've paid includes the right of passage," he said.

They continue to leave their home countries for economic reasons. Although the U.S. economy has provided fewer jobs for immigrants during the Great Recession and a long, slow recovery, opportunities south of the border have been even more limited, Casillas said.

That's why the Rev. Alejandro Solalinde, a Roman Catholic priest who founded a shelter for immigrants in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, said the answer is in regional development, not increased border security.

"This situation has grown because ultimately the migrants are merchandise and organized crime profits in volume," he said during a recent visit to Matamoros.

Rep. Filemon Vela, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee whose district includes Brownsville, said the immigration-reform debate has so far left out discussion of the security and economic development in Mexico.

"The incentive for people to cross over illegally from Mexico will never subside until these individuals feel safe and until they are able to feed themselves and their families," Vela said.

At the 150-bed shelter, more than half of the immigrants have just been deported from the U.S., Gallardo said. The others are immigrants preparing to cross. He said shelter workers constantly chase out infiltrators who are paid by smugglers to recruit inside.

At Solalinde's shelter in southern Mexico, threats from organized crime forced them to bring in four state police officers and four federal ones, who have lived at his shelter for the past year as protection. Solalinde now travels with bodyguards after having fled Mexico for a couple of months last year following threats.

One immigrant at the Matamoros shelter was a 48-year-old man who would only give his name as "Gordo" because he feared for his safety. He said he had arrived two days earlier after traveling from Copan, Honduras. Gordo said he had lived in Los Angeles for 10 years but had been in Honduras for the past four. He was trying to make it back to California, where he has a 15-year-old daughter.

Asked about his prospects for successfully crossing the river, he said: "It's difficult, not so much for the Border Patrol" but for the cartels.

Former Navy Secretary Richard J. Danzig, who has served as a bio-warfare adviser to the president, the Pentagon, and the Department of Homeland Security, urged the government to stockpile an anti-anthrax drug while serving as a director for the company that supplied it, according to a report published Sunday.

While there is no evidence any nation or terrorist group has achieved it, Danzig warned for a decade that terrorists could easily engineer a strain of anthrax resistant to common antibiotics that could be a devastating threat to national security, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times (http://lat.ms/12K6Rxh ).

Danzig successfully suggested stockpiling a drug known as raxibacumab, or "raxi," to guard against the potential threat, and biotech startup Human Genome Sciences Inc. has won $334 million in federal contracts since 2006 to supply the drug that now goes for $5,100 a dose.

At the same time, Danzig was a director for the company, earning more than $1 million in company compensation between 2001 and 2012. It was the first product the company sold and the U.S. government remains the only buyer. The Rockville, Md.-based company was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline in August for $3.6 billion.

Several officials who attended seminars led by Danzig said they had no knowledge of his ties to Human Genome Sciences.

"Holy smoke — that was a horrible conflict of interest," said Dr. Philip K. Russell, a physician, retired major-general and biodefense official in the George W. Bush administration.

Federal law bars U.S. officials, including advisers and consultants, from giving counsel on matters in which they have a financial interest.

Danzig said there was no conflict of interest, and that he sought only to inform officials of the danger, not to lobby for the purchase of raxibacumab.

"My view was I'm not going to get involved in selling that," Danzig told the Times in an interview. "But at the same time now, should I not say what I think is right in the government circles with regard to this?"

Danzig added, "I feel that I've acted very properly with regard to this."

Danzig, 68, who served as Navy secretary in the Clinton administration and has since worked as a consultant, began warning about antibiotic-resistant anthrax in the wake of five deaths from anthrax-laced letters that came soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The anthrax in the letters was not resistant to antibiotics, but Danzig was soon warning of the possibility of a deadlier form of the germ, saying his interest in the subject came from "people whose technical skills exceed mine."

The Times investigation found seven papers Danzig had written on bioterrorism since 2001, and in only one did he disclose his ties to Human Genome Sciences.

Two men have been arrested in the killing of a teenage boy over an iPad in Las Vegas, police said Sunday.

Jacob Dismont, 18, and Michael Solid, 21, were booked Saturday into the Clark County jail on charges of open murder, robbery and conspiracy to commit robbery.

According to investigators, Marcos Arenas, 15, was walking down a street with the iPad on Thursday when a passenger got out of a vehicle and tried to steal the device from him.

Dismont is accused of trying to wrest the tablet away and dragging Arenas toward the SUV when the youth wouldn't let go of the device. After Dismont re-entered the vehicle and Solid sped away, the teen was dragged until he fell. The vehicle ran over Arenas and he died at a hospital.

"I think both the public and police department share the same sentiment that this was a senseless act of violence," police spokesman Bill Cassell told The Associated Press.

The suspects succeeded in making off with the device, officers said.

Ivan Arenas said he bought the iPad for his son less than two months ago. The family has never had a lot, the father said, and his son valued everything he had.

"For him to lose his life over an iPad, it's just not fair," Ivan Arenas told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "Never in my life would I imagine that me buying my kid an iPad for his birthday would end up with him getting run over."

Similar thefts of iPads, IPhones and other Apple devices have become so widespread nationwide that the crime has earned the nickname, "Apple picking," Cassell said.

"This is a nationwide phenomenon where thieves are targeting individuals who are carrying them," he said.

Police urge victims of such crimes to always let go of the devices.

The latest high-stakes court hearing for O.J. Simpson in the glitzy capital of big gambles has come to a close with the former football star's defense team feeling confident that their client is closer to getting out of prison.

The last time Simpson was in a Las Vegas courtroom, he was convicted of kidnapping and armed robbery. Now, with a new team of attorneys on his side, he has mounted a cool, methodical case that his former lead lawyer botched the 2008 trial so badly that a new one should be granted.

"He has a very good chance now," said Ozzie Fumo, one of the attorneys who represented Simpson. "I don't think the state was able to counter any of our issues."

Simpson's lawyers presented evidence that showed Miami-based attorney Yale Galanter shared responsibility for the ill-conceived plan for the NFL Hall of Famer and former Hollywood star to take back personal items and mementos from two sports collectible dealers in a Vegas hotel room. They also built a case that he deliberately sabotaged Simpson's chances for acquittal and appeal to protect himself and his own self-interests.

When the weeklong hearing ended Friday there seemed to be little doubt that major mistakes were made when Simpson was sentenced to nine to 33 years in prison on 12 criminal counts. The real question is whether enough was done to meet the high standard needed for District Court Judge Linda Marie Bell to free Simpson from state prison and grant him a new trial.

The final witness she heard from was Galanter, who defended his actions in a tense courtroom standoff with Simpson and his new representatives Friday.

As Simpson's legal team worked to portray Galanter as hungry for the money and fame that could come from an O.J. trial, the lawyer said it was Simpson who agreed to spend more than a half a million dollars on his defense, turned down a plea bargain and decided not to testify.

"I felt a genuine fondness for O.J. and was devastated when he lost," Galanter said.

However, when Simpson testified Wednesday, he recounted his hotel room confrontation with memorabilia dealers, and his interactions with the lawyer he blamed for his conviction.

He said he trusted Galanter based a long professional relationship. "He was my guy," Simpson said.

He said Galanter made no mention of a plea deal and advised him not to testify in his own defense when other lawyers said it would help.

Galanter, when he was on the stand, said Simpson brought "too much baggage" to testify given his 1995 acquittal in the murders of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Following the "trial of the century" Simpson was ordered to pay $33.5 million when he was found liable for the killings in civil court.

Galanter also testified that Simpson confided to him that he had asked two men to bring guns to the hotel room in September 2007, and Simpson "knew he screwed up."

Simpson lawyer Fumo, however, said that claim wasn't credible.

"Galanter tried to throw O.J. under the bus, but it was inconsistent with the entire defense he presented," Fumo said. At trial Galanter had said Simpson never ordered guns to be carried and didn't see firearms in the room.

Simpson's lawyers have a high legal burden to prove their case under a writ of habeas corpus, which relies on showing not only that his lawyer's work was ineffective but that if he had acted differently it would have changed the outcome.

But there is another key issue — conflict of interest.

"An actual conflict is a violation of the right to counsel," said Jennifer Carr, a criminal law professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas."

If Simpson "can succeed in showing that there has been an actual conflict, he need not show that that conflict caused the verdict. Merely showing the conflict is sufficient to show his right to counsel was violated," Carr said.

Simpson's testimony was pivotal on this point. Even with his hair gray and thinning, and his finely chiseled features lost under the burden of years and weight, the 65-year-old Simpson was an impressive witness.

He was still O.J. Simpson, a man used to the spotlight. He shuffled to the witness stand in shackles but spoke with confidence. He told of dining with Galanter the night before the hotel caper and telling him the plan.

"I talked to Yale about it two or three times," Simpson said. "The overall advice he was giving was, 'You have a right to get your stuff.'"

Galanter told a different story.

"He said he and some of his boys might be doing a sting in the morning," said Galanter.

He added that Simpson said, "he finally had a lead on some personal pictures and memorabilia that was stolen from him years earlier. I said, 'O.J., you've got to call the police.'"

As it turned out, someone called the police but it wasn't Simpson. The memorabilia dealers claimed they were robbed at gunpoint. Simpson was arrested.

"It obviously didn't go the way I hoped it would," Simpson said with a touch of irony.

Las Vegas lawyers Gabriel Grasso and Malcolm LaVergne, who also participated in the case, testified that Galanter had a conflict because he could have been called as a witness. There was a trail of phone calls between Simpson and Galanter before and after the Sept. 13, 2007 confrontation.

Other points raised by Simpson's team included Galanter's failure to hire investigators or experts and never interviewing witnesses against Simpson because, "We already knew a lot about them."

A key criticism was Galanter's refusal to hire experts to analyze audio recordings from the hotel incident, telling a colleague they were "operating on a shoestring" while demanding more money from Simpson's business manager. He also refused to challenge admissibility of the tapes, insisting they would help Simpson.

Jurors said they convicted Simpson solely on the basis of the tapes because they found the witnesses not credible.

When the hearing ended, the judge said would issue a written ruling but did not set a date.

If Simpson succeeds in getting his conviction thrown out, prosecutors will have to either retry him or offer a plea bargain. It is also possible Simpson could be freed with credit for time served. If he loses, he will be sent back to prison and will probably appeal to a higher court.

He will be 70 before he is eligible for parole.

A police officer who was conducting a DUI stop on a vehicle in Phoenix died after another vehicle struck him and then fled the scene.

Authorities said late Sunday afternoon that police in Surprise located the SUV that struck 29-year-old Officer Daryl Raetz around 3:30 a.m. Phoenix police Sgt. Tommy Thompson said investigators are working to identify the driver.

The hit-and-run collision happened as Raetz was standing in the roadway and was wrapping up the DUI stop.

Raetz later died at a hospital.

Raetz was an Iraq war veteran and worked as a Phoenix police officer for six years. He is survived by a wife and young daughter.

Phoenix officials also are mourning a 23-year-old firefighter who was critically injured Saturday while fighting a mulch fire and died Sunday morning.