Daredevil Steve Fossett, whose millions helped him break aviation barriers, declared dead

Millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, who risked his life seeking to set records in high-tech balloons, gliders and jets, has been declared dead, five months after he vanished while flying in a small plane.

The self-made business tycoon, who in 2002 became the first person to circle the world solo in a balloon, was last seen Sept. 3 after taking off in a single-engine plane from an airstrip near Yerington, Nevada, heading toward Bishop, California. He was 63.

His wife, Peggy V. Fossett, had him declared legally dead in Cook County Circuit Court as a step toward resolving the legal status of his estate. Judge Jeffrey Malak heard testimony Friday from Peggy Fossett, a family friend and a search-and-rescue expert before deciding there was sufficient evidence to declare him dead.

While flight records brought him his greatest fame, Fossett, who was paunchy for most of his life, also climbed some of the world's best-known peaks, including the Matterhorn in Switzerland and Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. (Everest did elude him.) With top notch endurance and concentration, he swam the English Channel and completed the Boston Marathon, the Ironman Triathlon, the Iditarod dog sled race, and, as part of a team, the 24 Hours of Le Mans car race.

"Steve's lived his life to the full, and he hasn't wasted a minute of his life," Fossett's rival-turned-comrade, British billionaire Sir Richard Branson, had said as the search went on. "Everything he's done, he's taken a calculated risk with."

But Fossett was on a pleasure flight when he vanished and not looking for a dry lake bed to use as a surface on which to set the world land speed record, as was initially reported, according to his wife's petition.

Dozens of planes and helicopters spent more than a month searching the rugged western Nevada mountains before the effort was called off as winter approached.

The search area covered 20,000 square miles (52,000 square kilometers), and according to the Reno Gazette-Journal, about 15 to 20 private planes have vanished in the area since 1950. In 2005, wreckage was found in Kings Canyon National Park from a plane that went down during World War II.

A Stanford University graduate with a master's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Fossett went to Chicago to work in investments and founded his own firm, Marathon Securities. The fortune he amassed allowed him to take his childhood fascination with exploration to extremes _ he once said he drew up a list of feats he wanted to accomplish and started checking them off.

"Business is much easier for me," he told The Washington Post in a 1987 interview. "Sports is often very humiliating, because there are so many better athletes in these events. I would like to be the best in everything, but that's not possible. I risk humiliation because I have a genuine interest in participating."

In 2004, Fossett and his crew broke the round-the-world sailing record by six days. He even set world records for cross-country skis, according to his Web site.

But he was best known for his aerial exploits, first in ballooning, more recently in airplanes.

Beginning in the 1980s, teams led by Fossett, Branson and others used steadily improving technology to try to best each other and their predecessors in a series of ever-longer balloon flights. In January 1997 alone, there were three failed attempts, including a solo attempt by Fossett and a try by a crew led by Branson, the flashy founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways.

In 2002, after years of trying, Fossett became the first person to fly nonstop around the world alone in a balloon, setting the record on his sixth attempt. It took him two weeks to float 19,428.6 miles (31,266 kilometers) around the Southern Hemisphere.

Three years later, in March 2005, he was first to fly a plane solo around the world without stopping or refueling, covering 23,000 miles (37,000 kilometers) in 67 hours in the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer jet.

Solo flights represent the ultimate challenge, he told The Associated Press when the GlobalFlyer was introduced in 2004.

"They become more of an endurance endeavor, and become focused on the ability and the performance of a single person," he said.

Fossett made nearly as many headlines for his narrow escapes as he did for his successes. In 1998, during one of his solo around-the-world attempts, his balloon ripped during a storm, sending him plunging 29,000 feet (8,800 meters) into the Coral Sea. Falling at about 2,500 feet (760 meters) per minute, Fossett blacked out.

He said his next memory was "waking up with the capsule upside down, half full of water and on fire."

He was fished out by the crew of a schooner and was still on the ship when Branson called to invite him on another round-the-world attempt later that year, this time as part of a team. It ended in another dramatic rescue.

Branson, Fossett and Swedish balloonist Per Lindstrand made it more than halfway before poor wind conditions forced them to ditch in the shark-infested waters off Honolulu on Christmas Day 1998. The U.S. Coast Guard spent about $130,000 sending planes, helicopters and a boat to rescue the trio.

Fossett pressed on because of his thirst for accomplishments, and for all his close calls, those who knew him well said he wasn't reckless. Fossett once said the most dangerous thing he ever did was fall off his bicycle in Chicago without a helmet on.

"I'm doing these things for personal accomplishment, not the thrills," he told Stanford's alumni magazine in 1997, after his second around-the-world balloon attempt ended in India. "I don't do these things because I have a death wish."

Many of Fossett's recent adventures were financed with help from Branson, who is now teaming with renowned aerospace designer Burt Rutan to begin sending paying civilians into space within a few years.

As high as he flew, Fossett had no desire to take a ride into space.

"I really wouldn't want to go unless I get to be the pilot," Fossett told the AP in 2007. "I'm not a passenger type of person."

Born in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1944, Fossett grew up in Garden Grove, California, and climbed his first mountain as a 12-year-old Boy Scout and got his pilot's license in college.

On a fraternity dare in 1965, his final year at Stanford, he swam to Alcatraz and tried to hang a "Beat Cal" banner _ referring to a rival college _ on the wall of the island prison, which had closed two years earlier.

"I got it up there, briefly," he told the alumni magazine. "Then a security guard pushed me offshore. Luckily, my frat brothers were following behind me in a fishing boat with a keg of beer."

Fossett was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in July. He told a crowd gathered at the Dayton Convention Center in Ohio that he would continue flying and planned to go to Argentina later in the year in an effort to break a glider record.

"I imagine that when I'm 80 years old and sitting in a wheelchair that I might do something like take a remote control airplane and try and flight it around the world," he told CNN last year. "I plan to be setting and breaking records indefinitely."

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On the Net:

http://www.stevefossett.com/

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Water for $42 per bottle. What is wrong with people!?

I've never understood people's fuss over the water they drink when they go to hotels, let alone their willingness to pay for what is otherwise free in most western countries. When I'm out in cities where you can drink tap water, that's what I ask for; when I have to buy mineral water, I ask for the cheapest.

Water is water is water. Having said that, I agree that sometimes the taste is distinct. For example, here in Madrid, mineral water Bezoya and Aquafina taste strange to me; I will drink them if I have to, but I avoid buying those brands -- I don't like water that tastes like something (it's not supposed to taste like anything!), but otherwise I'm not fussed. The whole "tap water isn't good for you" conundrum doesn't phase me in any way.

It totally ruffles my feathers when I go to a posh hotel and people I go with actually have a preference of mineral water, so I would go absolutely bonkers if I went to Claridge's Luxury Hotel in London and was given a water menu with 30 international brands to choose from. 30!

According to a recent article in the BBC: For the most refined palette there is fine artesian water from Japan at $30 a bottle and $40 a bottle, or Mahaolo from Hawaii, described on the menu as "rare deep sea water" that is "very old." And Just Born Spring Drops from India is apparently "light and not aggressive," at $42 per bottle.

WHAT!? THAT'S MORE EXPENSIVE THAN A GOOD BOTTLE OF WINE! And this stuff sells?

"We wouldn't do this if there was a demand for it," says the hotel's public relations manager. Apparently guests not only ask for berg or glacial water, but water with no sodium content or water fortified with calcium and magnesium; they even specify the region from where they want the water! "People are so very, very careful about what they eat these days that it's moved into water."

Have I completely lost perspective here or do you find this as absurd as I do?

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Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that, due to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq and undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq and to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, it is in the interests of the United States to take additional steps with respect to the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 of May 22, 2003, and expanded in Executive Order 13315 of August 28, 2003, and relied upon for additional steps taken in Executive Order 13350 of July 29, 2004, and Executive Order 13364 of November 29, 2004. I hereby order:

Section 1. (a) Except to the extent provided in section 203(b)(1), (3), and (4) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(1), (3), and (4)), or in regulations, orders, directives, or licenses that may be issued pursuant to this order, and notwithstanding any contract entered into or any license or permit granted prior to the date of this order, all property and interests in property of the following persons, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons, are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense,

(i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:

(A) threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq; or

(B) undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people;

(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or

(iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.

(b) The prohibitions in subsection (a) of this section include, but are not limited to, (i) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order, and (ii) the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.

Sec. 2. (a) Any transaction by a United States person or within the United States that evades or avoids, has the purpose of evading or avoiding, or attempts to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.

(b) Any conspiracy formed to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.

Sec. 3. For purposes of this order:

(a) the term "person" means an individual or entity;

(b) the term "entity" means a partnership, association, trust, joint venture, corporation, group, subgroup, or other organization; and

(c) the term "United States person" means any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person in the United States.

Sec. 4. I hereby determine that the making of donations of the type specified in section 203(b)(2) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(2)) by, to, or for the benefit of, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order would seriously impair my ability to deal with the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, and I hereby prohibit such donations as provided by section 1 of this order.

Sec. 5. For those persons whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order who might have a constitutional presence in the United States, I find that, because of the ability to transfer funds or other assets instantaneously, prior notice to such persons of measures to be taken pursuant to this order would render these measures ineffectual. I therefore determine that for these measures to be effective in addressing the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1(a) of this order.

Sec. 6. The Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, is hereby authorized to take such actions, including the promulgation of rules and regulations, and to employ all powers granted to the President by IEEPA as may be necessary to carry out the purposes of this order. The Secretary of the Treasury may redelegate any of these functions to other officers and agencies of the United States Government, consistent with applicable law. All agencies of the United States Government are hereby directed to take all appropriate measures within their authority to carry out the provisions of this order and, where appropriate, to advise the Secretary of the Treasury in a timely manner of the measures taken.

Sec. 7. Nothing in this order is intended to affect the continued effectiveness of any rules, regulations, orders, licenses, or other forms of administrative action issued, taken, or continued in effect heretofore or hereafter under 31 C.F.R. chapter V, except as expressly terminated, modified, or suspended by or pursuant to this order.

Sec. 8. This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right, benefit, or privilege, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, instrumentalities, or entities, its officers or employees, or any other person.

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