'Dallas' returns with J.R. Ewing's final schemes

NEW YORK (AP) — J.R. Ewing wouldn't hesitate to cheat his fellow man. He also famously cheated death.

In the second-season finale of "Dallas" back in 1980, he was shot by an unknown assailant in his office and left for dead. But he recovered nicely, and the cliffhanger question that gripped the nation (Who shot J.R.?) was answered that November in an episode seen by 80 million viewers.

This time, J.R. won't get off so easy. During the second season of TNT's rebooted "Dallas," J.R. cashes in his chips and goes to his reward ... wherever that may be.

Meanwhile, viewers, however braced they are for J.R.'s demise, will have to reckon with the loss of arguably TV's greatest villain, and bid farewell to the actor who portrayed him so indelibly and also cheated death for years. Larry Hagman, who died of cancer at 81 the day after Thanksgiving, was diagnosed in 1992 with cirrhosis of the liver from a life of heavy drinking and, three years later, when a malignant tumor was discovered on his liver, successfully underwent a transplant.

This double loss would be a burden for any show to bear. "Dallas," returning at 9 p.m. EST Monday, comes fully loaded.

"I think viewers want closure," said Linda Gray, who plays J.R.'s long-suffering ex-wife, Sue Ellen. "They want to mourn Larry Hagman and J.R. Ewing. They want to know they can grieve the fact he won't be around."

But all that comes later. With its two-hour season premiere, "Dallas" carries on in familiar fashion, with the expected two-timing, squabbles, a kidnapping revealed, a stolen identity and assorted other mischief.

And never fear: J.R., though visibly frail, continues his reign as a scheming oilman and rascally Ewing patriarch.

"I came over to deliver some muffins to the pretty little secretaries," he announces on making an unannounced visit to Ewing Energies headquarters before he laments, "Who could have guessed so many would turn out to be MEN? Where's the sport in THAT?"

In another scene, J.R. shares sly counsel with his son, John Ross, on double-crossing other members of the family: "Love, hate, jealousy: Mix 'em up and they make a mean martini. And when we take over Ewing Energies, you'll slake your thirst — with a twist!"

The new "Dallas," which debuted last June, is stocked with a troupe of young regulars (including Josh Henderson, who plays John Ross), as well as veterans of the original CBS series, notably Gray and Patrick Duffy as J.R.'s ever-upright brother, Bobby. J.R. will appear in a minimum of five or as many as seven of the season's episodes before he meets his fate.

After that, can "Dallas" survive the dual deaths of its central character and legendary star?

"Larry being gone doesn't eliminate the influence of the character of J.R.," Duffy pointed out. Who knows what land mines J.R. will have left behind? "We can find business deals he did or schemes he started that now are coming home to roost, and they can turn up for years to come."

"Whatever will happen on the show, we will be talking about J.R. Ewing and he will have done things that have a ripple effect," Gray agreed. "He will always be there."

"There's a lot of driving forces on the show — not just J.R.," added "Dallas" executive producer Cynthia Cidre, who, interviewed by phone a couple of weeks ago, was parked outside a posh Dallas social club where the wake for J.R. was about to be filmed.

She said this season she tried to use Hagman sparingly.

"He was the most delightful man and a total professional," she said, "but he wasn't well and we didn't want to overtax him."

Now, with his passing, "we want to give J.R., and Larry, the proper send-off."

But she insisted there had been no contingency plan for how to plot J.R.'s demise in the event Hagman died in mid-season.

"We didn't have a Plan B, on purpose," said Cidre. "We just knew that we had Larry, so let's use him, let's enjoy him, and if something happens, we'll scramble and fix it. I had great faith in the writers' room. We knew the day might come and what we would do then: Figure it out."

That day came in late November when she got a call from Duffy. "He told me, 'Larry's in the hospital and it isn't good. He's saying goodbye.' In 24 hours we had fixed one of the scripts. We had two more scripts that had to be adjusted, and then this episode we're shooting now, the Goodbye Episode."

Roughly 85 percent of the season's story line remains intact, she said, supplemented by the death of J.R. and the mystery surrounding it: Who Killed J.R.?

"The mystery has all the machinations of a great J.R. business deal, as opposed to a whodunit," said Duffy. "Cynthia constructed a really interesting plot, of which I know Bobby's portion" — including whodunit — "but I don't know other stuff."

"We all know, up to a point," Gray said. "But they've got secret pages that we've not seen."

"I hope that we have come up with something really wonderful and enticing," said Cidre, "and by the time you're done watching episode 208, which I call the Funeral Episode, I hope you're saying, 'Omigod, I didn't see that coming, and I can't wait to watch the rest of the season.'"

The mystery, she said, will continue through episode 15, "with a giant, delightful, delicious climax in the season finale."

To get there, shooting continues until April on the Dallas set, where, even two months after Hagman's passing, "I'm lonely because my best friend isn't there to play with," Duffy said. "I was with him from 1978 until his final hours in the hospital. But I have no regrets. Every day I think of him and smile."

"I keep expecting him to walk in the door," Gray said. "He's so missed. But his presence is everywhere!"

___

Online:

http://www.tntdrama.com

___

Frazier Moore is a national television columnist for The Associated Press. He can be reached at fmoore(at)ap.org and at http://www.twitter.com/tvfrazier

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The New Old Age Blog: Time to Recognize Mild Cognitive Disorder?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published and periodically updated by the American Psychiatric Association, is one of those documents few laypeople ever read, but many of us are affected by.

It can make it easier or harder to get an insurance company or Medicare to cover treatments, for example. It factors into a variety of legal and governmental decisions.

And on a personal basis, a psychiatric diagnosis may be welcome (having a name and a treatment plan for what’s bothering us can be comforting) or not (are we really suffering from a mental disorder if we seem depressed after a family member dies?).

That last question refers to a change in the new DSM5, to be published in May, that has generated considerable controversy and that I discussed in an earlier post: the removal of the “bereavement exclusion,” once part of the diagnosis of major depressive disorder.

Another element of the revised D.S.M. could also affect readers: It will include something called mild neurocognitive disorder. The task force revising the manual wanted to align psychiatry with the rest of medicine, which has already begun to distinguish between levels of impairment, said its chairman, Dr. David J. Kupfer, a University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist.

True enough, as we have reported before. Neurologists call it mild cognitive impairment, a stage where cognitive decline becomes noticeable enough to affect daily functioning, yet people can still live independently and have not progressed to dementia.

In fact, a large proportion of people with mild cognitive problems never will develop dementia — but doctors and researchers cannot yet determine who will and who won’t. Biomarkers that could identify the biological brain changes that presage dementia are still years away.

Will it be helpful, then, for health professionals using the DSM5 — most of them not psychiatrists, but primary care doctors — to begin diagnosing mild neurocognitive disorder? Particularly as there is no treatment that can reverse it or reliably slow its progression, if it would progress?

Dr. Ronald Petersen, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and a member of the working group that developed the new DSM5 criteria, said he thought the newly recognized disorder would be useful. “The predementia phase is becoming increasingly important,” he told me in an interview.

Counseling could help people compensate for the memory loss and other deficits they are experiencing, for example. With a D.S.M.-recognized diagnosis, those approaches are more likely to be covered by insurers.

Besides, “one argument against Alzheimer’s therapies is that we wait too late, when there’s too much damage to the central nervous system to repair,” Dr. Petersen said, referring to several recent disappointing drug trials. In the future, with earlier diagnoses, “you may be able to intervene, stop the process and forestall the dementia.”

But as we have seen with screening tests for other diseases, early detection does not always lead to better health or longer lives. It can, however, lead to unnecessary treatments and procedures involving risks of their own. Could that happen with mild neurocognitive disorder?

“It will lead to wild overdiagnosis,” predicted Allen Frances, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Duke and the chairman of the task force that developed the previous D.S.M. edition. Indeed, about a quarter of people initially diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment are later determined to be normal, a prominent researcher told my colleague Judith Graham last year.

“People will get unnecessary tests and start getting weird treatments that have no proven efficacy,” said Dr. Frances, who has criticized a number of DSM5 changes. “They’re going to worry like crazy about being demented.”

Dr. Petersen agreed that it was a legitimate concern, but “by and large, we’re becoming better at distinguishing between the normal cognitive effects of aging and disease.” (The American Psychiatric Association will publish a specialized D.S.M. for primary care physicians, Dr. Kupfer pointed out, to help guide them through diagnoses.)

It is hard for patients and families to know how to react when experts disagree. But keep in mind that contemporary health care aims for what is called shared decision-making. That means patients and professionals discuss options and weigh the risks and benefits of treatments and procedures, their likely outcomes, patients’ preferences, and come to agreement on how to proceed. This essay in the New England Journal of Medicine calls shared decision-making “the pinnacle of patient-centered care.”

So when Dr. Frances refers to the DSM5 as “a guide, not a bible,” and urges skepticism about some of its diagnoses, he is advocating an approach that patients and families should probably bring to any medical decision.

Seeking further information, asking questions, assessing options — those are reasonable responses if, a few weeks after a loved one’s death, a doctor says you may have major depression. Or if she thinks your memory loss could mean mild neurocognitive disorder.

“The shorter the evaluation, the less the person knows you, the less he or she can explain and justify the diagnosis, the more tests and treatments that will result, the more a person should be cautious and get a second opinion,” Dr. Frances said.

Whatever the DSM5 says, it’s hard to argue with that.

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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Stocks Push Higher

Stock climbed in New York on Friday, buoyed by rosy earnings from Procter & Gamble amid a backdrop of sturdy corporate results.

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index climbed 0.3 percent in early trading. The S.&P. 500 was poised for an eighth day of gains, its longest winning streak in eight years. The Dow Jones industrial average added 0.2 percent and the Nasdaq rose 0.3 percent.

The equity market was also boosted by agreement in Washington to extend the government’s borrowing power through mid-May, encouraging signs of recovery in the global economy, solid corporate earnings, and seasonal inflows into stocks.

Those factors helped the S.&P. 500 rally for a seventh day on Thursday to a five-year peak. Still, the index struggled to climb convincingly above 1,500, a level it surpassed briefly Thursday for the first time since December 2007.

“We are seeing a very broad-based rally, and the ingredients are still in place” for gains to continue, said Steve Goldman, principal at Goldman Management in Short Hills, N.J. “This is the lift-off phase and it’s still significant.”

Procter & Gamble, the world’s top household products maker, said quarterly profit soared past expectations and raised its sales and earnings outlook for the fiscal year. Shares were up 2.1 percent.

Pointing to a rotation out of bonds, 30-year Treasury bonds traded more than a point lower in price on Friday, with yields touching session highs at 3.10 percent.

“You have had more confidence from fund managers to provide more allocations to equity markets,” which looked more attractive than bonds or cash, said Rick Meckler, president of investment firm LibertyView Capital Management.

Recent company earnings have been encouraging. Thomson Reuters data through early Thursday showed that of the 133 S.&P. 500 companies that have reported earnings so far, 66.9 percent exceeded expectations, more than the 65 percent average over the past four quarters.

German business morale improved for a third consecutive month in January to its highest in more than half a year, but Britain’s economy shrank 0.3 percent at the end of 2012, pushing it perilously close to slipping into recession for a third time since 2008.

European stock markets were up moderately. The DAX in Germany gained 1.3 percent and the CAC 40 in France added 0.6 percent.

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Democratic Senators Face Gun Owners Roused by Talk of New Laws

BECKLEY, W.Va. — Talk of stricter gun control has stirred up a lot of unease here, a place where hunters vie for top prize (a 26-inch LED television) in the Big Buck Photo Contest, and ads for a gun-simulator game ask, “Feel like shooting something today?”

Ryan Stone for The New York Times

Senator Joe Manchin III

Ryan Stone for The New York Times

Businessmen and community leaders in Beckley, W.Va., met with Senator Joe Manchin III last week to discuss gun control.

But before Senator Joe Manchin III invited a group of 15 businessmen and community leaders to lunch last week to discuss the topic, he had only a vague idea of how anxious many of his supporters were.

“How many of you all believe that there is a movement to take away the Second Amendment?” he asked.

About half the hands in the room went up.

Despite his best attempts to reassure them — “I see no movement, no talk, no bills, no nothing” — they remained skeptical. “We give up our rights one piece at a time,” a banker named Charlie Houck told the senator.

If there is a path to new gun laws, it has to come through West Virginia and a dozen other states with Democratic senators like Mr. Manchin who are confronting galvanized constituencies that view any effort to tighten gun laws as an infringement.

As Congress considers what, if any, laws to change, Mr. Manchin has become a barometer among his colleagues, testing just how far they might be able to go without angering voters.

On Thursday a group of Democratic senators led by Dianne Feinstein of California plans to introduce a bill that would outlaw more than 100 different assault weapons, setting up what promises to be a fraught and divisive debate over gun control in Congress in the coming weeks. But a number of centrist lawmakers like Mr. Manchin have already thrown the measure’s fate into question, saying that all they are willing to support for now is a stronger background check system.

As a hunter with an A rating from the National Rifle Association, Mr. Manchin gave advocates for new weapons laws reason for optimism after he said last month that gun firepower and magazine capacity might need to be limited.

But now, Mr. Manchin, who affirmed his support for gun rights by running a campaign commercial in 2010 showing him firing a rifle into an environmental bill, says he is not so sure. One of his local offices has been picketed, and even some of his most thoughtful supporters are cautioning him that stronger background checks are about all the gun control they can stomach. 

And on the afternoon the 15 residents met with Mr. Manchin in the conference room of a local arts center, they told him that going after guns and ammunition capacity would be much like banning box cutters after the Sept. 11 attacks, or limiting whiskey and six-pack sales to cure alcoholism.

“It takes about a second and a half to change a clip,” said Frank Jezioro, a former special agent with the Office of Naval Intelligence and now director of the state Division of Natural Resources.

Mr. Jezioro likened gunmen in mass shootings to suicide bombers: they will always find a way. “A guy can walk through this door right here with your Beretta five-shot automatic, and cut the barrel off at 16 inches, and put five double-ought buckshots in there and kill everybody in here in a matter of seconds,” he said. “And you don’t have to aim it.”

As it happened, there were at least two guns in the room. One was on the hip of a Beckley police detective who was invited to the lunch, the other at the side of the West Virginia state trooper who stood guard at the door.

Others at the lunch said that laws did little to help even the most violent societies. “Mexico, for instance, has got some of the strictest gun control laws in North America,” said Rick Johnson, the owner of a river expedition company. “They’ll put you in jail for a bullet in Mexico. And look how well it’s worked.”

“I can take my A.R.,” Mr. Johnson said, referring to his assault rifle, “load it, put one in the chamber and throw it up on this table, and the only way it’s going to hurt anybody is if I miss and hit someone in the head. The gun doesn’t hurt anybody. It’s the person pulling the trigger.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 24, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a New Hampshire senator who said she had been hearing from all corners of the state on the gun issue. She is Jeanne Shaheen, not Jean.

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Go forth and Tweet! Pope sees web networks as “portals of truth”

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Benedict urged Catholics on Thursday to use social networks like Twitter and Facebook to win converts, as he launched his own smartphone app streaming live footage of his speeches.

The websites – often associated with endless postings of idle gossip and baby photos – could be used as “portals of truth and faith” in an increasingly secular age, the pontiff said in his 2013 World Communications Day message.

“Unless the Good News is made known also in the digital world, it may be absent in the experience of many people,” the 85-year old Pope said in the a letter published on the Vatican‘s website.

The Holy See has become an increasingly prolific user of social media since it launched its ‘new evangelization’ of the developed world, where some congregations have fallen in the wake of growing secularization and damage to the Church’s reputation from a series of sex abuse scandals.

The Pope himself reaches around 2.5 million followers through eight Twitter accounts, including one in Latin.

Belying his traditionalist reputation, the Pope praised connections made online which he said could blossom into true friendships. Online life was not a purely virtual world but “increasingly becoming part of the very fabric of society,” he said.

Social networks were also a practical tool that Catholics could use to organize prayer events, the pope suggested. But he called for reasoned debate and respectful dialogue with those with different beliefs, and cautioned against a tendency towards “heated and divisive voices” and “sensationalism”.

The websites were creating a new “agora”, he added, referring to the gathering spaces that were the centers of public life in ancient Greek cities.

The speech coincided with the launch of ‘The Pope App’, a downloadable program that streams live footage of the pontiff’s speaking events and Vatican news onto smartphones.

Pope Benedict‘s embrace of new media responds to the Church’s concern that it is invisible on the internet.

The Vatican commissioned a study of internet use and religion prior to the pope’s Twitter debut, which found the majority of U.S. Catholics surveyed were unaware of any significant Church presence online.

(Reporting by Naomi O’Leary; editing by Andrew Heavens)

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Paris Opera Ballet names Millepied of 'Black Swan'

PARIS (AP) — Benjamin Millepied, the "Black Swan" choreographer who helped transform Natalie Portman into an obsessed, paranoid ballerina for the film and later married the actress, was named director of the Paris Opera Ballet on Thursday.

Millepied, 35, is a former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet who left in 2011 to create his own dance company in Los Angeles, L.A. Dance Project. He'll start at the Paris company in October 2014, when the current dance director, Brigitte Lefevre, retires.

Millepied and Portman, who have a son, met during the making of "Black Swan," Darren Aronofsky's psychological thriller that stars Portman as a ballet dancer.

Portman won the best actress Academy Award or her performance in the movie.

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Mind: Avoiding Cold Feet Down the Aisle

His charisma was big enough to make his bad habits seem small, more like quirks than flaws. The cigarettes on his breath; the extra weight around the middle; the indifference to clothing and appearances — surely these were minor things, correctable in time.

In the months leading up to the wedding, in 1988, even the fact that he’d been living with his mother at age 38 seemed somehow explainable, if not ideal.

“How about that for a red flag?” said Jincey Huck, a state court employee in St. Louis, of her first husband, who has since died. “Deep down I knew it was a mistake, but I wanted to be married, I wanted kids, all that. I had cold feet the entire time,” said Ms. Huck, now 51.

Psychologists have studied decision-making for more than a century, trying to tease apart how biases, emotion and personality affect big choices and small ones. They have studied people playing investment games. They have taken brain images during hypothetical moral decisions. They have compared the accuracy of snap judgments to long deliberation, trying to gauge the value of subconscious instincts.

But it’s a lot harder to simulate in a laboratory the sort of big life decisions that are risky and hard to reverse: Whether to move across the country. Whether to take a new job, or buy a new house, even switch from PC to Mac. And, perhaps biggest of all: whether to walk down the aisle or split up.

“Virtually every big, real-life decision requires the decision-maker to resolve 10 fundamental questions, or what I call cardinal issues,” said J. Frank Yates, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Michigan’s business school. People only feel real confidence, he said, when they begin to address them all, including trade-offs and timing.

Most people, of course, aren’t experts in decision science. They decide based on their own beliefs, whims and their gut.

So how instructive are gut feelings — particularly cold feet — when there are so many moving parts and the stakes are so high? A study published in the current issue of The Journal of Family Psychology provides an answer: plenty instructive, at least when it comes to marriage.

“Having doubts before marriage is not only common, it predicted a higher divorce rate for women and more dissatisfaction in marriages for men and women,” compared with newlyweds with no doubts, said Justin A. Lavner, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The study, with co-authors Benjamin R. Karney and Thomas N. Bradbury of U.C.L.A., is the first to examine premarital cold feet in a group of couples over time.

That gut-level doubt can portend coming trouble seems true by definition, self-evident. Yet most big decisions prompt some nervous hesitation, and research suggests that it is the nature and source of those doubts that matter, not their mere presence. Many of the psychological dynamics at play in premarital decision-making are similar to those that build around any big decision.

“The important thing to note is that most people who get divorced do not have major doubts going in” to the marriage initially, even if cold feet may increase the odds, said Arthur Aron, a psychologist at Stony Brook University. “At the same time there are factors — like disagreements with the other person’s parents — that may seem minor but become more important later, for instance, when you have kids.”

Several distractions can make these traps hard to appreciate. One is external pressure created by a wedding. “People get caught up in it and dismiss cold feet as, ‘Oh, that’s only the jitters,’ ” said Anne Milford, co-author with Jennifer Gauvain of “How Not to Marry the Wrong Guy” (Random House 2010), who interviewed about 200 women who had had strong doubts at the altar.

“Women most often said they knew they were making a mistake but did it anyway, often because they had no one who’d listen to them,” Ms. Milford said.

Two other elements that blur the decision are internal, less conscious, and can work against one another.

Both are types of idealization. In a series of studies, Sandra Murray of the State University at Buffalo and others have shown that new lovers have a strong tendency to idealize their partner, in the way that Ms. Huck did: Her friends are kind of sweet, when sober. He gets depressed mostly because he’s so sensitive.

Doubts don’t evaporate; they’re suppressed, only to return later.

The other is an expectation many have, of exquisite happiness. “People feel that they have to find the ideal, perfect Mr. or Ms. Right, who is their soul mate, with whom they will feel passionate love forever, and who will make them happy forever,” said Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, and author of “The Myths of Happiness” (Penguin, 2013).

She added: “Of course, both research and anecdotal evidence shows that this is not what typically occurs” and this type of person can easily become disappointed.

Being mindful of both distortions — and finding someone outside the wedding frenzy to listen — is one way to check whether those cold feet are ominous.

Another, Dr. Yates said, is to sit down and write about the doubts. “If a person writes about a decision problem, as opposed to simply thinking about it, she develops greater confidence in the correctness of the decision she eventually reaches,” he said in an e-mail. And that confidence is well placed, his studies have suggested.

“I really did ignore everything; I let it all slide,” said Ms. Huck, who is now happily remarried. “The worst part was afterward, knowing I’d done something I knew at the time was a mistake.”

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Markets Mixed in Early Trading

Wall Street markets opened mixed on Thursday as Apple slid more than 10 percent following a revenue miss, and analysts said equities may be due for a pullback after a six-day rally.

Apple missed Wall Street’s revenue forecast for a third consecutive quarter after iPhone sales came in below expectations, fanning fears that its dominance of consumer electronics was slipping. The shares began falling in premarket trading, and were down 11 percent, to $456.60, in early trading.

Over all, the Standard & Poor’s 500-share index was flat, the Dow Jones industrial average gained 0.2 percent, while the Nasdaq was 0.6 percent lower.

However, some positive economic news looked set to put a floor under stock prices. Growth in Chinese manufacturing accelerated to a two-year high this month and a buoyant Germany took the euro zone economy a step closer to recovery, business surveys showed on Thursday.

In the United States, the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly fell to its lowest since the early days of the 2007-9 recession, a hopeful sign for the sluggish labor market.

With signs the economy is improving, some investors are lauding the strength of the stock market rather than calling an end to the rally.

“The market has disconnected itself with Apple,” said Jack de Gan, chief investment officer at Harbor Advisory Corp in Portsmouth, N.H. “I think it shows great strength in the overall S.&P.”

The S.&P. 500 rose for a sixth day on Wednesday following stronger-than-expected results from I.B.M. and Google. But Apple could now halt that rally, which had lifted stocks to five-year highs.

In Europe, shares were mostly higher. The FTSE in London was 0.6 percent higher, while the DAX in Germany gained 0.2 percent in afternoon trading.

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The Lede Blog: Live Updates: Clinton Testifies on Benghazi Attacks

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Lede is following Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on the American Consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Mrs. Clinton had been scheduled to testify before Congress last month, but an illness, a concussion and a blood clot near her brain forced her to postpone her appearance.

As our colleagues Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt reported, four State Department officials were removed from their posts on last month after an independent panel criticized the “grossly inadequate” security at a diplomatic compound in Benghazi.

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Te'o tells Couric he briefly lied about girlfriend

NEW YORK (AP) — Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o has told Katie Couric that he briefly lied about his online girlfriend after discovering she didn't exist, while maintaining that he had no part in creating the hoax.

Pressed by Couric to admit that he was in on the deception, Te'o said he believed that his girlfriend Lennay Kekua had died of cancer and didn't lie about it until December.

"Katie, put yourself in my situation. I, my whole world told me that she died on Sept. 12. Everybody knew that. This girl, who I committed myself to, died on Sept. 12," Te'o said in an interview to air Thursday on Couric's syndicated talk show. A segment of the interview with Te'o and his parents was broadcast Wednesday on "Good Morning America."

The Heisman Trophy runner-up said he only learned of the hoax when he received a phone call in December from a woman saying she was Kekua.

"Now I get a phone call on Dec. 6, saying that she's alive and then I'm going be put on national TV two days later. And to ask me about the same question. You know, what would you do?" Te'o said.

An Associated Press review of news coverage found that the Heisman Trophy runner-up talked about his doomed love in a Web interview on Dec. 8 and again in a newspaper interview published Dec. 10.

Te'o's father defended his son when Couric pointed out that many people don't believe the Irish star, suspecting he used the situation for personal gain.

"People can speculate about what they think he is. I've known him 21 years of his life. And he's not a liar. He's a kid," Brian Te'o said with tears in his eyes.

On Tuesday, the woman whose photo was used as the "face" of the Twitter account of Te'o's supposed girlfriend says the man allegedly behind the hoax confessed and apologized to her.

Diane O'Meara told NBC's "Today" show that Ronaiah Tuiasosopo used pictures of her without her knowledge in creating a fake woman called Lennay Kekua.

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