NEW YORK (Reuters) - Faced with steep budget cuts, the U.S. federal court system on Monday slashed $15 an hour from the fees it pays private lawyers to represent poor criminal defendants.

The Judicial Conference of the United States said it would cut rates for non-capital cases to $110 an hour from $125. For death penalty cases, the rate drops to $163 an hour from $178.

Judge William Traxler of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a letter announcing the cuts that the action and other budget reductions were "necessary to avoid permanent damage to the federal defender program."

U.S. federal courts have lost $345.6 million from this year's budget as a result of across-the-board cuts called the sequester.

The cuts prompted a group of 87 judges to send a letter last week to Vice President Joe Biden and House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner detailing the impact of the sequester.

The biggest impact was a nearly $52 million hit to court-appointed lawyers for criminal defendants who can't afford them, a service that is required under the U.S. Constitution, the letter said.

Since October 2012, federal defenders offices have reduced their staffing by 6 percent, or 160 people, according to the letter. Remaining employees have been furloughed on average 15 days each over the last half of the fiscal year, it said.

In their place, the courts have been increasingly turning to the private lawyers who cost 20 percent more than salaried federal defenders, before taking into account the cuts announced on Monday.

The sequester is "not saving money, it's costing money," said David Patton, the executive director for the Federal Defenders of New York, which staffs cases in courts covering Manhattan and Brooklyn.

But the fee cuts and related cost-saving measures will provide for $49.8 million in estimated savings from September 2013 through September 2014, courts officials say.

The cuts to public defender spending have been cited in some high-profile cases. In one, the federal defender's office in New York sought to delay the terrorism trial of Suleiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden, because of staff cutbacks.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is presiding over the case, said at a hearing in April it was "extremely troublesome to contemplate a case of this nature to be delayed because of sequestration."

Robert Anello, the president of a lawyer group called the Federal Bar Council, expressed concern that the steps to deal with the sequester could threaten defendant's rights to a lawyer.

"It's just moving around crumbs of an ever shrinking pie," he said. "There's only so much moving you can do without dismantling the whole system."

The $15 hourly cut could result in some lawyers who were already accepting reduced rates to decline appointments, said Jeffrey "Chip" Frensley, a Tennessee lawyer who acts as the chief representative to the courts for private attorneys.

"The fee cut is just really an extremely disappointing situation," he said.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond and Emily Flitter; Editing by Philip Barbara)

LONDON (Reuters) - Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling secretly posed as a retired military policeman to write a crime novel that has been hailed as one of the best debut detective stories in years.

Rowling wrote "The Cuckoo's Calling" under the name Robert Galbraith and kept up the pretence that it was the work of a married father of two and former undercover investigator.

Her cover was blown when the Sunday Times newspaper became suspicious that such an assured piece of writing could have been created by a first-time novelist. An investigation uncovered that Rowling was the real author.

"I had hoped to keep this secret a little longer because being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience," the 47-year-old said. "It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation, and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name."

Her publisher Little, Brown had promoted the book as a "classic crime novel in the tradition of P.D. James and Ruth Rendell". The protagonist, Cormoran Strike, is a troubled war veteran with physical and psychological wounds.

The plot follows Strike's investigation into the death of a model in Mayfair, an upmarket district of London.

One reviewer described it as a "scintillating debut novel", while another called it "astonishingly mature".

The novel had sold around 1,500 copies in hardback. However, in the hours after Rowling was named as its author, it shot up the bestseller charts. It was listed as the third biggest seller on Amazon.co.uk on Sunday, having entered the top 100 only the day before.

The Sunday Times said Rowling has already written the second Cormoran Strike novel and it is due to be published next year.

After selling millions of Harry Potter books, Rowling released her first adult novel, "The Casual Vacancy", last year to mixed reviews.

(Editing by Mark Heinrich)

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese manufacturers' optimism improved to the highest level in three years, a Reuters poll showed, as a weak yen boosted earnings for exporters of textiles, chemicals, steel and other metals.

The index of sentiment derived from a monthly Reuters survey of manufacturers rose by 3 points to plus 16 in August, which matched the level it was at in November 2010. A positive readings shows optimists outnumbered pessimists.

The index is expected to rise again to plus 18 in November in the Reuters survey, which is strongly correlated with a closely watched quarterly Bank of Japan tankan survey.

Makers of cars and electronics, however, were less upbeat due to worries about slowing growth in emerging markets, highlighting the risk overseas economies pose to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's reflationary policies.

"Sales are doing much better than we initially anticipated," one chemicals maker said in the August 2-9 poll of 400 big and medium-sized firms, of which 276 responded.

The service sector gauge also rose 5 points in August from the previous month to plus 23. This marked the highest level since April 2007 due to a housing boom and increased corporate spending on IT services.

The index is expected to improve further to plus 29 in November.

The BOJ's tankan issued on July 1 showed manufacturers' sentiment turned positive in April-June for the first time in nearly two years and was seen rising further on the feel-good mood generated by Abe's policies, intended to end 15 years of deflation, spur hiring and improve wages.

The BOJ will release its next tankan survey on October 1.

The central bank kept monetary policy steady earlier this month and left its economic assessment unchanged as board members wanted more time to measure the strength of capital expenditure.

Comments from the Reuters Tankan survey in August suggest that a turnaround in business investment is still distant.

"Europe's economy is in the doldrums and domestically companies feel they still have excess capacity," said one machinery maker.

"Going through with new capital expenditure is much more difficult than we thought."

Japan's economic growth slowed more than expected in the second quarter, driven by an unexpected fall in capital expenditure in a worrying sign of companies' reluctance to invest.

Strong consumer spending, public works spending and a rebound in exports suggest that Japan's economic recovery can easily remain on track.

However, investor outflows from emerging markets due to worries about deteriorating growth could become a more of a concern for Japanese companies and policymakers.

(Editing by Eric Meijer)

At least he has plenty of company. For it turns out that several members of Congress aren't so into writing that check to the government. Below are just a few examples. (And no, these are not acts of Thoreauvian civil disobedience or libertarian antitax protests.)

1) Republican Rep. Jon Runyan of New Jersey earned millions of dollars (and a reputation as a "dirty player") as a lineman in the NFL. That didn't stop him fromon 33 property-tax payments. But that's not even his most notable tax issue (or at least not his strangest). For years, Runyan has had agrazing on his property, helping him avoid paying the full tax rate on 20 out of his 23 acres of land.

2) Earlier this yearin New Hampshire reported that Democratic Rep. Ann McLane Kuster owed nearly $11,000 in late property-tax bills. The television station also noted that Kuster has been delinquent on more than $40,000 in property taxes over the past three years. And it's not because she's poor. The Center of Responsive Politics estimated her net worth to be around $1.8 million.

3) Rep. Jim Renacci, R-Ohio, has been dogged by his fair share of tax issues over the years. The former car salesman was assessed nearly $1.4 million in unpaid state taxes, interest, and fees in 2006, according to the Associated Press. Last year, Renacci's opponent former Rep. Betty Sutton made a big deal of the Republican's attempt to "avoid paying taxes on nearly $14 million" (italics ours), a statement that was rated "" by Politifact.

4) Rep. Vern Buchanan of Florida may be the champion of IRS problems in the House of Representatives. Between 1994 and 2002 the Republican found himself in the midst of a tax fight that ended up costing him about $2.5 million ($1.2 million for what he originally owed, plus another $1.3 in late fees and interest). Buchanan has also found himself swimming in an alphabet soup of investigating offices over the years (DOJ, FBI, IRS, FEC).

5) Fellow Floridian Rep. Steve Southerland too has been late on his fair share. The Republican's company Machrise paid property taxes on a number of propertiesat least 27 times from 1995 to 2012.

Correction: WMUR is a televsion station, not a radio station. 

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) - Is NBC's "Million Second Quiz" as addictive as the network hopes it will be? Judge for yourself.

The 24-hour, live game show has just released an app that will allow competitors to answer trivia questions and potentially compete on the show when it premieres September 9. You can download it here.

We've tried the app. It's fun. The graphics are several notches above Words With Friends, much as we love Words With Friends. But earning points is slow going: You need 3,500 to potentially qualify for a spot on the show. After one game, I answered enough questions correctly to earn a mere 150. Also, did you know that Franklin is the most popular name for U.S. cities? Now I do.

"Million Second Quiz" is an attempt by the network to get viewers to watch primetime in real time, and even stay tuned in for commercials. Besides playing along at home, they can answer trivia questions during ads to win discounts on products and other prizes.

The stakes are higher for NBC than they probably are for you: Primetime ratings were down for the four biggest networks in the key demographic last season, and NBC hopes "Million Second Quiz" will be the kind of big-event television that people feel they have to watch live.

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Before we begin, we'll note that technically the NSA isn't allowed to look at the stuff you do online. Thanks to the Patriot Act, it can (and does)Americans make every daywho was called, how long the call lasted, maybe some location data. The NSA also pulls in online content, but can't do so legally on targets in the United States. This is part ofyou may have heard about, in which the NSA can access data from an array of companies in near-real-time. In practice, the NSA's procedures arethat it does collect information (content) from Americans, of course. And until 2011, , including subject lines and to- and from-addresses.

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That is the worst case scenario. Yes, the NSA is definitely slurping up scads of information about your phone calls. It probably isn't storing your Facebook chats, emails, and Skype calls. Our goal with this guide is to detail exactly what you need to do to assure that it can't, even if it wants to. As you will see, it is a cumbersome process.

For assistance in fleshing out this guide, we spoke with Micah Lee, staff technologist with .

The world learned about PRISM thanks to a series of slides leaked by Edward Snowden. Among those slides was one where, you can see the companies that participate in the program but also the data they offer the NSA, if the agency asks. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo (complete with trademark exclamation point), Facebook, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple. All of the logos smushed into the header of the slide. And all of the companies to be avoided if you don't want any chance that the NSA can surveil what you're doing.

Again: We are not saying that you should not use Facebook. What we are saying is that if you are desperate to prevent the NSA from knowing what you're doing, you shouldn't use Facebook. And there's nothing you can do to make using Facebook betterno encryption, no anything can make Facebook safe from the NSA. (We'll discuss this more a little later on.)

But it gets worse. These are the companies known to be participating in PRISM as of last October (when Apple was added). Since then, others may have been added; others may be added in the future. The truly paranoid, then, will have second thoughts about nearly any major Internet company.

And then it gets worse still, as Lee pointed out. "Any company that's inside of U.S. jurisdiction," he said, "can get government requests for data. Even if they're not listed in the PRISM slides, that doesn't mean the government isn't getting data from them." If the NSA wants your data, in other words, it can probably get it. It just might not be in real-time.(There is some hope: Montana recently passed a bill that requires the governent to btain a probable cause warrant before spying on you through your cell phone or laptop. As , "if you don't want the government to spy on you, move to Montana." Montana might be the safest state from cyber-spying in the nation, as it is the first to pass a comprehensive anti-spying bill, doing so even before the Edward Snowden saga broke out.)

Before we continue, we should flesh out an important distinction. When you think of an email, what you generally think of is the content of the email, the message. In order for that message to get to you, though, the email also needs to contain metadata, a term loosely-and-not-entirely-accurately used to refer to information about the email message itself. For example: who it is addressed to, who it came from, what its subject is. (We .)

That distinction is important because email operates like a letter sent through the post office. A letter, sealed in an envelope, can be hidden from the mailman. But the mailman needs to be able to read the address, or your letter won't get there. In this case, the metadata is what appears on the envelope; the content is the letter.

So there is a good way to hide the content of your email messages. A tool called PGP (short for "Pretty Good Privacy"), created by a man named Philip Zimmerman, offers a way to encrypt (encode) email messages between two parties using what's know as peer-to-peer encryption. That's an important property. It means that person A encoded the message and only person B is able to decode it. So as the envelope moves around the web, you can be sure it stays sealed until it gets where it's going. (How PGP actually works isn't important for our purposes. In short: It involves doing a math problem involving two very, very large numbers.)

How do you get PGP? PGP as a brand is now , so you can give them your money and they will set you up. But there are also open source implementations of the technology. (If you're deeply knowledgeable about technology, you can establish your own PGP systembut if you can do this, we doubt you need a tutorial.) One such product is known as GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard), which comes in bothandversions. This is not simple to implement, mind you, but the documentation is pretty thorough.

That's the tradeoff on this stuff. You can use a packaged product like, say , a program that gives you a free email account that can send encrypted messages. But when you sign up, you'll see a little notice that the company will work with law enforcement if you're using your account for illegal activity. And in the past,when ordered to do so. Easy to use, but not a guaranteed protection against the NSAas the site's .

So you've got your PGP up and running and you're all set, right? Nope. Lee explains why. "PGP protects the content of your email," he says. "Specifically: Just the body, not the subject line. Even without the content of the email, it still doesn't protect the metadata." As recently as two years ago, the government was scooping up all of that metadata, reading all of those envelopes. PGP can't help with that. So how do you protect yourself from having your metadata read?

One way is to use email servers that employ a system called . This is complicated, but if two email servers employ STARTTLS, even the metadata information on emails is encrypted. So the NSA could see two email servers communicating, but not the To and From addresses involved.

An easier way to hide your metadata is to restrict your email to one domain. As Lee explains, if you're sending an email from someone at privateemail.com to someone at privateemail.com, that message never goes out on the Internet. Meaning that the government can't watch it zip around and pick up the metadata. It's like leaving a note for your roommatethe mailman won't see that.

Unless the mailman kicks in your door/the NSA subpoenas your email provider. Or if your email provider already has an agreement with the governmentGMail or Outlook, for exampleit may be easier than that. How do you solve  that problem? Run your own email server and don't send email over the Internet.

Easier: send a letter. (Or , either.)

The NSA also collects data on targeted individuals' web activity. To prevent them from snooping on your important web activity (if you're like us: reading The Atlantic Wire; looking at pictures of animals), you again need to worry about encryption.

In web browsers, that means using HTTPS. HTTP, hypertext transfer protocol, is the normal way content is shipped from a web server to your browser. HTTPS is the secure version of that, using encryption between the server and your browser, preventing those watching the traffic go past from seeing what's happening. The most important thing you can do, Lee suggests, is use HTTPS whenever possible. To that end, the EFF has a browser plug-in called , which will make web pages that support HTTPS use it by default.

As always, though, there's a weakness. Let's go back to the mail-sending analogy. If you seal up a package nice and tidy, write Joe's address on it, and send it off, Joe will get a nice, tidy package from you. But somewhere along the way, the NSA could have grabbed the package, opened it, looked at it, resealed it, and sent it on its way. That's what Lee called a "man in the middle" attackliterally someone stepping in between the sender and the recipient. In the case of web traffic, you might send an encrypted message to your bank which someone intercepts on the way, reads, re-encrypts and sends on.

The way web traffic avoids that problem is using signed certificates. (That's what they're called, but it's a metaphor.) Companies like Facebook go to a certificate authority and get a certificate for their encryption. When you send a request to Facebook, your browser checks that the security certificate is valid; if it is, all of the encryption happens without you even knowing. If the certificate isn't valid, your browser returns a warning. You've probably seen it. In Chrome it looks like this:

Generally, this system works well. If a certificate authority gets hacked and its signing keythe tool it uses to authenticate certificatesis stolen, that could be a significant problem, allowing the hacker to forge certificates for any number of websites. But it probably wouldn't go undetected. EFF also maintains what it calls the , which keeps records of the certificates for websites and lets users compare the signed certificates they encounter on the web with the ones the EFF has on file. (It's done automatically, in case that seemed off-putting.) If the certificate for, say, Twitter were to change, the EFF would start seeing that change reflected in its toolkit. The organization could check with Twitter and see if there was a valid reason for the change and, if not, issue warnings to its users.

You may see the flaw here. If the government gets access to a signing key or uses Twitter's certificate, Twitter or the certificate authority may not be authorized to tell EFF anything out of the norm is happening. "If Facebook or any of these companies gives the NSA a copy of its cryptokeys, or if they obtain them some other way," Lee points out, "it would allow them to spy on traffic." But on the other hand, "Facebook could just give access to all of the users data," making the complexity of this somewhat unnecessary.

Besides encryption, there is a tool that will allow you to mask who you are as you travel the webto some extent, anyway. Called(short for The Onion Router), it establishes a system through which your requests to web servers travel through three other anonymous servers around the world first. It's like changing between three cabs on your way to your destination. Anyone trying to figure out where you came from would have a very difficult time doing so.

Particularly because the analogy is more like if you and 100 people shared that cab. The anonymous server through which you're traveling is someone else's TOR setup. You and many other people travel through each point, making the next destination of each hard to determine. Of course, if you use TOR to access your personal Facebook account, it's not going to keep the government from knowing what you're doing on Facebook. But if you visit a site with information you'd rather not be linked to, TOR can help sweep the path clean behind you.

If someone knew where literally every cab in a city was running and when, though, they could eventually figure out who started and ended where. This is the problem with TOR, as noted by Lee and . The NSA surveils a massive amount of network traffic, bothand . Could it have an overview of the entire system of TOR traffic. It could. It probably doesn't. As the recent revelations about therevealed, some fraction of network data is currently being gatheredthat could be a lot of data, but probably not all. Without a record of all of the stops, it's much harder to track those cabs.

For those of you dependent upon real-time chat with your friends, a few words of warning. First of all, the "off the record" sessions offered by Google Chat offer zero protection. Second, most other chat systems, particularly web-based ones, aren't much better.

You do have some options, though. IM protection works a lot like email, Lee points out, generally requiring end-to-end encryption using an external application. He recommends , an app which, unlike Google's "off the record" mode, provides that sort of end-to-end encryption. It requires an external chat client, for which .

Apple's iMessage isn't one of them. But itin the past thanks to its encryption, and the company insists that , which would mean that its involvement in PRISM wouldn't put your messages at risk. Some . After all, if Apple software is creating keys to encrypt your data, it necessarily has access to those keys. Anyway, it would only work when communicating with another Apple device using iMessage.

Nor does that end-to-end encryption obscure the metadata  again, as with email. The government could know that you sent a message to someone, and to whom it was sent, just as it can know who was called from which phone number. And speaking of phones:

We'll start by distinguishing between two types of phones. There is the type of phone that makes phone calls (a "phone") and the type of phone that primarily serves as a crutch for those desperate to retain a connection to the internet while not near a computer (a "smartphone").

If your goal is to mask the phone calls you make using a traditional phone, you're probably out of luck. It's still not entirely clear which companies turn over bulk metadata on calls made, but there's absolutely no reason to think any large carriers don't. If you use a small regional phone company, the odds are better that your call records are not going straight to the NSA that is, as long as you never call anyone who uses a larger phone company. Same goes for mobile phone providers. The smaller the company the less likely the NSA has gotten around to monitoring them, but don't bet on it.

Smartphones expand your options a little bit, but not much. "With phones, it's a lot closer to you not having a choice," Lee notes. Your options:

Voice over IP. VoIP is the term for using a machine's internet connection to transmit digital versions of voice communication. It's Skype, in other words. But of course you don't want to use Skype, since it's a PRISM company. Lee suggests , an Android app that offers encrypted voice communications. It requires two Android phones, though.

Textsecure. Another Android app from the same company as Red Phone,does what it says on the tin: end-to-end encryption over text message. Also as with Red Phone, TextSecure is Open Source, meaning that anyone can access the source code to the software. This helps explain questions like, "who might have access to my encryption key?"

TOR Browsers. You can also get TOR browsers forordevice. See above warnings / restrictions / hand-wringing.

(As it turns out, your smartphone is just a little computer, meaning that we're basically repeating the admonitions above. Who knew?)

And that's it. All of the ways you can protect yourself when you go online. Remember: no form of prevention is 100 percent effective. The only truly safe way to protect yourself is to abstain completely.

Top photo: Theodore Kaczynski's cabin in the woods of Lincoln, Mont., in 1996. (AP)

This is wilderness camping?

It was a delightful shock for my wife and me as we took our seats at the table streamside on the Middle Fork of Idaho's Salmon River, known in folklore as the River of No Return. Both of us are experienced wilderness campers, but we've sometimes defined camp luxury as dry socks. Not on this trip.

Our host for the six-day rafting expedition was a family-owned company based in Sun Valley called Far and Away Adventures. It has carved a unique niche in the crowded field of whitewater guides on the Middle Fork, one of America's great wilderness rivers.

They call it "glamping" glamour camping and it attempts to recreate the type of experience Ernest Hemingway might have had on a classic African safari.

In other words: No roughing it.

No wedging into a tiny backpacking tent for the night. Each couple has a stand-up six-person tent with cot, mattress and pillow, a lantern on the night table and a rug on the floor.

No crawling bleary-eyed from your sleeping bag, hoping someone has hot water for instant coffee. Instead, a guide delivers fresh-brewed coffee to your door with your wakeup call, along with a steaming hot wet washcloth to wipe away the sleep.

Need a good stretch to get going in the morning? Join the yoga session held after breakfast.

Shoulders sore after a hard day of whitewater paddling? The masseuse awaits you at her streamside massage table.

Want a hot shower? Just ask; it will be arranged.

And the food? Four-course gourmet dinners every night, with organic ingredients and a chef's eye for presentation. Gourmet breakfasts as well. And a hot lunch on the river, unique among rafting companies that usually offer cold cuts.

All of this, of course, is only a complement to the central purpose of the trip running whitewater rapids on one of the wildest, longest and most remote stretches of river in the United States.

The Middle Fork of the Salmon is one of the eight original rivers protected by Congress in 1968 in the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. It runs 100 miles (160 kilometers) through the wilderness of central Idaho, flowing between towering cliffs and forested mountains.

Over that 100 miles (160 kilometers), it drops more than 3,000 feet (915 meters), a steeper gradient than the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. It has more than 300 rapids, mostly class III and IV ("difficult" to "very difficult").

Shooting the rapids from top to bottom takes six days. Camping is on sandy beaches or in groves of ponderosa pine. Campsites are assigned by the U.S. Forest Service before departure, so rafters don't have to worry about sharing a site or not finding a vacant one. They can concentrate on the water.

And in the prow of a raft, the water is awesome. We plunged through long wave trains of 3- and 4-foot (1-meter) standing waves. We shot through rapids with 8-foot (2.4-meter) drops and standing waves of 6 feet (2 meters) or more that slap you in the face with icy water. We skirted giant whirlpools that stand ready to suck down the unlucky or unskilled boatman.

In the short stretches between rapids, wild cutthroat trout lurked in deep turquoise pools. I cast my fly rod from the rear of the raft, and those in the rafts behind cheered as scrappy trout hit the fly.

I was on the raft of Steve Lentz, co-owner of Far and Away with his wife Annie. He has been running this river for more than 30 years, and he knows by heart the most thrilling yet safest line to row through each of the Middle Fork rapids.

Still, getting wet is half the fun; we whooped with joy with each icy splash including the 82-year-old who shared my perch in the front of Steve's raft.

Like most Middle Fork outfitters, Far and Away offers a variety of trips to its clients. There are oar rafts, where a guide sits in the middle and rows through the rapids while the client sits in front and enjoys the thrill.

There are paddle rafts, where kneeling clients on each side paddle as a guide in back shouts instructions and steers; my wife, Joyce, quickly became a paddle raft addict.

And there are "duckies," solo inflatable kayaks that the intrepid can take through some of the easier rapids on their own. Guides make certain that a ducky client does not get over his head -- both figuratively and literally.

The final 20 miles (32 kilometers) of the Middle Fork flow through the aptly named Impassable Canyon, between sheer granite cliffs. Not even trails penetrate the canyon here, and the only way out is through the whitewater.

Then it's into the main-stem Salmon River and short float to takeout, where a bus will carry us back to our starting point at Sun Valley.

Dry socks will never seem like luxury again.

___

If You Go .

SALMON RIVER TRIPS: The river's Middle Fork runs 100 miles (160 kilometers) through central Idaho. Several outfitters offer trips with varying levels of service. Far and Away Adventures, http://www.far-away.com or 800-232-8588, offers a six-day luxury trip, $2,450 per person, beginning and ending in Sun Valley. Trips vary by season: Late May and June, when the river is high with snowmelt, the trip is fastest and most thrilling. As the river drops in July and August, the river slows, but newly exposed boulders can make some rapids even more challenging. The best fishing can be in September. Trips are offered through September.

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William Kronholm retired in 2006 as western regional news editor of The Associated Press. He lives in Helena, Mont.

WTAE-TV reports Robertson told the couple to always love and forgive one another as they were wed Saturday morning at a Field & Stream store near Pittsburgh.

Robertson popped in for the nuptials of Mehgan Cook, who sported a camouflage sash on her dress, and Charlie Miller, who was completely clad in camo gear.

The two hadn't planned on marrying at the store but Cook said they were eager to meet Robertson.

"I was going to cancel the wedding 'cause I heard Willie was coming," Cook told KDKA-TV.

Instead, Cook said, her mother came up with the idea of a wedding at the store and they got a surprise when Robertson appeared during the ceremony.

"That's a first for me, it's good to be a part of that," Robertson said. "They look like my kind of folks with the camouflage . that was cool."

On the "Duck Dynasty" Season 4 premiere, which aired Wednesday, family members threw a surprise wedding for patriarch Phil Robertson, wearing a black jacket over camouflage garb, and his wife, Miss Kay. They could only afford a justice of the peace when they married 48 years ago.

The show drew 11.8 million viewers on the A&E channel, making it the No. 1 non-fiction series telecast in U.S. cable television history in total viewers as well as all key demographic groups.

Cook said she had been engaged to another man, but he died in a car crash four years ago. But she met Miller at the scene and eventually the two started dating.

"I never thought it would happen again," Cook said, tearing up.

Miguel, 27, was pulled over by CHP officers in the early hours of Thursday in the seaside community of Marina del Rey for driving over the speed limit and having the front windows of the car tinted, CHP spokeswoman Sergeant Denise Joslin said.

"The officers investigating observed alcohol intoxication and he (Miguel) was arrested on suspicion of DUI," Joslin said.

The Grammy-winning "Adorn" singer, whose full name is Miguel Jontel Pimentel, was booked and released within a couple of hours on bail for $5,000 and is due in court on September 9, according Los Angeles County jail records.

Miguel was driving a BMW car with passengers, and upon arrest, the car was released to one of the passengers who was not intoxicated, Joslin said.

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Eric Kelsey)

On Monday, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk unveiled a transportation concept that he said could whisk passengers the nearly 400 miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes half the time it takes an airplane.

If it's ever built.

His "Hyperloop" system for travel between major cities would use a large tube. Inside, capsules would float on air, traveling at over 700 mph. The air would be sucked by a powerful fan at the front and expelled at the rear.

"Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment," Musk wrote in his proposal, posted online.

The system Musk envisions is not unlike the pneumatic tubes that transport capsules stuffed with paperwork in older buildings.

In this case, the cargo would be several people, reclining for the ride.

Coming from almost anyone else, the hyperbole would be hard to take seriously. But Musk has a track record of success. He co-founded online payment service PayPal, electric luxury carmaker Tesla Motors Inc. and rocket-building company SpaceX.

Monday's unveiling lived up to the hype part of its name.

Leading up to the unveiling, done on the SpaceX website, online speculation was feverish. Musk has been dropping hints about his system for more than a year during public events, mentioning that it could never crash and would be immune to weather.

During a Tesla earnings call on Thursday, Musk said he is too focused on other projects to consider actually building the Hyperloop.

"I think I kind of shot myself by ever mentioning the Hyperloop," he said. "I don't have any plans to execute, because I must remain focused on SpaceX and Tesla."

He said he would fulfill his commitment to publishing an open-source design, meaning anyone can use it and modify it.

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Follow Justin Pritchard at https://twitter.com/lalanewsman . AP National Writer Martha Mendoza contributed to this report from San Jose, Calif.